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Twitter 2012: Finding Your Voice in Changing Conversation

Posted on February 11, 2012 by Doug Luberts

Note: This entry kind of grew to gargantuan size, as there is just so much to talk about when it comes to Twitter as a social networking tool.

It is mostly intended for folks who are new to social networking, and Twitter, or who have had a tough time finding their voice, and building a presence, although there might be something there for old Twitterists as well.

Oh, teh twitterz…My old friend. I start this entry with ‘The Twitter Song’ by ihatemornings (Ben Walker), as a reminder of where we’ve come from, and where we’ve gone … And a lot of the stuff that Ben polks fun at in his music video is still on point.

Twitter can be fun, entertaining, perplexing, infuriating, and all of that at the same time…It’s pretty much replaced most commercial news outlets as my primary source of news and information, as well as a tool for marketing myself, my web portal and video productions, as well as groups and products that I support, and, most importantly, a way of staying connected to all of the friends and colleagues that I’ve made in the web space.

Twitter’s tag line has always been ‘join the conversation’, but that conversation is changing…Twitter has grown up over the past few years, and the way folks are using Twitter are changing as a result of the product maturity, and experience that has come out of the communal experience of the last few years.

Joining the conversation, and getting your voice heard can be a challenge, and building a professional presence can be daunting for a lot of folks, unless you’ve got someone who’s figured all of this crap out giving you some pointers…Which is what I’m going to do.

I’ve been helping some friends lately with advice on how to use social media to help get their documentary funded. A ‘social media plan’ if you will…and my friend tells me he’s gotten some benefit from the ideas I was throwing out, so I figured I’d share…

Now, I don’t sell myself as one of those ‘Social Media Strategists’ that seem to turn up daily on my Twitter followers tab, along with the usual assortment of porn bots, promising to help get me thousands of followers and make lots of money using Twitter…I never follow these folks, and they go away real fast.

No, I am just interested in sharing what I’ve learned, and am learning, because it’s still an evolving process, with friends, and all you folks, for free…Because I don’t think using social media approaches anything near the complexity of quantum mechanics, or anything you can’t learn yourself without having to hire someone who is going to charge you good coin for what basically amounts to common-sense ideas.

Also, the folks that I look to as mentors, and who I’ve learned all the basics from, offered their basic game books for free…So look at it as giving back.

Following and Followers

First piece of advice: Don’t worry about who is following you. Figure out what your interests, passions, and/or personal brand is, and follow people who have the same, or related interests with you.

Throw tweets at them…Remember, this is a conversation.

Engage with people with whom you share interests. Ask direct questions…The worst thing you can do at first is throw open-ended tweets out and expect folks who aren’t following you to respond. Ask someone something specific, comment on a tweet from a celebrity, or subject matter guru, with a joke…Or share some information with them that would be of interest from THEIR perspective.

One thing you can do is quote other folks tweets with your own comments in front of them. That creates a new tweet in your stream, that all of your followers will see, and the other person will see in their @connect tab. This is often a great conversation starter.

You will find that even some very big celebs, with huge followings, will sometimes respond to you…Not all, especially the ones who have assistants tweeting for them (which I think is kind of bogus, and most of the celebs and weblebs (social media celebrities) who I know personally, only tweet for themselves…)

Don’t be discouraged if your first tweet or two doesn’t get you into a conversation…Keep at it.

Again, who you follow is more important than who is following you, so don’t get caught up in a numbers game. It can take a long time to build up a following unless you’ve got a built-in brand factor, like a Lady Gaga or Aston Kutcher…You won’t go from zero to a bazillion-gagillion followers in a day.

Don’t get bummed if folks you would like to have as followers (and those are usually the folks with the big social media profiles, so everyone wants to be followed by them) don’t follow you back, even if they have a good tweeting relationship with you…It’s the communication that’s important, and while some celebs will follow everyone who follows them, many folks (including myself) try to keep their following count low, so they can keep the ‘signal-to-noise’ ratio low on their personal stream.

I’m following about 700 folks, which is too many, and it gets really tough to focus, and pick up on key messages, if you’re following too many people.

Also, some folks also use things like Tweetdeck, and Twitterific, so that they can set up filters and groups…You may be getting a lot more air time than you think (but don’t count on it.)

Again, focus on who you are following, and the content that you create…Add value to the information stream and the followers will come in time.

It is good to know your followers, at least in general terms (It gets hard to keep up with after a while), especially if they turn out to have information streams that are similar to yours, and you want to follow them. One good tool to use for checking out who is following/not following you, who un-follows you, and such, is who.unfollowed.me.

Who.unfollowed.me is actually a complete set of tools for tracking your followers. There is a free, or ‘lite’ version, which I use currently, that gives you a lot of functionality to see who your followers are, and when they leave you.

By using who.unfollowed.me, and checking it frequently, you can see if you’re tweets are attracting, or chasing off, the kind of followers that you consider are key to your personal brand…Or if you’ve just got a lot of churn going on in your followers because of bots…A problem Twitter has yet to effectively deal with.

Again, don’t get too hung up on who un-follows you at a micro level…Some folks might just want to connect with you in other ways, like Facebook or Google+, or sometimes you might just not meet their information processing bandwidth requirements (too many tweets, not enough tweets.) Look for trends of who is following and un-following you, and don’t get hung up on individuals.

For judging the overall effectiveness of your social media efforts across platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, WordPress, etc.), there is Klout.com, and peerindex.com, two analytics sites that are very useful, and will be the topic of future write-ups.

RTs and Getting Your Stuff Out There

A few years ago, this was pretty simple…You tweet about your stuff, I retweet you, and you reciprocate. Got a hot project? Just tweet a celeb, and ask for a re-tweet. No problem, right?

Well, that was then, and now is different. Things have gotten a lot more complicated than BITD (and by that I mean 2008. )

A lot of folks will not tweet or re-tweet anything other than things that either:

1) Are part of their product line or brand

2) They have a vested interest in

3) Are videos, products, or stories from trusted friends and partners

4) They get paid to do product placement in their tweets

5) They just don’t give a crap about anything but self-promotion and are just shouting their own virtues, non-stop, at the top of their lungs, into cyberspace

Twitter has grown up, as I mentioned before…Companies, big and small, have Twitter policies. Many companies will look at tweets by employees about company business as if the employee is acting as a press resource…You tweet about the guy who TP’d the corporate bathroom, and you’re making an unauthorized press release about company business. That can be embarrassing to the company, and might just get you fired.

Some companies, even some small production companies doing web content, have policies in place about not tweeting about other company’s videos or products unless it is part of their overall strategic marketing plan…You’ve got a buddy working for WeeWeeSmall Productions, who you think should be re-tweeting your latest vid, and get irked when he doesn’t? Well, he might not be able to do that and keep his employers happy.

It’s become increasingly difficult to cut through all of the noise of Twitter, and other social media platforms, and get a brand presence established (which is one of the reasons I’m trying to give content creators an edge, with respect to geek-affinity content, by offering content aggregation on GeektasticNebula.com in an effort to create a unified brand from many smaller ones.) That can be a factor for some folks who feel that using their social media presence to promote other brands and products is at cross-purposes with their own goals…So they don’t. It’s tough, but this is business, and although I don’t necessarily agree with that type of approach, everyone approaches their social media strategy, and rules for engagement, in their own, or their company’s, way.

Then there’s the problem of, “Hey, if I tweet for you, then I’ve gotta’ tweet for this other guy, and his two friends, and …”, and the next thing you know, you’re in the middle of all kinds of interpersonal dynamics issues over person X feeling disrespected because you didn’t retweet their stuff, but did for person Y.

It can be a friggin’ mess…

And that only escalates with the profile of the person being asked to do the tweeting…I’ve got a few friends that are pretty big players in the space, and they are constantly being bombarded with requests to tweet stuff for them…At some point they’ve just got to say no, both to keep peace, and because it gets to be too much of a time suck, and, face it, we’ve all got our own work to do…

One friend told me, a few years ago, that they were asked to get some big Hollywood producer they knew to tweet about something or other, and the response was, “Uh, no…I can’t do that.”

Because that would be one way of losing that producer’s ear, as bandwidth, and face-time, are valuable commodities for busy people.

I no sooner heard that story than someone approached me with a “You know…if you could get so-and-so to tweet about my stuff, I could really do something great…”. Yeah, you and everybody else.

