Plain words, uncommon sense
Locus magazine awarded Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys the Best Fantasy Novel award. The book was voted the winner by readers of the magazine, and the award was announed at a ceremony in Seattle at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, I didn’t even know such a thing existed.
Congrats to Neil Gaiman. The Toronto Star called it “remarkably funny.” I called it my favourite book of the year.
Yahooooo! Darren Barefoot is going to read Made to Break.
I started writing this comment on his blog, then realized that it was developing into a full blog post.
Made to Break is really great. I’m still chuckling about the fact that crackers were sold in a barrel. Cracker-barrel. Love it. Then some marketing genius figured that they could sell more crackers if they packaged them individually in boxes. Then they figured out they could put their company name on the box and say they guaranteed freshness. Very clever way to manage inventory and consumption.
But I must say Ritz crackers has taken it a bit too far. There’s a box where they individually wrap columns of crackers. The crackers all tossed together in the box taste much, much better than the crackers packaged in columns. I’m not sure why. My guess is that they are made and packaged at different factories. But whatever the reason avoid the overpacked Ritz crackers.
It’s also one small way to cut down on useless packaging that ends up in the trash heap.
Slashdot.org is reporting that Amazon is set to launch an online grocery store. I guess electronics and jewellery aren’t enough. Oh, wait, I think they sell books too.
According to the Slashdot article Amazon is only planning on selling nonperishables like peanut butter, potato chips and canned soup–things that could be accommodated on existing warehouse shelves.
The story is open for discussion at:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/06/18/1517244
Made To Break is the best non-fiction book that I’ve read this year. At the moment I’m learning about the history of FM radio.
I was just going on and on about the book this morning with my carpool buddies. Then in a moment of thematic convergence I received an email from the author this morning.
Made to Break has gone into a second printing, which is fantastic. And two Sundays ago it was excerpted in the Toronto Star. But basically, the American media is picking up the book and writing stories about it, but not the Canadian media, which is a sad thing because the author Giles Slade is Canadian. I wonder if it’s because the book was published by an American publisher or what the deal is.
I want to help Giles because he is a friend of a friend, but mainly because this is an amazing book. I think it perfectly coincides with other media events going on right now: World Urban Forum and Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth.
Here are the reviews so far. If you were a publicist or the media hound for this book, what would you suggest to get more people buying the book and more attention in Canada.
Reviews of Made To Break:
sfgate.com
Op-eds:
www.csmonitor.com
Interviews:
www.wnyc.org (audio: available in MP3 or podcast format)
www.will.uiuc.edu (audio)
www.businessweek.com (audio: also available from iTunes)
www.businessweek.com (print format q & a)
www.powells.com (print format q & a)
Excerpts from Made To Break:
www.thestar.com
www.hup.harvard.edu (PDF)
Translations of op-eds:
www.link.estadao.com.br
UPDATE:
Additional reviews:
Globe and Mail, Saturday, July 8. Reviewed by Heather Menzies, “In the throwaway culture, greed trumps need”
Congratulations to Katherine Dodds, who will be honoured with a Women in Film and Video Vancouver award. The award is WIFVV’s Woman of Vision Award, and she’ll receive it this week.
Katherine is really great. In my mind, she’s most famous for handling the marketing of the movie The Corporation. But she does all sorts of stuff. Her company is Good Company and they run the Hello Cool World website.
Katherine is the perfect recipient of this award. The award honours a woman who demonstrates leadership and vision in an enterprise or project that combines traditional entertainment media with the use of new digital technologies. According to the press release: “Katherine was selected for this award for her ground breaking work producing multi-media projects that use the tools of new media to connect audiences, on and offline, with social issue films.”
She did this really cool thing that got people to plan Corporation Parties. It was sort of like Tupperware parties. People come to your house, you watch the movie and then you log on to the Hello Cool World site to engage in group conversations about how to fix the world.
Katherine has a lot of exciting ideas and I’m pleased that she’s being recognized. Congratulations.
