In memory of Don Knotts, this week’s edition of the Sunday Seven has you ranking your friends from Mayberry.

But first, congratulations go to Carly, of “Ellipsis…Suddenly Carly,” who was first to play for the second week in a row last week!

On to the challenge!

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:
List in order your seven favorite Mayberry characters from “The Andy Griffith Show.” If you have trouble remembering the players, you can follow this link for a cast list.

Either answer the question in a comment or answer it in your journal and include the link in a comment. (To be considered “first to play,” a link must be to the specific entry in which you answered the question.)

My answers:
1. Floyd the Barber
2. Otis the Town Drunk
3. Mayor Pike
4. Barney Fife
5. Aunt Bee
6. Andy Taylor
7. Thelma Lou

I attended a recent service that focused on the Transfiguration, the moment when Jesus revealed himself to three of his followers on a mountain.

The text can be found in Mark 9:2-9. Put yourself in the place of one of his followers. Imagine what it must have been like:

²Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and john, and led them up to a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, ³and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. ⁴And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. ⁵Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” ⁶He did not know what to say for they were terrified. ⁷Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” ⁸Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.⁹As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

Wouldn’t it be so much easier if Jesus could appear today, make himself known in no uncertain terms as he did to the these three followers, so that there could be no doubt?

Sure. But being a Christian isn’t about easiness. It’s a struggle at times to be faithful, especially when you see all of the injustices in the world. Having faith isn’t supposed to be easy: it’s supposed to be a struggle. That’s what makes it all the more rewarding when you come out of a crisis with your faith and devotion intact.

It’s hard sometimes to know what the right words are when you try to explain God to someone who doesn’t believe. Actually, it’s hard almost all of the time, because there’s no easy script to follow. If it doesn’t come from your heart, then it’s just the recitation of words. If you don’t try to conduct yourself in a Christian manner, then you’re a hypocrit. And either way, your credibility as a witness to God’s Word is hurt.

If you could step into a room and see God, face to face, and it would eliminate any doubt in your mind as to whether He exists, would you step inside? Would it destroy your way of life knowing that God does exist? If so, doesn’t that in itself tell you something?

Those of us who do believe because of things we’ve felt haven’t witnessed something as definitive or dramatic as the Transfiguration. But our own experience is just as real to us. That experience is our own moment when everything changes, when nothing is ever quite the same again.

I wish everyone will experience their own moment of revelation while they’re still able to benefit and grow from it.

More sad news: Hollywood has lost one of classic television’s most beloved stars. Don Knotts, whose bumbling Deputy Barney Fife has entertained generations, died Friday night. He was 81.

Knotts’ entertainment career began shortly after graduating high school. Despite some early failures, he made it to the stage in “No Time for Sergeants,” where he met a fellow actor with whom he would build a lifelong friendship: Andy Griffith. Years later, when he learned that Griffith was preparing for a pilot for a situation comedy in which he would star as a rural sheriff, Knotts called his friend and suggested that he needed a deputy. Griffith invited him in to describe his ideas for the character, and the rest became history in “The Andy Griffith Show.”

“I was supposed to be the funny one on the show,” Griffith said in a 2002 interview. “But halfway through the second episode, I realized Don should be the funny one and I should play straight man to him. And that’s the best thing we ever did. That’s what made the show.”

Knotts wrote much of his own material for the show, and he collaborated with Griffith for much of the gags they performed together. As the show neared its fifth season, Griffith was making plans to leave. Knotts read the writing on the wall, and inked a movie contract with Universal. But when the fifth season came and went, Andy decided to stay on and the show was forced to go on without Fife’s character. For fans of the show, it just wasn’t the same.

Knotts was nominated for the Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy five times and won five times. The last two wins came as a result of guest appearances on the show after he had already moved on to films like The Incredible Mr. Limpet, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, and The Reluctant Astronaut.

He would entertain another generation of fans a decade later as would-be swinger Ralph Furley on later seasons of “Three’s Company.” There, he developed a good friendship with John Ritter, another comedy genius. The two shared a mutual respect for each other, according to a member of Knotts’ family.

Towards the end of his career, he partnered with Griffith again on “Matlock,” where he played the character of Les Calhoun, who was similar in personality to Andy’s faithful deputy. Why tamper with a winning formula?

