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Tuesday, March 23, 2010
No Such Thing as Too Many
1. The more old school games that are available, from a variety of publishers, the less likely it is for any one of them to become the old school game, either in theory or in practice. Speaking for myself, I prefer diffusion to centralization, as it's a good safeguard against repeating the mistakes of the hobby's past. Likewise, the more games available, the more cross-pollination of ideas we'll see and that too is an unqualified good in my opinion.
2. However, my position is predicated on the assumption that these clones are all roughly compatible with one another, sharing similar mechanical roots, so that cross-pollination is encouraged, if not actually facilitated. I prefer that new clones make their rules available for free, as Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, OSRIC, and James Raggi have done for this very reason, but it's not essential. At the same time, when a publisher introduces a proprietary "old school" RPG, my skepticism is heightened. That's why I tend to view games like HackMaster and Castles & Crusades differently than the aforementioned games, even though I find a lot to like in both of them. I suspect I'll feel similarly about the DCC RPG, but it's too early to tell.
The old school movement is a gloriously chaotic mess of creativity. That chaos fosters creativity and impedes the centralization of authority in any one game or publisher -- both positive outcomes in my view. So, the more, the merrier, I say.
38 comments:
I think you are wrong. Too many games peddling more or less the same play experience is simply going to turn off new players.
I have no problem with having many old-school-style games covering different sorts of settings and genres; that's fine. But even having two D&Ds in the 80s was one too many, IMO, and having 5 or 6 today is plain stupid.Luckily for me, I am not a brand manager or an industry wonk, so having numerous different games out there, all different but sharing some sensibilities, seems like fun to me... if only because as the player we will have more choices.
I really don't see the downside for anyone other than WOTC who probably don't want the competition for gamer's dollars.
It will never be the "boomtime" for RPGs of the late 70s/early 80s again... and I don't think thats a bad thing.- AnonymousMarch 23, 2010 at 11:32 AM
As I posted yesterday it's more about grabbing that mythical ODD buck than it is about pushing QUALITY content.
Goodman games has a solid reputation in the D20 community. I've used their products quite a few times. The concern that I have is that more and more publishers churn out product you'll get the same glut with ODD material as you had with D20. So many many many (I can't count how many elf books there are out there) products out there just throwing themselves at you eventually one gets burnt out on it all.
Competition and variety is good. I firmly support people wanting to get their feet wet with a new product line. It's the BUYERS who must be wary as I've seen it time and again where people just make absolutely horrible products and since there is nothing else out there cry foul when their products are shown to be garbage (Yes Jim Ward, I'm looking at FFE products here).
More is better. Use that sceptical nature and make sure that you pour your money into the RIGHT publisher that fits your game style and purge those that are just hopping on the money train.
/gets the blow torches and pitchforks
//forgot the kerosene
///settles for napalm - AnonymousMarch 23, 2010 at 11:40 AM
"As long as they're compatible"...
The problem is knowing if they are, or with which systems they're compatible (and which they aren't). I'd sort of prefer one B/X/ODD clone to take the lead and one 1E AD&D to do so. It'd be a lot easier to know the format and what to expect if that were the case.
One of the things I find confounding is that some of the retro-clones were designed primarily as a legal means to create and sell old school-compatible work, but some are actually designed as working game systems. OSRIC, IIRC, was originally made not to be an actual gaming system, but as a framework to produce 1E-compatible modules and supplements. I wish Goodman Games had picked one of the existing clones and used them, so that we can easily predict what the format and compatibility will be. Too many games peddling more or less the same play experience is simply going to turn off new players.
Please provide proof that this has ever been an issue with any industry.
Too many cell phone companies? Too many choices for auto insurance?
Variety and diversity is what pushes growth and innovation. The best products will rise to the top and keep creativity from stagnating. And I'm sure each will have it's own take on setting, monsters, mechanics, etc.
James is 300% right on this one--the more the merrier.Nagora, your point would stand if all these games were produced by the same company. But we're talking about a vibrant and diverse marketplace here, made up of a number of publishers of various sizes. The retro-clone idea is a hot new thing, so a lot of different interests are going to try their hand at it- some will succeed, some will fail and consumers will decide which is which. It's Smith's capitalism at its finest, frankly.
ReplyDeleteYou may hate me for this but I've just started running B2 - The Lost City using 4e. None of the players have every tried, to my knowledge, old school D&D gaming and even with the massive rules change the spirit is still there. Up until now they've been playing 4e in the new school heroic scale but are already wanting to run parties of just Halfings, secretly evil characters, hiring henchman to 'detect' traps and gold is the new reward of choice.
Maybe the system and therefore quantity of systems isn't important.- AnonymousMarch 23, 2010 at 11:48 AM
Joseph Goodman did playtests of the DCCRPG at Gary Con, and I had the pleasure of playing in one. My impression is that it'll be more compatible with d20-based systems like Microlite d20, bridging the gap between D&D's mechanical roots and their more convoluted and rationalized later flowerings. For me the most enjoyable aspect of the system was random generation of character background (which, being zero-level characters, was all we had; Joe said class/race would develop out of that through advancement) and starting equipment. The OSR has often celebrated the awesomeness of having a PC who is defined by rolling a longsword or a voodoo doll instead of choosing feats/powers/etc., but this is the first system I've seen to make that a default part of character generation.
I also think it's cool to see an old-school game built to support a specific line of modules. we have plenty of generic fantasy games, but one designed to enable specific adventure exemplars showing how it's meant to be played is cool. And if the playtest adventure is any indication that style is a dungeon as puzzle deathtrap, rather than megadungeon as sandbox. Both are important parts of the Old Ways (Jim Ward's game at Gary Con being the former, and Rob Kuntz's being the latter), but I think that the sandbox approach has gotten much more attention and welcome Goodman's focusing attention on the joys of touching the wrong thing and being promptly killed as a result.
- Tavis I don't see what the issue is. All I see is a bunch of people with similar shared history contributing more of what they enjoy to each other.
Bringing more people into the fold is important, sure, but at the end of the day just knowing that people are sharing their creativity with one another is way more important to me than some vast movement to reclaim something perceived as "lost".
There is too much focus on market share and badmouthing diversity in this community. Take some time to really think about what is taking place and I guarantee it will make you smile.
You can flame me all you want for sounding like an rpg hippie, but here are the facts as I see them:
I'm a fan of early TSR and Chaosium style gaming. There is more creative output in both of those "Old School" communities in the last two/three years than I remember there being in the last two decades. The more the merrier IMO.I really enjoy that "gloriously chaotic mess of creativity". It reminds me a lot of the pulp rags from the 30's. Each publication had it's own theme, but you are usually treated to wildly different stories left and right - even from a single source. Many of the yarns can so-so, but you'll never know when you'll hit pay-dirt, and its usually well worth it. Economics seem to be a major factor with both.
ReplyDeleteDitto Paladin and Aos. I got everything I need for my 1st edition gaming, but more power to people who need/want these things. I don't have a copy of Gamma World, so Mutant Future came in handy when I wanted to do a bit of that. Didn't feel the same though, but maybe that is just me.
I also don't need a vibrant old school community. It's great for this blogging, and discussion, but few of my current players are there at my table because they prefer an old school experience. They liked the cut of my DM jib, and are playing 1st edition because that is what I am offering.
I liked D&D in part because it always seemed fun to be into something "underground." "More the Merrier" is only on my radar when it comes to money, chicks or beer.I like it. More interest in the scene fundamentally feels good, even if I don't buy the specific product. Just the fact that that Roslof artwork got commissioned and I got to see it brightened my day.
That said, I think the "too many games" critics are coming from a good and honest place with rational points. It's the anti-intellectuals crying "elitist!" that start to make my blood boil.Actually there are a couple problems in marketing when there gets to be too much of a good thing.
1st, there is brand dilution.