I don’t, as a rule, ask folks to tweet, or re-tweet for me…If they want to it’s appreciated, but you’ve got to respect people’s time, and keep expectations real. If someone likes your stuff enough, and isn’t otherwise constrained by any of the other factors, you’ll get your message out. I have great Twitter conversations with folks, all the time, who don’t re-tweet my stuff…And it’s all good, because we’re interacting, and that’s what is important.

Again, the message here is that Tweeting and Re-Tweeting can be a lot more complicated, for the reasons I’ve mentioned, than seems obvious. Don’t get frustrated by failure to get RT’d…Just keep doing your thing.

Non-RT Responses from High-Profile Tweeters

There are also a lot of instances where the absolute last thing you want is for someone with a few million followers to RT your post…Especially if you’re a blogger with a site on a non-industrial-strength host, and you’re tweeting a blog link (Doug raises hand and points at himself.)

I use a pretty good hosting company, that offers unlimited bandwidth for a reasonable rate…One that is sustainable for the level of interest this blog receives, but is also affordable for someone who doesn’t derive the kind of ad revenue necessary (yet, but hopeful…) to sustain the cost of a dedicated server. I can take a good burst of hits in the thousands…But that’s about it.

In short, while I can take a pretty good amount of traffic in every-day use, one re-tweet from a celebrity like Stephen Fry, with his 3.8 million followers, and my host’s non-dedicated server would die a quick and painful death from the resulting traffic. Taking down all the sites on the server I’m sharing the space with, and having some poor guy in a basement somewhere going nuts trying to get everything back online.

The usual result is that the hosting company kicks you off of their service, because their ‘unlimited bandwidth’ deal isn’t really a free lunch, and you wind up scrambling for a new web host while loosing traffic, which is a huge PITA.

I’ve seen this a lot, and have one friend who I refer to, kiddingly, as Kali 2.0, as she has been known to lay waste to entire web sites with a mere touch of the re-tweet button (Yes, I’m talking about Felicia Day…How long into the post did you think it was going to be before her name came up? Seriously. :p )

Kidding aside, celebrities like Stephen Fry and Felicia Day have learned, the hard way, that a well-intentioned RT can cause unbridled havoc. Which is why you might see other things, like having your tweet favorited, or post bookmarked, or a comment liked on Facebook, a video favorited on YouTube, etc … Which will be a great show of support, show you that your efforts are being recognized, and drive traffic your way without making any data centers, or IT-tech people’s heads, explode.

It’s a good thing, and should be appreciated when it happens…

Paid Product Tweeters/Promoters

Case, #4 is the one that I, and many folks that I know, don’t really like…The paid product placement tweeter.

There are folks out there who make side money, or in some cases, more than just side money, by freelancing their Twitter feeds.

An advertiser pays them, and they will start tweeting about the product/brand in question as if they were just really into whatever the product is, and you would think, based on whatever drives you to follow that Tweeter, that they are giving you info based on their own preferences…Using their social capital with you to get you to buy into what they are being paid to tweet about.

I think it kinda’ sucks. No, actually, it outright sucks…It’s a breach of trust, when you think about it.

There is nothing wrong with paid product placement…As a model it’s been around a long time, and as a financing model for web video it has proven effective (I’m thinking specifically of shows like Ileana Douglas’ ‘Easy to Assemble‘ which is set in an Ikea store, and sponsored by Ikea), and there is nothing wrong with it … As long as it’s out in the open, and you’re aware of it. Same with branded Twitter identities, such as production companies and shows, that Tweet their sponsors products…Nothing wrong with it at all.

What I’m talking about is the Tweeters/Bloggers who surreptitiously slip product placement into their twitter stream when I’m following them because I trust their taste in <FILL IN THE BLANK>. They are misusing their position as a thought leader, and, to me, this is wholesale BS.

It’s also a part of why YouTube has a paid product placement policy in place for shows that are monetizing content through AdSense.

Twitter really should have a policy about this, but I don’t see it as being enforceable…Especially for a company that still hasn’t figured out how to deal with the porn-and-spam-bot problem that is a huge, rampant, pain in the butt.

Often, it’s hard to tell when someone is doing it, unless they are just an obvious Twitter sell-sword, in which case you might recognize products that are off-brand suddenly popping up in their stream on a regular basis…Often times folks will be a lot more subtle.

If you develop a relationship with a tweeter based on a common affinity and they all of a sudden start treating you like you have the social media equivalent of leprosy, while suddenly espousing something in their tweets with an almost-identical brand affinity to your own, something might be up…Like a pay day.

Just for the record…I tweet, and re-tweet, a lot of stuff … Things that I like, and feel that add value to the folks who are interested in what I like … People with whom I share a particular affinity space that’s part of my personal brand identity. If it’s from me and, for better or worse, it’s there because it’s something that I find value in, and nobody is paying me for (and that’s the way it will stay…)

The Pure, and Shameless, Self-Promoter

Finally, there are some folks out their who are just shouting their own message into cyberspace, and don’t give a crap…I don’t know why you’d want to follow someone like that, unless they are just that damn compelling that being a voyeur into their lives is appealing, but these types can benefit your own social media activities, in some cases, as I’ll explain in the next section.

“Well, that was kind of depressing as hell, Doug, what do I do to get my stuff recognized?”

Easy…Add value.

Don’t count on anyone else to promote your video, product, book, neat idea, whatever…Build your own social media profile by being part of the conversation, and adding value to it.

Maybe folks won’t tweet, or re-tweet about your message, but they almost always are willing to tweet, re-tweet, or join in a conversation about their own.

Be a fan…Be a supporter.

Find stuff that falls into your passion, or affinity, zone that others are doing, and support them. Build relationships, and join in conversations.

Write blog articles that review other web shows, or events, or products. Tweet about that, and that the creators of those other events and/or products will drive traffic to your site, because it is great for their marketing plan. That’s how you will develop a voice…as well as brand authority, which is important.

In doing so, you may not be getting direct support for your brand, but by developing your profile through tweets, retweets, and conversations about things related to your own brand, you will build a following, and that will enable to you get your message out there, on your own, without having to rely on the value of someone else’s social media identity to do it.

It works…in time. But there’s another part of this as well…

Don’t rely on Twitter as your only social media platform

There is only so much you can communicate in 140 characters and, as I mentioned before, the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter is pretty high, and not likely to get any lower. Also consider that there are now ‘promoted tweets’ (and tweeters), and that Twitter is really just starting to get going with its own monetization strategy which will likely drive up the noise level for those who don’t have advertising dollars to spend.

No, you need to go to other places.

Facebook is important. Google+ is important, and becoming more important…Especially with the synergies between Google+, YouTube, and AdSense, Google is looking to maximize both the user experience, and their return on investment.

If you’re not spending a significant amount of time leveraging these other platforms, as well as Tumblr, Flickr, and LinkedIn, you are missing opportunities.

Yes, it’s a lot of work, and Google+ is not nearly as easy to integrate with the other platforms … and I don’t think Google thinks its in their best interest to be. They want to provide as much of a one-stop shopping experience as possible, and maximize revenues.

I’ll talk more about these other platforms, as well as analytics and social media profile tools, in a future entry.

Would love comments, and questions, and any feedback on if you folks feel that blog entries like this are helpful …

Remember, it’s a conversation, so speak up!

Teh Twitterz Conversation the Interwebz was invented for …

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Doug Luberts

So, this conversation happened this afternoon on Twitter between ICM Web Super-Agent, and Deadliest Man Alive, George Ruiz, Queen of All Internet Geekdom, Felicia Day, and Nerdist Bloginatrix, Kiala Kazebee (who is definitively a top geek girl, even though someone forgot to put her on the list.)

I record it here for posterity, because, shit, somebody had to …

These people are why I <3 the Internet Age! It’s a great World we live in.

Curated YouTube Playlists: A great idea that needs a little work

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Doug Luberts

I was out to dinner with my of my web video production friends, last week, and after the usual important discussions about vital topics of the day, such as Dr. Who, Star Wars, and the irony of Kim Jong Il’s death being announced by CNN while we were in the middle of eating Korean Barbecue (dying is easy, finding good Korean Barbecue in Oakland is … Also pretty easy), we started talking YouTube and content creation, and the topic of curated YouTube playlists came up.

