Maybe you saw the Nissan commercial with the appliances powered by dirty, smoky gasoline engines. If not, here it is:

The presumption is that if those are so nasty, and are better because they run off of electricity in reality, then a car that runs off electricity should be nicer too. They are pushing hybrid and full electric cars, with the governments support, on the public, leading them to believe they are cleaner, better and cheaper. But it’s not that simple.

Here’s some facts.

The automobile didn’t come to be run off a gasoline engine by accident. Gasoline has the best energy density of any practical fuel. That is, anything that has more energy density is either too heavy, too big, too expensive or too dangerous to be practical. Gasoline won out as the practical choice back when steam cars went out of style. Diesel is a close second and preferred for large vehicles.

Switching to an electric car might be practical with modern advances in battery, motor and regenerative braking advances, and it might be cheap to plug in to an outlet in your garage, but what happens when everyone is doing it?

Electric production in the US is already in short supply at certain times. Just ask anyone whose experienced a brownout, rolling blackout, or been told to turn off their air conditioner to save electricity. Are you also going to skip plugging in your electric vehicle then?

And what about electric rates? Right now they are what they are, but as more and more people start using electricity to power their vehicles, what is going to happen to the cost of electricity? Will supply and demand drive it up? Will it be manipulated the same way gasoline prices have been for profit? If that happens, we will all pay more, whether we use it to drive or to heat our home.

According to answers.com, “About 49% of electricity is generated from coal, 21% from natural gas, and 1% from petroleum. Adding those together, you get about 71%.”

Even if electricity was in plentiful supply, look where it is coming from. That 1% from petroleum is deceptive too. Petroleum is the most expensive way to produce electricity and usually consists of fuel-oil – or diesel-fueled turbine – generators. They are used in peak periods when the grid is in danger of coming up short. Their expensive power is used as a last ditch effort to keep things running and are found mostly near power-hungry major metropolitan areas. They may account for only 1% of the supply, but they account for a much larger percentage of the cost of electricity. Not only are they expensive, they are the highest in pollutants.

So adding electric car use to an already maxed-out grid will only increase the use of the diesel generators driving up the cost of electric production and using more petroleum.

The fact is, no matter whether you drive a gasoline powered car or an electric one, or a hybrid, at least 71% of your power is coming from fossil fuels. The losses in conversion and transmission of electricity, plus the losses in storage in a battery and it’s charging probably make that a wash too. Batteries aren’t lossless, either. The general rule of thumb is you need to put about 140% in during charging to get 100% capacity out. They might shave a few percentage points off that with new battery technology and fancy intelligent chargers, but you still loose a significant amount of energy through heat and chemical reactions just while charging.

Then there is the “clean” issue of electric cars. Even if they are lower in emissions, you are just shifting the combustion byproducts to another place, the generating plant. Plus there is the issue down the road of disposing of the used batteries. They are full of lead, lithium, cadmium and other exotic metals, depending on their composition. Are they going to be safely disposed of?

I love technology and welcome alternatives, but let’s take off the rose-colored glasses and see what the costs really are of them. We all want to believe in a magic bullet that will solve our dependance on foreign oil, but if it were so simple, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. Just because some auto manufacturer makes a cute commercial doesn’t make it so. Don’t forget they are getting all kinds of pressure from the US Government to sell these alternative fuel cars and stand to profit by pushing them on the public, whether it makes sense, or not.

So, yeah, it makes sense to convert fossil fuels into electricity and power the electric grid, our microwaves, computers and hairdryers, but until a higher percentage of our electric production comes from solar, hydro, wind and nuclear sources, and capacity is built up to support significant vehicle consumption, electric/hybrid cars don’t really make sense.

It’s a happy-sappy commercial with catchy music that goes “Holiday, Oh a Holiday and the best one of the year.” Very Christmas-y on the surface.

The song is done by a group called Vampire Weekend and is excerpted in the commercial.
The lyrics, though happen to be exactly the same as those of Matty Groves which is Child Ballad #81, a traditional Folk song that has been around forever and reproduced in countless versions.

While those are nearly the only lyrics in the commercial and the only ones that Vampire Weekend‘s Holiday has in common with the traditional song, had the commercial’s producers realized that, they surely would have picked another song.

Why? Well, Matty Groves, also known as Little Musgrove and Lady Barnard, is a sad tale of adultery and murder. It has been performed by many artists, such as Joan Baez, Fairport Convention and Christy Moore among countless others.

In the traditional song, which has as many versions as performers, Matty Groves, a commoner, is seduced by Lady Barnard, the wife of a powerful, wealthy Lord, who is away tending to his lands and unfortunately, neglecting his wife. The Lady meets Matty in church and takes him home, where the Lord comes home and finds them in bed. An angry confrontation ensues and the Lord gives Groves a sword and promptly slays the commoner who is no match for him.

The Lady is unrepentant and when the Lord asks “How do you like your lover now?” She tells him she still likes him better. The Lord in a fit of rage, kills the Lady and they are buried in a common grave, with the Lady on top, “because she is of noble blood.”

Here’s a version performed by Fairport Convention.

Compare the lyrics in this to those in the Vampire Weekend video. Not a lot in common, but the only ones used in the commercial are the ones in common in both songs.

90% of people won’t recognized the Vampire Weekend song. I didn’t. But 99% of people probably won’t recognize the lyrics as belonging to Matty Groves/Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, either. In some versions, it was Lord and Lady Arlen. I’m sure it was adjusted for local political impact over the years.

I’m just tickled that a car company would choose a song with lyrics that bring an image of adultery and murder to my mind for their Christmas commercial. Pure genius…

The first show I saw had so much promise. It was the episode featuring a CEO of Hooters. When he found a manager who was mistreating his female employees, and exposed him for the misogynist he was, I thought the show had a future. Besides the fact that I would have dropped my cover and fired him on the spot, if I was the boss, it looked like the show would be interesting.

But ever since, it has gone downhill. I just don’t get much out of watching it anymore. Here’s why:

It’s too soft. They really don’t go very far to see the real company and uncover many issues. It’s clear that the locations and employees are carefully chosen to cherry-pick them. Whether it’s to show the companies in a favorable light, or they don’t want to face any liability if they show an employee in a less-then-flattering way, the show has been coming off as too feel-good.

The Bosses are lightweights. Most of the time they go in there and look like they wouldn’t last a day on the job. That’s sort of to be expected. Any employee’s first day isn’t usually much to write home about, but they are only there for a day. It would be nice to see them spend a week at one job and see if an executive could hack a real-world job.

It’s too Disneyland. At the end, the employees that the boss worked for get brought into the office for the big reveal. Sometimes, it’s funny, but usually not. Then the boss thanks them for something they taught him and rewards them with some vacation, donation to a charity, scholarship fund, or promotion that they didn’t expect. Some of the time, I wonder if they might not be worse off afterward.

One time, I thought they would actually do something that would change things for the better for all the employees. It was an episode about an airline where all the employees had taken a pay cut to keep the business running. One employee talked passionately about their sacrifice and urged the company to restore the cuts now that they were profitable again. While it was hinted that they would look into it, and the individual employee was rewarded, nothing was done.

It’s too religious. Episode after episode, we’ve heard how religious the boss or the employees are. Who cares? I’m not saying that those values shouldn’t be followed in the business world, but do we have to showcase it in the show? Shouldn’t treating people the right way be automatic, not something only tied to religion?

I want to like the show. It’s better than the bulk of reality TV we’ve been force-fed. But I’m just lacking much satisfaction once I’ve invested the hour watching it. I think there could be a lot of potential for the show to be entertaining and do good things for workplace conditions at companies at the same time. But what I’ve seen so far is just too sanitized to be real.

My last gripe is not with the show, but it’s time slot. It’s really an issue with the network not the show. As I said, I DVR it and watch it later. I really hate that it gets bumped 15-30 minutes many weeks by football games that go into overtime. Wouldn’t it be nice if the network could figure out that sometimes games go over and build a cushion into their schedules that let them get back on schedule quickly? Here’s a suggestion on how to do it: Cut commercials. Starting with the football game. Once it’s clear that the game will be running late, stop. You’ve already paid the bills, don’t pile on. After that, yes there are commercial ads that pay the bills and have to be aired contractually, but at least cut out the self-promotion. At least half of the commercials every break are freebies – they are for the network and promote other shows, usually the ones they are delaying. If they dropped that half of the commercials, they could make up at least 10-15 minutes every hour. Don’t run an ad for the program that is being delayed by the ad itself. It only infuriates the person who tuned in to see it.

I know it’s a complicated problem. There are local commercials that get inserted at certain times, but there must be a mechanism to handle the timing of it all. We’re in the 21st century, after all. We have the technology.

What’s up with your commercials? You don’t get to punch someone for a Tiguan. And it’s called Punch Bug, not Punch Dub.

What’s with the “dub” business anyway? Dub is a form of music, based on Reggae.

Look, it’s a childish game that we’ve all played, but your marketing department doesn’t get to change the rules to suit your ad campaign. It’s a pop culture thing, and manipulating it to suit your sales ought to be a big flop.

Leave it to Wikipedia to have the whole story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch_buggy

And what’s up with the name Tiguan. Tiger and Iguana? Oh yeah, that’s the image I want my car to suggest…

I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now on several computers and have to admit, I’m pretty happy with it, despite the fact that, even with all the hype, it’s really what Vista should have been, maybe after a service pack.

You must have seen the annoying commercials like the one above, where people seem to think that Microsoft actually listened to them and took their advice on some little nitpicky thing. Well, Microsoft, here’s My Idea (TM).

Windows Vista and 7 have a pretty good Media Center built into most of the higher versions. I have been using it on a PC connected to my Flatscreen TV in my living room. I have a tuner card in it and I can use it to record TV or watch a DVD. It’s pretty nice with Netflix or Hulu too.

The other PCs that have Windows 7 on them have this capability too, but since they don’t have a tuner card, they’re missing out on the live TV part. But an X-Box 360 on the home network can connect to the computer with the tuner in it, watch TV and even control the channel selection! Pretty nice if you have the X-Box. But, can you do that from another computer? No.

I’d really like to be able to sit in front of my computer in my office/studio/radio room and tune in to TV. I watch video off the internet that way all the time. Heck, I have two monitors and a laptop there most of the time, why not put one to use that way sometimes?

But that function seems to be missing. How hard could it be to add that, if they could put it into an X-Box game console? The media center stuff is all there, all it needs is some kind of client to talk to the PC with the tuner. I just don’t get how they could miss that simple application.

My TV in the living room sits slaved to a DirecTV DVR box most of the time. The tuner card in the PC is mostly unused right now. I’m usually the only one who flips over to it to watch something off the internet, or one of the Canadian TV channels that DirecTV doesn’t provide. The local channels are usually better quality there too, but most of the time who cares if Idol is in HD or not…

So, Microsoft, I’m a PC and not long ago, I had an idea: put the same remote viewing functionality that the X-Box has into Windows 7. Thanks, no commercial is necessary.