Stealth starbucks, or just a new brand from Starbucks?

If you google for 'stealth starbucks', you'll find several references to Starbucks opening cafes that lack the Starbucks branding, apparently to try to pose as a local coffee shop. This is kind of hilarious. I thought branding was the 400 pound gorilla of marketing: why would anyone abandon such a well-known brand?

According to a couple of the articles, Starbucks employees have been seen taking notes in local coffee shops.

Oh, maybe it's not popular. One article said it's been losing money. Ok. I didn't know.

This has got to backfire, though...in this day and age, word of the real source of any such company will spread fast.

On the other hand, it's delightfully weird. I would go look at such a thing if one opened nearby.

Some good comments here to give some perspective. Maybe it's not so odd. Selling wine might be the difference, so if they try out a store under a different name that also sells wine...that's more creating a new brand than hiding their brand.

Thanks to David Cramer for the tip about this phenom.

Saddest book ever: The Corner by David Simon

I'm about two-thirds through The Corner by David Simon (writer from the show The Wire) and Edward Burns. It chronicles a year in a Baltimore neighborhood dominated by the drug trade. It's written as a nonfiction novel.

It's the saddest, scariest book I've ever read. Difficult to read, difficult to put down. It shows the utter failure of the drug war and how it has warped and wasted lives. The centerfold includes real photos of the main characters. I was shocked, by then, to see such photos. That people would let themselves be interviewed to the extent required to describe them this way, and then allow photos of themselves in the book...I can hardly imagine it. If someone interviewed me enough to lay out all my flaws in such detail, I don't think I'd be willing to be photographed. I think I'd pull a Sean Penn.

The newest concept for me was the idea of the drug corner as an economic engine of devastation, always there waiting to suck people in. The idea of being dirt poor, not able to count on food or clothes, and knowing you could go out on the corner and sell drugs and live large at any moment, makes the choice to deal drugs comprehensible.

The people are fascinating and the concept for the book is amazing. It covers a whole year in the life of a neighborhood. It's difficult to imagine the work involved to be able to write with authority from each character's point of view. Simon's authorial voice never wavers as he talks about an addict mother's faltering attempts to get into a treatment program, and brutally chronicles how she'll probably fail. He constantly take the specific people he's documenting and relates them to the larger whole, talking about how addicts make plans for escape which are linear and fragile, broken when any link in the chain fails.

And after I read the book I kind of want to go find a corner and cry.

The best thing about the book is the way it makes an alien environment real. It makes me wary of trying to come up with an solutions, as a suburban white guy far away. Unfortunately, too much of the data about the drug war that I'm seeing lately indicates that it can't be won and the battle is devastating. And abandoning it seems politically impossible. Nothing about this book raises hope, not so far. But at the same time, it's an incredible read.

Bounced back: dealing with rejection

I had a story come back with its sixth rejection yesterday. It's a tiny little thing of a little over 2000 words.This is a boomerang. Or a very abstract drawing of a seagull. ;)


I got a little down over seeing this story come back again, but the truth that I should focus on is that I've actually sent it out six times. That's a record. I also sent it back out for number 7 the very same day. I'm proud of that.

It's a rarity in that I've never felt I needed to rework it since I started submitting it.

I guess it's not that different from other stories, in that I had a lot of angst over what exactly to do with it while I was writing it, and it germinated from a short and incomplete piece I wrote one day and months later sweated over to turn it into a complete story. But that was a long time ago and I've never wanted to revise it since.

My confidence in it may be misplaced. :) But that's not the point. I've got three or four stories lying around that I think are good, but which are unfinished or have problems. Most of them feel like they need a good solid week of work, which probably means a month. ;) Thus they languish. Some of them have been out and come back and I tried to fix them and got stuck, so it's very painful that they languish.

Willpower by Jason Stoddard

This short story on the Futurismic site combines some interesting tech with dreams of heroic exploration for the win. I liked it.

Rock squid (Sculpt-a-day 11)

Rock squid, sculpted 8/10/09, polymer clay on a rock

I built an elaborate armature for a pleisosaur about 10 inches long yesterday, but at 10:45pm I decided I wasn't going to be able to finish that, so I made this tiny thing.

Don't leave ferout Lily

Lily, 4, says "Don't leave ferout me!" when we go somewhere. She never says "without."

At four, I think she can figure it out. But she's made us laugh with stuff like this too many times. She's in the business of cute, and she's not getting out of it anytime soon.

_Batman: No Man's Land_

I picked up the first two volumes of this graphic novel set at my library. Turns out these are taken straight from the regular run of the Batman comic.

I'm not a regular Batman reader and I don't try to keep up with the overall continuity. That's why I like graphic novels, where you get enough of a narrative to stand on its own. But Batman's such an icon, I've of course learned a lot about him over the years. It's interesting to see how the character works in various writer's hands, too.

This series has an over-the-top premise even for Batman. In it, Gotham City has suffered two plagues and a devastating earthquake. Bruce Wayne went to Congress to ask for help, and was rebuffed. I think there's a whole political story about that that occurs in some other book, because Batman is absent from the early parts of this story, and there's a hint of some character who opposed help for Gotham.

Anyway, the government actually walls off Gotham and won't let anyone in or out -- after the initial evacuation, anyway. If you stay, you're considered to deserve your fate. Humanitarian aid isn't even allowed, which is pretty hardcore. It's hard to buy this setup, but it's, dare I say it, a lot of fun, because of what the writers can do with it after.

It's tribes in Gotham, many of them led by classic Batman villains. There's a story for each of these. The Penguin becomes a black marketeer. We get to see Two Face helping out with disaster relief. It's good stuff.

Great stories that focus on Jim Gordon, who has led the remains of the GCPD to establish their own territory in the turf wars that have claimed the city.

I plan to look for the rest of the volumes in this series.

The timely thank-you note

The other day, Tanya asked me if I had noticed how much laundry she'd been doing. I whipped out a thank-you note with a picture of an empty laundry basket on it, thanking her for filling our house with empties. I'd made it the previous day but forgotten to hand it to her.

Desert Rock (Sculpt-a-day 10)

Desert rock, sculpted 8/9/09, polymer clay over foil

This was going to be another small city, a futuristic one. But the shapes looked so organic that I abandoned that idea and went in another direction.