Its hard to get any sames (or play in the case of an RPG) momentum if there is no clear market leader and alternatives. I don't think this applies here as the total number of old school games is still pretty small compared to the possible player base. In addition we have several clear market leaders in the free (Basic Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, Swords and Wizardry) and pay only categories (Castles and Crusades and maybe Hackmaster)
2, There is a problem called tyranny of choice.
When there are too many choices its to hard to choose just one or two Happily this problem is minor here as well. OSR products are well categorized and somewhat interchangeable.
The only real challenge we face is building a player base. In that case, more is always better.I wish Goodman Games had picked one of the existing clones and used them, so that we can easily predict what the format and compatibility will be.
I do as well, especially given that they've already licensed OSRIC translations of DCC modules, but I'm not the least bit surprised they've chosen to create their own system. Whether it's open and how much of it is compatible with the old school clones will determine a lot about its acceptance among grognards.You can flame me all you want for sounding like an rpg hippie, but here are the facts as I see them:
I'm a fan of early TSR and Chaosium style gaming. There is more creative output in both of those "Old School" communities in the last two/three years than I remember there being in the last two decades. The more the merrier IMO
If this position makes you a hippie, then so am I -- and that would be absurd.So long as they're all D&D/variants?
If we ever reach the time when there are multiple competing retro-clones of Gamma World or Traveller, then I might modify my position, but, as it stands, most people who argue about there being too many clones are talking about D&D clones and not any other sort.
(That said, there are currently multiple RuneQuest/BRP clones available, but I think everything I said here applies there as well)I can see both sides of the argument. Too many 1e/Basic clones does make it feel like 3e with its 1001 D20 game systems. Other side of the argument: I understand how one might not want to use an existing clone. If one clone calls cavalier 'knight' instead, or uses proficiency rules, and you don't like that. Than you want a system you relate more too. Which clone is closest to one's own homebrew rules?
I think as long as you can run your fav clone game in another's adventures, and use another's monsters book, than it's fine.
Maybe the next clone book will be conversion rules between them all.James M said:
I do as well, especially given that they've already licensed OSRIC translations of DCC modules
That actually isn't true. Goodman released sort of "generic" 1e compatible conversions, sort of like PPP does, but he won't touch OSRIC as a brand at all. Just a random bit of info. ;-)
Anyway, other issues aside, I think it is pretty clear that Goodman wants to capture an audience that values the "idea" of old-school, but that actually wants a version of D20 light. I say all the power to him, and I hope he does well. It was probably the wrong time earlier to do it since there have been so many games like this, but maybe if he can sell it in a different way he'll do better. His main competition is C&C as far as I can tell, and I think it is probably utterly irrelevant in terms of taking "market share" so no need for people to get upset that there are too many games.- AnonymousMarch 23, 2010 at 4:03 PM
James, you didn't mention BFRP. It's been out since 2006 I believe. Version two is available now and it's beautiful.
And it's free. And the Lulu POD copies are at cost and inexpensive.
http://www.basicfantasy.org/ This is copied from my earlier post about the DCC ad, and I think it has relevance here:
I'm really surprised at the poo-pooing here about this product which, BTW, most of us no nothing about it.
AFAICT, those who did play it at GaryCon (and old-school con BTW) seem to enjoy the game.
Holding judgment based upon an ad is pretty stupid.
ALL OSR RPGs need to be examined on their own merits and people will make personal choices on what they like.
Statements like:
File under "Castles & Crusades, Hackmaster, utterly pointless."
don't help the OSR movement. IF anything, it detracts from it, and it's based solely on personal opinion and conjecture.
What's the worst that could happen? Maybe it's (GASP!)a good game?
And if it's bad? So what? It hurts nobody but Goodman Games.
There are plenty of OSR-type games out there, so if one doesn't make it...oh well.
Let's judge it by it's content not by it "cover", as it were. ,
In other words "the more the merrier!"There is a problem with too many games that attempt to remain "compatible". It means that most of these games will be sticking to similar core mechanics, limited somewhat the differences between them. I think having more games is great if there's variety of rules and approaches, but if compatibility is truly the goal, having too many games does become an exercise in redundancy, though I suppose that depends on the degree of compatibility. Are we talking about being able to use the same character stat blocks with little modification or simply the big-picture stuff? The more complete and fine-grained the compatibility the less inherent variation (except in setting, which is, to a degree, relatively rules independent).
ReplyDeleteThe too many games issue is moot then the Open Game License give the freedom to everyone to create new retro-clones as they see fit with nobody but the market telling them no.
With that being said in the long term the retro-clones will shake out in tier of popularity. The more popular will be those in distribution and take advantage of the wider market. So while there may a dozen retro-clone there will be only a few visible ones.I believe that the OS market needs to be much larger in terms of sales to support this many clones.
Each clone that fails will look like a good reason not to support the others, so it's not just a simple question of the more the merrier and Darwin will pick the best one. I remember what happened to the comics market when Marvel flooded it with titles. The whole market collapsed.
But, I guess it's not my problem. I'd LIKE to see a stable market place where people could put out high-quality product that I can use and be financially rewarded for their work, but I don't need it by any means. And if the average product sells 40 copies because of market fragmentation and cannibalisation, that's just as well for me.I posted it in the other thread, but I'll re-iterate here.
In response to calling games like HackMaster and Castles & Crusades fundamentally different (and not or less) important to the OSR movement, I was accused of wanting to "argue over the 'one true box'?"
And I say: What's to argue? I was under the impression that all of the various D&D versions released prior to Gygax's ouster from TSR collectively constituted the "one true game" and that the OSR movement was about primarily popularizing and promoting their continued use.
If that's not so, and anyone has the right to represent their own, brand new games as "old school D&D" with no dissent from that viewpoint tolerated? Well, that's a problem. It's called a completely incoherent movement without the necessary foundation of a single guiding principal or goal.
Would you try to steer the culture of, say, the Robert E. Howard Foundation toward recognition of every Conan pastiche novel and comic book under the sun, past and present, as equivalent in status to REH's original stories, to the point of wanting to wage rhetorical war on the community's "snobs" who objected? I sure hope not. Because if that endeavor succeeds, there effectively is no Robert E. Howard Foundation anymore.
It's not rocket science.I don't think so.
It does sound like you're arguing over what is the "one TRUE game".
Burn the heretics! BURN THEM ALL!!!!
It's getting harder and harder to get some of the original rule books. So why not have OSRIC, LL, or S&W be able to fill that gap?
Or Games like C&C, Hackmaster, or the new DCC to use a ruleset that is SIMILAR to the "old school" type of ruleset?
IS that so bad?"It's getting harder and harder to get some of the original rule books. So why not have OSRIC, LL, or S&W be able to fill that gap?
Or Games like C&C, Hackmaster, or the new DCC to use a ruleset that is SIMILAR to the 'old school' type of ruleset?"
Maybe because these are two fundamentally different types of games (classic D&D clones and brand new games that often resemble classic D&D only superficially)?
Maybe one of these types of games is a whole lot more relevant to maintaining any kind of meaningful OSR movement than the other?
Maybe brand new RPG games (even if they're in the fantasy genre and even if they try to cash-in on classic D&D with some of their advertising or artwork), already have plenty of their own homes online at places like RPG.Net and other blog networks?And here we go again.
Can some other posters, or maybe even James himself chime in and clarify if OLD SCHOOL is a philosophy on HOW TO PLAY the game or about WHAT GAME TO PLAY?
I was always under the impression that OLD SCHOOL is a certain kind of way to play the game.
Lets take Keep on the Borderlands and Tomb of Horrors for example.
I can use both modules without change or only minimal changes for the TSR products and most clones.
With some small changes I can also use Hackmaster (as far as I know they have some version of the modules for their system anyway) and C&C.
With some more changes I am able to use D&D 3rd and the D20 based clones.
With a lot of change I can even use 4th edition.
