December 27th, 2007 · 1 Comment
New York Times Writer "Does Not … Care Very Much"
Headquarters, New York Times
In What Do You Mean, Giving Me That?, a thoughtful, quirky piece about holiday gift-giving published December 23, 2007 in the New York Times, author Guy Trebay introduces the subject by describing his own experience as a five year old recipient of the gift of a record player and a selection of records:
“With the exception of one, the titles of those records have vanished from recollection. The remembered record was called “Cold Nose, Warm Heart,” and it was a song about a dog. A Google search suggests that the dog in this particular song was probably Lassie, but the writer does not remember or care very much about that.” [Emphasis added]
The Heck of a Guy Blog - Caring and Sharing Since 2006
Headquarters, Heck of a Guy Blog
Well, thank goodness, someone remembers and, yes, cares about the facts.
And, thank goodness, when the New York Times falls short, the Heck of a Guy Blog is on hand to pick up the slack.
As it turns out, “Cold Nose, Warm Heart” was also the first record I ever owned. The opening lyrics, as I recall them, went something like this:
My dog is the dog for me.
He’s one dog that you gotta see.
He’s exactly as a dog should be,
He’s got a cold nose and a warm heart.
If my “Cold Nose, Warm Heart” is the same song as Mr.Trebay’s “Cold Nose, Warm Heart,” I believe one will find that it was a track from “Songs of Rin Tin Tin,” a set of three 7-inch, mono, 45 rpm, vinyl records on the Golden Records (EP 745) label performed by the Sandpipers. The track listing follows: I Wish I Had a Dog Like Rin Tin Tin; A Dog’s Best Friend; Cold Nose, Warm Heart; Rinny, Rusty and Rip; 101st Cavalry Gallop; Rough Around the Edges.
Now, aren’t you more at peace and centered with the identity of the warm-hearted, cold-nosed canine ascertained? Doesn’t the universe seem less threatening and capricious now that justice has been done and Rin Tin Tin, whose fame was largely eclipsed by Lassie’s popularity, has been rightfully accorded his place in the Songbook of America? Isn’t it empowering to be back in sync with the universe as a result of the story’s ambiguity having been dissolved in the solvent of truth? And, isn’t it comforting to discover that the common man in search of information doesn’t have to rely exclusively on the whims of the New York Times to decide what is and isn’t important to know?
Rather than gloating, however, DrHGuy, Editor of The Heck of a Guy Blog, quietly and sagely noted,
Heck, to be fair about it, The New York Times had done most of the work on this story already. We’re all in the publishing gig together - we are just happy we could help out our New York colleagues. And they have nothing to be ashamed of; with some experience and perhaps some additional fiscal resources, they could have a bright future.
Heck of a Guy Bonus: The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin
From left to right: Corporal Rusty and Rin Tin Tin
While the character of Rin Tin Tin appeared in a batch of movies dating back to 1922 and between 1930 and 1955 was heard in three different radio series, my experience with Rin Tin Tin was as the titular hero of the ABC television show, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin from 1954-1959.
According to TV.com,
The first episode of this canine crime fighter series commenced when the U.S. Cavalry came upon a wagon train that had been attacked by Apache Indians. The only survivors were a young boy named Rusty and his German shepherd he called Rin Tin Tin. The Cavalry took the boy and his dog to Fort Apache in Arizona, where Lt. Ripley “Rip” Masters made Rusty a Corporal so he could stay on at the fort.
The mainstays of The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin in front of
what appears to be an urban outreach office of Fort Apache
I had remembered much the same premise, but on putting my version in print, it seemed a tad implausible, leading me to defer to the TV.com quotation. Apparently, US Army Lieutenants in the late 19th century had the authority to promote 10 year old boys to Corporals, which qualified them to live on their own in forts in hostile territory.
Sweet.
Footnotes
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Tags: Media Mayhem
November 6th, 2007 · Comments Off
Apparently Not DrHGuy
The music is Earth Song by Michael Jackson. The occasion is an audition for the TV show, “Britain’s Got Talent.” The human half of the duet is Damon Scott; his hairy, clingy partner is Bubbles.
What can I say? It’s the best of its genre.
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Tags: Media Mayhem
Accuracy, Verification, Credibility, and Blogs
I believe that some small but useful lessons in journalism, expectations, and the nature of truth can be garnered by an examination of the 8 August 2007 Heck of a Guy entry, Blue Alert Featured In Old Navy New Denim Jeans Ad, and the readers’ responses to that post.
