&c.

Sigh. May Samantha be waiting to give you the horn.

Normally, when someone is obviously, painfully wrong on a topic, it offers a warning to take that person’s other opinions with a bucketful of salt. But, occasionally, it can serve as a bullshit offset, a sink into which you can pitch all your wrongness to keep it from contaminating the rest of your thinking.

Thanks, John Gruber, for showing us how it’s done.

Long (and long-delayed) discussion on ‘the stuff of identity’ coming.

But to get back in the mood for writing, it’s a happy coincidence that the latest spat over Nick Denton’s editorial methods appears at the same time as another brief profile of Felix Dennis, something the media desks seem to write up on a semi-regular basis.

Dennis changed American magazine publishing in the late 90s. It was obvious from Maxim’s first few British issues that it was doomed to fourth place in a market saturated by lad mags; it was also clear that Americans were buying import copies of Loaded with nothing of their own to compare. Conventional wisdom was that the format wouldn’t work: you had your serious gentlemen’s monthlies, the sporty-outdoors mags, the aging hipster mags, the pinkish Details in post-Truman decline. All neatly stratified and commodified. Instead, Maxim’s US launch in 1997, driven by Dennis and a no-bullshit British staff, immediately made GQ and Esquire look fusty, and put Details out of its misery.

Of all the lad mags, Maxim was the one you’d least have expected to succeed in the US, based upon content and market positioning. But that misses one key element: Felix Dennis. Ten years on, it outsells all its US competitors combined, most of which now imitate some or all of its house style. (Details is back on the shelves, though in name only.) As for Dennis himself, he’s no longer at the helm, predicting the slow decline of print mags; that didn’t stop him from getting around $250m for offloading his American titles last year. (Translation: even more time to spend writing doggerel in Mustique. As a poet, he’s a great magazine publisher.)

That’s your model for understanding Nick Denton and his American blog menagerie, his treatment of writers, his PPV earnings model, his zest for publicity. (The comparison is inexact: if Denton writes poetry, he keeps it to himself; his prose sings like a goose.)

All done with complete unnerving honesty. Which you have to admire — from a safe distance.

Update: Denton’s made the comparison himself. (Note to self: 2003 and Kinja seems like a long time ago.) But the report presents it simply in terms of Maxim’s content, not the wider aspects of how both Dennis and Denton seem to view publishing.

I’m informed that the MacBook Air’s solid-state drive option fits the SAUK model precisely, with no rounding: 110% of (117.5% of (US$3098 in UKP ~= £1569)) = £2028. And Apple doesn’t always round upwards, it seems: the US$99 external SuperDrive comes out at £65.33 before adjustment, and is apparently being sold at £65 rather than £69. What charity.

Reaching back to my mostly forgotten maths classes, you can simplify the calculation to a standard Apple British Coefficient of 1.2925, for those who don’t get to buy ex-VAT (or, more likely these days, on a weekend in NYC).

The Apple Store numbers are somewhat deceiving, because US prices exclude state sales tax, which is paid by most buyers, while UK prices include VAT. But the standard rule of thumb for working out how much extra Apple screws out of British customers is as follows:

Convert the US price, add VAT, stick 10% on top for shits and giggles, then round up to the nearest £49 or £99.*

The MacBook Air fits this, as did the iPhone (figures rounded to nearest UKP):

Rounded up to nearest £99, you get £1199. Voilà.

* Unless it’s under £100, where you round to the nearest £5 or £9. Leopard’s $129 became (£65 + VAT) + 10% = £84, rounded up to £85.

(By which I mean those figures who inevitably get passed over in the sweep of history classes because they punctuate two much more interesting periods. AKA the John Major Cup.)

My long-time favourites: the Directors of France. No, not Godard, Truffaut et al. Think guillotine. Think Terror. Think Robespierre dragged off to be the climactic blood sacrifice to the cause. What comes next? ‘Um’, then ‘er’, then ‘uh’, then ‘oh, Napoleon?’ That was them in charge. So, let’s hear it for the people who ruled France for the four years that everyone skips between the blood & barricades and the short bloke.

Sometimes I think of these one-graf periods as pockets of the landscape kept deliberately uncultivated to encourage natural habitats, the fauna in this case being graduate students, who are naturally drawn to such obscure fields because the richest ones are long taken.

I understand the reasoning behind MSNBC’s rebroadcasting the live NBC coverage of six years ago. The crass rationale is that CNN did it (albeit via streaming) last year, and they had to wait until this year to copycat. Less crass is that after an orgy of replays, the footage was locked away for years, and the chaotic and war-fogged reporting was superseded by a more coherent narrative to suit what followed. Enough time has passed, perhaps, to recall the confusion.

That they repeated that repeat after dark makes less sense. The broken verisimilitude, for some odd reason, makes it feel crass. Or perhaps it exposes the innate crassness of the re-enactment.

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I think this thing is on. Expect me to change theme and fiddle with the styles and add some sidebar content and blah etc blah, but given my usual capacity to do such things, not necessarily in the next 24 hours.