A question of proportion 

Over the past few days I've been grazing news video at Yahoo. The search feature is nice. Say I want to catch up on Obama or find out what the heck it was that Ann "Schlafly" Coulter said, I enter a term and have a nice selection -- well, a selection -- of different sources.

The commercials, though. I think the 30-second spots will have to go. People aren't going to put up with them, not when your payoff -- the news clip -- is only a minute and a half. That's an unacceptable ratio, even given the fact that you don't get an ad with every clip. I don't mind the 10-second spots so much.

Why can't marketers and their conduits ever think like users and see when they've crossed the line? Many users won't even have a conscious thought about why they tried a service like this, but don't return to it again, or as often they might if they didn't have to sigh and wait and drum their fingers.

I do think about it consciously and it makes me feel dumped on and used, and angry with a commercial system so willing to sacrifice user experience in favor of thrusting messages on me. It's part of the reason I left PR work after working in it for so many years. There's a totally disrespectful -- not to mention completely illogical -- prevailing view that the wishes of consumers, the public supposedly being courted, don't count for much compared to the messenger's desire to be heard. You don't see that in direct sales, which is more honest, less subliminal and where all parties know the buyer is the boss.

Medical chart and manacled shark 

It's a misheard lyric. In the They Might Be Giant's song "I Palindrome I" the line goes "See the medical chart with the random zigzag." (They must mean something more like an EKG or respiration graphical output than the history on the bedside clipboard. At least that's what I always thought "the chart" meant. It's probably not on a clipboard anymore?) Anyway I heard it as "manacled shark." I thought it was a funny brain trick because, unlike a lot of misheard lyrics that don't make any sense, this one worked in its context. A shark having its fins bond probably wouldn't be able to travel in a straight line; it would have to weave this way and that, like when you paddle a long canoe all by yourself from the stern.