First, some background is necessary.
The Heck of a Guy Blog
Blue Alert Featured In Old Navy New Denim Jeans Ad was an atypical entry for this blog.
While its content, the use of a portion of the lyrics of Blue Alert in the new TV ad for Old Navy’s line of New Denim jeans, could hardly be accounted breaking news, it was an event that was taking place more or less contemporaneously with the publication of the post itself. Consequently, there was paucity of information then available about the ad.
The usual Heck of a Guy topics are typically less acute matters, episodes from my own life,, and or random subjects that have, for one reason or another, grabbed my interest over a period of time and thus become well known to me. It is instructive to note that the Old Navy post was preceded by The Great Ozark Folk Festival Flood of 1973: Mountain View and followed by The Great Ozark Folk Festival Flood of 1973: The Finale, parts 2 and 3, respectively, of a three-part description of an event that was part of my own life 34 years ago and the classic type of essay populating this site.
Examples of posts about “new” events or items at 1HeckOfAGuy.com are difficult to find and even those that might technically qualify derive from raw material appearing in other, usually online sources.
The only entries other than the Old Navy post featuring genuinely new events that occurred concurrently with the publication of the posts that come to mind are those covering the Anjani Thomas Warsaw Concert.
The Old Navy Ad Music Post
The Heck of a Guy Old Navy post, on the other hand, was one of the first online entries about the music of that ad. That distinction is important to this discussion not, alas, because it buffs Heck of a Guy’s reputation as a source of entertainment news but because it explains why more information about the ad was not available and provides a clue to the expectations of many readers of that entry and, in turn, their reaction to it. More about that in moment.
Given that I had heard Madeleine Peyroux’s cover of Blue Alert, the song playing throughout almost all of the 30 second Old Navy commercial, on a minimum of 20 occasions prior to seeing that ad and listened to Anjani’s original rendition many, many more times than that, it is probably not surprising that I was certain the lyrics were from Blue Alert nor that I believed Madeleine Peyroux was the vocalist for the advertisement.
This is the point at which my thinking and that of many who wrote and the handful who commented on this post chose different paths.
That, as far as I knew, Peyroux and Anjani were the only singers who had released recordings of Blue Alert made it more likely that I was correct but also raised the possibility that perhaps I was responding primarily to my realization that the voice did not belong to Anjani, i.e., I “heard” the voice as Peyroux’s because, by eliminating Anjani, I already assumed that Peyroux was necessarily the singer.
That may sound persnickety, but unintentional bias is frequently the source of error in medical research. In all too many studies, it turns out that the answer the researchers expected is indeed the answer they found while a neutral interpretation of the same data indicated something quite different. In the case of the ad, alternative explanations existed, including the possibility that Old Navy could have hired another, less less well known and less expensive musician for the commercial.
In addition, I could not then find any source anywhere that named the performer - or even the song.
Most significantly, in my mind, the intriguing issue in this situation was that music produced in part by Leonard Cohen, whose songs have rarely been released for use in advertisements, was now part of a national ad campaign for jeans - regardless of who sang the words. The prototypal reader of the post, in my mind, would be someone interested primarily in Leonard Cohen, Anjani, and the implications of permitting their work to be used commercially rather than someone who, seeing the Old Navy ad, became curious about the names of the song and the singer.
In any case, the singer’s name was, I assumed, somewhere a matter of record that would surface linked to an authoritative source in a day or two.
Consequently, I decided to publish the piece with only the notation that I could not obtain confirmation of the identity of the performer instead of offering my tentative assumption, nurturing the fantasy that readers would understand that there was a reason I had deliberately written that I was “unable to obtain confirmation of the identity of the singer” rather than I was “unable to identify the singer.”
The Response
Soon after the that post went online, I received a few emails and a comment or two pointing to Madeleine Peyroux as the singer, based on the the similarity the writers 
noted between the music on the ad and the Blue Alert track on Ms Peyroux’s album, Half The Perfect World.
In the next day or two, however - after the consensus of opinion on the Internet had identified the singer as Madeleine Peyroux - a determination I had also incorporated as a revision to the original post, I received another handful of comments but lots-o-emails with the same content (i.e., “It’s Madeleine Peyroux”) but conveyed in a range of tones from appreciation for identifying Blue Alert as the song in the ad to condescension and worse, apparently in the belief that I somehow guessed the name of the song but wasn’t quite bright enough to figure out how to compare the Peyroux version on iTunes to the ad’s music.
