Wally Is Right On About Retirement!

Wally—Dilbert's co-worker—spends most of his time walking around with a coffeee mug. The pointy-haired boss reminds me of a lot of the administrators at the Collegium. One bright idea after another. The idea of a 15-year vacation and returning 10 minutes prior to retirement REALLY appeals to me! Wally's idea of returning so recharged that he will do 20 years of work in 10 minutes is nothing short of genius. If this be (fair & balanced) malingering, so be it!



Copyright © 2003 Scott Adams

Let's Hear It For Solo Consumers!

I always KNEW that I would be a cutting-edge guy. Now, I am on the cutting-edge. This could be the greatest population shift since the baby boom. Or, not. More likely, I am on the blunt edge of change and can't tell the difference. If this be (fair & balanced) demography, so be it.

[x Christian Science Monitor]
The power of 1
About one-fourth of Americans now live alone. As their numbers grow, these singles are becoming a significant cultural and economic force.

By Marilyn Gardner | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

As Laura Peet put the finishing touches on plans for a vacation in Italy this month, her anticipation ran high. For years she had dreamed of visiting Tuscany, Rome, and the Cinque Terra. Now the trip was at hand, with just one thing missing: someone to share it with her.

"I was holding out on Italy as a honeymoon spot," says Ms. Peet, a marketing consultant in New York. "That hasn't happened yet, so I'm going for my birthday."

Score one for independence and pragmatism, the hallmarks of 21st-century singlehood. In numbers and attitudes, people like Peet are creating a demographic revolution that is slowly and quietly reshaping the social, cultural, and economic landscape.

In 1940, less than 8 percent of Americans lived alone. Today that proportion has more than tripled, reaching nearly 26 percent. Singles number 86 million, according to the Census Bureau, and virtually half of all households are now headed by unmarried adults.

Signs of this demographic revolution, this kingdom of singledom, appear everywhere, including Capitol Hill.

Last month the Census Bureau reported that 132 members of the House of Representatives have districts in which the majority of households are headed by unmarried adults.

In Hollywood, television programs feature singles game shows, reality shows, sitcoms, and hits such as "Sex and the City."
Read all about it

Off-screen, whole forests are being felled to print a burgeoning genre of books geared to singles, primarily women. Nonfiction self-help books, written in breezy, upbeat tones, serve as cheerleaders for singlehood and advice-givers on how to find a marriage partner.

A category of fiction dubbed Chick Lit spans everything from Bridget Jones to titles such as "Pushing 30." Harlequin Books publishes a special imprint called Red Dress Ink, billed as "stories that reflect the lifestyles of today's urban, single woman."

In June, a panel at Printer's Row Book Fair in Chicago discussed "The Fiction of Singledom." The well-attended event attracted a predominantly female audience, says panelist Steve Almond of Somerville, Mass., whose writings include short stories about singles.

Events like this, together with books for singles, dating services and websites, personals ads, and five-minute dating sessions, add up to big business, so sprawling that it cannot be quantified. Mr. Almond calls it the "commercialization of romantic connections."

To help the unattached make connections, even museums are getting into the act. As one example, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts holds a monthly gathering called First Friday, appealing to singles who want more cultured, upscale places to mingle than clubs and bars.

Singles with discretionary time to work out at the gym feed a thriving fitness culture. Travel agencies and special tour groups are also capitalizing on this market. Many travelers, like Peet, go alone. Within the United States, singles take 27 percent of all trips, according to the Travel Industry Association of America.

In supermarkets, the giant economy size still exists, but sharing shelf space with it is a newer invention: single- serving sizes. Mike Deagle of the Grocery Manufacturers of America calls it a "significant trend," although no statistics yet track those changes.

Even restaurants are finding ways to woo the growing number of singles who eat out. Marya Charles Alexander of Carlsbad, Calif., publishes an online newsletter, SoloDining.com, with a dual purpose. It urges restaurants to make solo diners feel welcome - no fair banishing them to Siberia, next to the swinging kitchen door. And it encourages customers eating alone to find pleasure in the experience.

"I do think 9/11 has definitely affected the way singles feel about their quality of life," Ms. Alexander says. "They're going to enjoy right now. More and more of them are saying, 'I am living my life today. I'm not going to be staying home, not going to be shackled by whatever people think about me eating out by myself.' "

A scattering of restaurants offer communal tables, enabling those arriving alone to share conversation. As Alexander notes, "Times are not as rosy as they were in the past for restaurateurs. It makes good business sense to cater to these people who are hungry and looking for an invitation to eat out."

