The number of people officially out of work for a week or more is at its highest level since I was a junior in college. Ages ago.

Ken Layne is now selling his new old album, 14 songs he recorded in the 1990s.

Since I know (marginally) more about business than music, I’ll first note that Ken has copied Dr. Frank and picked $8 as his pricing point. In this age of Internet marketing and infinite copiability, this price sounds far more reasonable than the $19.99 or whatever the pre-digital minded record industry folks still try to foist on us. Online purchases should be impulse buys… and to me $8 seems much more like an impulse buy (a big meal at McDonalds or a couple of pints at the local brewery) than $20, which is almost the cost of an entree at a nice (non-NY) restaurant.

If you scroll down his album page, you can read my mutterings about Ken’s musicianship. Buy one or two. How often do you get to own a nice durable chunk of genius for the price of dinner at McDs?

A clever nascent essay on the anthropology of fridges (and people who write about them.)

With some bloggers bragging about their revenues from Google Adsense, it’s worth remembering that not everyone is bragging. I just talked to a blogger who is making the equivalent of $0.16 CPMs from Adsense. Most advertising, yes Blog advertising too, is about a lot more than utility, folks. Don’t let advertisers blindly undervalue your loyal communities.

I just had an interesting chat with a substantial advertiser who is considering buying a big package of blogads. Turns out he’s fed up with advertising on sites like MSN.com. “I bought 29 million page impressions and made 29 sales — there’s gotta be a better way,” he said.

For those of you who have asked for a horizontal adstrip, we’re working on something. Take a look at this horizontal strip of blog advertising and drop me a line or leave a comment.

Safire channels Nixon (via cellphone from purgatory): “Kerry can’t smile and Lieberman smiles too much. Gephardt has no eyebrows and Edwards comes across as tricky. Dean would be a godsend for us, blowing his cool in debate. Joe Biden would give Bush the most trouble, but he’s waiting too long. Gotta run to Keynes’s class. Where’s the damn button to turn this thing off?”

The normal view “is that once a leader decides on war, he should stand aside and let the generals fight it without political interference. This view is analogous to the terror of micromanaging that is a standard feature of the advice in business books in recent years. The idea is that a chief executive is supposed to think big thoughts, set direction and then let people do their jobs without interference. Indeed, nowadays the chief executive is supposed to be a coach and a cheerleader more than anything else. In wartime, according to Mr. Cohen, that is nonsense. In four fascinating case studies, the author demonstrates that Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben-Gurion continually challenged and questioned their generals, mastered immense quantities of detail and, in important instances, overruled their advice. In all four cases, Mr. Cohen shows that these habits played a crucial role in achieving victory.” (Link)

“ACCORDING to research compiled by David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, multitaskers actually hinder their productivity by trying to accomplish two things at once. Mr. Meyer has found that people who switch back and forth between two tasks, like exchanging e-mail and writing a report, may spend 50 percent more time on those tasks than if they work on them separately, completing one before starting the other.”

I’m sometimes guilty of this and agree that it is bad. My rationalization: I don’t want to be the bottleneck in partner or colleague projects; I’m sacrificing my efficiency for theirs. Umm… usually.

The NYTimes introduces a bunch of tech characters who claim to be more successful, more vibrant, more competitive because they are multitasking. These guys usually sound like self-deceiving boobs, particularly the guy who uses his wireless-enabled laptop, BlackBerry and mobile phone while having imaginary dogfights with his five-year-old son.

“Both love the game, and it has an added benefit for Dad: he can play with one hand while using the other to talk on the phone or check e-mail. The multitasking maneuver occasionally requires a trick: although Mr. Mehlman usually lets his son win the Lego air battles, he sometimes allows himself to win, which forces his son to spend a few minutes putting his plane back together. ‘While he rebuilds his plane, I check my e-mail on the BlackBerry,’ Mr. Mehlman explained.” (He’s got two other kids too.)

“Advertising is the ultimate performance art,” says copywriter John Kuraoka in a permalinkless June 19 post. (Via Scott Knowles.)