I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry about Japan Tobacco’s “smoking manners” ads, which the company has deployed in an attempt to avoid anti-smoking legislation. As The Wall Street Journal said earlier this week:

Japan Tobacco is hoping to keep smoking acceptable in as many places as possible. The ads, which started on a limited scale in 2004, have recently rolled out on a wider basis, including new television spots promoting portable ashtrays. The ads aim to improve smokers’ manners so that smokers and nonsmokers can coexist harmoniously, company officials say.

The campaign includes such only-in-Japan slogans as “I was passing through the crowd carrying a flame. But that’s best left to the Olympic torch runner.” Then there’s the example above, which compares the lingering aroma of tobacco to another unpleasant scent. One can always hope that, if smokers see enough of these ads and actually take them seriously, they may just be tempted to quit, rather than just adhere to JT’s politeness code. After all, if most smokers really “hate other people’s smoke,” as one ad says, the only polite thing to do is to give up the habit.

A virtual family feud across the oceans of cyberspace

If you’ve been following the comments on this blog, you may have noticed some off-topic remarks in response to my post on global warming. The comments, from a young lady named Jenny Perton, had to do with the fact that she and I, though (presumably) unrelated, happen to have the same last name — and I beat her to this domain by about a dozen years. Her comments reminded me of a similar exchange I had back in 1995, with Australian politician Victor Perton. He tracked me down, just as Jenny did, through the search engines  — and asked me, quite bluntly, “Who are you, and how did you come to be named ‘Perton’?” A year later, I wrote about it for Media Central*:

I first learned about Cousin Victor about a year ago. At the time, I was the publisher of Asia, Inc. Online, a Web-based business magazine. I was also, I soon discovered, indexed on Webcrawler and Lycos. And that was how Cousin Victor found me.

One day, an e-mail appeared in my box, asking the bold question, “Who are you, and how did you come to be named ‘Perton’?” The question struck me as rather odd and forward – until I saw the .sig. The e-mail was from Victor Perton MP, Liberal Member for Doncaster in the Legislative Assembly of the State Parliament of Victoria in Australia. As it turned out, I wasn’t the first Perton on the Web. Cousin Victor had staked out his claim, and was eager to find out more about the interloper encroaching on his hegemony in the search engines.

Of course, the honorable MP is not my cousin, nor, as far as I know, any other kind of relative. But that’s how I began to think of him. After all, Perton isn’t a very common name, and both Victor and I had similar backgrounds: Of Eastern European extraction, our forbears had fled their native lands in search of freedom and prosperity, and had truncated lengthier names, coming up with what they believed was a suitable Anglo-Saxon alternative. Victor chose a career in politics; I chose journalism. Our paths crossed on the Web.

Having discovered my antipodean alter ego, I instantly became fiercely competitive. Not, mind you, in any public sense. Victor’s a liberal humanist, and I admire his stance on most political issues. If I were a Victorian, I’d vote for him. No, I started to compete in the only way I could: for search engine space.

When I first started, he was way out front. A Lycos search for “Perton” would easily come up with three times as many hits for Victor as it would for me. A search on Alta Vista, when it joined the fray, brought up a similar disparity in pages. Anyone searching for me by surname alone would be buried in a pile of Victor’s treatises on civil rights in Australia – unquestionably fascinating and important reading, but of little use to someone looking for me!

As prolific as I was, however, Victor maintained his lead. Even today, with this column appearing weekly, and with other items bearing my name scattered across the Net, an Alta Vista search for “Marc Perton” yields 49 hits to Victor’s 97. Reluctantly, I’ve thrown in the towel.

Except for one thing. A few months ago, I registered the domain “perton.com.” As far as the powers that be at InterNIC are concerned, I own the Perton name. Of course, Victor can register “perton.com.au,” or, being a Member of Parliament, “perton.gov.au,” but, somehow, that doesn’t seem quite as official as a genuine, InterNIC-certified, commercially minded “com” domain.

I am, however, not without mercy. I’ll gladly give Victor a mailbox at “perton.com,” or even – if “perton.com” ever gets its own server – host a mirror of his Web site. We Pertons, after all, have to stick together.

Go to Victor’s Website.

(Note: Thanks to my time at Engadget, I’ve finally beaten Victor. According to Googlefight, I’ve got over 100,000 links, to his 49,000. Sorry, cuz.)