This past August, Knotts was too ill to attend a special celebration in his hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia. A sufferer of hypochondria (and I can relate to that all too well!), Knotts battled a degernative eye disease in his later years, but kept working as long as he could, appearing in stage productions. His last role was the voice of Mayor Turkey Lurkey in the animated film Chicken Little.

On his off-time, he enjoyed reruns of “Seinfeld.”

Knotts criticized the changing landscape of comedy after his regular work on “Three’s Company.” His relative said that he felt that in the early days, the performers were allowed to contribute to the creative process and that the shows were about characters. More recently, he felt that the sitcoms had lost the focus on character development in favor of just trying to pack in more jokes, and that the performers found it harder to feel like a part of the creative process because of a “hierarchical” structure behind the scenes between actors and writers.

Of his good friend, Griffith said, “Don was a small man … but everything else about him was large: his mind, his expressions. Don was special. There’s nobody like him.”

Somewhere up there, Deputy Barney Fife is patrolling the streets once again, his one shiny bullet secure in his top pocket, watching for Jaywalkers.

More than 300 mourners gathered at noon today to say their tearful goodbye to two black bears who delighted visitors to Maymont Park for a decade. The bears were euthanized this week after one of them bit a child. The child and a parent had breached a wooden fence to enter a restricted area in an apparent attempt to feed the bears an apple.

The event was organized by a local woman who loved the bears and Maymont Park, and who wanted to do something to honor the bears’ existence. A few Maymont veterinarians to whom the bears were members of their family fought back tears of their own as they addressed the crowd about the events of the past week.

The community has been expressing its outrage over the decision to put the bears down so that rabies tests could be performed. Brain tissue is required to test for rabies, which requires that the animal be killed: both bears tested negative for the virus.

Visitors this afternoon talked about watching the bears frolick in the sunshine and expressed their shock and dismay about the decision, which was made following several hours of deliberation among 14 experts including doctors, veterinarians, public health and wildlife officials from the state, the City of Richmond and Maymont itself.

Some brought stuffed animals — mostly teddy bears — and left them at a display wall outside the bear habitat. One person brought a jumbo-sized Winnie the Pooh.

Others brought flowers, even favorite photos of the two bears. Children who had visited the bears with their parents brought homemade cards and drawings.

Others, children and adults alike, signed large posters and cards with messages like, “We’ll miss you.” They talked with each other about their memories of visiting the bears with their families over the years.

Still others came to take in the scene of the empty exhibit, their sadness too deep to express with anything other than silent tears.

Mixed in with that sadness and shock is anger. Anger that’s directed at the unidentified parent that apparently put the child in harm’s way despite two signs on the very fence from which the child reached through that read, “WILD ANIMALS ARE DANGEROUS. DO NOT FEED.” Anger that’s directed towards the officials who made the decision to euthanize the bears rather than simply making the child undergo the standard rabies vaccination. And anger at this morning’s revelation that the remains of the bears were buried in an area landfill rather than on the park grounds.

(The burial was done before the test results were known, and because Maymont Park is city property, the bears could not have been buried there because of public health concerns if either animal had tested positive. Also, Maymont did not own the bears: they were merely licensed to display them by Virginia’s Game and Inland Fisheries Department.)

Richmond Mayor (and former Virginia Governor) Doug Wilder has promised a full investigation of what he has called “one of the most reprehensible as well as senseless things to have occurred.” He also said that the city would investigate whether the parent — whom officials refuse to name — might face any criminal charges, including negligence and trespassing.

“The Maymont facility is to attract kids to have an appreciation for wildlife…to show how animals are our friends,” Wilder said at a Friday afternoon press conference. “And this is how we reward our friends.”

As the investigation continues, I hope that the public won’t take their frustrations out on Maymont: it is clear from talking to the various workers at Maymont that that the entire staff is devastated by the situation, as much, if not more so than the many visitors to whom the bears brought such joy.

(All photos, except the shot of the two bears, taken by the author.)

Don’t forget to take the sidebar poll: How would you have handled the incident?

The 98th edition is posted a little later than I would have liked, but I attended a special event that I’ll write about over at my primary blog later tonight.