You create a curated playlist by building a playlist of videos, and then adding your own video introductions. It allows you to become the host of a show on any area of topicality on YouTube, and feature other folks’ work in your show without directly, or inappropriately, making using of their Intellectual Property.

Sounds good? But wait, there’s more!

From a monetization standpoint, it’s a win-win-win situation … If your videos are enabled for monetization, via Google AdSense or a YouTube Partnership, you make money. If the content you are featuring is monetized the creators of those videos make money and, if everything is monetized, then YouTube’s algorithm has incentive for promoting your playlist videos because YouTube/Google makes money. Like I said…Win-win-win.

But there’s a but … (isn’t there always?)

Playlists are still a bit funkified, and need some work from the YouTube engineering folks, especially with regard to how their embedding API works with 3rd-Party applications like Twitter and Facebook, as well as, to a lesser extent, getting the kinks worked out of how playlists function on the YouTube site.

As an example, I created a playlist called ‘The Six Degrees of ‘The Guild’ Holiday Videos“, it’s a list of videos created by folks who have been part of the cast and crew of Felicia Day’s hit web series, ‘The Guild‘. The topic itself could easily be another blog post, but sufficed to say that there’s an incredible amount of talented folks who have worked on the show over the years, and they’ve created a body of work outside of ‘The Guild‘ that’s nothing short of amazing…I just cherry-picked six of the best of them, including a Christmas video from ‘The Guild’, and added my ‘Hooray for Santa Claus‘ music video. To that I added seven brief introduction videos for the curation aspect.

If the user starts the playlist from the YouTube Playlist Window, or clicks on the list from a YouTube channel’s playlist views window, the user experience is great, and each video in the list auto-plays in succession in on YouTube Video Pages. Occasionally a ‘plugin missing’ error might occur in the browser (I’ve seen this in Google Chrome) that requires the user to refresh the page, but it’s generally smooth sailing, with the playlist working as-advertised.

The problems with the YouTube API start happening when you try to link your videos in external sites (noticeably, I have not seen this to be a problem in Google+ for some reason. )

On Twitter or Facebook, linking the list from with a ‘play all’ link will run the first video, switch to the second, but not autoplay it. This is a problem for most content creators, as it’s those secondary apps that we’re going to rely on go get traffic to our videos. YouTube has got to work on this…and I have no doubts they will, as this is their bread-and-butter, and they are encouraging use of these playlists in their YouTube Content Creator Playbook as a way to promote and share content. I just mention it as, right now, it’s a gotcha’ that content creators need to be aware of.

For right now, the best way to link your playlist content is just to provide a link to the playlist window, and the user can hit ‘play all from there.

Also, YouTube needs to provide some housekeeping options on their new Channel Pages for videos that are part of curated playlists…There needs to be a way of not having them all on your channel’s ‘videos’ page, as they can confuse users who click on them randomly when they are not auto-running from a playlist. Which brings me to another point.

While the playlist functionality is great, when everything is auto-running correctly, video publishers need to make sure to add annotation links in all the intros in their curated playlists that point to the next video in the link with the playall tags embedded in them…For the first video in the list, this will ensure that the a viewer coming into the video randomly will be able to get into the autoplay list mode, and for the other videos, it will guarantee that the viewer has an option to ‘kick start’ the rest of the videos in the list if the playlist becomes disable or they don’t auto-jump to the next video in the sequence.

If that sounds a bit kludgy, it’s because it is…This is a relatively new form of viewing experience for YouTube viewers and creators. One that has a lot of potential but, just like folks who drove early cars, like the Model A, you have to be willing to get under the hood to make this work for now. Hopefully this will not be the case for very long…Google’s got some of the best engineers in the business, and if anyone can make this happen, they can!

Hooray for Santa Claus: The Video!

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Doug Luberts

Earlier in the week, I blogged about the movie Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, a venerable and, in my opinion, overly-maligned Christmas film that’s gotten a rep for being one of the worst holiday movies of all time.

Later on, I was putting together a Christmas Video Playlist for Spike the Wonder Chihuahua, and wanted to put the theme song from the movie, “Hooray for Santa Claus”, from Al Hirt’s single 45 (45rpm, a single-song vinyl record, for you kids out there … It’s what they did in the ’60s, before iPods and such.) The song is a classic. It’s got a surf-rock feel, and Al Hirt just wails on the trumpet parts…It’s my favorite Christmas song of all time.

I was kind of bummed when the only video version I could find on YouTube was set to a Powerpuff Girls video ripped from Cartoon Network…Heresy. So I did what any good video editor/content producer would do: I cut my own version of a music video for posterity.

Well, sort of.

Since I decided that ‘doing it right’ meant cutting a music video to footage from the original movie, I watched it again and … well, things got a bit out of hand. The result is a video mashup that I call ‘Hooray for Santy Claus Conquering the Martians in Under 4 Minutes‘.

Still with me? Good.

It involves a bit of a pre-amble, wherein we meet Kimar, Martian Planetary Leader, and “Chochem”, an 800 year-old Martian mystic who lives in a rocky swamp, dresses in a sack, and looks way to much like something that was George Lucas’ inspiration for Yoda to be a mere coincidence. I mean, sure, it could be a coincidence, just like the establishing shot of the Martian spaceship flying to Earth that doesn’t look anything like the opening shot from ‘Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope’, much.

Remember, “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” came out in ’62, so who knows?

Anyway, this was a fun project, and now there is something on YouTube that honor’s both the movie, and the great Al Hirt. My work is finished here.

Merry Christmas, all!

Record cover for the 45 single version of 'Hooray for Santa Claus'

New ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 2 BTS Video

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Doug Luberts

‘The Hobbit’ Trailer is here!

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Doug Luberts

I don’t usually blog trailers, but this one deserves it!

The new trailer for Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” is up, out, and looking amazingly cool. They even have The Dwarf Song!

Already watched it about a half-dozen times, and am now counting the days until December 2012 (and hoping the film is out before the Mayan calendar ends because, you know, just in case …)

VD is for Everybody: 2011 Political Mashup PSA

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Doug Luberts

I love old PSAs and sex education films from the ’30′s through the ’70s. Most of what you see is so outdated, and was so outrageous to begin with, that they are hilariously funny and/or parody themselves without any further help. There’s a ton of this stuff out there on archive.org, and a good portion of it is either public domain or under creative commons license. Expect to see a lot of mashups from me using this type of stuff as source material in days to come.

Anyway, with all the action surrounding Herman Cain, and his alleged dalliances and denials regarding same, as well as all of the other politicians and would-be leaders of our country who have been caught with their pants down over the years, I started thinking about the absolutely outrageous Ad Council PSA from the ’70s, a music video called “VD is for Everybody.” The result is the attached mashup.

Now, keep in mind that sexual dalliances are non-partisan, so I’ve tried to provide an equal number of offenders from both of our major political parties…The message here is not partisan, the message is that there are a lot of scheming, lying, hypocritical politicians out there, and that’s about it. The sad fact that these guys maintain a pretense of moral superiority while being anything but morally superior, and demand far higher standards from we, the governed, than they hold themselves to in their own lives is the true comedy (or tragedy) here.

Also, the intro is by the late, great, SoCal Newsman, George Putnum, from another film called “Pervsion for Profit”, a McCarthy-era piece of scare propaganda that connected the pornography industry with the “Red Menace”. It’s been cut down, re-mixed, and parodied all over YouTube, and is worth watching just to recall the madness of the McCarthy Era, and get a read on just how close we are to being manipulated by similar propaganda tactics today.

There were a couple of fun aspects to the actual editing of this piece, including using Magic Bullet Misfire to make all the recent footage fit in with the scratched, faded, and flickering look of the original film. I used about 3-4 different plugins for each of the clips, and the results are pretty powerful, given the simplicity of using the tools. Check out Red Giant Software’s page if you’re looking for cool plugins for editing effects.

For those who aren’t big on politics, the folks in the video are:

President William Jefferson Clinton
Former Presidential Candidate Herman Cain
Former Representative Anthony Wiener
Former Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer
Former Nevada Senator John Ensign
Former Senator, and Vice Presidential/Presidential Candidate,John Edwards

Feel free to look up their specific dalliances, if you’re not familiar, they are all pretty shameful.

Anyway, enjoy!

