Month: April 2004

A story near and dear to my heart: both because it happened in Taylorsville, Utah, relatively near my town of Tooele, and because it involved a very large Pacific Islander couple on the Atkins diet. I have to wonder if their race, due to popular stereotypes of Pacific Islanders as having prodigious appetites, and their noteworthy girth figured into the manager’s decision to kick them out?

No-carb eating couple booted from buffet

That all-you-can-eat buffet isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “The Choice Is Yours at Chuck-A-Rama” should be “The Choice Is Yours as long as you’re finished when we want you to be”. And yet…

“It’s so embarrassing actually,” said Isabelle Leota, Amaama’s wife. “We went in to have dinner, we were under the impression Chuck-A-Rama was an all-you-can-eat establishment.”

Not so, said Jack Johanson, the restaurant chain’s district manager.

“We’ve never claimed to be an all-you-can-eat establishment,” said Johanson. “Our understanding is a buffet is just a style of eating.”

I listened to some people who claimed to be there on the radio Friday Morning, and, according to rumor, the couple had been there for three hours, had exclusively eaten meat (mostly the roast beef) during that time, and had visited the carving area over a dozen times. Depending on who you believe, the manager asked them to leave because they’d stayed far too long, or asked them to leave because he’d watched them visit the roast beef station several dozen times. The manager was the one carving the beef. Regardless, their refusal to leave for not getting a refund was apparently the cause of the police being called and it making national news 🙂

I’m not sure whether to be ticked off or just laugh my head off about it. Sticking around at a buffet for three hours, I can understand, particularly with a large party of friends. Eating enough meat in that time to cause the manager to ask you to leave because the other patrons can’t have any roast beef? I’m not sure who to believe, but it’s funny!

Believe it or not, this made the World front page on CNN!

Oh, one more thing: Happy birthday to me. I’m thirty-one today. Ugh, I feel old. I’ve edited this since I posted it… I spent last night in agony in my ribcage. Saw the doc this morning, he said my heart couldn’t be better though my second number for my blood pressure (118/92) seemed strangely high, and that my rib cage’s cartilage is inflamed. I knew it didn’t feel like a heart attack, but it kept me up ’till 4:30 AM because of the pain. Whee! Here’s a birthday song I made up:

Happy Hapy Birthday
You’re looking pretty stout!
Have one more slice of birthday cake
And fill those trousers out!

I ran across an an old thread here on barnson.org where I got caught by Universal for file-trading The Hulk. I decided to look around the Internet a bit more to see what the latest deals are on file-trading legislation.

I read an article, written in November 2003 with the laughably ponderous title of Feinstein pitches stricter penalties for music, movie thieves Recording copyrighted movies, songs could bring 5 years in jail . Beyond the remarkably long name, though, I found a quote from the RIAA talking about loss of sales:

The Recording Industry Association of America, hit first by the now-defunct Napster and later by such currently popular file-sharing programs as Kazaa and Morpheus, says that in 2000 the top 10-selling albums sold 60 million copies. By last year that had shrunk to 34 million.

Now, there are a few different ways of looking at this little statistic:

• The RIAA’s Perspective: Instead of people buying the missing 26 million records, they are downloading them on the Internet, directly affecting our profits.
• The Independent Musician’s Perspective: Dude, those albums aren’t being sold because the Internet has enabled people to find music they really like rather than the rubbish the RIAA promotes. Their loss is our gain.
• The File-Traders Perspective: i d0N’+ \/\/@N+ +h3 +r@$h pu+ 0u+ by +h3 ri@@ @Ny\/\/@y. +h0ugh i h@v3 16,000 $0Ngz 0N my h@rd driv3, i purch@$3 @ 10+ 0f mu$ic 3v3ry y3@r 13gi+iM@+31y. (Translation: I don’t want the trash put out by the RIAA anyway. Though I have 16,000 songs on my hard drive, I purchase a lot of music every year legitimately.)
• The Economist’s Perspective: The U.S. economy is still in a very deep recession. Although traditionally, entertainment sales remain strong in a slow economy, in this case spending in real dollars on musical recordings is up from ten years ago before the economic “boom”.

