wedge blog

There are nine people looking at the house next door. I don’t like any of them.

With my luck, it’s the harried-looking woman, the one dressed in pastel polyester. It would be OK to have a neighbor with angst, but this lady appears overwhelmed with classic dust-bowl fatalism. Here she is, after church, with Ma and Pa and Grandma and three kids, plus two calm-looking older folks making sweeping gestures like models on The Price is Right. Those two look like realtors.

The back yard is so small that the lady with a little kid in the crook of one arm is now standing in my yard. Great. Where are the rowdy neighbors in the alley when I need them? I’d love for one of them to pitch an oversize can of ‘Natural’ over the eight foot fence. If I had known there was going to be an “open house” I would have bought the folks in the alley a case of hootch at the gas station, just to make things lively.

Maybe I should run out there waving plans for a two-story garage that would block any sunlight from ever reaching any room in that house, Amen.

The widow lady who lived behind us for twenty one years–now there was a good neighbor– despite her yippy rodent and the occasional north wind that sucked smoke from her chimney into our family room. God bless her, she was nearly blind, so I could romp in the yard in any state of disarray or undress, plus she never listened to any music, especially ‘country’ or ‘gospel’ or (gulp) ‘white country gospel’.

That house is just the right size for one, or maybe two quiet adults, not a young family of four or five. It sits only about ten feet from my back door, since at one time it was the ‘carriage house’ for the place I’ve called home for the last two decades.

I don’t want to deal with a thirty-something divorced mother yelling at her three kids while I’m trying to weed the herb garden and listen to NPR. I don’t want her being friendly at the back door. I don’t want her asking my husband to ‘loan her a tool’, and I don’t want her ex showing up at odd hours providing vocal counterpoint to the already operatic pathos that plays out in the alley.

I fervently hope she goes somewhere else…now the adults are huddled just outside my window, and the kids are climbing my 115-year old decorative wrought iron fence (except the one in the tired lady’s arms, and I think I smell that one).

God, I hope she doesn’t have a dog. Every time I look at a dog I see an asterisk of an asshole, and envision its center dilating and depositing organic waste like a pasta extruder.

I’m in no mood for neighbors.

I am a little ‘sick in the head’ about Walter Cronkite’s passing. The literal translation of Cronkite in Yiddish, the most literal of languages, is ‘sickhead’. As a student of language, Walter had to know.

I became a sickhead for news thanks to Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, and from my mom, who insisted on watching CBS and NBC news back-to-back every weeknight. Huntley was a Montana boy made good. All I can remember about David Brinkley is that he seemed to speak through clenched teeth and that he had excellent posture.

Cronkite was a curiously gutsy guy swallowed by a fleshy mustached sound box. He established the CBS tradition of the caring town crier; glee or grief didn’t have to be in the script: we felt privileged to witness the big fella fighting to maintain composure.

JFK had just visited Montana two months before his assassination; I might have only been seven years old, but I’ll never forget when Walter Cronkite took off his dark framed glasses just after telling us John F. Kennedy had died. I knew the world had changed forever: I saw it on Walter Cronkite’s face.

From Cronkite to Dan Rather to Katie Couric, CBS Evening News is still married to a simple, folksy style, for better or for worse. Network news audiences have gone from better to worse, losing an average of *one million viewers every year.

Cronkite’s competitor Chet Huntley died a few months after his return to Montana in 1974, David Brinkley died in 2003. With Cronkite’s passing Friday, network news, once a proud packed three-chimney steam liner, cast off its last anchor and is a dinghy adrift in international shipping lanes–perhaps with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart at the helm.

The Anchor & Ship

Instead of 23 minutes of news that’s pre-digested, organized and delivered at dinnertime by middle aged white males, there’s an avalanche of fact and opinion, theory and perspective at our fingertips. The wonderful, awful thing is that news and opinion aren’t filtered, boxed and labeled any more. The wrapping changes the contents to suit the specific sickhead who opens the box.

Sometimes I long just to sit down with a Swanson TV Dinner and wait for Walter Cronkite to make sense of the world for me…but that’s just not the way it is today, Saturday June 18th, Two Thousand and Nine.

* http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/narrative_networktv_audience.php?media=6&cat=2

(This post is published on the InStore magazine blog)

There has been a lively discussion on Polygon in the last week about the jewelry equivalent of a catalogue showroom.

There are certain stores in Canada where customers walk up to open displays, pick out a basic engagement ring–or two or three–and wander about unsupervised with 8mm rocks in designer settings. If they run out the door, I doubt if the sales clerk would even bother to chase them.

