Cliches, buzzwords and Hal Jackson.

About 75 times a minute at work, I pull a modified Hannah Arendt and rail about the banality of evil (use of language.)

Mostly, I deliver a screed against cliches and the use of the same words over and over again. In fact, I've taken to going onto Google ngram viewer and charting the increase in the usage of some of those words that drive me ape.

Uniqueness of language is what makes language effective. That's why, for instance, Orwell says, "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." 

In brief, language is like sushi. It had better be fresh.

The other night, I took a taxi home and I heard an old-timey radio announcer deliver this sign-off: "Stay calm, kiss your Mom, and ban the bomb."

That made me think of the great, old radio announcer, Hal Jackson, an African-American radio announcer who was on the air for over 70 years until he died in 2012 at the age of 96.

Jackson used to start his show like this, "Recorded stars from here Mars, whether you're here or in your cars. You're relaxing with Jackson, in the house that Jack built.

Jackson would say goodbye with these words: "It's time for me to pack the shellac and hit the track, but I'll be back."

A simple point today: simple,unique use of the English language.

Unfortunately, that ain't simple.

Not content with content.

Over the last 15 years ago, really since the rise of the internet, a myth has formed that essentially propagates the idea that amateurs are as good as professionals.

Today, everyone is a "content creator." We "crowd-source" ideas. We're told we must collaborate with everyone and his sister and that creative needs to be iterative.

In a word, this is all horseshit.

Just about every day, I am asked to review "content" that is so egregiously bad I can barely make it through the first five seconds. There is no hook, no story, no craft, no idea, no elan, no spark, no clue, no clarity, no simplicity, no argument, no nothing except a taking up of space and pixels.

Last night I had a had a drink with a few friends in the business.

I told them about a precept of mine--austere, I'll admit--but valuable to me.

In economics there is something called "an opportunity cost." It is the loss or gain from an alternative when another alternative is chosen. So, if I were freelancing and got a call for weekend work, I'd have to make a decision. Is my leisure-time worth "selling" for the money I would be receiving?

I apply the same logic when I view content. Is it worth the time I am being asked to give? 

In fact, I utilize something I call the "Citizen Kane" rule. Citizen Kane is 119 minutes long. If a video I am being asked to watch is 3 minutes long, I ask myself "will it be 3/119ths as good as Citizen Kane?"

In other words, simply, is it worth my time? Will viewing it unlock/pay-for something I want to see? Will I learn something in an effective and entertaining manner? 

Or, will I just see more crap?

By producing crap we train viewers to become accustomed to expecting crap.

This evening, on your way home, find a pile of dogshit on the sidewalk.

Even the most oblivious people try to avoid it.

The Availability Heuristic.

We in advertising, we in the modern world, suffer from something scholars call "the availability heuristic." Actually, to be blunt, the availability heuristic explains much of the underpinning of Donald Trump's campaign.

"The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision."

Some people call it recency.

That notion that you're most responsive or reactive to what's happened most recently.

The availability heuristic is what causes investors to over-react to financial news. It causes every television meteorologist to proclaim every winter storm, "snowpocalypse," and every over-heated sportscaster to trumpet every heavyweight fight as the "match of the century."

On Saturday, we were strafed once again with hyperbolic proclamations about the coming of the Manichean showdown between the forces of good (us) and the forces of evil (anyone with a funny last name.)

It pays, in my mind, to try to train yourself to take a longer view of events, trends, blips, downturns and upticks. Remember when Google+ was going to change marketing as we know it? When Facebook likes were more important than a succinct definitional message? When so-called "interactive" advertising was going to kill: a) Advertising; b) Marketing; and unalterably change 200,000 years of homo erectus history?

As Dooley Wilson sang in "Casablanca," 

[This day and age we're living in 
Gives cause for apprehension 
With speed and new invention 
And things like fourth dimension.

Yet we get a trifle weary
With Mr. Einstein's theory.
So we must get down to earth at times
Relax relieve the tension

And no matter what the progress
Or what may yet be proved
The simple facts of life are such
They cannot be removed.]

You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.

And when two lovers woo
They still say, "I love you."
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.

Moonlight and love songs
Never out of date.
Hearts full of passion
Jealousy and hate.
Woman needs man
And man must have his mate
That no one can deny.