Or, If I want to, I can run these modules with Barbarians of Lemuria or Burning Wheel or Tunnels & Trolls or Chaosiums Basic Fantasy Roleplaying (and related systems like Runequest, CoC, Stormbringer etc.).> I was always under the impression that OLD SCHOOL is a certain kind of way to play the game.
Per http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_63/3019000/3019374/1/print/3019374.pdf , y'mean (although the comments on http://www.gnomestew.com/reviews/review-of-the-a-quick-primer-for-old-school-gaming for one are an interesting counter-read in that context).
Well IMHO agreed in general about being more a broadbrush "way to play" than fussing overly about "is it a retro clone, but must be 'roughly compatible' with any others (or the 'originals'?)".James: You're a godsend, as usual.
Pond: This is EXACTLY the thesis I've held since I first came to Grognardia.
I am a little concerned about having so many attempts to do the same thing, that is to say clone B/X and 1e. Come to think of it aside Mutant Future I haven't really seen any retro-clones that aren't D&D. I think there might be a MSH one but that could be my memory playing tricks on me. I'd love to get a retroclone of Chill, or Star Frontiers, or Traveller.


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Special Feature
"I like the role of being the underdog better. If you're a favorite, and you go out there and bully a guy around and gas out and get beat, that doesn't look good. I've been a favorite exactly once, which was my last fight with Doerksen, and I lost."
Those of you holding out for one of his patented walk-out performances will be peeved by this, but when Tom Lawlor shows up for his bout with Patrick Cote, he'll be ushered into the Octagon on the sly. No fanfare. No leashes. No impersonating Dan "The Beast" Severn dressed as Apollo Creed from Rocky IV dancing out to the horn-blasts of James Brown's "Living in America."
He is the first live-air preliminary bout on Spike, so he'll just show up in the cage ready to go. But you know, Lawlor says there's a silver lining to bummers such as these.
"The good thing about it is, in the past, in my previous fights, I think I've gone through a five-minute walk-out," he says. "It's like fighting, like fighting an extra round. So that by the time the fight starts I'm already in the second round and I'm already gassed, and I'm fighting a guy who's fresh. So this time with no intro music or anything, my heart rate will be low and I'll be nice and calm."
Adaptability is one of "Filthy" Tom Lawlor's strong suits, and really it's something he plans to use a little bit on fight night at UFC 121 in Anaheim on October 23. Coming off of a second consecutive loss to Joe Doerksen at UFC 113 in Montreal—in a fight he says he may have taken a little for granted—the 28-year-old middleweight is happy to find himself with his back against the wall against the high-profile striker Cote.
He might have a point, too. Lawlor routed the sportsbook when he choked out C.B. Dollaway in the first round at UFC 100 when the odds were stacked against him.
"I feel pressure, but at the same time—and I haven't checked the betting line—but I'm pretty sure I'm going to be an underdog," he says. "I like the role of being the underdog better. If you're a favorite, and you go out there and bully a guy around and gas out and get beat, that doesn't look good. I've been a favorite exactly once, which was my last fight with Doerksen, and I lost. That's my worst performance in the UFC so far."
Having come off a controversial split-decision loss to Aaron Simpson in January, Lawlor was supposed to fight Tim Credeur next, but when he went down to an injury the durable Doerksen stepped in.
"I'll be quite honest—I trained real hard, but in the past it's been hard for me to stay away from partying," Lawlor says. "Like two weeks before my last fight I was out partying at a nightclub, just going crazy. I've kind of tried to get away from that a little bit. I didn't underestimate Doerksen; I just thought I had an answer for everything that he was going to do. One thing I couldn't go ahead and make up for was the amount of experience he had, and composure.
"And really that's where I lacked. There's no way to play catch-up once a fight's going. I threw everything I had at him, and he'd seen it all before. It's not like the fact that he was a late replacement took a toll on me, I think it was the fact that he was a late replacement with 60 fights."
Lawlor says that his latest setback was much harder to digest than the Simpson bout, because there was at least a consensus out there that he'd won that one.
"A lot of people say, still to this day, you were robbed against Simpson," he says. "And that makes you feel good when people say that. But as far as the Doerksen fight goes, I thought in my preparation that I had corrected my mistakes. I thought I'd figured out what went wrong in the Simpson fight, where things could have gone better, and thought I'd taken care of that. But after the Doerksen fight I was just dumbfounded. It really kind of sent me back to the drawing board, to re-evaluate some things. It was a lot tougher loss for me, but so goes life."
To help remedy the situation, Lawlor (6-3, 1 NC) is traversing the greater New England area—currently living in Orlando, he is native to Fall River, MA—training at various gyms to get him out of his comfort zone. He's spending a lot of time at Lauzon MMA in Bridgewater, Massachusetts; he's at South Shore Sportsfighting in Rockland; at Tim Burrill's BJJ in Rhode Island; at Mike Boyle's for strength and conditioning. He's spending time in New Hampshire.
He's all over.
"This is something new," he says. "I think in the past, I've stayed pretty much at one location. I've branched out and trained at a couple of different places. I trained at Lauzon's before, with my family in this area. After my last couple of fights I feel I just need a little different change of pace."
Lawlor, an avid pro wrestling fan who actually tried his hand at pro wrestling back in the day, will still have a few antics up his sleeve for fight week. But there's a seriousness to him this time through with relevancy at stake—not to mention his roster position.
Heading into his fight with Cote (14-6), who is coming off a loss of his own to Alan Belcher, Lawlor knows a plank when he sees one.
"If I lose a third fight in a row, no matter how exciting it is, I am pretty sure I'll be out of a job and looking to crawl my way back into Joe Silva's good graces," he says.
When asked how he sees things playing out against a guy who a short time ago was fighting for the middleweight belt, Lawlor makes it clear that, win or lose, he's going out swinging.
"I think it's going to be better than Bonnar and Griffin," he says. "To be honest, he's got a good chin—a great chin. He hasn't really been rocked that many times in his career. And I've got a gigantic head. So even though it's a big target, it can still absorb a lot of punishment. So I'm really looking forward to standing there and testing my stand-up skills in front of him."
Power Slap

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Winning the race in any given segment is much easier with the wind of a strong trend at your back. Major transformations—from behavioral changes, such as dietary shifts, to demographic evolution, such as the aging of the baby boomers and the swelling of the US Hispanic population—can be a marketer's friends, but only if they are identified and embraced.
Consider the impact that an increase in the frequency of on-the-move eating and the growing popularity of the high-protein, low-carbohydrate Atkins diet could have on breakfast cereal producers such as Kellogg's and Quaker Oats. Cereal customers have long been divided into an adult segment (for which brands emphasize health issues, including fiber content and ingredients that lower cholesterol) and a kid segment (appealed to by stressing fun and taste while reassuring mom and dad about the nutritional content). Cereal-focused market research would be unlikely to suggest modifying this approach. Yet on-the-move eating has already helped products such as NutriGrain bars, which appeal to both segments, succeed at the expense of some breakfast cereals. And more than 15 million people in the United States have tried the Atkins diet, so assessing the future economic potential of a "protein-seeking" segment that eschews the carbohydrates in breakfast cereals is important.
The segment's size today would be only a starting point. Marketers would also need to project their estimates on the basis of obesity rates, the number of Atkins books sold, growth rates in the markets that embraced Atkins first, and the adoption trajectories of past diet crazes. While such estimates are bound to be uncertain, projections with an error range as large as 20 percent can still help marketers bound the potential impact of trends, decide which are worth reacting to, and identify those (for instance, the grapefruit diet) that are flashes in the pan.
Follow the money
Once marketers have spotted meaningful trends, the next challenge is to determine their probable impact on the customer landscape and the likely profitability of the resulting segments. Rapidly growing ones may not be the most profitable down the road, so it's vital to translate growth projections into dollars and cents.