The rings are what’s known in the jewelry trade as ‘brass and glass’– base metal cubic zirconia examples of rings that can be customized with real gems and gold when an order is made. “Want that setting in rose gold, size 4 1/2 for pear shape? No problem. Come back in three weeks and it’s yours. That’ll be $4500 please. Ka ching!”

I see the tactical advantage of this, especially in slower economic times. Instead of investing in expensive “Cinderella Rings” that often live in a showroom for years, jewelers can order a basic style and make dozens of orders from a single base metal ring. The strategy also allows clients to browse without a nosy salesclerk. Imagine how far a semi-mount budget would go if a jeweler switched to brass and glass.

One of the jewelry industry’s most respected gurus is already helping several stores convert to this marketing strategy. You may be seeing brass and glass at a competitor or near you.

A couple of years ago, Overnight Mounting started to offer $20 brass and glass examples, so I delved in with a few hundred bucks. It was a dismal failure. Clients can get those rings off their fingers fast enough, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was not compatible with my business strategy.

First, I think it’s a mistake to mix fakes with the real McCoy. Customers expect the shopping experience, not a split personality. What’s real and what isn’t? Second, in a small town, you don’t want to sell too many versions of the same ring. Third, I think my attitude rubbed off on my clients: they could tell I just wasn’t that enthusiastic. Fourth, since I was leveraged and real goods and customers usually want things right away, I had little incentive to push the ersatz rings.
I can’t help thinking of a television ad for cellular networks where everything needs to go like clockwork. The stagehands kill the rain on command. The wedding planner locates the misplaced flowers, but suddenly the groom has cold feet. “Cue the stand-in groom!” A smiling substitute waits for the I-do’s.

I wonder if her two-carat ring was late, if that bride would accept brass & glass along with a cardboard groom.

Joe Rosetti owns a multimillion dollar company. He has impeccable taste in Western art and an impressive collection of motorcycles. He walks with a swagger and has played the markets for years. In the midst of tough times he built a new headquarters. Joe Rosetti is nobody’s fool.

I’ve been trying for months to convince Joe to put a small percentage of his net worth into some hard assets. I sent what I thought was a very convincing e-mail about using gold and silver as a hedge against possible inflationary times. I thought he’d understand the logic of holding a fistful of private tax-free assets.

Instead, I received a stinging response that gold bugs are basically idiots who are betting on the downfall of western civilization. A tax-free investment that goes from $400 to $900 in 5 to 7 years? So what. “Can that compare to a stock that I bought at $18 a share cashed out at $300 in 18 months?” he almost spit back at me.

I agree with Joe that gold might not be a good investment. And I’d rather not envision the unraveling of our economy, thanks. I just believe that a small amount of precious metals offsets a large portfolio of paper. I presented what I believe to be a logical argument, and Joe responded in kind. We had a simple disagreement, and I stopped trying to pitch him for a lousy 3% commission.

I was surprised when I got an e-mail from Joe recently asking about gold and silver. It was a short message. “I’m looking at precious metals. Now that I’ve seen this You Tube video, I understand the urgency of the situation.”

What did the You Tube guy say that finally swayed my client? After Joe ’s blistering response to my benign inquiry, it must be darn convincing.

It’s worse than convincing. It’s embarrassing. It’s frightening…and just plain weird.

The video, by a discredited Internet radio host, claimed that the US dollar faced extinction and imminent replacement by something he called the ‘Amero’. To prove this point, he claimed personal persecution by the U.S. government as he tapped a poorly made brownish coin on a desktop to prove it was real. “Do you see this tiny letter D?”he asked. “That proves this coin was secretly made by the Denver mint.”

Yeah, right. And the JLo swimsuit I wear means that my girls are as nice as hers.

It was odd that other YouTube videos visible on the website’s sidebar featured different versions of the same conspiracy, often showing entirely different coins. At least these conspirators should get together to decide what the damn thing looks like.
Hal Turner’s YouTube video claims the US government, Canada and Mexico have been conspiring behind everyone’s backs to dismantle currencies in favor of the North American version of the Euro, the Amero. This merger is the first step toward the US, Canada and Mexico erasing our borders: step one to a New World Order.

Can I Order fries with that?

According to Turner, there are 8 hundred million Ameros waiting in China, ostensibly waiting to offset some of our national debt. How were all these coins minted? On the night shift? Assuming each metal coin weighs 1 ounce, how were 27,428,571 tons trucked to waiting cargo ships and secretly loaded and transported, without a peep? Why on earth would a Chinese bank accept them? This insults the nation that invented the abacus (no worries, later Hal Turner insults Jews, too).