And you’ll be happy to know that I gave these questions an extra look to make sure I didn’t repeat any of last week’s! (And thanks to Wil for being the first to email me about the repeat question. You can’t put anything over on Wil!

Dac of “Planetary Verbosity” was first to play last week main edition. Also, last Monday, I posted a “replacement question” for the repeated one, and Barb of “A Ticket to Ride” was first to answer that question in a comment. Congratulations, Donna & Barb!

Here are this week’s “Saturday Six” questions. Either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your journal…but either way, leave a link to your journal so that everyone else can visit! To be counted as “first to play,” you must be the first player to either answer the questions in a comment or to provide a complete link to the specific entry in your journal in which you answer the questions. A link to your journal in general cannot count. Enjoy!

1. What is the most difficult aspect of your current job?

2. What is the easiest aspect of your job?

3. How many keys are there on your keyring right now? Are you able to recall exactly what every key on your keyring actually unlocks?

4. Take this quiz (if you haven’t already!): What kind of an elitist are you?

5. What is your least favorite ethnic food, and what makes it your least favorite?

6. If you were a different person, but were to meet someone identical to who you are and how you behave right now, would you likely be friends with that person? Why or why not?

If you have a Reader’s Choice question you’d like to see asked (and answered), click the e-mail link on the About Me bar and send it to me.

MY ANSWERS:

1. I tend to want to please everyone with what I do: a reporter may like a story “sold” one way, while a producer might think that a different angle is better. My boss then may say that the script doesn’t give enough of a reason to watch, then our consultants will review spots after the fact and suggest “better” ways to have done it. (It’s especially annoying when one of the consultant’s suggestions happens to be identical to a “rejected” draft.)

2. Getting the information I need to promote the stories is generally easy, though there are a few who make it more difficult than it needs to be.

3. There are 24 keys on my keyring, and there are at least six that I can’t immediately identify.

4.
You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every book ever published. You are a fountain of endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and never fail to impress at a party. What people love: You can answer almost any question people ask, and have thus been nicknamed Jeeves.
What people hate: You constantly correct their grammar and insult their paperbacks.

5. I’ve only tried Indian cuisine once, and I just didn’t enjoy the dish I had. There were too many strange spices and flavors that just seemed to clash, almost as if the individual ingredients were competing with each other for notice on the taste buds. I’ve been told about a very good Indian restaurant in town, and I’m considering giving it a try.

6. I’d like to think so, but honestly, I don’t think I would. I think one must be happier with one’s self than I tend to be to really allow many people to get as close as a good friendship really requires.

A quick blog jog on entries referencing the Maymont Bears that were euthanized after one of them bit a four-year-old boy who had breached a safety gate reveals that most people seem to be siding with the bears over the child.

Should the bears have been euthanized so that rabies tests should have been performed? The problem with isolating the bears in quarrantine, which is likely what would have happened if a stray dog had bitten the child, is that dogs would show symptoms in a shorter time. (I believe the typical quarrantine is twelve days.) No one is sure exactly how long a rabid bear would take to show obvious symptoms, but 45 days or more has been suggested; in that amount of time, the child, if he had been exposed, would likely have been deathly ill unless he received the rabies treatment.

The treatment, incidentally, isn’t as bad as it used to be. My mom tells me that when she was little, her mother made her and her siblings take the shots when a possibly-rabid animal had entered their yard. Back then, it was a series of shots administered into the abdomen. It was a painful procedure, to say the least.

Today, the treatment involves five shots administered in the arm, on the day of exposure, the third day, the seventh day, the fourteenth day, and the 28th day. The shot allows the body to quickly prepare antibodies that fight the rabies virus.

The sidebar poll has been changed to ask what you would do in this situation. Would you make the child take the shots or would you have performed the test on the bears?

Maymont Park has a collection of animals, including foxes, cows and a variety of fowl. I spotted a pair of ducks who were ready to nap in the sun following a brief swim.

The iridescent green and blue in the Mallard’s feathers are two of what I consider to be nature’s most beautiful colors. Those colors are probably the reason I also like watching dragonflies, which are much harder to capture on film. I hope you enjoy them as well.