It's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die.
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

Oh yes, the world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

Calm the fuck down, in other words. Or in the words of my preturnaturally brilliant daughters: "Get over yourself."

As for the poor deranged man who set the relatively harmless pipe-bombs in New York and New Jersey...

Forty-one years ago, on January 24th, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional Puertorriquena (FALN) killed four people and injured 53 with a bomb in Fraunces Tavern on the corner of Pearl and Broad Streets.

Four days later, the Weather Underground set off two bombs, one in Washington DC and one in Oakland.

On March 1, in Nairobi, Kenya, the Kenyan People Liberation Front killed 26 and injured 60 on a bus from Nairobi to Mombasa.

On March 4, the Palestinian Liberation Organization killed 18 people with a hostage-taking at the Tel Aviv Savoy Hotel.

The FALN struck again on April 19, injuring four people with four bombs set off within 45-minutes in Manhattan.

Baader-Meinhof terrorists made news bombing a West German embassy in Stockholm on April 24.

On July 4, a bomb in Zion Square, Jerusalem, killed 13 and wounded 77.

On August 5, the Japanese Red Army took 53 Americans hostage in Kuala Lumpur.

A week later the Provisional IRA killed 5 and injured more than 50 with a bomb in a Belfast bar.

This is getting boring, so I'll skip ahead a few months.

On December 23, US CIA Station Chief Richard Welch was shot to death outside his home in Athens by "Revolutionary Organization 17 November."

The year ended as so many dreams do at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, NY. On December 29, 25 sticks of dynamite were placed in a parcel locker between two luggage carousels. 11 died and 75 were injured in the explosion. The crime remains unsolved.

If you're worried--and Donald Trump hopes you are--that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, look at it my way. It's always been hell. And handbaskets are merely accessories.

1956. New York. The year in bombs.

1956 began as 1955 ended. 

On the evening of January 4th, until 1:50 AM on the morning of January 5th, "Forty-one policemen, detectives and railroad agents searched 2,600 lockers in Pennsylvania Station." An anonymous caller claimed to have hidden a bomb there.

New Yorkers next heard from the bomber on Washington's birthday, February 22, 1956, when, the Times reported "A 74-year-old attendant was seriously injured yesterday when a homemade bomb exploded in the men's lavatory at Pennsylvania Station."

The report continued, "Fragments of the explosive led the police to conclude [the bomb] was the work of an eccentric who is believed to have planted twenty-five such bombs around Manhattan since 1940. Eight persons have been injured."

Lloyd Hill, the men's room attendant, was informed by a young man that there was an obstruction in one of the plumbing fixtures. Hill tried to clear the blockage with a plunger when the device exploded.

Police found "lying in the washroom..." "and old sock, the frame of a watch and metal fragments." Chief of Detectives James B. Leggett said the fragments found were similar to those found at the scene of previous crude bombings in local theatres and railroad terminals.

Hill, of 141 W. 110th Street, was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital with injuries to his forehead and left leg.

On April 5, 1956, the trail of the bomber seemed to be growing warmer. The police department, the Times reported, had assembled "the most comprehensive portrait yet of the eccentric bomb planter who has eluded them for more than fifteen years."

In a thirteen-state alarm, they depicted him as a "skilled mechanic who owns or who has access to a drill press."

60 percent of his bomb threats were mailed from White Plains.

The twenty-six home-made bombs "were the work of a man over 40 years of age who bore a 'deep-seated hatred of the Consolidated Edison Company.'" According to Inspector James J. Walsh of the Manhattan West Detective Bureau, the bomber "had chosen a wayward course to publicize his feelings about the company."

The Times concluded, tersely, "Eight persons have been hurt by the bombs."

The bomber was quiet for months, until he struck on December 2, this time, at the Brooklyn Paramount, home of a Wurlitzer organ with 2,000 pipes and 257 stops.

At 7:50 PM, with 1,500 people in the theatre watching Tolstoy's "War and Peace," a bomb went off, injuring six people. They continued with the film.

"Abrahan Blumenthal, a 36-year-old postal clerk of 627 Sackman Street...was lifted from his seat by the blast." Also injured was Doris Russo, 31, of 903 Hancock Street and her sister, Joyce Young, 27, of the same address.

They were treated at Cumberland Hospital.