All Honor to the Minds that Created … The Lot that Lear Built

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Doug Luberts

While my time as a Stage Manager at KBMO in San Diego was memorable, and not to mention brief, it was just a short transition period in my career, leading me from San Diego State to my ultimate destination … Hollywood.

I had plans, you see. Plans that couldn’t be held within the limited confines of a small-market station doing live news and commercials day in and day out. No, that wasn’t for me. I had much bigger fish to fry … I was going to direct Soap Operas.

Okay, all of you, just stop laughing. Yeah, you … The guy running Windows ’98 on a Compaq Pentium V 500Mhz … Get a grip, it’s not that funny. (Besides, you’ve got your own issues.)

Soap Operas are an art … And remember this was during the whole Luke & Laura hysteria when General Hospital was at the height of its popularity. I’d been watching “GH” since the 5th grade, as it was on right next to my all-time favorite soap as a kid … Dark Shadows.

My next choice after that would have been directing sitcoms (I wasn’t going to be picky.) Plus I’d seen every episode of I Love Lucy, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Gilligan’s Island, twice, so, hey, qualified!

After narrowly escaping the clutches of Bud Blue and Susan Dale, the evil anchor team at KBMO, I started looking around for jobs up the coast. As luck would have it, Metromedia Square was advertising for a lighting maintenance engineer … A job I was totally unqualified for, so, thinking that nobody gets jobs in Hollywood by sending resumes (something that has proven false time and time again in my career), I sent in a resume. About a month later I got a call from the Director of Production Operations for Metromedia Productions … Wondering if I could come in for an interview.

Needless to say I wound up in L.A. defying all speed records for the, normally, 2-hour trip.

For those of you not familiar with Metromedia Square, which stood for years on Sunset Boulevard just off the 101 at the eastern end of what you’d think of as Hollywood proper, it was once one of the busiest video production lots in Hollywood. Known as “the lot that Lear built”, owing to the number of sitcoms produced by Norman Lear there over the years (All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Different Strokes, The Facts of Life, and more), it was a truly historic place. In 1984, while a bit past the Norman Lear sitcom heyday, Metromedia Square was still a thriving production hub operating on a 7×24 basis for much of the year. Shows in production at that time were Three’s Company, Gimme’ a Break!, Too Close for Comfort, The People’s Court, Jeopardy!, and more.

The meeting with the production guy went well … They weren’t interested in me for the maintenance position, but they were interested in my experience with the Strand-Century Light Palette lighting control system, an early, VAX-based, lighting computer which was state-of-the-art at that time, and something I had become bit of a guru about, thanks to my experience in the SDSU Theatre. It seems that there was going to be a large growth in production for the upcoming season, including a soap opera, and they needed a swarm of additional lighting guys. It was a foot in the proverbial door.

I moved up to Los Angeles right after the ’84 Olympics, which had pretty much shut production, and just about everything else in L.A., down for the duration, due to predictions of traffic nightmares during the games which never emerged. There was a late start on Fall production and the lot was in a frenzy.

Being one of the new kids on the lot, I got a couple of weeks of day gigs on set, which mainly consisted of sitting around waiting for something to go wrong, or striking lights after a shoot wrapped. These shoot days were coveted by crew, as it was usually a 15-hour day of not much work to do. Although sitting around on set got very monotonous, very fast.

To fill the void the crew used to do a lot of recreational … well, let’s just say it was the ’80s and it was Hollywood, and yes, from what I saw and experienced, most of the stories you heard about rampant intoxication of various kinds were true. Oh, man were they true. For the sake of not pointing fingers at behavior that, while once may have been tolerated but now is very seriously frowned upon, and so as not to earn the wrath of any litigious former co-workers who may still be around, let’s just say that the boredom at these times lead to us play a lot of darts on the lot … and off.

There was a back room at the Denny’s on Sunset across the street from Metromedia Square that was a bar. It was a perfect place to go after playing darts and have a few adult beverages before heading back to work after lunch, dinner (sometimes breakfast) or whenever. We spent a lot of time at Denny’s, or Chez Denois, as we used to call it.

On a shoot day you’d often find the lighting crew taking turns going up to the dimmer rooms above the stages to play darts. Nobody ever went up there and nobody outside could smell anything when we were playing darts in there, but just to be safe we’d have a lookout stationed nearby in case some production manager decided to nose around … A chirp on the walkie-talkies meant we had to put out our darts and get out of there. Not that it ever happened … and you could find used darts all over the floor in the dimmer rooms. So much in fact that if you didn’t have any darts of your own, you could probably roll a couple from what was there.

It wasn’t long before all of us new guys found ourselves on the graveyard shift … As I said, shoot days were highly coveted by the guys with seniority, and it really pissed them off when noobs got the day work. There was a fairly strict seniority-based caste system that dictated that kind of stuff, so after a few weeks of orientation, I found myself doing over-nights getting lights hung, rigged, and focused, for the next day’s shoot.

The schedule varied by show, but generally it meant coming in between 11pm-2am, after a set had been cleared from a stage. The two big stages, six and seven, had 3-4 shows on them every week, including a sitcom each. This meant rotating the sets in and out as soon as each week’s shoot was done. The lighting crew would come in first, hang all the lights on the pipes; the stages had a fly system so with an empty stage all the hanging could be done at ground level. Then the lights would be flown up so the grips could bring the sets in. We’d come back in the wee hours of the morning to hang any additional lights in odd places, or nail babies (1k lights) to the top of set walls … We nailed a lot of babies to walls on sitcoms. We also used to stick a lot of glass (diffusion material) in the babies. If you didn’t know the jargon, it sounded like a very violent and sadistic business.

Now hanging the lights was hard work, to be sure, but there was also a lot of down time between the hang, and after the grips were done putting the sets up. A lot of time in the middle of the night with absolutely nothing to do, except sleep … or play darts in the lighting shop.

We played a lot of darts in the lighting shop.

Back at this time, Metromedia was owned by a guy named John Kluge … One of the richest guys in the country. His Metromedia empire spanned television, news, billboards, and the emerging cellular phone market. The man was richer than god, which is all very well and good, except that with vast wealth can come vast excess … In Kluge’s case, one of these excesses manifested itself in his interest in art. The hang-on-a-wall kind, not the Garfunkel variety.

The Metromedia Square Building, and Kluge's rooftop art. We used to tell people that it was an antenna to spare ourselves embarrassment.

Well, you might say that’s not a bad thing, as art forms the basis of our collective consciousness, our common soul, and has been at the center of human existence since time immemorial. You could say that, and it would all be true, except that John Kluge had, what was held by consensus to be, the absolute worst taste in art in the history of worst taste in art. Kluge’s art collection was, in fact, a standing joke on the lot … and presumably throughout the entire Metromedia Empire (and the outside World.)

Most of this stuff was horrible. Most of it would make you want to embrace Jackson Pollack for his upbeat use of color and form. Not to mention texture.

On the way through the front offices at the Square, there were corridors filled with pastel-art depicting the Holocaust. Certainly appropriate, and very thought-provoking, subject matter for viewing when at the Simon Wiesenthal Museum, but not the kind of material you want to get your head into right before taking a meeting with one of the producers of The Ted Knight show about merchandising rights for Cosmic Cow. Just not the right vibe. Besides, it was also hideous stuff.

Sculpture was another important part of the Kluge art collection that reflected the same sensibilities and tastes evident in his collection of paintings and illustrations. Hideous was an often-used description.

There was this huge erector-set-looking thing that was mounted on top of the main building at the Square extending out, and hanging over, the 101 freeway. People often asked what it was, and if this giant tinker-toy served any kind of functional purpose. Most of us just told anyone who asked that it was a TV antenna, rather than getting into a long, detailed, explanation about this huge piece of scrap metal, that the owner of the company probably paid millions for, which served no functional or aesthetic purpose whatsoever (although it would probably claim a number of lives on the freeway below in the event of an earthquake.)

On the main lot, there was a sort of portico leading into the studio that was all done in black granite. In the middle of it was a huge, I’m thinking 20 foot, chrome statue of some Greek god carrying what was supposed to represent some kind of radio wave (but looked much more like the stars that used to circle Wiley Coyote’s head whenever he got ganked by the Road Runner) to Mankind. Beneath the statue, in huge silver letters, read the caption, “All Honor To The Minds That Created The Medium.”

