The Icepick Cometh

With March Madness™ underway, my favorite predictable crap news stories are the ham-handed hang-wringing about how many work hours the tournament costs American business.

Well, to paraphrase an old Onion headline, how many leisure hours are lost to working in today's economy, with unpaid overtime, answering e-mails and Blackberries at home, with conducting business while driving and talking on your cell phone, while surfing the Web at home to gain an edge on business the next day?

But no, the five days of handicapping and watching the first round (after which, interest drops waaaay off) is killing American business? I'm not sure this isn't a plot by CBS to get the NCAA to move all the tournament games to prime time, just like all the other sports, even if it means extending the tournament by four weeks — well, won't that be accommodating for the "student-athletes" — and, of course, a plot by Corporate America to further wring every penny out of your body and soul before discarding you to the retirement pile.

Meanwhile, Slate (blessedly and wisely) re-runs Jack Shafer's column debunking the math, myth and hysteria surrounding the annual and always predictable news stories about work-hours lost to the NCAA Tournament.

The Wall Street Journal joins the fray with a blog piece today making fun of the $1.7 billion supposedly lost this year, predicted by the firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. That same firm, the WSJ says, predicted this same NCAA tournament would have cost Corporate America $3.8 billion (not a typo) in 2006. Guess we all got more productive in two years, despite the rise in online video broadcasting.

My favorite quote from Challenger Gray's press release (the WSJ provides a link), regarding the difficulty in estimating this "lost" time: "…most people are not keeping a detailed time sheet on minutes wasted during the work day." Yeah, because they probably gave up hope in keeping track of how much time Work sucks out of their non-work day.

Watch for Challenger's next press release (and the resulting gullible news stories) on Productivity Lost to eating lunch, breathing air generously provided by Your Company, getting a vasectomy and taking a shit.

In Shafer's 2006 column, he quotes another Slate post that further proves the "workplace interruption" stats are bogus.

Still, it's sad to see how many media outlets still buy this line of bullshit, though thankfully, fewer seem to be swallowing, and some actually sound balanced, if not all benevolent masterly.

But with many news outlets falling for this year after year with predictable and repetitive stories, it's a wonder they just don't re-run last year's stories, like Slate did with Shafer's piece.

Think I've seen “The Wire” series finale four times now (thanks to HBO's repeated showings). I've already discussed my thoughts, and I've got at least one or two others percolating that I may or may not get to.

One digression: After the third time I watched the montage at the end of this episode, for the life of me, it got me to thinking about the montage that came at the end of Boogie Nights, which used "God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys as its music. Maybe because it was late when I was watching “The Wire” re-run, but after Rawls got his promotion to State Police super, I could've sworn the next shot would've been of The Colonel getting the beat down by his prison-cell roommate ("shut up, Colonel!"). Or maybe it was wishful thinking that Rawls would someday still get his just desserts.

But on a serious note, “The Wire's” last montage was one of the many things I loved about that final episode, and bringing back the Blind Boys of Alabama's version of "Way Down in the Hole" was note-perfect. That was one of the first songs I picked up when I began my iTunes account (that, and the Ryan Adams tune from the opening credits of Old School and the Black Flag version of "Louie, Louie" from the same flick — an odd trifecta, I know). I'm glad this montage used the full (or nearly full) version of "Way Down in the Hole" (when it's used as a credit-sequence opener, the song is necessarily truncated); it's such a perfect song, and it was the perfect way to punctuate the end of the series, segueing from McNulty on the expressway to the drug dealers to the politicians to Dukie to the newsroom to the prison yard in slow motion to the empty Season 1 sofa in the Pit to the Ports to that great rapid-fire sequence of real-life Baltimore residents to suddenly close back on McNulty.

Any other great movie- or season-ending montages? (not sure if the end of Animal House counts.)

For the record, I liked the other montage songs that closed the previous four seasons — they're on “The Wire” soundtrack, which I got last month and have been listening to almost non-stop since.

Random thoughts this evening while the coffee buzz again wears off:

And I thought we had it bad when we had a landlord that controlled the "free" heat (he kept it below, like, 60 degrees during the daytime, back when I was working nights — we tricked the box-locked thermostat by laying icepacks on top of it). Story from Daily News, via Gawker.

Best way to drink up this weekend.

I like this guy. Newsflash for Gannett: local people like local news. Second newsflash: People don't like stuff that sucks.

I also love this follow-up criticism surely from a Gannett zombie ("one of us, one of us, one of us"). Complainer's Alec-Baldwin-in-Glengarry-Glen-Ross-like comment: If you don't like it, leave. That's priceless! "All for company!"

Wonder if this fascist judge knows that at the rate he plans to impose these fines, he should hit this journo's annual salary in about 18 days (via Romenesko, who also turned us onto the Gannett blog, and the blog after the jump).

More coffee, more coffee (thanks again, Romenseko for turning me on to this blog.

I think "The Wire" is affirming of people's basic humanity, and an argument that even though it may be futile to rebel, it's the only alternative if you want to salvage anything that remotely resembles human dignity.

They hate us for our freedoms. And they hate us for transcending our heritage, and for transcending shit like this.


More here.

Random thoughts on the series finale of The Wire

(Warning: spoilers ahead).

Best line of the night:
You think it needed doing, I guess it did.

OK, critics come out and adore something, then the minute too many people adore it, they turn on their heels to bash it so that they look like they're apart from the pack. The rest of the pack follows.

The Wire and this season? Sure (here's the latest critic, who hasn't updated in two episodes; and don't get me started on the Slate guys).

Now, also, it's Obama after Hilary's own version of Super Tuesday, when her ability to laugh at herself on SNL put her over the top and revived her flagging campaign.

Follow the pack. But look like you're not. And we're wondering why the news industry is failing.

Terry Gross, at least, is keeping the faith.

This I don't get. Why the hell not just write a fictional novel based on real people, instead of writing a fake non-fiction version of it and get caught? In other words, why not just say up front its made-up, or better yet, label it as fiction and don't say anything at all. That's essentially why Hemingway did with "The Sun Also Rises" and kind of what David Simon and his gang does with The Wire. In fact, Hemingway and his publisher had the opposite concerns — that the characters and plot points in his Roman a clef would be too easily identifiable with real events and real people, who might be easily offended by his portrayal.

Is the label "memoir" so powerful in our times? Are we so caught up in Reality TV and real events that to label something fiction devalues it immediately? Well, how valuable are these fake memoirs now?

Update, 3/10/08 —NPR made the valid point over the weekend that fiction is difficult, and is judged as much by writing style as it is by plot. Non-fiction memoirs, on the other hand, are not judged as much by writing style. In other words, a shitty writer can make up for shitty writing by claiming something is true (i.e., it's a true story by an amateur, so forgive the shitty prose); as a novelist, however, you need some style, as well as a good yarn.

Esquire magazine is trying it, but labeling it as fiction. In their case, it just seems like a bad idea, but at least they're calling it fiction up front.