The nice people at APN remind me that it is Administrative Professionals Week. I used to thik that there was just Secretary’s Day on like the second or third Wednesday of April or something like that. Turns out that there is a whole week dedicated to the concept. I love all sorts of thematic celebrations, but my family doesn’t really do holidays and special occasions, so all holidays strike me as interesting more from an academic social anthropology perspective that, ya know, as a traditional participant. It is not terribly difficult, however, to entice me to attend or otherwise celebrate any themed event at least once.

The International Association of Administrative Professionals or IAAP has trademarked a number variations of the name for both the day and the week, including Professional Secretaries Week. There seems to be some controversy whether someone at IAAP originally came up with the celebration in 1952 or whether they hired the ad firm Young & Rubicam to come up with something snazzy to invigorate secretaries and other administrative professionals or whether an advertising agency came up with the idea on their own as part of the war (WWII) recovery effort. Some sources credit specifically a Harry F. Klemfuss at Young & Rubicam as the architect of Secretary’s Day and Administrative Professionals Week. And, like most holidays, Administrative Professionals Week and/or Day engenders the suspicion in some that it is engineered by a greedy secret cabal of flower, greeting card, and boxed chocolate distributors.

Over time, the IAAP has pushed for the term Administrative Professional to be used over the term secretary. The idea behind this evolution of language is that the changing and expanding role of support staff should be reflected in the terminology. The original secretary title, however, meant literally keep of the secrets and referred to the sort of person a king could trust with uber-important information. Sovereigns truly need trusted keepers of secrets. I think that by this time next year, we should work to transition the name of this celebration to Keepers of Secrets Week.

This week internet superstar Fred got a last name, Figglehorn, to go with his new web site FredFigglehorn.com.

So the video above by Fred here has been viewed nearly ten million times on YouTube. According to sites which rank video views, each of the Fred videos have been viewed many many more times than that, syndicated across many sites. On YouTube, the format is called Imrov, although I’ve been told by industry professionals that the show segments are scripted, so I’m not sure why Improv is the category. Could just be because nobody knows how to categorize a lot of new formats which have sprung up via new technology. The show describes itself as follows:

“Fred Figglehorn, a six-year old with anger management issues and an alcoholic mother, uses her video camera against her wishes to posts videos to YouTube documenting (vlogging) the details of his love for Judy, hatred of bully Kevin, crush on Miss Amy, Bertha’s instigations, his annoying Grandma, his friendships with animals, and whatever else pops into his mind. The Internet’s All-Time #1 Weekly Series, with over 100 Million views.”

Of course Fred looks distinctly post-pubescent and not six, but it’s, ya know, comedy.

I understand that a team of around half a dozen people put these vids together. I assume some portion of the team is responsible for marketing, but I have not yet discerned what is particularly different or special about either the content or marketing or talent involved in these productions. Apparently, at least as presented to advertisers who might buy web tv air time or product placement, tween females are the number one demographic. Although, with these numbers, definitely not the only one.

Other than imp in the machine or perversity of the universe, I have no explanation for why Fred is an internet sensation. He doesn’t make my skin crawl or anything, like he does some folks, but I don’t really get it either.

Anyone want to take a shot at hypothesizing why Fred is the most popular boy in internet television?

Back when I worked in other people’s offices, I used to refer to myself as technologically bisexual. I was equally comfortable on a MAC or a PC. I mean, most of my work was in Photoshop, PowerPoint, and PageMaker, with the occasional call for MicroSoft Word, Quark, or Illustrator. Once in the blue moon, I’d need to use some more esoteric software, but it was generally something available on both MAC and PC. And once I was inside the software, it was fundamentally the same thing on either platform. I could handle the amazingly wrenching switch from dealing with a doohickey key to a control key.

When I bought my own machinery, over the years, Blue Blood has been almost entirely PC. There has been the occasional person who already had a MAC that I bought MAC stuff for, such as a MAC cam or something like that, but, for the most part, Blue Blood has been entirely a PC-based company. I was not prejudiced against MACs. Certainly not at the beginning. I thought the machines were fundamentally the same, except a MAC had a nicer case, and a PC was more bang for the buck. This is not to say that a PC was in any way a technologically better machine. It wasn’t. It just cost a little more money to get the same thing in MAC format. Plus I could buy PC parts and really save by building my own power workstations.

But then Apple came out with their series of Think Different advertisements which made my teeth itch. First they bought all that footage of really cool dead people, like Apple had a fucking endorsement from Einstein or something. Then Apple pitched a fit when The Church of Satan web site, made by actual living person Peter Gilmore, put an Apple logo and a Made with Macintosh web badge on their page. He also made a Think Different tribute featuring a photograph of Anton LaVey with the Apple slogan in the format of the Think Different Apple campaign. Now Anton LaVey actually did own and use Apple computers. Unlike say Einstein who was probably spinning in his grave as Apple utilized his image. Jessica M. Brody of the powerhouse law firm Arent, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin & Kahn went after The Church of Satan for trademark dilution, despite the fact that there were numerous places on the web which encouraged Apple users to fly their lame substitute for a freak flag high.