It was far from the most heinous article of artistic effluvia decorating the lot, but subject to no less derision than the rest of the collection largely because people had to walk by it on their way in to work from the parking lot every day … or night, as it was lit up with some high-power floodlights that insured it was visible, at least as far as Compton, after dark.

The Object of our late night plot ...

One night, after we had finished doing the hang for a particularly light show, we were all sitting around in the shop. It was about 3am, and we had absolutely nothing to do until the lighting director for the show got in at 8am. An major round of playing darts ensued.

A couple of hours later, the lighting shop thick in a post-darts-playing cloud of smoke, the disjointed conversation turned to John Kluge, his art collection, and, specifically, the giant chrome Silver Surfer knock-off at the entrance to the lot. It seems that everyone had pretty much gotten sick of looking at this behemoth.

“It’s hideous!”, said one of the electricians.

“I’m sick of it!”, cried the board operator.

“Somebody oughta’ do something!”, said somebody else.

“Hmmmnnn. I got an idea”, chimed in the gaffer.

And right then and there, amidst a flood of outrage and boredom, and darts, a conspiracy was born whose repercussions would reverberate throughout the entire Metromedia empire.

The lighting director went over and pulled out a box of lighting foil … The thick, heavy, foil, a common enough staple in any gaffer’s bag, but for some reason this batch was silver instead of the usual black. It was probably ordered in error and had been sitting in the shop, largely unnoticed, until our guy pulled it out and started measuring suitability to mischievous task.

With an evil twinkle of glee in his otherwise bloodshot eyes, he began to construct a large cylinder from the foil … About 4 feet in length and probably close to a foot in diameter.

It was probably a half-an-hour, or better, into his manic crafting that we realized what he was doing. Everyone dropped their darts and stared in awe at the marvelous creation; It was a giant, glittering, chrome schlong, life-like in every detail, well, except for being chrome. It was a surreal penis of beauty.

Next, plans for deployment were made. Walkie-talkies were distributed and look-outs dispatched. One got the sense that if camo was available, we would have broke that out do … We were on a covert mission, and our very survival, or at least the survival of our careers, was dependent on stealthy execution of this maneuver.

The giant willy was attached to the statue with great care. High tension wire supplying the invisible underpinnings.

The monolithic tadger in place, the lights were re-focused on the giant’s new-found manhood, with tasteful sidelighting applied to provide an enhanced sense of depth (we were, after all, lighting professionals.)

Finally, all that remained was a slight modification to the caption beneath the statue, made with the aid of silver tape.

Afterwards, the entire covert missions team departed the scene, retreating to the safety of the lighting shop, undetected. Our mission a success, a round of darts was in order, as we waited for morning to come, along with the fallout from our escapade to begin.

That day, as hundreds of workers arrived at the lot, they were greeted with a new, and improved, statue displaying its massive tool for all the World to see, with a caption that now read:

“All Honor to the Minds that Created the Medium, the Large, and the Extra Large”

The teaming masses arriving on the scene just stood there, slack-jawed, ogling the freshly enhanced masterpiece. Some impressed, some appalled, none without something to say about the effort.

In the Brechtian sense, the win was thoroughly epic.

Now, studio management, who I suspect enjoyed this display as much of the rest of us, but having to feign disgust due to differing allegiances and agendas, promptly dispatched a maintenance crew who, even more promptly, emasculated said work of art, but not before a couple of hours of arriving workers, guests and visiting dignitaries had a chance to view the statue in its modified, Ron Jeremy-esque, form.

A call was made to round up the usual suspects and, after the usual inquiries were made, a promise was offered by management to find, and ultimately punish, the culprits responsible for this defacement of Mr. Kluge’s prized statue.

Never happened.

Nobody talked.

The tale of the statue and his prosthetic pecker went on to become a thing of Metromedia legend.

At the end of the ’85 production season, I left Metromedia, returning to New York for what I thought would be a six-month trip to attend to some family issues. I didn’t get back to Metromedia Square until 2001, when I found the facility boarded-up and gated off … a depressing specter of its former self.

Metromedia had sold off its production and television interests years before and Fox, the new owner, had moved to a newer facility, donating the property to the L.A. Unified School District. The lot, and everything on it, was demolished a few years later to make room for a huge new high school. The students of Los Angeles would be better for having it, although a huge piece of Television history would be sacrificed for the benefit.

To this day, everyone who worked at Metromedia Square back then will remember all those who “honored” the minds that created the medium … And wonder just who in the hell they were.

I’ll never tell.

Of Local News Anchors, Airplane Wire and Bermuda Shorts

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Doug Luberts

I’ve had a lot of varied career experience … both in and out of the Entertainment Industry. One job that has left its indelible mark on my psyche was my stint as a Stage Manager at a network affiliate station in San Diego.

I was freshly out of SDSU, the ink on my theatre and film degrees barely dry, and was working around town as a freelance lighting and audio guy at the local regional, summer stock, and dinner theatres around, San Diego. It was fun, and I learned a lot, even though the pay sucked beyond the telling of it.

I was doing a gig for a sound company at a downtown hotel, when I ran into Mitch Koi, a friend of mine who was a Producer/Director at KBMO, the local NBC affiliate. Mitch had taught a TV production class while I was at State, and we had kept in touch ever since.

As it happened, KBMO had an opening for a stage manager, and Mitch thought I’d be ideal for the job. He gave me the number of the station’s production manager, and I got in touch with him that afternoon. And got the job.

The station was typical of many smaller-market TV stations (I believe San Diego was about the 21st largest TV market in the country in 1983), mainly producing local news and sport shows, with production revenue beefed-up by producing commercial spots for local businesses.

For those of you who have never been on the business end of a local news operation, it’s a fascinating world.

For many of the talent, a station in a mid-sized market is a weigh station … A stepping-stone to bigger and better opportunities in cities like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. For others, it was a place where they had found their niche in broadcasting and decided that they didn’t have the ambition, need, or in some cases talent, to move up to a larger market.

The combination of savagely aggressive ladder-climbers and big-fish, small bowl, types made for some pretty interesting interpersonal interactions with many of the staff members … Okay, I’m just being polite, this station had more neurotic divas per square inch than you’d find in most of society … including Entertainment Industry types. Especially among some of the news anchors.

There was a news co-anchor on the 5 and 11 who, albeit the absolute sharpest knife in the drawer, was a just a wee bit tonto in la cabeza … The man was obsessed, crazed, and just plain MEAN!

He would typically re-write all of the copy for each broadcast, before air, because, hey, it did it better than the producer and he wanted to get out of this podunk town and get to LA and so he could make the big bucks …

He was hell on the engineering/production staff as well … Particularly the stage managers.

When he wanted the attention of a stage manager during a broadcast, he would throw one of his razor-sharp pencils (which he kept a full cup of on the news set for no other purpose) at your neck … I think he must have minored in darts at college, because the son of a bitch was wicked accurate.

OUCH!

Whenever the guy threw a tantrum, during breaks … which was pretty much every show … He would take the trash can from behind the news desk and throw it at the stage manager and camera crew. It got to the point where filing grievances with the Union was useless … The guy was a whack job, but he was the “Talent”, so you just had to deal. Well, maybe.

One of the maintenance engineers, the station uber-nerds who know how to fix the electronics, was into flying ultra-lites … a sort of a flying lawn-chair for those who haven’t seen them. He had gotten a hold of some really thin aviation-grade cable … So thin, in fact, you could barely see the stuff … And tied the trash can to the set.

On the weekends, most of the anchors practiced a modified dress code; they just wore their shirt, tie and jacket, with shorts. The logic being that, since they never stood up and nobody would see them from the waist down, why bother with the pants?

So one Saturday night, our boy, let’s call him, “Bud”, gets to his boling point over some stupid thing or another. He was already pissed that he had to cover a junior colleague’s weekend spot and someone had dared to put pink highlighters on his news desk, instead of yellow (It really didn’t take a lot to put a nickel in old “Bud’s” slot.) So when we go into commercial, he starts doing his thing, and throws his usual child-like hissy fit … With one minor exception.

When “Bud” goes to grab the trashcan, hoping to heave it at the stage manager, he finds that its been securely tied to the set and won’t budge … Which causes him to freak even more!

It was amazing. I would have never thought the human face could turn so many distinct shades of red.

“Bud” goes ballistic, ranting, raving, and using language usually reserved for longshoremen and Casey Kasem, not realizing that the red tally light just went on over one of the cameras.

He is now standing up, in his bright orange shorts, suit jacket and tie, ranting and raving and swearing like a truck driver … ON AIR!

The director dumped to commercial quickly, not causing too much embarrassment, but I understand that there were some serious discussions in the news director’s office, on Monday morning, about Bud’s attitude and dress code.

Eventually Bud did land that big-time job in Los Angeles, where he remains to this day … No doubt still the terror of stage managers and news directors alike.

The maintenance engineer quit the business and opened up his own ultra-lite dealership in the ‘burbs, promptly went bankrupt, because nobody in his right mind wants to fly around in a flying lawn chair that could run out of gas without warning, and, for a brief time at least, peace ruled at the station.

There are just some experiences that have to be lived to be believed. This is a true story, and I wouldn’t believe it had I not been there to see it for myself.

iCloud: Getting your stuffs together in the Cloud

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Doug Luberts

Note: This post is primarily for folks who came to iCloud with a variety of AppleIDs and other email accounts. If you’ve just gotten started, have “one AppleID to to rule them all” (or just one AppleID), then skip this post, and read this gem about LeMons Racing and The People’s Curse, instead.

After setting up iCloud with your master AppleID, and getting all of your various MobileMe, iCloud, and other email accounts consolidated, you’ve got all your “stuffs” on your Mac, or other iDevice, and everything his synching properly. Life is hunky-dory, so what next?

If you find yourself, like me, with a variety of email accounts, and a MobileMe account that is now a secondary, you probably want to start getting all of your “stuffs” (Mail, Calendar Appointments, Notes, etc.), into your primary iCloud account. Here are a few tips:

Move all of your old MobileMe mail folders into your primary iCloud Account

While you’re at it, move all of your saved emails into the primary iCloud account mail folder as well. Since you’re going to be re-directing all of your mail traffic to the primary iCloud account (or another email alias that forwards to your iCloud account), you can clear out your old Mobile me mail and start tracking down emails that are going to that address for re-direction.

Yeah, that’s some detective work, but getting your inboxes organized and minimizing all the directions your mail is coming from will be worth the effort. Not to mention that you’ll be able to see all of your email in one place if you need to use the iCloud.com web app for viewing.

Transfer your iCal Appointments to your primary iClould Account

If you’ve added all of your accounts (iCloud, MobileMe, Google Calendar, etc.) to your Calendar application, it’s pretty simple to change the calendar that the appointment lives on. You can go through and re-assign all of your recurring appointments and events from your old calendars to your primary iCloud calendar. (Note: I haven’t tried this with my Google calendar appointments, since I don’t really use it, just mentioning this as a possibility.)

After you’ve been working through this, and getting all of your stuffs in one online-place, you can, if you want, shut down your old accounts, like your secondary MobileMe account. After all, one of the goals of the iCloud tech is to make things simpler for you, and having all of your stuffs is one way to reach that goal.

Racing LeMons: The People’s Curse

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Doug Luberts

2.4: Whiner Eligibility. Whiners are not eligible to compete. If you believe that you might be a whiner, please check with a domestic partner, guardian, or health-care professional before getting the rest of your team kicked the hell out of the race.
-24 Hours of LeMons Rules

Last week, I attended my first 24 Hours of LeMons race out at Infineon. In my last blog entry about LeMons racing, I talked about how I’m pretty much hooked on the concept, and have been doing more research/reading about the sport before making a full-on plunge into driving for one of the teams.

In reading the rules, a few things come through very clearly: LeMons is about having fun first, and foremost, and if you take the competitive aspect of this too seriously, or you cheat, it will likely not go well for you, your team, or, in the case of the People’s Curse, your car.

As stated, quite succinctly, in the official rules of 24 Hours of LeMons:

1.6: Your Car May Be Destroyed at Any Time: In addition to accidents and other unfortunate boo-boos, one car may be selected by blind ballot of all teams for immediate removal and total destruction. It could be your car. It probably WILL BE your car. You’ll have 30 minutes to yank out any safety items you want to rescue, and then it’s toast. Them’s the breaks. Don’t bring it if you ain’t OK with losing it.
1.8 The People’s Curse: Each team gets one People’s Curse ballot
after finishing tech. Teams should return ballots by 10am Sunday or as directed at the Drivers Meetings. After the ballots are counted, all cars appearing on >10% of returned ballots get a Black Flag penalty; all cars appearing on >20% of returned ballots get a nasty but (probably) nonfatal Curse penalty; and all cars appearing on >33% of returned ballots get a totally nasty, mega-fatal, possibly frame-flattening Curse penalty.

In other words, you try and race a “cheater” car, one that everyone knows, or at least believes, to be more than a $500 investment (not including safety gear), and you leave yourself at the mercy of the other teams who may decide, by exercising the democratic power of the ballot, to have your car cursed and/or destroyed.

I was asking Anton about this yesterday, and he quickly threw out a half-dozen, or so, stories about how this has happened to teams, and their cars, in the past, with exacting detail on the pain and misery inflicted on the cursed vehicle.

To paraphrase Marsellus Wallace, when the People’s Curse comes down on your team, they’re gonna’ get medieval on your ass…Well, your car’s ass. Do cars have an ass? Whatever.

This is especially true if you fall into in that last-case scenario, the “totally nasty, mega-fatal, possibly frame-flattening Curse penalty.”

Attached is a YouTube video in which the People’s Curse is enacted on a BMW that everybody at the race thought was worth just a wee-bit more than 500 bucks. It is pure carnage, and I must say that the backhoe work involved approaches fine art.

More LeMons to come …

iCloud Migration from MobileMe: How to Un-hose Yourself with Multiple AppleIDs

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Doug Luberts

Last night I went on an expedition, fueled by a Cole Coffee binge (Yemeni Mocca Sanani. It’s brilliant), to un-hose my iCloud setup, which was quite, well…hosed.

The reason for this is pretty simple: I’ve been dealing with Apple directly for over a decade, and have wound up with a handful of AppleIDs, all with different, and now mostly defunct, email addresses. This is a potential cause of having your iLife getting FUBAR when converting to iClould from MobileMe.

The problem was, in a nutshell, that my mail, photo stream, calendar, and contacts were all hooked into my MobileMe account, and my iCloud account was hooked in to the AppleID that I use for the iTunes, and other Apple Stores.

It took a few hours of experimentation, but I finally managed to get the whole thing sorted out.

At the end of the ordeal, and in an effort to help bail out other poor schmucks, like myself, I wrote a long and comprehensive blog entry detailing just how to do it. (I’m here to help …) But after finishing the lengthy tome, the result was confusing as hell, and only likely to help someone who had the exact same mashup of AppleIDs and MobileMe, and who had gone through the MobileMe Migration the same way I had. So I trashed it, and am just going to provide a couple of suggestions for how to transition, along with some links to docs that were useful in working everything out.

1) Create your iCloud account using the AppleID that you use for iTunes/App Store and Apple Store.

This is kind of key, and will make your life easier.

2) If you have a MobileMe account that is under a different AppleID, or has a different email address associated with it, migrate it to iCloud, and use it as a secondary iCloud account.

What?

You can’t easily merge the two together, and MobileMe will be going away at some point, but you can add your secondary iCloud account to your Mail and Calendar apps and have everything in one place while you migrate your mail usage to your new iCloud .me email address.

What Apple Needs to Do …

Most of this mess could be a lot less messy if Apple were to take a more flexible approach with AppleIDs … Allow users to delete, or recycle them, merge them, and provide more flexibility about changing the name and underlying email account associated with an AppleID.

If you’re just starting down the iLife, with your first iPhone, iPad, or Mac, try to get it right from the beginning and use one AppleID for everything. It will save you headaches, and Saturday nights spent in an over-caffeinated-frenzy trying to figure out why your Photostream isn’t streaming and your email not going where you want it to …

Helpful Links

iCloud 101: Apple IDs and your iOS Device (GigaOm)

Apple IDs and iCloud (Apple Support Doc)

Apple ID FAQ (Apple Support Doc)

iCloud Support and Community (Apple)

24 Hours of LeMons: What the hell is it?

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Doug Luberts

For about as long as I’ve been having my bikes worked on over at Tyler Carson’s Hayasa Motorbikes, I’ve been hearing about LeMons racing (say Lemons, the capital “M” is just there for effect), or more properly, the 24 Hours of LeMons. Tyler, Anton, and a bunch of the other regulars at the shop have been into the LeMons thing at one point or another. In fact, Anton, has been very involved with the sport, and races for a number of teams.

