I’m glad I didn’t purchase a laptop this year. Because now I will have an excuse to seriously consider the MacBook Air.

Of course, it’s been all over the interwebs. I’ve just been reading and looking and absorbing. I do like the Mac (though I use a PC mainly, I have ready access to a Mac and the fun that comes with it) and since a notebook computer might be a good thing to have (it’s come up a few times) this would allow me to have both. And at something like 3 pounds and less than an inch thick? Oh, yes, please.

Here’s a nice little Wired piece on it (about its unveiling at the Macworld expo).

Clearly, I won’t be able to buy it when it comes out - and that’s just fine. I’m sure they’ll be hard-to-near-impossible to get at first, and it’s usually a good idea to wait a while before buying a brand new Apple product (prices drop, bugs are worked out, etc.)

But when I do finally acquire it (maybe next summer or fall) I already know what kind of case I’ll be getting for it. I’m sure you’ve heard the gimmick from Steve Jobs’ presentation: he pulled an Air out of a manila envelope to show off the slimness and size of it. Some hipster designers have already taken that and run with it. They call it AirMail.

“handmade out of durable upholstery-grade vinyl, and lined with fuzzy, soft fleece, a manila envelope for your MacBook Air.”

This is day three of waking up early (sans alarm) despite having gone to bed at a relatively late hour. What’s most annoying is the inability to fall back asleep.

What did I do yesterday when I couldn’t get back to sleep? I broke. I joined Facebook, despite my earlier rant against social networking. Why? Well, since I work as a marketer, it’s good to have actual familiarity with the newfangled whozamawuzzits out there that all the crazy kids are using. And a couple of good friends sort of talked me into it—without knowing they did —separately from one another. Anyway, I figure I can put as much or as little effort into it as I see fit, and there’s always the deletion option.

Now I’m going to edit the post I started last night but got too sleepy to finish.

While I was waiting in the train station today, I found myself standing next to a woman carrying one of those now ubiquitous woven polypropylene totebags - the kind you can purchase at your local high-end or natural food market for a couple of dollars and are meant to re-use instead of wasting plastic bags.

Her particular bag advertised the fact that it was purchased to support an environmental preservation and rescue organization, and the side panels of the bag contained a long missive with a large headline proclaiming, “THERE IS ONLY ONE EARTH” in large green letters.

Let me state at the outset that I have nothing against these bags, however ubiquitous and omnipresent. It’s a good thing. I carry a totebag and have canvas and polypropylene totes I’ve amassed at various book trade shows that I use for shopping and carrying stuff. However.

However, there’s a point where a well-intentioned marketing tool like a reusable totebag becomes an ironic and obvious example of the failure of the message - usually because the tool became a trend which everyone bought into and the medium (which was the message) lost the message and meaning (paging McLuhan? Strictly speaking, I know it’s not The Media, but it’s certainly A Medium). This woman was one such example.

Her reusable totebag was stuffed almost to overflowing with regular old plastic shopping bags containing shoes, food and magazines (the visible items) and who knows what other items in the very plastic bags her big bag was meant to replace. Now, I can understand wanting to keep your shoes and food separated in some way. However, there’s no reason the magazines had to be parceled up into their own bag. You might be saying, “But maybe she carries those other plastic bags to reuse them!”

I gave her this benefit of the doubt, too, until I saw what was hanging off her other arm. A plastic bag from the snack shop in the train station (white) with a plastic bag from the newsstand (yellow) within it. And the snack shop bag contained several plastic bags of chips and a bottle of soda. This last bit, I admit, is a matter of strong personal bias. Because she opened her 99¢ jumbo-size value bag of “Funyuns” and started chomping messily - which just grossed me out.

So I have to wonder: did she realize how mixed her own messages were? Probably not. Is she aware of the reason those bags became popular and why people everywhere are carrying them? Has she read the side panel of her bag for an explanation of the environmental impact of plastic bags? I’m guessing, “No” and “No.”

But she’s certainly not the only one, which is part of the problem. The good idea has gotten lost in the relatively short span of time it’s taken this trend to speed over from Hollywood to suburbia.

This woman was just the one who happened to cross my path today and trigger my wrath with Funyuns.

Über-marketer Seth Godin posted on his blog yesterday about… reading blogs. Sayeth he:

If you’re not currently reading your blogs through a reader, I highly recommend it. It’s possible to go through a hundred blog posts in four or five minutes once you get good at it.

Too right, Seth. Too right. Rather than a feed reader becoming a huge time suck, if you can learn to parse/process/sort that information as you skim, you can quickly separate the wheat from the chaff (to use the old idiom) and absorb mad amounts of relevant info in a relatively short amount of time.

What is relevant for you will, of course, vary (”YMMV“)… for me, this post from Seth was important and will be shared at work tomorrow. But this item from CuteOverload was also important as was this awesome vase posted to NOTCOT.

Godin specifically mentions Google Reader and Bloglines. I wonder how many people will be signing up for a Google Reader account when they get to work tomorrow (chances are they didn’t read his post over the weekend).