For those setting a table for one at home, other help exists. Retirement communities are holding classes with cheerful titles such as "Cooking for One Can Be Fun," and adult education programs offer Cooking 101, geared to those living alone.

Singles are also nesting in record numbers. Traditionally, one-third of home buyers are single, with women buying houses at double the rate of men, according to the National Association of Realtors. Peet recently bought a house in rural Connecticut, becoming one of the 6 percent of single women who own second homes. In 2001, 10 percent of second homes were bought by single women and 10 percent by single men. All these new households in turn are helping to feather the nests of businesses that sell home furnishings, kitchenware, and lawn equipment.

Unmarried Americans are also changing the face of organized religion. Because younger singles often do not attend regularly, some churches and temples are creating special services to attract them. At Temple Kehillath Israel in Brookline, Mass., a monthly Shabbat service and dinner on Friday evening targets the generation between 22 and 32. And St. Paul's Cathedral (Episcopal) in Boston holds a Sunday evening gathering for those in their 20s and 30s.

"The institutional church is starting to awaken to the fact that churches tend to be almost reflexively family- oriented," says the Very Rev. John P. Streit, dean of the cathedral. "That can be unintentionally exclusive to people who aren't married and don't have kids. The church is starting to pay more attention and be more careful about its language, the way it structures its programs, and who it imagines is sitting in the pews."

In the secular world, that kind of attention to singles is crucial as well. "We've got disposable income," Peet says, using as an example a friend who just bought herself diamond earrings. Other unmarried women are treating themselves to a "right-hand ring," complete with diamonds.

Still, solo consumers may represent an untapped market. "I've been waiting 15 years for advertisers to catch on that single people are important," says Joan Allen, author of "Celebrating Single and Getting Love Right."

Marcia Stein, who lives alone in Washington, D.C., offers another example of singles' power at the cash register - power that businesses ignore at their peril. She says, "When I go to the grocery store, there are huge portions in the meat department. I will often say, 'Will you split this?' Some places will, some places won't. Where they won't, why should I become a customer?"

Not all singles enjoy the luxury of plentiful disposable income, of course. "Living alone is not economically feasible a lot of times," says Sandi Garcia, a 20-something who handles marketing for the Wyoming Business Council in Cheyenne. "It definitely helps to have a double income. It is so expensive to live alone."

As the ranks of singles grow, so does the recognition that dating is not the exclusive province of the young. Noting that there are more older singles than at any time in the nation's history, AARP last month launched online dating services for those between 40 and 69.

This age group represents a lucrative market for other businesses as well. Alexander, who is launching a website of travel resources called SoloTravelPortal. com, says, "Many travel organizations are waking up to the fact that there are mature solos who are saying, 'It's time for me to get out and see all the things I had planned on doing.' It's a group of people who are just beginning to get their sea legs. They're casting out a lot of the societal shackles singles have been living under."

Although singles now have the power to change some things, the agenda is far from finished. Ms. Allen finds that "enormous stigmas" against single men and women still exist. These include inconsistencies in the law and subtle biases in the workplace.
Some things still slow to change

Research by Unmarried America, a group promoting equal rights for unmarried workers, consumers, and taxpayers, finds that single employees generally make less money than married workers, have a higher unemployment rate, and receive less compensation for benefits. Unmarried employees make up more than 42 percent of the nation's workforce, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

"Having been single most of my professional career, there have been times when I've felt I was carrying the weight of people with families," Peet says. "And I understand the need for children and parents to have tax breaks, but on the other hand, I don't want to be penalized because I don't have children."

She offers another example of inequities. "When I was married, my car insurance was a certain level, and when I got divorced it went up. Married people were regarded as more responsible. Clearly that needs to change."

What will it take to create a more solo-friendly world?

Thomas Coleman, executive director of Unmarried America in Glendale, Calif., wants political parties to recognize singles. They make up 35 percent of voters, giving them potential power in the polling booth.

Even so, Mr. Coleman says, "It's a tough sell. Democrats seem to take the single vote for granted. Republicans are traditionally, understandably more family, family, family." He also sees the need for a singles-friendly workplace campaign to counterbalance popular work-family initiatives. At the same time, he emphasizes that his organization is not antifamily.

