The Sam Whitmore Sampler

Aug. 22 birthdays

John Lee Hooker. Carl Yastrzemski. Claude Debussy. Valerie Harper. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf. My next-door neighbor, Carolyn Goldberg. And me -- 52 today. Never felt better.

Questions

Back when I ran PC Week edit, I used to ask job candidates the following question:

"Think back to the last time you laughed really hard -- we're talkin' a deep-down belly laugh. What were you laughing at?"

I always felt that a sense of humor was the single most valuable asset a worker could have. And what a person thinks is funny reveals a lot about them.

Now look at these questions -- the kind that HR asks of job candidates at Google and Microsoft.

What do they reveal?

You Think YOU Feel Guilty??

I heard a chilling broadcast late last month on This American Life. It was a series of interviews with people who accidentally killed someone, or believe they did. Can you imagine trying to live with that kind of guilt? These individuals did. One 18-year-old motorist -- now 36 -- killed a bicyclist. What became of the second half of his life?

The podcast is long, and one does need to be in the mood to listen something like this. But I found it to be quite nourishing. Hope you do too.

A Beautiful Place to Sweat

San Leandro Marina Park, in San Leandro, Calif. is a beautiful place to sweat. It's a park abutting the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. Here's a PDF map of it. If you sit on the right-hand side of an aircraft about to land at Oakland International Airport, you can see it really well out the window.

This place has ducks, sea birds, grass, trees, friendly people and 17 exercise stations. You run from one to another. Each is different: touching your toes, stretches, leg lifts, you name it. The circuit is tiring, but the fresh air and view more than compensate. If you're ever in the East Bay, you might want to check it out sometime. Even if you don't exercise, it's a gorgeous spot.

More on this Blog

Well, so much for posting every day. Our new Facebook group has 105 members as of today. That's where I'm putting a lot of our excess energy so this blog remained dormant this week. Our apologies to anyone who cares about such things.

I might have been a bit hasty about saying that there would be no more tech media stuff on here. A friend of ours in Washington reminded us that slogging around in Facebook groups can be an annoying experience, and by the same token, that RSS is a beautiful thing. Thou speaketh the truth, Frank. I guess we'll see how it goes.

An Announcement about This Blog

As of today we'll no longer post tech media content on The Sam Whitmore Sampler. Why? Because we've opened up a Facebook group for SWMS subscribers, and we believe it should be the single repository for all of our tech media content.

We're not discontinuing this blog. Quite the opposite: we'll continue to post each day. But it will be purely a personal blog -- or in the pejorative, an "ego" blog, I guess. If you come here to read about China's censorship or what happened to us at the rent-a-car desk in Seattle, you'll continue to enjoy the Sampler. But if you're a tech PR pro looking for the SWMS-related material we offer, come join us on Facebook. Add "swms at mediasurvey dot com" into FB and we'll do the rest. That's where all the new stuff will live, starting today.

Banished Words

Not that it's the supreme authority or anything, but Lake Superior State University has just issued its latest list of banished words, which the university says have outlived their usefulness, if they ever had any in the first place. This is the sort of stunt George Carlin would approve of. The reader comments are funny as hell.

Some of the words and phrases that made this year's list:

* Black Friday (as in the shopping day after Thanksgiving)
* Perfect Storm
* Post 9/11
* [Blank] is the new [Blank] (as in "50 is the new 30", or "pink is the new black")
* Sweet
* It is what it is

No one asked me, but to their list I'd add:

* Actually (which I've blogged about before)
* At the End of the Day
* And Oh By the Way (Christy alerted me to this one... watch for it this year)

See You Next Year

Was it a good year for you? Are you happier today than you were this time last year? We earnestly hope so.

This seems to be a good day to say, thank you for reading our blog. Since we launched it in April -- and with an occasional exception -- we post to it every day. Some items were better than others. We violate many of the basic rules of blogging, you know. The cardinal one is, stick to one theme or topic, so people can decide what they're getting. As you've probably noticed, we don't do that. Yeah, there's some tech media in here, but there's a lot of lefty social commentary, mention of weather/natural events, and whatever else strikes us.

Christy and I are planning several 2008 road trips -- the car kind -- so we'll probably offer pics and tales from the heartland. We hear there's an election next year, and the smoggy Olympics, but you know, there are plenty of places you can read about that stuff. We can add no value there, so we likely will avoid those topics. For the same reason, we rarely write about what other bloggers are writing about, i.e. the kind of thing that fuels Techmeme or Blogrunner. Therefore, we don't get a lot of links or "Google Juice."

So for all these reasons, we know that anyone who reads this blog is either a family member, a friend we know, or a friend we haven't gotten to know yet. Maybe next year will be the year for that!

Merry Christmas

Hope the day is a great one for you and yours.

Malls, Comedians and the Truth

From the Lenny Bruce days to the present, comedians see and say what others can't and won't. Chris Rock has a comedy routine about how most parts of America have "the white mall" and "the mall white people used to go to." And judging from my bicoastal life, his hypothesis has turned out to be pretty much true.

My 17-year-old son and I joke about the fact that the Peabody/Danvers region of Massachusetts has the Northshore Mall, where I tend to shop, and the Liberty Tree Mall, where, for various reasons, I don't shop as much as I used to. Not because of race, of course. But you'd expect me to say that.

Now that I live in the East Bay, I've noticed an enormous percentage of white shoppers at the Stoneridge Mall in Pleasanton (at least the one day I happened to be there). Meanwhile, at the 43-year-old Southland Mall in Hayward, where I shopped Tuesday night, I saw one other white person. And I've met people -- who happen to be white -- who for various reasons don't enjoy shopping at Southland. Not because of race, of course.

BigMallRat rates Stoneridge Mall "10 out of 10" and Southland "6.5 out of 10." There are various reasons for this.

Next year I'll follow the elections in three core ways -- through Fox News Channel, NPR and Comedy Central. I'll put most of my trust in the comedians. To me, that's "fair and balanced." And the most fun, too.