Planet Abell

Oh, to have been a fly in the room when Research in Motion Chief Executive Thorsten Heins briefed the New York Times on the face (and potentially company) saving Blackberry 10, due out Jan. 30 and not a moment too soon for the company which rivals Nokia for top prize in the mobile phone "How Far The Mighty Have Fallen" honors. I flatter myself but also Bits writer Ian Austin by saying confidently that I infer from his report the mood of the room was ... cautiously pessimistic. How else could these seasoned journalists have processed this Money Quote from Heins: "I don't expect things to get much worse." It's right up there with "What could possibly go wrong?" and " This might just do nobody any good " and "The check is in the mail." ( Continued ... )

Mad Men is one of my favorite shows, so much so that I don't even trust it to the perfect television nanny that is TiVo. The series is an iPhone obsession I treat myself to for my Metro North commute, which runs parallel to the Ossining-to-Grand Central Terminal route Don Draper take when he bothers to go home (which isn't often, as it happens). I don't need to explain the obsession to people in the know. But I have some personal reasons, too: It takes place at a time in my native New York City that was a Golden Age, during the afterglow of World War II when the Greatest Generation was giving way to a bunch of Boomers who would shepard this nation to a period of great prosperity and fairness. It was the Boomers who decided that Gays were not "perverts" -- as described by one Mad Man -- and who changed the world just enough so that a black man who's greatest realistic aspiration might have been to operate an elevator at Sterling Cooper could now imagine bec...