Here’s a question for the parents in the audience:

Let’s suppose that you’re visiting a zoo with your four-year-old child. He’s excited to see all of the wild and exotic animals, and you’re watching him closely. He stops when he reaches a pair of bears and wants a closer look. The bears are enclosed within an eight foot fence, and outside of this fence is a seperate wooden “people fence” designed to keep visitors from getting too close to the cage. Your child wants to get “up close and personal” with the bears. You don’t work with the zoo, have never had any personal contact with the bears yourself, and don’t know whether they’re tame or not, beyond any obvious appearances.

Would you risk letting your child get close enough to touch a bear?

I’m hoping that most of you…scratch that: I’m hoping that every single one of you would say no, because when we’re talking about wild animals, the operative word is “wild.”

It’s been a sad week at one of my favorite places in Richmond, Maymont, where a parent apparently didn’t say no in such a scenario.

Part of the Maymont estate features a small zoological park that displays animals native to the James River area. The exhibit — prior to this week — featured two bears, ages 12 and 9, that had been at the park for years.

Despite warning signs, a parent and child breached a fence, according to WTVR-TV, the child stuck his hand through the inner ten-foot fence and was bitten by one of the bears. Though the wound required no stitches, the skin was broken, which allowed for the possibility that rabies could have been transmitted.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that a wildlife spokesperson has speculated that the child may have been eating an apple, or may have had the scent of an apple he had eaten recently, on his hands and this might have led to the bite.

So the two bears were euthanized (since the mother couldn’t identify which of the two had actually bitten the child) so that tests could be performed. The community, understandably, was outraged that such an act could result in the death of the two bears who were only guilty of doing what bears do.

There is no way to test an animal for rabies while it is alive. In bears, the illness is not completely predictable, and could have taken as long as 45 days to manifest itself in definitive symptoms. By that time, it would have been too late for the child to begin receiving treatment. And treatment — even as a preventative measure — requires a series of five shots over a 28-day period. And you can’t expect a four-year-old to undergo such an ordeal for doing what he was allowed to do: who would think a four-year-old would realize the danger if his parent helped him reach it to start with?

This morning, insult was added to injury: as nearly everyone expected, both bears tested negative for rabies.

A poll at the Times-Dispatch, as of this writing, indicates that 96% of people think the bears should not have been killed. I’m an animal lover and I find this story sickening. But I think there was no other reasonable choice to make sure that the child was safe from the rabies virus: you can’t subject a four-year-old to painful rabies shots for no reason just to save the bears’ lives: of the two, the child’s safety is paramount. No matter how many animals had to be put down, knowing that the child was safe should have been the only real deciding factor.

Two lives were lost here. Only human arrogance would pretend that the lives aren’t important because they’re “only” animals and that a bear isn’t one of God’s creatures just as the rest of us. The lives weren’t lost “needlessly” because the test results provided information that was urgently-needed; but the loss could have been so easily prevented with the use of even a drop of common sense.

A child was scarred, and those scars are potentially physical and mental. Zoos are designed to teach a love and appreciation of nature. And because this child was allowed to get too close, because these people violated the zoo’s safety measures specifically designed to protect visitors from just such an accident, others won’t get the chance to see these animals.

One simple act costs everyone.

The title of this post came from the title of the most recent post over at On the Wrong Side of the Alligator.

The simple answer to the question is “Yes. Absolutely.” The publishers who put an author in the black section solely because of the race of the author do it every day; if they didn’t feel they could justify it, they wouldn’t bother separating the titles based on skin color to begin with. They point to their own sales figures which show them, apparently, that the best chance a black author has is to be marketed as a black author, regardless of the content of the author’s work. Their justification is based on sales figures that show them how successful the AA niche is for black writers, and for some reason, they have become unable to see a difference between a black writer’s work and work that is specifically geared for the AA niche.

That’s wrong. I’m not defending the practice: It’s racism. There’s no way around that obvious point to anyone who takes a moment to consider the matter objectively.

Unfortunately, business doesn’t always allow complete objectivity: businesses want to make money. And those businesses who are making money by segregating authors of color regardless of their subject matter are only looking at the figures they already have convinced themselves tell the whole story, whether they do or not.

