nerdmeyr & K

Only 5 percent of consumer electronics products returned to retailers are malfunctioning –yet many people who return working products think they are broken, a new study indicates…

Accenture estimates that 68 percent of returns are products that work properly but do not meet customers’ expectations for some reason…

The study attributes another 27 percent of returns to buyer’s remorse–situations where customers simply changed their minds. That leaves only 5 percent of returns that are attributable to defects or other malfunctions.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/146576/most_returned_products_work_fine_study_says.html

I don’t know what to make of this study.  Almost 70 percent of [objects] are returned because they don’t help with getting laid losing weight making more money looking cool butter the toast after toasting the toast grow new hair prevent hair from growing just don’t fit into our self-conceived lifestyles? (e.g., the one where we’re gorgeous and smart and charming and we shouldn’t have to mess with poorly designed products that overpromise and underdeliver?)

I’m kinda tempted to substitute “hyper kids” or “immigrants” or [other social problem] in for [object].  Like, only 5% of hyper kids or immigrants or whatever are actually causing problems, but collectively, we seem to want to turn in 95% of them because they don’t mesh with our dreamworlds closely enough.

Although my absolute favorite thing to donate is plasma, due to the uproarius tingles gotten for free when the de-calcified blood makes its way back into my veins, donating blood is alright, too. Especially when I can do it over the lunch hour at work, as that makes me feel wise and efficient in my use of time. And especially when they don’t run out of chocolate chip cookies.

The donation site during these occurrences, The Blood Mobile, is odd.  Partially because it and all the workers inside it come from Louisville, KY each time.  This, on one hand, makes me feel like my blood is really something special, that they’d burn all that gas and drive two hours one way just to tap the keg so to speak.  It is also odd because it is not spic and span the way you’d think a vehicle like that would be - the blinds on the windows next to the lounges need a good wipe, and there are mysterious iodine-like splatters in places. It is also odd because I end up in there next to colleagues, and the act of lying there while having something like a medical procedure being done feels strangely personal and intimate, and therefore something I’d prefer wasn’t witnessed by people I work with.

For some reason, as I’m waiting (and it doesn’t matter if I have an appt or not, there’s always a sizeable amount of waiting involved at every Blood Center I’ve been to, ever… its like they have an official policy to match as closely as possible the experience of a doctor’s waiting room), I always wonder about what will happen to the Blood Mobile after they de-commission it from official use.  The setup is strange, hardly suitable for re-organizing into a family camper, but also possibly appropriate for some sort of mobile pro bono rock star psychoanalyzing tour?  (There are small offices, and also chaise lounges.. so the Gestalt people and the Freudian people would all be happy).  Or I can imagine a low-rent remake of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (retitled The Life LandBound with Steezo Zeezo) where the Blood Mobile bumps around backwater places like Portland OR or NYC and studies the strange wildlife and removes samples for further study.

Today was a good day in the Mobile Blood Center; extremely chilled orange juice, chocolate chip cookies, and excellent country and western music that one of the nurses kept humming along to.

I was very sad to have missed the PRIDE float in the 4th of July parade (esp. since it met its oh-so-timely demise in the rainstorm), but, to be honest, I was very happy to have spent July 4th in a random cafe in Montmartre with an Aussie who now runs a non-profit to train people in other non-profits in Ireland, and a work buddy from Trinidad. The work buddy who is, as I speak non-verbally, still stuck in ol’ gay Paree thanks to our infinitely wise and thoroughly suspicious government.  I am slightly dizzy and out of it from travel, and also maybe from re-landing on earth after walking around a slightly different planet.  In brief (because the one thing I kept thinking about as I watched tourist pop picture after picture of really, the most inane things… like the light switch that Dali didn’t touch, or the small scale model of the Sacre Coeur in parmesan cheese… is “My god, I pity the poor fools who have to sit through that guy’s slide show.”):

