Well the Doc opened up the old mailbag today and here’s what poured out.
Dear Dr. Ads,
There’s no question the Obamacare national rollout has been a disaster.
But the state healthcare exchanges have done much better.
Except for the Brosurance campaign in Colorado.
Representative sample:
Mother of mercy – don’t we have enough problems without that?
– Kathleen S
Dear Kathleen S:
That’s not the half of it.
There’s also this . . .
Read the rest at Ask Dr. Ads.
The feisty local tabloid’s real-estate crusade continues today, with two full pages dedicated to ripping the lid off Mayor Tom Menino and his Boston Redevelopment Authority marionettes.
Of special note is this whack at one BRA member in particular (if you guessed that he has union ties, vote yourself a special treat) . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
From our One Holiday at a Time desk
Lord & Taylor is really pushing it in this ad from yesterday’s New York Times.
First of all, could we maybe have Thanksgiving before we unveil the Legendary Holiday (read: Christmas) Windows?
Second of all, what’s with the God’s Love We Deliver?
Maybe a little less Lord, a little more Taylor is in order here.
From our Walt Whitman desk
What will the Boston Herald do when Tom Menino vacates the corner office at City Hall?
Probably a lot more of this:
Inside, Menino sort of answers the question . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
From Tuesday’s New York Times Corrections:
An article on Saturday about the controversial mayor of Lawrence, Mass., William Lantigua, erroneously attributed a distinction to James Michael Curley, a former Boston mayor, often compared to Mr. Lantigua, whose populist appeal helped him survive a felony conviction. Mr. Curley, who served four terms as mayor between 1914 and 1950, was Irish, but he was not the first Irish mayor of Boston. (The first was Hugh O’Brien, who served from 1885 to 1889.)
Okay. Just to be clear:
William Lantigua
James Michael Curley
Hugh O’Brien
Sorted.
From our Late to the Pizza Party desk
It’s only taken the hardwalking staff a month and a half to notice this, but the Great BU 
Pizza War is over. The slice-off between the venerable University Grill and the upstart Comm. Ave. interloper Sal’s Pizza began about two years ago, as the hardmunching staff chronicled and sampled.
But Yelp don’t lie (much), and it turned out to be no contest between U-Grill and Sal’s when it came to customer reviews. (Sal’s got all of three reviews in two years.)
And so . . . here’s the end result, via Boston Restaurant Talk:
Sal’s Pizza at Boston University Has Closed
A local chain of pizza places that has been expanding through the Boston area over the past several years has closed one of its locations within the city.
According to a post on Twitter from @sportsgirlkat, Sal’s Pizza on Commonwealth Avenue by Boston University has shuttered, with a check on the Sal’s website confirming that it has indeed closed down (the site refers customers to shops on Brookline Avenue in the Fenway and Tremont Street in downtown Boston).
Said site referral:
It seems to the hardjudging staff that this is a just and proper outcome, and that Sal’s should never have moved in next door to the U-Grill bros.
Now we need a small fries to go.
I knew Mike Ford before he was Michael Ford.
He and I roomed together in 1970, the year he graduated from Xavier University. That 
Jesuit institution in Cincinnati left an indelible mark on Mike, as strong as Holy Communion or Confirmation.
As his obituary in the Washington Post noted, “Mr. Ford — a veteran of nine White House campaigns and a senior adviser to several of them — was once described by Newsweek magazine as having ‘an odd blend of boiler-room savvy and cloisterish philosophy.'”
The boiler-room savvy, I think, came from Mike’s Dad, who was a pioneer in the field of cybernetics. The cloisterish philosophy came from Xavier.
That combination led him to great accomplishments. And legendary ones.
From Campaigns & Elections:
Michael Ford remembered for pig-and-chicken tale
Michael Ford will be remembered as an inspirational strategist and the originator of the pig-and-chicken story that’s been used to motivate countless Democratic field organizers.
Ford died Nov. 5 from complications related to melanoma, according to the Washington Post. The 65 year old marked his final Election Day at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Joe Trippi remembers meeting Ford while working as a “$15-a-day organizer” on the late-Sen. Ted Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign. “I remember the very first time I ever laid eyes on him. He said to a whole room full of field organizers that he didn’t want us to just be involved, he wanted us to be committed,” Trippi recalled to C&E. “And that if we had any doubt about what that meant think about your breakfast in the morning.
