Until Tuesday (a better update Today)

I did not intend to take the entirety of last week off from this blog, but research on my next big piece has been slow to come in and I wound up working ten plus hour days while I was on the road. Of late, I have been scanning for updates on Dorchester Media and have really found nothing new to report.

Dorchester now has a brand new website and its own blog. The blog I only took a glance at. What really seems to be new is that the connecting pages to True Story and the other magazines are now gone. If this means that all of the magazines are now gone has yet to be made clear. I may blow in a call on Tuesday to see if there is any real change or if the magazines have been sold. If it turns out that the magazines have been discontinued as opposed to being sold, then this truly is the end of the pulp era.

Also being disclosed sometime on Tuesday will be the government’s evaluation of Toyota’s mechanical systems. When last we left this story, Toyota had claimed that most of the accidents reported are the fault of stupid American drivers. (People mistaking the floor mats for the brakes—same difference.) This blog has contended that it is a drive by wire issue: that mechanical components were substituted for electronic systems which are failing due to software glitches and unforeseen radio wave influence. There are others who have expressed a different potential cause:

Unlike a year ago, when Toyota's recalls mostly affected cars in America and the Japanese comforted themselves that domestically-produced vehicles were manufactured to higher standards with Japanese parts, the latest recall mainly involves 1.3m Japanese vehicles.

If the current problems fit any pattern, it might be the same as last year's lesson: Toyota's growth came at the expense of proper surveillance of its supply chain. There used to be more than 30,000 parts in a car and Toyota excelled at putting them together; now there are around 5,000 modules from many different suppliers.

"But the suppliers are now more important because they assemble the modules," notes Ulrike Schaede of the University of California in San Diego, who has studied Toyota's production problems. "What is new is that if these were cars made in Japan with Chinese parts and it is not working well, that's interesting. You might as well make them in China, and give up on the pretext that you're good at putting them together," she says.

Mind you, this does not conflict with this blog’s contention. If anything, perhaps a cause and effect relationship can be found between these two ideas. In any case, the government sic-ed NASA on the issue and we will know by Tuesday.

Our other pet dead dog to beat, Newsweek, has also been picking up some rather negative press. Again, when last we left America’s Second Favorite News Magazine, it had been sold for the lofty price of $1.00 to a speaker manufacturer, who in turn turned over its editorial controls to the Daily Beast. The results so far: the Newsweek website and the Daily Beast website are now clones of each other and Newsweek today now greatly resembles the US News & World Report before it bit the dust, block coloring, clip art graphics and all. A sad end indeed.

Nor is Newsweek’s former Mothership, the Washington Post doing all that well. Warren Buffett has departed the corporate board, claiming he has better things to do. Other voices have indicated that the sage of Omaha may be attempting to distance himself from the firm’s related stench. This stench was rather well defined by the following:

Let us suppose Don Graham really is intent on eradicating the unscrupulous practices that seem prevalent at many Kaplan campuses. (I, for one, am predisposed to believe that.) Let us further accept that he is taking on the Department of Education's proposed new rules not out of crass corporate interest, but because of a genuine fear that the new regulations will close off needed educational options for students. If the Grahams were the only people in the for profit college industry, I would be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, if for no other reason than their history of public stewardship and basic decency.

But the rules Graham is lobbying to water down would apply not only to Kaplan, but also to the rest of the for-profit college industry--a vast and disturbing frontier that includes disreputable entrants such as the Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, and Career Education Corp. And Graham asks us to believe these players, too, can be trusted; that together, Kaplan and the industry of which it is but a single piece are not just in it for the money, but for the welfare of students.

That is a hard proposition to swallow, an assertion that runs headlong into unfortunate truths--truths that the greatest family in journalism would surely be probing itself, were it not increasingly dependent on what looks like ill-gotten money to pay for the ink.

(I may have more to say about the subject of online schools later.)

***

About Splotch

I meant to give it a longer preamble, but it just would belabor the point. I think the reader picked up that our hero was a bit of a stick in the mud. Editors not liking the narrator was the number one reason for rejecting the story. A pal of mine said he didn’t think the ending had anything to do with the beginning—which is really never a good sign. This was the last thing I did before just resigning from the short fiction field. The version I presented was a little rougher than what I submitted. I am hoping to post the final worked product on the website. I am thinking of replating the website in its entirety in a week or so.

