Ever wondered about Celebrities? What are their lives like? What do they do with themselves? How do they have fun? Do they always dress that well? How do they chose which car to drive on a particular day, or which jewelry to bedraggle themselves with?

These are important questions!

Hah! At least you’d think they were, given the media coverage that is lavished on celebrities.

It seems you can’t go anywhere without tripping over photographs of celebs sporting the latest fashions, or endorsing some product, or giving an opinion on some issue of the day, etc.

Why does this matter?

After all, a celeb is generally good at only one thing.

Maybe it’s a sport. Maybe it’s painting. Maybe it’s telling jokes. Maybe it is being someone else – making us believe in a character that’s crafted carefully to be understood, identified with (or empathized with) and involved in a “situation” that will be resolved in about a thirty minute, one hour or two hour slot – that is, a celeb actor.

Good celebs – i.e. the “stars” of their fields – are, by necessity and design, more often than not extremely one dimensional: the dimension of their talent. There are a few that go beyond that – true geniuses – but for the most part, any given celeb works so hard at achieving her or his own success they really have little time to develop in any other dimension. Often, they are undeveloped, or simply cases of arrested development.

So, why do we crave what they have to say? Imitate what they wear? Go where they go? In short, worship them.

Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

Unless one is extremely cynical and believes that most people can’t create, or think independently, and thus are “followers” – sheep that follow a leader.

Look in the mirror. Is that the face of a sheep? Is that the face of someone who can’t create for themselves?

Not!

(Hmmm. Celebs even get into our language - look at using "not" as a complete sentence. Now which celeb made that happen?)

Problem is that there is a lot of programming going on – subtle as it is. Ever been led to believe life is boring? Humdrum? Ever been presented with so many opportunities to consume rather than produce?

(Ever visited a Mall? You know, the place with the brainless music in the background, the almost affordable “fashions of the celebs”, the foot courts of “supersize me” capability, the trinket shops, etc. – all coupled with the anonymity of the herd … shoppers wandering the walk ways and looking for distraction or attempting to specialize their lives and stand out for a moment from the herd, through their purchases …)

Surprising isn’t it that society pulls everyone in that direction. Establishing a celebrity elite is one of the elements of that movement – people to look up to. People you too have a shot at becoming, if only …

That’s the trap. If only what?

Reality: each individual is a celebrity of one. Each individual has something to celebrate – no matter what background, color, language, schooling or standing. So, don’t let the bozos get you down – if they do, they’ll keep you there.

Lift up – express yourself and create the world you want, no matter what the scale you are able to accomplish.

Is this too preachy?

Maybe, but after you’ve seen the Cruises, Anistons, Gibsons, Armstrongs, Tysons, Woods, Jacksons, Fishburns, Reeves, Whitherspoons, Fords, Pitts, Stings, Lenos, Madonnas, Spears, Jaggers, Jordans, etc. being interviewed, photographed, quoted, annotated, followed, tracked and worshipped, you get the desire to jump and shout:

“People – this is not what life is about. Be yourself! Don’t strive to be a copy of a one dimensional, media spun celeb. Nor should you strive to be a patchwork quilt of several well spun celebs. After all, without an audience and a following, celebs are just people too.”

Well, perhaps it was preachy ... but then after struggling to avoid a force feeding of celebs (and their thoughts - or whatever process they follow to at least a passing resemblance to thinking) during the convention madness, what do you expect for free?

Their pattern and patter is always the same: pictures of "beautiful people" enjoying the good life (a.k.a. the life you should be having) and always a pushy narrator explaining that all this could be yours if only you'd send some non-trivial amount of money to the producers of the story and, what's more, you won't have to work! Nada - you need to nothing more than send money!

Once you send that magic check, or give the precious credit card number, nirvana will be yours effortlessly (whether nirvana means losing weight - and we mean serious weight as opposed to "5 or 10" vanity pounds, or, reaping ATM fees from ATMs you've invested in that are placed in "choice locations" (hurry, the good ones are being snapped up!), or, perhaps becoming an IT professional by sending off for free CDs (you just pay "shipping") that explain how Windows XP works (perhaps these could be sent to Microsoft to help its hard working programmers get the next, safer version out?), or, perhaps just being fortunate enough to attend a lecture or two given by some famous motivational (and successful) speaker who'll explain to you how to find your core strengths, stay energized and come up with a gig as good as his - i.e. getting people to pay small fortunes to hear him say what they'd like him to say about them, etc.

