THE IMPORTANCE OF GOOD OPTICS. TGIH.

In a recent article, Professor Kathleen Vohls claimed that messy rooms promote creativity (psychologicalscience.org).  Einstein’s desk was messy. So was Steve Job’s. Well, maybe that works for scientists and techies, but if you are in politics you’d better clean house. Optics count in government.

Consider Snowden’s revelation that governments spy. I’m shocked, shocked. And even if you think, like National Intelligence Director James Clapper, that spying is Diplomacy 101, you still need to express shock, at least in front of voters. It looks better than shrugging your shoulders.

Yes, friends, looks count in politics.

Why did the Canadian Liberals choose young Trudeau as their leader? Not for his brains, which are luckily invisible. They chose him because his optics are good. He has wavier hair than any Canadian prime minister in recent memory. His chin is cleaner than NDP leader Thomas Mulcair’s. His smile is whiter than Prime Minister Harper’s.

But Thank Goodness It's Halloween, the great equalizer, and everyone can be as ugly as they want and still get a treat.

Tomorrow it’s back to tricks only.

 

AVERSION THERAPY. The Boomer Effect

Headline in the Globe, 25 Sept: Baby Boomers rediscover Marijuana. Apparently teenagers are already aware of this trend among the old folks and have therefore decided that smoking up is no longer cool. There was a sharp drop in use among 15-24 year olds. “It doesn’t seem to be as much fun for the kids anymore,” Alison Myrden observed.

Hey, there’s a lesson here for all you opinion makers!

Facebook executives, watch out. According to the Pittsburg Post-Gazette, the old generation has massively taken to the social network (“OMG Mom’s on Facebook!”). In other words, posting on the Page is no longer cool.

If the practices of boomers have that kind of dampening effect, why don’t we get them to drive recklessly? Perhaps it will make defensive driving cool. And if that works, we should also encourage Boomers to twerk and hope for a sharp drop in the number of young offenders against good taste. Next, we could ask the old guys to spray graffiti and totally disgust youthful vandals.

The dislikes of Boomers are marketable as well. They could be helpful to industries hoping to expand their sales to the coveted 15-24 age group.

I suggest publishers spread the rumour that Boomers hate books. It might attract a youthful readership.

And a word of advice for Harper’s strategists: Whipping up boomer interest in Justin Trudeau might help you kill the Liberals.

Finally:  Would Blackberry have recovered its market share and flourished, if Boomers had scorned its product?

UNDER SURVEILLANCE. Baselinetelematics.com has you covered.

Okay, so you spotted the cop with the radar gun, slowed down at last minute, and escaped a speeding ticket. Enjoy! Because the good times are over. Once Baseline Telematics gets into your car, it will be pay-as-you-drive. They’ll supply your insurance company with up to the minute driving data, how fast you go, how hard you brake, how close you take the corners. – And your insurance will bill you accordingly.  

Of course progress doesn’t stop there. Next, you have Telematics installed in your body. How’s you ticker? Blood pressure – uh-uh. Cholesterol – those bacon burgers are bleeping!  It will be pay-as-you-breathe. All you snowbirds wintering in Florida will have your health insurance adjusted accordingly. And you thought upwardly mobile was a desirable quality.

Doesn’t worry you? You brave the Canadian winters and are covered by Mother OHIP? Don’t hold your breath. And not just because Telematics will report you, but because they will soon be in your house, joining the smoke detector on the ceiling in the corridor and reporting on your lifestyle. You’ll pay-as-you-smoke. Better vote for Justin Trudeau and hope he doesn’t lie when he says he’ll decriminalize marijuana use.

Telematics in the home will be a really useful device for religious leaders. When I lived in Utah, I made the mistake of being visible from the curb on a Sunday morning. Immediately, the church brigade knocked on my door and wanted to know, in the nicest possible way, why I wasn’t at the temple and if I wanted an appointment with the bishop. With Telematics, the Latter Day Saints can dispense with that hit-and-miss approach and get you directly with a pray-as-you-go system. As soon as Telematics detects your presence, a loudspeaker will come on: Attention! Attention! Someone in this household isn’t where they are supposed to be. Proceed to the temple immediately! But then they have very nice hiking trails in Utah, and you could hit one of those on a Sunday morning. The mountains will probably stay Telematics-free for a few more years.