And there were a few emails that informed me not only that the singer was Madeleine Peyroux, which, by this time, the revised post had listed as the consensus choice, but also that the song was Blue Alert, which was, of course, the crux of my original post as indicated by the subliminal cue in the post’s title, “Blue Alert Featured In Old Navy New Denim Jeans Ad.”
So What?
Lesson #1: The value of content (AKA Truth) is determined by the reader’s expectations and needs rather than the accuracy or quality of the writing.
Almost all those who emailed me about the Old Navy ad were unknown to me. In retrospect, it is clear that this group was composed primarily of folks searching for the answer to two simple questions, “What is the name of the song on the new Old Navy ad?” and “Who sings it?” It seems likely that they gave not one hoot let alone the proverbial two hoots about the rarity with which Leonard Cohen’s songs appear in ads, the way Blue Alert’s lyrics are aligned with the ad’s visuals, or any of the other material I included in my post. For these viewers, the ideal post might well have been “Old Navy New Denim Ad Music: Blue Alert. Madeleine Peyroux.” My blog entry, however concise by Heck of a Guy standards, must have seemed bloated and irrelevant to many.
Conversely, while I remain vague on some goals I hold for this blog, I’m relatively certain that being perceived as an almanac of facts is not one of them. I suspect the audience most important to me probably has little overlap with those looking up names of singers on jeans ads.
Lesson #2: The blogosphere’s reputation of shooting (opinions) first and asking the pertinent questions later appears to be well-earned and in some respects a trait reinforced by the demands of readers. That same characteristic puts the Internet at risk of becoming a Petri dish for rumor preservation and propagation
If there is a demand for quick answers unhampered by annoying qualifications - and there is - those sites that provide easy access to that information will thrive. When those answers are accurate, the only downside is the opportunity cost of not exploring a topic further than the bare facts.
When an incorrect answer contaminate the system, however, the Internet’s exponential powers of information dissemination can overwhelm its capacity for self-correction.
Consider this example of an error of less than monumental but by no means trivial importance that abounds in cyberspace although it is a matter of fact, not judgment, and a fact that could be readily referenced. I was interested in the musicians responsible for Woke Up This Morning, the theme that opens episodes of The Sopranos. A routine Google search for “Woke Up This Morning” and “lyrics,” produced not only the correct answer, Alabama Three but also a huge number of sites that attributed the song to one Leonard Cohen. Surprised to find such a well known song listed in Leonard Cohen’s repertoire that as on none of his albums I owned, I investigated a bit farther and discovered that the Cohen attribution was fallacious.
I suspect that the original error may have been as simple as someone automatically associating the deep, growling vocals of Woke Up This Morning with Cohen’s voice and consequently listing him as the artist. Others looking for the answer to “Who sang Woke Up This Morning?” found that response, proffered unencumbered by doubt, and not only accepted but also spread it. Now the mistake is so widespread to so many independent sites that eradicating it may be impossible.
Lesson #3: The degree of confidence expressed by unknown individuals in their own, unsubstantiated opinions is not equivalent to the degree of accuracy of those opinions.
Certainly, plenty of folks with full pundit credentials evidenced by their access to a computer and the Internet, have no qualms or hesitation about describing the intrapsychological mechanisms of world leaders, let alone the identification of a singer on an ad based solely on their own judgments and assumptions with nary a disclaimer or admission of doubt. The two or three folks I noticed who mistakenly named Anjani as the vocalist were equally confident as those who selected Peyroux. Doubt and caution are, it seems, anathema to the Internet.
So, I stand by my original judgment that providing my best guess for the name of the singer in the ad without confirmation or consensus support would have been misleading to readers.
The counter-argument, of course, is that it’s only a matter of the name of the singer on a jeans ad so what’s the worst that could happen if the answer is wrong?
I was impressed to discover as a teenager that ethics guidelines and internal policies of institutions such as The Associated Press; the Society of Professional Journalists; the Washington Post; Philadelphia Inquirer; New York Times; The Radio and Television News Directors’ Foundation; Media General Broadcast Group; etc. maintained criteria re the source of news that had to be met before a given story, regardless of its importance, was printed. And, later on, I was equally impressed by the safeguards implemented by competent medical researchers to prevent errors of bias and interpretation.
Implicit in these and similar rules governing other fields is the conviction that if an news item is important enough to be in the paper or a clinical issue is important enough to perform the research then it’s important enough to do whatever necessary to reach an accurate conclusion.
