- Tonight at 9pm CT on ESPN2, be sure to watch Wednesday Night Baseball. Two of the top pitchers on the Chinese Taipei staff square off against each other as they try to impress their owner (me). Hopefully we'll see both Kevin Brown and Greg Maddux put up complete games, with Maddux winning 1-0 on an unearned run.

- I've just been informed that tonight is also the Dawson's Creek finale. The big question is, who will die, Pacey, Dawson, Joey, or the other chick? Well, since I got the inside scoop, my money is going on Joey.

- Now that I have added another thing (my Pocket PC) to the list of "stuff I carry around", a problem arises. Where do I put everything? Especially with summer arriving, I'm not gonna have my many-pocketed coat on all the time. I don't have enough stuff to need a briefcase, but I don't want my pockets to be bulging either. A purse would be nice, but too bad it's unmanly. It would be like that episode of Friends when Rachel gives Joey a man-purse.

- Why is there an "energy drink" called "AMP"? You'd have to be a retard not to know that Amp is a measure of current, not energy. They should call it "Volt*Amp", or better yet, "Watt". (Any NERC certified readers should probably step in and correct me if I'm mistaken)

Asian Pacific American History Month

How many people know that May is "Asian Pacific American History (/Heritage) Month"? I never even heard of it in my life until yesterday. Now I'm kinda pissed. I can't believe I've been missing out on all the Asian Pacific American hoopla all these years. My May's have been so disturbingly lacking in heritage... what a bummer.

So I looked up info on the whole thing on Google, and learned some interesting facts. The most amusing thing to me was that Asian Pacific American Heritage Month actually started out as Asian Pacific American Heritage Week in the '70s, as the first 10 days of May (why 10 days was called a "week" don't ask me). Then, for whatever reason, the first President George "H-Dubs" Bush extended it in 1990 to span the rest of May as well. Score!!

I guess maybe somewhere along the way in the '80s, Asian Pacific Americans got more popular or influential in this country and white people decided that we deserved a spot along with the other minorities. So now it's not only Blacks, Women, Hispanics, and Native Americans who get to celebrate their very own one whole month out of the year. I too, as a Asian Pacific American now have May to hold onto as mine. It's also cool that we got a 31-day month, whereas Black people kind of got screwed with February. [in voice of Nelson from Simpsons]: ha-ha

Ok, in case you didn't know, I'm just kidding. Well, there really is such a thing as APAHM in May, and that history stuff was true too, but honestly it all couldn't mean less to me, an APA. The whole idea seems pretty cheesy if you ask me. I remember The Onion had a hilarious article in March about "Black History Month Ends As White History Year Resumes", and that pretty much sums up just how meaningless the concept of "_____ History Months" are. But if you are still interested, look it up on Google yourself, there's a lot of info on Asian History that you might find intriguing.

Normally I would take this opportunity to write down my whole spiel on race relations and all that, but I don't want this blog to be super long. See, I'm really trying to keep things short. But know that I do have a lot of thoughts on the subject of race and if anyone is interested in having a heavy discussion, come talk to me in person and we'll have a friendly chat.

*****

Update on the UPS Delivery: As you may have noticed, I did not write an entry about "Why I Hate UPS Online Tracking". This is because I did get my package, as promised by the tracking info on the website. Too bad I didn't have time to play with it much yesterday, but hopefully when I get home today, I will have a chance to check out my toy in more detail. As Chras would say, "GYEAHHH".

Technology vs. Old School

In one of his blogs last week, P talked about the charm of looking up baseball box scores in the morning newspaper. This is a practice which has gotten lost in the midst of today's readily available, live-updating websites like ESPN Gamecast, CBS Sportsline, or best of all, Yahoo StatTracker. But yeah, his opinion is a feeling that I totally share... that even though I've gotten used to having all those Internet services, I kind of miss the good old days of opening up the Tribune at breakfast, going to each box score of every game involving one of my players, and mentally calclating how many fantasy points he got.

I was reminded of this because I have been waiting for a package to arrive via UPS, with my Pocket PC and SD card. Most of us who have ordered stuff online have experienced using a "online tracking number" to see where their package is. Well, here at work I just checked the status of my order on the UPS site, and it tells me that my stuff was shipped out last week from Kentucky, routed through Indiana on Friday afternoon, through Chicago on Friday night, and scanned in at Palatine Saturday morning. It also informs me that as of 7:02 this morning, the package was sent "Out for delivery", which I can only assume means that it should be on my doorstep by the time I get home today.

