Nobody likes a private investigation firm that rats out iffy occupants of rent-controlled/rent-stabilized apartments. But at least these hired snoops are good for the occasional false-identity anecdote:

[Investigator Shane] Williams chimed in about a building where the illegal tenant listed his apartment under the name O. B. Juan KNobi.

Could it be that George Lucas is surreptitiously subletting a pad in some pre-war building downtown? Talk about a disturbance in The Force…

If, like me, you’ve been skeptical of Amazon’s steadfast refusal to disclose just how many Kindles it’s actually sold, you’re not alone:

It’s in Amazon’s best interest to keep Kindle sales details under wraps, said Michael Norris of Simba Information, a research firm that covers the media and publishing industries.

“They can keep this perception of being the market leader without releasing the details,” Norris said. “It’s interesting to sit through Amazon earnings calls and nobody pushes for Kindle details. It’s as if people are trained not to ask.”

In general, e-books net Amazon more profit versus physical books, Norris said. He points to an “amusing” July press release that said the company sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books.

“A lot of the Kindle bestsellers cost 25 cents — of course they’re going to sell better than hardcovers for $14,” Norris said.

“They’re comparing apples to Apple Jacks,” he added. “This kind of message management is beyond normal corporate public relations. And now I’ve gotten so used to it that I’m becoming suspicious of any stats they release.”

I’m sure Amazon has sold a good volume of Kindles by now. But I’m sure they’re not selling like hotcakes — it’s only after all the price cuts and heavy marketing that they started to move. If these truly were ever a hot item, Amazon would have been crowing long and loud about how fast they were flying off the digital shelves, just as any company with a similar best-selling tech device would. Their silence speaks volumes.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen evidence around me of how little penetration Kindles have had. It took a solid six months after the e-reader went on sale, before I saw one “in the wild” here in New York — and this is a prime territory for such a device. Meanwhile, I spied my first iPad being toted around within hours of its sales release. That’s a bit apples-to-oranges, in that there are several Apple Stores locally, and so there wouldn’t be the same lag in mail-order delivery. But still, I think it’s reflective enough of the reality that Amazon is trying to hide.

All told, the push for these dedicated e-readers feels like a race to the bottom. The now-standard notebook computers will morph into iPad-like designs, making other third-screen devices (other than phones) superfluous. Amazon and the other entrants in that space can cook the numbers all they like toward that end, but that won’t change the eventual outcome.

I’m going through my second reading of Bret Easton Ellis’ “Imperial Bedrooms”, and I’m struck by this matching set of questions:

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

These questions present themselves at different points in the book, but the duality they represent is pivotal to the plot. Not to give anything away, but they echo the sentiment — from Ellis’ prequel narrative, “Less Than Zero” — to “see the worst”.

All of which sets me to wondering: What if the answer to both questions is the very same event? A deed so foul that it victimizes the same person who carried it out — think crimes against humanity, etc. — should rank right up there in self-inflicted torment. I’m guessing that that’s not normal for most people, and thankfully so.

Early last week, I received a couple of unsolicited offers for revenue generation from the content I’ve generated on the Web:

- D2, a newspaper-insert magazine-lette akin to the New York Times’ T Magazine, requested permission to use a long-ago photo I took of the former American Apparel billboard adspace on Manhattan’s Houston Street (a crop of which is featured above).

- The same day, someone at vectorTrap asked to place a text ad on the index page of this blog. Something to do with wireless phone service, I think.

The common thread? Both offers flaked out. I might have scared them off. I asked for a relatively hefty sum from vectorTrap (“hefty” if you consider that I’m sure these outfits usually pay out only a couple of bucks to more naive bloggers), while I told D2 that I’d expect accreditation and some sort of compensation. I didn’t hear back from either after relaying that information. I know D2’s request was time-sensitive, hinging on the production deadline for their next issue, so I assume they moved on.

No big loss, although I’d gladly take the money/credit if it was offered up. Part of my ulterior motive was to avoid going out of my way for such non-spam inquiries, so in that sense, I got what I wanted. The micro-monetization of user-generated Web content doesn’t seem well-structured for substantial cash outlays.

I suppose this is an inflection point in entertainment media: Hollywood’s favorite stock-sound effect, The Wilhelm Scream, is increasingly finding its way into today’s videogames.

