Why Do We Still Call It A "Phone"?

You can place and receive telephone calls with them, but if that’s all your cell phone does, you’re in the dark ages. Or so it would seem, based on a new worldwide survey of 8,000 cell phone users by the hugely respected marketing firm Synovate.

There’s no question Americans are attached to their cell phones. 82% of the Americans surveyed said they never leave their home without their cell phone. Nearly half of the Americans surveyed say “they cannot live” without their cell phone.

And you thought the microwave oven was hot stuff.

The Synovate survey says these small devices are so widespread that as of last year, more people on the planet owned cell phones than did not. And, in a lesson for marketers, the survey says most people do not think of their cell phone as a media platform at all. They classify it differently from mainstream media like TV, radio, even the internet.

So much for the FM radio app for the iPhone. It’s not radio’s savior.

Even a basic cell phone these days is a lot more than just a phone. Two-thirds of the cell phone owners on the planet use it as an alarm clock, and more than half of the Americans surveyed said they regularly used their cell phone as a wake-up alarm. Two-thirds of cell phone users worldwide us it as a camera, and about a third play games on their cell phone.

And we’re not talking here about really smart cell phones, which have things like GPS, apps that help you surf the web, read and send e-mail, and even update your Facebook status or Tweet on the fly.

We haven’t even mentioned text messaging, another thing the “basic” (dumb) cell phone can do. Almost three BILLION text messages are sent every day, and it’s proved to be a real financial banquet for the wireless industry. From basic communication, to flirting, even to dumping a partner is done by text now. (Thankfully, only 4% of Americans say they’ve dumped somebody by text.)

A third of the people worldwide admit they’ve lied about their whereabouts via text message. Nearly ten percent of Americans say they’ve set up a first date via text.
If I call my 20-something kids on their cell phone, it almost always goes to voicemail and they respond eventually. If I text them, even if they’re at work, I get almost instant response. My son has an iPhone and my daughter has some sort of Blackberry-like device.

It seems as if for young Americans, their cell phone is the remote control device for their life. They carry it everywhere and are lost without it. Almost half of the Americans surveyed say ther sleep with their cell phone nearby every night.

I leave mine on the kitchen counter when I go to bed. But my wife has her iPod Touch next to her on the nightstand. If one of the kids texts her, it makes a sound like a cat’s meow. That’s sure to rouse the dog, even if we sleep through it.

It’s our family’s own personal 9-1-1 system, I guess. Maybe we can't "live" without our cell phones, after all.....

Scooter Jensen: STILL Not In Prison

If you’re reading this Thursday morning, the Jensen clock on the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign’s Big Money Blog has just ticked over to 2,582 days. That’s how long it’s been since Scooter Jensen was criminally charged with misconduct in public office.

The Democracy Campaign is keeping track of this, because Scooter’s case is one of the worst examples of how money and influence can “game” the justice system. It’s been over seven years since he was charged with using state-paid employees to work on political campaigns, something expressly forbidden by state law.

Scooter’s defense? Everybody else was doing it (namely, the Democrats), and that’s what led the state’s highest court to decide Tuesday that he may well yet get still another trial, on his home turf, in Waukesha County.

To my way of thinking, saying “everybody else was doing it” is an admission of guilt, not a defense.

When the state Supreme Court eventually gets around to making a decision on still another trial for Jensen, whose expensive lawyer argued his client should get a new trial so he can introduce evidence that he wasn’t the only one breaking the law, it may well be a 3-3 vote. Justice Prosser won’t be allowed to vote on this one. Justice Prosser was a character witness for Jensen in one of the many earlier legal rounds.

Not to get too far ahead of the story, but if the state Supreme Court ends up tied 3-3, the decision of the lower court will be affirmed, and Jensen will end up being tried (again) here in Dane County. That decision is probably a few months away.

Maybe the State Journal was right, when it editorialized yesterday that no matter what the Supreme Court decides, or doesn’t decide, Scooter has already lost the case in the court of public opinion. The paper says “regardless of the outcome, he will never be able to dodge disgrace”.

I hope they’re right.

The case is unusual. It’s been so long since Scooter was charged, that the state legislature has passed new laws which Scooter’s expensive lawyer says should apply. Dane County D-A Brian Blanchard, the prosecutor, says the laws that were in effect when Scooter was charged should apply. Seems simple to me. It’s not Blanchard’s fault the case has dragged on for years.