I did just send out my last short fiction piece to a magazine I am fairly sure it is unsuitable for. Which is really how I got to be in the position that I am in.

**
I am not going to say where I was for the past week, because that would be evil and wrong. I will say this much: it snowed mounds upon mounds on me and I had to drive through it. Quite character building. Despite becoming increasingly familiar with it, the Ford Sync system proved to be more of a distraction than a utility. That said, I am still glad that I had the Ford Edge SUV than the Dodge Charger I had planned on renting.

I think I would have wound up in a ditch with a cone on my car. That’s what they do where I was—as opposed to towing you out. A bunch of guys in a truck come over and yank you out of the car. They toss your sorry ass into the back of their Klieg kit Suburban and place a cone on your car. Then you go off to rescue the next nitwit down the road. No car actually gets towed until the snow stops. And then it’s whenever they feel like getting around to it.

Not that it appears like it was any better in Chicago (our home town) where oodles of people decided to get on Lakeshore drive just as the snow was hitting. Good job making the entire populous look like morons doing that. I thought we prided ourselves on not being that stupid. Perhaps we are devolving?

From an account I was given today, it seems the snow hit rather suddenly. I’ve been in those. In under two minutes you can become entirely stuck. At that point you do have to get out of the car or just stop and wait until it subsides. Then again, knowing that this can happen, I would be nowhere near Lakeshore Drive. So you’re still idiots as well as being massively unlucky.

***
Scenes From My Trip

The scene is a bakery/coffee shop, smallish but bustling. There are four flappy headed townie women tending to the counter and about ten equally flappy headed townies of various sexes in repose on thinly padded seats. These black seats are around tables arranged single file next to the wall. The glassed in counter runs opposite of this seating area. Between the seating area and the counter is a good three clear feet, the invisibly defined walking area. The shop specializes in some sort of ethnic pastry which is essentially just a fruit stuffing filled coffee cake with a lot of frosting. Mostly it sells rather indifferently prepared coffee, cookies and donuts. Into the shop enters three men, two in business suits and one in a coverall and cat hat.

Suit One bends down, pointing at one of the specialty coffee cakes. He calls to the lead flappy head baker woman: “Those were really good yesterday. We could have gone through two of them.”

Flappy head Baker Leader: “Yeah, the gunk and pecan gunk unpronounceable. I only made one.”

Cat Hat Man, now talking to Flappy Head Baker Leader as if Suit One does not exist: “Hey, I’ll take one of them goknowswhat and a chocolate crawler and a coffee to go.”

Floppy Head Baker Leader starts yanking things from behind the glass counter. She asks Cat Hat Man “You want cream and sugar with that. We charge for cream and sugar.”

Suit one then interjects “I was wondering if it might be possible for you to make two of these so that I can have them for tomorrow morning.”

Flappy head baker leader: “Oh, I don’t know how many of them I am going to make tomorrow.”

Cat Head Man: “No thanks on the cream and sugar. I have an appointment to see the doctor about my lungs today. They still don’t know what’s wrong. I think it might have been all that stuff I was breathing in at the factory. They gave me a mask, but I still think I breathed stuff in. I’m probably dying of lung cancer.”

Flappy head Baker Leader hands Cat Hat Man a bag amd says “Sorry about your dying from cancer. That will be $2.50.”

Cat Hat Man pays her, goes shuffling off in the direction of the door, but does not leave.

Suit Two speaks up “I need sixteen cups of coffee.”

Flappy head Baker Leader asks Suit Two: “To go?”

Suit Two answers “Yes. Do you have one of those cardboard carafes?”

Flappy head Baker Leader thinks about it for a second and says, emphatically “Oh dear no.”

Suit One then asks Flappy Head Baker Leader “Would it be possible to make two of these if I paid you?”

Fallpy head Baker Leader motions to a flunky and then at Suit Two. She turns to Suit One and says “If I know I can sell them I will make two.”

Minion appears at Leader’s side. Minion points at Suit Two and then at the coffee pot on the back wall, saying “The cups and coffee are over there.”

Suit Two heads for the back wall, saying “I need sixteen cups of coffee.”

Minion says “We will make another pot as we need them. I’m going to have to charge you as you go.”

Suit One says to Flappy head Baker Leader “Do you want me to pay you in advance for the two unpronounceable?”

Flappy head Baker Leader: “No. But you are going to have to show up early, because they sell out quick.”

I am very glad to be home again in Chicago.