When I sit in bed, I can see a battery-powered analog alarm clock, the clock on my VCR, and an AC-powered clock radio. I usually wear my watch to bed, and could set the cable box to display the time, too. It makes me nuts when they all display a different time. More than a minute off and I get to work.

The clock in my car has a button that syncs the time precisely to the nearest hour. I usually listen to the CBS all-news station, and press that button more often that I like to admit to.

In the kitchen, there are three clocks. The one on the microwave is usually right. The analog one over the ovens is not; it loses time whenever we use the oven; the heat buckles the paper on which the hours are printed, which interferes with the hands moving. The mechanical digital clock on the ovens themselves hasn’t been right since we moved into the place eight years ago and I’ve long since given up on it.

(I’ve also given up on my Windows computers’ displaying time with any degree of accuracy. The Mac is rock solid, because it automatically syncs up with Apple’s network clock.)

I like to think that this obsession is rooted in my background in wire services and broadcasting, where seconds really do matter. It may well be true, however, that the obsession led to the background, not vice versa.

All of this is a long-winded introduction to why I’m glad I don’t live in Venezuela. There are many reasons I’m glad I don’t live there, actually; a spectacularly painful and enduring sunburn I got there 27 years ago is one of them. But this reason is especially piquant:

Reuters, through CNN, is reporting that clocks in Venezuela are slowing down. It seems that a water shortage on a major river has caused a shortage of hydroelectrical power. In response, the country’s electrical current is running a few cycles short of a full 60. (Not unlike the grid’s management, it sounds like.) This makes clocks run slower.

By the end of each day, the sluggish time pieces still have another 150 seconds to tick before they catch up to midnight…. “Your computer isn’t affected. Your television isn’t affected. No other devices … just clocks,” [Miguel Lara, general manager of the national power grid] added. The meltdown has taken a total 14 hours and 36 minutes from Venezuela’s clocks over 12 of the past 13 months, he said.

 

From CNN: If End is Near, Do You Want To Know?

A researcher for Rand suggests that if an asteroid is about to hit the Earth, it may be better if governments didn’t tell anyone.

“If you can’t do anything about a warning, then there is no point in issuing a warning at all,” Sommer said earlier this month at an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Denver.

“If an extinction-type impact is inevitable, then ignorance for the populace is bliss,” he said.

Tom Ridge, entangled in duct tape, could not be reached for comment. Nor could Dick Cheney, who was reported to be in a secure and undisclosed location. (No, the story doesn’t say that….)

 

Back in August, I wrote:

How is possible to be Bruce Springsteen? … How can anyone deal with a blank sheet of paper when faced with that kind of creative pressure? It wouldn’t be at all unreasonable for this guy to sit at his desk with an open notebook asking himself, ãWhat in Godâs name do they all want out of me?ä

In this week’s cover story for Entertainment Weekly, the always excellent Ken Tucker asks Springsteen the same question through a slightly different route, and comes away with some great answers. Once they get the obligatory “how do you think you’ll do at the Grammy’s” stuff out of the way, the conversation shifts into an examination of how a megacelebrity can avoid ending up like Elvis:

The key to survival in the line of work he…INVENTED is the replenishment of ideas. You can’t really remain physically or mentally healthy without a leap of consciousness and a continuing, deeper investigation into who you are and what you’re doing. Those are the things that will make sense of the many silly and weird things [he laughs] that will happen to you [when you’re a star]! [But] what keeps you from maintaining that replenishment of ideas is an insecurity about who you let in close to you. To have new ideas you usually need to have new people around, people willing to challenge your ideas in some fashion, or to simply assist you in broadening them. Which means you have to be open to the fact that your thinking isn’t everything, y’know?

The performers who suffer through their success have a difficult time making those connections, because they come from a different environment. The culture of ideas is usually over here [gestures to his left] and you’ve grown up over here [gestures to his right]. In between is this tremendous void that, when Elvis started, was rarely bridged. Bridging that void is your ace in the hole, but to do it you’ve gotta be aware of the limitations of where you come from and be willing to say, ”Well, I’ve gotta go out and seek new things.”

There probably aren’t a ton of musicians who’ll spend time in an interview talking about Bob Herbert, Philip Roth, and Rage Against the Machine.

 

 

If you live in coastal Washington or Alaska, get yourself down to the beach:

Thousands of pairs of Nike basketball shoes are washing up on beaches from Washington state to Alaska after spilling from a container ship in Northern California.

There’s just one hitch to finding a free pair.

“Nike forgot to tie the laces, so you have to find mates,” said Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who tracks sneakers, toys and other flotsam across the sea. “The effort’s worth it ’cause these Nikes have only been adrift a few months. All 33,000 are wearable!”

 

According the NYTimes, Coca-Cola is offering its customers an electronic payment payroll service.

