Today I’m flying again. And so it fills my heart with joy to hear the news coming out of Washington today. At long last, President George W. Bush is rolling up his sleeves, focusing on the problem, and getting to work on solving it.

The LA Times, among many other news outlets, reports on this development, and quotes the Commander in Chief, who appears to be as righteously indignant as anybody who actually has the experience of flying commercial. ”There’s a lot of anger amongst our citizens about the fact that, you know, they’re just not being treated right,” Mr. Bush said. “We’ve got a problem, we understand there’s a problem, and we’re going to address the problem.”

The Chief Executive particularly mentioned the need for people’s complaints to be heard and addressed promptly, telling his Transportation Secretary and the acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration “to make sure that consumers are treated fairly and complaints are listened to, and that we address some of the egregious behavior that our consumers have been subjected to… Endless hours sitting in a airplane on a runway, and there’s no communication between the pilot and the airport, is just not right.” 

I don’t know about you, but the news that Mr. Bush is engaged in solving a problem of this magnitude is welcome indeed. At least it gives us something to smile about.

Got a suggestion for the President as to how he can help improve the situation? Send it in. I’ll pass it along with all due respect.

Just a quick note this morning. I was shocked to see the outpouring of bitterness and grief that has attended the death of the Marshall Field’s brand, which Macy’s (M) has apparently defenestrated. You may find said exhalations of regret and anger in response to a prior post on this site, the one inquiring what you believe to be the biggest business stories of 2007.

A huge number of you took the opportunity to expound on this story of a brand retired by its new corporate master. And not in any bogus, organized way, either. One by one, each by each, you line up to yell at Macy’s for depriving you of a brand that you loved and lost.

When I was a boy growing up outside Chicago, I have a sweet memory of the long days of boredom my parents would impose upon me. We would go downtown for the day. While there, we would (if I was lucky) visit the Museum of Science and Industry, which I loved, or, if I was less fortunate, the Art Institute, which made me feel like lying down on the cool marble floor and dozing. Somewhere in there, my mother would insist on a visit to Marshall Field’s. I imagine, and I may be wrong here, that we had lunch there, lunch being the centerpiece of any day for my mother.

What I remember most clearly was the way she said those words: Marshall Field’s. I’m not sure what we shopped for there. I have no idea whether her reverence for the brand was well-founded, even. Not even the names of Bergdorf Goodman or Tiffany (TIF) had the same heft for my mom. Marshall Field’s meant quality. It meant, for her, entering a world of class and calm and civility.

There were other stores that had the same weight, most of which are gone now. I recall that Best & Co. was a very big deal. My mom got me a little hat from there. It was made of felt. I wonder where it is now.

My first car was a Studebaker Lark. My first electric guitar? A Hagstrom. My first beer? Schlitz.

The brands that mark our lives are like everything else. They feel permanent, like signposts that will never confuse us, never alter with time. And then one day they are gone.

We can rail against the motion of the sun and moon. We can bemoan the passing of those things that were meant to last forever. And we can remember what it was like to enter the portals of Marshall Field’s in the great big city that made us feel so small, and wonder what mall, what superstore, what online shopping site will ever be able make our moms, or anybody else’s, feel quite that happy and elegant again.

Honestly, I never thought, when I declared a contest over my IPod yesterday, that I would receive such an outpouring of rational need, foolish greed and wretched hyperbole as has crossed my electronic blotter since.

I challenge you all! Read them, all 145 or so at this time and counting. Which of them would YOU select? It’s tough, you’ve got to give me that. There’s RJ from Oakland, CA, who said, simply and eloquently, “Because.” There’s Daren Baughman, who offered to bribe me with a $500 return on my (zero) investment so that I could get myself some DECENT CIGARS. There’s Mike Baker of Charlotte, NC, who yelled, ”Just give me the damn thing already!” There were a few of you who, quite touchingly, I think, told me to give you the IPod simply because you were Canadian. Jason from Atlanta plucked my heartstrings with “I think you should send me an IPod because I’m a cheap idiot.” Gotta love that. Arren from Greenfield, Iowa, seems to have let Saddam Hussein borrow his or her IPod and hasn’t seen it “since Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction went missing.”

Finally, there are the people who want to please their pregnant wives or others who have a genuine need. Those too, moved me to moments of extreme cogitation in the dark hours between yesterday and now. So many entreaties and exhortations, great ideas, outrageous notions, pleas that would wrench a tear from a lump of granite, stuff to laugh about and wonder.