Consider what has been happening in the hospitality sector. For decades, the industry recognized two customer segments: service-oriented business travelers and price-driven leisure travelers. In recent years, however, the highly profitable business segment has begun splintering, with threatening implications for hotels (including stalwarts such as Hilton Hotels, Marriott International, and Sheraton) whose brands are associated with traditional business travelers and their needs. At one end of the spectrum, rising pressure on corporate expenses has produced a new kind of value-driven business traveler. At the other, a new breed of mobile, aspiring professional will go to great lengths to avoid standard business hotels, for these luxury-driven business travelers increasingly wish to merge work and play. Some are "fashion-seekers," who view the hotels they patronize as a form of personal expression. Others are "escape-seekers," who are looking for a break from the humdrum of business on the road and want to feel pampered.
Responding effectively to these pressures requires an understanding of each segment's future economic potential. Volume is part of the story, but variables such as capital requirements, changing room rates, and earnings from sideline services are important as well. Playing in the fast-growing value-business segment requires a delicate balancing act: keeping costs low enough to meet the customers' low-price expectations profitably while spending enough to build a differentiated brand. The luxury fashion segment also presents perils: it depends heavily on spending for style and status—extras that customers might choose to do without during economic downturns. Fashionable hotels may also have to spend more to keep their bars, restaurants, and lobbies in vogue.
Such insights help marketers decide which segments to target and how to go after them. Where growth is likely but profitability less certain, the prudent course is often to limit the downside risk, perhaps by stretching existing brands to meet new needs. Some hotel chains took this approach by offering what they call "value rates" within existing properties or by creating value sub-brands such as Holiday Inn Express and Courtyard by Marriott. These brands had reasonably healthy returns both before and during the recent economic downturn.
By contrast, during the late 1990s the superluxury business segment attracted a flood of new entrants ranging from independent boutique hotels to companies such as Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide and Marriott, which expanded their St. Regis and Ritz-Carlton brands, respectively. While many of the hotels briefly filled their rooms at stratospheric rates, revenue per available room in this segment has fallen more than twice as fast as the industry average during the economic downturn. Distinguishing between cyclical effects and long-term trends might have limited the carnage.
Building the brand
Once marketers have their eye on the most promising future segments, they must rethink the brand—an increasingly complex process. Brand proliferation and rapid imitation have diminished the return on clever advertising and "breakthrough ideas," such as adding a "miracle ingredient" to a detergent or associating a sports star with a particular brand of athletic shoes. Today, cost-effective brand building depends on knowing precisely what consumers care about and tailoring the brand accordingly. Sophisticated new analytic approaches provide the precision but only when coupled with conceptual clarity in first defining a brand and then actually delivering it through a variety of what marketers call "touchpoints," the sites where consumers interact with it.
What's my brand, anyway?
Defining a brand involves emphasizing its key benefits and attributes for consumers. To do so, marketers must recognize that a brand consists of more than a bundle of tangible, functional attributes; its intangible, emotional benefits, along with its "identity," frequently serve as the basis for long-term competitive differentiation and sustained loyalty. Coca-Cola, for example, is a powerful global brand not just because the beverage comes in a familiar red can and customers like the taste but also because it conveys an image as an optimistic, American product.
Marketers could promote many tangible and intangible brand attributes, but the goal is to uncover the relevance of each to consumers and the degree to which it helps distinguish the brand from those of competitors. The number of brand elements at play and the interdependencies that often exist between tangible and intangible attributes can make these assessments complex. Fortunately, statistical techniques can now increase their reliability. As such an analysis often shows, certain features may differentiate a brand from its competitors but don't matter to customers. These attributes are the fool's gold of branding.
Some attributes, however, are important even though customers expect them from any competitor. We call them "antes," after the small payments poker players make to receive cards from the dealer. In the hotel industry, for example, Holiday Inn Express seeks to provide clean, fresh, comfortable facilities, and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts tries to offer all the business services its customers might need. These antes aren't the centerpiece of either brand, because they don't distinguish the players from other competitors. Nonetheless, such basic brand benefits can't be ignored: a value establishment won't last long if it offers dirty rooms or uncomfortable beds, nor would a luxury business hotel's brand remain credible without fax and Internet facilities.
The most successful brands emphasize features that are both important to consumers and quite differentiated from those of competitors (Exhibit 2). We refer to these features as "brand drivers." Holiday Inn Express hopes to distinguish itself by providing customers with the emotional benefit of feeling like "a smarter business traveler" and attempts to convey a brand personality that is "fun," even a bit "wacky." For the road warrior whose expense limit has been cut, an opportunity to be "smarter" and "fun," not just cheaper, is attractive. Further up the price scale, Westin Hotels & Resorts is trying to differentiate itself from Hilton, Marriott, and Sheraton by claiming to offer "serenity and efficiency." Among higher-end customers, the Four Seasons seeks to distinguish itself by providing what it calls an "escape from the ordinary" and a personality of "calm sophistication."
Which touchpoints matter?
With the brand antes and drivers defined, a critical issue remains: how to deliver them cost-effectively. Brands are delivered at touchpoints, which for a hotel include reservations, check-in and checkout, frequent-stay programs, room service, business services, exercise facilities, laundry service, restaurants, and bars. Holiday Inn Express delivers its "smarter" and "fun" brand through touchpoints such as quality breakfasts, assurances that its on-line rates are the lowest publicly available, and zany advertising. Westin provides "serenity" for business travelers with its Heavenly Bed. And the Four Seasons relies on personal touches, such as a staff that always addresses guests by name, higher-powered employees who understand the needs of sophisticated business travelers, and at least one best-in-region facility, such as a premier restaurant or spa.
Trade-offs are possible. Airlines, for example, are unlikely to differentiate themselves for business travelers through easily imitated benefits such as better food and wine or portable DVD players. More durable brand delivery mechanisms are costlier. British Airways, for instance, redesigned its cabins to offer the first flat beds in business class when other airlines merely increased the pitch or width of their seats. Virgin Atlantic Airways reinforced its famous "doing things differently" brand personality with a restyled "Upper Class" service that features "designer-styled" cabins, a sit-down bar, an in-flight massage service, and flat-bed seats. Deciding whether such expensive initiatives are worthwhile requires an understanding of their potential returns, and the quantitative tools now available to marketers can help with this too.
Delivering on touchpoints involves a concerted, creative effort throughout the organization. Companies may even have to develop operational targets to help build their brands. If an airline, for instance, decided that the most cost-effective way to deliver a "considerate" brand was to speed up its check-in and security-clearance procedures, it might strive for performance levels dramatically exceeding those of competitors—for example, a two-minute check-in and a five-minute security clearance.
Persuading other parts of the organization to play along is often more difficult for marketers than exercising their creativity and planning a brand's advertising, sponsorship, and promotion. Fortunately, analytic approaches can help marketers make their case by dramatically increasing the likelihood that they will put forward the right proposals.
Getting rid of guesswork
Recognizing antes, drivers, and touchpoints is difficult enough in retrospect. How should companies choose the right ones prospectively?
Traditionally, the elements that deliver a brand's value to the consumer have been identified through costly trial and error. The process involves posing direct questions about a brand's functional benefits, analyzing the results through techniques such as conjoint analysis, and then taking a series of creative leaps that qualitative research may not validate. Although this approach has been useful over the years, its functional focus runs the risk of overlooking a brand's subtler, intangible dimensions. Traditional techniques are also ill equipped to identify with precision the relationship between a brand's attributes and the most cost-effective touchpoints for delivering them. Finally, the experimentation that is part and parcel of traditional techniques can have the unintended consequence of confusing consumers by emphasizing first one set of brand attributes, then another.