On the day after Christmas, all hell seemed to have broken loose in New York. The Times headlined, "13 BOMB THREATS KEEP POLICE BUSY".

The subsequent article said, "Fall bomb reports pestered the police throughout yesterday as they unsuccessfully sought the man who left a homemade explosive Monday in the New York Public Library.

"As on Tuesday night, persons with warped senses of humor had telelphoned to thirteen places by late evening with bomb threats.

"The macabre callers during the day cited as targets two hospitals, two theatres, two libraries, one in Newark; a hotel, a large apartment project, a pier, a restaurant, and business houses, one in Hillside, NJ."

Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy was "considering the offer of a cash reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for the placing of thirty-two pipe-type bombs in public places here since 1940....Police said yesterday they were not ruling out the possibility that the perpetrator might be a woman."

1956 ended with a long article in the Times by Alexander Feinberg. Stating that "Bomb scares and hoaxes [had] reached epidemic proportions..." the Police Department said they won't respond to alarms "unless a device was actually discovered."

Bomb scares took place in Madison Square Garden (packed with basketball fans) the Waldorf-Astoria, the State House in Trenton, a restaurant in Philadelphia, the Socony-Mobil building, Grand Central Terminal, Port Authority Bus Terminal, Carnegie Hall Studios, a department store in Brooklyn, and various other hotels, subway stations, bank buildings, newspaper offices, neighborhood movie theatres and "just plain buildings."

The police brought in George Cermac, 63 years-old of Bethlehem, PA. He was interrogated at the East Thirty-fifth Street station, where he "suddenly collapsed and died."

Thus ended 1956.

Some bombings in 1955.

The bombings continued in 1955 in some new locations and some previously attacked sites.

The year in bombing began when on Wednesday, January 12 the Times reported, “Penn Station Bomb Blast Is Ignored by Commuters”. The bomb, which exploded at 5:25 PM caused “little hubbub among commuters.” Later that evening, at 11:15PM, an anonymous phone call was received saying there would be “an explosion in fifteen minutes” in Grand Central Terminal. Police closed off the main waiting room and searched 1,150 lockers over two hours. No bomb was found.

On Thursday, May 5, 1955, the Times reported “SIX BOMBS THREATS KEEP POLICE MOVING”. Police investigated Macy’s department store on Herald Square, where a “woman shopper” found a note on a sales table saying a time bomb set for 5:35 PM was under the table. The note was signed “Rocky.”

At 4:12 in the afternoon, a man telephoned Police Headquarters and said that a bomb was “ready to go off” at the Roxy Theatre, 7^th Avenue and 50^th Street. Police investigated and found no bomb. 

The Roxy Theatre was located at 153 W. 50th Street and had seating for 5,920 patrons.
It was torn down in 1960.

Moments later telephoned warnings were received claiming bombs were planted at Webster Hall and the Academy of Music motion picture theatre at 126 East Fourteenth Street.

A porter at the First National City Bank branch at Canal and Broadway received a call about a bomb after banking hours. He called the Secret Service who called the FBI who called the NYPD. No bomb was found.

The First National City Bank building. Today it houses a Payless Shoe Store.

Once again, Radio City Music Hall received a bomb threat, claiming a bomb was set to explode at 11PM. Uniformed police searched the theatre, moving through the audience with flashlights while the movie continued.

On August 12, 1955, a bombing once again made the front page of the Times. For the first time, a bylined reporter, Lawrence O’Kane covered the story, and for the first time a bomb was linked to 22 others.

As the Times reported: “The bomb’s characteristics and the method by which it had been placed identified it as the work of a mysterious bomb-planter for whom the police have been searching since 1940.

“This was the twenty-third bomb in the fifteen-year period bearing the same criminal hallmarks, according to Inspector Edward F. Fagan, in charge of the Bureau of Technical Services….”

John Sena, an upholsterer employed by the Roxy Theatre, was checking all 5,869 seats in the theatre for rips and tears. He found a damaged seat and took it to the basement. At 3:30 PM, as 2,000 people in the Roxy watched Bette Davis in “Virgin Queen,” Sena began to repair the seat.

As he tilted his workbench, a length of pipe encased in blue cotton fell out. The police were contacted and various high-ranking officers sped to the seen, along with an emergency truck, the bomb squad and various detectives.

