DoubleFlavor - things loved, things hated

Hated: The Bar Exam

Teddy Schroeder — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 12:42:57 +0000

Loved: Rendezvoo’s Artist Initiative

Teddy Schroeder — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 14:36:09 +0000

Rendezvoo is the place where you can spread the word about what you love — your portfolio, your best blog posts, your website, your business, and everything else you care about. This week, Rendezvoo is kicking off its Artist Initiative where it is giving away $50 free credit on its Promote Now! system to any artist who wants to promote their work. One of its goal is to make Rendezvoo the place where artists can promote themselves and their work easily, as well as build a user community that will give feedback and patronize the best of those artists.

To get the free credit, you need to enter this promotional code when you register:

rdv50yes

Your account will get a $50 credit, and you will get an email that tells you how to use it. Good luck in promoting, and hopefully, you will get some exposure!

Loved: Colbert’s Secret

Teddy Schroeder — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 01:40:03 +0000

A continuation of Colbert v. O’Reilly. Perhaps the funniest thing I’ve seen this year, hands down. Hilarious…

Loved: Beckham’s U.S. Arrival

Teddy Schroeder — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 14:24:07 +0000

Will Beckham’s arrival push the MLS into the country’s already crowded professional sports spotlight? My answer is yes, and here’s ten reasons why:

The media is excited. Getting fans is less important than getting the media to cover you. If people are watching highlights, the fans will come just from exposure.
More European stars will follow. Beckham comes before he is completely out of his prime to get the money. One star on each team will mean more season tickets and better TV ratings. Right now, we want the old washed-up guys who are still going to be playing better than 95% of the league. The Zidanes, the Davids, the (fat and bored) Ronaldos. With more stars like this, there are more highlights, which under #1 above mean more media coverage and fans.
Somebody other than Landon Donovan and Freddy Adu can be promoted. Even though I still hope that both can meet their massive potential, potential only carries attention for at most a year. Kevin Garnett, Tracy McGrady, and LeBron James are stars because they transformed the media honeymoon they each got into stardom with great play. Donovan and Adu just aren’t superstars yet (and likely never will be). Adu’s honeymoon proved that the U.S. will care about soccer if the goods are there. They were for that year when Adu hadn’t been turned into a little boy playing among men yet.
Cross promotion is the holy grail of today’s professional sports. Why is there those stupid halftime concerts at the Super Bowl? Because it brings in all the people that don’t really care about the game. For better or worse, professional sports in the U.S. is not about sports; it’s about entertainment. The MLS needs Beckham and his wife to be Hollywood superstars because it translates into more casual soccer fans. I would go as far as to argue that the casual baseball, football, and basketball fans really make the sports so successful, not the diehards. The casual fans are usually the ones that motivate buying the corporate boxes and corporate season tickets, which bolster the bottom line of the club. In other words, bring in a movie star/soccer play, you get corporations buying tickets for the entertainment value for the clients. And don’t get me started on new casual soccer fans watching games because the star of the latest reality show is playing…
The United States only cares about stars. Sure, this is interrelated to the previous points. But, Hollywood learned something back in the 1930s. A star actor meant higher ticket sales. Sports are no different. When European teams are available for comparison, U.S. fans will always know that their U.S. “stars” don’t measure up. If you switch perspectives, it is the same thing as saying overseas film actors are as good at selling tickets as U.S. actors. In general (and with exception to pockets like the Indian film market), U.S. films gross more money overseas than domestic actors because of their stars. The U.S. is no different. Bring the true stars and we’ll start to appreciate the product.
Tighter refereeing. Beckham is going to get roughed up, which will lead to tigher calling, which will lead to a more technical game. True skill will come out because the league won’t allow for the player that makes more than all the teams combined to get hurt. This will only compound with the arrival of more stars.
He speaks spanish…well, sort of. He may be a gringo, but he’s coming from Real Madrid… Latino watching will skyrocket because I’m guessing the L.A. Galaxy are going to make a big push to market to that demographic. And if they don’t, they are idiots. You will see David Beckham speaking just as much Spanish as English if the Galaxy are doing what is right.
A NY Yankees is needed. Okay, this one is a bit of a stretch with the strigent salary cap in place for MLS teams. But, even successful league needs a monster team that everyone loves and hates at the same time. It creates the villian, which we Americans absolutely need to have to care.
TV rights deals + Beckham = a decent chance at viewers. Season tickets for L.A. are selling quickly, and other teams have seen an increase in ticket sales already. But, the real measure will be TV ratings. If the Beckhams take advantage of the cross promotional opportunities as I mention above, more TV viewers will result without any extra marketing. And you know that, come summer, all you are going to be seeing is David Beckham in a Galaxy uniform.
He’s got something to prove. His ego is monstrous like any professional athlete. I’m sure he doesn’t like the fact that the England national team dropped him, he wasn’t playing for Real Madrid this past year, and most people think that his footballing days are over with his arrival in the States. My guess is that he wants to prove people wrong in a Jordan-esque sort of way. The question is whether he is a Jordan or not. I’m betting that his game will be in top form, and you will see many, many highlights result from the Beckham / MLS marriage. He may never make it back to the English squad, but his desire to do so will keep his game in top form for the next few years.