Today, marketers can eliminate much of the guesswork by applying social-science techniques to identify the underlying brand attributes driving loyalty among specific customers. Known as pathway (or structural-equation) modeling, these techniques aren't new; they rely heavily on fundamental regression techniques. But they are only now beginning to be applied to branding as marketers become more and more aware that targeting precisely what customers care about is the core of efficient brand building. Developing this understanding is possible today because of the information boom generated by diverse factors (such as loyalty programs, cheaper Internet-based consumer surveys, and electronic point-of-sale data) and by attitude-based research from third-party research firms as well as the availability of increasingly sophisticated and accessible data-analysis packages.
Investing in analysis
The first step is to conduct consumer research: developing questionnaires that probe as many as 250 tangible and intangible brand attributes, asking consumers to rate the brand and its competitors on each dimension, and then quantitatively linking these dimensions to the consumers' overall loyalty. Three features distinguish this approach from traditional methodologies such as focus group-based qualitative research and conjoint analysis. First, the specificity and breadth of the questions help marketers understand the brand's tangible and intangible benefits in great detail. Second, the analysis shows marketers the relationships among each of the brand's elements—nuances that conjoint techniques can't provide. Finally, rather than trying to determine the importance of individual elements, the new approach pins down their contribution to brand loyalty—which is significant, because what people say and what they do can be at odds. Whereas traditional methods might reveal that hotel customers have a broad interest in reliable business services or comfortable in-room amenities, the new techniques make it possible to uncover the core need (such as "a hotel that makes me feel like I am at home while I am away") underlying these desires. Meeting such needs is the essence of building an effective brand.
Completing the core consumer research and analysis helps pinpoint the most effective combination of touchpoints that will deliver the brand's value proposition. The key is determining which touchpoints correlate best with the brand's essence (that is, which "make me feel special") and then assessing the statistical relationship between the touchpoints themselves to arrive at the groupings that correlate best with the desired brand positioning (see sidebar, "Behind the math"). This analysis often highlights instances in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Combining a strong frequent-guest program with fast check-in and checkout procedures, for example, might have the strongest collective correlation with a given hotel's brand proposition, even if rapid room service and high-speed Internet connections had stronger individual associations with the brand.
The payoff
As complex as pathway modeling may sound, it should make the eyes of marketers light up because it allows them to quantify the potential impact of brand initiatives on customer loyalty, which can be translated into dollars and cents. When compared with likely costs, these forecasts let marketers make rough estimates of the return on their branding investments.
Such estimates simplify the process of making touchpoint trade-offs. Consider the plight of an airline that targets frequent business travelers and wants to be seen as "more considerate." At least 20 customer-care touchpoints can be identified, including faster check-in, higher checked-baggage allowances, more upgrades, more extras onboard, and more frequent-flyer miles. Without careful targeting, the airline could squander resources on the wrong one. Techniques such as pathway modeling can also identify touchpoint conflicts. A Canadian food service company turned to cash-only transactions at its drive-throughs when it found that speed was of the highest importance to customers—debit cards (previously thought to be a high-priority touchpoint) were slowing things down.
The businesses pioneering these techniques are achieving impressive results. For example, a pharmaceutical company that understood which physicians were prescribing what products, but not exactly why, discovered the brand attributes that would be most likely to influence prescription-writing patterns. It did so by surveying more than 2,000 physicians around the world about more than 150 tangible and intangible brand dimensions—a huge leap forward from the simple, functionally oriented surveys it had previously used. In the brand's first year of repositioning, sales increased by more than 10 percent. An industrial company that used the techniques to overhaul its go-to-market strategy generated $200 million in new sales. And a specialty retailer boosted same-store sales by 2 percent within three months of refining the way it appealed to loyal customers.
Ensuring success
Pinpointing the attributes that distinguish a brand and the touchpoints through which they should be delivered isn't just a quantitative exercise. After all, if a questionnaire doesn't ask about a potential brand attribute, it won't show up in customer responses. Relevant input from everyone—senior executives to brand managers and sales representatives to advertising people—is therefore vital. Broad involvement can create issues of its own: in designing research the dice can certainly be loaded for or against an executive's pet theory. Senior leaders can play an important role by calling for a level playing field that allows the research to settle disputes in a fact-based way rather than perpetuating them.
Marketers can increase their chances of success by investing heavily to communicate their analyses internally and to show their colleagues why these analyses support proposed initiatives. Pathway modeling can easily sound quite academic; the challenge is to present its conclusions in a way that senior leaders who aren't marketers can understand and believe. Armed with conviction, the CEO and the business-unit heads can become the chief brand advocates in their organizations—crucial in a world where brand building depends not just on a catchy jingle but on the whole company.
Companies can build better brands for less money with a forward-looking segmentation and sophisticated analytic tools that increase the precision of defining and delivering a brand. This approach requires an open mind and persistence, but it beats placing bets that may not deliver.


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It's normal to feel down after a heart attack, but symptoms of depression can compound your recovery. Studies support that people who had heart attacks and were diagnosed with depression fared significantly worse than those without signs of depression. Other studies have tracked heart attack patients for several months after they left the hospital. Those studies found that the patients with diagnosable depression suffered more heart complications, including death.
How does this affect you? It translates to better care if depression and how to treat it are incorporated into the heart attack recovery process.
Identifying the Risk Factors for Heart Disease
In the United States, heart disease is the number-one killer of men and women. To help determine who may need more aggressive treatment after a heart attack, doctors assess each patient's risk factors. Most known risk factors center around complications of the heart itself or predisposing traits, like high cholesterol, smoking, diabetes and high blood pressure. Interest in the role of depression and mental health however, opens up another avenue in the fight against heart disease and its complications. In light of findings of depression as a risk factor, many doctors now recommend that all heart attack patients be screened for depression, a move supported by the American Heart Association and American Psychiatric Association.
Finding the Connection
To understand why depression in heart attack patients may lead to worsening complications, doctors look for common biologic patterns that connect the two. The current prevailing theory focuses on the balance of the actions of the nervous system. Part of the nervous system, called the autonomic nervous system, constantly regulates our internal organs without our awareness.
For example, we don't need to tell our lungs to breathe or our hearts to beat. The autonomic nervous system does these things on its own. But if the autonomic nervous system is off-balance, many normal functions of the body are affected. Scientists note that patients with depression have distinctive changes in the balance of their autonomic nervous systems. Some believe these changes may underlie the connection between depression and heart disease.
If there is a biologic connection between depression and heart disease in people with weakened hearts, can depression also be a risk factor for heart disease in people with normal hearts? According to a medical review, this does indeed seem to be the case.
Treating Depression Effectively
For some heart attack patients, symptoms of depression may resolve without treatment. For others, whose symptoms persist, data sheds light on effective treatment. A large medical study showed that the antidepressant sertraline causes no harm to the heart and can reduce symptoms of depression in people with heart disease.
Patients that had access to treatment for depression had better recovery outcomes than those that did not. Patients with access had improved depressive symptoms, reduced numbers of second heart attacks, and less complications.
Any patient who has suffered a heart attack should discuss the risks of depression with their doctor. Likewise, patients with depression and no evidence of heart disease should be aware of all heart disease risk factors and should evaluate their individual risks with their doctors.


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Surprising Study Reveals Smoking Is on a Sharp Decline
Smoke 'em if you got 'em? Not quite.
The percentage of people who smoke is slowing down, according to a new study of 187 countries.
Around the world, 31% of men smoked in 2012, a steep drop from the 41% who did so in 1980. Among women, the rate fell from 10% in 1980 to 6.2% in 2012.
The world's population grew during that 30-plus year period, so the number of people who lit up actually jumped from 721 million in 1980 to 967 million in 2012.
Smokers enjoyed more than six trillion cigarettes in 2012 – that comes out to about 857 cigarettes for each person on Earth.


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Momentous Supreme Court term ends with flourish
By MARK SHERMAN
WASHINGTON (AP) — A historic Supreme Court term ended with a flourish of major rulings that marked a bitter defeat for racial minorities and a groundbreaking victory for gay rights, all in the space of a day.
