Fiat Blog!

Kickn Flickr

2013-05-21T15:46:00.000-07:00

Oh Flickr. You knew what was coming and you did it anyway. Oh Flickr, Flickr...you knew better than to do that. You knew from Facebook that clumsy heavy-handedness doesn't make you richer or more powerful or more beloved by the masses. It just makes you look clumsy and heavy-handed. Now: When I click on a bookmark to go to my home page on Flickr, I do not want a photo from one of my contacts to be displayed so large that it takes up 3/4 of the screen. Some of my contacts upload fairly scary pictures and I do not want to get hit in the face with one of them when I land there. What were you thinking when you decided to set that as the default and give the user no other options for how that page is laid out? As far as I can tell, there is no "Options" or "Preferences" or "Page setup" link on that page, and since the page-scrolling is set by default to "infinite" it took me an inordinately long time to get to the bottom of the page to see if there was a "Preferences" link there. All I could find was a choice between one photo per contact or five. Oh Flickr, don't make me hurt you. I'm sure some of your users like the new home page format; it's just the right thing for them. That's great. For the rest of us: Add options for small and medium thumbnails to be displayed on that page. If those options are already available, make it easier to find that link on the page. That's a simple fix: add options for thumbnails. How much simpler can I make it? Now, if several weeks go by and this page layout is still the only one available...you know I'll just shrug and go elsewhere.

Dan Brown's Inferno

2013-05-18T12:48:00.000-07:00

I recently read the first few pages of Inferno by Dan Brown and thought, as I read, "Do I have to write like this to be a successful writer?" Brown's writing style includes passages like "I scramble, breathless..." and "hoarse voices smelling of lampredotto" and "They stare deep into my clear green eyes" and "dying unthinkable deaths" and "Langdon bolted awake" and "shot a glance at the bearded doctor" and "sat bolt upright" and "advanced with the intensity of a panther stalking its prey" and "mission had gone horribly awry." Popular writing mystifies me. Millions of people will read Inferno, and bestsellers like it, without cringing when they come across the cliches in the text. I don't understand that. I'm baffled that so many people tolerate writers writing at a mediocre level. Readers should gravitate to writers who are attentive enough to clean the cliches out of their writing and come up with poignant replacements. "Scramble"? I can't picture the Shade scrambling along the Arno. I think Brown meant something like "scuttle" or "crab," the Shade running sideways low to the ground to avoid being seen, since "scramble" usually implies more haphazardness than the Shade exhibits. "Hoarse voices smelling of"? Voices don't smell, breath does. Voices sound. More like "vendors..., with their hoarse voices, their breath smelling of lampredotto." Just to quibble, with actually modifies I. "I snake through vendors with their voices." But how did you get their voices away from them? "Into my clear green eyes"? That's an abrupt change in viewpoint, isn't it? Up to that point the reader has viewed the action as the Shade, but suddenly the reader has an external view of him. Rather than "unthinkable deaths," Brown probably meant "unimaginable deaths." "Langdon bolted awake"? The verb bolt should simply be retired from the language; label it obs. in the dictionary and leave it there. Brown uses the verb twice within a few pages. "Shot a glance." If the character had shot a glance, Langdon would have noticed it. I think Brown meant that she met the other doctor's eyes briefly to convey a message to him subtly. Advanced, intensity, panther, prey. Don't even get me started. If this were a movie, the actor would be overacting. "Horribly awry"? If the character is as methodically deadly as I think she is, a mission may catastrophically fail, but it would never go horribly awry.

Dear Jim Parsons:

2013-05-11T14:11:00.001-07:00

I'd give considerably more than my left leg for your endorsement of my novel (although not a first-born as I haven't any-born). It's a kinda oxymoronic brainy gay novel. Digs down to the origin of most Western religions. A few pokes at conspiracies. Do you need a release form? Thanks big much lots!

(Note accompanying a Kindle copy of Secreta Corporis I sent to Mr. Parsons.)

When is a review not a review?

2013-04-18T21:27:00.000-07:00

A.l. Boyd? I thought you were AM Larson. As AM Larson you gave my book Secreta Corporis three stars on Amazon. Here on Goodreads, as A.l. Boyd (with lower-case L, a typo) you gave my book two stars. But you copied and pasted the review. Same review, different rating. How come?

Did you give it the two-star rating after reading my comment on your review on Amazon? If you read it, you'll remember that I included this in my comment: "I should emphasize that I appreciate the reviewer giving the book three stars. He easily could have given it one star, and he didn't. Much appreciated. I just wish he had mentioned some of the positive aspects of the novel, like the extent of the research, or the depth of the character development, especially of the character Audric as he works through episodes of depression." (I apologize for using "he" instead of "she.")

I think it may have been just petulance that motivated you to drop a star from your rating here. Petulance in a review (do you need to look up "petulance"?) helps no one because petulance isn't about the book, it's about the reviewer. You were expressing how you felt, rather than how the book was written. What is a review for? Autobiography? You aren't the focus of a review, the book is.

Did you notice that Chapter III in the book was constructed as a flashback within a flashback? Did you pick that up? I think if you had you would have mentioned it in your review. The fact that you were confused by Chapter III being out of sequence doesn't mean the book is poorly written. You were just confused. And you probably didn't like that Chapter IV started off with an exploration of the history of Jaffa stratum by stratum down to the earliest Canaanite settlement.

This was a difficult book for you. That's okay. It's good when we read outside of our comfort zone. But you should have left the review for the grown-ups to write. It helps no one that you disliked the book because it was over your head and told people it’s a lousy book. (Two stars means "lousy book.") The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco also is a difficult book. But it was a NYTimes bestseller, because there are people who do like this kind of book. And your two-star review makes it less likely that some of those people will find - and like - my book. Should an early reviewer have that much control over the acceptance of a book? If a review is well-written and carefully considered, yes. Your review just said you didn’t understand the book.
______

(My response to a reviewer on Goodreads. Should an author be required to graciously take just anything a reviewer writes, no matter how careless or uninformed? A seasoned writer with bestsellers on his author page, probably yes. A new writer like me with very few reviews, I don't know. If people decide to read a book or not based on a book's reviews, a new author should have some recourse on the wide-open Web where anyone can write anything in a review.)

Review of The Talpiot Find

2013-03-22T11:05:00.000-07:00

Exercising Thought

Amos Lassen
To me a book that makes me think is a book worth reading and keeping. John Garvey’s book is a great example of that. It certainly made me think about the way I think and how I began to think a certain way. I think that is the result of being able to tie present and past together and by doing so in a unique manner—using an archaeological dig to do just that.

Marc is a graduate student and he really just wants to graduate. He does not appear to be overly ambitious and does not seem to want to succeed in his profession too quickly. He has been assigned to a dig in Jerusalem in the Talpiot area. If you know anything about Jerusalem, you know there are always digs going on and Talpiot is one of the major places for them. Many feel that Jesus spent his last few hours in Talpiot. Marc is near the supposed site of Jesus’ tomb and he is lackadaisical about any kind of find there. He doubts that they will find anything there. A year earlier a garbage pit from the 7th century bce was found there during the excavation of a well. Marc has been working around the well that dates back to the 12th century and all he has been able to find are pottery shards and bones of animals—just ordinary stuff. Suddenly he finds a human skeleton and when checked the bones date back to the 7th century bce and the diggers are faced with an interesting situation and want to know if the skeleton is the result of a murder.

Marc makes another find—clay tablets which also date back to the 7th century bce. On the tablets was something from the Torah written in an early form of Hebrew (so now I am truly hooked on the story since my field of study is Biblical Hebrew—not to be confused with the modern spoken language). I have seen many such finds and they have always been a major source of excitement. What the archaeologists have yet to figure out is if the tablets and the skeleton are at all related and if there was a murder. They have to ascertain if the location of the tables has anything to do with anything else or is the location coincidental. The tetragrammaton appears on the tablets and means that they should not have been so openly exposed and actually belong in a genizah (a special place in most synagogues where holy books that are worn are kept). The tablets that date back to the 7th century bce should not have been in a garbage pit and even more interesting, they were found next to a dead body.