Whatever unfinished business remains, Allen and Coleman, among others, see strength and inevitable progress in numbers. "I do think there's a new evolution going on," Allen says. "Eventually the stigmas will subside."

Adds Coleman, "Even though single people are not organized politically, the sheer numbers, the weight of those numbers is eventually going to force change, slowly."

Copyright © 2003 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

5 O'clock Follies Redux

I dare anyone to read Frank Rich's review of the Bush administration's campaign of disinformation and NOT be very, very afraid. History does not repeat itself. We just keep repeating the same mistakes, over, and over, and over again. Rummy and McNamara eerily are akin. Condi Rice on Oprah! W gets his news from Condi and Andy (Card)? This is madness. If this be (fair & balanced) fear and loathing, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
October 26, 2003
FRANK RICH
Why Are We Back in Vietnam?

n his now legendary interview last month with Brit Hume of Fox News, George W. Bush explained that he doesn't get his news from the news media — not even Fox. "The best way to get the news is from objective sources," the president said, laying down his utopian curriculum for Journalism 101. "And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."

Those sources? Condoleezza Rice and Andrew Card. Mr. Hume, helpfully dispensing with the "We Report" half of his network's slogan, did not ask the obvious follow-up question: What about us poor benighted souls who don't have these crack newscasters at our beck and call? But the answer came soon enough anyway. The White House made Condoleezza Rice's Newshour available to all Americans by dispatching her to Oprah.

"No camera crews have ever been granted this much access to this national security adviser," Oprah told her audience as she greeted her guest. A major scoop was not far behind. Is there anything you can tell us about the president that would surprise us? Oprah asked. Yes, Ms. Rice said, Mr. Bush is a very fast eater. "If you're not careful," she continued, "he'll be on dessert and you're still eating the salad."

And that's the way it was, Oct. 17, 2003.

This is objective journalism as this administration likes it, all right — news you can't use. Until recently, the administration had often gotten what it wanted, especially on television, and not just on afternoon talk shows. From 9/11 through the fall of Saddam, the obsequiousness became so thick that even Terry Moran, the ABC News White House correspondent, said his colleagues looked "like zombies" during the notorious pre-shock-and-awe Bush news conference of March 6, 2003. That was the one that Mr. Bush himself called "scripted." The script included eight different instances in which he implied that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, all of them left unchallenged by the dozens of reporters at hand.

Six months later, the audience is getting restless. The mission is not accomplished. The casualty list cannot be censored. The White House has been caught telling too many whoppers, the elucidation of which has become a cottage industry laying siege to the best-seller list. Vanity Fair, which once ran triumphalist photos of the administration by Annie Leibovitz, now looks at this White House and sees Teapot Dome. The Washington Post, which killed a week of "Boondocks" comic strips mocking Ms. Rice a few days before her Oprah appearance, relented and ran one anyway last weekend on its letters page, alongside the protests of its readers.

But print, even glossy print, is one thing, TV another. Like it or not, news doesn't register in our culture unless it happens on television. It wasn't until the relatively tardy date of March 9, 1954, when Edward R. Murrow took on Joseph McCarthy on CBS's "See It Now," that the junior senator from Wisconsin hit the skids. Sam Ervin's televised Watergate hearings reached a vast audience that couldn't yet identify the pre-Redford-and-Hoffman Woodward and Bernstein. Voters didn't turn against our Vietnam adventure en masse until it became, in Michael Arlen's undying phrase, the Living Room War.

However spurious any analogy between the two wars themselves may be, you can tell that the administration itself now fears that Iraq is becoming a Vietnam by the way it has started to fear TV news. When an ABC News reporter, Jeffrey Kofman, did the most stinging major network report on unhappiness among American troops last summer, Matt Drudge announced on his Web site that Mr. Kofman was gay and, more scandalously, a Canadian — information he said had been provided to him by a White House staffer. This month, as bad news from Iraq proliferated, Mr. Bush pulled the old Nixon stunt of trying to "go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people" about the light at the end of the tunnel. In this case, "the people" meant the anchors of regional TV companies like Tribune Broadcasting, Belo and Hearst-Argyle.

Last Sunday, after those eight-minute-long regional Bush interviews were broadcast, Dana Milbank, The Washington Post's White House reporter, said on CNN's "Reliable Sources" that the local anchors "were asking tougher questions than we were." I want to believe that Mr. Milbank was just being polite, because if he's right, the bar for covering this White House has fallen below sea level. The local anchors rarely followed up any more than Brit Hume did. They produced less news than Oprah. Will countries like France, Russia and Germany provide troops for Iraq? one of them asked Mr. Bush. "You need to ask them," was the reply.