That seems like a good idea for blogs as well.
I further submit that while unalloyed confidence may be an effective sales technique, a blogger’s perpetual concern to write precisely what he or she means, occasional confession of fallibility, regular use of the subjunctive mood, and quick admission and correction of errors are also good ideas, benefiting the blogger as well as the reader.
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Tags: HOAG Site · Media Mayhem
Featuring Edina As The Drunk In A Midnight Choir - And Elsewhere
In yesterday’s post, Leonard Cohen BBC Interview: “I’d like to go out [on tour] again”, the BBC interviewer alluded to the use of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird On A Wire” in an episode of the British sitcom, Absolutely Fabulous.
Being a sporadic viewer of the series, I had not seen this episode but was intrigued enough to track down the specifics, an effort fully requited by this rendition of the Cohen classic. Although “Bird On A Wire” has been covered by - well, nearly everybody from Joe Cocker to Jennifer Warnes to The Bobs, the Ab Fab version is, I believe, uniquely memorable.
The Scene: Absolutely Fabulous - Bird On A Wire
Jealous: Series 3, Episode 4 (First broadcast 27 April 1995)
Edina (AKA Eddie, AKA Eddy), has expectations of winning the PR Person of the Year Award over her rival, Claudia Bing, but, despite rigging the vote, loses instead and wants revenge. Later, at an industry luncheon, Edina loses her prepared remarks but proceeds unabated to give a drunken speech, one portion of which consists of the lyrics of “Bird On A Wire.”
The Dialog: Absolutely Fabulous - Bird On A Wire
From IDMB (with “Bird On A Wire” lyrics placed in bold by me):
[Edina (Eddie) has lost her speech which she has to present to the PR meeting]
Eddie: Yeah I was gonna’ make a-
[taps microphone]
Eddie: Testing. Testing. -Yeah I was gonna’ make a speech, but I just can’t be bothered anymore. I mean, this used to be like fun you know; yeah it used to be fun, but I’m getting bored of all the ‘fun’ bits now. You know, your endless bloody lunches and launches, you know, no-career celebrities and party desperates. And what for, huh? Some colony of crap tags and mags! Well I’m sorry there has to be a little more than that doesn’t there?
[slams her handbag down]
Eddie: Hmmm? You know I had a speech, you know, my… my integrated-projected-global-tele-network system bloody system-system. But you know, if that’s what the worlds coming to I don’t want to be in it. No I don’t want that. I don’t want to be in some sort of cyber-space-hypervirtual bloody reality. I don’t want that- exchanging e-mails with some old age bloody hippies with more information at their fingertips than is safe to know about. I don’t want that! What kind of reality is that, huh, you know, with a thirteen-amp plug on the end of it? Huh? Huh?… That can be un-plugged like that? Come-on I’m going.
[She turns to leave, but... ]
Eddie: No I’m not going yet! No, you!
[points to her competition, Claudia Bing]
Eddie: You, you, just sit there like your velcroed to some bloody add-man! You know those crap-head add-men over there, you know, those kings of bastardization that have just taken everything that was ever real and genuine and honest and original and attached it to a toilet cleaner! Whereas I, I… Like a bird on a wire… Like a drunk in a midnight choir… I have tried in my way to be free.
[Then she sings]
Eddie: Like a bird, on a wire.
Patsy: Go for it Eddy.
Eddie: [singing] … Like a drunk in a midnight choir. I have tried in my way to be free.
[Claudia Bing and her colleagues are laughing]
Eddie: Yeah you can laugh, but you know something- I don’t want more choice I just want nicer things! And you, you can take that look off your face, sitting there with your… with your wheels and AIDS and starvation. You know, skimming a neat profit of the whole of human misery. Labeling us all with this- with this global guilt. Well it may not be all great and good but it ain’t that bad, so cheer up world it may never bloody happen!
[slams her bag down again]
Eddie: Come on I’m going.
[Edina walks off making rude farting sounds at everyone in the room]
Audio Only: Absolutely Fabulous - Bird On A Wire
This audio excerpt contains only the 20 seconds of Edina’s rambling version of the lyrics from “Bird On A Wire.”
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Video: Absolutely Fabulous - Bird On A Wire
The YouTube video below is the fourth quarter of the episode in which Bird On A Wire appears. The pertinent segment begins at 3:08 and continues until 3:40.
Footnotes
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