As reported on Thinkubator:
To celebrate its centenary year, M&S is holding a draw to win its “Essential 100” books (over $2,000 value). For details, visit the M&S website.
www.100years.ca
My friend Scott is competing in Martini Madness at Mark’s Fiasco on Thursday, June 15.
If you live in Vancouver and like martinis, come down to Mark’s Fiasco between 8 and 10 pm. For $10 you get 3 martinis and the chance to vote on the best one. Actually I will be voting for Scott’s martini, whether it is the best or not, but you can choose to be less corrupt.
Thursday, June 15
8-10 pm
$10 at the door
Mark’s Fiasco Restaurant
2486 Bayswater St. @ Broadway
604-734-1325
<-- Vote for this guy.
TheTyee.ca was started in November 2003 by David Beers, who’s renowned for bringing arts and culture news to British Columbians.
The Tyee is an independent alternative daily, and it’s all electronic, meaning you can subscribe to the RSS, you can receive updates via email, you can read and comment in the various forums, and you can enter cool contests.
And now, there’s books!
In addition to the usual mix of reviews, features, essays, interviews, and excerpts, the editors are promising eclectic reading lists, interactive discussions between writers and readers and daily coverage of book news from BC and beyond.
It’s exciting when new Book pages are born.
Here are the links to some of those cool contests I mentioned:
Win Tickets to Earth: the World Urban Festival
http://thetyee.ca/Contests/2006/05/30/EarthContest/
Win a Summer Reading Library! Tyee Books brings you BC publishers’ hottest recent releases.
http://thetyee.ca/Contests/2006/06/12/ReadingContest/
The nonfiction book that I’m reading right now is worth talking about well before I’m finished.
The book is Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade. The book is a history of consumerism and the factors that led American inventors and companies to deliberately create obsolence in consumer products. Ok maybe that doesn’t sound like simulating reading but it really is.
The book opens with the shocking numbers of computers and cell phones that are discarded annually. For example, “in 2005 more than 100 million cell phones were discarded in the United States.” That’s 50,000 tons of still-usable equipment. The compact design of cell phones means that it is easier to throw them away than disassemble them, recycle them, and make new ones. All those phones, added to the number of discarded PCs, then the number of TVs are equal to a toxic time bomb according to Slade. “We do not have enough landfills to store and then ignore America’s growing pile of electronic trash.”
Good heavens.
The big scary numbers in the introduction captured my attention, but the real grabbers were in the upcoming chapters on what led to today’s present toxic state, all of which are a contributing factor to the climate crisis Al Gore talks about in the movie An Inconvenient Truth.
Basically mass production is one of our great problems. In the late 19th-centry when the economy changed from man-powered to machine-driven, company bosses stayed up at night worrying about that fact that they could over produce more goods than could be readily consumed. Rather than reducing production, they came up with ways to get people to consume more.
Slade gives a brief history of crackers–once sold in a barrel and then individually packaged and “branded” with guaranteed freshness–of King Camp Gillette and his invention of disposable razors, and other crazy stories.
It’s fascinating to think about the origins of branding and packaging, how clever we were at creating repetitive demand, how we sat around dreaming up ways to encourage disposability of things–some of which I greatly appreciate like sanitary pads and tampons, bathroom tissue and bandaids but also of consumer electronics, automobiles and clothes.
Slade talks about the anti-thrift campaigns during and after the First World War, during the Depression, and after the Second World War, and how entrenched that thinking is today. He talks about the history of the automobile and the creation of the annual model change–change for style sake vs. change for improvement. The Academy Awards make an appearance in the story as an example of a marketing strategy to encourage repetitive consumption. The movie industry’s own version of the annual model change, as was the New York Times‘ establishment of the bestseller list for books.
Slade’s story involves a lot of name dropping, but I love it. He’s got the history of autos and why we started painting them different colours, the history of light bulbs, the history of crackers (the National Biscuit Company, which we know as Nabisco), and the history of the radio and why RCA was adamently against FM radio (it was seen as a direct competitor to TV, which was not yet being marketed).
Made to Break is a wild read, and I’m only a third of the way through.
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