Turner forecast that by February 2009 (Note to Hal: revise ticking clock of fiscal doom), the U.S. Treasury secretary would de-monetize the dollar, making it worthless. Your savings, checking, IRA, stocks, bonds, retirement: poof. The commies who run the U.S., Canada, Mexico (and China) will take it away with the stroke of a pen. The only way Americans will get any value, perhaps two cents on the dollar, is if we line up at the bank with wheelbarrows of dollars to exchange for…you guessed it: Ameros.

This solution to our economic woes (explain again how that solves all our problems without creating bigger ones, please?) is aimed squarely at the working class, Turner extolls.

Even more incredible than the Amero is Turner’s advice to Americans. Not only should we buy gold and silver (duh!) but “more importantly, we should transfer whatever funds we have to FOREIGN BANKS and denominate them in British, French or Swiss funds.” Turner never mentions that these currencies are economically tied to the U.S. Dollar and they are also fiat currencies, not backed by precious metals. In an odd caveat, Turner says the Euro is a bad choice, “because it is not backed by anything.” (?)

It frightens me that rational arguments about hedging failed to convince Joe, a man I respect and admire, but a dangerously flawed home movie posted by a discredited reactionary did the trick. When sloppy slogans and scare tactics lure guys like Joe, we are poised for a worse fate than the Amero.

*I changed the name of my client to protect his privacy–his sanity is already in question.

1. It’s been said.
2. It’s been said better.
3. Need a Mac.
4. It’s more fulfilling to skip the writing and go straight to ‘having written’.
5. Someone might read it.
6. No one will read it.
7. Have not yet mastered artistic temperament.
8. Have mastered artistic temperament and no longer have the patience for creative endeavors.

Photo: Tormenting Roger at the Kitchen Table

He was eight when I told him that every bubble in a glass of milk turns into a burp when it’s swallowed. For months he speared the edges of his tumbler with a toothpick. On occasion I’d tell him he swallowed one—I saw it!—he would open his little mouth wide to force it out. If I put on a pouty face and said, “Too late,” he’d produce a pitifully entertaining wail.

“Stop that, Roger.” Our mom was too busy with her job and a passel of other kids to ask Roger why he poured so slowly and why, at every meal, he rolled his milk around the inside rim to pop every last opaque dome with a small wooden stick.

He looked so pathetically intent and I felt so powerful. I was ten.

Roger, the youngest of five, was neat and quiet and still somewhat gullible in the year after Dad died. I was next-to-last, an ‘also ran’ in the family race, noisy and messy and as selfish then as I am to this day. The first three kids, Win, Place and Show, had ribbons in their stalls. I was left to run wild and Roger brought up the rear.

I had to get back at Roger. He was cute. He was deviously well behaved. He was a Virgo.

He parted his hair on the left, tucked in his plaid cotton shirts, folded his Cub Scout uniform and never got in trouble. He actually filed his Halloween candy in a locked chest in his bedroom closet, and he had the discipline to eat two nasty cheap candies between each really tasty treat. In this way, he made his booty last until Christmas and my rancor last for decades.

I’d eat all the good stuff in the first two days, and regret throwing away Jolly Ranchers and Pez, especially when I wound up watching Roger relish a fun size Butterfinger after Thanksgiving (amazingly, without making a mess).

I used to ruin Roger’s entire day by moving the orange Wheaties box from the cabinet to the left below the sink to the cabinet on the right above the refrigerator. When he got married I shared this trick with his new bride: every new wife deserves a small arsenal of ways to make her man suffer.

Roger is a Virgo, born in the second week of September. As a grown up physician whose most mystical reading is a PDR, he looks at me, shrugs, and carefully backs away. I am a Cancer: I remember taking a PDR to step aerobics class, then going home and opening it randomly to see if there was anything in the three inch medical volume that might offer me some relief.

Sooner or later, if I come up with the cure for what ails me, I’ll call my brother and ask for a prescription.

Perhaps there’s something in there for Roger, too.

Originally published by InStore magazine, January 2007
(ED NOTE: We sent our correspondent, Great Falls, MT, jeweler Claire Baiz to watch Blood Diamond … not once, but
twice. We asked her to write about how the movie made her feel as a viewer and more importantly how she believes it
will impact her as a jeweler.)
DECEMBER 30, 1999THE DAY BEFORE THE WORLD ENDED
On December 30th, 1999 I was in my jewelry store backing up my hard drive, printing two loose-leaf notebooks full of appraisals just in case my computer went belly up with Y2K. I figured if the world went to hell in a hand basket, in the new hard-asset economy my customers might want offers on the family jewels. If that was the case, I would be ready to work under generator power if necessary.