The list of opportunities is endless ... but the message is always the same:

Hey you! I mean you, couch-boy (or girl) ... see this dream life? It could be yours and you don't even have to move your butt further than the phone. Just send me money and I'll show you how, rent you the gear, sell you the supplies, or whatever. You won't have to do anything - just sit back and watch it roll in ...

The sad thing is that enough people must buy this line of manure because the airwaves, netwaves and cablewaves are full of these pitches and they don't seem to be going away at all. That means, people are buying into the schemes. In fact, in the cable/broadcast world, the later you get at night, the more frequently these things interrupt your programming. Is it just cheaper or are night owls just more likely to follow these paths of the soon to be fleeced?

As someone said, just say "no".

There's no real way to get to the easy life without doing the work. Very, very few people get away with that. Even the bozos pushing these messages are hard at work - it obviously takes a lot of talking to hoodwink enough of the public to make a buck these days! Obviously the country's gone to the dogs ...

As in all things, there are bozos on both sides of this equation: the suppliers of the magic pixie dust and the consumers who get duped into putting down their ready cash.

Come on people - lets all get a life and leave the bozos on the supply side of this equation to twiddle their thumbs next to phones that never ring:

Don't call now, leave those operators standing by. And, remember, Ginsu knives are not all they are cracked up to be.

With the Oscars, the film award season comes to an end and there is one “recognition” that surely must be given here… and perhaps unlike the impossible to understand euphoria that has been generated around "Lost in Translation", the writing here will loose nothing in its translation (or perhaps that’s transcendence) of its real place in the annals of entertainment.

While it was suspected in the lead up to Oscar night, it became obvious that the marketing and PR people had achieved a miracle of bozonic proportions when multiple members of the media began making hay of the fact that Ms. Coppola was the “first American woman” to be nominated for Best Director.

Please!

Yes, it is a true statement, but is it relevant? While recognition for female American Directors is long, long overdue, Ms. Coppola is certainly not the first woman nominated in this category (Jane Campion can claim that status and she also won the award for best Original Screenplay at the same time – but, she’s from New Zealand, not the US). In addition, does her work really compare with that of her peers – whether nominated in this particular race to an award or across the board in the past year?

“Lost in Translation” is a clever and entertaining “movie” to be sure. But is it Oscar material?

The premise is that people who are spending time in a different culture, isolated and further numbed by a totally alien language and set of customs, will eventually find each other and, while they’d never look at one another in their home country, develop unexpected attachments that call into question some of the foundations of their respective lives.

That’s it - basically the entire subtext of the film.

Throw in some witty verbal and sight gags for the extremely talented Bill Murray, add a good looking, talented ingénue to play the “straight guy” and almost love interest opposite him, and you complete the story that actually won Best Original Screenplay against such extremely creative and far deeper works such as “Invasion of the Barbarians” or “Dirty, Pretty Things”.

The even sadder thing is that the premise here is actually true, but it has been sugar coated and “packaged” for the audience (and no doubt academy voters):

Anyone who has spent time in a completely foreign country – Japan, China, Senegal, even India, etc. – knows the isolation only too well. The experienced travelers guard against it and are careful about the attachments they are tempted to make. The inexperienced, or jaded, follow the pattern of Mr. Bill’s character; however, all too often the loneliness of the long distance voyager leads to flings, romantic or lustful, that re-engineer the participants’ lives. Or, they resort to professional services and risk health and threaten their own ethics and morality.

Of course, while sugar coating the reality, “Lost in Translation” needed a glossy, over exaggerated backdrop to keep the audience engaged. As a result, the Japanese portrayed as faddish, aggressive people who alternate between the bizarre to the obsequious. The Japanese are no doubt too polite and respectful to comment directly on the various slurs this production created out of their culture.

Just imagine if the characters had been set against a less glitzy, techno-neutral backdrop, say Jakarta – but wait, that’s been done and that film, “The Year of Living Dangerously” certainly shows how to use a premise with a meaningful backdrop.

Ms. Coppola is, without a doubt, a very talented film maker. She produced a very entertaining film as her first contribution to the medium. However, there are so many entertaining films that deal with a mixture of sugar coated reality, humor and pathos, such as LA Story, Bandits, Wag the Dog, Ground Hog Day, Michael, Gaudi Afternoon, or, on the less humorous side, Point Break, The Limey, Near Dark, The Professional, The Dish, etc.

It is probably a good thing for Peter Jackson and the Lord of Rings team that Ms. Coppola is not from New Zealand herself or she probably would have outdone Ms. Campion at their expense.

Who’s the bozo in all of this? We all are if we believe that “Lost in Translation” is really a cut above simply being what it is: fine, innocent entertainment.

Only bozos believe the hype there has been around this “movie” in the lead up to the Oscars. Obviously there must been a high coefficient of bozosity in the voting – maybe the voters just thought the hype was so entertaining they had to hand over their votes, or maybe their markers were called by the dynasty behind this project.

Who knows, but, in reality, it’s over and there’s always next years circus to look forward to.

In the end, this particular “movie” clearly shows that, like so many things in life, it can be all in how you play the politics – personal and studio.

Live ... while waiting at the pleasure of an airline who's equipment is late for "unspecified reasons" ...

There is nothing like being late for a flight these days. In fact, it is highly recommended as the stress and worry (of missing the flight) really does focus the mind on the gymnastics the TSA people put passengers through. This sport is, of course, done for the resulting increase in "security".

Before going further, let's be clear: security has been increased.

While no sane person would argue against the cost of this increase in security, why does that increase have to involve a proportional increase in the level of bozosity that seems to creep through the system?

It is not the TSA hourly workers who implement the system that are at fault here, it is those who direct and set their policies and procedures - probably going far up into the amazing, Technicolor Dept. of Homeland security. Perhaps if some time were spent observing what happens, thinking about it and also balancing that against probable threats to the system, we could achieve a system that was:

• Even more secure
• Definitely more efficient
• More balanced with respect to passengers
• Less inconsistent from station to station, airport to airport

Unfortunately, the way things are going, pretty soon the average passenger is going to have to strip before being allowed through the scanners.

Let's take a few cases in point from this mornings exercise:

1. Why is it that laptops have to be taken out of bags? Only laptops. People carry other things that are as dense, have large batteries, or could conceal things. But laptops are singled out. Cameras are not. PDAs are not. Radios (including two way portable aircraft band radios ...) are not. GPS receivers are not. Does this make sense? Perhaps to a bozo ...
2. Shoes. Anyone with intelligence could have told the TSA people that their scanners were incapable of detecting anything in shoes - long before someone actually tried (rather successfully as it happens) to get something onto an airliner in his shoes. Why had none of "Those in Charge" worked out that threat vector in advance? Now we live with the knee jerk reaction: if it looks like a shoe, remove it - at some airports. While at other airports, the people actually use some intelligence and only require shoes be removed and scanned that look like they are actually big enough to contain something other than a pair of large feet. At other airports, it seems shoes are removed just to reduce false positives and help the speed up the flow of passengers. Where's the consistency? Does this really help security? Why are scanners not being re-engineered to deal with shoes? That would be the real solution. Question of the week: if you show up in bare feet, do you have to remove your feet and put them through the X-Ray machine??
3. 1 carry on and 1 personal item? What happens if people show up with more? Nothing apparently. Surely one way to police that situation would be to place such people in the extended screening line and rip is all apart? After all, who's the more likely to be carrying "unapproved items"? What actually happens is that everyone else gets to be delayed as these "cargo carriers" struggle to get their items processed through the scanner - in fact, TSA people, trying to be helpful, actually fuss around to get these people through faster. Why not just send them over to the "secondary search" line?
4. Ever noticed how processed seem to spawn "new positions"? In the interests of moving the process along, some TSA wiz-bozo invented the "queue director", now a feature at big airports. After wading through the uni-line that often snakes around the check-in area at such airports, passengers are then confronted with the queue director. This person stands between the passengers and the fan-out queues for the multiple scanners in service. In theory, the queue director is supposed to maintain an even load on the machines by distributing people evenly. Unfortunately, as anyone who's studied queuing theory could explain, the algorithm can't be done that way. Instead of stacking people in the fanned-out lines, it is better to keep them in the major lines and make sure the faned-out lines are never more than 2 or 3 people deep. Of course,  the queue director is not to blame: he or she operates as per procedural directive since TSA people are sadly required to operate as machines slaved to a procedure.
5. Then there are the machines - we know they can't scan shoes when you walk through scanners but what about those X-Ray machines? You'd have to be a bozo not to realize their shortcomings - but they won't be described here since to describe such things would probably cause a different type of bozo to try something...
6. Finally, there are the "random" secondary screenings. It is hard to understand the algorithm that is used to make these "random". It is hard to even understand if it is intentionally non-random - at least, it is hard to understand if it is non-random with intelligent purpose. Based on observations over the last year, it does seem that the system that selects subject passengers favors elderly women and older business types (male or female). Children, or families with children, never seem to be selected. It also seems that hale young people also generally avoid this process. Are we to believe if there is a next major event, it will be carried out by octgenarians? Or perhaps it is the older people who need to think that the system is working to protect them and making their security process more difficult gives them some added assurance of this? Or, more likely, is there is it a bozo who designed or is in charge of the algorithms used for the selection process?

Bottom line: wouldn't it be great if it were possible to easily give feedback to TSA management and planners? Ever seen a suggestion box? Ever seen an address - physical, email or web - posted to do this?

Hmmm. Perhaps that would be too obvious an improvement.

It seems that one of the latest fad web businesses is to offer a service to users that lets them keep their contact lists in a database maintained by a web-based service company.

The selling points appears to be that, either by direct access or through a mail client/browser plug-in, your contact would be available anywhere, AND, the service automatically polls your contacts via email so that they all have the "opportunity" to keep their contact information up to date while you sit back, no doubt drinking a favorite beverage and assuming you've done yourself, and the world, a great service.

Why the world? Because, some of these 3rd party services also offer the opportunity to pre-screen your email and "help" sort out the wheat from the spam ... but more about that later.

Let's go back to the concept of putting your contacts in someone else's database. Again, the question is who's the bozo? The shysters that thought up this novel business, or those who subscribe to it? Why does this imply there's a bozo? Simple ... before doing this with your contacts, just go and read the "privacy policies" of some of these services ...

In one particular case, the service promises not to spam or bother their customers BUT specifically ignores spamming or bothering their customers' contacts.

Sure enough, that is exactly what they do: once they have the email addresses they start spamming the contacts not just to verify the email addresses on behalf of their customers, but also to sell their services to the contacts. What a genius idea - first you con people into giving you their contacts (for a monthly fee, no less) and then you use their contact as a email list to go troll for more business.

Sheesh.

In another case, the service promises not to spam its customers and not to use their contacts EXCEPT in the case where the business is acquired or merged with another business, in which case ... all bets are off.

Of course, if you also let these services pre-screen your email for spam, then you've given them two legs up: they get valid email addresses to add to their databases, and, they can also scan the content of your email - making sure the probability of your email being insecure just maximized.

In all cases, you really think that these companies aren't going to turn a buck (or Euro, or Yen, or Ruble, etc.) by selling the aggregated contact lists to 3rd party spammers???? If you think they won't, let's talk about shares in a bridge in Brooklyn - or maybe you'd like to buy a timeshare interest in a piece of Floridan swamp ...

So, do yourself - and more to the point - your friends and contacts a favor: skip these services. Keep your contacts confidential to yourself and you'll be doing a lot to help your contacts not get even more spam ...

As for keep your contacts up to do - shouldn't you do that yourself?

After all, the important ones and frequently used ones you're going to do it anyway.

Who cares about all the others ....