The justices struck down parts of two federal laws — the Voting Rights Act and the Defense of Marriage Act — that were passed with huge bipartisan majorities of Congress.
Yet only one justice at the center of this conservative-leaning court, Anthony Kennedy, was on the winning side both times. Kennedy joined the four more conservative justices on voting rights and he was with his liberal colleagues in the gay marriage case.
Just in that 24-hour span, the rulings demonstrated two truths about the court under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts.
The 58-year-old lawyer who cut his teeth in the Reagan administration put to rest any questions he may have raised about his conservative credentials a year earlier when he cast the deciding vote to uphold President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.
Roberts has shown himself to be a skillful judge who can get even ideologically differing colleagues to agree on narrow rulings that help form the basis for more definitive later judgments, as happened in the voting rights case.
The chief justice sees a benefit to the court as an institution and to his longer-term goal of saying, "We could go farther here, but let's wait and see," said Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania law professor and former high court law clerk.
But Roberts can move the court no farther to the right than Kennedy is willing to go.
Divisive civil rights cases dominated the high court's work in the past nine months, including a challenge to affirmative action in higher education that ended in a compromise ruling.
The second gay marriage case, involving California's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, also produced something of a compromise. It ended in a technical, legal ruling that clears the way for same-sex unions in California, but said nothing about a constitutional right to marriage.
The justices also delivered important victories for business in cases that limited class-action claims and lawsuits over international human rights abuses, allowed authorities to collect DNA from people they arrest, ruled that human genes cannot be patented and called into question agreements between pharmaceutical companies that delay the entry of cheaper generic drugs on the market.
The timing of the voting rights and gay marriage decisions was not planned, but was perhaps inevitable, because the court's toughest cases typically are the last ones resolved before the justices take a long summer break.
Last Tuesday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wondered what had happened to the court's "usual restraint" in the voting rights case. On Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia said society's debate about marriage should "be settled democratically rather than by judicial command."
Paul Clement, a former Bush administration official who argued that the federal marriage law should be upheld, said what links those two cases, apart from Kennedy's vote, is the idea that Congress did not give sufficient respect to states.
It subjected some states to strict federal oversight of elections based on old data rather than current conditions, Roberts said in the voting rights case. Congress made second-class citizens of same-sex couples in denying them federal benefits even after states extended them the right to marry, Kennedy said in the gay marriage case.
"It's certainly the thread that united the votes of Justice Kennedy in the DOMA case and the voting rights case," Clement said.
Roberts first expressed reservations about the voting rights law when he was a young lawyer in the Reagan White House. A debate was then taking place in Congress about extending the law's key requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination in voting get Washington's approval before changing the way they hold elections. This "preclearance" provision, often called a crown jewel of civil rights law, was enormously effective in heading off the creative ways some states devised to keep minorities from voting.
When the justices looked at the voting rights law four years ago in a case from Texas, Roberts wrote a consensus opinion that pointedly criticized the law as being focused on past problems, but he sidestepped the larger question that the court now has emphatically answered.
The affirmative action decision ordered lower courts to cast a more skeptical eye on college admissions programs, but did not throw out the University of Texas program that was being challenged. Nor did it make a major pronouncement about affirmative action.
But it may have set the stage for a more consequential ruling in future years, in much the way that the court's voting rights decision flows from its 2009 case.
In the affirmative action case, seven justices formed the majority, including the unlikely pair of justices who have benefited from affirmative action, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas. Sotomayor has spoken positively of affirmative action, while Thomas has been an unyielding critic who has voted to ban all racial preferences.
Their agreement in the Texas case should not mask a deep division on the court about the validity of race-conscious admissions programs.
The court's business cases predictably took a back seat to the run of high-profile civil rights cases. But the business cases show a court that has steadily made it harder for plaintiffs to band together in class actions that can be more efficient and lucrative for plaintiffs, but much more expensive for companies that most often are the defendants in such claims.
Doug Kendall of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center said the court's conservatives "were completely united in the push to protect corporations from being held accountable in federal court."
Theodore Boutrous Jr., a Los Angeles-based lawyer who often represents business interests at the Supreme Court, pointed out that some of the business cases were unanimous outcomes, not ideological.
"The court again showed deep skepticism toward efforts to stretch statutes and rules to expand class actions and liability based on new and creative theories," Boutrous said.
The court showed both more unanimity, in nearly half its cases, and more 5-4 splits, nearly 30 percent of the time, than the average in recent years, according to scotusblog.com.
Those splits often were based on ideology, but not always. Notably, in three cases Scalia aligned himself with Justice Elena Kagan, Ginsburg and Sotomayor. In those instances, including the DNA evidence case, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer was the fifth vote for the majority.
When looking at the four newest justices — two conservative Republicans and two liberal Democrats — the division is stark. In 5-4 cases, even when the court is not strictly split along ideological lines, Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito almost always disagreed with Sotomayor and Kagan.


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Sandy I. Weill, the former Citigroup CEO who helped usher in the era of super banks, said during an interview with CNBC today that big banks should be split up.
"What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that's not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that's not too big to fail," Weill told CNBC. "If they want to hedge what they're doing with their investments, let them do it in a way that's going to be mark-to-market so they're never going to be hit."
They should be broken up, said Weill, "so that the taxpayer will never be at risk, the depositors won't be at risk, the leverage of the banks will be something reasonable..."
Bloomberg explains why this is a big deal:
"Weill helped engineer the 1998 merger of Travelers Group Inc. and Citicorp, a deal that required repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law that forced deposit-taking companies backed by government insurance to be separate from investment banks. The New York-based company became the biggest lender in the world before almost failing and taking a $45 billion taxpayer bailout in 2008."
In a separate interview with CNBC, Sheila Bair, former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said she was "flabbergasted" by Weill's reversal.
"He and his institution were in the lead in pushing for the repeal of Glass-Steagall and then, of course, Citigroup is the poster child for too-big-to-fail in the bailouts during the 2008 crisis," Bair said. "It is truly ironic."
After the Weill interview, CNBC also talked to Bethany McLean, who writes for Reuters. She called Weill's comments "astonishing."
Here's video of that interview:
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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Tiger Woods has been given a two-stroke penalty at the Masters, a tournament he's won four times, after a review found that he performed an illegal drop on the 15th hole of his second round Friday. Woods faced a possible disqualification for the infraction.
The incident began when Woods' wedge shot was a bit too on-target — it hit the base of the pin, and shot off the green and into a water hazard.
Golf's official rules gave Woods choices for dropping a new ball onto the course for his next shot. As The Augusta Chronicle reports, "The Rules of Golf gave Woods three options for his drop: the designated drop zone, on the line keeping the point where the ball entered the water between his drop point and the pin, or "near as possible" to his original spot."
But instead of putting the ball where he had struck his previous shot, Woods stepped farther away from the green. This was after he had decided to pass on the drop zone.
"I went down to the drop area, that wasn't going to be a good spot, because obviously it's into the grain and it was a little bit wet," he said in an interview after the round. "So it was muddy and not a good spot to drop. So I went back to where I played it from, but I went two yards farther back and I tried to take two yards off the shot of what I felt I hit."
Woods' own words helped spark the review that led to his penalty. Officials at Augusta National, the club that organizes the Masters, say they were first alerted to a possible penalty by a TV viewer, and that Woods' comments seemed to back up the idea that he had performed an improper drop.
Before he found trouble on 15, Woods had charged from four strokes down to claim a share of the lead Friday afternoon. He finished the day tied for seventh, three strokes back. But after Saturday morning's revision, he was five shots behind leader Australia's Jason Day. Fred Couples and Marc Leishman are tied for second at five under par.
While Augusta National officials have made their ruling, the public debate over Woods' drop is continuing — and it will surely live on past Sunday, if the penalty affects the final outcome.