Next thing you know, the gaming studios will get even more cinematic and start using the same newspaper prop over and over.

This afternoon, while walking down 8th Avenue toward 14th Street, I passed by a too-tall, too-obvious drag queen. S/he locked eye contact with me, and slowly drew out these words:

“You look mahhhhvelous!”

I muttered a quick “thank you”. And with that, we went our separate ways.

I don’t know if this complimenting queen was channeling Billy Crystal or Fernando Lamas, or both. Or more likely, neither. Regardless, this vignette gives me a good enough excuse to showcase one of my favorite vintage “Saturday Night Live” skits, Fernando’s Hideaway:

Despite my newly-enshrined marvelousness, I have never been to a Hollywood party where dildo-like bodybuilding objects were offered as hors d’oeuvres. But I do know one thing: That it is better to look good than to feel good. If you know what I am saying to you.

The American Psychological Association apparently feels that we’re due for a Seduction of the Innocent Part Two, with modern-day movie superheroes as the corrupters of young boys.

“There is a big difference in the movie superhero of today and the comic book superhero of yesterday,” said psychologist Sharon Lamb, PhD, distinguished professor of mental health at University of Massachusetts-Boston. “Today’s superhero is too much like an action hero who participates in non-stop violence; he’s aggressive, sarcastic and rarely speaks to the virtue of doing good for humanity. When not in superhero costume, these men, like Iron Man, exploit women, flaunt bling and convey their manhood with high-powered guns.”

The comic book heroes of the past did fight criminals, she said, “but these were heroes boys could look up to and learn from because outside of their costumes, they were real people with real problems and many vulnerabilities,” she said.

Somehow, I think that Stan Lee is eating this up.

It’s been the mass medium of choice for the past half-century-plus. So it’s only appropriate that TV is now showing its age, demographically:

The median age for viewers at [CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox] is now 51. The broadcasters’ audience has aged at twice the rate of the general population during the past two decades, according to a new report. It’s a quiet trend with a real impact on the way they do business.

“It should be a concern, but it doesn’t seem to be a concern at the moment,” said Steve Sternberg, who wrote the report for Baseline Inc., an information source for the film and TV industries that is owned by The New York Times Co. “You don’t want to have CBS, ABC and NBC all having median ages in their mid-50s.”

The risk in having a rapidly aging audience is the networks becoming less relevant to advertisers, the backbone of their business. Increasingly, that’s a way of thinking that itself is getting old…

A young audience has always been the holy grail for networks, but that’s changing, said Alan Wurtzel, research chief at NBC. Not only are more older viewers available, advertisers are starting to recognize that they spend money and are receptive to their messages.

“But that’s changing” has been the supposed trend for the past couple of decades now. When the chips are down, though, advertisers still skew their pitches to the younger end of the spectrum. The fact is, there’s a cachet in tailoring marketing messages to young adults, because it appeals to older demos and their aspirations to identify themselves as “still young” or “not that old”. That’s not going to change — in fact, I’ve argued that it’s a societal trend that’s only going to get more pronounced.

That doesn’t mean that television will be part of that persistent process. The aging of the boob tube audience is a testament to how fragmented the media landscape has become, especially to youngsters who never experienced a world of TV as the primary media outlet. Without that force-of-habit viewership, we are indeed seeing a fundamental shift in media consumption:

Does TV begin a decade-long transformation, similar to what radio went through in the 1950s, with various shows and other programming migrating online, leaving behind… What? Infomercials and pharmaceutical ads on the boob tube, branding it as something that only “old people” watch?

I think that question, which I asked only a little over a year ago, has been answered by these numbers. Welcome to the end of the Television Age.

I don’t listen to enough radio to give much of a damn about the medium. But one trend has me puzzled: What’s with applying identity-like brandnames to individual stations?

Many radio station names are basically mnemonic devices for remembering the call letters — stations like KROQ in Los Angeles (“K-Rock”) or New York’s WHTZ (“W-Hits”) — and some even manage to turn the mnemonic into a brand, as did San Francisco’s KLLC, known as “Alice,” a name that goes beyond the call letters to effectively evoke its “chick rock” brand identity as well as referencing Lewis Carroll’s famous Alice (their in-studio webcam is called the “Looking Glass”) and the lyrics of “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane (“Go ask Alice…”).

