American Madness

Nothing says “American Madness” quite like the current state of the housing market. It’s amazing how our collective denial has allowed us to watch almost the exact same situation replay itself over and over, and yet still convince ourselves that everything’s going to be fine.

When people speak of the housing bubble, the most frequent argument I hear is “well, this bubble can’t pop, because if there’s a correction in the market, people just won’t sell for a while.”

If everyone in the market simply owned their own home, there would be some truth to that, aside from those that sell out of fear once the market turns downward and those forced by circumstance to move.

Let’s leave the argument that once the market turns, so will the economy, meaning people won’t be able to pay those high mortgages, for another day.

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Online mania has swept over even the oldest of Old Media in the past few months. Maybe it’s because those that can’t adapt are seeing their profits drop through the floor, and finally realizing, “It’s the Internet, stupid.”

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Bayou group’s founders have just admitted they did it: they suckered investors out of perhaps $400 million in money invested with what they had called their “hedge fund.”

But there are far more suckers in the public who are going to think that Bayou Group really was a hedge fund.

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Why is the British press concerned with how the American press covers the Tom DeLay indictment? Is this news?

(see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4293102.stm)

The BBC piece is more evidence of what one might call derivative journalism.

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Capsaicin, the “active ingredient,” to so speak, of Cayenne Peppers is powerful stuff. Eating it can cause you to break out in a sweat, screaming “whooo!” while your eyes water. Turned into a spray as mace, it can bring you to your knees. Formulated as a nasal spray it can… Clear your sinuses?

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For me, the great downfall of technology has always been that writers and publishers encounter so many technical issues whenever they venture online that they have no time left to actually write. This has been my unfortunate situation for the past few days, as I attempted to redesign my website to incorporate some unobtrusive advertising.

Being somewhat skilled at webdesign, I thought that the redesign would be a snap. Obviously, I’m still not skilled enough to remember that no programming task is ever a snap. There is always a glitch. Always.

Changing the layout was a snap thanks to Liew Cheon Fong, who has released a great 3 column revision of the default Kubrick theme.

The particular issue this time is that the Google ads display perfectly fine in Explorer and Safari, but they do not display in Firefox. The strange thing is that using Firefox I can see Google ads on other sites, but not my own site. So, it is not, as Adsense support suggested, a problem with my Javascript or adblocking settings.

I am thinking that the problem may have to do with the Kubrick theme itself, since ads do not display on either the default or the three column Kubrick design. Also, after looking through the WordPress support forums I have found a number of posts on this issue, but the problem still remains unresolved.

Here are two links on the WordPress forums relating to this problem:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/40709
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/31020

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

P.S. Liew, I noticed that you have Google ads displaying on your site, and I can see them in Firefox. How did you do it?

I’ve always been interested in the strong connection between marketing and art. That’s why I started Market Anomaly a marketing shop that helps artist and others get themselves noticed. My career has since evolved and Market Anomaly is now more of a side business.

My full-time job is located in Chelsea where the art season is in full effect, so I guess it’s time for me to start taking lunchtime strolls through some galleries. I’ll try to give you an idea of what is compelling and what is crap.

Also happening here… look out in the next year for Chelsea to go through another transformation as Google moves in and Apple builds another Store. There goes the neighborhood! Hell, it was already gone, but these developments are kind of exciting. It’s a little Frisco on the Hudson.

Anyway, here are the highlights of today’s wanderings.

Bellwether
Adam Cvijanovic: Love Poem (Ten Minutes After the End of Gravity)
08/09/05 - 15/10/05
Exceptional frescos of destruction and the end of things.

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Bortolami Dayan Gallery
?CLOSING DOWN?
Opens Sept. 21. (510 W. 25th St. 212-727-2050.)
The two upstarts from Gagosian, who ran away to start their own gallery debut a group show of Gagosian favs. The show is a mixture of awesome stuff like a full sized guillotine and other mediocre pieces. Many of the artists have been seen before at Gagosian. They don’t seem to have a homepage yet.

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Cheim Read
Lynda Benglis: The Graces
09/10/05 - 10/15/05
Great Polyurethane structures. The rest of the exhibit is questionable at best.

Sorry that I was offline for so long. I’ve been in Prague. I actually did not use a computer for an entire week and it felt great. I highly recommend spending significant amounts of time away from computers when possible. It allows the brain to do real thinking and put the nonsense of the world into perspective.

I was able to ask myself things like whether it is really important to read today’s top 50 blog posts on Marketing and the Media? The answer came back that I was probably just filling my head up with a lot of detritus, since there are really only a few truly significant posts each day that add new information and prospectives. Given this, it makes sense for sanity’s sake to focus on the best of the best and let everything else fall by the wayside.

The bad news for those whose livelihood is tied to blogging, is that they will never be able to really escape from the melee, because leaving a blog unattended will put a significant hole in the website’s traffic. I noticed when I got back that my little vacation had cut my website traffic in half. This did not really phase me, as I only have myself to answer to for the moment. However, advertisers are not as forgiving about the human need to disconnect from the digital age.

Strangely, I’ve decided to begin including advertising on my site starting next week. We humans are a contrary and masochistic lot.