When an administration is hiding in a no-news bunker, how do you find the news? The first place to look, we're starting to learn, is any TV news show on which Ms. Rice, Mr. Card, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld are not appearing. If they're before a camera, you can assume that the White House has deemed the venue a safe one — a spin zone, if you will. They will proceed to obfuscate or dissemble at will, whether they're talking to Oprah, local anchors or a Sunday morning network chat-show host.

A TV news venue that the administration spurns entirely, by contrast, stands a chance of providing actual, fresh, accurate information. There have been at least two riveting examples this month. Ms. Rice, Mr. Powell and Mr. Rumsfeld all refused to be interviewed for an Oct. 9 PBS "Frontline" documentary about the walkup to the Iraq war. Yet without their assistance, "Frontline" nonetheless fingered Ahmad Chalabi as an administration source for its pre-war disinformation about weapons of mass destruction and the Qaeda-Saddam link. It also reported that the administration had largely ignored its own state department's prescient "Future of Iraq" project — a decision that helped lead to our catastrophic ill-preparedness for Iraq's post-Saddam chaos. "Frontline" didn't have to resort to leaks for these revelations, either: the sources were on-camera interviews with Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, our first interim leader in Iraq, and Mr. Chalabi himself.

The administration officials who stiffed "Frontline" habitually do the same to ABC's "Nightline." Ted Koppel explains why in a round-table discussion published in a new book from the Brookings Institution Press, "The Media and the War on Terrorism": "They would much rather appear on a program on which they're likely not to get a tough cross-examination." On Oct. 15, the week after the "Frontline" exposé, the White House was true to form when asked to provide a guest for a "Nightline" exploring the president's new anti-media media campaign. But later in the day, the administration decided to send a non-marquee name, Dan Bartlett, its communications director. Mr. Koppel, practicing the increasingly lost art of relentless follow-up questioning, all but got his guest stuttering as he called him on half-truth after half-truth. Mr. Bartlett tried — but soon failed — to get away with defending a litany of prewar administration claims and insinuations: that the entire American contribution to rebuilding Iraq would be only $1.7 billion; that Iraqi oil income would pay for most of the reconstruction; and that the entire war would proceed as quickly as a cakewalk.

It's at times like this that we must be grateful that Disney didn't succeed in jettisoning "Nightline" for David Letterman. (The administration is only too happy to send its top brass to Mr. Letterman when it doesn't send them to Oprah — Colin Powell most recently.) If the Oct. 15 "Nightline" wasn't an Edward R. Murrow turning point in the coverage of the war on terrorism, it's the closest we've seen to one since 9/11. There will be others, because this administration doesn't realize that trying to control the news is always a loser. Most of the press was as slow to challenge Joe McCarthy, the Robert McNamara Pentagon and the Nixon administration as it has been to challenge the wartime Bush White House. But in America, at least, history always catches up with those who try to falsify it in real time. That's what L.B.J. and Nixon both learned the hard way.

Even as President Bush was using a regional anchor to tell "the people" that congressional delegations were visiting Iraq and would come back with happy progress reports, Fox News and Newsweek were telling us that these delegations were spending their nights in the safety of Kuwait, not Iraq. Even as identical, upbeat form letters from American soldiers mysteriously turned up in newspapers across the United States, Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon-financed armed forces newspaper, was reporting that half the troops it polled had low morale. "Some troops even go so far as to say they've been ordered not to talk to V.I.P.'s because leaders are afraid of what they might say," observed Stars and Stripes' Jon Anderson in a Koppel-style interview with the commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. This week The Post's Mr. Milbank reported that the administration is shutting off TV images of dead American soldiers, too, by enforcing a ban on "news coverage and photography" of their flag-draped coffins returning to American military bases.

In-bed embeds are yesterday's news. It's only a matter of time before more dissenting troops talk to a reporter with a camera — and in TV news, time moves faster now, via satellite phones, than it did in the era when a network report had to wait for the processing of film or the shipping of video. At the tender age of six months, the war in Iraq is not remotely a Vietnam. But from the way the administration tries to manage the news against all reality, even that irrevocable reality encased in flag-draped coffins, you can only wonder if it might yet persuade the audience at home that we're mired in another Tet after all.

Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company