But in the end, I come down to two:

Scott, who began it all because neighborhood children stole his. One of you amusingly wrote in to say that it was YOU who had stolen Scott’s IPod and then it had run out of batteries. I liked that. There is something fair, however, in giving the guy who got this all started the prize.

And then there is Ed from Syracuse. I quote his entry in its entirety:

I was on my way to my mom’s carrying a new prescription for her heart medication. I had my boom box on my shoulder. It was a hot day and that old boom box was really heavy. I stopped to rest, it was only for about five minutes. When I reached mom’s building there were four flights of stairs to climb. I put down the boom box and rested again, just for a minute or two, then I started to climb. When I reached mom’s appartment she was sitting in the rocker very quiet. I thought she was sleeping so I went to rouse her. She had slipped away. As the ambulance crew was lifting her into the van I could only think that if I had had an iPOD and not that heavy dam boom box, I might have gotten ther in time to save mom.

Here we have a guy who actually conjures up the death of his mother in order to get a free, obsolete IPod. In its shocking willingness to say anything to achieve his desired objective, I believe Ed most fully represents the values that are daily expressed in this website, and in American business as a whole, the driving principle that made this economic system the wonder of the world.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to send Scott my old IPod, and I’m going to give Ed my slightly newer, second-generation IPod mini, the one that comes with its own USB connector and hangs around your neck on a cord. If I can find it. I think I can. I was just using it a few weeks ago. I think I know where it is.

Ed? Scott? Send me your personal information in a comment. I won’t publish them, but they will tell me where to send your prizes. Congratulations!

Oh, and be a little patient, by the way. The person with the original old gizmo is still sort of reluctant to part with it. Now more than ever, for some reason.

Scott from Washington, D.C. weighs in with a brilliant idea. “Bing,” he writes, commenting on my churlish refusal to spend my time engaging in social networking, “could I score one of those iPods uselessly gathering dust? Neighborhood kids stole mine.” Scott is referring  to my offhand mention in that post of extra elderly IPods cluttering up my personal space. 

Great concept, Scott! But why should YOU get it when there are so many people out there who are iPodless for one reason or another? Sure, I could pop my old first-gen 20 gig iPod into a padded envelope and send it out to Scott right now. But what fun would that be for anybody but Scott? Why not make a contest out of it?

So that’s what we’re going to do. If any of you now reading this can think of a single reason I should send you my old but perfectly functional iPod, please leave a comment here. I will judge the most convincing, outrageous or demented one, and indeed award its author the discrete object of his or her desire. Scott’s reason is that neighborhood kids stole his. That’s compelling. Perhaps you can do even better. We’ll never know until you try.  

Send in your supplications. They should make for tasty reading. And if nobody answers I’ll just keep the ancient but still highly efficient relic for myself. Either way, I win. That’s my kind of game, ladies and gentlemen.  

“I believe the more connected people become, the more disconnected they truly are.”

Mike
Los Angeles, CA
Commenting on “Why I Refuse to Join MySpace”

It’s almost October and the stores have their Halloween displays up already. Tempus fugit and all that.  Soon it will be time for the drooling season leading up to the holidays to begin. Not quite yet, though, thank goodness. 

With autumn a-comin’ in, we have, however, arrived at the season when people who think about business for a living (as opposed to doing any) begin considering what might have been the biggest, the best, the funniest, the stupidest, the most pathetic and the most inspirational business stories of the year, in preparation for their year-end extravaganzas. So that’s what I’m thinking about. As always, I hate that. Thinking, I mean. I would rather ask you for help.

So. What do you think were the biggest, the best, the funniest, the stupidest, the most pathetic and the most inspirational business stories of the year?

• Was it China, which last week added the recall of a million baby cribs to its list of miscreancies?
• Was it the state of the crazy, hazy airline industry?
• Was it Mr. Jobs promising to give $100 cash American to anybody with eleven fingers?
• Was it the spread of BlackBerry ubiquity?
• Was it the arrival of Sudoku as brain Drano of the year?
• Was it YouTube’s 1,000,000th talking cat video?
• Was it the branding of Philanthropy as a fad, replacing Excellence, Synergy and many others that came before?
• Was it the decline of the celebutante and pop tart as dependable mercantile entities? I mean, haven’t these people ever heard of chauffeurs?
• Or was it something else? Something, say, that YOU did that you believe is worthy of note?

