The Friday Night E-mail shutdown

The Clarion Content has observed a phenomenon at our offices and in the personal lives of our staff. We call it The "Friday night e-mail shutdown," though it goes on for the whole weekend. We want to ask you, dear readers, is it as pervasive for you as it is for us?

In our little corner of the world, the weekend nearly brings to a halt email communication. We are deluged all week. People expect responses to emails within hours, if not minutes. Then suddenly just after about 6pm Eastern, there is an abrupt and fairly complete drop off to our email traffic, from heavy to near nil. Even the folks who usually reply in five minutes all week, disappear.

Is this true for you, too?

There are probably a couple of phenomenons at work here. One is texting. Social planning of a rapid and semi-spontaneous nature is far easier via text than e-mail. Two is Facebook, a far more social milieu than e-mail (The Clarion Content does not Facebook, but so we hear.) Perhaps a third, is that people who spend so much time working in front of their computer all week are ready to get out from in front of a computer by the weekend, to leave it behind, like letting go the shackles of work itself. We have various friends of the Clarion Content who we know fall into that category. Email even more than computing in general seems to be associated with work and obligation. Many emails are requests for one to do something. Respond or react to something. Have an opinion on something. Sign a petition on something. Action and doing required. Effort.

What say you, dear readers? Are you reading this column on a Monday having spent the weekend away from your computer and email?

Zebra runs amok in the ATL

This is where and how circus zebra's live

"Zebra runs amok in the ATL"
We are by no means f*ing with you, dear readers, that was indeed the headline out of Atlanta this afternoon. Our pop culture editor, a radical Gaian, is always telling the rest of the staff that the zoo is animal jail. They think of it as the clink, the pokey, the cell block. In his view, the circus is an even lower form of routine, more akin to a chain gang. Today one of the zebras made a break from the Man. In its case, the man was Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

The story is thus. The circus was in Atlanta. The zebra got loose from his handler and made a break for it. Cue wild goose chase scene now! And, bingo. The Atlanta Constitution Journal quotes Daniel Nance, "All of a sudden, a freaking zebra comes running down the street like a car. Five or six police cars were in hot pursuit. And a bunch of officers on foot."

For real. The boundaries of possible and real events are unimaginably large, and the number of events verges on the infinite, ergo things can and do happen.

The ATL-CJ continues, "Prapik Jani saw the animal jogging along Baker Street a half mile away next to Centennial Olympic Park. Jani...looked outside and saw an African creature running down the pavement. "It was wild," Jani said. "I thought I was seeing things."

Jani said there were "a bunch" of police on bicycles chasing after the zebra."

Reportedly the zebra was cornered in the parking area by the Richard B. Russell Federal Building, which is near the CNN Center and NBA Atlanta Hawks' Philips Arena.

Circus trainers were walking with the zebra when it started to charge again, dragging one of the trainers momentarily before it took off, in another bid for freedom, running across the railroad tracks and through a gate. One of the trainers was holding on to the zebra as it ran through the gate, but subsequently bounced loose as the zebra headed first for a nearby underground tunnel, and then up the block to a freeway entrance ramp. According to the Constitution Journal, "[he] was finally captured on the interstate near the Grady curve. According to witnesses, he was galloping between lanes of traffic on the Downtown Connector before his capture."

When a creature yearns to be free, say what, say what, anything can happen.

Read the Atlanta Constitution Journal's whole account here.

Spy Car, a toy?

Shopping for Junior?

The flying cars they promised us as children have yet to show up in reality. But dang if the toys haven't gotten better and more fascinating than we could possibly have imagined in our youth, case in point.

Wild Planet Entertainment Inc. is debuting this week the Spy Video Trakr, a remote controlled robotic car which includes a night-vision video camera, speakers and route-mapping feature. Oh yes, dear readers, you can cause a lot of trouble with toy like that. CEO Daniel Grossman knows it and relishes in it.

He told the Wall Street Journal,"A kid can program the Trakr to snap a picture of his sister talking on the phone when she is supposed to be doing homework, then drive the car to his parents and rat her out with a pre-recorded message." Wow! Not only is the remote controlled car pre-equipped as a spying device but it is programmable, so it can be adjusted to do even more. Does this thing have military applications or what? Or perhaps is it already borrowing technology from existing military applications, like the pilotless drones killing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Real night vision binoculars are already available as a kid's toy, those with a range of fifty feet retail for $59. According to the Journal, Wild Planet has already made available for download a night-vision feature on the car's remote control LCD color screen to see the car as it maneuvers in the dark.

Wild Planet Entertainment is not the only toy company making available toys that ape the trend magnified by the i-Phone, reprogramming, building your own applications. The Wall Street Journal article cites, "Robonica Ltd., a South Africa-based toy robot company, recently debuted Roboni-i, a remote-controlled two-wheeled robot that has a Web site and comes with software that enables users to rewrite the robot's basic's instructions."

The future of toys is upon us.

Super Bowl ratings

The last time the Nielsen's were updated this was a cutting edge color TV

A savvy, local, Durham painter made an interesting comment to the Clarion Content's editor the other day. He said that he thought this might be the highest rated Super Bowl ever. The analysis behind his argument was tight. The mid-Atlantic Snowmageddon snowstorm guaranteed a huge chunk of the country is a captive audience. It also means that in that region far fewer folks will be watching collectively at sports bars and other peoples' houses.

Long time readers of the Clarion Content know that we have been highly critical of the Nielsen ratings for ages for just this reason. The Nielsen's are a monopoly and have not been pressed to get better. This flaw has existed for ages and they have ignored it. The biggest television spectacles and especially sporting events tend to be watched collectively, the Oscars and the Super Bowl are the classic examples. The Nielsen's in no way account for this. They continually underrate the viewing audiences for these events by counting television sets, not eyeballs. They do not account for sports bars. The Nielsen's are wildly wrong during the NCAA tournament and every Sunday of the NFL season.

We agree with our local painter, this Super Bowl could be the highest rated Super Bowl ever by Nielsen. But will that really mean more people watched it?

Calvin and Hobbes creator

Bill Watterson the creator of the legendary comic strip Calvin and Hobbes broke a twenty-year silence this week. He had not given an interview since 1989. A proud Clevelander, Watterson sill lives in the greater Cleveland area. He answered a few questions for his hometown paper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer. The Clarion Content cannot help but wonder if he was influenced by the recent passing of one of the other all-time famous recluses, J.D. Salinger. Both men were brilliant thinkers in their own mediums. We can't help but believe that the explosion of media attention surrounding Salinger's death, and the subsequent speculation into the vacuum that Salinger left, had to influence Watterson's decision to air some of his positions now. Less is more up to a point, but leave the masses too blank a slate and they will make use of it. Read the whole Plain Dealer article here.

Toenails

Perhaps you already know this, dear readers. Or perhaps you don't suffer from ingrown toenails. However, if you do or know someone who does, maybe you will appreciate this tidbit.

Ingrown Toenails
Cutting tiny v-shaped notches in the center of the toenail (while not pretty) prevents ingrown nails very effectively. The nail is urged to grow toward the center of itself, rather than outward into the toe and cuticle area.