TheCapeBlog

This week, I’ve been reading online copies of legendary pitchman Elmer Wheeler’s books Tested Sentences That Sell and Sizzlemanship.
Wheeler, who coined the phrase “Sell the sizzle, not the steak”, developed his sales theories in the 1930’s and 40’s, and he’s still considered a guru today.
He came up with a simple formula for the three basic buying motives: X, or health and self-preservation; Y, or “romance”, by which he meant glamour, fun and adventure; and Z, or money, either making it or saving it.
Another of his simple rules is the A and B formula: “Tell the Benefits (A), then give them proof (B)”.
A third rule is to offer the customer a choice of goods rather than ask a yes or no question: a waitress will sell more ice cream by asking if the customer wants chocolate or vanilla on their pie than by asking if the customer wants their dessert a la mode.
Wheeler also believed strongly in treating customers with respect. He uses an example of a vacuum salesperson: if a customer asks if the vacuum cleaner is too heavy to easily operate, the salesperson replies, “It may look heavy, but see how light it is” rather than arguing with the customer that it isn’t really heavy at all (you dummy!)
Reading these 60 year old classic treatises on sales comes as a shock because the deftness and diplomacy described therein seems almost non-existent today, as inundated as we all are by hundreds of daily sales messages. I’m thinking in particular of the clumsy, almost sleazy recent attempt to sell me a timeshare as an example.
Having grown up around salespeople, I have respect for how difficult a profession it is. I also don’t enjoy heavy-handed pitches and appreciate someone who has mastered the craft, whether the sale happens in person or online.

Sometimes, I consider how fortunate I am that my soul/consciousness occupies a physical shell that’s at the top of the food chain as opposed, for example, to being in the body of a cow or a species of plankton.
I was not lucky to be born female, though.
To take away at least some of the curse of gender, I was extremely lucky to be born in the United States. While it’s not as enlightened as the Scandinavian countries, the US is a heck of a lot better for women than just about anywhere in South America, Africa or Asia, and I was lucky to beat the law of large numbers in being deposited here instead of there.
Then I think about the petites.
My son is sick of hearing this, so I’ll make this brief: petite women have the life celebrated in American song and fable about the love, money, privilege and esteem that is supposedly strewn at female feet.
Let’s just say that unless those feet are a size seven or smaller, the love/money/privilege/esteem pickin’s are slim to none.
Which is an irony and a shame: having beaten tremendous odds to be born human and American, one loses out at the last possible role of destiny’s dice.
I guess it’s true, the odds are always stacked in the house’s favor.

In its plot outline of the film “Chatham”, which is being shown in pre-release this weekend at the Cape Cinema, IMDB refers to Mariel Hemingway’s character as a “middle-aged woman”.
I noted this with astonishment, since I still think of Ms. Hemingway as an ingenue.
Turns out, she’ll be celebrating her 46th birthday this Thanksgiving. Considering that I was not a lot older than she (49) when Bob was born, I guess our girl is entitled to be cast as a mature adult.
What is even more unsettling is the age-appropriate casting of Bruce Dern, Rip Torn and David Carradine, all of whom play 70 year olds in the film.
David Carradine attained Social Security normal retirement age almost six years ago?!
I feel like Rip Van Winkle, just waking up from a long nap.

It’s a good feeling when ambitious plans work out.
The weather was so mild that I took the day off yesterday, starting out with a visit to the tailor shop at Mashpee Commons to drop off a pair of slacks that needed hemming.
I’d picked up the slacks last weekend at the new LL Bean outlet in Wareham, and the discount was substantial enough that it was worth it to “splurge” on professional tailoring.
Did a couple hours of clean-up at Edgewater, finally leveling off the stump grindings from the tree that used to be in the middle of the yard, a casualty of the Noel backlash, and tackled more leaves.