All the other politicians charged with Scooter in the so-called “caucus scandal” have been to trial or done their deals and have served their sentences.
But Scooter has gamed the system very well, delaying, denying, and using campaign money to pay the huge legal bills.

Eventually, though, he will have his FINAL day in court on this matter. For the people of the State of Wisconsin, that day can’t come soon enough.

Palin's "Stealth" Visit to Wisconsin

It was supposed to be a closed event. The anti-abortion folks in Milwaukee invited failed Vice-Presidential candidate and failed former Governor Sarah Palin to give a pep talk Friday night. The media were NOT invited. Admission was by $30 ticket only. The rules were stated clearly: no cell phones, no recording devices, no video or still cameras, no laptops, no photos or recording of any kind, and all bags will be searched.

Except for the “no media” part, you’d think it was a rock concert.

But the media got in. At least three reporters were at the event, including one from the popular online political website “Politico”, who worked the way reporters have for years…taking notes…and filed a five-page report on the pep rally. How did Politico reporter Jonathan Martin sneak in?

He bought a ticket.

It’s not difficult to understand why the Maverick Queen doesn’t want reporters around, given her pathetic performance during the failed White House campaign. And, according to Martin, she didn’t disappoint.

She didn’t say “death panels” in her talk Friday night, but Martin says she repeatedly suggested that the Obama administration and its liberal policies would lead to de facto euthanasia. It was a rambling speech from prepared remarks, peppered with those colorful ad-lib remarks about how the military is “awesome” and the liberal media are “bogus”. And there were the familiar themes the anti-abortion crowd loves to hear.

She made the death-panel charge again, though, the next day (Saturday) on her Facebook page.

According to Martin, there was the inevitable foot-in-mouth moment, although Palin had no clue she was doing it. She whined that the newly-minted dollar coins have the phrase “In God We Trust” way off on the periphery of the coin, on the edge, rather than in the center, and said “Who calls a shot like that? Who makes a decision like that?”

The answer, of course, is George W. Bush, whose Republican-led congress in 2005 approved the design.

Apparently the lipstick-wearing hockey mom thinks it was that horrible Obama man who put God off on the side of the coin. She must have been fooled by the bogus e-mails on the topic being sent around by conservatives who don’t do much fact-checking.

Politico says about five thousand people were at the event, in a huge building at the State Fair Grounds, and there were pledge cards on every chair including an offer to become one of “Sarah’s Rogues” by giving a thousand bucks. In addition to being an official rogue, you’d get a copy of her new book “Going Rogue: An American Life”.

Apparently if Limbaugh and Hannity and their ilk have their way, Palin will be on the Republican ticket in 2012. I don’t listen enough to either show to know if they want her on the top of the ticket. But I hear them talk about her a lot, in the limited listening I do.

But don’t take my word - or Politico’s - about Palin. She’s got a Twitter account again…and you can follow her tweets at SarahPalinUSA.

Include me out.

Holiday Desperation

The number-one movie at the box office this past weekend was Disney’s latest re-make of “A Christmas Carol”, which did 31 million dollars in ticket sales. People took their kids to see Jim Carrey play multiple roles in the holiday classic, while it was a gorgeous 70 degrees in Madison.

Often when drivers who own convertibles put the top down in weather like we had this weekend, they’ll have the oldies station playing on the radio. Except this weekend, the local oldies station was playing Christmas music. WOLX-FM went “all Christmas music, all the time” last week.

The social media -Facebook and Twitter - were alive this past weekend with posts from Madisonians who were taking advantage of the beautiful weather to put their Christmas decorations up early. One of my friends posted “Is it wrong to put up Christmas decorations because it’s so nice this weekend?”. Another friend replied “Not if you don’t turn them on”.

Even though Veterans Day is tomorrow, the ads on TV this weekend were dominated not by Veterans Day sales, but by Christmas sales. One company pushed its “Black Friday Sale” ads seemingly every hour or so.

Retailers call the Friday after Thanksgiving “Black Friday”, a reference to the ink on the financial books turning from red to black that day. It’s widely (and erroneously) believed that the Friday after Thanksgiving is the “biggest shopping day of the year”, but it isn‘t. Don’t believe what the TV news folks tell you. The biggest shopping day of the year is the Saturday before Christmas.

