Clutch City! Bring on the Cards!

The Houston Astros win their first series!

Yeah, the franchise is 43 years old, but it's still sweet. It was the deciding game, the Braves had narrowed the game to a 1 run lead...and then the Astros scored 9 consecutive runs.

The Killer B's -- Beltran, Bagwell, Biggio and Berkman -- were all clutch. Beltran had 5 RBIs and homered on two consecutive at bats.

I'm not much of a baseball fan, but it's exciting to see the Astros play the Cards. The Astros are really a feel good story right now -- written off for dead, they ended the season 36-10 to squeak into the playoffs.

And the Yankees are playing the RedSox. That's an intense rivalry. Having been to Boston around the beginning of the season, it was amazing to me how intensely Bostonians loved their RedSox.

Go Astros!

The Houston Astros beat the Atlanta Braves on Saturday, setting the stage for Sunday's game. It's a chance for the Astros to win their first playoff series in franchise history.

Go Astros!

The presidential campaign signs

John Moore posts about Scott Dadrich's New York Times editorial. Dadich admits that, while he's a Democrat, Bush's campaign logo is much better, while the "Kerry logo displays the same inconsistency that his opponents accuse him of. . . No wonder some voters think he's a vacillating wimp."

Kerry's signs really are bad. Of course, in a presidential campaign the signs aren't as important -- in lesser races, yard signs are a primary way to raise a candidate's name ID -- but they are many voters' daily exposure to

Ouch. Of course, it's even worse when he spent four weeks mulling that logo.

Novel blogging

Director Mitch is writing a novel.

It'd be hard to do, but it'd be a great marketing ploy to write the novel each day as a blog post. Considering how hot blogs are in the media right now, that's a surefire way to get attention.

DQ

Katharine Stone writes about Dairy Queen's attempt to rebrand itself as DQ -- a slightly more upscale brand that is known for food, not just blizzards.

Stone writes:

We probably pile into the car once a month for strawberry shakes (for my son and husband, who insist they're better than you can get anywhere else) and a double Snickers Blizzard for me. But you couldn't get me to buy food in that place on a bet. I have no interest in whatever food DQ has to offer unless that food is made from cream and sugar and is -16 degrees C (the typical serving temperature of ice cream, in case you were wondering -- and yes, I had to look that up).

She then goes on to ask:

If you were going to reposition Dairy Queen, or DQ as I understand they now prefer to call it, what would you do?

A friend of mine's father retired a few years ago, and took his lump sum pension to open up a DQ.

He opened the store in a growing fringe of suburb where there weren't any established fast food chains in the immediate vicinity. The store was new and always bright and clean. In other words, not your typical DQ. Typical Dairy Queens in my experience tend to be old, kinda dark and dirty -- especially the bathrooms.

Customers felt comfortable buying food there. I tried the food a few times, and it was actually quite good. Some of it was better than McDonalds.

I think that's one of the answers to rebranding: work with your franchisees to change the feel of your stores. A bright, clean store will make customers more comfortable buying food, and happier to eat the food in-store.

Sidenote 1: DQ is a very common occurrence in small town Texas. I'm not sure why, but it seems like every small town has one. Probably it has -- or used to have -- low franchising fees. Either that or Texans just like ice cream.

Sidenote 2: I'll also note that Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway owns Dairy Queen. You'd have a great track record if you always invested in the same business Buffett does.

AP article on poker gifts

The AP thinks that poker stuff is the hot Christmas item this year:

With poker's popularity growing because of televised tournaments, retailers are betting that playing cards and chips will be among the must-have items during the holiday shopping season.

Stores are showcasing displays of casino-quality chips and gaming tables with holders for drinks and betting chips.

"I'm not a big poker player, but I know a lot about it because it's such a hot item," Kmart spokeswoman Caryn Klebba said. "It seems like the teenagers are in love with it."

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Karen Burk said the renewed interest in poker may make a deck of cards the top stocking stuffer of the holidays this year.

Howard Stern won't be dealing with the FCC soon

Howard Stern and Sirius radio today announced an $100 million a year deal where Stern will leave the public airwaves. The $100m a year covers Stern's base competition, studio costs, staff, etc.

I saw a Sirius representative discuss this with Neil Cavuto today. Sirius believes that they will only need about 1 million new subscribers to break even. They estimate that there are about 11 million Stern fans right now. Sirius believes these fans are very loyal to Stern, as evidenced by his movie, two bestselling books, etc.

Stern's base compensation will be in the tens of millions, but he'll also have incentives and bonus compensation.

An interesting deal. Sirius charges each subscriber $12.95 per month. Stern won't have to worry about the FCC anymore; he can be as lascivious, crude, and tawdry as he wishes.

Satellite radio has had displays and PR booths at every festival/event I've been to recently. But until now I'd always considered it to be today's equivalent of the .com boom. That is, an idea unlikely to ever make money.