Well, the point of that story is that even though it's nice to know when your stuff is gonna arrive, it sucks that online tracking robs you of the old school way of doing things. Don't we all remember the times we would race home from school every day, full of excitement to check the mail and see if the stuff we ordered came that day? Even if it didn't, that just made the excitement build that much more for the next day's mail-checking time. The hype would keep building until the joyous occasion when the package finally arrived. Well, with online tracking, all those feelings of excitement are long gone.

Another subject I can think of that technology has changed is music. I have vivid memories of me and my sister patiently waiting by our radios for our favorite song to come on (such as "Achy-breaky Heart"), so we could record it on tape. Seriously, we would just sit there all day, with our fingers hovering over the "Record" button, hoping to catch the song we wanted. Then later we would compare each others' versions to see which one was the best. Now, with mp3's being easy to get, we have no need to do any of that.

The other thing I remember about tapes was all the rewinding/fast forwarding through songs, or how cool the "Auto Reverse" and "High Speed Dubbing" functions were. Sometimes, me and my sis would record the same song over and over on the whole tape (Tag Team's "Whoomp! There It Is" comes to mind), so we wouldn't have to stop and wait for the rewinding to hear the song again. Well, the rise in popularity of CDs made all that obsolete, with the convenience of forwarding tracks quickly and easily. And now, switching between songs or looping songs is even simpler with a few clicks of the mouse on Winamp. Sure it saves a lot of time, but I can't help but to think back fondly on all the hours we spent fooling with those stupid cassette tapes.

I'm sure there's a lot of other examples, but I can't think of any more right now off the top of my head. Plus I'm too excited to think or type, and I'll probably leave work early today so I can go home and play with my new toy. It better be there, or I'll probably end up writing a scathing blog entry on "Why I Hate UPS Online Tracking".

By the way, just because I talk about missing the old school stuff, doesn't mean I would ever give up the conveniences of modern technology to go back. I guess I just like reminiscing... yes that's me, an aging old man, looking back on the primitive '80s and '90s and scowling about how "kids these days don't know how good they have it". Join me in the elderly community!

Happy Mother's Day to all my readers who happen to be mothers. I know there's a lot of you moms out there who check my blog frequently, so I'd like to take this chance to say, "Thank you" for being good mothers.

So this morning I woke up early and drove home to deliver a pot of azaleas to my momma. I think she was in a bad mood when I got there, but it never ceases to amaze me what some flowers can do to cheer up a woman. I don't get it, but I do know that her face brightened immediately when she saw the flowers.

At church, there was a special performance by the little kids for the mothers. It doesn't seem like that long ago that I was up there myself, but when I think about it, it's been almost 20 years. It's always funny to watch the kids because you see the girls are so well behaved and paying attention, but the boys are all fooling around and pushing each other.

Anyways, since I said I'd write a followup on the last blog, here it is. A page from the big book on Dudo509 Microeconomic Theory.

Advertising And The Economy

I remember a few years ago, there was an ad campaign about why advertising was good. The argument was that advertising would stimulate economic growth by increasing demand for consumer goods. Well, I do believe that advertising increases demand, which is why it is such a genius concept. And I know that more demand equals more spending equals more growth of the economy. But I also think there is a limit to how much advertising you can have before it becomes harmful, and I believe that this applies to our current economic situation.

It seems to me that the long-term result of all this advertising is that our economy becomes falsely-inflated with demand. For example, you can get people to buy more Vermont Teddy Bears by having Eddie & Jobo endorse them. This grows the GNP in the short term, but can this demand for teddy bears truly sustain the economy? In the prosperity of the late 90's, maybe... and maybe during this time it was the collective sum of demand for these teddy bears, for Playstation 2's, for Cadillac Escalades, Prada bags, etc. that was responsible for the ungodly double-digit growth in the economy.

Consumer demand was exploding, probably due in no small part to the hard work and brilliant ideas of advertisers. In turn, corporate executives saw their profits exploding and heavily invested in more, with the expectation that demand would continue to expand.

But common sense should tell us that this kind of growth is not gonna continue forever, that at some point, the bubble is going to burst. The word I used in the last blog was "saturation", and I think it's a good way to describe the effects of advertising on our nation.

The way I look at it, our economy is like a cup of distilled water. Advertising is like sugar. You add some to the cup, stir, and it smoothly dissolves, leaving no visible trace. The result is that your cup of water is sweeter, and everyone is all the happy for their sweetened water. Add a little more, the cup gets sweeter. Keep adding, and adding, and in no time you'll have quite a tasty economy.

But the thing is, anyone who has ever made Kool-Aid and been a little overzealous in the process can tell you that you can't add too much sugar to your glass of water. Add too much, and the excess sugar floats around or settles to the bottom. It's annoying, it's ugly, and it's not what you want for your cup of sweet water.