Procrastinators rule the Christmas market, apparently.

My calendar says Black Friday is still two and a half weeks away, but a number of national retailers have been in Christmas mode since the week before Halloween. One of the big national drugstore chains that has a dozen or more locations in the Madison area had Christmas stuff on display the last week of October.

Then there’s “Cyber Monday”, a relatively new phenomenon that supposedly happens the Monday after Thanksgiving, when everybody returns to work and uses the company’s broadband connection to surf the big sales on the internet.
This year, it all seems so desperate.

So many merchants, large and small, seem to be trying to cash in on the Christmas bonanza before everybody else. The biggest one of them all, WalMart, had huge Christmas decorations up in their SuperStore in Monona this past weekend.

Part of the problem merchants face, it would seem, is that we’re leery of spending money these days. Many people have just hunkered down to ride out the recession. Another problem merchants face is that some reality has finally been injected into the credit card business. Those come-on’s to sign up for a credit card that we used to get in the mail five or six times a week - not so much any more.

Perhaps the congress needs to enact “No Merchant Left Behind” legislation.
CNN says the average bonus for the big Wall Street money firms this year is just over a quarter-million dollars. Maybe they’ll spend some of it on Christmas presents, so the merchants don’t have to be so desperate.

Committing Commerce In Madison

It was another gorgeous day yesterday and we had a lot of things to do. Who knew November 8th….or 7th, for that matter….would be sunny with highs in the 70’s? We had a lot of running around to do both days, so we couldn’t just sit on the deck and enjoy the unbelievable weather.

One of the items on the checklist was buying a high-quality pair of hiking shoes for my wife, who’s discovered some wonderful nature trails in our suburban neighborhood. There are streams and mud and rocks involved, so she needed something sturdy, with good ankle support, and good traction. Waterproofing was critical.

So we’re talkin’ a hundred bucks here.

We decided to go to a big sporting goods store on the west side of Madison, since we had other stops out there anyway. I won’t name the store, but just to give you a clue, the name on the front of the store is a common nickname for a man named Richard.

We went in, a young man pleasantly greeted us, and asked what he could help us find. My wife said “hiking boots”, and he pointed us to the back of the store, a couple hundred feet away, under the huge overhead sign that said “footwear”.
She soon discovered that this area had lots of running shoes and basketball shoes and tennis shoes, but no hiking shoes. She was able to flag down a young fellow dressed in store apparel who was nearby, and he said “oh, no, hiking shoes are upstairs, in the back, under a sign that says ‘rugged footwear’”. OK.

Up the escalator.

She found a couple pairs she liked, but they were display shoes, and apparently the stock was somewhere else. We wandered the entire area of the upper floor of the store, looking for someone to help us. No luck. I even went back into the area marked “employees only”, hoping to make contact with a human that way.

Nope.

My wife found a “floor manager” and he said he’d send somebody right over.
Finally a store employee showed up, with a customer in tow. He pointed out a pair of rugged boots he’d like to try on, and the employee didn’t even acknowledge us, even though we were obviously there to buy something. By now, we were 25 minutes into this mission, and we’d both had it.

As we walked to the front door to leave, there were three young men, all store employees, congregated around the door, visiting with each other. I said as we left “you just lost a sale because nobody would come and help us”. I didn’t wait to hear a response.

We drove a few blocks to another shoe store… I won’t give you the name, but it rhymes with “Hogan’s”. We were greeted immediately upon entering, and taken right to the women’s hiking shoes area by another young man. Twice during the trying-on phase, a store employee came up and said “you guys doin’ OK?”.

We dropped a hefty amount of money in the store. We’ll go back there again. We’ll never go back to that other store.

If only the Packers had performed as well yesterday as the young men in that second store……

Modern Economics (An Internet Tale)

There’s an interesting e-mail going around the internet this week called “Smoke and Mirrors”. It’s supposed to be a slam on President Obama’s economic policies, I guess, but it’s fascinating nonetheless.

The little story is set in a small resort town in August. It’s tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. A rich tourist happens upon the town, and stops at the only hotel.

He lays a $100 bill on the reception counter, and tells the innkeeper he wants to go upstairs and thoroughly inspect all the rooms. If he likes one of them, he’ll stay a few days.

