Black Friday: Death and Savings -or- The Running of the Savages
When is a deal a great deal? When you trample a Walmart employee to death to get it. Last year, I wrote a short piece called Black Friday: More Insane Than Ever. My chief complaints were that stores were going to be opening at 4am and that Lowe’s had their Christmas displays up in early October. This year, my chief complaint is that someone died because you people act like animals when given the opportunity to buy cheap, foreign-made garbage at Walmart at 30% off. That’s right - you people. I stayed home on Friday. And I don’t want to hear “well, I wasn’t at the store in Long Island, so I had nothing to do with it”. If you went shopping on Friday, especially if you were at your local store at three, four or five o’clock in the morning, you are to blame. It’s because of people like you that Walmart and companies like them can get away with this madness. You feed the beast.
Walmart - and I know I’m picking on them, and it could have happened at any of the thousands of stores that had giant crowds on Friday - could have handled the situation better. They should have had crowd control measures in place. They know what the situation is like because it happens year after year. This year, someone ended up dead. Maybe next year, the multi-billion dollar multi-national corporate giant will shell out a few hundred bucks for some organizers to line up the crowd and keep things safe.
Between the savages breaking down the doors - literally - and the corporations who feed the hysteria every year, it’s amazing that we haven’t heard about more tragedies like this. Stories abound of people going home with broken bones or cuts & scrapes from being pushed around, but reports of deaths on Black Friday have been mercifully few. Of course, that doesn’t excuse the inhuman behavior of both the shoppers and the companies they shop with. Will this year’s death at Walmart be the wake-up call that starts us on the road of ending this Black Friday nonsense? I’d like to think so, but I’m not hopeful. Americans have been trained too well by the corporations, and I guarantee, whatever the PR department says, Walmart considers a single death an acceptable loss for the amount of business they generate on Black Friday.
Bastards.
You know, in Spain they’ve got the running of the bulls, and we Americans (by and large) look at that and think, “who the hell would run with the bulls like that, they’re risking their lives with those beasts”. Draw your own parallels.
I followed up last year’s Black Friday post with an update in which I wrote, “Can’t wait to see the news reports tonight of people getting trampled in stores trying to get 20% off on a toy. Nothing says Happy Holidays like a few broken bones.” Turns out, nothing says Happy Holidays like killing a fellow human being.
The Friday Podcast with Andrew Wee
Earlier this week, I was a guest on Andrew Wee’s Friday Podcast, which was posted to his website last night. Andrew is an internet marketer and blogger and one heck of an interviewer as well. I had a great time, though I think that once you start listening, you’ll get that I don’t have any experience being interviewed - I tend to ramble a bit 
I had a great time though, and learned as much as I taught, that’s for sure. I’m definitely looking forward to following up with Andrew at a later date!
Who knows, maybe I’ll even ask Andrew to be a guest on my podcast. What? I don’t have a podcast? Not yet I don’t…
Check out Andrew’s website here, and listen to the podcast right here!
New Guns N’ Roses… Meh.
Two GNR-related posts in one week? Let me see… yeah, there’s my picture… there’s my logo… this is definitely my website. Huh. Whaddayaknow?
My initial reaction to hearing the new Guns N’ Roses tracks was a definitive “meh”. I wasn’t impressed, and my expectations were close to zero. I heard about it, coincidentally, on the night that my cousin’s GNR cover band was performing on Letterman. I gave Chinese Democracy a spin on MySpace, where the entire album is posted for your pirating - I mean, listening - pleasure.
Axl’s voice has matured, and while Geddy Lee of Rush, for example, has aged gracefully, Axl just sounds old. It’s been over twenty years since the classic Appetite For Destruction, and this record makes that point in a fairly negative way. There will certainly be a significant number of die-hards that defend the album with fanboy intensity. Those that aren’t fanboys will likely give the album a bland reception. Over the next few days and weeks, I fully expect there to be a chorus of “it took them a decade to make this?”