My take: I think that the reason the top ten albums are suffering is directly related to the Internet, but I espouse the Indie Musician perspective. More small bands are taking a larger slice of the pie from larger ones. I know many people today who buy CDs from small-time bands, and it seems to be a pretty hip thing for college students to latch onto indie bands now as well. The depressed sales are a result of consumer choice — ask independent labels what their sales figures are like, and the successful ones will tell you their bottom line is way, way up, due in large part to file-trading and Internet-based distribution.

So did I miss some reasons? Do you agree with the Indies, the Economists, the RIAA, or have a totally different explanation for the large statistical difference in top-10 album sales between 2000 and November 2003?

Have you ever done something so embarassing you just couldn’t deal with it?

For instance.. last week, I was in Starbucks.. and I was a hoot. Man, i was being funny, getting everyone around me laughing.. and generally trying to be the life of the party. Boy it feels good to have the attention… That is of course, until I was handed my caramel Frappuccino, and as I was there in the limelight of my own creation, My fingers slipped on the wet cup.. and I spilled it all over the counter, the girl handing it to me.. and myself.

The ironic thing is not just that i had drawn so much attention to myself.. but I had asked someone who I thought I knew who they were.. and we couldn’t place it.. until I realized he was a good friend of an ex-girlfriend of mine.. and I swear, as i tried with the recycled napkins to clean the frozen delight from the counter, he was yanking out his celphone and dialing furiously.. maybe its me.

So do we all have these mortifying times?.. cuz I have many.

I’m naturally interested in how people influence others. This, along with understanding the basis of people’s knowledge, fascinates me. I love “The Apology of Socrates”, by Plato, for that exact reason: it’s Socrates’ attempt to explain to a lay audience why he questions everything. He wants to understand how people know what they know, and throughout his life found that, underneath it all, all logic is circular. We really know nothing, except assumptions built upon assumptions so ancient that we can’t possibly hope to trace their antiquity. My personal goal is to push the frontiers of my knowledge to where the circularity of my assumptions is no longer obvious to me. I’m not nearly there yet.

In a related note, at work, there are people who appear to be naturally charismatic: they can propose a solution to something, and theirs is chosen quickly and unanimously. In many cases, it’s a less-than-ideal solution, when better solutions have been presented.

I found myself wondering what makes the difference between a successful influencer and a non-successful one?

Well, the answer organized itself for me this morning. I have in my lap a training manual for sales professionals that I once studied in an attempt to be a more successful pitchman. In reviewing it this morning, I was struck by how, with a better understanding of how persuasion works, this manual actually reads like a playbook of how to convince someone of something by appealing to their base instincts, rather than their capacity to reason. Its unstated goal is to manipulate emotions to the point that the person is invested in the idea, and then will make commitments based upon that investment. And, once you’ve gotten someone to say something, feel like they owe you for something, and invested in something, you’ve got ’em hook, line, and sinker. They’ll have a very difficult time deciding not to do what you want.

I’ve become better, over the years, at sniffing out fact from fiction on first hearing, but simple knowledge of these techniques doesn’t grant immunity to them. And learning the lessons has been a very, very expensive tuition in the school of hard-sell. Sales appeals go straight to our pre-programmed, impulsive, biologically-driven responses; trying to break out from following the pattern the sales person expects you to follow requires constant mental effort and vigilance. And the funny thing is, I think using these to try to get someone to buy into something is abusive, yet I use them every day at work, home, and online to get people to do the “right” thing.

