Category: writing

Chris Cocca Is Wrong About Everything + Novels + Hess’s Department Store + Paul Ceglia and Facebook: Search Term/SEO Answer Bag #57

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment

I’ll start this edition of the Search Term Answer Bag by admitting two things:

  • It’s not really, sequentially, #57.  That’s just its name.  Probably because I like ketchup.
  • I stole the whole idea from David Letterman’s old “CBS Mail Bag” routine.  “Letters, we get letters, we get lots and lots of letters! LETTERS!”

and a suspicion:

  • I am approximately one half of this blog’s audience who gets a kick out of this bit.  Good enough for me.

Now, on to the search terms!

First, my favorite:

chriscocca is wrong about everything?

Even here, I was only wrong half the time.

Classic.  There are a few other Chris Coccas out there in the world, so I won’t be big-headed enough to claim that this was a query about me as a matter of fact.  But for the sake of this post, we’ll go with it.

I appreciate that this was searched with a question mark and not a exclamation point or, even worse, a period. As far as an answer goes, I’m willing to say that I’m probably not wrong about every single thing, but we can’t really be sure.  I also think chriscoccaiswrongabouteverything would be a great name for a website not called The Daily Cocca, and it would be an excellent follow-up album to the still-on-hiatus uppityupalexvanderpoolera.

Searching for verbs and/or prepositions:

what to when you are almost finished a novel?

It’s unclear here whether the asker is almost finished reading or writing said novel. If reading, I’d say get ready to pick your next book. If writing, I’d say get ready to revise. That’s when the real writing happens.  If you’ve done that, and have met with good writers groups and gotten feedback you trust and then revised again and then again and are sure you manuscript is exactly what it should be, then I guess you start sending query letters to agents and try to start publishing excerpts.

A get a lot of hits from people looking for information about Hess’s Department Store.

Behind the South Mall in 2011. Image by Frank Tienstra.

And rightly so. It was an amazing place.  Today’s proper question:

when did hess’s dept store allentown pa remodel the front of the store

Sadly, I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m guessing it was before I was born (1980).  Can any Allentonians/Lehigh Vallians help me out here?  I’ve been getting a lot of hits from people looking for the famous rainbow-colored sugar from the Hess’s Patio Restaurant.  I know you used to be able to buy it at MusikFest, and I’m willing to bet you can find it on ebay if not at places like the Moravian Bookstore or the Lehigh County Heritage Center.  Sadly, I can’t be much help with those seeking strawberry pie recipes.  But I can share this post, with 30+ commentators sharing their favorite Hess’s memories. Really a special place. I can also share this bittersweet, recent image sent to me by Frank Tienstra. It’s one of the old Hess’s trucks still sitting behind the South Mall as of January.  Sad for anyone who knows what Hess’s was all about.

Lastly, a question about Facebook:

is facebook layout changing again for the summer 2011

I really don’t think so, but this could be one of the things I’m wrong about.  Mashable has some of the best coverage of social media developments: here’s the Facebook news aggregator-inator.   Soon, you may have better luck asking this guy:

Not Mark Zuckerberg

Never heard of Paul Ceglia?  He’s the chap that might (ooops) own half of Facebook.  So who knows?  Maybe Paul has a few design ideas stashed with all those old emails he keeps finding.  When I first heard about this case last year, I thought it was a long shot.  But the plot keeps thickening. When I try to imagine what might be the next big thing to come along and knock Facebook off the block, I have a pretty hard time.  But you know what?  It might just end up being Mark Zuckerberg.

One For The Baseball Purists Among Us

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment

I found this picture via the latest Jerry Reuss post at UniWatch:

What is up with Terry Francona’s mock turtle neck?  This picture was taken last season, I believe.  You know the umpire can’t believe he’s seeing this.  “Calm down, Terry.  And listen, man, I think, well, shit Franc, I think you’re wearing a tunic. Take it easy, little brother.  Did Jayson Werth roll and smoke your jersey during interleague again? No, I don’t know why he’s not staying with the Phils, but Terry, that’s beside the point.  You need to get back in the dugout.  Now.  You’re the manager of a legacy team, dude.  You need to class this up.”