1. Dali is not overrated, nor is Gaudi.  Amazing.
2. Churches are not necessarily cool, but entire abbeys jammed into the middle of giant pink rock formations and which almost single-handedly preserved the Catalan language from early expiry are cool. Also. hermitages.
3. I may be getting too old to fully appreciate or tolerate the experience of hostelling.
4. Any place that has wine twice as inexpensive as Coke is fine by me.
5. For being populaces which have to deal with an inordinate amounts of wandering, befuddled, loud dumbass tourists for much of the year, both the Parisians and the Barcelonians are amazingly friendly and nice.
6. You can get far just by knowing how to say ‘please’, ‘thank you’, ‘excuse me’, and ‘i’m sorry, i don’t understand’.  Also, ‘Bush sucks like a Hoover, and I didn’t vote for him’.
7. Yay eating dinner at 10pm and having lots of people wandering about until 5am!

Pictures after I get them developed. That’s right, I said, ‘developed’.  That means the technology that arrived right after cave painting… if I took the digital camera, what would K have used to distract herself from all the feelings she was having during the July 4th parade???

Three years ago I saw my first Bloomington 4th of July parade in 100 degree heat. The parade consisted primarily of dump trucks and sundry patriots. This morning, I walked down to the parade route in a refreshing 67 degree rain storm. It was raining so hard, I figured they would cancel. Not a chance! After an interminable prayer, two minutes of silence, the singing of the national anthem, a rendition of taps, and a ten gun salute, the parade started. All the usual suspects - Mustang convertibles (top closed, naturally), vintage Army Jeeps, the League of Women Voters, the city’s intramural football team, and Bloomington’s own Beanpole the God of Pointless Behavior, who seemed to be having a great deal of trouble this year with float mechanics. At some point, the MC said something about renewable energy sources. If you hadn’t noticed these days, nothing says green like red, white, and blue.

And then, from a block away, I saw the gold tips against the sky and the reason I’d dressed in my summer best. It might be that in my excitement to beat to the front of the crowd, I missed the MC’s introduction. Or perhaps he simply pretended not to notice the fifteen foot flaming gold float surrounded by stylish people dancing with hand-sewn fish and rainbow umbrellas. But I noticed, and so did the grandma standing next to me who asked, “Is that a Pride float?” It was a hot Technicolor beam of love in a tepid gray sea of american eagle t-shirts, and it’s a miracle I didn’t tear up because parades always make me cry, and so do happy gay people, especially when they’re wearing red cowgirl outfits. Luckily I was too busy trying to make Nerdmeyr’s camera work to be sentimental.

I also managed not to get in a fight with grandma who just had to say that she thought it was inappropriate which meant I just had to get my fur up and hiss “there’s nothing wrong with gay people” before stalking off. What an understatement! Every town should be so lucky to have such a handsome float in their 4th of July parade. Yeah big love!

Last night I went on the second monthly Bloomington Community Bike Ride and it was down right magical. Everyone meets up at People’s Park at 7pm (last Thursday of every month!) and mills around for about twenty minutes until someone says “Let’s ride!” and then we head out and the first order of business is to loop the Showalter Fountain before meandering downtown, to the park, through some subdivisions and ending at another bike-friendly fountain.

We were serenaded by a cassette-tape-player-in-handlebar-basket and were hailed overhead by a mysterious toy helicopter. As we rode past, someone on the sidewalk pointed and said “hey, it’s a bike parade!” Indeed.

Once again the fellow with the yellow bike did an outstanding job of spreading cheer to all impatient motorists and everyone pitched in to spread bike love. Our ride was so sweet that folks out on their porches grabbed their bicycles and joined us which means we ended with more people than we’d started with. (although we did loose Nerdmeyr to a flat.) One sentence with date, time, place and the word “bicycle” produced that much sugary goodness. I can’t wait for the July toothache.

Faithful readers may have noticed changes in this remote electronic chronicle. We sport a new tag line, new visuals, and new categories. We assure you that these changes pose no threat to the hard hitting cultural-political commentary and fanciful re-tellings of our lives that you’ve come to expect. Nerdmeyr promises to keep delivering those breathless death-defying blink-and-you-might-miss-me analogies that put the “Mars” in marvelous and the “Pryor” in gee wiz. For my own part, I will continue to deliver factoids of mind-bending quality and arrange them alongside other startling bits of pure white uncut information until your joints disjoint with the significance of it all. In short, we’re the same, only improved. We’re Scout and Boo Radley together as you’ve always wanted to see them; technicolor dolby techtronics as you always believed it could be.