Now I'm not so sure. I have some friends who have gotten satellite radio and love it. They say they would never go back to regular radio. Stern may be on to something big.

Pictures of Will

Folks over at Slithery D were discussing what Will Baude looks like. Will then revealed a picture of himself that obscures his face.

A cursory Google search turns up a picture (scroll towards bottom) that actually shows his face.

Quiz bowl-ers

As a former quiz bowl person, I was amused to see this article from the Washington Post:

Back in college, Robert Hentzel and his teammates competed at the championship level, but victory always came without fanfare. Or fans, for that matter. As spectator sport, academic quiz bowl was a bit like watching a perpetual IQ test being given out loud, with small teams of students vying to see who could answer the most questions the quickest.

Quiz bowlers didn't merely accumulate knowledge; they stockpiled it. Fact upon fact upon small, obscure fact. Worthless information, outsiders would scoff. But the quiz bowlers' passion ran deep. And their pursuit turned out to be not so trivial.

Over the past five years alone, more than 40 former quiz bowlers have quietly infiltrated the ranks of television game-show contestants, raking in nearly $7 million, primarily from "Jeopardy!" and "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."

Call it the ultimate revenge of the nerds.

"There's definitely a subculture there," acknowledged Michael Davies, executive producer of "Millionaire" and himself a reject from the academic challenge team at the University of Edinburgh. ("I was just useless in classics and the sciences.")

Certainly the most visible member of the underground intelligentsia these days is "Jeopardy!" phenom Ken Jennings, a 30-year-old software engineer from Salt Lake City whose pretaped winning streak is the longest and richest in that show's history, and is rumored to be more than half over. And while "Jeopardy!" questions are less complicated than quiz bowl's elaborate clues, Jennings said he figures that roughly 40 percent of his correct answers on "Jeopardy!" came from knowledge he amassed over the years via quiz bowl.

Excellent article. Read the whole thing.

The people I knew at Quiz Bowl were very into quiz bowl, and I'd always wondered why these people didn't go tear through Jeopardy, because they clearly had the knowledge.

By my own estimation, I'd been very successful at quiz bowl in high school, and I knew from their record that my university's Quiz Bowl team wasn't that good.

I was blown away. These people just went out and memorized trivia for the sake of memorizing trivia. [Aside: there are Scrabble afficianados who memorize every possible 2 or 3 letter word, plus stems and many other obscure words] They could tell you the order of opponents in the original Nintendo version of Mike Tyson's Punchout! They could tell you who was on the cover of Newsweek in the 2nd week of November 1989!

Easy trivia questions like "Who was the only President and Supreme Court Justice?" (Taft -- who supposedly much preferred being Chief Justice) is akin to being asked their multiplication tables.

There were areas in which I could compete -- often based sheerly on speed, or because I could better guess where the question was headed -- but I quickly realized I wasn't going to be a star.

Unless you've witnessed this yourself, it's hard to fathom.

Supreme Court rules for AmEx

The Supreme Court has affirmed lower court decisions that resulted in antitrust judgments against Visa and MasterCard. The decision clears the way for banks that issue Visa or MasterCard to also issue Discover and/or American Express.

Also, interesting facts from the article:

Visa has 323 million accounts, MasterCard has 264 million, Discover has 50 million, and American Express has 37.5 million, according to the companies.

Visa cards are 10 more times likely than AmEx. Huh.

Go Astros!

The 'stros now lead the NL wild card race. They've won 6 games in a row and 17 games in a row at home.

Since the Astros lead, if they lose tomorrow to close the regular season and the Giants win, then they will play a one game playoff in San Fran.

Roger Clemens pitches tomorrow for the Astros on only 3 days rest. Manager Phil Garner decided he wanted to give it his best shot, so he's putting Clemens on the mound.

Personally I'd rather give Clemens the day off and save him for a possible onegame playoff.

Merck

Is Merck a buy right now?

I almost bought Martha Stewart's corporation's stock when it was at its nadir. I was convinced it was a good deal, I just didn't get around to it. After all, the fundamentals of the business were still sound. Her supporters seemed to be rallying around her, unconcerned by the jail sentence. And the jail sentence was only going to be a short time anyway.

Apparently the stock price has since doubled.

I haven't researched Merck's situation yet and I haven't been paying attention to the story. But my initial guess is that the market has probably overreacted, and Merck is at a level worth buying.

Oil makes me nervous

I'm a strong believer that energy prices are a significant influence in economic growth. It makes me nervous to have oil over $50 a barrel. I think low energy prices was one of the most overlooked reasons the economy was so strong in the 90s.

I remember getting gas at 86 cents a gallon, and it's now about $1.90 nationally. That's a huge difference on a micro level, and given the multiplier effect it is no surprise that the economy has not been chugging along as swiftly as it might otherwise, particularly when taxes are cut.