I remember from my other people’s offices days that some designers were afraid to work on a PC, simply because they never had. They would try to claim that really the MAC was better for design, for reasons they could never explain. This was awesome because I would get their jobs.

The only reason designers liked MACs better were that the MAC platform tended to be marketed more towards creative professionals. And people who are not tech savvy are often afraid to try varied technology. Musicians sometimes liked MACs better because new software iterations for certain music software packages tend to be released for MAC first. Slacker losers tend to like MACs better because the Apple marketing lets them feel extra creative without them actually having to do any, ya know, creative work. That and Apple did a series of crazy successful ads featuring John Hodgeman from The Daily Show claiming to be a PC and the dude from Accepted claiming to be a MAC and like so much cooler than John Hodgeman. I know I could go to IMDB or even probably just search for the article on BlueBlood.net I wrote about the Accepted party at Comic Con to find the name of the dude from Accepted. But my point is that, even in the Apple adverts, the MAC guy is actually less accomplished than the PC guy. But you can’t have turned on a television or watched video online for very long without seeing the I’m a MAC and I’m a PC advertisements, so I won’t bother to describe them, other than to say they irritated the fuck out of me. And their impact on slacker losers who started talking about the MAC tech superiority because of those adverts just drove me nuts.

And, of course, Apple astroturfed the heck out of forums on the internet where they would have their ridiculous and illogical bullet points posted. And of course the meme-susceptible and the emotionally-needy would pick up those laughable talking points and run with them, causing a viral-born illness of technically inaccurate information all over the web. To anyone who finds mentions of viral marketing makes them think of the claim that a MAC is safer than a PC, because its secure operating system makes it less likely to get a virus, (a) a MAC can get malware, but (b) it does make more sense to program anything first for the operating system with a ninety something percent market share, so I guess that goes for viruses and adware too.

After all that, I started actively avoiding use of or purchase of Apple products. Not because of their technology, which is sometimes slightly ahead, sometimes slightly behind, and generally simply in the running with other similar products. I have a Blackberry and not an iPhone. I have a Sony music player from Japan where Sony released product with higher capacity drives and not an iPod. I have never made a single purchase from monopolistic iTunes which is trying to control what music you can listen to and which musicians can make a living and which can’t. Even though I once received an iTunes gift card as a holiday gift. (Apologies to Matthew Cooke; I did still appreciate the gesture even though I didn’t use the card.)

So I’m terribly terribly pleased that MicroSoft is smacking stupid Apple back with their current Windows Not Walls ad campaign. First off they found an actual MicroSoft employee who looks so much like John Hodgeman that the viewer has to double-take. They point out Apple’s bigotry of cool. Bill Gates apologizes for wearing glasses. Basically they call Apple out for acting like anyone who used a PC must be a geek and nerd and the only worthwhile thing in life would be to be cool and hip. After succinctly demonstrating the loathsomeness of Apple’s fundamental point, the MicroSoft commercial goes on to show that most of the world runs on PCs. A string of successful people in extremely varied jobs from politico to teacher to athlete to musician to actress to guru point out that they use PCs.

I do not dislike Apple products, but their marketing makes me actively irritated. So I would like to thank MicroSoft for bitch-slapping those smug and ignorant astroturfing Apple freaks back.

In this week’s episode of AMC’s Mad Men, the Paul Kinsey character, ably played by Michael Gladis, throws a party in his hipster Montclair loft. I’m not sure what Montclair is like today, but, when I was in school in Connecticut, I recall Montclair being mostly nice suburban homes. Definitely no longer hip and outlying. In the 1962 time of Mad Men, however, it is a transitional neighborhood which is home to its original have-nots and the adventurous vanguard of hipsters who are the frontline shock troops in any gentrification.

Paul Kinsey has invited people from all different areas of his life, hoping they will mingle with one another happily, and think better of him for throwing such a fabulous interesting party. It is a bit scandalous that, as an aspiring writer, Paul has snarfed a typewriter from work and left it on display where his guests can all see it. Some of the people from the Sterling-Cooper advertising office where he works feel uncomfortable, uneasy and unsafe in his neighborhood. Some just feel threatened by the strangeness and feel compelled to assert their alleged superiority. Paul’s ex-girlfriend, the sexually predatory office manager Joan Holloway, refuses to acknowledge that his new girlfriend is an assistant manager at a supermarket, calls her a checkout girl, makes a thing of her being black, and accuses Paul of basically trying to hard to be interesting. One of Paul’s collegiate chums fails to close the Peggy Olson character because he can’t wrap his head around the notion that a woman is a copywriter like his friend and not a secretary or receptionist. It is a very satisfying moment when she tells him that she is not going home with him because she is in the persuasion business and his presentation was unimpressive.