Why the new theme, you might ask? The theme is inspiration and a suggestive frame for all that we write. Keeping this blog — an open-ended public journal with a low threshold for sense-making — has been an interesting experiment. What do you write when you can write anything? Who do you write for when you have no idea who might read your entries? For someone who makes her living crafting carefully worded arguments for a select audience, blogging has been a strange exercise. I found that I’m not all that interested in writing about myself and more interested in writing about things and their relationship to other things. What I like about this particular medium is the license it affords me to put anything in relation to anything else with little need for justification. That quality is what promised to revolutionize journalism, but the traditions of journalistic writing and the desire to “speak truth to power” disarmed blogging of its inventive potential. Disappointment abounded when blogs failed to be the hoped for founts of previously suppressed news and instead only managed to decentralize commentary. As usual, I arrived late to the party, skeptical and largely indifferent. Now that I’ve been won over by my charming host, I wonder where everyone went (I know, I know: off to twitter). I like this cheaper and more readily accessible version of the dream of a radio free world. Everyone broadcasting without censure their thoughts, news, tales, and favorites at all times of the day to whoever will listen. Social networking sites offer something similar, but it’s hard to get away from the self-profile, self-promotion, self-disclosure of social networking. Being shy, ambition-less, and text-oriented makes the blog a better match for my broadcasting aspirations.

Blogging has given me new insights into the function of order because it requires all kinds of arbitrary decisions regarding the order of things. The use of tags is one obvious example, but even the need to give some kind of theme to a blog is a kind of ordering. As Nerdmeyr pointed out, these practices have even spawned a study of order distinct from taxonomy and cataloging: folksonomy. The more I thought about what I wanted to write, the more I realized it wasn’t a matter of choosing a topic, but of how to order it. I’ve been wanting to write about fish, for instance, but what could I say about fish that hasn’t been said a million times and is probably available in a much more convenient and comprehensive format elsewhere? It eventually occurred to me that the function of this blog is not to provide information, but to re-order existing information to see if, by rearranging it, it means something different. Once I understood my purpose, I stopped worrying about what I would say about fish and started thinking about how I could organize information on fish. This liberation led to all manner of questions about order and…a new theme was born.

Re-ordering our blog proved the first lesson in order, as we discovered that it is a massive pain in the ass to re-categorize old posts. There is simply no convenient way to do it unless your old categories have a one to one correspondence with your new categories - and how often is that going to happen? Message in a bottle: could someone please invent some kind of matrix with the titles of posts on one axis and old and new categories on the other? Then bloggers could uncheck the old categories and check new categories without having to open each post.

While the re-ordering was a joint effort, all technical and graphic credit goes to Nerdmeyr who worked coding wonders to make the flashy lights and whizzing do-dads that now adorn our site. And there you have it. We hope you’ll all enjoy the show and tell your friends about us.

As usual, Dennis Kucinich is trying to do what the rest of our spineless representatives and senators should’ve done six years ago: make Bush and Cheney take responsibility for their lying cheating actions. He introduced a resolution to impeach Cheney last year, and now he’s doing the same for Bush, which undoubtedly will join its predecessor and languish ignored in a sub-committee.

Like most people, I’d rather bitch and moan than do something productive, but today I managed to email my representative to encourage him to support Kucinich’s bill. I don’t actually imagine he’d listen to his constituents over ol’ keep-em-in-line-and-support-the-status-quo-but-yet-somehow-i’m-seen-as-a-liberal Pelosi, but it can’t hurt to say my 2 cents (which follows).

I encourage everyone to do the same: Write Your Representative and tell them to support Kucinich.