• Authority: You are more likely to believe someone who claims greater knowledge, regardless of whether or not that knowledge is in the field under discussion. For instance, I’ve been recently hearing commercials on the radio where a psychologist pitches a weight-loss pill. He even jokes about not being an authority — yet I feel more likely to believe him because, well, such an educated, well-spoken person wouldn’t be deceived, would he?
  (I also find this happening at home. The unspoken assumption towards my kids is, “I’m your parent, bigger, stronger, and older than you are. I’m right.” How do you get away from using that?)
• Commitment: If you can convince someone to agree to something, they will most likely continue to agree to it in order to appear consistent. For example, a common practice of door-to-door cleaner pitchmen is to get you to agree to statements such as “don’t you want a cleaner house?” “don’t you want healthy children?” “don’t you want more time to do what you really like, rather than scrubbing?”. The next question is often “then don’t you want our cleaner to help you do those things?” Human instinct drives us to want to continue to agree.
  (I find myself using this at home, too: “Write down your goals.” “Tell me what you plan to do.” “Go tell your brother you’re sorry.” “Are you going to do that again?”. I see this in my own life up until two years ago, repeating mantras from the religion of my youth in order to appear consistent and trustworthy. It’s human instinct to try to preserve our consistency, but it can also lead to some pretty severe psychological problems when misused.)
• Liking: If you have a friendly relationship with someone, they are more likely to agree with you. Why do you think salespeople get their clients to go golfing with them?
  (I have to wonder if I use this at home, too. Why do I go on “dates” to fun places, be nice, and try to make sure I bring as much pleasure to our family relationships as possible? Is this actually a selfish thing, because instinctually I understand that if they like me, they’ll be more likely to do what I want them to do? I don’t even know if I want to go there 🙂 As with other things, I think it can be abused — the key seems to be how we use this.)
• Social Proof: If many other people also agree with you, you’re more likely to believed. This is why you’ll see blurbs on books saying “over one million sold!”, on DVDs saying “The funniest movie in America” (implying that most Americans think it’s funny), or “As seen on TV!” (implying that, if it was on TV, millions of people have heard of it).
  (This is also sometimes called “peer pressure”, although that’s a much smaller thing. I use this at mealtimes: “Look, everyone else ate their food, why don’t you?”)
• Scarcity: If it’s difficult to get something, or something is rare, it’s more desirable. You run into this in hard-sell automobile pitches all the time. Coercive statements on the sales lot, such as “This special price is for today only!” or “The car you want today will probably be gone tomorrow” are rather brutal examples of this principle in action.
  (I wonder if in home life, this is the reason for the “kids are starving in China” argument at mealtimes? Never held much water for me as a kid, though. But if my parents had said “this is the last meal you’re going to eat for the next two days”, I may have been inclined to eat it all up.)
• Reciprocation: If I have given you something, or done something for you, you are more likely to want to give me what I want in return. A good example is the cleaner pitchmen that work door-to-door: a vital part of their presentation is to scrub your toilet, stain in your carpet, sink, etc. with their product to “show you how well it works”. The REAL point of this exercise is to put them into a position where you owe them for the “favor” and are more likely to buy. Ditto for the people giving out “free samples” of a product.
  Or like when Christy and I went to try to purchase a vehicle in Las Vegas, we walked out of a deal because it wasn’t to our liking, and the manager of the lot ran out to meet us before we climbed in our car and said “wait, we just did all this work for you, contacting the financing company, spending an hour going over paperwork… I thought we had a deal?” You know, in my gut, I still feel bad for that poor sot, yet my head knows that he was just giving us another section of an elaborate hard-sell sales pitch.
  (I see Reciprocation in use in my relationship with my wife all the time: I help her with something, she helps me with something in return. It seems to be a very natural, healthy human pattern, and a cornerstone of society, but it’s also abused by salespeople. This seems to be the trend in all these patterns: intentional abuse of common human “shortcut” behaviors to get you to agree to something you don’t want.)

Recognizing these tactics for what they are, particularly when they are wrapped in an inoffensive package, is often very difficult.

What are some of your experiences with coercive sales pitches?

So, I got together with three buddies and we went to the 9:50 PM showing of “Man On Fire”. Here’s my review! WARNING: Moderate spoilers contained within.

OK, first thing’s first. I loved the Die Hard movies. I enjoyed the heck out of Ransom. I never entirely got First Blood. But they seemed cool.

