Jane Jarvis

The Sunday NY Times carried an obituary for Jane Jarvis. She was the organist at Shea Stadium for fifteen years. Much more to her life than just that, according to the obit, but it's for that which I will remember her. According to the article, she left the Mets in the late '70s, only a few years after I first started going to Mets games (1977, I think, was my first), but in my memory she had to have been pounding her organ keys longer into my Mets attendance than that. It's a tribute to her that I feel as if she must have been part of my life longer than she actually could have been. Thinking of Jane Jarvis brings back memories of what is now a long distant age when you could go to a baseball game without being assaulted by loud non-stop music. Even after Jane left there was a certain civility to the soundtrack at a Mets game, like having Sunday in New York played before every Sunday home game. I must be getting old, to be getting sentimental about the quiet old days at the ballpark, when all the music came from two hands on an organ keyboard.

The Trial

Um, no, not the Kafka one.

Gail Collins has always been a favorite columnist of mine. Many years ago she was at New York Newsday. It was a great loss when she left for the NY Times where she was on the Editorial Board and thus having to submerge her voice, and a great pleasure when she returned to being a columnist.

So it's no surprise that I liked her column on the Khalid Shaikh Mohammed trial, but I also think she's going at something very important without quite going deep enough.

To keep this part of it brief, and for those not following the whole saga very closely, KSM is one of the Al Qaeda masterminds of 9/11. Several months ago, the Obama administration decided to try him in Manhattan at a courthouse in Lower Manhattan not far from the World Trade Center. A lot of people in NYC were "hip hip hooray, we're better than those wimps in Illinois who don't want no stinkin' Guantanamo inmates." Then, we get word of the NYPD plans to secure the trial. Which would turn all of Lower Manhattan below at least Canal Street into a giant prison full of barricades, policeman, road closures, random searches, and the like. Then everyone says it isn't such a good idea, and the US has decided to seek alternate locations.

Gail Collins says, not without some reason, (and I paraphrase) that we need to cowboy up and stop acting like this, where anything goes in the war so long as it doesn't go near us.

But where she doesn't go is where I think we need to go. Our society is so enmeshed in fear, hiding from any risk of terrorist anything, that we're forgetting the whole "who watches the watchmen" part. Some people at least question the TSA about security theatre at airports, in part because it's such an in your face annoyance to the rich and powerful including the politicians who have to fly back and forth to DC. But I've hardly heard anyone in the mainstream, Gail Collins in this column included, questionning the deeper assumption in the KSM trial debate.

Which is, why the heck does hosting this trial require such a deep level of security that Lower Manhattan would have to be turned into a war zone at this level and expense of security, to try this guy? I think that's bullshit. New York is a terrorist target right now today. We're less than a month shy as a write of the 18 month anniversary of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. I've been living in a terrorist target for at least 18 years. If we need to have this $200M/year security plan for the KSM trial, then we should have a $500M/year security plan for the entire city that's in effect every single day, because the bad guys will be just as happy to bomb the subway tomorrow as to do it while KSM is on trial.

But everyone is buying into the security plan. The rich real estate interests that won't be able to sell a luxury condo in lower Manhattan in the middle of a war zone aren't lining up at police HQ to say "yo, Commissioner Kelly, come back with a better plan," they're just saying the plan is right and we can't live with it.

I'm torn on the subject.

I want Guantanamo closed. I don't like torture. I don't like lopsided military tribunals. I think America has ideals it should stand for even when they're inconvenient because we need to lead by example and show we're better than the other guys.

And I don't want to live in a police state. I did not want NYC to get the Olympics because that would have been a forced three week vacation while I left the police state behind. When the WorldCon was in Boston in 2004, I headed up a few days early so I could entirely avoid the police state New York City during the Republican National Convention, and I didn't even like my layover in New Haven switching from Metro North to Acela because even there the station was too full of police and police dogs for my enjoyment. I don't like walking around midtown east when the UN General Assembly is in session.

If the only way we can try KSM in Manhattan is to have a police state for the duration, then I'll go with the people saying "thank you, but no." But first, I'd like to go back to NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and say "great job, Ray, but that's not the kind of approach we're looking for right now. What else you got for us?"

So I'm kind of ending up in the same place as the people I don't want to be with, though from the exact opposite direction.