Don’t way it’s a new New England thing.  Terry, you’re  better than that. I don’t care what Scioscia does.  He knows better, too.

Dear Music Industry: I Can Draw Diagonal Lines, Too

~ Chris Cocca ~ 6 Comments

Okay, so the music industry is suing LimeWire. Sue away, Lars Ulrich, sue away. You should, I guess.  But you have to admit that this image, supposedly showing how much dough the biz has lost since the creation of Napster, is pretty convenient:

Isn’t it amazing that projected sales based on historic growth show none of the, er, historical plateauing you expect from any healthy graph and in fact see as having occurred here many times pre-Napsters and then NEVER AGAIN IF NAPSTER HADN’T HAPPENED.

Please.

Guess what, MusicTown?  Even if Generation Y hadn’t happened, and even if the youngest members of Generation X kept buying music instead of (okay) stealing it in college, the economic still would have gone in the crapper at least twice since then.  You’re not really saying that incing Napster early would have stopped the dotcom bubble burst or the downturn after 9/11 or the mortgage crisis, are you?

And remember how you abandoned all the Baby Boomers once you got your hands on their kids’ allowance?  Remember how you stopped producing Adult Contemporary, remember how you colluded with radio stations and sales tracking companies?  Remember how you gave us post-grunge? You’re saying that would not have happened?  Are you saying MTV and Vh1 would have kept showing your ready-made commercials instead of banking easy cash from reality shows and nostalgia trips (which ironically tended to feature the very artists you’d stopped promoting)?  For real?

Music Industry, you can do so much better than this.  Throw in some downward trends to make this graph realistic. I’m disappointed in you, frankly.

Napster or no Napster, there’s no way I buy seven albums this year, friends.  Radio is free, dynamic, and serendipitous.  I do iTunes, but almost only when I have gift cards. Last album I bought?  Neil Young Live at Massey Hall (digital download).  Before that?  No Line on the Horizon, physical copy.  Both were excellent choices and lived up to the album mystique.  But I knew that beforehand. Buying albums from new acts is, like, seriously committing.  I don’t know.  Though now that I think of it, I did buy a Taize album for someone for Christmas, and that was a good call.

Sales graph shenanigans aside, what do you think?  Are albums (even digital ones) obsolete?  Has Steve Jobs (not Napster) really killed the music business like His Royal Joveness says?

Related Articles

Touché, Apple. Touché. And also William Faulkner, Barack Obama, 1995 etc.

~ Chris Cocca ~ 6 Comments
NYC - West Village: White Horse Tavern
An actual genius bar. God bless you, Dylan Thomas. Image by wallyg via Flickr

Remember the Tom and Jerry cartoons where Tom and Jerry and a little mouse I always assumed to be Jerry’s nephew were set in 17th century France? The little mouse thinks he can beat Tom with his chivalry and ethics (and musketeer pastiche), and goes around saying “touché, le pussy cat?” at the most hilarious moments possible. The best. So that’s what I was thinking of with the title. (Also, I am finishing a paper about The Sound and the Fury, and it strikes me that Quentin Everloving Compson is not unlike that nephew-mouse).

On to the main thrust of this post so that I can get back to finishing that paper.

My power adapter died for the billionth time. We took the whole deal over to the Apple Store. Even though I knew that the only way to make an AppleCare (ha!) appointment at an Apple Store was via the internet (and since my computer wasn’t working, I had no such thing), it still bugs me. That’s gripe #1. Yeah, I actually booked my appointment via a public library computer. If Apple made an e-reader it would be even more ironic. Oh wait, right.