Restaurants, of course, tend to have low-wage employees who are barely on the grid. Many of them do not have checking accounts — and it is the rare company indeed that pays on-the-books wages in cash. Workers who don’t have a banking relationship with anyone rely on check-cashing services, which take up to 2.5 percent of the checks they cash.

Coke will market debit cards to restaurants, which will offer them to their employees. The benefit for the workers is that Coke’s $1.50 monthly charge is far less than check cashers’ fee. The benefit for the employers is saving time and money on processing checks. The actual banking part of the business will be run by Citibank and MasterCard.

It turns out that other businesses with transient employees do much the same thing:

A number of other employers, including McDonald’s, FedEx and Sears, Roebuck, currently offer their employees payroll cards, and enrollment has quickened since Visa and MasterCard entered the arena in 2001 and widened the cards’ acceptance to all locations that accept their brands.

Offering the cards are payroll processors like Paychex in Rochester, human resource companies like Ceridian in Minneapolis, and more than a dozen banks, including the Chicago-based Bank One and Bank of America in Charlotte, N.C. And even more businesses specialize in payroll cards.

In the relationship chain that Coke is envisioning, however, it’s not the employer or the banker or the payroll service. Rather, the company is leveraging its relationship with its customers to market a third-party service that’s quite outside what one would think is its normal line of business.

What’s next — Coke offering expansion financing? Or does it do that already, too?

 

There’s a case study in the NYDaily News — apparently a propos nothing but this Sunday’s Grammy Awards — that breaks down the cash flow of a hypothetical hit album by a hypothetical rock quartet. It illustrates all the people that get paid along the food chain, including some odd recoupable record company expenses, like a 25 percent “packaging deduction” and a 15 percent “free goods charge,” off the top, most of which the label keeps.

The bottom line is that a gold record (500,000 copies) selling at $16.98 will gross roughly $8.5 million, of which each member of the hypothetical quartet will pocket about $40,000. (The case study doesn’t take songwriting royalties into account.)

So for every $16.98 album you rip, you’re costing a performing artist about 34 cents, and the lawyers, producers and labels about $16.64.

 

I’ve got a friend I haven’t met, name of Jerry McGinn. Like me, he’s a Downholder — an alumnus of UPI. He and I are on an e-mail list of about 400 other Downholders, and discussion frequently veers away from the Old Days and toward an analysis of current events.

Iraq is on a lot of our minds lately, and Jerry’s written a particularly good rant about why he’s less than comfortable about where our government is leading us, and why. It was an e-mail, written on the fly; I’ve edited the wirespeak but the rest is Jerry.,

If you’ve ever filed an expense report, you probably have a funny story about it. Here’s one from Steve Otto, a sportswriter for the Tampa Tribune:

“They want my long johns?” I repeated, in disbelief.

“They aren’t yours,” she said. “They belong to the Tribune.”

The most famous expense account story I know has several versions, all identical but for the name of the publication. People Who Should Know have sworn to me that it really happened at Time Magazine, so here it is.

A reporter based in Los Angeles was sent to Alaska to cover a story in February. The reporter, living in LA, did not own an adequate winter coat, and so bought one and put it on his expense report. The report was bounced back by New York, with an attached note: “Time Inc. does not buy personal goods for reporters on assignment. Parka expense denied. Please resubmit.” The reporter did so, with a report that had the same bottom line and an attached note: “Expense report resubmitted. Go ahead — find the parka.”

Oh, OK, one more. In her excellent memoir And So It Goes, Linda Ellerbee tells the story of NBC reporter Jack Perkins, being reassigned to New York after many years in the Orient. He cabled something like “Presume NBC will pay to move personal effects and junk to new assignment.” Of course, the accounting office consented, which is how NBC got stuck moving a full-sized Chinese junk halfway around the world.

 

It’s not like you Britain’s The Sun newspaper is the height of journalistic credibility, but I just came across a kind of neat automotive review while looking for something else.

Seems there’s a company that’s done some work to the Mini Cooper S that allows the cute li’l critter — already no slouch — to <ahem> get out of its own way with a bit of alacrity:

 … 0 to 60 in 6.6 seconds and a top speed of 145.

145mph. In a Mini.

Sweet. This is a car that would earn its British Racing Green paint job.

 

If you want to know what you’ll be allowed to know about Gulf War II while it’s going on, you need to read this item.

Editor & Publisher — the newspaper industry’s trade magazine — is reporting which papers will be sending how many reporters and photographers to Iraq, what units they’ll be deployed with, and what they’ll be allowed to report.

[Col. Jay] DeFrank [director of press operations for the U.S. Department of Defense] confirmed Thursday that more than 500 journalists will be embedded with troops involved in the expected invasion of Iraq.

Those journalists, by the way, will not be required to have completed the Pentagon-run “boot camps.”