Here’s what I wrote to my rep:

I am writing in support of Rep. Kucinich’s resolution to impeach President Bush. At this time, there seems little doubt that President Bush was directly (or indirectly) responsible for any number of impeachable offenses, including his lies and shams related to convincing Americans that we should start the Iraq war.

I write to you as an American concerned about our loss of civil liberties, our reduced standing in the eyes of the rest of the world, and the encroachment of executive power onto the domains of the legislative and judicial branches of our government. Although I tend to vote liberal, I’m concerned that President Bush’s two terms in office have set unfortunate precedents that I don’t want _any_ future president to be able to continue. And that includes Sen. Obama, who I know you support.

Please, please, please have some courage and support Rep. Kucinich’s resolution. It is crucial that we defend the Constitution and re-establish long-standing rules of law related to executive responsibility and duties.

While in the bagel shop yesterday I happened to see this article in the Wall Street Journal about an FDIC take-over of a small bank in Minnesota. The article describes how forty men in black stealthed into failing First Integrity Bank and transferred oversight of the bank to the FDIC without any the 3,200 residents of the town knowing about it, thus avoiding a run on the bank. The take-over required federal agents to invent a fake business for themselves so they could pretend like they were all attending a conference at their hotel and pre-planning where they would all park so as not arouse suspicion. The strangest part of the story is the actual take-over in which agents taped open the bank’s doors to prevent automatic locking. The article’s author, Damian Paletta, doesn’t elaborate on this curious detail.

Compare this story to one about the fall of Bear Sterns and you’d think the two events had happened in different centuries. The First Integrity Bank story might as well have been about federal agents who traveled back in time in an attempt to prevent the Great Depression. In my mind, the modern financial world is entirely electronic with no material manifestations of any kind. Money is for farmer’s markets and retro video arcades, and all other financial transactions are bleeps and blinks on a screen. Would anyone now a days actually think of going into a bank and withdrawing all their money? In an FDIC-insured world, can any of us even imagine our debit cards just drying up?

This article made me wonder how hard it would be to get your money back if in fact your bank lost your savings. I bet there wouldn’t be any magic 800 number that you could call. I’m sure that before any federal agency cut you a check you’d have to take a weekend-long seminar called “How to diversify your personal finances and avoid financial loss” because it would never be the bank’s fault that your savings had disappeared. Some how, the FDIC would make it your fault for believing that you could put all your money in an FDIC-insured bank and think everything would be okay.

The article also made me wonder if there was any duct tape involved in the Bear Sterns take-over. Maybe financial take-overs always involve duct taped doors and massive pizza deliveries, but in order to maintain the illusion that the financial world is a slick cyber system of Flash-heavy websites, the WSJ saved their duct tape story for some remote bank for poor people in rural no-where. By far, the strangest thing about the First Integrity story is the description of the physical manifestation of banking — the very fact that the bank had doors that had to be managed in addition to the checking accounts.  There were no comparable details in the story about the fall of Bear Sterns, or of Long Term Capital Management (for those who can remember back that far). In those cases, money just disappeared.

In the story about First Integrity Bank (that name grows more ironic with each typing), the agents keep reassuring everyone about the safety of their safe deposit boxes. Again, something I never think about - safe deposit boxes. I like the idea that people are still storing away valuable keepsakes in bank vaults with little keys. I bet the vast majority of those precious keepsakes have no true market value of any kind. I bet it’s all locks of baby hair and confessions of crimes of passion. It makes a lot more sense to me that folks would get panicked about losing that sort of stuff than their savings (if for no other reason than, as I mentioned before, can anyone imagine their savings just disappearing?). And I especially like the idea that the FDIC”s primary responsibility is to take care of what are basically memento storehouses for the nonsensical squirreling habits of lovelorn Americans. Come to think of it, where would people keep their beloved scraps if all the small banks fail? I can’t imagine trusting Bank of America with my twizzle stick from the Netherlands. What is going to happen to our secrets and memory-soaked shards of the material world in the impending financial crisis? You can always hide your money under the mattress or bury it in a can in the back yard, but some things need to be locked up in an anonymous box with only one key. The more I think about it, the more the collapse of Bear Sterns pales in significance to the failing of First Integrity.