Though I'm not at the same places as Charles Krauthammer, the conservative columnist who likes digging his teeth into Barack Obama like Joshua Bilmes into a slice of Devil's Food Cheesecake from Juniors. He wants for Congress to defund any civilial trial at all for KSM. I think it's a better thing for the US to have him given a good old-fashioned criminal trial somewhere than to say our courts aren't up to the task. And I'd be very happy if we could try him right here in NYC with me living a few miles away, in a way that says we can go about our daily business for the duration. I'm not convinced that we can't do that.

Borders UK, the reprise

This past Friday, I had a champagne toast with Jon Wood, the head of fiction at Orion Books in the UK, to celebrate the success of Charlaine Harris. I asked him how things had gone so bad so quickly at Borders UK, which had shut its doors right before Christmas.

I'd mentioned in my post at the time that I'd noticed a huge gap in performance between their flagship locations and the retail park outliers and wondered if those bad real estate bets could be reason enough to put the company under. And I guess the answer is "yes," because Jon's immediate answer to this question was the real estate strategy of going into retail parks.

A "retail park" in the UK is something like Potomac Yard in the US, one of those suburban centers with big box stores and big parking lots going on for a half mile. Though a book superstore here is moderately more likely to be in a center with a Bed Bath Beyond and other slightly more upscale retailers, it's not uncommon for book superstores to be part of the mix. Trying this in the UK, Jon said, was a disaster. People went to retail parks to shop for clothes and food, and the bookstore part did not work. I can vouch for that; most of the Borders UK retail park locations I visited were beautiful stores to look at but not selling any books to speak of.

Hence, Borders UK had a lot of stores that weren't generating any sales, and even if the rents were cheap the drain on cash was immense. And then the stores that were generating sales, like the flagship outlet on Oxford Street in London, had huge rent bills on account of their luxe locations, so it was hard for them to be profitable enough to carry the retail park locations. And then add to that just a little that many of the smaller Books Etc. locations opened in the early 1990s when rents were in a lull after the 1987 stock market declines. If locations were on a 15-year lease, the leases were up to renew doing the thick of the now-collapsed real estate bubble.

Add it all up, and t'was the end of Borders UK. Which leaves the UK with one "high street" bookstore chain, Waterstones, and we should very much hope that we don't end up with that situation in the US.

Statistics

I've been thinking on all of those auto insurance company ads. Customers who switched to this company saved an average of $x and to that company an average of $y and to the other company an average of $z. Wow!

What's fascinating is how this is one of those statistics that is essentially meaningless, plenty of which float around in the world.

Let's say 1,000 people look at switching from AllFarm Auto to ProGeico, or vice vera. Of that 100,000 people, 62 of them actually end up switching. Why do they switch? Well, probably because they'll save money, because otherwise you aren't going to switch. Lo and behold, you now have a statistic. Those 62 people saved an average of $629.39. If even 100 people thought of looking, that average savings becomes $390. 750 people it's all of $52, and how many people want to go to the hassle of switching companies to save $52/year?

So all of these car insurance statistics are saying no more and no less than "people who switch insurance companies do it to save money, people who can't save money switching probably don't." But as to which company actually has the best prices overall, if you went out and priced for 50,000 policies?

Here's another shocking statistic: Teams that are winning baseball games after 7 or 8 innings tend to win most of those games. Even bad teams, even teams with bad closers.

Variety Pack

A few quick things...

The newspaper and book publishing industries have been eagerly salivating over the rumored Apple Tablet that gets unveiled tomorrow. I don't know what the Tablet will be like, but I'm loving what Doonesbury has to say on the subject!

Most articles on publishing or profiles of major authors drive me a little bit crazy. One common beat-head-against-wall for me is to have them written by authors who don't understand that a book with an unearned advance can still be profitable to the publisher. Or they're full of sycophancy, or etc. Sunday's NY Times Magazine had an usually good profile of James Patterson, which was written by an author who seems to actually know what he's talking about when he talks publishing, and which provides some unusually good insight into some of what makes a James Patterson into James Patterson. I'd highly recommend giving this a read.

