The Raven

Wednesday, December 18, 2002

The Raven's Guide to Christmas Decorations

We're not humbugs at Raven HQ. True, if you're in a group of carolers and you step onto my property, I'm liable to come out and shoot you. Some people are suckers for the ruddy-cheeked faces and ankle-length scarves, but not me. Keep it on the parkway and we'll get along just fine.

Still, we make a good faith effort to get into the spirit of the season, so we put lights on the house. This is partly because it's festive, but mostly because our neighbors are insane. They confuse low-flying aircraft into thinking there's a landing strip down here, and I can drive the last quarter-mile home with my headlights off, it's that bright. Well, they put pressure on you, and if you don't have that display ready by November 1st, you'll be sorry.

This year I put up our standard "tasteful display" number, and while I was crawling around on the roof, dangling over the eaves and wetting my pants, I reflected on what separates a top-notch display from the second-rate.

Less Is More

With decorations—like lip gloss, perfume, and lingerie—a little bit goes a long way. You want your house to be the "slinky black dress with a string of pearls" on the block, not the gussied-up town whore. We line the eaves visible from the street with a strand of lights, and put a few into the hedges. You can see our indoor tree through the windows, and the whole affair acknowledges Christmas without going overboard.

Go Little

Forget those old jalapeno-sized painted lights, they're passe. The trend today is for the tiny white lights: that's why they use them for year-round outdoor decorations at upscale venues. They "twinkle" merrily, and draw less power—a real plus in these lean times.

Color Me Gone

Stick with the white bulbs for the heavy coverage. We use multicolored bulbs for the front hedges as contrast, but you want to go easy. Just a touch and you're home free. I've seen some nice effects with dark blue lights in a front-lawn tree, and here again, easy does it. Figure two colors at most and you can't go wrong.

Static Cling

No "blinkers." You don't want to set off the epileptics in your neighborhood with a riot of flashing, whooping, animated lighting. Screw that. Your options are "on" and "off." Keep it simple and don't even think about the computer-controlled crap.

Santa's Dead

Not the live dude, the giant plastic one on the lawn. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but a 7-foot polystyrene Santa with a light bulb inside doesn't look like Santa, it looks like some cheap plastic crap out in front of your house. That goes for the reindeer, the elves, the nativity scene, the giant candles, the whole bag of bananas. If you must have the Jesus and Mary bit, do it in plaster and light it indirectly.

Bag the Mail

In this case, that means you want to avoid winding gold and silver tinsel garlands around your mailbox. I see that, I write you off as a cognizant life form.

Cut It Out

The paper cut-outs people stick in their windows? "Have a Wal-Mart Christmas!" Just... don't.

Can the Weather

Another bad idea is that "Jack-Frost-In-a-Can" crap. You know, people spray that on their windows, so you think, "Hey, it's 95 friggin' degrees here in Palm Springs, but those folks have rime ice building up." Either they're insane, or you are. Hint: You aren't.

The Third Dimension

My next-door neighbors commit this crime. It involves some sheets of plywood that are spray-painted white, and have slots in them. They stick 'em together and make something that's supposed to look like a couple of cavorting reindeer. Newsflash: It looks like some ugly-assed sheets of white-painted plywood.

What happens when people eschew the sensible advice above? Behold, and tremble.

Here's another nut-job who couldn't stop buying stuff when he got to the Outdoors department at Lowe's. They brag:

This year we have 65,000 lights, most of them minis. Fifteen artificial trees in the front are controlled by a disk-jockey type sound activated controller. They flash on and off in 16 patterns according to the music. We encourage viewers to walk through the back and then take a drive past the back from a block away.

These jokers in Bakersfield, CA, have named their deal, and call it Lightasmic!: "It's 185,000 lights all synchronized to music with computer!" You can see more of this kind of thing over at Planet Christmas, where people put up so much junk they draw more power every night than some third world countries consume in a month.

If you absolutely must have a lawn ornament, why not go Lugosi? This "Dracula Nativity" could be yours and the e-bay auction ends tomorrow, so move fast.

be the hit of your block or trailer park, this christmas!

no one will have one of these!

WHAT AN AWESOME DISPLAY!

perfect for this christmas nativity, or for that dracula or cat fan!

What does this guy do, put the Santa out on Halloween?

7:18:42 PM

Touchtone Terrorists

This morning's Raven looks at developments in the communicative world of telemarketing. We've pulled in what's happening at the government level, the industry itself, and what activists are doing to fight back. Here's the enemy poised in mid-call. Happily chatting with you. At dinnertime. If you're like me, when that phone rings at 8:00 pm, whether you say it out loud or not, you're thinking, "This had better not be a telemarketing call. I swear to God if it is I'm gonna 'go off' on the clown." But Omni Telemarketing sees it a little differently:

At Omni Telemarketing, we know the phone was never meant to be an instrument of torture. Our clients have gotten plenty of feedback and they'll tell you—people actually like talking to us.