In television, I deal with consultants who like to do a lot of market research. One of the things they ask news consumers to do is rank the kinds of stories that have the most interest. They come up with categories like “Breaking News,” “Breaking Weather,” “Your Local Forecast,” “School Stories,” and other categories. Somewhere in the list is the category, “Sports.” Naturally, most people put things like “breaking news” near the top. Sports ends up, usually, near the bottom.

This leads some local stations to cut their sports segements down to maybe two minutes on a good day, or even to knock them out of some shows completely. The research convinces the consultants that no one cares about sports. But that’s not what the research shows: it merely shows that people care about other things more than sports. (Look at the success of networks like ESPN and tell me that no one cares about sports!)

Sure, there’s a big difference between race and the content of a newscast. But in this example, there is no difference in the way research and sales figures (or ratings) are being misinterpreted. It’s flawed conclusions from research taken too literally that leads to situations like this.

To get it back to the example at hand, one of the complaints black authors who have been treated this way have expressed is that by being segregated into the African-American niche market, they are being excluded from exposure by up to 85% of book customers who don’t buy AA books; they’re walking into the marketplace with the disadvantage of getting only 15% of the market if they’re a complete success.

A valid complaint, indeed.

But let’s take that scenario and reverse it: if a publisher believed that the book could be a financial success as a mainstream-marketed work, why would that publisher settle for shelving it in a corner and thereby shutting out more than three-fourths of potential buyers? Let’s say you owned a business and you made a product that you genuinely believed would be embraced by all segments of the population. Would you then market your product to such a specific clientele — and only that clientele — to guarantee that you’d only get exposure to a fraction of the customer base?

The very idea is so ridiculous that it’s laughable. And therein lies the problem: for publishers to have reached this point so easily, it’s clear that their sales figures and marketing research — to their experts — must justify the practice. Otherwise, one would have to wonder why they’d go to the expense of publishing a book and then “hide” it from the majority of book customers.

That doesn’t, in any way, make the practice right. But understanding how they reached a point doesn’t require one to agree that the point is the right place to be.

Defining “Justification”
What concerns me is that there seems to be no difference between looking for the reason racism is happening so regularly in the publishing industry and advocating it. What does it mean to “justify” racism?

If you search for the logic in such a practice, are you automatically setting out to prove that the practice is okay? No. If you determine why the publishers feel it’s the right thing to do — despite the fact that it clearly isn’t the right thing to do — are you then advocating what they’re doing? Of course not. In fact, you may well be providing a more convincing argument about how wrong the practice is.

The color of your skin shouldn’t determine what shelf your novel lands on in a book store. And the color of your skin shouldn’t determine which side of this issue you must be on, either. I think that is being lost in the anger of the discussion.

Early on, when I tried to ask why publishers would market the work of black authors as “AA” without regard for the content of the story, and suggested that they must think that’s the best way they can sell those titles, some assumed that I was advocating this practice. I wasn’t…then or now.

The same thing happened to J.A. Konrath, who made similar points that I made, and was then jumped on for “defending” the practice. But this reaction is like accusing a prosecuting attorney who digs for the suspect’s motive in a crime of being an advocate of first-degree murder!

The reality is that racism always requires ignorance and often requires hatred. Sometimes the hate is a direct result of ignorance, but it doesn’t have to be.

While there certainly seems to be a good deal of ignorance in operation here, based on an obvious lack of research that shows that a mainstream novel which happens to have been written by a black writer could sell just as well as work written by a white writer, I don’t see hate in the publishers’ motives. Maybe it’s there and I’m missing it, but it just seems more logical to me that if black authors were hated by the publishing industry, the publishers wouldn’t buy their work at all.

And the lack of any obvious hate-based “conspiracy” is important to recognize: Mere ignorance can be fixed; blind hate is a much harder obstacle to clear.

Finding the reason the publishers are segregating the work of black authors without regard to the content of the work still doesn’t make what they’re doing right. But in exposing their justification for it, we should have a starting point to begin to deconstruct their preconceived notions about what is and isn’t salable.

Indeed, the acknowledgment that racism is occurring shouldn’t be the end of the discussion. There are no points to be awarded for such a conclusion. That acknowledgment should only be the beginning of a bigger discussion: what to do to convince publishers that their methods are wrong?

That’s the difference between justifying something and advocating it.