Continue reading It All Got Done

It’s expected to hit 60 degrees today, so it seems like we can enjoy one day of Indian Summer before colder air moves in. Sunny now, supposed to rain later.
Got an email from Hotwire yesterday announcing a one-day airline fare special. Without a traveling companion, though, it seemed like a waste of time to even look into it.
I like this left outer join t-shirt.
Last PT appointment is tomorrow. Attended a lecture last night by Frank Moss, the Director of the MIT Media Lab. He talked about the technologies they’re developing to help paraplegics, including an electronic ankle. It takes a tremendous amount of CPU to replicate movement in an ankle, as opposed to a knee.*
Can’t believe Thanksgiving is next Thursday.
That’s probably why things have been quiet on the recruitment front, everyone’s getting into holiday mode, or maybe scared about the impact of higher oil prices and the subprime market debacle.
Have been wondering how aggressive Bush appointee Ben Bernanke and the rest of the gang at the Federal Reserve are going to be in averting a recession this coming Presidential election year.
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*I was a little disapppointed with the lecture, which was subtitled “ushering in a new era of human adaptability”, having hoped that Dr. Moss would talk about other types of human:machine interfaces, like downloading the ability to understand foreign languages.

Today, I uprooted the tomato plants. We’ve had a couple of overnight frosts, and it was time to say good-bye.
I’ve put this off much too long, figuring I’d be depressed to see the empty planters. Instead, the bare soil is not so much a bitter ending but more of a promise for next year.
I also put fall arrangements in the flower boxes at Edgewater and even mowed just about all of the back yard. The cleanup was a lot less work than I’d figured. There’s still more to do, but at least the yard is useable in the unlikely event that my grandchildren decided they wanted to go outside to play.
James and I were joking about this the other day. He’s the only one who cares to join me when I’m doing yardwork, and we were speculating that maybe the other two stay inside because they’re scared that an elephant is going to appear out of nowhere and trample them.

Yesterday’s good weather provided an opportunity to start Fall cleanup, one of my least favorite chores, but being outside is always better than inside, no matter what.
I removed most of the gone-by’s from the flower boxes and the garden by the fence, and did some raking and lawn mowing.
It was the first time in about two months that I felt confident enough to put my bad leg to use, and it did very well.
I put the wrong kind of gas in the lawn mower, but Peter was able to clear it and get it running. James kept me company for a little while, offering water and conversation while I swept the street.
The back yard at Edgewater needs serious blow-down raking before I can do the lawn. The oak trees in the front still have a lot of leaves.
It’s raining today, but supposed to be better tomorrow.

I learned this past weekend that my grandchildren are members of the Millennials, that generation born between 1980 and 2000.
Opinions about the Millennials are almost universally rhapsodic: they are family and team-oriented, patriotic, confident, hopeful, goal-oriented.
In the workplace, they look for learning opportunities, the chance to work with friends, fun, flexibility and respectful treatment.
Millennials are lucky, employers are “desperate” to hire them, and will continue to be so for years to come because of my generation’s hypothetical upcoming retirement from the workforce (as if most of us could afford to retire).

We learned with sadness that Norman Mailer passed away this weekend.
I heard him speak several times in the last few years at the home of friends of a friend.
Sunday mornings were reserved for “Norman”, and he was consistently ferocious, urbane and irreverent: at his presentation last year, he growled, “Organized religion is the citadel of Satan.”
His passing represents the loss of yet another member of a unique generation of intellectuals and activists whose like we will probably not see again.
A singular confluence of events created them, and in my view at least, our modern Weltanschauung – frightened, tepid, vulnerable to the marketing of idiot politicians and neurotic rock stars, hostile to true inventiveness, competence and insight – is incapable of producing the kind of astute, idiosyncratic avant-garde of which Norman Mailer was a part.

The boys slept over, and Bob asked me to write down that this is James’s overnight, not his.
So, there you have it.
James is a good guest, as usual. The only bad thing about having him stay over is that he insists on sleeping on a foam chair/couch in the living room rather than the trundle in the guest room.
As a result, when I get up at my usual 5 or 5:30 and make coffee in the kitchen, no matter how quiet I try to be, I always seem to wake him up.
I’ve tried putting the coffee maker in my room, but even that doesn’t work. James has a knack for sensing the slightest noise and movement, even when he seems to be sound asleep.

Continue reading It’s James’s Overnight