Is that you laughing out loud, or is it me? Let's start with the industry's own predictions:

Nearly 265,000 US companies will be using telemarketing in the near future.
The overall consumer penetration of telemarketing adds up to an unbelieveable 47.5 million households.
Two factors have primarily fueled this growth: Costs of other marketing media has risen, while telemarketing costs have gone down.
Statistics indicate that the yearly sales of goods and services by phone in the US totals well over $150 billion.

Sorry to hit you with numbers early in the day, but it's important to remember that the call-you-up people have a serious incentive to do it. The economics involved allow no other posture. Yet the main war isn't in the trenches, with Joe Familyman screaming at a caller and hanging up furious, it's taking place in Washington, where AT&T lobbies hard with senators, and the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) seeks out and destroys pro-consumer legislation.

The DMA's president once said; "The goal of the DMA is to discover and to thwart possible government regulation, and we have done it."

My interest was piqued this morning by a headline at the NYT announcing "FTC Creates New Rules for Telemarketers." I scanned this to see if any new tools have been enacted on our behalf. I see the standard bit about a new national "do-not-call" list, which is important because so far such lists have been restricted to in-state marketers.

Federal Trade Commission officials said that under the strengthened rules telemarketers also must transmit identifying information that can be viewed by services like Caller ID and limit the number of "abandoned" calls that hang up or leave people listening to silence on the line.

I get those silent calls all the time. I've gathered that these are often computers that are speed-dialing through lists and checking off the "hello's" for later live calling. Regardless, we'll show you how the above rules have already been been cirumvented. First, the "caller ID" bit. A related article mentions that some marketers are "sending a dummy telephone number with their calls" to defeat that and Call Intercept.

Onto the next part of the ruling:

Consumers who register on the Internet or with one call to a toll-free government number would remain on the list for five years before having to renew.

That sounds good, doesn't it? Makes it seem like you really want to be on that list, and if you are, the marketers will be required to check it "every three months." The DMA has already responded by warning that it "intends to pursue all legal and equitable courses of action" to overturn this roadblock. But that's just a pro forma protest, because of several "exceptions" to the new protections, allowing a company to call you if:

You bought, leased or rented something from the seller within 18 months.
You inquired or applied for something during the last three months.
They are a charity.

It's that second one that's going to let them off the hook and keep you on the line, because any company that buys the FTC list (as telemarketers are required to do) or the DMA list will be able to classify you as a "customer" in a technical sense.

Back to those "silent calls" you get. Most of these are from something called "predictive dialers," which work in tandem with banks of live operators. The idea is that the dialer machine anticipates that a telemarketer is just about to terminate one call, and routes you, who are saying "hello?" right to 'em.

"It increases productivity immensely," adding 15 minutes of productive talk time per hour of work, said Jerry Cerasale, vice president for government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association.

Multiple Lines of Defense

The savvy consumer needs to employ a "defense-in-depth" strategy to obtain relief. We've mentioned Caller ID and Call Intercept, two services you have to pay the phone company for, and a lot of people are doing that. Another weapon is the Telezapper. This device won't protect you from a live caller, but it is supposed to do a fair job of confusing predictive dialer software. Amazon says you can get one for $37.99. From the company's literature:

The TeleZapper is designed to "zap" calls made by predictive dialer computers by doing two things: first, by disconnecting predictive-dialed calls before you can be connected to a live telemarketer and second, by deleting your phone number from telemarketing computer lists.

Do these really work? Some reviews suggest you'd be better off saving the forty bucks. This guy says there are trade-offs:

But after the first while, I got very annoyed with it. Often, I would pick up the phone and nobody would be there. You are basically trading one inconvenience for another: a telemarketer vs. dead air. Both are annoying when they come at a bad time.

So much for the Zapper. The Raven prefers to human engineer the unwanted caller, and likes the creative counterstrike. For example, here's Tom Mabe, a comedian who sells recordings of himself torturing phone pests:

In one conversation, he tells a salesman from a funeral home that it's lucky he called, because he's been contemplating suicide and was waiting for a sign from God. Then he asks if the company has a credit plan.

You need to exercise some caution. If the marketer thinks you're doinking him around, he might retaliate. One of them interviewed for the above article says that, "if someone was mean and rude, they would pass that number around the room for everyone to call, and share it with other telemarketers to get even." The Wall Street Journal gives a thumbs up to Private Citizen, an activist group it calls "The telemarketing industry's worst nightmare." They have an impressive Website, and joining them puts you on some heavyweight lists marketers are likely to pay attention to. Another activist site, Stop Junk Calls, is run by Californians Against Telephone Solicitation (CATS) and that link takes you to a go-round between Circuit City and group's founder. Fun reading. If you're into some of the technical issues involved with building your own Telezapper, including free phreaking tones, try this link.

When we've discussed this issue in the past, we've mentioned Martijn Engelbregt's telemarketing counterscript, and during our research for today's Raven noticed several others out there, too. There's no comparison: Martijn's is the best hands-down. Once you start pumping them for information, the equation changes completely.

11:41:43 AM