Damn but I have had that party. I always want to meld all the areas of my life into one. I don’t want to have to present a different face to each group of people I know. I want everyone to know the true me and somehow this feels like it means that everyone I know should be able to enjoy one another as much as I enjoy each of them.

I invited many of my friends from university and from the science fiction convention circuit to shindigs at my old punk rock group house Cambodia. Some of my school friends thought it was a great opportunity to bang a piece of strange, but they would also talk amongst themselves about what a waste it was that I was doing this instead of working for a management consulting firm or investment bank or something. Some of my punk rock friends failed to bang a piece of what would have been strange for them because it never occurred to them that someone in a buttoned down shirt could, for example, be gay. I still cringe when I remember one of my favorite people from sf fandom telling me he had the single worst time he had ever had at any party ever at Cambodia.

I thought that putting the different groups of people together would expand their horizons in an enjoyable way. My university prided itself on its diversity and I believed that diversity was simply good. Sometimes, for some people, my cross-pollinating shindigs did work out the way I hoped and intended. Writer Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, calls people like me connectors for introducing those who might otherwise not meet. Sometimes it is stimulating and invigorating being a connector and sometimes not so much. I try to make Blue Blood an entertainment haven for people like myself, who have wandered through many subcultures, never finding just one which was wholly who they are. Living that way, a person is likely to avoid believing the common lies people tell themselves, a person is likely to avoid believing things which are simply not true. There is a purity to this, but there is also the very real possibility of ending up feeling like a person without a country.

I think Mad Men was probably my favorite television show last season. The show name Mad Men is derived from the ad men who worked on Madison Avenue in New York. The first season of the show revolved around the lives of people who work at a fictional ad agency called Sterling-Cooper in 1960. Despite the fictional nature of the agency depicted, the modern ad industry trade magazine Advertising Age put together a whole fictional issue with news bites, interviews, and profiles of fictional industry professionals. That is some mighty creative marketing.

Don Draper, the primary character on the show, is always quick with a clever word and a creative approach to marketing at work and coming up with the best personal presentation personally. In describing him, one of the his coworkers says, “nobody has ever turned over that rock; he could be Batman.” So his carefully-constructed persona has worked for getting his dream job and dream house and dream woman and dream family and a number of spare dream women, but the people he knows both professionally and personally sense that Don Draper is holding back to the point where he is somewhat unknowable.

Show creator Matthew Weiner also wrote a dozen episodes of The Sopranos and produced thirty-three episodes of The Sopranos, so it should come as no surprise that his baby Mad Men is about a lot of things with interlocking multiple storylines and complex and deep characterizations. It is always difficult to make a period piece come across as both convincing and relevant, but Mad Men succeeds brilliantly. In addition the the snappy dialog and strong set design, Katherine Jane Bryant’s costume design is nothing short of amazing in its variety, beauty, and attention to detail in character development. The award winning costume designer is best known for her work on another impressive period show, David Milch’s delightfully foul-mouthed HBO western Deadwood.

On a macro level, Mad Men is about a moment in time when America, as a nation, felt optimistic and almighty but was about to feel less so. Mad Men is about a place in American history where the role of women in society was in dramatic flux and the general population’s views on bigotry over race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation were all changing or about to be challenged. Many historians view the early 1960’s as when the country collectively held its breath before the tumultuous late 60’s clashed with the previously ordered world of the man in the gray flannel suit. Sort of a time when everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

On a micro level, Mad Men is about the ways in which human relationships make us vulnerable, force us to expose ourselves, and create strife when we want a little extra privacy. On the surface, a number of the characters look like they have perfect lives, but they all struggle to keep what they have built together. Whenever the characters in Mad Men feel envy of one another, the viewer cringes, knowing what discomfort is behind those facades. This will resonate if you have ever gone to a corporate office job and done your best to make the right impression, all the while worried that somehow people can tell that you have to make the effort to come across like they do naturally.

While pitching Kodak at Sterling-Cooper, Don Draper explains that, in Greek, nostalgia means the pain from an old wound. According to the Advertising Age, err, articles, Sterling-Cooper got the account for the Kodak slide carousel after Don Draper said, “This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel; it’s called the carousel. It let’s us travel the way a child travels around and around, and back home again. To a place where we know are loved.” This pitch is from a man who has erased his early personal history and has no one left to share most memories with.

The two most common responses Mad Men evokes are laughter and a certain deep ache sort of pain. It is not entirely a feelgood series, but it is aesthetically lovely, verbally witty, and emotionally moving. New season starts tonight with a dateline of 1962, two years after season one ended. I hope season two can live up to the high expectations set by season one.

The conventional wisdom is that more people were forced to present a false front to the world in the early 1960’s than now. I’m not sure whether that is reality or wishful thinking, but I’m looking forward to season two of a show which makes me think about important questions like that.