Anniversary

Happy Fifth Anniversary to us all!

According to Bill Quick of Daily Pundit today, January 1st, was the day in 2002 when he formally coined the term blogosphere.

But like most everything else in this medium, where nothing much is writ in stone, Wikipedia declares that prior to Quick’s pronouncement:

The term blogosphere was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke.

Take your pick, anyway.

Community Blogs In Tracy

Just learned today that our local community paper, Tracy Press, has on its website initiated a listing of community blogs in the City of Tracy. And this humble blog (including my spin-off blog, Hobbies and Pastimes) were included on the list, clearly because I include Tracy as my location in my Blogger’s profile.

Clearly also, this move is a good first step. To acquaint ourselves with members of the local blogosphere. Apart from the staff bloggers of Tracy Press, two other bloggers listed are quite familiar with me, Tracy Today and Tracy Real Estate, both having been in my blogroll for quite a while.

However, I do feel a tinge of guilt being listed as a member of the Tracy community blogs because I have not really blogged anything about Tracy, whether social or political in nature or otherwise.

A big part of the problem has been because we are new residents of Tracy, having really not completely severed ties with our old neighborhood and city in San Mateo County. With the old residence already on escrow, hopefully the New Year will allow me and the wife to settle permanently at our digs in Tracy, and allow us to get to know our new environs a little better. A married daughter lives with her family also in Tracy.

Let it be said that Tracy Press, which we find in our driveway most days of the week, has been a valuable tool in our introduction to the local scene.

It is an earnest resolve then to start blogging about Tracy when the New Year rolls in.

To everybody on the list, glad to know your acquaintance and may the coming year bring in more opportunities to learn more about each other.

More power!

About A Film

Yesterday afternoon, while preparing to reheat overnight foodstuff for a late lunch, the wife decided to channel-surf and ended on a rather dreary beginning credits to a black and white film, quite obviously from some distant past.

After several night-time scene cutaways astutely showing a motley group of people agonizing and trying to cope with their personal problems, I had lamely asked the wife to move to another channel. Like the one showing those grand old Westerns shot in those wondrously beautiful locales in the Old West.

But she had calmly persisted, more to show who's boss rather than having a special liking for this dark film, which I did initially think was a film noir by some obscure film-maker.

Anyway, decided to bear the expected ennui and sit quietly intent on finishing the meal remnants.

Suddenly, after more dreary scenes which put together started to shed more light on the locale, a sudden bolt of recall came to my consciousness. Scenes of overhead trains, remnants of the old El in New York. Train stations scenes with familiar turnstiles and ticket booths. The different characters slowly but surely being drawn to a train station, very late in the night or very early in the morning.

And suddenly, the vague recollection from some distant past gelled into something recognizable and communicable. Thus, I blurted out: I have seen this movie as a younger man and at the end one of the soldier passengers, his right hand on a sling, is going to be knifed by a hoodlum on the train, because he is the only one brave enough to confront evil.

Indeed, the film was The Incident by Larry Peerce, and made in 1967.

For the curious, one doesn't need to rent the VHS which came out in 1989, I learned.

For this blogsite has most of the skinny, with liberal sprinkling of screen captures from the actual film, over a hundred of them. And some audio clips and the actual musical score.

It featured a cast of characters many will recognize even to this day. The soldier with the broken arm was played by Beau Bridges, son of the late Lloyd Bridges and elder brother to Jeff Bridges. A young Martin Sheen, playing the noisy but cowardly punk. A young Donna Mills, pretty and blond. Then old reliables like Gary Merrill and Jan Sterling. Even host Ed McMahon was in it. Yes, he acted before being known as a TV host. And evil personified played well by Tony Musante, a face you love to hate. He played a queer character in Sinatra's The Detective. Director Peerce is known more for his TV works, Wild Wild West and Batman.

Why was this memorable for me, thriving latently in some forgotten corner of my memory all these years?

Because it exposes in graphic clarity the classic confrontation and mortal combat between pure, pristine, and humble "good" against a pure and unmitigated incarnation of "evil".

Furthermore, it also exposes the very thin and easily breached veneer of polite and civilized society. How when we are faced with actual evil, we find ourselves not up to the challenges that we thought we could easily and proudly surmount.

We find ourselves playing uncharacteristically the role of "appeasers" of evil, exerting utmost efforts to play "safe" against evil. Both assiduously and frantically trying to parry and deflect all its attempts to harm us personally and somewhat hoping it moves elsewhere to cast its ugly spell.

