Canuckflack

For a dozen years or more, David Letterman coveted one job: the host of the Tonight Show slot at NBC. We all know who held that spot: Johnny Carson.

David cooled his heels, kept his time slot and stretched the boundaries of what network censors would allow with his Late Show. (Andy Kaufman and Jerry Lawler, anyone?)

Then, Johnny retired. And Jay Leno got the time slot, and a nice production deal working for NBC.

In 1993, Dave, in what seemed at the time as a tremendous fit of pique as well as a risky gambit, struck his own production deal with CBS. Dave was taking home a huge paycheck – but owned his own show.

In the years since, Dave’s proven that two variety shows can co-exist at that time slot. AND he’s brought Craig Ferguson into the fold.

This week, his independent streak paid off. Dave’s production company, WorldWide Pants, struck a deal with the striking Writer’s Guild of America. As a result, he will be back next week – with his full writing team.

The deal breaker? Letterman’s company will pay his writers the new residual payments for the rebroadcast of the show on the Internet – until CBS and the other networks arrive at a larger agreement with the union.

In the short term, Letterman will get an opportunity to out-perform Leno and his other competitors, and will have an opportunity to book Screen Actors Guild members.

In the long term, I hope this early move to settle the strike is a sign that WorldWide Pants understands that online and distributed content will be the key to profit and success – not the old-fashioned and short-term focus on weekly eyeball numbers?

It looks like a fun snow tubing park, with a webcam, but Chicopee Tube Park has one of those easy-to-misread URLs: www.chicopeetube.com.

I think that’s an episode of Chico and the Man that I missed.

I realize that Canadians are buffered from breaking U.S. trends in casual dining, but a 90 minute wait to get into a Cheesecake Factory?

“…The average wait at a Cheesecake Factory restaurant is 1 1/2 hours, said Alethea Rowe, director of restaurant marketing for the Cheesecake Factory Inc. Once the doors open and the restaurant fills up, then the waiting line forms. …

The lines, however, are a positive sign to restaurant management. “I think this is the biggest compliment our guests can give us,” Rowe said. “It tells us that they think the Cheesecake Factory is someplace special.”(Hartford Courant)

Yeah, that’s what the investors in Planet Hollywood thought as well.

Didja hear? The traditional enclosed mall is in decline. Apparently, someone told The Economist, because they’ve run a long piece on the original enclosed mall, Southdale Mall in Minnesota.

In Rise and Fall Of the Shopping Mall, we get the magazine’s well-written and comprehensive look at mall culture – especially as it developed under the imagination of Victor Gruen, Southdale’s architect.

“Gruen got an extraordinary number of things right first time. He built a sloping road around the perimeter of the mall, so that half of the shoppers entered on the ground floor and half on the first floor—something that became a standard feature of malls.

Southdale’s balconies were low, so that shoppers could see the shops on the floor above or below them. The car park had animal signs to help shoppers remember the way back to their vehicles.

It was as though Orville and Wilbur Wright had not just discovered powered flight but had built a plane with tray tables and a duty-free service.“

I thought that analogy was worth a mention, but there has been much more written about Gruen and his impact on the culture of North America. Ten years ago, the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages wrote about the “Gruen effect” and the “mauling of America.”
In a 1957 interview with the New Yorker, Gruen recognized that urban populations need common spaces (the precursor to the “third place”?) – and also fingered merchants as the guiding force in the development of North American culture.

… Mr. Gruen grumbled that “planning” has become a dirty word in this country. “Almost as bad as if Lenin had invented it,” he said. “The fact is no city was ever planned enough. Planned and replanned. Here in New York, we’re like a big family that’s all dressed up with no place to go. Wherever we turn, it’s jostle and bustle and frayed nerves and bad tempers.

In Detroit, six or seven thousand people make their way to Northland on Sunday afternoons. The stores are closed, so what are they doing there? Looking for open space. They window-shop and stroll through the gardens and sit on benches and soak up the sun and enjoy the fountains and sculpture.

What Northland teaches us is this—that it’s the merchants who will save our urban civilization. ‘Planning’ isn’t a dirty word to them; good planning means good business. Besides, any improvements they make are tax-deductible. Sometimes self-interest has remarkable spiritual consequences. As art patrons, merchants can be to our time what the Church and the nobility were to the Middle Ages.”

Well, fifty years on I would be willing to debate the value and quality that a merchant-based culture has brought to our society. I guess that’s what being po-po-mo is all about.

Ten years ago, the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages touched on the “Gruen effect” and the “mauling of America.”

In practical terms, it seems that quite a few cities commissioned Gruen to design new urban centres, but only cherry-picked his designs for pedestrian malls for actual construction:

“…Kalamazoo, however, adopted only the pedestrian mall from all the recommendations of the plan, as many other cities would do with their Gruen plans. Fresno, California would build a downtown pedestrian mall in 1964, based on a 1958 Gruen plan; Honolulu, Hawaii would also convert two blocks into a pedestrian mall in 1969, three years after commissioning a Gruen plan.”

Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Gruen three years ago (which I blogged about).
There’s also a book about the man, and how about an academic analysis of his work: “Victor Gruen and the Construction of Cold War Utopias“?

[tags] Victor Gruen, Southdale Mall, suburbia, pedestrian mall, retail, mall [/tags]

I admit it. Scientists and communicators often don’t mix well. They certainly don’t share a love for numbers, or even for precision. After all, it is hard to communicate science to the public.

James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, has provided his colleagues with something of a guidebook to making your way as a scientist.*

As reviewed in Harvard Magazine, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science does dwell on his past as a Harvard professor and wunderkind, but also identifies some basic traits to help battle it out in academia and the world of science:

• Manners Needed for Important Science
• Manners Required for Academic Civility
• Manners Deployed for Academic Zing
• Manners Maintained When Reluctantly Leaving Harvard
• Science works better when the winners don’t take all
• Share valuable research tools
• Never be the brightest person in the room
• Science is highly social

As the review points out, Watson often broke these rules or didn’t demonstrate these traits. As communicators, however, we know that highly social systems are effective at creating “weak links” and helping transmit information and understanding.
*Watson isn’t without his oversize controversies, either.

It’s two days until New Year’s, and I thought you might appreciate an instructional case in “putting the moves on.”

Well, not really luxury. More like the perks you used to expect when traveling by air. This is from a recent New York Times article about US Airways:

“…Another employee wondered in October 2006: “Why can we not get better quality snack items for our coach customers? One customer recently compared the generic pretzel nubs we serve to the fish food you buy in a .25 gumball machine at any zoo or park.”

Actually, fish food would appear to be too costly. “We’ve worked with our purchasing team,” management explained, “to bring in many companies to compete on our main cabin tidbit item (pretzels). To date, no one has been able to match our current cost, about 3 cents per package.” (NY Times)

h/t to Nan.

All I wanted for Christmas was a taste of 1982: