For Goldie

2000-2008

Her brown eyes are closed.
The beat of her tail is stilled.
She was a good girl.

Thanks to her family for letting me share her love.

Marketing Lessons

Marketing to Americans 101

You go to buy a chocolate bar and discover that the price has gone from $1.00 to $2.00. When the price drops to only $1.70 you are thankful.

The price of gasoline creeps up by a dime a week from about $2.50 to $3.00. You are thrilled when it drops back to $2.90.

The president jacks up the number of troops in Iraq. Next he lowers the number of troops by bringing half of the additional troops home. The American people thank him for cutting back the number of our troops in Iraq the way we wanted.

The American people are being scammed in which scenario?

a- Chocolate bar
b- Gasoline
c- Troops
d- All of the above.


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Marketing 102

Several years ago the amount of coffee in the "one pound" cans quietly dropped a few ounces to anywhere from 11 to 13 ounces. The cans remained the same. The price per can remained the same.

When shoppers caught onto the scam the coffee companies' spokespersons explained that they were responding to the wants of their customers. [Huh?]

The moral? Always look carefully at what is really inside the can even if the can looks the same.

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Marketing 103

Shoppers are familiar with the changes in wrapping on their favorite foods that occur from time to time. Usually the price goes up with the "New and Improved" packaging even is the contents are identical.

The moral? Always look carefully at what is really inside the package even if the package looks different.

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In this morning's New York Times Bush is quoted as saying "Fifteen months ago, Americans were worried about the prospect of failure in Iraq."

Who are these Americans? I can't find them.

The Presidential "What If"

Writers, particularly fiction writers, are familiar with the “what if” exercise, the practice of taking a familiar event or day-to-day experience, introducing an unexpected twist and then seeing what happens. For example:

What if in January 2009, Inauguration Day arrives and everyone is ready for the swearing in of the next president…and the current president decides he shouldn't leave?

He determines it is in the best interests of the country for him to stay president because we are involved in a controversial war and in a domestic economic crises and he believes he is the only person who knows how to manage everything…and his attorneys and advisors tell him he can.

Now what?

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One of the rules of the “what if” game is that your answer can’t be “oh, that would never happen.” Besides, is this scenario really beyond the realm of possibility?

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Despite the date, this is not an April Fool’s Day post. I’m not sure what writer I would pick to take a crack at this “what if”; Stephen King doesn't seem quite right.

And What About Afghanistan?

There was a lot of commentary this week about it being the fifth anniversary of George Bush invading Iraq and the fact that 4000 American soldiers have died there.

But did anyone notice the small Associated Press item in today's newspapers: "An Army Green Beret from Monmouth County has been killed in Afghanistan..."? When did we arrive in Afghanistan and how many of our soldiers have died there?

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"War is a contagion." - Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945)

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"War ... should only be declared by the authority of the people, whose toils and treasures are to support its burdens, instead of the government which is to reap its fruits." - James Madison (1751-1836

You Must Be a Stranger In These Here Parts

The following item was broadcast on the traffic report on one of the New York City radio stations today. The emphasis is the announcers, not mine:

"...and due to flooding the Griggstown Causeway is closed between Franklin and Montgomery [slight pause] in BOTH directions."

Duh.

Just another one of the joys of living between the New York and Philly media giants. And if you don't understand this post...see the title.

The Sledding Hill

Every adult who grew up anywhere that had the slightest bit of snowfall remembers the definitive sledding hill of their youth.

Mine was at the end of my block; a curving slope that ended on the next street up.

We all took our sleds - wood with metal runners - to the top of the hill for the run down. There was a rumor that soaping your runners made for a faster run but I never remember testing that theory, as my mother wouldn’t “waste” soap for such an endeavor.

There were about thirteen boys and two girls in our gang. One of the girls had blonde Shirley Temple curls and always boasted that she had once won a baby beauty contest down the shore. Her mother claimed that we picked on her when we were sledding, so whenever she was there her mother would stand at the bottom of the hill guarding her daughter.

I don’t remember having to stop for cars, but they must have been there at least when our fathers came home from work.

We sledded until it was so dark that the streetlights went on and our mothers began to yell for us to go home. Our wool coats and leggings with zippers on the bottom would be soaked, our mittens hanging off our mitten clips, and clots of snow embedded around our wrists. The metal fasteners on the front of your galoshes would be encrusted with frozen snow. If your nose began to run you wiped it off on your rough cold wet sleeve. The style of your sledding outfit could depend on whether your older siblings were boys or girls.

When you finally got home and leaned your sled against the house, you undressed just inside the kitchen door so you didn’t melt all over the house and the smell of wet wool pervaded the kitchen. Your face and your hands were red from the cold and droplets ran off your eyelashes and your mother brought an old towel for you to wipe off your wet fringe of hair.

A few years ago, in the spring, I happen to be near the town where I grew up. I made it a point to ride through my old neighborhood and took a picture of the sledding hill.


The hill was a lot bigger when I was sledding on it – way longer and a lot steeper. Honest. Or maybe it just looks different when it is covered with snow...

Exactly Who Is the Cliff Dweller?

About 20 years ago, when Hillsborough was going through a building boom, I bought a high-end townhouse. By high-end I mean it had its own garage and my parents couldn’t believe that I was spending so much money (about $125,000) for “an apartment” when I could spend the same money for a “real” house.

My neighbors were a varied group.

One was an older widowed lady – a long time Hillsborough resident whose family was well known for the hundreds of hours they had volunteered to the town’s emergency services. She could no longer care for her single-family home, but wanted to stay as independent as possible, remain near her friends and family, and still have a place to plant her rose bushes.

Another neighbor taught piano at the beautiful grand piano that filled her living room. The family had left Russia for the United States and now worked hard to afford the first home they had ever owned – a dream they never thought would be possible - and to proudly honor their adopted country.

Two units down from me was a couple in their sixties. The husband had finally retired after spending decades being repeatedly transferred all over the country while serving in the United States Army. This was the first home they had actually owned.

There were families who wanted their children to be able to safely play outside their houses and truck drivers and owners of small businesses, and young working couples; a variety of people working hard on the American dream, starting with their first small home.

Hillsborough should be proud to have these families choose to live here. But recently a resident of the western end of town, posting on a local forum, disdainfully declared that Hillsborough would be better off without these people who he contemptuously and condescendingly refers to as “cliffdwellers.”

As far as I can determine, his superior attitude rests on the belief that his family has a right to reside here because they have been here longer and he lives on one of the older homes on a small farm. He believes our town would be a better place if all the “newer” homes (by which he seems to mean any dwelling built after his) went away and their residents ceased to exist.

That is an interesting viewpoint from a resident whose forefathers apparently arrived in North America only around the seventeenth century. The real cliff dwellers, possibly ancestors of the present-day Pueblo tribe, built their towns in the southwest United States between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.

Which homes would those original cliff dwellers want to go away? Who would they choose for their neighbors?

Who would you choose for your neighbors?

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"The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. Their followers forgot it. What is the trouble between capital and labor, what is the trouble in many of our communities, but rather a universal forgetting that this teaching is one of our first obligations." - Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)