On Twitter, the hashtag #dropgate took off Saturday morning, with some observers saying Woods should be disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard, while others say the difference in spots wasn't big enough to warrant a penalty in the first place.
Tournament officials say that the scorecard rule doesn't apply in this case, as the penalty was assessed retroactively. But the official statement also notes that the competition committee first became aware of a possible violation while Woods was still on the course Friday.
Golfer David Duval, who has twice finished second at the Masters, said via Twitter that he feels Woods should not continue in the tournament.
Woods, who regained his ranking as the world's No. 1 golfer last month, is scheduled to begin his third round at 1:45 p.m. ET.
The drop debate comes one day after the enforcement of golf's rules sparked a different debate. On Friday, Tianlang Guan, a 14-year-old who became a fan favorite after holding his own during the tournament's early rounds, was assessed a one-stroke penalty for playing golf too slowly.
Guan still made the cut to continue playing in the tournament, becoming the youngest player ever to make the Masters cut. But his case has led some to say that in his case, golf's rules were applied too harshly.
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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Do you ever find yourself getting really irritable for almost no reason? Or suddenly feeling down without knowing why? Going from sadness to anger to joy in a matter of minutes can make many teens feel as though they're losing their grip. But why is the feeling of being on an emotional roller coaster so common among teens?
Dealing with constant change and pressure is part of the answer. Maybe you're starting a new school and not able to see old friends as much. Getting good grades or wanting to be better in sports or other activities can be a concern for many teens. It might feel as though there just isn't enough time to do everything.
Being a teen means struggling with identity and self-image. Being accepted by friends feels extremely important. Teens also may notice, for the first time, a sense of distance from parents and family. You may feel you want to be on your own and make your own decisions, but it can also seem overwhelming and even a bit lonely at times.
As fun and exciting as this time is, it also can be a time of confusion and conflict. It can take a while for teens — and their families — to feel comfortable with the transition from childhood to adulthood.
Another important cause for mood swings is biology. When puberty begins, the body starts producing sex hormones. These hormones — estrogen and progesterone in girls and testosterone in guys — cause physical changes in the body. But in some people, they also seem to cause emotional changes — the ups and downs that sometimes feel out of control.
Understanding that almost everyone goes through mood swings during their teen years might make them easier to handle.
Feeling irritable or short-tempered can be signs of depression. So can feelings of boredom or hopelessness.
Many people think of depression as feeling sad, but depression also can bring feelings of moodiness, impatience, anger, or even just not caring. When depression gets in the way of enjoying life or dealing with others, that's a sign you need to do something about it, like talking to a counselor or therapist who can help you deal with it. Also, if you ever feel like hurting yourself, that's more than just a bad mood and you need to tell someone.
Here are some things you can do that might make those bad moods a bit easier to handle:
Reviewed by: D'Arcy Lyness, PhD
Date Reviewed: Aug 14, 2015
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So The Amish County was visited and enjoyed. The idyllic green farmlands, the quaint villages with equally quaint names like Bird-In-Hand, Kitchen Kettle Village, Intercourse (ahem !!), the buggy ride through the Amish Farms, the Dutch Farmers Market with their fresh produce and the jams & preserves was thoroughly enjoyable , more so with the lovely weather bestowed on us since Friday.
The little daughter was an angel, no throwing-up, no car seat blues, very co-operative during the entire trip, The parents were happy, The husband was happy, he got his own TV to watch while me watched chick-flicks with dear Momma (yeah I carried Movies as a backup plan for the Rains), The People who did business with the "Amish" as their USP were very very happy indeed, The Amish...I do not know.
Everything was fine except something that kept gnawing at the back of my head, that something called commercialization of the entire thing. I had gone there thinking there would be villages & farms and maybe a gift shop or two thrown in as is the norm but I was astounded by the bustling business that had built up around the whole thing and the malls that had sprung up to cater to the visitors.
Coming from a culture and a background where materialism is not the norm and simplicity is or at least was the way of life, I wasn't very amazed by the Amish way of living, though I am impressed now that being there bang in the middle of all those malls with brands screaming from BOSE to BASS they still adhere to their culture and lifestyle not perturbed by the "Amish" brand visitors are falling for.
All said and done, we had a nice break, I got lovely veggies and pickles & jams. I got a huge cauliflower so there I go and cook. I got this recipe of cauliflower called "Ada FulKopi" or "Adraki Gobi" or "Ginger Cauliflower" from my bengali recipe book by an author known as Bela De. My Ma too does this with a little variation, but the one I did yesterday was almost by the book. It is a very nice dish with ginger dominating the flavor and the taste is a little emphasizing the tartness of the tomato and the crunchiness of the cauliflower.
The BIG cauliflower :)
Ada FulKopi or Ginger CauliFlower
What You Need
Cauliflower ~ 1 cut into florets. I used half of the cauliflower shown above and cut the florets a little on the large size
Baby Carrots ~ about 10 of the small ones cut into halves
Green Peas ~ ½ a cup
Ginger ~ 1" chopped fine in juliennes
For Paste
Onion ~ 1 and ½ medium sized
Garlic ~ 2 big cloves
Ginger ~ 1 & 1/2"
Grind all of the above to a paste
For Puree
Tomato ~ 2 medium sized nice plump red tomatoes pureed. I did with skins and everything
For Phoron or Tempering
Elaichi or Cardamom ~ 2
Laung or Cloves ~ 2
TejPata or BayLeaves ~ 2
DarChini or Cardamom Sticks ~ about a 2" stick
GolMirch or Peppercorns ~ 10
Coarsely pound the above
Yogurt ~ 2/3 cup
Turmeric Powder
Red Chilli Powder (according to taste, I did not use any)
How I Do It
Cut the cauliflower into medium sized florets (not very small else they will turn mushy while cooking)
Chop the carrots
Heat Oil in Kadai/Frying Pan. Use Olive Oil if you prefer
Lightly fry the cauliflower (no deep frying, more like sauté them) florets till Golden. Tip: I always add Turmeric Powder to the hot oil and then add the cauliflower to prevent the oil from spluttering. This also makes the cauliflower golden with light frying. Also cover while frying.
Remove the florets and keep them in a bowl.
Grind the onion, ginger and garlic to a paste. Keep about 1 tbsp of the paste for frying, use the rest in the next step
Mix the yogurt with this paste and a little salt. Also add chilli powder if you want to the yogurt according to your spice level.
Marinade the cauliflower florets with the above marinade for about half an hour.
Heat Oil in Kadai/Frying Pan. You can use the same oil.
Add TejPata, Elaichi, Laung, DarChini, Gol Mirch as phoron or temper with this
Add the finely chopped ginger and fry a little
After frying the ginger for a little add about 1 tbsp of the onion/ginger/garlic paste and a little sugar
When the onion turns a light brown, add the carrots and peas
Saute for a little while
Add the cauliflower along with the marinade
Then cover and cook till the masala is cooked and coats the veggies uniformly. This in Bengali coking term is called "kashano"
Add salt according to taste and add the tomato puree
Cover and cook till the veggies are done. They should be crunchy.
Add a little sugar if the taste is little sour to your liking
This has very little gravy so adjust that accordingly
Garnish with coriander leaves
You can have this "Ada FulKopi" with Roti, Paratha and even Rice (I love my Rice :)). This can be served as a dish when you have guests over and also for your weekday lunch or dinner.
Trivia: Mark Twain said " Cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a College Education"


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Cameron Diaz bares all in 'Sex Tape' movie
NEW YORK — Cameron Diaz does something she's never done before in her upcoming movie, "Sex Tape."
She gets naked on camera.
It's a first for the 41-year-old actress, who described the experience to Esquire magazine as "just a part of the role."
She says her co-star Jason Segel also gets nude on-screen.