So we go to the Apple Store on time and are not seen for 35 minutes. I had no idea that Apple was looking into taking over cable. I mean, I know they swiped most of their early ideas from Xerox (oops, Xerox, that one’s on you), but who would have thought they were cribbing the finer points of customer service from the great approximation school of temporal theory. So then blah blah blah, and we get the computer back today.

We specifically told them not to mess with our desktop icons. They specifically did not listen. My desktop, my comfortable, messy, organized-to-me desktop, has been wiped clean by conformocrats and I don’t know where they put the stuff. Quite frankly, that’s unacceptable. There will be a visit to a manager after I finish my paper, because I’m sorry, that’s an arrogant violation of my expectations. Blah blah blah it runs faster if we do this…yeah, whatever. Fix the power cord issue, friend. You don’t have to be a hero. In fact, faceless backroom tech who I haven’t met, you’ve become a villain with your cavalier approach to my long-established and well-articulated organizational preferences. You waved them away like they were so many PC users, didn’t you? How’s the weather up there, thou ascendant Form? You know better and you have the shirt to prove it, smarty. Quite frankly, I’m embarrassed that we probably have the same glasses and iTunes library.

Yeah, those were all easy shots. I know. I actually think this is Apple’s way of messing with me because I sort of called them the devil last week for maintaining a squeaky-clean and hipster-certified ethical veneer all whilst enabling the sweatshop gristmills of Shenzhen, China.

If you’re keeping score at home, that’s:

  • Tom and Jerry
  • The Three Musketeers
  • Dylan Thomas
  • William Faulkner/The Sound and The Fury
  • Apple
  • Sweatshops
  • Xerox
  • cable companies
  • customer service
  • Hip stuff (see other items)

all in one compact post.  I just do what I do, friends.

If you think I’m being too hard on the good folks at the Apple Store, know that I have no idea who worked on my computer.  The friendly chap who processed the work order must not have written down the specific instructions to not go ahead and assume their tech dudes had the right to mess around with my stuff.  That’s so…preemptive.  Bam, I just added Obama to list of things this post is about.

Speaking of, I had a dream the other night that Barry O and I chilled over pizza for like two hours.  He did some explaining.  We solved a few world problems.  But the first thing I did was ask him how we’re going to prevent this government shutdown. He punted to John Boehner, who was not available in my dream for comment, so that kind of wasn’t fair of you, Dream President Obama. And you said you didn’t come to town for politics as usual.  By the way, I know I’m late to this party and all, but a note to the Republicans: 1995 called and it wants its epic fail back.  It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re doing what you think is right according to the kind of fiscal conservatism that got you elected in November.  Government shut downs don’t seem to spin out in your favor, fellas.  Take no solace in the fact that Obama isn’t Clinton.  Thing is, friends, he beat the Clintons.  He’s the uber-Clinton and the anti-Clinton all rolled into one.  Good thing you have one strong front-running candidate ready to get geared up for 2012.

But seriously, Apple, WTF? Touché, le corporate giant? Just wait until I dispatch Quentin Compson. Then we’re gonna dance.

Is This War Preemptive? Is Libya Sovereign? Do Words Mean Things?

~ Chris Cocca ~ 4 Comments

I think this is a fantastic assessment of President Obama’s basis of preemption in Libya.  It calls everyone out on the carpet and ends with this:

And for those Democrats who are either cheering on or grimly supporting the president’s actions…there’s a reason why the biggest fans of last night’s speech were hawks like William Kristol: If you didn’t like Iraq, you really won’t like Iran. And when that day comes, please don’t debase yourselves by crying crocodile tears over the Constitution, or pretending for even one second you are anti-war.

My only real point of contention with writer Matt Welch comes from this graph, in which he makes an important mistake:

Set aside the administration’s ever-elastic definition of “interests,” and instead grok this: The Democratic foreign policy best and brightest have admittedly adopted as their causus belli for dropping bombs on a sovereign country the same test that former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used for pornography: They know it when they see it. As for the rest of us taxpaying, war-weary plebes, we’ll receive an “update” from the president now and then to let us know where his own eyes have taken him next.