This entry originally appeared on Media Central on April 18, 1996.
* At the time, that site was owned by Cowles Business Media, which was later acquired by Primedia. A bit after that, it was bought by Steve Brill, and renamed Inside.com. It is now, alas, owned by domain squatters.

There used to be a time when an exceptionally warm winter would be treated as a gift from the weather gods; a time to throw aside heavy coats and engage in the joys of spring at a time of year more usually associated with shoveling driveways and huddling under comforters. Yet, this year, as the temperature has crept into the 70s here in the northeast, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly nervous with each passing day. Sure, it’s great to go out wearing nothing heavier than a fleece vest. And it’s great not to have to scrape ice off of the windshield in the morning. But these feel almost like guilty pleasures because it’s simply not supposed to be this warm in the winter. And although this year’s mild season may well be just a natural quirk of nature, I can’t help but think that this is a taste of what global warming is doing to our world. And I’m not alone. Today’s New York Times has an article about the Westchester Global Warming Task Force, which includes the observation that “even if you are no fan of snow and ice, this elongated break from winter weather is giving most of us an uneasy feeling. You cannot quite enjoy it because you know something is up.” Of course, the snowbound in Colorado and citrus farmers in California might disagree with that assessment. But the effects of global warming aren’t distributed evenly. And like the woman in the Twilight Zone who awoke from a nightmare of the Earth moving closer to the sun, only to discover that the opposite was occurring, we northeasterners may well wake up a few years from now to discover that melting polar ice caps have lowered the temperature of the Atlantic, and the warm winters of today will be a distant, sad memory. This nightmare has only just begun; let’s hope we all wake up before it’s over.

If you’ve been receiving email from an address that appears to be from this domain, I apologize. Please be assured that it did not come from me or anyone else at perton.com. As they are wont to do, spammers have ”borrowed” this domain name and are spoofing it to try to cover their tracks. I’m in touch with my hosting service, and we’re trying to resolve this. If you’re received one of these messages and want to help, go ahead and contact your ISP, and the ISP of the spammers. Be sure to include the original header, so they can try to track them down. But, please, don’t try to get this domain black-listed. I use it for my personal email, and once the spammers move on to the next one (pertom.com? qerton.com?), I’d like to still be able to do so.

Last year, I had the privilege to blog CES live for Engadget (see if you can find me in the pic at the right). This year, my experience is somewhat vicarious. I am, of course, checking Engadget regularly, and will be sure to practice my F5 stroke for the Gates keynote tonight. But there’s a new player on the Vegas strip this year, and I’m helping it from afar; we officially launched the Consumer Reports Electronics Blog this weekend. CREB isn’t intended to compete with Engadget and other tech blogs; it would be pointless to try. However, we believe there is a mainstream audience for electronics news that can benefit from the expertise of CR’s product testers and editors. We’re not going to be updating 40 times a day, we’re not going to live-blog keynotes and we’re not going to do unboxings (unfortunately). What we are going to do is provide early insights from the people at CR who do the hands-on testing and reporting, much as we’ve been doing in our Cars Blog for close to a year. For everything else, we’ll be checking Engadget. And wearing out that F5.

Here’s one more reason print has a problem: This week, The New York Times Magazine published its annual issue about notable celebrities who’ve died over the past year. And, although the issue was dated December 31, 2006, there was nothing inside about James Brown, Gerald Ford or Saddam Hussein, all of whom died after the magazine went to press. Of course, print publications will always be at the mercy of press deadlines, and the Magazine is one of the first sections of The Times to close. The real missed opportunity is online. The version of the magazine that appears online is identical to the print edition. There’s absolutely no reason this version couldn’t include Brown, Ford or even Saddam, assuming the editors felt they fit the issue’s “idiosyncratic” selection criteria. No reason except for the worst possible one: the idea the online and print editions need to be consistent and identical. Which makes absolutely no sense at all. Ten years—or even ten weeks—from now, when someone is prowling the archives of nyt.com, all they’ll see is a magazine that was out of date before it was even posted online, and they’ll wonder how The Times, with all of its resources, could somehow neglect to cover three of the most significant deaths of the year.

Effective today (or, rather, with my next post and a DNS update), I’m switching hosts. If you’ve been accessing this blog via perton.com, it should be transparent; if you’ve been using perton.net, you should update your bookmarks and feed links to point to the perton.com domain (that’s if you’re one of the four people who’ve bookmarked this site or read my feeds). Pre-2007 archives will stay at perton.net for the time being, until I can figure out why phpMyAdmin is choking every time I try to import the database from this site. See you on the other side!