Mr. Brownstone on the Late Show with David Letterman
Last week I got a message from my mother, saying that she had talked to my Aunt Pam. The big news was that my cousin, Drew, was going to be on the Late Show with David Letterman with his band! Now, Drew is in a project called Takka Takka, and my first thought - since I wasn’t specifically told - was that Takka Takka was going to be performing. Turns out… not so much. Shortly after I got the first message, I was told that he’d be on with Mr. Brownstone, the Guns N’ Roses cover band that he’s been involved with for many years. I confess, I was a little disappointed - I’m a big fan of Takka Takka. Hopefully, with the release of the new album, Migration, and their inclusion on the soundtrack of the Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist movie, Takka Takka will have a shot to play Letterman in the near future!
Living in the Southwest as I do, and Drew living up in the Northeast as he does, I’d never seen him perform in Mr. Brownstone. Here’s the clip, via YouTube - my cousin (who wasn’t even allowed to listen to Guns N’ Roses when we were growing up) is the shirtless, leather-panted bass player:
Hopefully the clip won’t get yanked off of YouTube! The guys clearly had a great time on the show, and okay, it was a little over the top, but wasn’t Guns N’ Roses themselves always a little over the top? Great job, guys!
Learn more about Mr. Brownstone
Learn more about Takka Takka - can’t recommend them highly enough!
Commercials Need to Follow Program Standards
I’m watching Nick Jr. with my three year old daughter right now, and I have a question. Since when is it okay for the between-show commercials on Nick Jr. to market hair care products on the premise that they will make your hair “sexy”? Now, I’m no prude. I don’t think that children of all ages need to be shielded from every marginally grown-up word or concept until they hit 18 years old. I think that, for the most part, people who raise the “WE NEED TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN!!!!!” battle cry are using kids as an excuse to censor ideas and language that they simply don’t like.
Nobody had to explain to a 5-year-old what Bill Clinton did with Monica, and anyone that says they did is either lying or they didn’t realize that 5-year-olds are really easy to distract with a shiny object. I’m old-school; I firmly believe in simply telling a kid that some things are for grown-ups and some things are for kids and leaving it at that. It worked for me when I was a kid, and it’s working great with my own daughter.
I do think that the commercials need to match the programs, though. When I’m watching shows on the Food Network, I fully expect the commercials to be food-related. When I’m watching The Shield, I expect the commercials to be aimed at adults. I don’t want to see a commercial for Barbie dolls during The Sopranos, it’s inappropriate.
It’s also inappropriate to run a commercial for Pantene hair care products between Dora the Explorer and Diego featuring a beautiful woman in a short black dress who says of her hair, “I think volume is sexy”. There’s a time and a place for everything, and I think that if they wouldn’t use a word or concept in the show, they shouldn’t use it in the commercials attached to the show. If Dora ever turns to Boots and says “you know, Boots, I think when my hair is up like this, it’s really sexy”, then I’ll have no problem with Nick Jr. running the Pantene ad.
My Super Short Thoughts on the Election
1. For about a month or so leading up to the election, I had the graphic you see to the left in the sidebar of this site. Of course, I’m not so foolish as to believe that the tens of visitors I get on a daily basis would be influenced by it enough to change a McCain vote to an Obama vote. I had it there because I felt good about having it there. I can sum up the reasons why Barack Obama won last night pretty easily. One of them is that people like me, people that vote Democrat regularly, people that voted for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, felt differently about Obama than we felt about both Gore and Kerry. We voted for Gore and Kerry, but we were not inspired by them. They did not represent generational change. They did not speak to us the same way that Obama does. I was proud to vote for Gore and Kerry. I was excited to vote for Obama. This is the first time in my life that I have gone beyond just voting and actually contributed financially to a campaign. My $25 probably didn’t pay for much more than a few streamers at the convention, but I was happy to provide what I could.
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