As soon as the tourist goes upstairs, the innkeeper takes the $100 bill and runs across the street to pay his debt to the butcher, who’d been carrying him through the hard times.

The butcher sees the rancher get out of his pickup truck across the street. He takes the $100 bill and gives it to the rancher, to pay his meat bill.
The rancher takes the $100 bill and goes a couple doors down the street to pay his debt to the supplier of feed and fuel, who’d given him credit in the tough times.

The supplier of feed and fuel takes the $100 bill, slips out the back door, crosses the street, and knocks on the door of the town prostitute. He pays her the debt he owes her for rendering her services “on credit” during these tough times.

The town prostitute quickly walks to the hotel, and uses the $100 bill to pay the innkeeper for the rooms she rented on credit during the tough times, when she brought her clients there.

The innkeeper then lays the $100 bill back on the counter, so the rich tourist won’t suspect anything when he completes his inspection of all the rooms.

A few moments later, the rich tourist comes down the stairs, says he doesn’t really like any of the rooms, takes the $100 bill, gets back in his car and drives out of town.

Everybody’s paid off, and the town now looks to the future with optimism.

The story, of course, is based on a number of very shaky assumptions, such as the innkeeper knowing he could “cover” the missing $100 bill, if the rich tourist decided not to stay there. There’s no way the innkeeper could have predicted the chain of events that would end with the $100 bill back on the counter, and in such short time.

But it’s a fascinating story that gets you thinking about how money and credit work. Most of it’s imaginary…like the stock market.

Stopped by the Presidential Motorcade

When you’re in the business of broadcasting, as I was for over 30 years, time is everything. The six o’clock news happens at 06:00:00, not “around six”. Commercials, which pay the bills, are sold in precise increments of time. A one-minute commercial is sixty seconds. Broadcasters are keenly aware of time.

I wouldn’t wear a watch on vacation, because I didn’t WANT to know what time it is. At work, everything was time and timing. At one point a few years ago, I was doing morning drive newscasts for five radio stations, and I had to keep very precise timing constantly. So, when on vacation, I didn’t want to think about time.

Obviously I’ve gotten far from being a slave to time in the past year. Yesterday afternoon, as I left home to run a number of errands, I ran smack dab into a roadblock for the Presidential motorcade. Coming up Rimrock Road and headed for the Beltline Freeway, I saw the big black Yukon (maybe it was a Suburban) swing crosswise into the intersection, and I knew I was in for a wait.

Eastbounders could get on, but nobody was getting onto the overpass to go west.

I was about the fifth vehicle in the line. I realized immediately that my timing couldn’t have been worse. But, I run my own clock these days, so no big deal. It soon became apparent that several people in line had no clue why access to the Beltline was blocked.

The huge green military helicopter circling Wright School, just a mile or so away, might have been a clue. But clearly a few folks were agitated. They were out of their cars and looking around. It was 48 degrees, so I ran my window down. The guy who was two cars ahead of me had gotten out of his car and was talking to the guy in the car between us.

I overheard him saying he didn’t know why they had the road barricaded. I stuck my head out of the window and said “it’s for the Presidential motorcade”. The guy came over to my SUV and said “the President is here?”.

Even though I’ve been a news anchor most of my life, it still does not surprise me that no matter how big an event, there are always people who are clueless. I told the fellow that the President was making a speech about education at Wright School, and pointed to the huge military helicopter circling the school.

“So the President is here, huh? How about that. How long you think we’re gonna be here?” I said my guess was about 10 or 15 minutes at the most. He went up to tell his pal in the car ahead of us what was going on. I could hear just enough of the conversation to tell that his buddy didn’t believe him right away, and he pointed at me as he was explaining the situation.

Before long, we saw the State Patrol cruisers come whistling up the westbound Beltline, all lit up with the red and blue lights flashing. Behind them, a bunch of big, black cars and SUV’s…one of them, of course, with the President aboard, tailed by three more State Patrol cruisers, one in each lane, lights on, movin’ fast, bringing up the rear.

It was sort of cool. Well worth the brief delay.

On the way home from making my stops on the west side, I got off the Beltline at Verona Road and came home through Fitchburg. Fool me once….er, what was it the other President said about that?