I agree that the president’s definition of “interests” is ever-elastic. I like that Welch used the word grok. I admire the Stewart analogy, although for some reason I thought O.W.Holmes owned the quote.  The last sentence would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

But the Gaddafi regime is not sovereign. When you murder you own people, you lose whatever tenuous grasp on those straws you ever managed to muster.  The Libyan people are sovereign.  Their idea of Libya is sovereign.  The reigning government is not.  But what does it mean to say that a people are sovereign if they’re not also free? If protests are met with bullets? If that popular sovereignty cannot be expressed. The truth is that we don’t know what set of priorities the sovereign people of Libya would choose for themselves if given the chance (apart from deposing Gaddafi).  That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve the rights of self-determination. They deserve it and they deserve the support of free peoples.  But I continue to question the degree to which the Obama doctrine really supports the people of Libya. Yes, preventing a massacre of a civilians provisionally registers as a just casus belli, but Welch is right: people who based their opposition to Iraq on the previously unprecedented doctrine of preemption who don’t see the Libyan engagement as a preemptive war are kidding themselves.  This is a war, and it is a preemptive one.  I am wont to say that the disagreeable means justify the ends of preventing a civilian massacre, even as I’m wont to say that no one except committed pacifists would now oppose preemption in Iraq if WMDs addressed to the US had ever been found there.

Good God, what a mess.  And now there are reports coming from a Vatican official that US NATO bombs have killed 40 Libyan civilians.  Remember that line in the president’s speech about the Libyan civilians coming to the aid the American rescue team that came for the pilots of the grounded F-15?  For the first time ever, I have started to believe that Barack Obama has bigger brass ones than Bill Clinton, because guess what?  Our guys mistakenly shot six of those helpful, peaceful, friends. One was a kid.  No one died, but the boy might lose his leg.  Is this the acceptable collateral damage of “kinetic military involvement,” or is this the basic stupidity behind all wars and behind all acts of aggression?

Getting back to my original point:  Libya, the nation, is sovereign and is without a legitimate government.  That vacuum is dangerous, provisional, and fraught with hardship.  But it doesn’t cede Libyan sovereignty to NATO, the West, the US, or Barack Obama.  We’ve seen that play out here before.  It doesn’t end well.  As commenter SingleMaltMonkey said here on a recent post, none of this ends until we stop selling arms, until we get serious about dialog. Until we don’t brazenly assert our right to stop humanitarian crises when they’re happening in countries who’s fate is somehow fundamentally aligned with our “interests and values.” (Ed. note: the following sentence is added to clarify SMS’s position and what I’m adding to it as per our discussion in the comments below). To that, I’d add: until we stop saying we’re justified in intervening to protect civilians because our national interests and values are also at stake.  I mean, what the hell does that even mean?  It’s in our interest to stop humanitarian crisis everywhere, isn’t it, because that’s what people with souls want to do.  But when we say “yes, we can get kinetic on this one because, oh happy day, we can justify intervention by some vague appeal to natural law and universal rights and happy unicorns, and, um, also our (bwa ha ha ha) interests,” we sound like the opportunistic douches the most extreme haters say we are.   I guess that’s why John McCain and others are saying that regime change has to be our ultimate military priority like it was with Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. I guess that’s why attacking military installations, sending the CIA, and hoping that the regime in Tripoli just says uncle strikes so many as the worst combination of a bunch of ways forward.

To recap:

  • This is a preemptive war.
  • War probably doesn’t really help the net good of Libya or the planet.
  • But Libya’s already in a war, and civilians should be protected by powers that can protect them.
  • By attacking his own people, Gadaffi has formerly ceded power. That power sits in a vacuum, and that’s cause for bot concern and hope. And that makes everyone uncomfortable.
  • This power does not belong to the US or any outside force.  It belongs to the Libyan people.  But ff the Libyan people are left unprotected, they might be massacred, even those who don’t pick up any arms to fight Gadaffi.
  • We feel like we should do something, but we can’t call it war or preemption because those are things George Bush does.  We are not George Bush.
  • So we call war “kinetic military action” and we say that the massacre of civilians is always bad, but it’s only bad enough to stop when our other interests are also at stake.
  • We sound like assholes.
  • We kill and maim civilians.
  • This all gets very ugly.