I stopped at a convenience store to get overcharged for gasoline and I went inside to pick up a Diet Coke. While standing at the counter, I glanced at one of those signs that remind the customers (and the clerk) of the most recent year in which a customer must have been born to be able to buy tobacco.

Apparently, I haven’t looked at one of these signs in a while, which isn’t surprising since I don’t smoke, anyway.

But I noticed that people born on or before this date in 1988, the year I graduated from high school, are now 18 and thereby old enough to buy cigarettes. Eighteen years ago?

Ouch! That hurt worse than the workout at the gym!

On the most recent edition of the “Saturday Six,” I inadvertently reran the previous week’s question in slot number four.

To those who had already answered that question, I offer this one as a replacement:

4. Take this quiz (if you haven’t already): What literature classic are you?

Normal “first-to-play” rules apply for this make-good question. I’ll give the appropriate blogger their props on the next edition of the Saturday Six.

My answer:

Oscar Wilde: The Portrait of Dorian Gray. You are a

horror novel from the world of dandies, rich

pretty boys, art and aesthetics, and

intellectual debates between ethical people

and decadent pleasure-seekers. You value

beauty and pleasure but realize their

dangers, as well.

I’m more brand-loyal than your average consumer. When I find a product that I like, I stick with that specific product. For soap, it’s Ivory. For toothpaste, it’s Crest. For soup, it’s Campbell’s. That’s not to say that other brands aren’t better or even as good, but I found the brands I like before I discovered “better” alternatives, and so I stick with what I like.

Working in television can cause a problem for us brand-loyal types, particularly if you relocate to a station that’s an affiilate of a different network. In my career, I’ve worked for stations that have been affiliated with a total of four different nets. One of the four is my “favorite” network. But of the stations I have worked for, while I may not have watched everything on that station, when it comes to the local product: news, the station I work for is the “brand” of news that I watch.

I’d have a hard time working for a station — and specifically, marketing that station’s news products — if I wasn’t one of its consumers myself. For one thing, I’d want to know from firsthand experience what makes that product unique and (hopefully) better. But I’d also feel a little guilty trying to talk up a product that I myself didn’t bother using.

So here’s a question for you:

If you learned that the president of a major airline only flew on another carrier’s flights, or that an executive of one grocery store chain did all of his grocery shopping at a competitor’s chain, would you wonder why?

I would. And apparently, I’m not alone in that.

Over at AOL, Joe, the Journals Editor, wrote a post defending Ted, an AOL vice president who is hosting his blog outside of AOL “J-land.” Apparently, enough people have said something about it that Joe felt the need to respond.

Joe does make a good point:

“If AOL Editors choose to use it — we hope they will, there are many who do, and some of them are doing some neat stuff with it — I and the Journals team will do everything we can to support them.However, if AOL Journals isn’t the right product for them, when it comes down to it, I would rather they blog using third-party software rather than not blog at all.” (Emphasis is his.)

I agree. If you have something to say, then by all means say it.

But then Joe added this note about Ted’s decision to blog outside of AOL:

“Looking at Ted’s blog specifically — early on, we had some conversations with some of Ted’s team to talk about his blog; they had some specific requirements that the AOL Journals platform wasn’t going to get within their timeframe. For example, one of those requirements was for more control over the look and layout of the blog; AOL Journals is going to get this in the spring with custom skins, but we’re not ready yet.So, they went with a custom implementation that exists to serve one customer: Ted.” (Emphasis is his.)

There’s something wrong here. A vice president of a company can’t have a tech team design a “custom implementation” that would give him a presence in the very product he’s hoping more people will use? And if the vice president can’t get changes made that he needs, how are customers supposed to think that their input will make a difference?

Beyond that, if you’re a head honcho of a company, why wouldn’t you want to experience your own product from a consumer standpoint to identify those areas in need of improvement? Isn’t it just possible that using your own product might help you identify more with your customers?

When some of us first noticed that Ted’s blog wasn’t an AOL Journal, we didn’t think, “Well good for him, he has something to say so he’s saying it.” We thought, “Why wouldn’t he blog with AOL?” The old “it’s more important to blog elsewhere than to never have blogged at all” philosophy doesn’t make as much sense for a higher-up in a company who’s going with someone else’s product.