Coincidentally, I was talking about feed readers (and Google Reader specifically) with a marketing colleague at work a few weeks ago. I was pretty enthusiastic and even, perhaps, a bit of a zealot about it. Zealotry will get you in trouble - or get you invited to speak about your beloved topic to a room full of people and conduct a live on-screen walk-through of set-up and whatnot. That’s what I’ll be doing in a few weeks.

You can bet I’ll be using Godin’s post somewhere.

Last night, I caught a few minutes of Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone on ABC Family (background noise while I was eating dinner - my other options were Sex and the City or How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days). During the transition to commercial, Mr. Announcer pronounced that Harry Potter was part of their special “25 Days of Christmas” programming, brought to us by New Line Cinema’s The Golden Compass.

There’s something quite hilarious and more than a little contradictory about that. ABC Family is touting the fact that Harry Potter (a movie and book series quite heavily criticized by religious groups) is part of their Christmas programming. That heathen, Harry, is sponsored by The Golden Compass, which right now is garnering all kinds of attention because The Catholic League and Focus on the Family (among others) are calling for a boycott of the movie for its anti-religious basis.

For those who aren’t familiar with the books or the movie, here’s some basic info. Philip Pullman wrote a trilogy of childrens’ books (not young children - young adult/intermediate fiction is more appropriate) collectively entitled, His Dark Materials. That title comes from Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, about the Fall (of Adam and Eve, and the rebellion of the angels led by Satan). The specific quote is:

Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look’d a while,
Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross.

The books in the trilogy are The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, and they center around a pre-teen orphan girl named Lyra who is living and attending a boarding school in a sort of alternate universe Oxford. The college is run by a religious order known as the Magisterium - they’re quickly revealed to be corrupt and working on an evil project based in some crazy fundamentalist-like beliefs. I don’t want to belabor with details but, essentially, it turns out that our heroine is a child born out of wedlock (gasp!) and the evil agenda involves separating children from their souls (which are corporeal in this universe and take on animal forms) before they reach puberty.

Hanna Rosin, in The Atlantic Monthly, wrote a great piece about the movie called, “How Hollywood Saved God.” The full article is available only to subscribers (hi!) but here are some of the more interesting segments. Rosin interviewed Philip Pullman and spoke to him about how the studio has sterilized the movie and removed basically all the edgy religious elements:

In discussing the film, he chose his words carefully, acknowledging that his role now is to be “sensible” so that the next two films get made. Nonetheless, he was honest about what was missing: “They do know where to put the theology,” he said, “and that’s off the film.”

Long silence. Then, “I think if everything that is made explicit in the book or everything that is implied clearly in the book or everything that can be understood by a close reading of the book were present in the film, they’d have the biggest hit they’ve ever had in their lives. If they allowed the religious meaning of the book to be fully explicit, it would be a huge hit. Suddenly, they’d have letters of appreciation from people who felt this but never dared say it. They would be the heroes of liberal thought, of freedom of thought … And it would be the greatest pity if that didn’t happen.

I didn’t put that very well. What I mean is that I want this film to succeed in every possible way. And what I don’t want to do, you see, is talk the other two films out of existence. So I’ll stop there.”

Then later:

When pressed, Pullman grants that he’s not really trying to kill God, but rather the outdated idea of God as an old guy with a beard in the sky… The Narnia series, in his view, embraces a worldview that comes close to “life-hating ideology”—punishing, misogynistic, racist, and death-obsessed. By contrast, his own books are filled with a kind of warmth, an exuberance for finding utopia in this life. When he loses patience with his Christian critics, he lists the values he promotes in his own stories: tolerance, love, kindness, courage, duty, individual freedom over blind obedience.

He also talks about how his books celebrate sexual awakening - and not preteens having sex, but teenagers awakening to the knowledge of their bodies and sexuality… much like Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge.

The San Francisco Chronicle published a piece on Friday, by Mark Morford, about the religious groups’ boycotts of the movie -”Jesus loves ‘His Dark Materials’: Shrill Bible-thumpers boycott ‘The Golden Compass’; world’s children grin devilishly.”

Pullman’s luminous novels have nothing to do with rejecting faith or destroying the spirit or inhibiting the exploration of what it means to be divine. They are, in fact, the exact opposite. They relish spirit and the magic of belief and love, are soaked through with divine inspiration of a kind any intelligent Christian (or honest spiritual seeker of any stripe, for that matter) should crave the way Lindsay Lohan craves cocaine. This is what makes them so incredible.

No, the nefarious thing the books aim to kill is, well, religious authority. It’s about the destruction of dogma. It’s about power, about who wants to control and manipulate life on Earth; it is about blind, ignorant, even violent adherence to insidiously narrow codes of thought and belief and behavior, sex and desire and love.

This, of course, is the God of organized religion. This is the false deity that promotes numb groupthink and inhibits growth and abhors the feminine divine (perhaps the books’ most beautiful, inspiring theme), the same paranoid, dreadful God that votes for George W. Bush because, well, he will smite the icky gays and protect us from vile pagans and Buddhists and Muslims and feminists and frumpy genius atheist British writers.

He goes on in much of the same vein. I’ll be seeing the movie; the books are good. The previews look good. Daniel Craig looks good. There are murder plots, trepanned heads in jars, a battle royale, armor-wearing polar bears, and there will have to be lots of wicked cool special effects. So we’ll see.