Let me qualify something, though. Soccer is not going to reach the level of basketball, baseball, or football. But, it can be a fourth sport, especially with the growing Latino population in the country. If the MLS stops screwing up and going after kids instead of the Latino vote, the Beckham deal is the start of establishing that fourth spot.

Links:
High level commentary (Simon Jenkins)
Beckham as Arnie’s Succesor? Funny… (soccerfiesta.com)
A doubter

Hated: Colbert and O’Reilly was a snoozer…

Teddy Schroeder — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 21:27:38 +0000

Yesterday evening’s “showdown” was something that I had been looking forward to all week. And I shouldn’t be surprised that the culture war that the two guys were supposed to fight was pretty lame. Colbert was much more prepared than O’Reilly for the battle, with O’Reilly looking like he didn’t quite get the comedic style of Colbert. Colbert’s five minute stint on O’Reilly was extremely boring. O’Reilly biggest attack was Colbert “french” last name, which is a multi-layered joke already. O’Reilly’s appearance on The Colbert Show only moderately more entertaining. The one highlight was Colbert’s mockup of O’Reilly as a dancer and perhaps the fact that Colbert stole a microwave from Fox…

What happened? Though I should have guessed it, the two guys got in bed together in trying to excite the other’s audience with their shows. Colbert beats the hell out of the Right with his faux-ego, loud shouting, and heavy satire, and O’Reilly hammers away at the Left daily. Last night was simply the attempt to implement a commonly known strategy out of the playbook of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh. There are the fans of these shows, and then there are the people who absolutely hate them. Both listen, and together, these groups deliver monster ratings. Same goes here. O’Reilly wanted exposure to Colbert’s fan and some of their hatred; Colbert wanted the same from O’Reilly’s fans. In the end, Colbert spewed all the same jokes he’s done for the past year — very little new and nothing funny (mostly because O’Reilly was completely disengaged most of the time). O’Reilly just seems out of his element completely. Links and video follow…

Links:
Eat the Press (Huffington Post)
A nice summary (Martin’s Mouth)
Spot-on commentary (thepurplestate.com)

Loved: Colbert v. O’Reilly

Teddy Schroeder — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 01:32:45 +0000

Tonight, it’s a double dose of the best loudmouth and the biggest idiot on cable television. Not quite sure what we are going to get from each guy, but my guess is that Colbert will be in full character for both shows. O’Reilly is likely to have some problems punching holes through Colbert’s faux approach, seemingly always agreeing with him but poking fun at the same time. What’s my take on both of them? Hmmm… let’s see. On his show, Colbert has singlehandedly popularized words named word of the year by overly reputable sources (”truthiness”), as well as inventing completely new self and cross promotional tactics (his green screen challenges, getting his fans to vote for him as the namesake of a Hungarian bridge, his interplay with Congressional representatives on “Better Know a District”). All I know of O’Reilly is that he settled out of a law suit with some pretty bad accusations and has the originality of a rock. From the little I’ve watched, he basically followed the playbook set the previous decade by Rush Limbaugh.

My next post will be remarks on Colbert’s visit to O’Reilly’s live show and O’Reilly’s visit to Colbert’s. I’m hoping for some fireworks…

Loved: Conan’s iPhone Commercial

Teddy Schroeder — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:51:25 +0000

Nothing like the Apple hype machine creating a buzz. So much that the comedians are already making fun of the buzz…

Loved: The Devil and Daniel Johnston

Teddy Schroeder — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 16:25:03 +0000

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

Year: 2006

Length: 110 minutes

Rating from : PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)

UPC for dvd: 043396154933

ID in Amazon.com: B000GNOSGS

Rating: 4 out of 5

Not quite sure what I was getting myself into, I popped in “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” last night. It’s a documentary about a musician/artist with a great many mental issues. In and out of mental hospitals, Johnston managed to affect the national music scene in a way much more profound than I knew. His most famous moment actually came through his artwork, which graced Kurt Colbain’s T-shirt for most of Nirvana’s early public appearances. His music definitely inspired the output of acts such as Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and other monsters of the grunge / alternative movements. While his sound is definitely an acquired taste, his songs are absolutely brilliant. And the movie itself tells the story of his life, mostly through cassettes that he had recorded since he was a kid. Quite wild that it was so fully documented…

Photo from DiscoverCovered

Oddly enough, the thing that I like even more than the music (which again, I will say is an acquired taste) is his artwork. I’ve got a painting by a Mexican schizophrenic on my wall that I purchased on my honeymoon. Since then, I’ve been definitely interested in artwork done by these types of artists. Without a doubt, Johnston has the aura of greatness in the fact that he is so odd. I’m guessing Van Gogh and others had a similar air about them. What’s so odd and perhaps the hidden quality of genius of artists like this is the ability to end up meeting the right people or being in the right place at the right time. I guess fate/luck plus oddity sometimes is the formula for genius. After watching the movie, I definitely plan to pick up some of his old recordings and maybe some of his original artwork.