As magazines and newspaper editors meet in serious conclave, with stacks of clips and videos in which to immerse themselves, let’s see if we can go them one better and begin the construction of a meaningful, entertaining and illuminating list.

Okay?

I’m interested in the amount of hostility that my offhand comment about not wanting to belong to MySpace seems to have generated.

What’s fascinating to me is that some of you are more incensed by the fact that I don’t want to be on a social networking site than you are about the notion that your personal information on such sites is being used to target you for marketing purposes. A bunch of you even called me a loser for not wanting to be a social networkee.

I can imagine myself in, like, the middle ages. Not MY middle ages, mind you, but THE middle ages. And here comes a representative of King Richard who is asking all males to get on their horses, put on their armor, and go to the Jerusalem to rid the Holy Land of the infidel. It’s the Crusades! Everybody’s going! Why not you, Bing?

I don’t go to see movies everybody tells me to. I don’t know why, I just don’t. I don’t watch television programs that I simply HAVE to see. I don’t drink chai latte when I’m in LA, although I did try it just once because I was all coffeed out. It made me gag. But that’s not why I don’t drink it. I just don’t like going with the flow, particularly when the thing in question isn’t likely to improve my life one little bit, but will, in fact, just clutter it up more than it already is with social obligations, electronic stimulation and marketing in my face.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m no Luddite. I can take a computer apart and put it back together. My shelves are stuffed with software from the entire age of computing, starting with ancient artifacts like Persuasion and Harvard Graphics and ending with the coolest new toys like Final Cut Studio and Photoshop CS3. I spend more time feeding this blog than I do feeding myself. I have about six IPods of varying generations lying around and one of those new mommas on the way. I work on both PCs and Macs and am completely platform agnostic. I just don’t want to belong to a friggin’ social network, okay? Not even if, as one reader suggested, it would help market my books.

Phooey. Is that why social networks were created? To market more people more effectively? I don’t think so. In fact, I think the things exploded into life when young people called out for a digital space where their every thought, movement and taste would not be exploited by the big boomer sales machine, where they could talk to each other in a virtually mercantile-free zone. Now here come all the boomers to ruin it all. Well not me, guys. Call me square. Call my funky. But I’m out.

I’ll see you at my analog social networking venue. It’s right across the street from my office and features special pricing between 5:00 and 7:30.  

The New York Times reports that MySpace has developed the ability to tailor advertising towards each of its members. Executives knowledgeable about the new program indicate that “the tailoring technology has improved the likelihood that members will click on an ad by 80 percent on average,” the Times says.

This gives me yet one more incentive to join that flourishing community, and only two remaining reasons not to: 1) my conviction that anybody over 28 who belongs to MySpace is a hopeless loser not unlike the parents I knew in the 60s who wanted to smoke pot with their kids and 2) I have no real friends I’d want to put on my page. That is, all the friends I have I speak to as often as I want to and there are a whole lot of people I have forgotten on purpose.

That said, this new technology is a powerful inducement. An imaginary Bing page on one of the social networking sites would quickly target me for:

• Computer related hardware and software
• Cameras
• Liquor
• Downloadable video and music
• Cheese logs, giant fruit, mail-order ham

I will point out that I did purchase each of those things in the last week or so without being targeted, but who knows? With some additional persuasion and a powerful recommendation engine at work, I might develop ancillary needs that are as yet unknown to me. Possible offshoots of my current obsessions may include:

• Beef sticks
• A mainframe to run parallel search functions
• A high-definition video studio
• One of those little golf carts you see on the streets these days
• Bowling shoes

I don’t know that I need any of those things, but I feel like I might if I was properly deglazed, probed and polished by the right algorithm.

Quite a few of you seem to be interested in the subject of grammar, the usage of English in both social and business settings, in speech and on paper. Some of you deplore the existence of grammar entirely. Others defend it with the kind of passion that the citizens of Chicago reserve for the Cubs, with probably the same success.

After I peeved a while back in this space about the distinction between “me” and “I” in our continually devolving culture in this regard, I got enough mail to warrant a full-torque column in that greatest of all business publications, FORTUNE Magazine, where I occupy the back page, as most of you know, I think?