But what if your church or your government or your local retailer latches on to socialbots? According to NYT (18 August), only 35 percent of Twitter users are real people. The rest are members of a bot army directed by people with an agenda, who want to channel your thought in their direction. The only defense is to mobilize your own bot army, appropriate their hashtag, flood them with counter tweets, and stop them cold by triggering their spam filter.

Maybe you could get one of those predictive search apps, which anticipate your every wish. They have your calendar entries, email messages, and Google search history memorized and know that you don’t want to go to the temple. Unfortunately, they also know what you want and will make sure you get it—I just hope they mind your credit limit.

Smoothing out things: AN ALIEN CONSPIRACY.

Some efforts to smooth out things have been around for a while, like filling in POT HOLES, which is a spring rite, and filling in facial WRINKLES, which has become a rite of passage. There’s also AUTO-TUNE to smooth out the voices of pop singers, manipulating their pitch and nudging them toward the desired note.  Yeah, yeah, you say, we know all that. But do you know the larger context? These smoothing efforts are part of an ALIEN CONSPIRACY! Some outer space nation wants to norm us so that we will no longer be able to tell the difference between humans and robot body snatchers when the invasion starts!

Cher looks invaded already, as does Liza Minelli. Mick Jagger’s cratered face, on the other hand, has so far defied alien efforts to smooth out his wrinkles and make him look normal.  Ditto with Clint Eastwood of empty chair fame. He is past norming. His telomeres are way too short. Telomeres, in case you haven’t heard, are the shields that keep your cells from aging.

You see this is the latest trend (or the latest tool of ALIEN CONSPIRATORS): equal telomeres for everyone! Check out the NY Times of 21 April. They’ve started measuring them, and pretty soon your local hair salon will peddle telomere extensions. It could be the end of dying, meaning you’ll never inherit your parents’ nest egg.

On the positive side, you’ll never have to suffer through another election campaign, because what’s the use of voting after all politicians have been normed. The ALIEN CONSPIRATORS will standardize them to telegenic men and women spouting platitudes in the language of your choice. They’ve got Justin Trudeau in the bag already: dazzling white teeth, pablum in French and English. Harper is still struggling with the alien forces, withholding smiles except of the most tight-lipped kind. The aliens almost got him last Christmas (remember when he sat at the piano and sang nicey-nicey Beatle songs?), but he escaped in the nick of time and reverted to his old dour accountant self.

Speaking of Justin Trudeau and nice. Looking for the root causes of the Boston bombing, he came up with a cogent reason. It happened because SOMEONE FELT EXCLUDED (Globe & Mail, 18 April).  The ALIEN CONSPIRATORS will take care of that. They’ll make everyone feel included and connected at all times. Why do you think they created Facebook? The aliens will have you surrounded with FRIENDS. You’ll be horribly stuck in the sink hole of on-line friendship. You won’t be able to go on with your life.  You’ll be mired in a mass of cute cat and dog pics and smothered by the sweetness of babies. You won’t see the ALIENS for all your FRIENDS.

Another human quality the ALIEN CONSPIRATORS want to eliminate is the joy of bullying, although it will only work if bullies start reading books. Apparently the CONSPIRATORS have swamped the publishing world with anti-bully books. They’ve even persuaded publishers to start their own anti-bullying campaigns and gotten their full cooperation. After all, it gives the publishers a chance to look good AND promote their products. I guess the quality of hucksterism will stay put. The aliens will have to deal with that.

Another way of taking the snark out of bullies and norming us all into bland and benevolent beings are CHIPLETS, now developed in Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Center (NY Times, 21 April). They’ll provide supple, sensitive skin for our hands and make us sensitive all over.

Once the CHIPLET programme has kicked in, we’re done. We’ll all be indistinguishable nicey-nice.  And the ALIEN CONSPIRATORS will take over for good.