Stacey, of the sports blog, “High Above Courtside,” spoke right up:

“I understand what you’re saying, but would you eat at a restaurant when the chef’s husband won’t eat there? ‘Buy my product- I don’t use it, but…’”

Joe’s response:

“Ah, but Monponsett — to butcher your metaphor — by blogging with the rest of us, Ted IS eating in the restaurant.He’s just using a different set of plates.”

To butcher the metaphor is right! If Ted is using a different blogging platform, he’s not eating off of a different set of plates: he’s dining at what he must consider to be a finer restaurant somewhere else.

When I pointed this out, Joe suggested that to demand that Ted use AOL for his blog would be as “silly” as requiring him to use AOL Hometown to host the website of the Washington Capitals, which he owns.

Not so fast, Joe. For one thing, AOL Hometown, a web-hosting service designed to allow AOL members to make personal websites isn’t an ideal place to host a business site. And I don’t know of any nationally-prominent business that hosts its web presence through AOL Hometown. Most of them, the Capitals included, have purchased their own domains by now. It is the 21st century, after all.

Apples and oranges.

Joe then adds:

“It would be different if AOL was saying, ‘Because you’re an AOL member, we forbid you from using anybody else’s software to blog.’ As I said and as you yourself know, we’re not.”

Of course they’re not! How can they? AOL is in no position to require paying customers to use only their product. Many of the people I know who use AOL Instant Messenger, for example, also use Yahoo! Messenger or Microsoft Messenger as well. AOL hasn’t the right to restrict their customers’ use of any other product.

And I’m not even suggesting that AOL should restrict their employees’ use of other services. It should certainly be voluntary. But when an executive of a company doesn’t use AOL’s journal platform for his primary journal, it’s a decision that could be interpreted more than one way.

It’s all about perception. For many people, perception — no matter how wrong it is — is still reality.

I read one of the most ridiculous letters I’ve ever seen in the Miss Manners column, and I’ve spotted some really weird ones in my time.

Here’s the writer’s first sentence:

“I have been dating my boyfriend for four months and it came up this week that he still does not know my name.”

No, really…that’s what it said. She continues:

“I do not know what to do about this because he has heard my name so many times, both my English name and my Italian name. I also write it on everything I have given to him, yet he still calls me by the wrong name.”

At this point, I’m already trying to picture anyone else tolerating anything like this. She continues:

“He will blame it on his disabilities, yet he knows all of his co-workers’ first and last names, even the most recent workers. He tells me he has all of these feelings for me and really cares about me but I feel, ‘You can give the world to someone, but if you don’t know who you are giving it to, it’s just not worth it.’”

That’s where it ends. There’s no real question from the writer. It seems to me as if there was no real question in her mind as she wrote her letter, regardless of what Miss M might say in response. (Miss M, by the way, points out the obvious by saying that a gentleman’s inability to learn the name of a lady he’s been courting for four months is “not a good sign.”)

My question is this: how long would it take the rest of you to break up with someone who couldn’t get your name right? Would he or she even get a second date?

Last week, your assignment was to come up with seven types of candy you’d like to receive for Valentine’s Day. If you ate lots of candy then stepped onto the scale, you might wish for the chance to go back in time to do things over again. Going back in time…all the way to your childhood…is this week’s topic.

Carly, of “Ellipsis…Suddenly Carly,” was first to play last week. Congratulations, Carly!

On to the challenge!

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:
List up to seven Saturday or Sunday morning programs you loved as a kid, cartoon or live action.

Either answer the question in a comment or answer it in your journal and include the link in a comment. (To be considered “first to play,” a link must be to the specific entry in which you answered the question.)

My answers:
1. Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Show
2. Space Academy
3. The Pink Panther
4. Sigmund and the Sea Monsters
5. Isis
6. Land of the Lost
7. The Cliffwood Avenue Kids

The policy of allowing unmarried detectives to actually engage in sexual activity to obtain a more definite charge against prostitutes has now been abandoned.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the Spotsylvania County sheriff issued a statement that read, in part:

“I understand the feelings and concerns the citizens of this county have expressed. And I empathize with those feelings.”

The story, which received statewide, then national attention, went on to be talked about across the globe.