It did not take long to learn that there is something in the tables that is very important and that there are those who are willing to kill to get them. It seems that there is a connection between the skeleton and the tablets and someone knows more than Marc and his colleagues.

This is the second of Garvey’s books with a setting having to do with the Biblical world and right away the two books spoke to me. I spent many years in Israel and was on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem so quite naturally my interest was in the books. I understand that the book is based upon historical happenings. For me, reading this was almost like going home and Jerusalem is indeed a city that has both past and present visible in daily life. I remember being told that this Biblical person or that one stood where I was standing and maybe slept in that house over there. Combining history and mystery, Garvey gives us quite a read.

From Reviews by Amos Lassen

Secrets of the body

2013-03-05T22:21:00.000-08:00

Secreta Corporis, a novel by John Evan Garvey, was published for the Kindle on 22 February 2013.

Two Templar knights are ousted from the Order for sexual perversion but are then targeted because of their knowledge of an ancient artifact the Templars will use to control the papacy.

The story
A.D. 1193. To avoid an arranged marriage, Rolant joins the Templars and is quickly transferred from France to Jaffa, the coastal city in the Holy Land that is the main port of entry for medieval pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. At the citadel in Jaffa, Rolant, who is nineteen and only recently knighted, is paired with Audric, a more experienced knight, who cautiously introduces him to a secret brotherhood of Templars who commit “the sin which shall not be named” in the dense groves of tamarisk trees scattered among the dunes along the coast. The secret brotherhood considers their activity in the groves to be comparable to grappling or swordplay, but for Audric and Rolant, their activity takes on a different tone because love becomes an integral part of it.

One of the main tasks Templars perform in the Holy Land is escorting pilgrims to Jerusalem and other holy sites. While Rolant is among the Templars escorting a group of pilgrims to Bethlehem, they encounter Saracens digging a well just at the moment human bones are displaced by the digging. The Saracens abandon the well and the pilgrims want to see if the bones are those of a saint. While the pilgrims pray over the bones, Rolant notices an old clay tablet in a dirt pile. The text inscribed on the surface looks ancient, like no language he has ever seen. He takes the artifact back to Jaffa with him as a memento but must relinquish it because Templars are allowed no individual possessions.

When in Jerusalem, Audric has avoided sleeping in the unsanitary lodging of the pilgrims by staying with a married Saracen friend, Tariq. Audric and Rolant’s activity in the groves and with a Saracen in Jerusalem do not go unnoticed by a secret society within the Templars, Lucerna Corporis, whose mission is to purge the Order of vice. At the citadel in Jaffa, Templars who frequent the groves begin receiving cryptic threats in the form of alchemical symbols drawn in blood on their bedsheets. A couple of Templars are killed, and when Audric and Rolant learn they are the next to be killed, they secretly leave the Order. They stay first with Tariq and then find beds at a boarding house, but their first night there they are attacked by Templars in plainclothes. They return to Tariq’s home, and Rolant realizes that the tablet he found—which, he has learned, is theologically damaging, and now would be called a smoking gun—can be used effectively by the Templars to threaten the papacy with disclosure only if no one knows about it other than a few Templar leaders. The Templars then target Tariq’s family along with Rolant and Audric.

The novel is available now at the Kindle Store and soon will be available for the Nook and iPad and in paperback.

More information about the novel is available on this page.

Thinking on the Edge

2013-02-01T14:27:00.000-08:00

Dear Editor,

Wow, you're all about prestige, aren't you.

Every writer on the website's front page is a world-renowned this or that.

Prestige. Climbing as high as possible up the hierarchy. Being the alpha male. Enjoying the approval of many. Being the center of attention.

Sounds grown-up, doesn't it. And much more sophisticated than the animal species that exhibit similar behaviors؟

Please recognize that wanting to associate with only the world's most prestigious thinkers is sorta immature thinking. The sort of thinking that would provide great material for a BBC sitcom.

John Garvey

[Sent to edge.org]

Zazzled again (cont.)

2013-01-15T19:44:00.000-08:00

Hello John,

Thank you for your email to Zazzle.

The new Content Management sections in your Account is broken down into two sections, "Under Review" and "Revise & Resubmit".

The Under Review section will have products that are currently under review by our Content Management Team at Zazzle. These products will consist of USPS Custom Postage, and Products in which the seller requests a review.

We like to be very careful when processing custom stamps because Zazzle Custom Stamps are real postage and subject to special Appropriate Use Guidelines (detailed at http://zazzle.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/135).

As for the Revise & Resubmit section, this area will have products in which a seller requested a review, but before we can approve the product to be published on the Marketplace, we will require some minor edits to be made to the product. For the most part, the edits will consist of making changes to the title, description, and/or tags associated to the product.

Currently, we are unable to place products from the marketplace that may have been a violation of our User Agreement in the Revise & Resubmit section, but it’s a feature that we hope to bring to all of our sellers in the near future.

Please feel free to submit a revised design which does not infringe upon Alana "Honey Boo Boo" Thompson's rights of celebrity/publicity.

Thank you for using Zazzle.com.
----------------------------------
Best Regards,

Mike
Content Management Team
Zazzle Inc.
__________________________

Hi Mike,

Thanks for explaining the Content Management sections to me, although I was already familiar with them. I don't know if you were with Zazzle at the time, but when the Revise and Resubmit section came online, the policy did include placing published products in Revise and Resubmit when the owner of the infringed property filed a complaint. My file probably includes the object(s) that I revised and resubmitted in the past under this policy. The policy of not putting published items in Revise and Resubmit is new and is probably the result of cost-cutting. But I have a hunch that, with the economy slowly rebounding, Christmas sales last year were much better than they've been in several years and perhaps even were Zazzle's best yet.

Regarding the change I need to make to the design, I need only remove one word from the design ("BooBoo") and reposition one word ("Honey") to fill the space left by the deleted word. Removing the word "Honey" isn't necessary because it would then be associated with "Badger" and Honey Boo Boo's property rights do not extend to the term "honey badger," unless I'm mistaken and "Honey Badger" refers to her Mom. I don't think she's taken on that nickname, and the meme "honey badger" became popular a few years before Honey Boo Boo became a celebrity.

I remember reading in past emails from Zazzle the statement "Please feel free to submit a revised design" after a design had been removed. The aristocratic, condescending nature of that statement must be lost on Zazzle managers, but to the designer whose design has just been insensitively deleted, it comes across as "Let them eat cake." Zazzle is not providing a free platform for its users in the same way that YouTube is. Because YouTube doesn't charge users for its web space, YouTube can pretty much do what they want with advertising on a user's pages. Zazzle, on the other hand, takes a fairly good percentage from the price of a purchased item. I wonder what percentage is left after the designer's royalty and the discounted bulk wholesale cost are subtracted from an item's price. Zazzle isn't providing a free platform, and so a YouTube-style arrogance is surprising.

Please restore my item to Revise and Resubmit. And please return to the policy of placing published items in Revise and Resubmit when necessary.

CafePress, surprisingly, is still doing well. And generally, Zazzle's users have blogs where they can inform their readers of company policies.