Man On Fire is definitely not entirely something in that vein. The plot summary: Ex-special-forces assassin Creasy is a washed-up drunk. He’s out of the service, but haunted by it. His buddy convinces him to take a job as a bodyguard in Mexico City for a little girl who’s parents are concerned about a rash of kidnappings. Of course, the little girl he’s guarding gets kidnapped and presumably killed — which sets the stage for a tale of revenge.

Suffice to say, it’s a bloody flick. Not “spray blood all over the room” bloody like the old Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but realistic, painful-looking stuff that’s enough to make anybody wince.

The whole first hour of the movie deals with Creasy’s relationship with the young girl he’s assigned to bodyguard — building a rapport, yet foreshadowing the eventual disaster. I felt like it was really, really slow. But then after she’s kidnapped, and Creasy spends weeks in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds, the action is enough to quicken anyone’s blood, and the sometimes-cartoonish situations provide an excellent foil for Denzel Washington to show off some terrific gallows humor and intensity.

Overall, I’ve definitely gotta say it’s ultimately just not my sort of movie. I enjoy action flicks, but I prefer movies where the violence is a bit less graphic, and certain plot twists less predictable. It seems at certain times the director simply delighted in how he could make each extraction of information and dispatch of a “bad guy” more creative.

In the words of one of the characters, “Creasy’s art is death. And he’s about to paint his masterpiece.”

That’s really the heart of the movie.

Mediocre, predictable storyline is livened up by superb performances by Denzel Washington as Creasy, young Dakota Fanning (for, alas, only the first half of the film) as Lupita, Christopher Walken’s enigmatic portrayal of Rayburn, and Giancarlo Giannini as the honest cop that looks the other way while Creasy goes on a rampage.

But, under it all, it’s a fairly average revenge flick with only a unique setting, powerful actors, and interesting camera effects to redeem it.

I’ve gotta give it two and a half out of five Barns. A few redeeming qualities, a noble sacrifice, a predictable storyline, and violence that… well, I’m a little squeamish, and it was a bit beyond my comfort level.

Note to self: Must create nifty “barn” graphic and half-barn graphic for future movie reviews. Additional note to self: check out reviews of movies before I go see them in the future; although it was a great chance to hang out with my buddies, I’d have probably passed on this movie if I had a do-over.

For you Star Trek fans, Paramount has finally released the long-awaited service pack for the original series. This hotly anticipated release has me on the edge of my seat with excitement!

Mother’s Day is right around the corner.

Have you thought much about what to get for your significant other, mother, mother in law, and grandma?

If you don’t want to think too hard about it, let me help you!

I am a Home Interior Decorator and I’d love to help. I do custom-made floral arrangements for great prices and would ship whatever you need to where ever you need it to go. If you’d like to take a look at my products, visit my web site at www.homeinteriors.com/cbarnson. You can place an order from the web site and it will come right to me!

EDIT by matthew: Fixed formatting and a tpyo 🙂

Everybody seems to have unique coping strategies for those times when you’re stressed to the max. Christy and I are definitely at that point at the moment: trying to close on a new house, get our old one sold, get packed, take care of kids who are turning into teenagers early, and the looming prospect of unemployment when my contract is done.

Me, I de-stress sometimes by playing video games. Used to be that I’d go running, and that helped (though it killed my knees at the time since I was forty pounds heavier).

What do you do to de-stress?

George Monbiot writes a chilling piece today, called Apocalypse Please. It details the effect a radical fundamentalist Christian belief is having on U.S. foreign policy. Disaster awaits… or does it? What do you think?

Local copy below; please see the original for other articles by Monbiot.

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religion / Apocalypse Please

Apocalypse Please

US policy towards the Middle East is driven by a rarefied form of madness. It’s time we took it seriously.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 20th April 2004

To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state’s Republican party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the decisions made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston.1

The delegates began by nodding through a few uncontroversial matters: homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; “any mechanism to process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns” should be repealed; income tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and corporation tax should be abolished; and immigrants should be deterred by electric fences.2 Thus fortified, they turned to the real issue: the affairs of a small state 7000 miles away. It was then, according to a participant, that the “screaming and near fistfights” began.