Does the humanitarian crisis end if Gadaffi isn’t deposed?  Does deposing Gadaffi ourselves line up with our humanitarian military mission?  Is a humanitarian military mission a contradiction in terms?  Does deposing Gadaffi ourselves ice the so-called Arab Spring?

Oh, and in case you missed it: this preemptive war just accidentally killed 13 rebels.

Related Articles

Still Smarting after 19 Years: The MC Hammer Concert that Wasn’t (And Google Just Keeps Rubbing It In)

~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments
Great Allentown Fair
The Happiest Place On Earth

Two people came by today via searching Allentown Fair 1992 Boyz II Men.

In case you don’t know your Lehigh County Agricultural Society History (for shame!), this was a the concert that was headlined by MC Hammer.  My awesome older cousin and I wanted to go.  Opening for BIIM was TLC (“who?” I said at the time).

I wasn’t allowed to go.  Thanks for the reminder, Google.  Jerks.

Does President Obama Need a New Producer?

~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments
Wag the Dog
No, you're the greatest actor of our generation. No, YOU are! And then Bill Clinton's all like, heh guys, 'member me? I'm like the Pete Rose of disbelief suspension. Settle down.

Remember all those things we realized too late that we should have done before engaging Iraq in 2003?  John Boehner does, and he’s pretty sure the President doesn’t.  From CNN:

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, sent a letter to Obama Wednesday complaining that “military resources were committed to war without clearly defining for the American people, the Congress, and our troops what the mission in Libya is and what America’s role is in achieving that mission.”

“In fact,” Boehner said, “the limited, sometimes contradictory, case made to the American people by members of your administration has left some fundamental questions about our engagement unanswered.”

Among other things, Boehner asked whether it is acceptable for Gadhafi to remain in power once the military campaign ends.

“If not, how will he be removed from power?” Boehner asked. “Why would the U.S. commit American resources to enforcing a U.N. resolution that is inconsistent with our stated policy goals and national interests?”

Boehner also posed other questions for the president. Since the “stated U.S. policy goal is removing” Gadhafi from power, “do you have an engagement strategy for the opposition forces? If the strife in Libya becomes a protracted conflict, what are your administration’s objectives for engaging with opposition forces, and what standards must a new regime meet to be recognized by our government?” his letter said.

Another piece on CNN.com has John P. Avlon proposing that the Left feels as though the world  is experiencing a third Bush term.  An interesting excerpt:

An objective assessment of the Obama record on foreign policy shows that he has not been the soft liberal ideologue that conservatives want to run against. An excellent book by my Daily Beast colleague Stephen Carter, “The Violence of Peace,” analyzes Obama’s War Doctrine at length from a legal, but readable, perspective. Carter writes, “On matters of national security, at least, the Oval Office evidently changes the outlook of its occupant far more than the occupant changes the outlook of the Oval Office.”

While Obama has changed the unilateral style of the Bush administration, he’s kept much of the substance. He has drawn down troops in Iraq, as promised. But on many other fronts, he has found that campaign rhetoric often does not square with the responsibilities of governing.

Because many on the left define themselves in opposition to authority, they are historically quick to turn on presidents of their own party for being insufficiently liberal — whether it is Truman’s and Kennedy’s Cold Warrior enthusiasm, LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War, Jimmy Carter’s budget cuts or Bill Clinton’s welfare reform.

Frankly, I’m surprised that no one has brought up the fact that Clinton’s 1999 airstrikes in Kosovo were basically lifted directly from Wag the Dog.