Thanks.
John

Zazzled again

2013-01-14T21:02:00.000-08:00

Dear carpecranium,
Thank you for your interest in Zazzle.com, and thank you for publishing products on Zazzle. Unfortunately, it appears that your product, Honey Badger BooBoo T-shirt, contains content that is in conflict with one or more of our acceptable content guidelines. We will be removing this product from the Zazzle Marketplace shortly. Please help us make our content approval process better by taking this short survey. The details of the product being removed are listed below:
Product Title: Honey Badger BooBoo T-shirt
Product Type: zazzle_shirt
Product ID: 235689032591470459
Result: Not Approved
Policy Notes: Design contains an image or text that may infringe on intellectual property rights. We have been contacted by the intellectual property right holder and we will be removing your product from Zazzle’s Marketplace due to infringement claims.
Image: Image
If you have any questions or concerns about the review of your product, please email us at content_review@zazzle.com and we'll be happy to provide you with additional support.
Best Regards,
Content Review Team
Zazzle Inc.
_______________

I just noticed in the email informing me of my product not being approved, that the Image link in the email text links to an image of the crown used in the design of the T-shirt. The image is what prevents the item from being approved? I was under the impression that the use of a celebrity name (Honey Boo Boo) was the problem. I may not understand the purpose of the image link in the email, and it may be included just to provide information for the user to know which product was not approved. If the image is the problem, however, you should know that I designed and created the graphic myself and I am unaware of an organization using a similar image as a logo. Content Review once informed me, regarding a product I created with an alpha-male theme, that a company uses "alpha male" in its name and didn't want my product being confused with theirs. Would you let me know who uses a similar crown design so I don't commit the same property infringement in the future? Or, if the infringement is with the celebrity's name, I would like to know that it was the problem rather than the image.

Also, I've mentioned several times in past emails that deleting a user's product without offering them the opportunity to alter the design is simply too cavalier. The pages Content Management, Under Review, and Revise and Resubmit were created to provide the user the opportunity to alter a design and avoid having the effort expended in creating that design negated. If my design has already been deleted, would you restore it and place it under Revise and Resubmit? I'm surprised that this procedure wasn't followed for this item, since the Revise and Resubmit page has already been developed and is operational.

Thanks for looking into these issues.

John Garvey
_______________

Hello John,

Thank you for your e-mail to Zazzle.com.

We would love to offer every design that our users submit, however we must abide by all applicable laws and standards as well as our own content guidelines and copyright policies.

Unfortunately, your product was removed because it featured a design that does not meet Zazzle’s Acceptable Content Guidelines. Specifically, your product contained content that violates Alana "Honey Boo Boo" Thompson's rights of celebrity/publicity.

We are sorry for any disappointment, but hope you will understand our position in this regard. For future reference, please review Zazzle’s Acceptable Content Guidelines at: http://zazzle.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/143.

If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Thanks for using Zazzle. We look forward to seeing more of your creative designs!

Best Regards,
Mike
Content Management Team
Zazzle Inc.
_______________

Mike,

No, your Content Management person simply forgot that there is an Under Review page and a Revise and Resubmit page. Have those pages been taken down? They still come up on my computer.

Did you notice that "BooBoo" was the only word I needed to delete from the design to make it acceptable? (I think Honey Badger don't care if I violate his rights of celebrity/publicity.) Once "BooBoo" is deleted from the design, Alana Thompson will have no claim to the design.

I'm really baffled by this. Zazzle went to the trouble and expense of creating those pages, and now they're not being used? I ask again, would you restore my product and place it under Revise and Resubmit so that I can edit it and resubmit it?

If that feature is no longer available at Zazzle because of the personnel required and the resultant expense, as I now suspect is the case, at least remove the pages from the menu. Given the percentage Zazzle receives from each item sold, you can afford at least that expense.

John Garvey

[An exchange with Zazzle today over removal of one of my items referring to the celebrity Honey Boo Boo]

The greed model

2013-01-13T12:22:00.000-08:00

(Note to the Customer Support person: Please pass this on to Administration. They need a little perspective. Thanks.)

You are kind of stupid, aren't you. It's understandable that you're not in this business to provide a free service. We understand that. But requiring that I subscribe in order to read emails/messages sent to me by subscribers? When you display ads on my screen, you are making money. If I were able to read emails/messages without being a subscriber, you would still be making money from the ads displayed on those screens. But almost every click on your site takes me to a page that says "Subscribe!" The fact that you provide so few features to non-subscribers indicates that you're trying to squeeze every penny out of the user. I wonder if you even display ads on subscribers' screens. Do you? The main purpose of a subscription is to have access to features without annoying ads on the screen. Which means that a non-subscriber could have access to those features with ads appearing on the screen, and Match.com would still make money. Didn't Match.com start out with that business model? But since then has gradually reduced the number of features available to non-subscribers? It's to the point now that a free account serves no purpose; almost no features are available. But you still make money from the ads displayed on non-subscribers' screens. Did you catch that? You still make money from the ads displayed on non-subscribers' screens. Since that revenue isn't enough for you, I won't be subscribing. Up to $40 a month? For what? On top of your not making money from my subscription, you also won't be making money from ads being displayed on pages that I would otherwise view. So, as a result, you are making less money now than you would if you provided features to non-subscribers. You lose ad revenue every time I don't view a page that I otherwise would. And I doubt I'm the only one put off by your greed. A potential user doesn't view any pages, and so no ads are displayed on those pages that are not viewed, and so no revenue is generated by either subscription or page views, multiplied times how many potential users? I'm fine with not viewing any of your pages, I lose nothing. But for you it represents a money leak—revenue lost because that revenue isn't enough for you. But the lost revenue doesn't amount to 0. It adds up to negative numbers.

[A note I sent to Customer Support at Match.com.]

Prepare to think

2013-01-02T12:08:00.000-08:00

The Talpiot Find challenges and entertains the reader with its offbeat approach to the familiar archaeological-find-rewrites-history theme. Readers will confront the Big Questions in a calm, no-big-deal atmosphere and will find themselves musing more than once “I never thought of it that way before.” While following the thought-journey of a very likable protagonist with a bias for humor and irony, readers will explore whether their own world-view is based on a need for comfort and feeling useful, or on a desire for everything to make sense. Whether any change should be introduced to the world-view is left for the reader to decide, but by the end of the book the reader will have more information and ideas to work with in their experience of the everyday world.

Grad-student Marc isn’t hoping for a spectacular archaeological discovery to catapult his career right from the start. He just wants to graduate. His assignment on this dig site in the Talpiot district of Jerusalem, near the alleged Jesus ossuary tomb, hardly seems likely to produce anything of note, much less spectacular. An ancient garbage pit had been discovered the previous summer while the dig team excavated a twelfth-century well. Marc is now down in the well methodically uncovering unexceptional pottery sherds and animal bones thrown out with the rest of the scraps from meal preparations twenty-six centuries ago. But then he finds a human skeleton. When the human bones turn out to be as old as the rubbish around them, the archaeologists wonder if the person, apparently dumped into the pit, was a murder victim. And then he finds clay tablets, right next to the skeleton, carbon-dated to the same time frame as the skeleton and the surrounding trash. The tablets turn out to be an interesting find, a portion of Torah written in ancient Hebrew Canaanite, seventh century BCE. Are they related at all to the skeleton, and the murder? Or is their location coincidental? What are the tablets doing in a garbage pit? Bearing the tetragrammaton, they should've been placed in a genizah. Why were they discarded? In a garbage pit? Near a corpse? Of a murder victim?

1,800 MPH

2012-12-26T14:44:00.000-08:00

A bullet traveling in the neighborhood of 1,800 mph is a compelling reason for gun control. Nothing else in our normal surroundings travels near that velocity with that much destructive energy generated by an individual employing a single finger. A car possesses more destructive potential but can’t approach the velocity of a bullet. Nothing in our normal surroundings can. That uniqueness is the reason for unique treatment of guns and gun ownership. Musket projectile velocities in the eighteenth century, when the Bill of Rights was written, were a fraction of current projectile velocities. Legislation intended for the musket is inadequate for modern weaponry.

A carrot on a stick for Google AdWords

2012-11-28T13:24:00.002-08:00

(At the end of their online survey regarding the effectiveness of customer support, Google AdWords provides a text box for any comments the AdWords user would like to make. This was my comment.)