A growing trend, I think, is that more and more radio stations are beginning to realize that there’s no law requiring them to be named after their call letters, so you get stations like San Francisco’s KSAN calling themselves “The Bone,” a name related more to their hard classic rock format and brand identity than their call letters (which, typically, just relate to the local area). When a station has an evocative name, it has more than just call letters or a handy way to remember the call letters — it has a brand. And since radio is now such a competitive big media business, brands are more important than ever. So The Bone’s listeners are called “Boneheads” and KFOG’s are called “Fogheads,” and all kinds of promotion is done playing-off the names.

The local New York examples that come to mind: The Breeze 107.1 (hardly unique, as I’m betting there are a few hundred easy listening stations across the land that use the same name); The Peak 107.1 (Adult Album Alternative format, whatever that’s supposed to be); and The Wolf 94.3 (upstate-oriented country music). The trend is probably more prevalent on non-music format stations, chiefly news and talk.

Music stations are so homogenized, with the same songs on virtual repeat for days/months/years, that some kind of station-based branding is the only way to build listener loyalty. What makes it unique is how it’s applied strictly on the local level — by necessity, but still. Television networks do the same thing, especially when they’re niche (Spike TV, Cooking Channel, etc.); but they have the additional advantage of exclusive content to distinguish themselves. With radio, outside of format restrictions, the same song can be heard on a range of stations.

The big constraint in communicating these brands: They’re always accompanied by the station frequency. That’s another necessity, because the goal is to have people know where to tune in. But it’s an awkward pitch. To me, it sounds goofy: “Music festival sponsored by one-oh-two-point-five The Sound!”.

But again, radio is largely dead to me, so maybe I’m immune to this marketing angle. The charms of station-monikering escape me.

Seems that Fox Network gave Craig Kilborn a new show, and then neglected to tell anyone about it:

After five weeks of its six-week test, “The Kilborn File” is averaging a 0.9 rating/2 share weighted metered market average, according to Nielsen Media Research, across Fox-owned stations in seven markets. That’s down 53% from the show’s 1.9/4 average lead-in and 47% compared to last summer’s 1.7/4 average in the time slots.

From what I can tell, the show’s already off the air in the New York market. That, and the above numbers, indicate that the gamble that Kilborn’s old audience flocking to this vehicle were ill-founded. Given that he hasn’t been on the tube in six years, it was a foolish assumption to begin with.

And I say that as a Kilborn fan. He had a memorable presence on “SportsCenter”, providing a solid supporting role during ESPN’s “Big Show” era. And hold onto your hats: I actually preferred him as the original host of the original iteration of “The Daily Show”, over Jon Stewart and what that show morphed into.

So I’m a little disappointed that “File” tanked. Maybe there’s an opening in Bristol that Kilborn can revert back to; that might actually prompt me to tune into the World Wide Leader in Sports again.

Kudos to New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott, who decoded the I’m-quitting saga of JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater in a pop-cultural context:

How many see the resemblance between Steven Slater of #jetblue and Stephen Stucker, who played the sassy Johnny character in “Airplane”?

Sure enough, the resemblance is uncanny. I would have run side-by-side headshots of Steven and Stephen, but I couldn’t find decent enough photos of them (not surprisingly for Stucker, who’s been dead for a quarter-century). But it’s there. The fact that they are/were both gay probably also contributes to the similarity.

It also doesn’t hurt that Slater’s real-life meltdown could have been scripted right out of Airplane!. And by the way, don’t call me Shirley.

This sign, adorning a Chelsea storefront, says it in as blunt a manner as possible:

Because summertime is the right time to have a store-wide sale on “most shit”. The rest of the shit inventory gets moved during the winter sale, I’m guessing.

Corning has gone through its R&D vaults to unveil something called Gorilla Glass — a super-strong yet flexible material ideal for televisions, touchscreens and other electronics.

Corning set out in the late 1950s to find a glass as strong as steel. Dubbed Project Muscle, the effort combined heating and layering experiments and produced a robust yet bendable material called Chemcor…

In 2006, when demand surfaced for a cell phone cover glass, Corning dug out Chemcor from its database, tweaked it for manufacturing in LCD tanks, and renamed it Gorilla. “Initially, we were telling ourselves a $10 million business,” said researcher Ron Stewart.

Interesting that Corning felt the need to re-brand an industrial component with a snappier name. Does “Gorilla” sound more appealing to manufacturers than the technical-sounding “Chemcor”? Should that matter, when it’s performance that counts? This hints that business-to-business marketing resorts to the same tactics used for consumer-facing selljobs.

Metro Washington has suffered without a streetcred-worthy nickname for long enough, so hipsters in the District and its Maryland-Virginia environs are promoting “the DMV”:

Sleek, succinct and inclusive, the name has been in common use for several years among the area’s — ahem, the DMV’s — hip-hop and go-go music crowd. It’s familiar to listeners of black-oriented radio stations such as WKYS-FM and WPGC-FM, whose DJs decorate their patter with mentions of it. It also pops up as geographical shorthand (“DMV man seeks woman”) on Craigslist.

Hate to break this to them, but here in New York, “the DMV” is instantly-recognizable shorthand for the Department of Motor Vehicles. That’s been the case for decades, and it’s not going to change easily. I know that not every state shares that designator for its driver’s license clearinghouse, but most in the Northeast do — including DC.

Adopting the widely-known mark of a perpetually unpopular bureaucracy as a civic tag? At first I thought it was a weak ploy. But, we are talking about Red Tape Central here. So I guess it’s perfect.

It’s been exactly 15 years since the release of controversial film Kids, which offered up this grit-core imagery of misspent Manhattan youth:

The plot seems inconsequential compared to some of the set pieces: the opening shots of the ‘Virgin Surgeon’ Telly deflowering an impossibly young looking girl; Caspar beating a man twice his age with his skateboard; Harold Hunter slapping his penis between his thighs in a public pool. It was crude, yet compelling — Kids felt authentic and thus gained importance because of its perceived authenticity. The lives these 13-to-17-year-olds lived seemed real. Janet Maslin of the then particularly dreary New York Times called it a “wake up call to the world”—this was then touted in the trailer.

“Seemed real” was key. Even though it was obviously a scripted movie, the mannerisms and body language of many of the young players were enough to lull you into thinking you were catching snippets of a demented documentary. The devouring of doomed children theme was, of course, provocative enough.

And maybe, toward the end of New York City socio-cultural nadir, that realism was too much to bear:

It seems that in many ways the city seems to have forgotten the film, just as many of those involved in the film also seem happy to forget it. Some might expect some sort of celebration of the 15th anniversary of the film, but few seem to be talking. ([Director] Larry Clark’s agent did not respond to inquiries.) [Writer] Harmony Korine has moved away from the realism of that film’s concept and execution, settling most recently on a bizarre faux-realism in his faux-documentary Trash Humpers. “It was not a movie I was dying to tell,” he has said of Kids. And our “Sassy” intern, Chloe Sevigny, has since said that she can’t bear to watch the film, and that she doesn’t like the movie much.

It was a landmark film, but I’m not sure what’s to be gained from a retrospective right now. It works well as a period piece, its shock value intact; in that way, it speaks for itself. The movie itself is teen-aged right now, and that’s enough. Maybe another 15 years of perspective is needed for a substantial look back.

It’s true: When you massage the written word for a living, there’s no happy ending.

The job has its perks — an accumulation of random knowledge, for instance — but it also has its side effects when you unintentionally drink the copy Kool-Aid. Once you train yourself to spot errors, you can’t not spot them. You can’t simply shut off the careful reading when you leave the office. You notice typos in novels, missing words in other magazines, incorrect punctuation on billboards. You have nightmares that your oversight turned Mayor Bloomberg into a “pubic” figure. You walk by a beauty salon the morning after you had sex for the first time with a guy you’ve been seeing and point out that there’s no such thing as “lazer” hair removal, realizing that this may not be the best way to get to have sex with him again.

I’ve never consciously let grammar-policing get in the way of personal relationships. The closest I’ve come is in playing the spoiler to those early-Internet chain emails which contained the usual crackpot urban myths. Friends and family would inexplicably get mad at me for debunking nonsense like the Oliver North “warning” about Osama bin Laden back in 1987, and subsequently exclude me from the forward-message fun. (So I guess my compulsiveness paid off!)