In the end, in spite of being hobbled and disadvantaged by man himself, good triumphs using the same means evil uses - violence.

Gift Giving: Economics Vs Intangible Values

This is the day after Christmas. The much-anticipated day when retail stores collide with hordes of shoppers, the latter armed with tons of unwrapped gifts received but to be returned either as unexpected, unwanted, ill-fitting, or simply dispensable. And the former for their parts, ably fortified with inventory prices slashed to the bare bones, backed with everything down to the kitchen sink to lure those harried shoppers into the premises and shrewdly attempt to divest them of funds coming either from returns credits, from leftover or hoarded disposable funds, or from the now greatly favored and ubiquitous gift cards that retail stores have flooded the markets with.

In the US alone, perky TV newscasters wading into crowded stores and blending in with the packs of early-bird shoppers have been blaring all day about what this auspicious day promises to be. They authoritatively lecture listeners that retail sales for the period from Thanksgiving to Christmas will account for 25% of yearly sales, and that profits from this same abbreviated period will account for about 60% of yearly profits, making it the retailers’ most profitable period for the year. Fearless forecasts peg that total sales for this day will most likely exceed those on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the Saturday before Christmas, traditionally the best sales day for the entire year. This year sadly both dates could not break the 10 billion dollars mark for all those stores included in the reported surveys.

Thus, from a strictly Economics point of view, most early prognostications are generally upbeat. Score a big point for the dismal science. But on the downside, the same science in another vein exposes to us inefficiency in the current practices of gift giving, exclusive and apart from the ritual of massive returns of gifts which characterizes this day’s activities. And it is that by and large, when surveyed and polled gift recipients project a rather dreary unintended consequence about gifts received. For when asked about their estimates of the value of gifts received or how much they themselves would pay for the gifts received assuming they were needed by them, recipients typically undervalue the gifts or would spend considerably less for them if paying out of their own pockets. Undervalued by as much as 10% of how much the gifts actually cost, giving rise to what would be called a waste, or at the very least an inefficiency, in expenditure. Economists call it deadweight loss. Thus, had the recipient instead been given cash, he would have purchased the same for less price and get the same satisfaction. Now, to get perspective, if gift-giving in the US during the Christmas season amounts to over 50 billion dollars, and that would be a conservative estimate for actuals, we would have a loss of 5 billion dollars that could otherwise have gone to more productive undertakings, or put differently, allocated to more efficient application of resources. And we have not included here the other gift giving occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, etc.

Remember the ubiquitous gift cards mentioned above? They appear to be an easy answer to this dilemma.

But wait.

The revered practice of gift-giving, very visible and highlighted during the Xmas holidays, is more involved than that, for one it is generally accepted as lying at a plane above the very mundane concepts and earthbound theories of Economics. Because beyond just cash or financial values, gift giving in the spirit of Christmas partakes precisely also of things spiritual, intangible and unquantifiable. We enter into the realm of sentimental values. Because in gift giving it is “the thought that counts, not the price of the gift.” The self-same mantra recalcitrant miserly givers are accused of pre-empting and hiding under.

Add to that what the economic theory of signalling may connote and assign to gift giving, which essentially claims that gifts act as signals from the giver to the recipient, allowing the recipient to gain a hoped-for balanced access to information that a giver may have for the recipient. To illustrate, in gift giving to loved ones, in a real way the actual gift of the giver makes known to the recipient how the giver feels about him or her. Thus, we popularly speak about sentimental values, which typically trump financial values of the gifts. An apt application of the trite axiom, the thought and not the price of the gift.

So what are we to make of this?

In such an obvious dilemma, I suppose a happy blending of Economics with sentimental values could work justifiably well for society collectively. But given the vagaries of unpredictable human behavior expect no abatement to the frenzied rush we call the day after Christmas shopping spree.

Just assure you give best diligent efforts to “signal” to loved ones the appropriate messages your gifts are supposed to convey – not only your showering love and attention, but also your workable understanding of their real needs and desires.

Or maybe, be the modern “old” Ebenezer Scrooge, not for his lack of moral clarity, but for the “perceived” economic benefits for being maybe not miserly, but frugal, thrifty, sparing, economical, austere, or what have you. But that’s another issue for another time.

Elvis On The Holidays

Courtesy of YouTube, here are some little offerings for the holidays:







PEACE TO ALL MEN OF GOODWILL!