You’re not looking in the right place. Support is very helpful, very effective in getting an issue resolved. The problem is with AdWords’ management itself. You should send surveys to users about AdWords’ policies and procedures, not about Support. That is where the problems lie. For example, I’m never told what websites display my ad impressions—except, once a month I’m sent an email that includes a list of the top four websites for my ads. Four websites a month. When there can be 10,000 impressions per day. Almost every time I’ve received the list of four websites, I’ve seen that the impressions were appearing in the wrong types of sites—game sites and sites where the text is displayed in Asian languages. I’ve responded to each email report by changing keywords, adding negative keywords, and filtering out additional countries, but since the language of my site is only English, no impressions should have appeared on Asian-language sites in the first place. This isn’t an issue I need Support’s help with. I need AdWords to show me every site where an impression of my ads is displayed so that I can adjust my campaign appropriately. Why wouldn’t I want to know where my ads are being displayed? Why wouldn’t you want to provide me with that information?

Regarding the whole AdWords paradigm, I have the best suggestion any user could come up with. Change the business model of AdWords so that your revenue comes from actual sales, not clicks. If that were the case, it would be in AdWords’ best interests to focus impressions on the right types of sites. As it is now, AdWords’ job is done when an ad is clicked on, even if a person clicks on an ad only out of curiosity and has no intention to make a purchase. An ad is clicked, you get paid, and you’re done. If the carrot were held a little farther out, AdWords would focus its efforts on getting its users’ products sold so that AdWords could be paid. But would AdWords/Google ever consider a business model like that? I know that Support is directed to respond to comments like this by saying that more money needs to be spent to be competitive with higher bids. Pour more money into the problem rather than fix the leak where the money falls out. But please, don’t direct Support to say that AdWords has no way of knowing if an actual sale is made or not. Tracking is what you do.

Dear Amazon

2012-10-10T07:30:00.000-07:00

It would be interesting if, in tandem with sales rank, you could analyze the writing in a book and give it a rank based on how well it’s written. Density of vocabulary, number of words of various types, length of sentences, number of cliches, number of typos, and similar criteria. It would help people find good writers who are buried in the sales ranks. (It would also motivate authors to proofread.) If you set up the analysis so that books by, e.g., Norman Mailer and J.D. Salinger scored well but weighted the ranking toward current writers, it would be an innovation in the industry as well as an alternative to the paradigm where popular writers just keep getting more popular. Offer the customer a choice of how books are sorted, by sales rank or quality rank. The media attention it brought Amazon would naturally result in an increase in sales.

Toes of parchment, feet of clay

2012-10-01T19:13:00.001-07:00

(My recent submission to Boing Boing)

The Talpiot Find by John Evan Garvey follows a grad student from Los Angeles doing his required fieldwork in archaeology at a dig site in the Talpiot district of Jerusalem. He uncovers ancient clay tablets while excavating a twelfth-century well, and when one of the archaeologists begins translating the tablets, he realizes that this document may have been part of a deception coordinated by Temple priests and scribes in the seventh century BCE. The archaeologists contain the information as long as they can, but a disgruntled student on the dig team who was the target of an unbelievably offensive prank leaks it to the public in an online video. The archaeological team then learns that anonymous groups want to discredit the tablets and are determined to keep any further information about them from reaching the public.

There are a billion Catholics; add to them all Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Mormons and any other religious group who takes Moses seriously as a prophet; then add to them all atheists and agnostics who have rejected any of those faiths. The sum is the number of people affected by the novel’s proposition that Torah began with a deception in the seventh century BCE. Numerous scholarly books since the early nineteenth century have suggested that the Temple priests and scribes during the reign of King Josiah composed a scroll that eventually developed into Devarim/Deuteronomy (e.g., Finkelstein and Silberman, 2002), which the priests themselves “found” during Temple repairs as described in II Kings 22:8-13 and presented to the people as if it were the divinely inspired writings of Moses from six centuries earlier. The priests’ motivation would have been to redirect all of the worship and offerings to the Temple by getting rid of all the competing shrines and sex temples crowding the Temple courtyard. The priests benefitted greatly by the implementation of the law in the scroll which they themselves had found; even the King subsequently had to seek their approval. Motive and opportunity. Like the Book of Arnold in The Book of Mormon developing out of what the originator knew were untruths but that were accepted by the people beyond what he expected, that one fake scroll may have led to the development of the rest of Torah and Tanakh/Old Testament and then the New Testament and the Qu’ran and the Book of Mormon and so on. The priests who composed the scroll intended only to control the worship and the flow of tithes of their time; they had no idea it would develop into the huge Judeo-Christo-Islamic structure it became and that still exists 26 centuries later and still influences elections and lawmaking.

I really will be mystified if you don’t think this is interesting enough to include in your blog. It’s true that your Buddhist and Hindu readers will find it ho-hum; their faiths are rooted elsewhere. But how many of your readers are attached, loosely or firmly, to a faith that grew out of the law of Moses, or have left a faith that grew out of it? I’d say a majority. A book that strongly suggests that no aspect of any of their faiths can be true because all of the faiths were founded on the belief that the faith that preceded them was true, all the way back to a single forged scroll, isn’t relevant?

The Talpiot Find is available in Kindle and Nook/iPad editions and as a paperback.

The story follows a modern-day archaeology student and a 7th-century-BCE slave manager. It’s even kind of brainy in spots. And none of the central characters take themselves too seriously. Lots of pop-culture references.

(Another submission to Boing Boing)

Assassin’s Creed meets Brokeback Mountain:
Secreta Corporis, a novel, is an examination of what would happen if two knights were placed in a similar sexual-identity crisis as Ennis and Jack. The knights, Rolant and Audric, in this case Templars in 12th-century Jerusalem, see a sea-change in the look-the-other-way policy of the Order as a secret-society-within-a-secret-society, called Lucerna Corporis (“light of the body”), begins purging the Order. Rolant and Audric begin to see knights dying around them and, when they realize they are the next targets, they secretly leave the Order. Their married Muslim friend in Jerusalem, Tariq, takes them in and helps them assess what their options are, since Rolant and Audric would rather be dead than return to the Languedoc in France as dishonored Templars. A seemingly innocuous episode, Rolant finding an ancient clay tablet in a dirt pile as Templars escorted a group of pilgrims to Bethlehem some weeks earlier, leads to Rolant and Audric being targeted again when the Templar leaders, unseen, within the citadel in Jaffa, evidently piece together what the clay tablet’s purpose was. Tariq surmises that Rolant’s clay tablet, as well as others left in the ground, represent a rough draft of a book of the Torah, Devarim/Deuteronomy. It looks like the Temple priests and scribes in the 7th century BCE composed the book to authorize their taking over the worship system in Israel but presented it to the people as the writings of Moses from six centuries earlier. The Templar leaders realize that the tablets would allow them to control the papacy with threats of disclosure of the fraudulent origins of Scripture, but only if the knowledge of the tablets were limited to a few Templar leaders. When Rolant and Audric are attacked by Templars in plainclothes, they piece together that their knowledge of the tablets is considered a threat, and then they learn that their association with Tariq and his family puts them at risk as well.

The inclusion of the tablets was inspired by II Kings 22:8-13 and the thought “What if the rough draft of that scroll surfaced?”

But New Yorkers call everybody savages

2012-09-20T22:47:00.001-07:00

My comment to the article "NYC Subway Ads Call For Defeat of Jihad 'Savages.' The ad: "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad."

Support Israel? Why? The land wasn't Israel's to take back after 19 centuries. "19 centuries since what?" Find out. Look it up. It's been 19 centuries since Israel was an independent nation governed by Jews. Think about it: It's been only 13 centuries since Babylonia was an independent nation governed by Persians. Who would support Iranians retaking their portion of Iraq? Anybody? Anyone? No? Then why should Israel's occupation be supported after 19 centuries? Why are the rules different for Israel? Are the rules different for Israel? Why? Whatever answer you give...why is [your answer] legally binding now? That was 4,000 years ago. "What was 4,000 years ago?" Look it up. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, what did the West do? When Jews invaded Palestine, what did the West do? No, the rules aren't different for Israel, they just think they are.

Freedoms: Speech = Faith

2012-09-14T17:03:00.000-07:00

Muslims!
It’s a poorly made little film!! No one takes it seriously!!

Enough already! Every religion gets trashed by somebody! Even by you!

Freedom of speech allows freedom of religion.

Freedom of religion requires freedom of speech.