There's another changing of the guard at Borders as CEO Ron Marshall is off to some other retailer. Is this good news? Well, I've been a big fan of Marshall's, so I'm not pleased. Three CEOs in three years, while the Riggios have run B&N since forever. The press release says that there will be great continuity of management as Marshall is going off and leaving the management team in place, but the new guy will almost certainly want to bring in his own team, and my experience is that the old guy will end up wanting to re-form his team. The one argument I can think of for not being too upset is that for all the good Marshall was doing in ways I noticed, he wasn't able to start regaining customers. And of course if he was hunting for another job it's clear his heart was no longer in the Borders challenge. But it's not good news.

Elizabeth Moon was kind enough to point me in the direction of a series of anti-literary agent screeds by Dean Wesley Smith. This links to one of them, and you can find links to the others there. Almost as "interesting" as the actual posts by Dean are the comments afterward. If you've ever watched one of those after-hours colloquys on C-Span where two or three senators or congressman enlighten the world, reading these exchanges between Dean Wesley Smith and Laura Resnick is like watching one of those in either the best or worst sense of it. I don't know if I should find the hours in the day to try and do some careful rebuttals or just let it all be. To me, the sad part of this is that there's a lot of good points Dean Wesley Smith does make which he then carries to vituperative extremes. One, as an example, is to remind that an author is ultimately the one in charge of his or her own career, and that the agent works for the author and not the other way around. But it's clear that he and Laura Resnick have both had experiences with the wrong agents or with bad agents to the extent they cannot comprehend that any author would actually stick with an agent for 20 years and feel they've gotten some good out of it.

gotta love it

This is an e-mail I got today:

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Why do reputable companies try so hard to act like scum???

First, Kill All the Bankers

I incorporated my business to start the year, so now I can call myself President Bilmes.

But even though the business is today what it was a month ago, so much changes. The new business needs a new number with the IRS. Then it needs a new number with New York State. And it needs a new bank account. And because all of these numbers are changing, the payroll service has to be set up anew. All the people who send us money need to update their records with our new IRS # and/or the new bank account numbers. There are the little things that need to be changed, like getting workman's comp and the NYS disability insurance re-done with the corporation.

My new bank is the same as my old bank, but it's so intent on treating me like a new customer that I'm starting to think I should have gone to a new bank. At least that way, if I were getting all of the new customer hassles, I'd actually be a new customer.

The day I open the new accounts, one of the checks I have to deposit is a large 3-figure check for translation rights to a book. Yes, 3-figure check. It's from a bank in the foreign country, but it's in US dollars, payable through a US bank, and it has all of the US routing and account numbers that will allow it to be processed just like any other US check. The bank's computer system insists that this check be entered for collection. For those who aren't familiar, collection is a process where a bank prays over a foreign check for weeks before giving you the money, and charges you generously for its efforts in praying over your money. Oddly enough, when I ask the branch manager to try depositing the check into the old business account, the system accepts it as is. Yep, even though it's the same person with the same business as has been with this bank for fifteen years, because I have a new account it wants to screw me over on a large 3-figure check.

Small checks that would a month ago have been available to me the next day routinely, now I pop them in the ATM and it wants to be sure I take my receipt because the availability will be delayed. This isn't a big deal because I've put enough of my own money into the account to start with that I'm not going to go bouncing checks to anyone, but it's still annoying.

Of course there's no way to get any of the information from the old account to migrate to my new account. Which is proving to be a problem, because I can't add any payees to the online banking for the new account. Which takes multiple calls getting bounced from bank representative to bank representative, most of whom are at some level or another blaming me for the problem because I'm trying to do it too soon or I hit option 3 on the phone menu when of course I should have chosen option 1. Finally I'm connected with a representative who actually helps me, and determines that my profile has been set up in a different way than it maybe should have been and usually is, and he toggles some switch somewhere that fixes the problem.

Finally able to add vendors and clients, I begin paying some electronically. And then at 10AM on Saturday morning the security team calls to verify these small transactions, most to people whom I've been sending money to routinely and often in much larger amounts than these. So I have to start answering multiple choice questions generated from publically available information about aspects of my or my family's life. Which gets to be the final straw. The moment I'm off the phone I compose a letter to the President of my bank to say, and send it off by Express Mail.

Because like I said at the top of this column, if you're going to treat your customer of fifteen years like shit just because his business now has an Inc. instead of a dba in the name, shouldn't I really get that white glove treatment from a bank that really doesn't know who I am?

So I'll probably get a call in a few days from some presidential escalation customer service department who will tell me how this is All For My Own Good, just like the airport security that you all know how much I love.