“Because the eggs that you ate, the chicken was involved in your breakfast, but when you had that bacon, the pig was committed to it.”
For a fuller sense of the man Mike was, check out this video of his 2010 lecture at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service.
The website michaelfordmemories.com has much more about his achievements, including this:
In 2009, Mr. Ford founded the Center for the Study of the American Dream at his alma mater, Xavier University. The Center serves as the nation’s pre-eminent clearinghouse for information on the state of the American Dream.
As its Founding Director, Mr. Ford led the Center’s efforts in generating significant original research analyzing shifts in the Dream’s continuing evolution. Under Mr. Ford’s leadership, the Center has received significant national attention for its work.
At the time of his death, Mr. Ford was working on a book on the history, meaning, and future of the American Dream, which his family plans to publish posthumously. The book’s genesis comes from his 2012 Washington Post Sunday Outlook 5 Myths opinion piece “Five Myths about the American Dream.”
That was now. But even back then, it was clear Mike would be a star.
As clearly he was.
It’s the latest cultural tut-tutchstone: Everyone’s clucking about Selfies at Funerals, a Tumblr page that delivers exactly what it promises. Here’s a representative sample:
The site is the brainchild of Jason Feifer, a senior editor at Fast Company who told the website Jezebel, “I make Tumblrs to make people laugh. But I do totally understand and appreciate how it can hit a nerve.”
Ya think? The Huffington Post ran a piece last week headlined, Funeral Selfies Are The Latest Evidence Apocalypse Can’t Come Soon Enough.
More benignly, we could chalk it up to the “perpetual adolescence” Joseph Epstein described in his fine 2004 essay: “Youth is no longer viewed as a transitory state through which one passes on the way from childhood to adulthood, but an aspiration, a vaunted condition in which, if one can only arrange it, to settle in perpetuity.”
In that world, selfies are what young people do regardless of the circumstances – especially when no one has told them how respectable people conduct themselves at solemn events like funerals.
But there’s something more going on here: the development of a different relationship to death that digital media are enabling.
Increasingly, we not only experience grief, but memorialize and publicize it as well.
Two years ago an outfit called I-Postmortem Ltd. launched I-Memorial and I-Tomb, described this way in a Wall Street Journal ad.
• Build your immortality. Say what you have to say. Do not leave unprepared. Let www.i-memorial.com become the fully secure guardian of your lifetime, the best place to leave the trace of your passage on Earth.
• Join a Human Revolution. Tell the story of those who have left you. Bring your loved ones back, anytime, anywhere, when you want to cherish and remember with www.i-tomb.net, The World Virtual Cemetery.
That’s a whole nother concept of the afterlife, isn’t it?
(Poke around on the web and it sure seems that I-Postmortem met an early demise – Twitter feed: 16 followers – but that impression could be greatly exaggerated.)
One site that’s absolutely a going concern, though, is Find a Grave, which promises a “virtual cemetery experience.”
There you can Search Famous Graves or “find the graves of ancestors, create virtual memorials, add ‘virtual flowers’ and a note to a loved one’s grave, etc.
Or you could “Join the discussion!” at one of Find a Graves forums.
And, because this is America, there’s merchandise. The Find a Grave Store features We’re history t-shirts, Find a Grave baseball caps, lapel pins that say ?, and stainless steel mugs that will likely last an eternity
The site also features a hit counter on its main page, which shows 13,755,979 13,971,292 Page Views Today as I type this at 11:27 11:39 PM. (That means there have been 215,313 new visitors to the site in the past 12 minutes.)
In his essay Joseph Epstein noted that “time doesn’t seem to the perpetual adolescent the excruciatingly finite matter, the precious commodity, it indubitably is. For the perpetual adolescent, time is almost endlessly expandable.”
From all the digital evidence, that’s starting to be true for everyone.
Well the Doc opened up the old mailbag today and here’s what poured out.
Dear Dr. Ads,
There’s a tradition of Veterans Day Sale ads that always struck me as kinda, well, cheap. But now there’s Veterans Day Ads 2.0, in which stuff gets given free to military vets.
Exhibit A: This full-page Starbucks ad from any number of newspapers.
Exhibit B: This Applebee’s full-page ad from ditto.
So is this good, Doc? Or just using vets to make money?
– Non Vet
Dear Non Vet:
That’s not the half of it. Check out this Vetapalooza of freebies . . .
Read the rest at Ask Dr. Ads.
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