React like grownups! View insults in perspective.

Violence is the wrong response. Did the film burn any vehicles?

Make a film insulting the Coptics’ Christ if you want.

Peaceful protests are much more effective than violence.

No one listens to a violent mob.

State your objections. Don’t shout your objections.

You’ve succeeded in greatly increasing the film’s audience.

Almost no one would have seen the film without the protests.

Think about why you, personally, are protesting violently.

Never join a violent protest to prove how faithful you are!

Never join a violent protest because everyone else is!

Never join a violent protest because religious leaders tell you to!

Never join a violent protest for the adrenalin rush!

Peaceful protests are boring, but they work.

Think about why the film was made.

Do Muslims discriminate against Coptic Christians?

Think about why you think that’s all right, if you do.

Do you think Muslims are superior to everyone else?

You despise Israeli exceptionalism. Why would you be the same way?

Get used to being equal with everyone else.

Get used to everyone being equal with you.

Don’t generalize about non-Muslims.

They’re not all the same.

You want respect. They want respect.

To get respect, give respect.

Your protests against corrupt regimes were noble.

These violent protests are just immature.

Admit you’re wrong sometimes. Everyone is.

Think more. Shout less. Talk less.

Conform less.

Trust authority less.

The world will always be evil. It will also always be good.

The visual realism of Assassin's Creed III

2012-08-27T16:19:00.001-07:00

(A comment I was going to leave for an Assassin's Creed III trailer on YouTube before I learned about the word limit.)

Eh, the game is all right, if you like chop-fests. No, seriously, the game is phenomenal—the amount of detail in the textures, the smoothness of the animations constructed on the fly, the beautiful lighting, the sophisticated particle effects. The state of the art has really reached an astounding state. It’s been interesting to watch the evolution of the technology from Altair moving among the NPCs in Jerusalem to Connor in the Colonies displacing knee-deep snow as he walks through it. A significant increase in detail and realism at each stage. And on top of the technological advancements is the game’s concept itself—locating the different stages of the game at significant points and places in history so that the user’s experience ends up being effortlessly, invisibly educational. Grand concept, impressive execution.

While watching one of the trailers for AC3 the first time, however, I had an unexpected negative reaction to Connor on the battlefield chopping a path through the Redcoats. The effect was different than Ezio taking on a dozen Templars in battle gear with his sword and retractable knives and all. It was different seeing Connor using a sleek steel tomahawk to actually chop up soldiers dressed in natty uniforms and armed with quaint guns. The game almost seems to be celebrating the killing. At one point, soaring orchestral strings accompany the hacking of British soldiers. At first, of course, I thought he was going after the British, which made the seeming celebration of the beauty of efficient killing even more disturbing. But even after I read that he killed only Templars in that scene, the scene was still disturbing because of the number and detail of the kills.

I understand the need for the kills in the context of the game and the use of the tomahawk in the context of Connor’s heritage, and that episodes in American history actually were as gristly as this. But I feel that things are different with the game this time around. With advancing game technology making characters look progressively more like real people than constructs of uv-mapped polygons, it becomes more significant that players feel a surge of endorphins and dopamine when hacking away at the characters. You can say “Nobody dies in a game” and you’d be absolutely right. They’re just polygons. But it’s also true that a part of the brain does not perceive it as just software moving polygons in response to user input, and that is the part of the brain that motivates the user to play the game. If you were to replace human models in the game with donut models that spurted jelly or creme when stabbed, the effect would be comical and the game would be fun to play for a while. Assassin’s Creme III. But the user wouldn’t have the deep visceral reaction to it that he has to gameplay involving animated models that closely resemble humans. The more realistic the characters look, the more significant that reaction is.

So, Ubisoft, since users would never, on their own, cap the number of kills they make in a game so that things don’t get out of hand, you could do that. You could easily reduce the number of Templars to be identified among the soldiers. As game worlds continue to look progressively more real, you could diminish the importance of the kill in the gameplay and emphasize instead the decision, the clue, the plan. It’s true that movies present very real-looking violence to the viewer, but the difference with realistic games is that the player isn’t a passive viewer of violence, he initiates and propels the violence. Ubisoft, you’re making a killing from a part of the player’s brain processing the game’s visual information the way it does. Play carefully with that part of the brain.

Is It Finally Time to Let the South Secede?

2012-08-13T11:16:00.000-07:00

[This article appeared today in Set You Free News. Just a note: I discussed secession briefly in a blog post in January 2005.]

By Joshua Holland | Alternet

The author of a new book challenges Northerners and Southerners to consider the possibility of a friendly divorce.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that cultural friction between the North and South persists to this day. After all, we fought an incredibly brutal, ugly Civil War.

The battlelines that were drawn then continued to divide us through the Reconstruction period and well into the middle of the 20th century, as federal troops were once again deployed to enforce the civil rights acts.

According to Chuck Thompson, a veteran travel writer who toured the American South, a degree of mutual enmity between Northerners and Southerners continues to be a source of cultural tension and political gridlock. We remain divided even as we have grown to become the world’s superpower. In his new book, Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto For Southern Secession, Thompson argues that it may be time for a divorce – to shake hands and go our separate ways.

Thompson appeared on last week’s AlterNet Radio Hour to discuss his book. A lightly edited transcript of our discussion is below (you can listen to the whole show here).

Joshua Holland: Chuck, you seem to be channeling the frustration of a lot of Northern liberals. I may have even said myself that we should have let the Confederacy walk in 1860. But I haven’t heard a lot of people calling to break up the Union today. You’re known as a comedic travel writer. So my first question is to what degree are you being tongue-in-cheek here? To what degree are you being serious?

Chuck Thompson: I am being serious. I understand that the meta arguments here that call for secession can be received as somewhat absurd in some corners. I acknowledge that it is probably a remote possibility. Within the framework of that argument I think there is a lot of room to highlight a lot of these problems and a lot of these frustrations that you refer to. One of the goals of this book really was to more or less articulate – to put some facts, figures and research behind a lot of this frustration of Northern and Southern liberals, of which there are many. I encountered many Southern liberals while conducting my research.

There’s this seething frustration people have. There’s this kneejerk reaction to blame the South. The sort of Northern media strafing of the South for a lot of the nation’s ills is a longstanding tradition. What I wanted to do was to get away from the traditional stereotypes of the dim-witted, mouth-breathing, Southern racist redneck and really look at what’s going on today. Find out why people are still having these issues with the South, and put some hard research and some facts and figures behind this general unease with the influence that the South has on the rest of the country.

JH: So we know we have an overtly religious political culture down South, and a culture today that is pretty hostile toward organized labor. What is it in your travels or in your research that prompted you to call for Southern secession?

CT: I get tired of everybody bitching about the problem. It’s like what Mark Twain said about the weather. Everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything about it. People have been having this problem with the South for my entire lifetime, and as my research pointed out to me, since even before there was a United States of America. Even in the Continental Congress, before the Declaration of Independence was signed, there were a lot of Southerners from South Carolina – particularly a family called the Rutledge family – sort of running the show back then and didn’t want any part of the United States. So a lot of the problems that have arisen between North and South have been around for a long time.

So, as I’ve said, I’ve spent a lot of my life hearing from everybody from Seattle to Savannah. Almost every American, at one time or another, has said that it’s too bad the country didn’t just split when we had the chance. We didn’t let the South go when we had the chance. We would have avoided a lot of problems. We – meaning this group in the north as we might identify ourselves – could take the country we want into a direction that we think is befitting of America without this push and pull that comes from the Southern states. At the same time the South could do the same thing.

What really led to this call for secession was understanding that a lot of people from the South are just as sick and tired of people like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid having an impact on their country as I am sick of people like Newt Gingrich and Jeff Sessions, Eric Cantor, Haley Barbour having an impact on my country.

So why shouldn’t each of these societies that are really very different from each other in the way they approach the fundamental building blocks of society – education, religion, commerce, politics – both sides of the country really approach their problems in the way they want to put their societies together in very diametrically opposed ways. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to live in a pseudo-theocracy if they want to? If the majority of the people in a very large part of the country wants to have the Ten Commandments emblazoned in front of their legislative houses, why shouldn’t they be allowed to do so?