BEAUTY PAYS. EIGHT WAYS TO MAKE IT HAPPEN.

A couple of years ago, economist Daniel Hamermesh published a study, BEAUTY PAYS. We need a prof from Texas to tell us the obvious?  Beauty is a winning ticket. That’s why Dwight “Triple Chin” Duncan bowed out of the Liberal leadership race, and Justin Trudeau is still smiling full-gleam. That’s why the Democrats picked Mitt Romney as their candidate rather than Newtface Gingrich, although Mitt didn’t come through for them in the end. Maybe his tan wasn’t deep enough.

If beauty is so important, how do you explain the election of 300 pounder Rob Ford or beer-bellied Angela Merkel? Apparently it’s the face that counts, the part you can’t hide, at least not where I live, the part no act of willpower, diet or exercise will change. So how can we level the playing field?
 

• Bring on social services. We have welfare to take care of the disadvantaged, don’t we? Let’s have free plastic surgery for the facially challenged. Put HAWK NOSE into the medical dictionary. THIN LIPS are a genetic disease! Why should you have to pay for pumping them up?
• Believe you are beautiful. Exploit what blogger Aaron S calls the AMERICAN IDOL LOOPHOLE. Seriously untalented people win because they think they can sing. So why not convince yourself you are beautiful?
• Spread the rumour that hot chicks are stupid. On second thought, don’t bother. It won’t work. Men are so shallow!
• Remember that age does not improve looks. So become famous early in life and, like The Who, trust in early onset Alzheimer among your groupies. They won’t notice that they aren’t living in the sixties anymore.
• Let the Mayan calendar take care of things. The world ends in less than 20 days, so what do you care about beauty? -- Can’t get yourself to believe in doomsday? Then:
• Find work at a call-in centre where all faces are equal. Oh, I forgot. They’ve moved those to New Delhi.
• Work online and use a fake photo. I tried it. I posted a blog with the cover of PLAYING NAOMI: 22 hits. With a youthful photo of Greta Garbo: 633 hits.   What about the unlikely case of CNN asking me to put in a personal appearance? No problem.
• Bring on the burka. And wait for my study: BURKA PAYS.

BE YOUR  *** ing SELF.

 

Be authentic. Express yourself!
Only one word comes to mind, you say?
Good thing you don’t live in the 60s when you had to spell it F***K. In the 70s they were more creative. Pierre Trudeau, for example, spelled it FUDDLE DUDDLE.

Last week, when a Brampton student tweeted that her teacher was an f***ing loser because he, like, ATE FISH STICKS, she was suspended. According to The Toronto Star, she shrugged off her week-old tweet: It’s so long ago. I don’t know why they’re bringing it up now. I’m amazed, but willing to learn: (1) Fish sticks are for losers. (2) The Toronto Star still doesn’t spell out the teenager’s favourite word. (3) Counting in teenage years, a week-old tweet is, like, totally prehistoric or something.

When Toronto Mayor Rob Ford said to a visitor Who the fuck do you think you are? Are you a fucking teacher? -- nothing happened. But when he used City Hall stationary to raise $3150 for a personal cause, the judge turfed him from office.

By contrast, Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion never said fuck. So, when she used her office to promote a land deal worth millions to her son, the judge ruled it was a BONA FIDE ERROR OF JUDGMENT. I’m amazed, but willing to learn: (1) Don’t bother with piddly sums when abusing your power. Keep it in the six-to-seven-figure range. (2) Never say fuck, and the judge will look kindly on you.

Young Justin Trudeau understood that principle and kept his white teeth clean. Fuck never passed his lips. But he didn’t observe the other all-important rule for politicians: Better have no platform than a platform that gives offense. He spoke his mind, saying he wanted to see more Quebeckers and fewer Albertans in politics. Well, he apologized on the double. But the damage was done. He should have stuck to FUDDLE DUDDLE.

So let me sum up today’s lesson: Be yourself. Speak up. And use plenty of a***s.