In "Sex Tape," Diaz and Segal play a bored married couple who decide to spice up things by filming a sex tape. After it's accidentally leaked, they try to get it back.
She also has a labor scene in the film. Diaz has been open about not wanting children in real life, saying she never really wanted to be a mother.
The August issue of Esquire goes on sale July 18, the same date that "Sex Tape" hits theaters.


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After months of speculation, former Israeli Foreign Minister and Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni on Tuesday announced her candidacy in Israel's Jan. 22 general elections, unveiling her new party Hatnuah ("The Movement").
According to media reports, Livni delayed launching her new party until after hostilities with Hamas in Gaza had ceased.
"It was difficult for me to return to politics," Livni told a packed roomful of reporters at a press conference in Tel Aviv. "I came to fight for our shared vision; to fight for peace. I will not lend a hand to those who are trying to turn the word 'peace' into a bad word. I came to fight for Jewish Israel, for democratic Israel. I came to fight against social gaps."
Livni said she "didn't return to politics to be in this or that party."
"My return was motivated by a void that has emerged," she said. "When I thought that [former Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert may run, I was relieved, because I thought he would pose a viable alternative to the prime minister (Benjamin Netanyahu). Ultimately, I stepped in because the political arena remained empty."
Livni initially entered politics just over a decade ago, following a stint in the Mossad intelligence service—as a legal adviser, some say, while others speculate that she helped hunt Arab enemies abroad—and then a career as a corporate attorney.
Dubbed "Mrs. Clean" by one Israeli newspaper columnist, a reference to her unmarred integrity while her colleagues were plagued with criminal investigations, the usually dour former foreign minister is widely seen as the antithesis of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a glad-handing veteran politician embroiled in a corruption scandal that forced him from office.
Reactions quickly followed Livni's press conference. Labor Chairwoman Shelly Yachimovich, who had asked Livni to join the party but was rejected, issued a statement saying: "Tzipi Livni, who is a worthy woman and politician, is making a terrible mistake. She is establishing a party of double refugees and giving Netanyahu and [Avigdor] Lieberman a reason to smile. Instead of focusing on their [Likud-Beytenu] ultra-extreme Knesset list, now we're focusing on the fact that there is another little party in the Center. Anyone who believes that Israel should have a fair economy and just society, protect democracy and the rule of law and be able to promote a diplomatic [peace] process should unite behind the leadership of Shelly Yachimovich, who is leading the Center bloc with confidence and stability. Next week, the Labor Party will present an economic-social plan that, when implemented, will give Israeli citizens better, more decent lives."
The other main Center-Left party, Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid ("There is a Future"), also issued a statement, saying, "The maneuver that Tzipi Livni instigated this morning is an embodiment of the old politics, the quintessential monster, motivated solely by her ego. It is unfortunate that Livni refused to be a partner in making a real change in the lives of Israel's citizens." Lapid had also asked Livni to join his party, and had been refused.
Likud primaries
Meanwhile, the results of the Likud primaries, which ended on Monday after two days of voting due to glitches in the computerized voting system, indicated that the party's list for the next Knesset includes Members of Knesset considered as belonging to right-wing side of the party.
The big drama of the primaries was considered to be ministers Dan Meridor, Ze'ev Binyamin (Benny) Begin, Avi Dichter and Michael Eitan failing to garner enough votes to win spots on the list that would guarantee them seats in the next Knesset.
MKs Danny Danon, Yariv Levin, Tzipi Hotovely all made it to the top 10 spots on the list. Moshe Feiglin, who heads the Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership) faction in the Likud and is considered on the far right of the party, captured the 14th spot on the list and will enter the Knesset for the first time in his political career.
The party's first 20 candidates for the Knesset are Gideon Sa'ar, Gilad Erdan, Silvan Shalom, Yisrael Katz, Danny Danon, Reuven Rivlin, Moshe (Bogie) Ya'alon, Zeev Elkin, Yariv Levin, Tzipi Hotovely, Yuli Edelstein, Haim Katz, Miri Regev, Moshe Feiglin, Yuval Steinitz, Tzachi Hanegbi, Limot Livnat, Ofir Akunis, Gila Gamliel and Carmel Shama Hacohen.
"When you compare our list with that of any other party, you will see that we have more public servants with proven experience," said Erdan, who is currently Israel's Minister of Environmental Protection.


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Ganesh Chaturthi 2024
* Muhurat timings for other cities are local time of respective cities
Ganesh Chaturthi in Recent Years
* Ganesh Chaturthi dates are calculated for New Delhi, India
Notes: All timings are represented in 12-hour notation in local time of New Delhi, India with DST adjustment (if applicable).
Hours which are past midnight are suffixed with next day date. In Panchang day starts and ends with sunrise.
2023 Ganesh Chaturthi
Ganesh Chaturthi is celebrated as birth anniversary of Lord Ganesh. On Ganesh Chaturthi, Lord Ganesh is worshipped as the god of wisdom, prosperity and good fortune. It is believed that Lord Ganesh was born during Shukla Paksha of Bhadrapada month. Currently Ganesh Chaturthi day falls in month of August or September in English calendar.
The Ganeshotsav, the festivity of Ganesh Chaturthi, ends after 10 days on Anant Chaturdashi which is also known as Ganesh Visarjan day. On Anant Chaturdashi, devotees immerse idol of Lord Ganesh in water body after a gala street procession.
Ganapati Sthapana and Ganapati Puja Muhurat
Ganesh Puja is preferred during Madhyahna as it is believed that Lord Ganesh was born during Madhyahna Kala. Madhyahna Kala is equivalent to midday according to Hindu division of the day.
As per Hindu time-keeping, the time duration between sunrise to sunset is divided into five equal parts. These five parts are known as Pratahkala, Sangava, Madhyahna, Aparahna and Sayankal. Ganapati Sthapana and Ganapati Puja on Ganesha Chaturthi are done during Madhyahna part of the day and as per Vedic astrology it is considered the most appropriate time for Ganesha Puja.
During midday, Ganesha devotees perform detailed ritualistic Ganesha Puja which is known as Shodashopachara Ganapati Puja.
Prohibited Moon Sighting on Ganesha Chaturthi
It is believed that one should not sight the moon on Ganesh Chaturthi. Sighting moon on Ganesh Chaturthi creates Mithya Dosham or Mithya Kalank (कलंक) which means false accusation of stealing something.
As per Puranic legends, Lord Krishna was falsely accused of stealing precious jewel named Syamantaka. After seeing plights of Lord Krishna, Sage Narada informed that Lord Krishna sighted moon on the day of Bhadrapada Shukla Chaturthi and because of that he has been cursed with Mithya Dosha.
Sage Narada further informed Lord Krishna that God Chandra has been cursed by Lord Ganesha that anyone who sighted moon on Shukla Chaturthi during Bhadrapada month would be cursed with Mithya Dosha and would be tainted and dishonoured in the society. On the advice of sage Narada Lord Krishna observed Ganesha Chaturthi fasting to get rid of Mithya Dosha.
Mithya Dosha Prevention Mantra
Depending on start and end time of Chaturthi Tithi, sighting of moon might be prohibited for two consecutive days. According to DrikPanchang.com rules, Moon should not be sighted while Chaturthi Tithi is prevailing. Further, Moon risen during Chaturthi should not be sighted even if Chaturthi Tithi gets over before moonset.
If anyone has mistakenly sighted moon on Ganesha Chaturthi then he should chant following Mantra to get rid of the curse –
सिंहः प्रसेनमवधीत्सिंहो जाम्बवता हतः।
सुकुमारक मारोदीस्तव ह्येष स्यमन्तकः॥
Simhah Prasenamavadhitsimho Jambavata Hatah।
Sukumaraka Marodistava Hyesha Syamantakah॥
Ganesh Chaturthi is also known as Vinayak Chaturthi and Ganesh Chauth.


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