So what in the Wide, Wide World of Sports is the 24 Hours of LeMons? (Hint: Click on the link and go to the website, slacker. Do I have to do it all for you?)

LeMons racing has been described as Halloween meets Gasoline, but coming from Planet Nerd, I like to think to think of LeMons racing as the Comicon of auto racing, where the cars do most (although not all) of the Cosplay.

The idea is this: You, buy a heap of a car, and get it ready to race without spending more than $500 , and create some kind of theme for the car … Like a Molvo (Half Miata, half Volvo wagon), an “Angry Birds” car or, this fine specimen, a car modeled after the Pokemon character, Pikachu.

Anton Lovett driving the Pikachu for Team Good Luck Everbody Else Racing at Infineon Raceway on October 22, 2011

That’s about it … Well, except for the part about finding a handful of your soon-to-be-very-best-friends for your driving team, and having a couple of mechanics, welders, and electronics tech folks comes in really handy. Then you go race, well, until you breakdown, and then you fix your heap, er, car, and go racing again.

This past weekend, after many years and a few false starts, I finally got my first whiff of LeMons racing at an event called “The Skankaway Anti-Toe-Fungal 500″, held at Sears Point/Infineon Raceway.

It…was…a…BLAST! (And not just in the oops, look, that car’s engine just exploded sense, although there was some of that going on as well.)

There are lots of interesting folks running around the race including cosplayers, whacky race judges who dole out bad driving punishments designed to educate, inform, and enlighten…like taping you to the hood of your car, placing your team in a chain gang (with real plastic chains) and parading them around the pit area while playing “Jailhouse Rock” on a car radio, doing repetitious writing assignments on the hood of your car, and other fun (to watch) stuff. There’s a whole show going on off of the track.

It’s pretty serious business that it is all geared towards the fun side, and the organizers (and many of the team members that I spoke with) prefer keeping the emphasis on the crazy circus sideshow, and less on the competitive racing aspects. There is also very strong sense of community evident here…Everyone knows everyone else, and folks seem willing to lend each other a helping-hand or some friendly advice when needed.

Oh, and don’t worry too much about the judges…They can be bribed, and bribery of judges is an encouraged form of informal business arrangement at LeMons races. It’s all part of the carnival fun, and I understand most of the food an other goodies collected by the judges as their “bribes” get kicked back to the folks out working the track all day.

Drivers can also buy their way out of penalties by writing a check to whatever the 501(c)3 charity that the organizers have selected for the event.

If only government worked this way …

Then there are the prizes…The winning team gets $1,500, usually in nickels. There are also a number of category awards, and special themed participation prizes at these regional events. For the Infineon race, there was a Bay Area, Jerry Garcia-themed award, the full title of which I can’t remember but it evokes the memory of an unfortunate incident in the late rock star’s past involving a cop, some smoking paraphernalia, and a BMW.

Anyway, I think I’m going to be writing, photographing, and doing videos (there’s one currently in the works) about this sport in the future … And who knows, maybe even driving on one of the teams.

Yeah, I think I’ve got bit by the bug pretty hard on this one.

Special Thanks to Nick Pon from 24 Hours of LeMons for allowing me to photo and video my way through the weekend, Anton Lovett for being the facilitator of my bad (and usually fun) moto-related habits, and “Judge Phil” Greden for … Well, it’s a long story, let’s just say I didn’t get taped to the hood of a car or anything.

Enjoy the photos.

El Bandito – or – This is My Bike

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Doug Luberts

This my bike. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

My bike is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.

My bike, without me, is useless. Without my bike, I am wheel-less. I must ride my bike true.

I must ride straighter than my enemy, the cage driver, who is trying to kill me. I must pass him before he t-bones me.

I will…

Okay, enough already. You get the idea (and my apologies to the U.S. Marine Corps.)

After my last post a few folks have asked me what kind of a bike I ride…Well, truth be told, someone I know asked me what kind of a Harley I ride.

Harley?

Look, I’m fat, bald, and like to watch “Sons of Anarchy” on a regular basis, but stereotype much?

I love collecting Harley T-Shirts from dealerships visited in my travels, but the bike a person rides is usually a reflection of their personal style and riding preferences, and Harleys are just a wee bit too laid-back the kind of daily urban commuting runs, and canyon craving I do. I ride a 2007 Suzuki GSF1250s Bandit, and this is my bike.

My ride.

The Bike

The Bandit is a bike with a long, and kind of interesting, history. Suzuki started out in the late ’90s with the idea of building a no-frills bike with the basics of a sport touring bike. It was built with mostly off-the-shelf parts, and available with either a half-fairing, as seen above, or in a “naked” model that developed a rep for being a “hooligan bike” in Europe.

Over the years the bike evolved, and in 2007 was given a brand-spanking-new, 1248cc, water-cooled, engine, and made available with an ABS option. The non-ABS version (what I’m riding), was available for an MSRP of $8,299, which was ridiculously reasonable compared to other bikes in the Sport Touring class such as the Honda ST1300 or Kawasaki Concours.

In 2009 I was looking to trade in my ’93 Suzuki Intruder 800, a nearly indestructible cruiser with chopper styling (it was a great, reliable, ride, but uncomfortable and ugly as hell), when I came across a new, left-over, 2007 Bandit at a local dealership that was being offered at an even MORE ridiculous price.

I like the Bandit because of its inline-four, 16-valve, engine, which has a reputation for delivering a massive amount of torque (a must for any San Francisco commuter bike), in a highly reliable, low-maintenance, package.

For some reason the 2007 Bandits did not sell all that well in the U.S., possibly because of its in-between the lines positioning between a true sport bike and an upright standard, and just never got the same kind of love as the GSXRs and Hayabusas. The bikes have done extremely well in Europe, where there is a fairly decent aftermarket for turning the Bandit into a full-on street fighter, but Suzuki has re-tooled the 2011 Bandits into fully-faired bike aimed at the Sports Touring market. In doing so they’ve added ABS as standard equipment, and upped the price to a not-nearly-as-amazing-but-still-cheaper-than-a-Beemer-or-Honda, $11,599 M.S.R.P.

The U.S. buying public’s fickleness is their loss, and the potential gain for anyone who wanted to get a great deal on one of these bikes.

I’d love to say it was all rainbows and fluffy bunnies from there on (but I wouldn’t say that, ’cause I’m a guy, and we don’t say stuff like that), but it became clear on the ride home that the Bandit, while having the basics of a great bike, needed some serious sorting out before it would live up to the promise. That’s the trade-off in buying a Bandit vs. one of the higher-end Sport Touring bikes; There is less initial sticker shock, but you wind up having to put some of those saved dollars back in to the bike to bring out its potential.

Stock 2007 Bandit. Notice the hideous exhaust can.

The biggest problems?

In order to meet Euro3 emissions standards the stock fuel injection map is so wonky that the bike is subject to serious lurching and stuttering in the lower power bands…Trying to maintain a steady pace in city traffic at 25mph is more or less like riding a horse that isn’t saddle broken.
The front suspension, which offers only preload adjustment, and uses extremely light, multi-rate, fork springs, is too light for most U.S. riders (especially us plus-sized models), and is subject to major front-end dive when braking.
The stock seat is pure Hell on Earth and, even after a 1600 mile break-in period, one of the biggest ergo/rideability issues with the bike (IMNSHO.)

Also worth mentioning, while not a huge issue, the catalysed stock muffler on the Bandit is a huge, ugly, chrome beast that adds an extra 20lbs of mass, and rusts almost instantaneously upon purchase.

None of these issues, with the exception of the fuel mapping, are absolute show-stoppers, and while the bike and rider is initially the worse off for the trouble, everything is fixable in the fullness of time…and cash. It’s also important to remember that this is a price-point bike, and that skimping on these things is what allowed Suzuki to keep the M.S.R.P. down on the bike in the first place.