Even though copyediting isn’t my primary gig anymore, I find the auto-editing switch in my brain never has turned off. In fact, it’s gone beyond bulls-eyeing mere typos — hardly a sporting pursuit since the advent of the filter-less Web. I now find it hard to read, watch, or listen to any lengthy piece, and not critique its overall structure: How it could have been shortened here, reworked in that section, and so on. I can’t decide if it’s a real problem for me or not. In some ways, it’s gratifying (on a strictly personal, internal level).

I’m not above triggering an online meme based around images of some anonymous hot chick. And so:

The above two ads have been making the rounds on websites I routinely visit. Nothing particularly special about them — one’s pushing the acai berry fad, while the other claims to hook you up with Apple gadgets for low-low prices. Nothing shady there, I’m sure.

But obviously, the common thread is that tanned blonde woman, posing as some kind of investigative reporter in both instances. She must have a fairly free-formed beat if she’s covering “breaking news” on both superfoods and iPads. Reportage versatility is highly valued…

Obviously, she serves as an eye-catching prop in both ads. It probably works too, to the tune of an extra percentage-point or two in clickthrus. I’m just wondering who she is, and what possible connection there is. Is she actually behind both ventures, as a sort of scammer-girl of all trades? Or simply a stock-photo model, whose image was procured by separate ripoff operations? From such are online mysteries born…

Who better than Franz Kafka — or, at least, his legacy — to get caught up in a courtroom-setting morass over ownership of the author’s personal papers?

A protracted legal battle over the contents of four safe-deposit boxes in a Swiss bank, believed by some to contain unpublished works by Franz Kafka or other material shedding light on his life, came to an end on Wednesday when an Israeli judge ruled that the papers should be made public. The decision follows the opening earlier this week of a vault at a UBS bank in Zurich, where the documents were stashed in 2008 by two Israeli sisters who had fought for two years to keep the papers private.

The first find is a handwritten, unpublished short story. If the trademark Kafka quirkiness holds, it should be about the alienation stemming from having your correspondence rifled through after your death — and be fittingly unfinished…

The alleged demands of SEO started taking a toll on online news headline-crafting years ago, and now we see the bland results:

Newspapers still have headlines, of course, but they don’t seem to strive for greatness or to risk flopping anymore, because editors know that when the stories arrive on the Web, even the best headlines will be changed to something dull but utilitarian. That’s because, on the Web, headlines aren’t designed to catch readers’ eyes. They are designed for “search engine optimization,” meaning that readers who are looking for information about something will find the story, giving the newspaper a coveted “eyeball.” Putting well-known names in headlines is considered shrewd, even if creativity suffers.

Early this year, the print edition of The Washington Post had this great headline on a story about Conan O’Brien’s decision to quit rather than accept a later time slot: “Better never than late.” Online, it was changed to “Conan O’Brien won’t give up ‘Tonight Show’ time slot to make room for Jay Leno.”

I still question why such pun-filled blurb creativity needs to be sacrificed. I can’t believe that Google or any other content-crawler would penalize a page that’s otherwise chock-full of pertinent keywords, just because the headline doesn’t precisely jibe. In fact, I’d think that a unique hed would make an article link stand out from the surrounding vanilla descriptions. As in the above example: After scanning line after line of “Conan-Tonight-Leno-etc.”, wouldn’t the clever wordplay of “Better Never Than Late” lure more eyeballs, just out of curiosity? I’d like to think so.

I had thought that the model in that York Peppermint Pattie commercial looked familiar: It’s Alexi from IMBOYCRAZY.COM!

And this is that commercial, spliced together with Requiem for a Dream:

I think the extreme closeup on the pupil in both video-works was the inspirational hook. How else to draw a line between mint-flavoring and heroin? And the chop-quick cut scenes complete the parallels. Well done.

Not that Alexi endorses the smack habit. But she does encourage you to tan it, in the event that you can’t tone it. Yeah.

It may seem morose to dwell on the following passage out of Bret Easton Ellis’ “The Informers”, but it’s been in my head for the past few days, so I might as well share it. From the end of the story/chapter “On The Beach”:

I walk away from Mona. I know what the word gone means. I know what the word dead means. You deal with it, you mellow out, you head back to town… “I know what the word dead means,” I whisper to myself as softly as I can because it sounds like an omen.

Mortality and nihilism, tied up in a tidy package of misery. Does the job.