C.S. Lewis writing before cable TV

"You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act — that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?

- C.S. Lewis 

 For me, magazine food photography, mostly the same feeling.

Phrasing! The problems with names.

Be careful what you name things. An off-the-cuff name concocted in a meeting tends to stick. Years later you regret it. For example, we used to call the groups of free-ranging crew on the production floor, the folks who could work any station, "Floaters". Thankfully that stopped. We now call them "Mercs," short for "Mercenaries," which, while tinged with what's probably an unhealthy amount of war and vengeance, at least has some glamour in it. UPS, at their Louisville hub, calls them "Hot Spares" which I wish we thought of first.

This naming problem shows up everywhere. Take Global Warming. What a terrible name. The fact that Global Warming often causes extra-cold weather has, in my opinion, done more to hurt its credibility than just about anything else. Most news agencies have started calling it Climate Change but that's blanded it into a position no better. It's a phrase that lacks any urgency or sense of direction.

You may be be like, "Pshaw, Mo, you are a writer marketer talking about word choice. Of course you care about names. But most people see through words. They know what things really mean." Maybe. But I think the clarity and power the right phrase evokes can have a huge effect. I'll keep posting to this theme under the tag "Phrasing" and share more evidence. Meanwhile I'll leave you with a couple historical examples to think about.

It used to be called Sex (Discrimination), and then:

“I look at these pages and all I see is sex, sex, sex. The judges are men, and when they read that they’re not going to be thinking about what you want them to think about.” — Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s secretary, 1970s, as she was typing Gingsburg’s briefs to present to the U.S. supreme court when Ginsburg was a practicing lawyer. Ginsburg changed the word to “gender discrimination.” She was hailed for winning more cases on this cause than any lawyer in history. New Yorker

In used to be called Birth Control, and then:

In 1962, the director of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Harlem (over whose opening, three decades earlier, W. E. B. DuBois had presided) met with Malcolm X. Malcolm X said that he thought it would be better if the organization called its service “family planning instead of birth control.” (The meeting notes, sent to Guttmacher, read, “His reason for this was that people, particularly Negroes, would be more willing to plan than to be controlled.”)  New Yorker

Drank No. 16: Fernet's moment

On the mini bar at the Wythe Hotel.

Fernet-Branca is having a moment. It's on cocktail menus everywhere, mixed in a raft of recent drinks. It's on industry night happy hour menus at bars in New York where it's known as "Fernet" (rhymes with "hairnet") and drunk by the shot, straight. The buzzy new restaurant Pearl and Ash has a Fernet-Branca ice cream sandwich on the dessert menu. The Wythe Hotel, Williamsburg Brooklyn's swankiest hotel — well, Brooklyn's only swanky hotel — offers a bottle in its mini bars and not much else.

If you've ever tasted it you may wonder what on earth is going on. If you haven't then let me suggest the flavor is what might happen if you took Jagermeister on a trip to Italy. And in some ways that explains its appeal. It's extreme, like Jagermeister, yet it's not Jagermeister, which most food industry insiders think jumped the shark years ago. It's an amaro, the herbal infused fortified wine family that includes Campari and Aperol, which means it's part of a growing back bar assortment that drink makers have been working with to improve their cocktails (where it does some of its best work). It's probably the most intensely flavored of all the Italian amari and that pedigree, given this is America and we do like extremes, also explains why we've gravitated so strongly towards its menthol orbit.

Traditionally, amari are served before or after the meal. If they're served before they tend to be lighter, fruitier, and often get ice and citrus added to the glass to further soften their impact. If they're served afterwards they tend to be richer and more medicinal, offered neat or with a single cube of ice. In Italy they're known as digestivi. Fernet-Branca definitely falls into the after-dinner camp, where it resembles the German Underberg, one of a long line of medeivally inspired European attempts to medicate overindulgence with alcohol. Thanks, Europe.

Same day delivery? How about same hour delivery?

eBay now has $5 same-hour delivery in certain cities for certain items. This comes on the heels of Amazon announcing same-day delivery. Is this something food mail order companies should be worried about?

I don't think so. This is set up for self-buyers (people buying for themselves), not gift givers, and food mail order is largely a gift business. (Imagine the message it sends if a person wearing a one-hour delivery shirt shows up at your door with your birthday present.) Another reason is perishability. The way same-hour and same-day works is they need to park inventory in every city to have it ready to ship on a moment's notice. That's a real pain to do with food — at least the food people want to give as gifts — since it tends to expire at a rapid rate.

Should any business be afraid? In general it pays to be afraid of eBay and Amazon so yes, someone should be scared. If you sell commodity electronics or home goods — i.e. if you're K Mart or Sears — you might want to be extra fearful. Well, if you're one of those two you're probably already scared to death since you're so far behind in retail period. WalMart — they might get a little nervous too. They've announced same-day delivery as well, using their network of stores, but they've yet to make their online business connect like Amazon's does.

Then again maybe there's not much to worry about. Others have tried this and failed plenty of times. Most notoriously, I remember New York's Urban Fetch and Kozmo in the late 1990s. You could order a CD, a box of donuts and a pint of Ben and Jerry's (my first order) and a bike messenger would deliver them to you in an hour, often with free warm cookies! It was amazing, so amazing that it lost mountains of money and both were gone within a year.

Don't break the wrong part of yourself.

In America we insure parts of our bodies separately. Eyes are covered by optical insurance. Mouths are covered by dental insurance. The rest is covered by "health" insurance.

In other words if you fall and break your nose and teeth and you have no dental insurance, only health insurance — a pretty common situation in America where dental insurance is considered a "luxury" — the doctor would fix your nose but not your mouth.

"Sorry, I know they're both located on the same appendage an inch from each other but you didn't have coverage for one of them. Good luck with the eating." 

How did this come to be? Why are our eyes and mouth treated differently from the rest of us by insurance companies? How did these parts of our bodies get carved off, so to speak, from the rest of medicine? They're crucial to our overall health, our body is one unit, why are they insured separately?

Imagine different car companies insured different parts of your car. You got in an accident and had to go to the fender insurance company to file a claim to fix your fender and the bumper insurance company to file a claim to fix the bumper. It would seem absurd. Surely someone would come along and offer to insure the whole thing to make it simpler for car owners.

Surely, someone, right?

The Worst Run Industry In America is my look at the American health care industry, its service, prices and promises, from my view as a merchant.

Easy on the brain

Zipcar identifies which car you're renting by name, not license plate number. Why? It's much more memorable, it's far easier to recall. It's a good thing to keep in mind whenever you're designing a something that works better when it's quicker to remember, like, in our business, the identification of a pick rack or a route.

Slate signs

They are natural, reusable, make writing easy to read, and, when rough like these, have an amazing texture you can't replicate with printed material.