In a more accurate analogy, our cup of water would naturally grow as the population gets bigger, people get richer, and demand expands along the way. But my point is that for our given economy (cup of water), we're already beyond saturation with advertising and the artificially-generated demand that advertising creates. You might say we're "super-saturated". tee-hee *nerd alert*

Whether ads on buses or atop urinals count as "too much" is debatable, I don't know exactly where we are to draw the line. All I do know is that on the whole, there's way too much advertising for me. And my experience this morning of flipping through 6 radio stations was merely the spark that set me off on the blog I wrote.

Okay, so that was my economic theory. You probably won't find any textbooks out there comparing our economy to a cup of water, but that was the best I could come up with. Econ wasn't my major, so forgive me if none of that made sense and I sounded like a dumbass. Anyone who might have further thoughts on the subject, please make them known... i'm very interested to hear what people have to say.

Too Many Commercials

I hate when I go through my list of 6 radio stations in the morning, and all 6 are playing commercials. For a second I stopped on the Mix because Eric and Kathy were talking, but then I realized that they were pushing Vermont Teddy Bears for Mother's Day.

I'm convinced that the most evil people in this country are not the lawyers, but those in the advertising industry*. They are probably also the smartest people in this country too, but there's nothing to celebrate about evil genius. These fockers find every way imaginable to increase the amount of ads they can surround us with, and every way imaginable to increase the effectiveness of these ads. Worst of all, they don't care about anything other than maximizing their profits.

Everywhere you look or listen, these people have found a way to fill it with advertising. It's not just billboards, magazine ads, or commercial breaks on TV/radio. It's the sides of buses, banner ads on websites, and even on top of urinals so you can read them while you pee. It's the short commercials like the Coca-Cola Refreshing Moviemakers Award or Celine Dion driving a Chrysler that they show before movie previews, which are actually commercials themselves. Think about that, ads that precede more ads, it's ridiculous.

Not only this, but they continue to find new ways to make their advertising sneakier and more intrusive into our lives. They're not just harmless "click here" banner ads anymore, they are pop-up windows and Flash animations that fly in your face and cover up the article you are trying to read, forcing you to pay attention. You're not free from advertising once the TV show or movie starts, either. There's product placement all over the place, from that Men's Health magazine being read by the dad on Everybody Loves Raymond, to the Mazda RX-8 in X2.

I know that without advertising, many of the things we know in life would not exist. There wouldn't be free TV or free internet sites like ESPN.com and Yahoo. And I have to admit that a lot of ads are pretty well done and entertaining in themselves, not just annoying. Most of the Superbowl commercials end up being pretty clever, and I definitely thought the Aston Martin in Tomorrow Never Dies was cool.

But as they teach you in the first days of economics class, "there is no such thing as a free lunch". Sure, you don't directly pay to watch TV or play Fantasy Baseball on Yahoo. But it should be obvious that somewhere, somehow, they are making money off of you. If it weren't profitable, they would've all been long gone by now. A 30-second spot during the Superbowl wouldn't be worth millions if it didn't somehow cause us to spend more by watching it. For that matter, nobody would pay millions of dollars to Michael Jordan for wearing their shoes, if it weren't bringing back millions more in return.

I'm personally at a point of saturation when it comes to advertising. It would be one thing if the only way it affected me was the annoyance of having to delete all the spam emails or sit through commercial breaks between innings of the Sox game. I'd even be able to accept it, to a certain degree, if the ads subconsciously or consciously made me want to buy more stuff. But I really think it goes much deeper than that. There's way too much advertising, and it is costing us more than the money we spend or the time we waste. It is seriously hurting and draining our society.

The most disturbing thing to me is that advertising controls almost everything we see and hear, which in turn shapes the way we think. This is going too far. We've all heard about the girls who develop eating disorders because they want to be like the impossibly-thin models in the magazine ads, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. With nearly everything in the media being ratings-driven, everything we see and hear is somehow tailored to maximize the exposure and effects of advertising. Sadly, not even the news we watch is immune to its influence. Because CNN has to worry about ratings and profits, we're seeing less and less objective, responsible news reporting, and more and more signs of tabloid journalism, which plays up emotions and stirs up controversy in hopes of attracting more viewers.

The world of advertising is the epitome of capitalism at its best and worst. While it brings us many positive things, in excess it brings plenty of negative results as well. Without further exploding the length of this blog, all I want to say is that we can't only look at the benefits of commercialization without realizing the danger of over-commercialization. And yes, I do consider it a real danger, not just a matter of mere annoyance.

* The evilness of the advertising industry I'm talking about does not include the lovely people whose job is to buy advertising time from the networks for the ad agencies