My call here for secession isn’t really a punitive thing towards the South, though I admit to a lot of these Northern frustrations. It’s an effort to identify these differences; to acknowledge that they’re very striking and very strong, and to say each one of these sides might be better of without the other.

JH: So we could have a divorce without an excessive amount of acrimony.

CT: I would hope so. Why not?

JH: How are you defining the South? Are we losing the research triangle in North Carolina? Are we losing Texas in this deal? And is there any chance we could give them some of the duller states. We’re not using South Dakota, are we?

CT: There are some noncontiguous pockets of what would be left of the North that I think would be culturally more comfortable in the South. It’s the first question I started off with in doing the research. It’s a lot trickier than we might imagine. As for the research triangle in North Carolina? Yes, we’re going to lose it. Texas is really interesting to me. The best line I heard about Texas during the research was from a student at the University of Georgia who said the Texas state flag is a perfect representation of Texas, in that it looks just like the American flag without all the other states.

Even though Texas was part of the original Confederacy, it’s always been an all-around pain in the neck to categorize. They’ve never really been much of a team player, let’s face it. In my breakdown of the South I did not include Texas as a Southern state. I completely acknowledge there’s a lot of room for argument there, and that’s probably the easiest point in my book to argue against. I could argue both sides of it myself. In the end I decided that Texas would stay with the North in large part for economic reason. Texas is really one of the economic anchors of this country.

JH: So it wasn’t just for the barbeque?

CT: Barbeque, cheerleaders and Dr. Pepper.

JH: What about the people who live in those states? It’s easy to say they vote for the crappy government they deserve, but consider that in Utah – the reddest state in the country – 30 percent of the population vote Democratic. I’m not saying that voting Democratic is a perfect proxy for one’s ideology, but there’s a good chunk of people down there who we would be consigning to basically English-speaking Mexico. In Alabama, it’s 40 percent. Do you just say, ‘here you go you have to live in a third-world country with crappy education systems, no healthcare, and a government of snake handlers?’

CT: [Laughing] You’re tougher on the South than I am! Let me give you two answers to that. One is that in my imaginary secession legislative framework, I’m building in a period of 10-20 years where there’s free and open citizenship for anybody who feels caught on the wrong side of the divide. A tofu-scarfing liberal in Mississippi would be free to come on back over to the North, as well as maybe some survivalist NRA fanatic in the hills of Washington state would be legally entitled to take up residency in the new Confederate homeland. So I’ve built something into the imaginary structure for that.

The larger point goes back to what I said about even if you consider the argument for secession absurd, it really does give us a lot of room to address other issues. One of those that you allude to in your question is one of Southerners who are not the mouth-breathing, white-supremacist, gun-toting rednecks. That is the stereotype, but the fact of the matter is that’s a minority in the South.

JH: Fifty-seven percent of African Americans live in the American south.

CT: That’s right. That’s exactly right. One of the big mistakes that people who make these sort of polemics and screeds against the South is that they assume “Southerner” equals conservative white male. Now if you want to be really mean you include “racist” with Southern white male, that’s the stereotype.

But let’s even say that it’s conservative, evangelical Southerners. The fact of the matter is that’s not what the whole South is. There are a lot of African Americans in the South. There are increasingly a lot of Hispanics in the South. There are a lot of liberals in the South. There are atheists in the South. One of the things I really try to do with this book was not solely traffic in those easy stereotypes that I think a lot of people trap themselves with. That’s not to say I didn’t find a lot of those Southern, evangelical, white conservatives. I did and they’re in the book, but I also made a huge effort not to define the South solely on the classic Northern stereotypes.

JH: Ultimately, while I share your befuddlement with Southern politics I have to say that I’ve traveled extensively in the South. I lived in Arkansas briefly. I love the South, and I’ve met good, progressive people everywhere I’ve gone.

CT: What did you love about it?

JH: I love the culture of the South. I love the people of the South. I really had some great experiences dealing with Southerners. Even those Southerners I couldn’t necessarily discuss politics with.

I guess a related question is this: We have a really screwy political system with lots of deeply entrenched problems. Do you see anything that could be gained by the South’s secession that couldn’t be achieved by, say, getting money out of our political system? Or bringing back the fairness doctrine? Maybe reforming the filibuster in the Senate? Do you know what I’m saying? Those things aren’t likely to happen in today’s environment, but the South splitting away isn’t too likely either.

CT: That’s right, but a lot of these problems have been deeply entrenched in American society long before this dysfunction befell our political system. Politics is really only one way in which the South is quite a bit different it approaches its society. I think religion is the really big factor here and I think that’s what’s really not going to change in the South. Yes, there are evangelicals and religious lunatics in all 50 states in the country. Only in the South, though, do they represent a voting quorum. Only in the South can you appeal to voters in very overtly religious terms and expect success on a consistent basis. Again, that’s not to deny that this exists in the rest of the country. It does, but in the South is where its power base is.

I think that is the piece of the puzzle here that informs the politics of the South, in the same way that evangelical Christianity is the least tolerant of any sort of diversity or diversity of opinion. It’s Bible literalism. Everything is true and you adhere to everything; it’s black and white. When that is the foundation of the majority of the people in your society, when that becomes your whole social framework, then that’s the politics that grows out of that society. So we get that same sort of blinkered view of humanity of politicians in the South who come up to the North – we get this absolute, no compromise stance between these hardcore conservatives and other politicians.

When there were Republicans and Democrats fighting it out in the ’80s during the Reagan years, there was the famed Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan give-and-take. This is how politics works; it’s the art of compromise. The ruling power says to the opposition we won the election so we’re going to get these big things. Don’t give us too much trouble and we’ll work with you. We realize you have a constituency. Let us get our big things through without a lot of hassle and we’ll make sure you’re taken care of on some level. That’s sort of how it has worked for the most part. In the South, it’s different, because there is no such thing as compromise. If it’s God’s law that is driving you, if God says gay marriage is an abomination, if God says abortion is an abomination, then you simply can’t compromise. That’s not in your DNA if you really believe that. That’s where I think a lot of the dysfunction of our political process comes into play.

And I don’t think that’s going to change, regardless of whether you pull the money out of it or not. This ties into how the South deals with education. Southern states don’t typically fund their public schools the way other states do – they’re typically at a much lower level. There’s less commitment to the ideal of public education in the Southern states than there is in the rest of the country. That’s why we see over and over when the statistics come out, the South has the lowest SAT scores, lowest graduation rates, the most illiteracy. Whatever measures you want to put on academic performance it’s those core Southern states that are always leading the bottom of the back. In the bottom 10, eight or nine of them are always going to be Southern states.

I wanted to look into this. Why is that? Is it just that Southerners are stupider than the rest of us? Clearly that’s not the case. It’s the same gene pool. The more you look at it the more you realize there’s just a lower commitment to public education in the South than there is in the rest of the country. That’s been going on for hundreds of years. It’s not changing.

I was in Arkansas. I spent a week in Little Rock while they were searching for a new superintendent of schools last year. The dysfunction that I saw just in attending these public meetings where they were talking about what they needed was astonishing.

JH: We see a lot of liberal animosity towards the South. Were you at all concerned in writing this book about whether you would reinforce the stereotype of the coastal, elite liberals looking down their noses at the middle and the South? Was this a concern?

CT: Sure, people are going to jump to that conclusion. As you know — and as I found out in writing web articles and books — most of the really heated criticism you get from people are always from people who don’t even bother to read your article or your book in the first place. That’s going to happen. There’s nothing I can do about it. I really did make an effort not to be strident – though I’m certainly judgmental – and to find good things in the South, which there are. You deal with Southerners on an individual basis and they’re great. They’re friendly, hospitable, gregarious, and they like to party. They like to drink, to give you their food, they like to play music. It’s a lot of fun.

