Have a happy New Year everyone: That’s New Year, not New Years.
My dad retired from the New York City Police Department when I was six years old. Even at that young age, I knew he detested dealing with the drunks while he was on duty as a uniformed cop on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. At that very young age, his hatred of New York City’s iconic New Year’s Eve celebration impressed me so much that even when I was a teenager, I never wanted to be in Times Square on New Year’s Eve to watch the ball drop from what used to be the NY Times building.
I occasionally comment on this blog about the correct way to handle crisis PR. If you want to see how to bring the entire Internet down on your head, then handle the crisis PR yourself and do it horribly wrong, Google either of the following two terms: “Paul Christoforo,” or “Ocean Marketing.”
One thing that will happen in 2012 is the beginning of the end of incandescent light bulbs. They use a lot more energy to produce light than some newer technology does. On the other hand, they’re a lot cheaper to buy than the new technology. It’s not against the law to buy or use them, but it’s against the law to make certain wattage incandescent bulbs going forward.
Judging by what I’ve seen this week on TV, we’re going to have to deal with a lot of “documentaries” about the Mayan calendar that stops on December 21st, 2012. Lots of people have predicted the end of the world and nobody has been right so far. I predict that trend will continue, so when I take down my Christmas decorations next week, I’m going to put them away, not throw them away.
If I can’t figure out how to stop Google Music from launching when it wants instead of when I want, I’m going to delete it from my computer sometime in January.
Even though the post office raised the first class postage rate to 45 cents, they raised the rate for post card stamps from 29 to 32 cents. This means that the post office remains one of the few American institutions that continue to push for the use of pennies.
I think we could do away with pennies, nickels and dimes. About the only thing I’ve bought with a quarter recently was time at a parking meter.
There are two ways to be a successful broadcaster. Either learn the craft and do it better than anyone else, or do something compelling and entirely different from anyone else. In the second category was New York broadcaster Lynn Samuels. Lynn had a grating voice and a strong New York accent, both antithetical to the usual standard for broadcasters, and in a time of conservative talk radio she was a liberal with a decidedly independent stance. With that against her, she was smart, honest, funny, and well worth listening to. She once broadcast on WABC radio in New York, and was most recently heard on Sirius satellite radio. Lynn died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve, long before she ran out of things to say. Sad.