United Press International picked up the story of the Roxy bomb and was much more lurid in its details. “Dismantling Bomb Placed By Maniac” they headlined, calling the bomber a “madman.”

At 6:05 PM, the Times reported, the bomb disposal truck took the device to 12^th Avenue and 52^nd Street. Later, when traffic was lighter, it was taken to Fort Tilden, Queens where it was stored in a bunker until it could be X-rayed and examined.

Roughly two months later, a bomb once-again exploded in a New York theater, this time, the Paramount. The Times said it was the “24^th of Its Kind Placed in City”.

This time the blast occurred in a sixteenth-row seat, which struck William Jones, a 37-year-old pharmacist’s helper, in the right foot.

The bomb squad described the explosive as “a piece of iron pipe about three inches long and two inches wide, containing a small watch and an electric light….The upholstery of the seat had been cut and the bomb inserted. A small, ivory-handled penknife, apparently used for the cutting, was found inside the upholstery.”

The final blast of the year was reported on Friday, December 2, 1955 in a small, below-the-fold article. “CRUDE BOMB SET OFF” it read.

The article, about 120-words in length, reported that a home-made bomb exploded in Grand Central Terminal at 5:05 on December 1.

The Times said, “the explosion occurred in the large men’s lavatory on the level just below the main concourse…” near the 42^nd and Vanderbilt Avenue corner of the building.

The bomb “was placed in a toilet booth, which it damaged…”

Bombings. And New York.

Dateline, New York City, October 22, 1951.

BOMBS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL THE CONSOLIDATED EDISON COMPANY IS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE FOR THEIR DASTARDLY ACTS AGAINST ME. I HAVE EXHAUSTED ALL OTHER MEANS. I INTEND WITH BOMBS TO CAUSE OTHERS TO CRY OUT FOR JUSTICE FOR ME.

The police found a home-made pipe-bomb cut into the cushions of a seat at the Paramount. 

The above note directed police to the Paramount Theater in Times Square and to a telephone booth in the Pennsylvania Station. A bomb was found at the theater; nothing was found at the train station.

Dateline, New York City, November 29, 1951.
Special to The New York Times

Some weeks after the subway locker explosion, the liberal Republican "New York Herald Tribune" received this note. Like the note above it was written in pencil in block letters. Experts of the NYPD noticed that the Gs and Ys were peculiarly-shaped, leading them to surmise that the bomber might have been educated in Europe.

HAVE YOU NOTICED THE BOMBS IN YOUR CITY – IF YOU ARE WORRIED, I AM SORRY – AND ALSO IF ANYONE IS INJURED. BUT IT CANNOT BE HELPED – FOR JUSTICE WILL BE SERVED. I AM NOT WELL, AND FOR THIS I WILL MAKE THE CON EDISON SORRY – YES, THEY WILL REGRET THEIR DASTARDLY DEEDS – I WILL BRING THEM BEFORE THE BAR OF JUSTICE – PUBLIC OPINION WILL CONDEMN THEM – FOR BEWARE, I WILL PLACE MORE UNITS UNDER THEATER SEATS IN THE NEAR FUTURE. F.P.

On March 19, 1952, a bomb exploded in Port Authority Bus Terminal without injury. In June and then December bombs exploded in seats of the Loews Lexington Avenue theater. The December bomb caused one injury.

In 1953, bombs exploded at the following sites:

• Radio City Music Hall
• The Capitol Theater
• A rental locker near the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal
• an unexploded bomb was found in a rental locker at Pennsylvania Station.

NY Police described the Grand Central bomb as the "homemade product of a publicity-seeking jerk."

On St. Patrick's Day, 1954, "The New York Times" reported this story.

Later that same year, bombs were found in a phone booth in Port Authority and another bomb was found in a phone booth in Pennsylvania Station.

On November 7th, a capacity audience of 6,200 were at Radio City Music Hall viewing Bing Crosby in "White Christmas."  A bomb stuffed into the bottom cushion of a seat in the 15th row exploded, injuring four movie-goers.

This time the bomber got more press. In a front page story, the Times reported the explosion.

Victor Borella, vice president of Rockefeller Center and a member of the board of directors of the Radio City Music Hall was, according to the Times, "convinced the bombing was the work of a "crackpot."

More later or tomorrow.