I didn’t try to be this super-strident jerk who was just sitting there bashing. I really am trying to put some numbers and some facts to this argument. These are two very different societies that have been economic and social frenemies from the day they were founded. The dysfunction has got to stop at some point.

—————————————————————————

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He’s the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

[Come to think of it, I also discussed secession briefly on the product pages of two of my T-shirts on Zazzle, one in January and the other in July.]

AdWords infinitum V

2012-07-24T22:00:00.000-07:00

This morning I received the following reply from AdWords:

Hello John,

Thank you for your email. This is Ankita from Google AdWords and I will be helping you with your query.

John, I am glad to hear that you wish to participate in our survey and give feedback regarding our AdWords account.

Your opinion is greatly appreciated. I have forwarded the suggestion to the team concerned and they will definitely look into it.

John, thank you for your valuable feedback. It is only with your support and co-operation that we can provide you with the best advertising service possible. If you have any other ideas or feedback regarding AdWords, please do feel free to let us know and our engineering team will look into it.

This evening I received another request to fill out an AdWords survey, from adwords.google.com this time. I believe it was a different survey, focused primarily on the professionalism of the support representative. I gave Sarah all high marks because she was friendly and professional in communicating with me. In a space provided for additional information, I wrote the following:

Sarah was very professional and friendly. I had no problem with her as a support representative. My concern is with Google's policy of abruptly taking an entire ad campaign offline, with no explanation offered either before or after the campaign is taken offline as to why there needs to be a review. That is very cavalier. An advertiser would want to know what triggers a review so s/he can avoid repeating the questionable behavior.

AdWords infinitum IV

2012-07-23T15:53:00.000-07:00

At 2:30 pm today, I checked the two ads created yesterday and awaiting approval, and both had been approved. I'm very glad to see that the occupation ad isn't being treated like the Captain Uncut ad.

Not long after that I retrieved my email for the first time today (usually much earlier) and found a reply from Sarah that had been sent at 6:42 am today:

Hi John

Thanks for your patience. I've confirmed that your account is out of the review and your ads are now running on Google.

We apologize for the disruption to your ad delivery and thank you for your understanding.
Best,
Sarah

So they did send a notification. Good. I'm glad.

And then this: I received an email today from Google AdWords that was dated Wednesday, December 31, 1969.

Okey-dokey. It read:

Dear AdWords customer,

We are writing today to ask you to complete a brief survey about your experience with Google AdWords. The survey should take about 10 minutes to complete and your responses will be kept confidential.

Your feedback is critical in helping us understand the challenges and opportunities you face every day, so we can prioritize the tools and services that will best help you. To get started just click on the link below, or cut and paste the link into a browser window.

I was surprised that they wanted feedback, since they're so big they don't need it. I noticed that the email was from the Google AdWords Research Team, while Sarah's email had been signed the Google AdWords Team. I picture the two departments going at it, launching attacks and counterattacks via email and texting. Or not.

I then noticed that the link was to survey.googleratings.com. After a moment of wondering why it wasn't ratings.google.com/survey, I clicked on the link and landed on a legitimate-looking page. But then I thought "'Googleratings'? Naw, this is a phishing site" and clicked the Back button, thinking that if damage were going to be done it was already done. I did searches for "googleratings.com" (on Google, wasn't that smart?) and came up with no warnings that it was a scam but also no really clear statements that it was genuinely genuine. Hmm, ponder, ponder. With the date of the email being strange, I thought I'd rather err on the side of safety and sent the following email to them:

About the googleratings.com survey, I would feel better about going to a subdomain of google.com, like survey.google.com. The googleratings.com domain could easily be a phishing site. Or it could be no more than Google handling its accounting like Mitt Romney handles his, but I still would be reluctant to participate in the survey if that were the case.

I appreciate very much your interest in learning about users' experience with AdWords. I'm willing to participate in the survey, but even if I'm assured that it's a genuine site, I'm reluctant to participate at googleratings.com. It's like (how should I describe it?), it sounds like the piano needs tuning. It doesn't ring quite true.

Thanks.
John

AdWords infinitum III

2012-07-22T16:10:00.000-07:00

At 1:11 pm today, I created an AdWords ad that read "End the Israel Occupation. Here's why: The Talpiot Find, a novel. Find out." At the moment it's 3:50 pm and the ad is still under review. Most of my other ads are more neutral or come out against the Bible, and those ads have taken less than an hour to be approved. At 3:58 pm I created another ad of the same type (text rather than Flash). This ad reads "Ebooks should be free? The Talpiot Find, a novel by John Evan Garvey. Find out." A very culturally neutral ad. I'm curious how long it will take this one to be approved.

AdWords infinitum II

2012-07-19T17:20:00.000-07:00

AdWords' reply on July 19 to my email of July 18 (see previous post):

Hi John,

I'm sorry about the inconvenience caused to you because disruption to the ad serving. I've escalated your account to expedite the review process and will update you in the next 1-2 business days.

I understand your frustration and I'll pass on your feedback to our specialists and we will keep these suggestions in mind if any future changes happen.

Having said that, I also wanted to point out that account reviews are necessary for various reasons, including account security and billing verification purposes. We conduct reviews as quickly as possible, so that your account can get back up and running. However, due to account volume and the time-sensitive nature of each review, we're unable to proactively notify customers about individual account reviews.

Per our Terms and Conditions (https://adwords.google.com/ select/tsandcsfinder), ads can undergo review at any time, and we do not issue credits or refunds for this period of inactivity.

Ad review process

John, I see that you had a concern related to ad approvals and I'm happy to explain that as well. It is possible that certain ads get reviewed quicker than a few others and this may happen because:

-A few ads may have triggers for potential policy violations and they may need specialist review, while others may not have those triggers and will be approved sooner.

In any case we try and complete these ad reviews within 3 business days and if there are any ads that take longer than this, please feel free to write us and we will have them reviewed for you.

Also, please be assured that all ads are reviewed diligently and we ensure that they are in accordance with our advertising policies. I'd assure you that we do not consider any other factors for an ad review other than the policy guidelines. Here's some more information about the ad review process and hope this explains.

Best,
Sarah

Officialspeak. Companyspeak. Sarah reflects the company image. You maintain their goals to live by. Shine your shoes, let's keep a neat haircut now that you're— A coat and tie? Jeans and T-shirt. But anyway. Ms. Sarah, say Ms. Sarah, I have seen you go through a day. You're everything a robot lives for. Walk in at— 9-to-5? Hardly. But anyway, robo-reflecting the company image can come in all shapes and sizes.

I've considered replying again, but I'm just one of, how many?, tens of thousands? of AdWords users, and nothing I say in an email is going to affect corporate policy. I would only annoy a few customer assistance facilitators. The people who actually make policy and design the user experience are safely buffered by customer assistance. If I suggest that, when they take a user's campaign offline, an automated email be sent to the user to inform them, that suggestion would go no further than the customer assistance facilitator who reads it first, and probably not Sarah next time. It's interesting that expediting the review process will still require 1-2 business days for her to get back to me. It's also interesting to read that, if the review of any ads takes more than the expected 3 business days, I should feel free "to write us and we will have them reviewed for you." Did she mean that, if they aren't reviewed in 3 business days, they aren't going to be? Are they left in a pool of unreviewed ads, to be retrieved only for those advertisers who care enough to contact them? That's a great policy. Another suggestion I would offer them, instead of abruptly taking a campaign offline so it can sit in a queue for days, would be rather to wait until a reviewer is available and then take it offline. But would that suggestion reach any influential person? Doubt it.

Sarah assures me that they do not consider any other factors for an ad review other than the policy guidelines. And maybe that's true for her and the group she works with. But given the subject matter of my ads and the history of protectionism and exceptionalism of those associated with the subject matter, I think it's very likely that somewhere in enormous, labyrinthine Google are individuals who've never been taught to think outside the box, never been allowed to think outside the box, who follow an agenda that differs somewhat from that of their employer.

Stay tuned.

