Category Archives: In Case You Were Wondering What I Was Thinking

• American Idol is an example of a once-dominating franchise that ate itself to death through self-indulgence.

• The co-author of my first book in 1988 told me that extreme expressives have to applaud themselves if they can’t get anyone else to applaud them. Today, they are crawling all over Facebook, printing their latest clients testimonials, fan mail, and grammar school report cards.

• The next person who is a complete stranger to me and asks me to endorse his or her work seriously needs an electroshock. Can you say, “Ethics”? Only slightly dumber are the strangers who write me and would like referrals for their business.

• ”House of Cards” is at the same time intriguing, revolting, hysterical, and depressing. We have three episodes left and I don’t want it to end.

• I’ve noted some morons are now arguing that I’m wrong because at my age I don’t have the right perspective. Once it was that I was too young, occasionally because I am a male, frequently because I’m a New Yorker, and often because I was Jewish and then Catholic. The commonality, amongst all the bigotry? These are people who can’t argue an intellectual point because they have no ammunition with which to do so.

• When I look at the preponderance of comments on the social media platforms, I become seriously worried about our future, because these people have or can have children! (Imagine their rooms with wall-to-wall Successeries framed sayings….)

• Outside of the Four Seasons and Peninsula hotel chains, the next time I find a luxury hotel, with the entire management staff oriented toward the guest’s comfort and not revenue, will be the first.

• There’s a huge political dispute among the American Kennel Club, the German Shepherd Dog Club of America, and the White German Shepherd Dog Club of America over whether the white dogs are a separate breed, should be allowed to be shown in competition, and so on. Fortunately, the dogs have more brains than the club officers.

• I’m sitting in the combined Air France, Alitalia first class lounge at Logan Airport in Boston. Four members of management are doing nothing but moving furniture around, often right by us, and the woman looks at us and never smiles or acknowledges our existence. Not only is service generally worse in Europe, it’s even worse with European managers in the U.S.!

© Alan Weiss 2013

• Why would hotel management think that tying the hair dryer cord or robe belt into a Gordian knot every day might be helpful to a guest?

• Where are all the alarmists, fiscal cliff people, and doom and gloomers now? They should confess their sins and undertake a vow of silence.

• There’s a thin line between Paul Revere and Chicken Little, if you catch my drift.

• Carding people who are OBVIOUSLY over 21 in ballparks is just another sign of rampant bureaucracy and regulation addiction overcoming common sense and judgment.

• If you don’t believe it’s all about the writing, I saw a new play in Providence the other day so poorly and amateurishly written that even veteran, admirable members of the repertory company looked like lousy actors. I could have written something better in a weekend while watching TV.

• The route to self-esteem is not to give everyone meaningless awards and recognition, but to teach everyone the work and discipline required to win, and why that’s so important.

• Every newsreader on television is beginning to look and sound exactly alike, and is settling into a vast field of mediocrity.

• I can’t understand what goes through women’s minds, because when I buy a pair of expensive shoes I can wear them right out of the store in total comfort.

• Newsies is the best musical I’ve seen since In the Heights.

• Alas, really good Jewish delis are disappearing in New York as the older customers move to Florida or die off, and their progeny prefer fast and/or healthier food. In all of Manhattan, I only know of two outstanding places for an old-time, really good pastrami sandwich.

• TSA pre-check is fabulous, but it’s a little sad, with an entire squad of people taking care of perhaps one person every couple of minutes. (Nothing is easy, of course, and it takes a while to figure out which number you place in what area on your airline profile page.)

• You gotta love people who buy a $16 book at discount on Amazon and then send email asking the author for free consulting or coaching help! I’ve written 50 books in 11 languages, perhaps sold 450,000 over that time. If you purchase a book, you’re not a customer, you’re a book purchaser. (You can try being Amazon’s customer!)

• Except for Khaleesi and her dragons, Game of Thrones is getting self-indulgent and boring. We’re tuning in to see Tora Tora Tora, not Casablanca. The Vikings is now far better.

• Sign of the times: Carrie Ann Inaba on Dancing with the Stars feels free to utter vulgarisms on network, live TV. She ought to focus on screaming about her obsession with “lifts” and otherwise watch her mouth.

• Watching seniors play golf on TV must mean that you’ve watched everything else ever broadcast and are at the bottom of the barrel.

• People on Facebook seem obsessed with applauding themselves. Well, enough about me, what do you think of me?

• Canlis Restaurant in Seattle just made my top ten list in the U.S.

• If someone doesn’t get Lindsay Lohan psychiatric help, they are going to find her dead on a floor somewhere. How many cries for help do you ignore?

• I wouldn’t mention this to my daughter, but I’m pretty certain that my dogs view my granddaughters as peers, at best.

© Alan Weiss 2013

How can you be surprised when clients simply don’t use common sense? It’s in ridiculously short supply. Our government tumbles toward conditions which will hurt millions of citizens because neither the President nor congressional leaders are willing to compromise. Customer be damned! (Because it won’t affect them.)

The Oscars were their usual directionless mess, with a snarky host used to making bathroom jokes acting snarky and making bathroom jokes. Red Carpet banter was barely sentient. Women seemed assembled more than dressed, with more people engaged in their creation than it took to build the Golden Gate Bridge.

NBC has finished behind Univision in the ratings, never before accomplished: A fifth place finish for a major network. (Or what used to be a major network.) Watch just one episode of “Smash” and tell me if you couldn’t find better writing and acting on the subway platform next to you in the morning or the Starbucks line during lunch.

Given this (not to mention the Italian elections, demonstrating that someone is always loonier than we are), is it surprising to you that major companies don’t know enough to stop doing something when it hurts or come in out of the rain? (“Hey, you! If you come through these doors it isn’t raining in here, and stop hitting yourself with that hammer!”)

© Alan Weiss 2013

• Jon Stuart can find parody in Marco Rubio having to drink water, but not Bobby Menendez allegedly hiring prostitutes in the Dominican Republic? How’s that for an agenda, Jon?

• American Idol has far more superb female than male contestants this year, but the voting constituency for the show is mostly teenage girls.

• The State of the Union speech was no doubt once a major event, but now it’s a predictable, choreographed, vaudeville act.

• I’ll be you can think of a dozen people immediately who should follow the Pope’s example of departing voluntarily when they’re no longer on top of their game. Sandy Koufax did it. Frank Sinatra didn’t.

• The more we give phony self-esteem awards to kids no matter where they finish or how they perform, the more difficulty they’ll have adjusting to the real world which is competitive by nature and ignores you if you don’t show up.

• If you believe that money can buy results, I’d suggest you look at the Boston Red Sox payroll.

• I know it’s perverse, but I get a hoot when the temperature in February is 45 degrees in Miami. Yo! Snowbirds!

• Can someone direct me to the “paperless office” and “checkless society”?

• Did you see where the Canadians produced new currency that’s plastic-based and tends to melt and stick together? The best and the brightest don’t go into government work anywhere. (Money in the Philippines with pictures of the country had the boundaries incorrect.)

• Whoever is in charge of global warming, please stop by in New England.

• The most profound acts of charity are not publicized or announced. They are quietly performed. There are no audiences, no awards, no “reveals.”

• That meteor in Siberia struck with zero warning, injured hundreds, and had an explosive force of a hundred atom bombs. It was miniscule compared to the one that took out the dinosaurs (the size of a bus vs. six miles across). Are you still worried about whether you should take a risk tomorrow?

• Do people stay up at night investigating cosmically stupid things to post on Facebook? They make the tee shirts on sale at the Jersey shore (“I’m with stupid”) seem like Dickens by comparison.

• USAir and American! If they can buy Carnival Cruise Lines and the Toonerville Trolley, they should have it all locked up!

• The Dark Ages originated in the gap between the Super Bowl and the NCAA playoffs.

© Alan Weiss 2013

• Sportscaster Brent Musberger remarked during a boring rout of a bowl game that the winning quarterback’s girlfriend, in the stands, is gorgeous (which she is). Some female professor is quoted in the Times about his sexist remarks and ESPN (his channel for the game) apologizes. The woman in question, a former Miss Alabama, accustomed to strutting on runways in bikinis and stilettos in front of men to win competitions, comments that she didn’t find his remarks at all inappropriate.

Let me remind you that these TV stations post a woman, heavily made-up and perfectly coiffed, unnecessarily on the sidelines of the field itself to give a couple of meaningless reports and 30-second interviews with the coaches with the simple purpose of providing some pulchritude in the otherwise male-dominated broadcasts of a sport played by men. No one would care if they weren’t there at all. No one, they are superfluous.

Mr. Musberger is on the high side of 70, and I’ve noticed that people in public positions strangely garner more criticism as they pass that landmark. Even the nonpareil, legendary sportscaster, John Madden, started to receive criticism post-70. (He has since retired.)

Mr. Musberger admired a beautiful women after the director required a camera operator to focus on her (a management decision). He did so, in an age when we adorn everything from medicines to Mercedes with women draped this way and that in order to sell the merchandise on TV, on billboards, on the internet, and in magazines and newspapers.

Give me a break. This is more about ageism than it is about sexism.

• I would rather have the shyster pitch of the latest completely unnecessary kitchen gadget (“Buy one and get a second for free, for only (outrageous) shipping and handling!”) than the schoolyard “wink, wink” entendre of the ridiculous erectile dysfunction commercials. I keep wishing for a water moccasin or an alligator to surface on those those two annoying people in the bathtubs.

• When you spend time critiquing others’ tweets on Twitter, you have WAY too much time on your hands. When you’re worried about your Klout score for Twitter, you probably need medication.

• People who use obscenities to describe a ham sandwich or to give vacation advice on Facebook were at least solely local curiosities before social media platforms turned them into pubic fools.

• If you’re not allergic or otherwise traumatically affected by dogs, and you still don’t like them, you have intimacy problems.

• When you blame others for your perceived woes, you’re enslaved to people who don’t care and may not even be aware of your issues. Accept accountability for your own problems and you can independently resolve them.

• There is a restaurant and bar in Miami Beach called Prime 112 which has the rudest, most obnoxious waiters I’ve ever encountered. We were there only for a drink (they feature free bacon on the bar), but I’d never go back. There are too many wonderful places in the area to be subjected to 1950′s arrogance. Stay away.

• Why isn’t anyone complaining that President Obama has almost all male senior advisors? An Hispanic group just complained that the Kennedy Center Awards have not included enough Hispanics. They may have a point, with just two in two decades. Why aren’t the women complaining about Brent Musberger calling a beautiful woman “beautiful” up in arms about this? Go figure.

© Alan Weiss 2013

Narcissist definition: Self-centeredness and a grandiose view of one’s talents.

Woody Allen: Someone who’s better looking than you are.

Alan Weiss: Posting a glam shot of yourself on Facebook and then commenting on it!

• How many women will the Today Show fire before admitting their ratings problem is Matt Lauer, a horrible interviewer and dreary presence?

• A fiscal cliff? Really? Even wild animals are smart enough not to run over a cliff unless, of course, their leaders are too stupid not to do it.

• I’ll call it a “Holiday Tree” when you say “May the force bless you” when I sneeze.

• Educational issues aren’t about unions, or charter schools, or home schooling. They are about a fundamentally flawed, archaic, and doddering approach to young people in an age of computers, a wired society, and vociferous stimuli. We run schools as if they are factories, and most factories are extinct.

• There is no “fiscal cliff” any more than there is a “war on women.” These are simply incendiary metaphors to scare people and to polarize opinion. The fiscal repercussions of a failure to agree on preventing automatic austerity measures will be more like a long glide.

• Has anyone noticed that highly reputable sources are citing energy independence for the U.S. in the coming decades? Isn’t good news important at all, any more?

• David Letterman is over 70, and he’s certainly not getting funnier.

• If there is a bigger non-talent created by hype and media than Justin Bieber, I’ve yet to see it.

• At some point, every celebration and tragedy become ABOUT the media rather than reported by them.

• The U.S. economy is based on consumerism. Why is everyone so surprised that customers line up at stores and stores seek to advertise?

• People who ask for things for free because they claim they deserve special consideration are not people I want to get to know long-term.

• When I questioned a Native American newspaper editor who wrote an op-ed piece on an unrelated matter, he responded with a vicious, racial tirade (in which is got my ethnicity and religion wrong), calling me “Whitey” and claiming I was disagreeing simply because he’s Native American. Bias knows no racial bounds.

• Most local parades are desultory because they are created for the benefit of the organizers and participants, not the viewing public.

• Daniel Day Lewis is the finest actor of our times.

© Alan Weiss 2012

• Why is it we can evaluate the performance of a civil engineer, a violinist, a neurosurgeon, a librarian, and a botanist, but there are claims that it’s impossible to evaluate a classroom teacher?

• Have someone shop your own business. If a retail clerk or telephone service person doesn’t begin with, “Hello, how may I help you?” and use “please” and “thank you,” fire them. That’s not a skill problem it’s an attitude problem.

• Why are the iPhone and iPad engineered so that they annoyingly have to turn themselves on whenever you plug in a charger?

• Verizon is one of the worst companies I’ve ever seen in relentlessly sending ineffective and annoying solicitations, thinking “important news about your account” will still fool us the ninth time. Marketing morons.

• Boardwalk Empire is great television. Homeland has “jumped the shark,” and so has Dexter. Once outstanding shows, the plots are now implausible and the writers seem to be out of breath. No one wants to admit this, but there you have it.

• There’s a national electric train society for people running model railroads. I’d bet that 95 percent of the membership is at least over 55. They squabble and try to stage coups to gain leadership like kids in a schoolyard. I suspect they have way too much time on their hands and are all used to running their own trains!

• Outside of a true emergency, the reasons some doctors keep you waiting is that A) the office is run worse than Citibank or American Airlines; and B) there is an arrogance that regards patients as damaged and inferior.

• Please stop coming over and asking me if I like the food. I’m an adult. If I don’t like it, you’ll be the very first to know.

• It’s one thing to disagree with someone’s opinion. But it’s another to feel constrained that you MUST let them know, even though you have no relationship with them, as if your demons can’t be exorcised unless you make it clear that you hold an opposing view.

• If you want to see the underbelly of American life, read local “patches” and web sites set up for communities. You’ll find a slice of people who can’t disagree without obscenity, vitriol, and epithets, and their letters are full of bad grammar and misspellings. I can see them pounding the keys in hate as they froth.

• Using the phrase “game changer” with “Presidential debate” is like using the phrase “clutch hit” with a foul ball. Oh, but that our system were based on all voters watching reasoned, articulate debate with superb moderators keeping candidates on point. I’ve seen cage fighting with more organization and purpose.

• No matter what your politics, that smile on Joe Biden is Jack Nicholson creepy.

© Alan Weiss 2012. All rights reserved.