I don’t know what the original motion said, but apparently it was “watered down significantly” as a result of the shouting match. The motion they adopted stated that Israel has an undivided claim to Jerusalem and the West Bank, that Arab states should be pressured to absorb refugees from Palestine, and that Israel should do whatever it wishes in seeking to eliminate terrorism.3 Good to see that the extremists didn’t prevail then.

But why should all this be of such pressing interest to the people of a state which is seldom celebrated for its fascination with foreign affairs? The explanation is slowly becoming familiar to us, but we still have some difficulty in taking it seriously.

In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel’s occupation of the rest of its “Biblical lands” (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the Antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to earth.

What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all “true believers” (ie those who believe what THEY believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow.

The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000 three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there)4, sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/European Union/France or whoever the legions of the Antichrist turn out to be.

The believers are convinced that they will soon be rewarded for their efforts. The Antichrist is apparently walking among us, in the guise of Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat or, more plausibly, Silvio Berlusconi.5 The Walmart corporation is also a candidate (in my view a very good one), because it wants to radio-tag its stock, thereby exposing humankind to the Mark of the Beast.6 By clicking on www.raptureready.com, you can discover how close you might be to flying out of your pyjamas. The infidels among us should take note that the Rapture Index currently stands at 144, just one point below the critical threshold, beyond which the sky will be filled with floating nudists. Beast Government, Wild Weather and Israel are all trading at the maximum five points (the EU is debating its constitution, there was a freak hurricane in the South Atlantic, Hamas has sworn to avenge the killing of its leaders), but the second coming is currently being delayed by an unfortunate decline in drug abuse among teenagers and a weak showing by the Antichrist (both of which score only two).

We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them. That their beliefs are bonkers does not mean they are marginal. American pollsters believe that between 15 and 18% of US voters belong to churches or movements which subscribe to these teachings.7 A survey in 1999 suggested that this figure included 33% of Republicans.8 The best-selling contemporary books in the United States are the 12 volumes of the Left Behind series, which provide what is usually described as a “fictionalised” account of the Rapture (this, apparently, distinguishes it from the other one), with plenty of dripping details about what will happen to the rest of us. The people who believe all this don’t believe it just a little; for them it is a matter of life eternal and death.

And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John Ashcroft, the attorney-general, is a true believer, so are several prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay (who is also the co-author of the marvellously-named DeLay-Doolittle Amendment, postponing campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel last year to tell the Knesset that “there is no middle ground, no moderate position worth taking.”9

So here we have a major political constituency – representing much of the current president’s core vote – in the most powerful nation on earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelations (9:14-15) maintains that four angels “which are bound in the great river Euphrates” will be released “to slay the third part of men.” They batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support for Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.10

The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this. Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US electorate, the Middle East is a foreign issue, and therefore of secondary interest when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it’s a personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don’t get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to.

George Monbiot’s book The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order is now published in paperback.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.harriscountygop.com/sections/sdconv/sdconv.asp

2. eg. Committee on Resolutions, Harris County Republican Party, 27th March 2004. Final report of Senatorial District 17 Convention. http://www.harriscountygop.com/sections/sdconv/sdconv.asp

3. ibid.

4. Paul Vallely, 7th September 2003. The Eve of Destruction. The Independent on Sunday.

5. eg. http://www.raptureready.us

6. eg. http://www.raptureready.com/rap16.html (note: 5 and 6 are rival sites)

7. Megan K. Stack, 31st July 2003. House’s DeLay Bonds With Israeli Hawks, Los Angeles Times; Matthew Engel, 28th October 2002. Meet the new Zionists. The Guardian; Paul Vallely, ibid.

8. Donald E. Wagner, 28th June 2003. Marching to Zion: the evangelical-Jewish alliance. Christian Century.

9. Leader, 1st August 2003. DeLay’s Foreign Meddling. Los Angeles Times.

10. Jane Lampman, 18th February 2004. The End of the World. The Christian Science Monitor.

20th April 2004