Update Friday, July 20, 10:55 pm:

About 10:00 pm tonight, I discovered that my ad campaign was back online. From the number of impressions, I could tell that it hadn't been up for long, maybe an hour. No email from Sarah. No explanation of what they were looking for when they took it offline. No warning that they were going to take it offline or notification when they let it go back online. Google doesn't follow best business practices simply because they don't have to.

AdWords infinitum

2012-07-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

I contacted Google AdWords Help on July 17 to find out why the number of impressions for my ad campaign had dropped to zero after generally having been between 1k and 5k impressions per day. I received the following reply July 18.

Dear Advertiser,

We're sorry to hear that you're experiencing difficulties with your AdWords account. It appears that you have some questions about why your ads aren't showing. We checked your account and found that it's currently under review by our specialists. In an effort to provide the best experience for our users and advertisers, some accounts are submitted for review to ensure that they comply with our policies. Your ads won't show during this time, but they'll automatically be eligible to show again as soon as our review is complete.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

My email reply:

If an advertising account is taken offline to be reviewed, the advertiser should ALWAYS be notified. That is just basic business practice. I interpret from your email that I received this notification only because I contacted AdWords support. I should have been notified of the review before my account was taken offline.

From my experience with individual ad approvals, I've learned that ads of a certain type will languish indefinitely "under review," actually for a week or so, while the rest of the submitted ads are approved within minutes. I interpret this discrepancy as the individual(s) responsible for approval and rejection of ads being unable to reject an ad because it complies with company policies, but because they find this type of ad personally distasteful, they will leave it "under review" until the advertiser gives up and deletes it, effectively rejecting an ad for which a rejection would not otherwise be permitted. I anticipate that my account will undergo the same quasi-rejection as some of my ads have received.

I believe that the activites described above are a serious breach of company policies and that they would be grounds for dismissal of an employee should the activities become known by management. Unless, of course, management is directing the activities.

Thanks very much.
John

What I had been promoting with my AdWords campaign was, primarily, my novel The Talpiot Find, which takes a reasonable approach to examining the controversial topics of the divine inspiration of Scripture and Israel’s traditional claim to the land. The "certain type" of ads that languish indefinitely "under review" are those that promote a T-shirt design I'm selling through Zazzle.com. The design includes an image of a superhero named Captain Uncut who has the title "Defender of Foreskins." At the top of the design is text that reads "No foreskin left behind!" I had developed the design while working on the graphics for Sherwin Carlquist's photography book Uncut, which playfully discusses the medical and social aspects of circumcision and advocates that the custom be abandoned. I thought that a T-shirt displaying the graphic I created for the book's cover would help promote the book. I got my AdWords campaign for my novel up and running in March of this year, and in June I included ads for a few of my items on Zazzle, including a page of assorted Captain Uncut items. Every other ad I created in my AdWords campaign was approved within minutes. Captain Uncut, however, remained under review for about a week, when I contacted customer assistance. The facilitator moved the ad through the system within a few hours. A few days later, I decided that the ad should point to only one item, the T-shirt pictured in the ad, and I changed the URL and resubmitted, thinking that whatever holdup there had been before had been removed by the facilitator. More than a week later, I decided just to delete the edited Captain Uncut ad, which had gotten stuck again "under review."

I could be making a wrong connection between my ad, which could be called anti-circumcision, being blocked and then my entire ad campaign, which primarily promotes my end-the-Israeli-occupation novel, being blocked. But there at least appears to be a unifying theme.

Tune in tomorrow for more AdWords fun.

Obama Should Seize the High Ground

2012-05-28T11:36:00.001-07:00

By Thomas L. Friedman
This column appeared in the New York Times 26 May 2012

DURING a recent discussion in Seattle with a group of educators, one of them surprised me when she pointed out that even though their state did not win President Obama’s education “Race to the Top,” that program was critical in spurring education reform in Washington State. As I listened to her analysis, the thought occurred to me: I wonder how Barack Obama would do if he ran for president as himself. ... How he would do if he ran for re-election on all the things he’s accomplished but rarely speaks about.

Barack Obama is a great orator, but he is the worst president I’ve ever seen when it comes to explaining his achievements, putting them in context, connecting with people on a gut level through repetition and thereby defining how the public views an issue.

Think about this: Is there anyone in America today who doesn’t either have a pre-existing medical condition or know someone who does and can’t get health insurance as a result? Yet two years after Obama’s health care bill became law, how many Americans understand that once it is fully implemented no American with a pre-existing condition will ever again be denied coverage?

“Obamacare is socialized medicine,” says the Republican Party. No, no — excuse me — socialized medicine is what we have now! People without insurance can go to an emergency ward or throw themselves on the mercy of a doctor, and the cost of all this uncompensated care is shared by all those who have insurance, raising your rates and mine. That is socialized medicine and that is what Obamacare ends. Yet Obama — the champion of private insurance for all — has allowed himself to be painted as a health care socialist.

Think about this: Obama didn’t just save the auto industry from bankruptcy. Two years later, he also got all the top U.S. automakers to agree to increase mileage for their vehicle fleets to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, from 27.5 m.p.g. today. As Popular Mechanics put it, this “is the largest mandatory fuel economy increase in history.” It will drive innovation, save money and make America less dependent on petro-dictators. Did you know Obama did this?

Finally, how did Obama ever allow this duality to take hold: “The Bush tax cuts” versus the “Obama bailout”? It should have been “the Bush deficit explosion” and the “Obama rescue.” Sure, the deficit has increased under Obama. It was largely to save the country from going into a Depression after a Bush-era binge that included two wars — which, for the first time in our history, we not only did not pay for with tax increases but instead accompanied with tax cuts — plus a 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill that we could not afford, then or now. Congressional Democrats also had a hand in this, but the idea that Bush gets to skate off into history as a “tax-cutter” and not as a “deficit buster” is a travesty. You can’t just blame Fox News. Obama has the bully pulpit.

But Obama is running even with Mitt Romney not simply because of what he didn’t say, but also because of what he didn’t do. As the former Obama budget director Peter Orszag notes, to get the economy moving again, what we’ve needed for the past two years is a plan of “combined boldness” — another stimulus focused on infrastructure that would grow jobs and enhance productivity combined with a credible, bipartisan plan for trimming future growth in Medicare and Social Security and reforming taxes to get our long-term fiscal house in order, as the economy improves.

In short, we needed more stimulus paired with some version of the Simpson-Bowles deficit plan. It is highly unlikely that you could “get one passed without the other, and you shouldn’t want to anyway,” said Orszag. Together they would launch the U.S. economy.

Obama, in fairness, tried a version of this with his “grand bargain” talks with the House speaker, John Boehner, but when those talks failed, Obama made a huge mistake. He should have gone straight to the country and repeated over and over: “I have a plan that will create millions of jobs and send the stock market soaring — near-term stimulus plus Simpson-Bowles — and the Republicans are blocking it.”

Obama could have adapted Simpson-Bowles, but symbolically it was vital to embrace it in some form as his headline deficit plan, because it already enjoyed some G.O.P. support and strong backing from independents, who liked the way it forced both parties to compromise. Had Obama gone to the country with more near-term stimulus married to Simpson-Bowles, he would have owned the left, independents and center-right. It would have split the Republicans and provided a real alternative to the radical Paul Ryan-Romney plan.

Instead, Obama retreated to his left base, offered a stimulus without Simpson-Bowles and started talking about “fairness.” The result has been a muddled message that has alienated independent/center-right voters who put him over the top in 2008. Don’t get me wrong: I want fairness, but fairness that comes from a growing economy and comprehensive tax reform not from redividing a shrinking pie.

In sum, Obama’s campaign right now feels as though it were made in a test tube by political consultants. It’s not the Obama we admire. Rather than pounding the country with “I have a plan” — a rebuilding stimulus plus Simpson-Bowles — which would be an Obama-like message of hope, leadership and unity that would put him on higher ground that Romney can’t reach because of the radical G.O.P. base, Obama is selling poll-tested wedge issues. I don’t think it’s a winner for him or America.