Shortly after the hit TV show, M*A*S*H wrapped, my increasingly feeble brain believes series star, Alan Alda said, “How many ways you can say, ‘War is hell and the food stinks.’?” My friend, Matt echoed that about what he reads here. “I get it. Media is hell and ads stink.” Then, he added this provocation, “What else you got?” The answer is I’m not sure.
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270 days in and I’m. Not. Sure.
I could veer off into other things and tell life stories. But few people want to hear those and I hate telling them. And, plus, also, I don’t want to be the center of attention.
So, I can keep doubling down on examples of the absolute apathy toward most media that’s not live sports. I can point out shady ad practices. I could remind people that the ads that litter our digital space are no better than the faded, water-torn bills that people slap over post no bills stencils. All of us know all about the complex ways the industrial privacy complex creates complexities to prey on our digital souls. These days, we find ourselves mashing the delete key as fast as the services email us the new, opaque terms of service they’ve created that allow them to not to disclose how they won’t not unscrew us over. I can even repeat the simultaneously smart and sucky ways social platforms have redefined the media landscape or amplify the illogical strawmen arguments ad tech people use to justify the need for nuclear power to stalk us with relevant ads.
But, there’s a reason a backgammon betting cube stops at 64. Because, after a while, the repetition is nothing more than exponential oneupmanship. So we just ignore it and finish the game.
Maybe that’s why, from time to time, it’s fun to write about corporate comebacks in Dr. Suess rhyme on Jesus’s resurrection day. Or, about cookie deprecation on the night Santa comes down chimneys. Or the character of media’s content on MLK Day.
When stories don’t align with the calendar, rants fill column inches. But, then my newfound friend, Judy blue eyes DM’s me worried that I’ve gone on a psychotic break. But I’m happy. In fact, “happy,” is my go-to response when people ask how I’m doing.
Most people accept that. But Reuben isn’t most people. He’s one of the guys who pushed me to start this and quethed (yes, “be,” be superfluous) unto me the name unCharles. When Reuben pushed me to explain why I was happy, my best response was, “Because I’m too tired, lazy, and dumb to do the work to figure why I’m unhappy.”
Business makes me happy. Reading about business used to make me happy. But, then, the stories about business became blah.
That’s why I started this. To inject very little of something akin to Dave Barry’s wit (hey, I said very little) into the media prose written by media pros. To make the blah a little less blasé. For a while, I’ve been thinking about when to end this.
Is it the time to throw in Linus’s blanket and close with the words from the guy who penned and inked Calvin and Hobbes, “I will be stopping Calvin and Hobbes at the end of the year. This was not a recent or an easy decision, and I leave with some sadness. My interests have shifted, however, and I believe I've done what I can do within the constraints of daily deadlines and small panels. I am eager to work at a more thoughtful pace, with fewer artistic compromises. I have not yet decided on future projects…”
— 29½ —
Then, I came across a comment on LinkedIn from Lindsey Colferai, I woman I don’t know IRL, but who reads this and had this to say about the cost of inaction. And, I thought, “well hell,…” if somebody cranky isn’t going to be endlessly and repetitively vigilant then there’s no way media is going to get less derivative.
Media needs a world-class curmudgeon to poke fun at itself. 60 Minutes had Andy Rooney. And, with all requisite humility, I’m the perfect person for now. I’m cranky by nature and duplicatively redundant. In fact, like media, I don’t live in the future. I don’t even live in the past. I live in an odd nostalgia-free cocoon. I replay the same shows, movies, and songs because they make me happy and it’s really easy. I don’t need to get to know new cast of characters or new lyrics. Sometimes, like when I find a bootlegged version of Mark Knopfler playing Sultans at a backwater venue in Bogota in 1987, it’s like finding a picture of an old college girlfriend. New, but not really. Or, when I hear the Stranglers play their version of Burt Bacharach’s hit, Walk on By, and they change the last few words in the second line, “I just can't get over losing you // And so if I seem so broken in pieces,” (at about the 55 second mark) it makes me smile, because it’s just different enough to make my day.
The only marginal downside to my cocooned life is not being able to contribute answers to questions like, “What are you binging?” But you don’t need me. You have a Spread for that. They’re a human curation engine happy to wage a war against user generated content. No joke. If I’m not here to poke fun at the illogic of that then who will? So, no, this ain’t the end of unCharles. It’s the beginning of something new. OK, something slightly new which is going to look, feel, sound, and read like 270-ish-days of old and familiar unCharles.
Welcome to Funny Business by unCharles. A column that makes business fun. A sort of Chicken soup for CEOs. No, that’s going to put me in copyright lawsuit hell. A sort of matzo ball soup for media mavens. Restaurant quality at fast casual prices. Come for the leanin’s and stay for the learnin’s.
Thanks to Lindsey, you’re stuck with me. At least for a little while longer.