The Upgrades

While admittedly being a bit of a gearhead (okay, a complete and total gearhead in every aspect of life), I think you need to put your money into what will make your bike ride safely, and comfortably, so that’s the general order of priority for the upgrades made to the Bandit over the years.

Holeshot/Cogent Fork Springs and Race Tech Gold Valve Kit

Dale Walker, over at Holeshot, has developed a pretty large line of aftermarket parts and accessories for the Bandit, as well as other bikes. He worked with Cogent Dynamics on developing fork springs and rear shocks for the Bandit.

The springs are available in standard as well as heavy weight, and combined with a Gold Valve kit from Race Tech, which functions as a cartridge fork emulator, provide a nice, plush, response to the front-end of the motorcycle, and eliminate the nasty diving characteristics of the stock springs when you’ve got to get on the brakes hard.

While we’re talking suspension, the stock rear shock on the Bandit isn’t anything to write home about either, but it can be finessed enough to work well. At some point it will get replaced by a Hagon unishock (half the price of an Ohlins with about 85% of Ohlins’ quality), but it isn’t something that needs to happen in the first 15-20K miles.

DynoJet Power Commander and Leo Vince Evo Muffler

After building a safer front end, the problem of the throttle response/engine lurching has to be dealt with…Especially if you are a daily commuter, like me, who sometimes winds up having to deal with miles of backed-up and slow traffic where you are in the 18-25mph zone (yes, this is California, and lanesplitting is a helpful option, but some times you just have to sit in traffic and deal.)

The Power Commander is a nifty little computer gizmo that sits between the ECU (Engine Control Unit) and the fuel system, arbitrating between what the ECU thinks it wants the EFI system to do, and what the EFI really needs to do. You download a custom map for your bike/exhaust configuration, and the Power Commander takes care of the rest.

If you’re into a racing mindset, the thing to do is to get the bike run on a dyno and have a custom map generated for your bike. I’m not really into trying to squeeze every pony out of my bike …In fact, while I know that between the Power Commander and the Vince slip-on, the Bandit is capable of pulling something like 115hp and hitting upwards of 120mph, I wouldn’t know exactly what the numbers are, and don’t have any intentions of finding out first hand.

Using a stock map, the bike is fast enough, and torque-y enough, to negotiate the madness of California Freeways, and haul-ass up and down the steep hills of San Francisco during my daily commutes. That’s plenty for me.

Again, safety and comfort are the key words.

I could have left the stock can on the bike, but opted for the Vince EVO slip-on for ergo/aesthetic reasons; the stock can is coyote ugly and ways a friggin’ ton. The Vince slip on is quiet (EPA approved), small, light, and, yes, I paid about a hundred bucks extra to get the carbon fiber model ’cause it’s black and looks bad-ass. (So there. :p)

Corbin Gunfighter and Lady Seat

The last of the essentials was actually something I really waited too long on.

This past summer I finally got rid of the stock Bandit torture-seat-from-hell, and replaced it with a Corbin model. After about a 1500 mile break-in period, this single purchase has paid some of the biggest dividends on any investment put into the bike.

As a motorcyclist you can, and do, put up with a lot of adversity on a daily basis, from idiot Bay Area drivers who think that turn signals are optional equipment, to a hundred other obstacles in your way, but it’s a lot easier to take the slings and arrows of every day motorcycling in stride if your ass is happy. (And you can quote me on that.)

Miscellaneous

There is a lot of other little stuff on the bike … Mirror extenders, bar risers, and a Givi top box to carry tools, emergency supplies, rain gear, and a growing list of riding essentials (so much, in fact, I’m going to have to add side bags just to be able to pick up a few groceries on the way home.) A GPS would also be nice, but then I’ll have to add a bus box, some wiring, and, hey, that Bluetooth system for my iPhone/iPod would also come in handy, and … Yeah. Total gearhead.

But, after all, this is my bike. There are many like it, but this one is mine …

Anton working some electrical magic on the Bandit over at Hayasa. I'll do a lot of small things on the bike, but soldering and electrical work is a better mechanic's game. Anton is a master.

Props to the Folks who Keep Me Running …

When I first started riding, almost 10 years ago now, I knew absolutely nothing about motors, cars, or anything mechanical. While I keep learning, and do more fiddling about with a wrench and a voltmeter than I used to, all of the heavy lifting for customizing the Bandit has come with a lot of help from some friends.

Tyler Carson and Anton Lovett, over at Hayasa Motorbikes in East Oakland, have been working on my bikes for about 5 years now, and have done all of the custom suspension and electrical work on the Bandit. They’re great mechanics, knowledgeable, honest, and have created a shop that’s every bit as great an environment to hang out around as it is to have your bike worked on at. More about Hayasa in a future blog …

Hayasa Motorbikes, East Oakland.

The Royal Enfield Bullet

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Doug Luberts

My geekyness knows no bounds.

Really.

Comic books, film, TV, sci-fi, theater, the web, gadgets, its all in there. But there is no bigger place in my geeky heart (outside of the one reserved for Dr. Who, Star Trek, and the collected works of Felicia Day) than the spot set aside for the geekiest of obsessions … Motorcycles.

Now some might say that Motorcycles are not a true object of geekery, that motorcycling is a rough-and-tumble world of big iron, hard chrome, and lots of leather (not to mention ink), but I would disagree.

Motorcycling is a realm of geekery as vast as The Vortex, and as endless as time itself. No matter whether the biker in question is a hardened Harley rider with a 3-piece patch and a rap sheet longer than the 4th Doctor’s scarf, or a devotee of vintage British bikes with a penchant for Bellstaff Trialmaster jackets and hand-rolled cigarettes; Motorcycling is all about the boys (and girls) and their toys.

Toys that go fast.

My own interests fall more towards the vintage British side … Especially anything Triumph or Norton (with a nod to BSA as being the coolest thing to come out of an armaments factory not designed to explode … Well, at least not intentionally. Old British bikes due tend to behave about as reliably as a vintage TARDIS with a blown chameleon circuit.)

Getting a hold of one of those old bikes, like a 1960s/’70s Triumph Bonnie, and restoring it, is something I want to do further down the road, but that ambition has been held back by the need to have a good, reliable, daily commuter that doesn’t require constant attention and maintenance, as these older bikes do.

But there is a whole market that has been opening up in the past few years for new “modern classic” lines of bikes that have the look and styling of vintage bikes, but all modern technology under the hood. These bikes, such as the newly-reborn Triumph Bonneville line, offer the best of both worlds.

Another bike that is taking off in popularity is the new line of Royal Enfield Bullets.

Royal Enfield is a venerable name in motorcycling with roots going back to Edwardian England, and the Bullet is a bike with a design history dating back to the 1930s.

2011 Royal Enfield Bullet C5 Miltary. Note the evap cannister on the front of the frame and the muffler with 3-stage cat converter for California Emissions compliance

Currently produced in India, Royal Enfields have one of the longest production history of any bike around, and were in constant manufacture up until a few years ago, when the company changed hands. (For a complete history of the Royal Enfield Company, and Enfield India, read Mick Walker’s execllent book, Royal Enfield: The Complete Story, available through Amazon.)

Although available abroad, and in certain U.S. States, for the past couple of years, we’ve only seen the new Enfield Bullets in California starting in 2011, after a complete engine redesign including electronic fuel injection, and a muffler with a 3-stage catalytic converter, enabled the bike to meet State emission standards.

The result is a thoroughly vintage-looking British single-cylinder motorcycle, with an electronic brain and a host of cleverly-hidden modern conveniences that make this puppy a ton of fun to ride.

It’s important to note that these bikes aren’t powerhouses…The Bullets is rated at 27 ponies, stock, but this isn’t about speed, it’s about stepping out in style …

Jay Leno did a walk-though of the various Bullet models for his “Jay Leno’s Garage” web series, which I’ve included on this page. You can also see the bikes at the Royal Enfield USA page, which also includes user forums, and a store with all kinds of aftermarket goodies that you can pick up to trick out your own Bullet.

Best of all, a new, top-of-the-line, Bullet C5 Classic will set you back a little over $7k out-the-door, so it’s in that range of being affordable for a second bike that isn’t your daily driver or, as Leno points out, a very cool alternative to a scooter, for tooling around town.

Munroe Motors is the local dealer in San Francisco, and I hear that they’ve got a Bullet reserved for test drives.

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