In further evidence that she and I share a psychic link, Junko Mizuno, creator of Hell Babies, has been busy building a pink plastic octopus wonderland and painting girls with bunnies for a show titled “A Cabinet of Natural Curiosities.”

For the last several years I’ve been collecting bunnies. The collection started by accident. By sheer coincidence I had accumulated three or four rabbit figurines including a pair of salt and pepper shakers and a paper mache bunny rattle. Many of the items had been given to me and two miniature wooden bunnies I’d had since I was a child. My friend Sarah saw the bunnies as a “collection” before I did and gave me a plaster-of-paris rabbit head she’d made in art school with the comment that it belonged with my other bunnies. Only then did it occur to me to intentionally collect bunnies.

I decided that I wouldn’t tell anyone what I was doing so as to avoid endless unwanted rabbit gifts, and that I would only collect rabbits that I genuinely liked rather than feel obligated to own a bunny merely because I collected them. I kept the bunny collecting a secret for about a year before telling Nerdmeyr, who was bound to notice at some point that her house was slowly filling with rabbits. She wasn’t keen on the idea and made me promise not to tell my mother. I kept that promise for about another year before I let slip to my mom that I “liked rabbits.” It turned out that my mom was of the same mind as I and when she gave me a tiny hand craved wooden rabbit for Christmas she said “I’m only interested in art pieces,” meaning, I think, that she felt collections should be tasteful.

My mom’s appreciation for having some kind of standard for a collection is born of life experience. I suspect that she acquired her attitude in response to her own mother’s collecting habits. My grandmother collects frogs and before that she collected kangaroos and owls. My mom knew first hand that such broadly defined collections could go down a path of wrong. The problem with collecting something as broad as bunnies is that you can end up with a lot of crap. But how do you put parameters on something like a bunny collection? Answering this question has become the real fun of collecting them. Each bunny I encounter that I like begs the question: why that bunny? There are any number of easy answers that I could give to that question that would limit the bunny collection in some clearly definable way. I could make it a collection of wooden bunnies, miniature bunnies, wind up tin bunnies, bunnies made before WWII, or laughing bunnies (of which there are a disturbingly large number). I could collect a certain series such as Bunnykins figurines or the urban vinyl Dunnys. But what would be the fun in that? (I ask in all seriousness anyone who collects series of things to explain the appeal. The collector’s logic behind the desire to have a “complete set” of something escapes me.)

As far as I can tell, the universal goal of collecting is to assemble unremarkable brick-a-brac that when viewed together takes on the glow of significant. So far I have a couple of different strategies for achieving that glow. Within the bunny collection, I have a sub collection of salt and pepper shakers - all bunnies of course. I’ve found seven sets so far. There’s something about the growing numbers of pairs of bunnies that makes them appealing. Just how many bunny salt and pepper shakers exist in the world? The fact that they’re not a series, but the same object re-designed over and over, is what makes them interesting. I don’t think any other animal but the rabbit (unlike roosters or scorpions, rabbits have no distinct personality) could lend itself to so many different depictions.

The other sub-collection of my collection is of bunnies that are not quite right. What do I mean by “not quite right?” Take, for instance, the fellow featured on this plate who looks as though he’s had his ears gnawed off by another rabbit.

Or this Bunnykins (from the “Occasions: Easter” series) that, as Nerdmeyr put it, looks as though he’s been impaled by a Peep.

My most prized bunnies are those that veer toward the creepy, but so far I don’t really have any because Nerdmeyr put her foot down and wouldn’t let them in the house. I hope to some day build a safe space, a hospital perhaps, for the creepy bunnies. And there are loads of them out there shoved in the corners of display cases in rambling antique stores in small towns across America.

When assembled, you ask, what would the collection signify? Liberation of the unwanted; the dark underbelly of anthropomorphism; the under-appreciated genius of folk art; or some combination there of. It’s possible that the answer won’t come until all the bunnies have been assembled, which is an idea that I find delightful.
To be continued.