ESPN is pulling an MTV

ESPN appears to be taking a page out of MTV's playbook.

MTV built a brand as an edgy, hip music video brand aimed at the 13-35 demographic. Then they dropped the music video, and just became an edgy, hip brand aimed at 13-35. MTV realized that they had built a brand using the music videos, but they could then leverage the brand into entertainment. Now MTV is almost entirely entertainment, with only lip service to music.

ESPN appears to be going in the same direction. They've ridden the poker wave with their World Series of Poker. Their WSOP shows have done extraordinarily well. They have Dream Job, which must've done well in the ratings, because they're starting several other sports-themed reality tv game shows.

No surprise there. More people will tune in to watch a show like Dream Job, with sports info and a plot then will want to watch a mid-July meaningless baseball game between the Expos and the Brewers.

I'm curious though -- no network has really taken over MTV's former niche of music videos. There are a few networks, but none has hit the same prominence. If ESPN continues to move towards entertainment and away from sports, will other networks fill the void? To some degree, there already are competitors (more so than music video networks) such as Comcast Sports or Fox Sports Network.

Cycles

Seems to me that everything in business runs in cycles.

Forbes is running a series on corporate integrity. About Microsoft they say:

One reason Microsoft gets an A for corporate governance is that Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and Chairman Bill Gates, unlike their employees, do not get stock awards.

This amuses me. I wrote previously about not believing the hype around companies, and used Campbells Soup as an example.

Campbells' Board of Directors was given awards for having the best board in America, and one of the reasons -- if I recall correctly -- was that they took the lead in compensating directors in stock options.

Now companies are giving awards for not giving stock options. Figures.

Expos to DC announcement tomorrow?

ESPN.com is reporting that MLB will announce that the Expos are moving to Washington, D.C. tomorrow.

Mayor Anthony Williams said, "I think we'll be in a position where we can have a celebration tomorrow."

The thrill of the chase...

Forbes has an article on a recent study by a U of Minnesota professor that suggests that happiness is largely genetic. No surprise to me, as I generally come down on the nature side in the nature vs. nurture debate.

Another shocker that shouldn't have been: Wealth levels have a limited impact on happiness. Again, this is no surprise to biologists, Ketelaar says, because money is a relatively recent development in the history of human evolution. "Of course individuals aren't built to track wealth," he says. "Prior to agriculture, you couldn't have a society that could amass wealth."

Clues to our behaviors can be found in the brain chemical dopamine, which is the key to the body's reward system. Strangely, in chimpanzees, dopamine levels peak not when they are going to get an award but when they realize the award is coming. That's very similar to our response to money.

For chimpanzees, this kind of brain chemistry can lead to strange behavior. In an essay, Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky described a chimp that chased a prospective mate far beyond what would be reasonable, because the mate dropped occasional signals that she might be willing--maybe, someday. Sapolsky referred to this as the "pleasure and pain of maybe." The chimp was willing to go to great lengths for a hypothetical reward.

In other words, it's the chase that is thrilling. Getting what we want is often not so thrilling.

There's something about setting goals and pursuing them that makes us happy. Achieving goals isn't so important, it's the struggle to achieve.

Career paths

A snippet from Forbes:

Careful observers gained pleasure in a whole other layer of knowledge--less concrete, but more tantalizing--by watching the interaction of speaker and audience. Consider the feverish note-taking of AOL founder Steve Case--now a major land developer in Hawaii--when social observer Malcolm Gladwell noted how often consumers misdirect because they do not know what they desire.

From AOL to major land developer in Hawaii.

Cool, but

Via Small Business Trends, comes the Swiss Memory from Victorinox. Basically, take a swiss army knife and add a USB memory stick.

This is cool, I like the combination. But I wonder if it will work out. If I want a memory stick, I'm more likely to buy a keychain memory stick (widely available these days for only $30 or so) than I am to buy the Swiss Memory. The two products aren't very complementary. The swiss army knife is an outdoors activity, while a memory stick is a decidedly indoors activity.

So I don't know. It's a neat concept, but one I doubt will be popularly successful.

One of the few things (I think) I know about women...

Gordon Smith writes:

Our 19th anniversary is on Monday, but we will not have much of a chance to do anything, so this is part of our anniversary celebration. My wife is the funnest, most interesting person I know, so today undoubtedly will be memorable.

P.S. I noticed that GM gave away 276 cars to celebrate Oprah's 19th season. I haven't thought much about the appropriate gift for #19. Any suggestions?

Yes, I have one. Never admit that you waited until two days before the anniversary to think about her anniversary present. If I were the professor, I'd delete the post right now.

On a more substantive note, my father taught me a very valuable lesson: never get a woman you love anything practical. I have found that jewelry is wonderfully impractical.