Anyhow, that column is read by people who occasionally touch paper, take a walk outside, think about analog things now and then. One of those turns out to be a very smart fellow by the name of Steve Glass, who teaches Classics and Classical Archaeology at the Claremont Colleges in California. As opposed to me, who admits to being something of a bulls**t artist capable of bloviating on virtually any subject with equal credibility for five minutes, Mr. Glass appears actually to know what he’s talking about on his chosen subjects, one of which is grammar. “Mr. Bing,” he writes…

I greatly enjoyed your piece on “The Element’s of Style” in the August 20 edition of *Fortune.* A moment’s respite and a temporarily empty computer screen before the fall semester begins moves me to offer a few ruminations on some of the points you raise.

The inability to distinguish “I” from “me” is difficult to remedy given that relatively few people can tell a preposition from a proposition. How would one explain the principle of a preposition’s taking an object to those who have never heard of an object. These days, when one is teaching, say, Latin, it’s necessary to have one’s students buy a small book, titled *English Grammar for Students of Latin.* With a little editing, it works for students of Greek as well. What good does it do to explain to students that the accusative case is used for the direct object and the dative case for the indirect object when they’ve never heard of either and have never had teachers who knew how, or were moved to diagram a sentence on the board in front of a classroom? I think you’re right: as regards the object versus the subject of a personal pronoun, “the distinction … may be disappearing.” I suppose that the split infinitive issue is related to the personal pronoun problem in that both are directly related to the fact that English, at least in its post-Old English incarnation as a lightly inflected language, was deliberately saddled with a set of highly inflected grammatical rules that were ill-suited to the language thus saddled. How many times have you heard people say that they never really understood the principles of English until they studied Latin. Why should they have had to study Latin to learn that?

“Their” versus “they’re” versus “there” have a permanent home in student papers and examinations, where homophones, homonyms, and homographs my students don’t distinguish those terms either flourish like the green bay tree. One gets used to them, sigh, but they still inflict grating visual pain on their reader.

“Its” and “it’s. Well another sigh this related to your entire article and certainly raises what has always seemed to me to be a curious point about language; it has to do with that point you raise later about the linguistics folk who constantly remind one of the inevitable mutability of language. They’re right, of course, and I suppose it’s worth noting that “it’s” was, in the distant past, the proper spelling of the possessive rather than a contraction of “it is.” The curious point of all this is that we are all aware of linguistic change, and, when we employ what we currently consider a correct spelling or correct grammatical principle, we are, more often than not, using a form that is the direct result of a change that occurred at some time in the distant past. We weren’t there, of course, to object to that change when it occurred, and, as I say, are perfectly content to use it thus changed. When a linguistic change occurs in our own time, however, we orthoepists are outraged, though our descendants will cheerfully employ that change without demurrer. Hell, I’m still pissed off about the designated hitter rule.

Thanks again for the entertainment. It was sent to me by a colleague in the local Economics department. By the way, if you’re disquieted by the strange fortunes besetting the apostrophe, you ought to see what’s happened to the semicolon.

Thanks, Steve. Call me old fashioned, but I get a real charge out of knowing there’s still somebody who cares about punctuation.

You keep on writing and I’ll keep on passing along your stories about your incredible, loathesome and even sometimes funny bosses of the crazy persuasion. Today’s batch includes a boss who shares WAY too much information with her subordinates and another who pathologically claims credit for a cheesecake she didn’t make herself. Those are just two. There are more and there will be more and they will never end, for which I thank each and every one of you. Take a look.

A happy Monday to you. It’s a stop and smell the neurosis morning. The sky here in New York is a deep and trusty blue, the air has the tang of autumn soccer in it, and the first leaves in the park are starting to turn. It’s days like these you want to open your window, lean out and inhale what is probably the best air we’re likely to get for a while. Too bad they don’t open – our windows. The best we can do in this particular corporate tower is peer out at all the little people in the street enjoying the weather. My, they look happy.

Quite a few of you wrote in to either spank or thank me about my little tale of BlackBerry autism I offered last week. My favorite came from Michael in London, who writes:

Hi Stanley, had similar experience on flight from Dubai to London except in my case I was treated to all the emotions that your bloke didn’t seem to share. Before we had even received complimentary drinks, we heard the roars of good news I assume, followed by hmmmm, wonder what was next, it came just as we left the tarmac, it was “oh b**ger”, when I looked at him he didn’t even muster up an apology or some flippant British comment, instead he met my gaze then looked straight back down. So on we go, through the turmoil of mutterings of oh I know better, all the way through to pain. The good point came for me when as I was g