Orphan Vacuum

Vacuum073108

Another in an occasional series on the orphan vacuums of Berkeley. In these parts, this seems to be the most often abandoned home appliance. Every so often you encounter a microwave oven or iron left out on the street, and unwanted computer monitors are regular curbside finds, too. But vacuums keep turning up. This one graced the streetside lawn strip along Monterey Avenue not too long ago.

As with some previous finds, this specimen hails from the Hoover clan of fine vacuums. Hoover, hailing from the days when the United States was, no doubt, a world center of vacuum cleaner manufacturing. Cogitating on the picture, I wondered whether anyone keeps statistics on cast-off appliances–how many household machines and helpers large and small wind up in landfills every year? I looked briefly and found nothing. My mind then turned to vacuum cleaner production. Someone must keep track of vacuum cleaner manufacturing here and abroad.

Oh, do they.

“Household Vacuum Cleaner Manufacturing” has its own category number in the U.S. Census Bureau’s North American Industry Classification System (it’s 335212, if you want a truly arcane fact to trot out over cocktails). The category includes manufacturers of regular old electric vacuum cleaners (canister, upright, or handheld) as well as central vacuuming systems, floor scrubbing and shampooing machines, floor waxers and polishers, and electric sweepers. Unfortunately, the most current public Census numbers on U.S. vacuum cleaner manufacturing are from 2002. Back then, there were 10,400 workers engaged in the industry, and total vacuum cleaner shipments that year were $2.6 billion. (Be patient–I’m going somewhere with this.) The industry was essentially flat from the previous year for which a snapshot is given, 1997.

It won’t surprise you too much to find out that vacuum cleaners are also made outside the United States. The U.N. actually maintains an online database of worldwide vacuum cleaner manufacturing for the years 1995-2005, featuring such powerhouse producers as Belarus (which put out 6,600 units in 1995 and just 2,200 in 2005), Bulgaria (which apparently hasn’t produced a vacuum cleaner since 2000), and Chile (production in 1995: 257,000; production in 2005: 0). Iran made 257.000 vacuums in 1997 and just 200 in ’04 (wouldn’t you like to see the inside of that factory?).

So who makes all the vacuums? In no particular order, Japan, Korea, Germany, Italy and France make millions of machines a year. Having mostly apples and oranges statistics, it’s hard to rank those against the United States, though the value of U.S. vacuum shipments appears to be far higher than those of any country in that group; 10 times as much as Italy’s, for instance, and five times as much as Germany’s. Based on how many vacuums those countries, shipped, one might guess that the U.S. was producing 30-35 million vacuums in 2002. Just a guess.

One country I haven’t mentioned is the one that looms largest in our modern industrial world: China. According to the U.N. numbers, China produced 10 million vacuums in 2000; that looks to be far behind where the United States was. In 2004, the number was 50 million, almost certainly far ahead of the U.S., at least in unit volume. So the takeaway for this edition of the Vacuum Chronicles is that while those discards on the street today have a pretty good chance of having been made in the U.S.A., the next generation or orphan vacuums will likely have begun life far, far away.

Technorati Tags: ,

Tour de France: The Ratings

Media Life Magazine: “One nasty spill for the Tour de France.” The article’s gist: The “cume” — the number of people who watched at least once, was up. But average viewership for the broadcasts was down as much as 20 percent. The reasons: Number One–no Yank stars (sorry, Christian Vande Velde). Number Two–le dopage. Quote from the article:

“Versus says that a larger number of people than last year tuned into at least some portion of Tour coverage, but average viewership took a hit, meaning many of them did not return after sampling.

“Doping deserves some of the blame.

“ ‘Obviously it’s the elephant in the room,’ says Marc Fein, Versus executive vice president of programming, production and business operations at Versus. ‘Some people might be turned off a bit by the bad things that have happened, the doping in the sport.’ ”

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Sunday

You know how it is: late to rise, to meet friends and to tackle the day’s chores, late to eat and late to bed.

Late, and still not done with whatever it was we thought we had to get done.

To bed anyway, and tomorrow, we’ll see.

TdF 2008: Finishing Kick

The Tour’s over. One or two things left to say about it. But for tonight, just one stunning image from the today’s stage. The finish, as all true fans know, is on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The riders do eight laps of the famous avenue and its environs. For this stage and this stage only, it was possible for the organizers to set aside a traffic lane parallel to the finishing straight. As the sprinters massed at the front for the rush to the line, they had a motorcycle and cameraman driving alongside. That gave the perfect view to see the closing sprint of this year’s race: Gert Steegmans, a Belgian, launched himself from a teammate’s lead-out with maybe 150 meters to go. The side-on view, which would have been fantastic to capture the acceleration of Team Columbia’s Mark Cavendish during earlier stages, captured the explosive acceleration that allowed Steegmans to build a two- or three-length lead–enough to hold off his late-closing rivals.

Nice moment. And now the Tour is over. The usual poignancy is dimmed a little for me by the expectation that we’ll hear in the next week or so that some more of the riders have tested positive for some sort of doping. Here’s hoping that doesn’t happen.

Technorati Tags:

Evans: Australian for A__hole

We mentioned earlier we’re not huge fans of Cadel Evans, though we think less of ourselves for that. He’s gritty and tough as nails–a description that fits any rider in the Tour, though he’s faster than most of them. He’s also nastier than most of them if you judge by what you can see in public. Early in the Tour, Evans swatted a motorcycle-mounted gendarme whom he thought was riding carelessly. It was a great moment–on live TV and everything. As The New York Times notes in a story the rider’s antics of the past few stages, “Evans might be the only living person not in custody to have punched a Gendarme.”

Other choice Evans moments: Screaming at and batting at reporters who brushed against his injured left shoulder after he gained the yellow jersey in the Pyrenees. Head-butting a camera that got in his way after he lost the jersey in the Alps. And threatening, “I’ll cut your head off!” to someone who nearly stepped on his dog after one race.

Such behavior draws all sorts of head shaking and clucking of tongues. It is ugly, of course. But face it, what’s more delightful than watching some luminary losing it in public. We can only hope someone provokes Evans again on Saturday and gets him off his game enough that he finishes second or third overall on Sunday. That way he can do a reprise of his Paris Podium Pout of last year.

Below: The Worst of Evans, by way of YouTube.

Above: Evans after winning the yellow jersey. What a sweetheart.

Above: Evans shows helmeted head-butt technique. Cadel, would you mind winning a stage for my grandson Jimmy, who’s laid up with a touch of brain cancer?

Above: “Don’t stand on my dog, or I cut your head off.” Odds-on front-runner for The International Bicycle-Riding Pet Advocate of the Year!

Technorati Tags: ,

What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Probable Cause?

Highlighting the lovely, due-process-free side of the Doping Prohibition Era: “Schleck unruffled after dad’s customs search.” The story: Johnny Schleck, father of CSC Tour de France stars Frank and Andy Schleck, was waylaid by French customs police while driving along the stage route Thursday. The cops spent at least a half-four searching his car, apparently looking for the magic juice that makes his sons ride so fast. They didn’t find anything, and sent Dad Schleck on his way. At the end of the stage, Andy, the younger son, opined (at least for public consumption) that it was no big deal that pop was pulled over and had his vehicle turned inside out by the gendarmes.

Well, Andy, might be right if he and Frank were notorious dope merchants and his father was returning from a trip to, say, Tijuana. It wouldn’t seem extraordinary for narcs or border agents to stop him and give him the once over, though even in the case of a family of crack dealers some legal niceties would be observed (in a prosecution, the cops would at some point have to show they had some cause for stopping their suspect; the issue of stopping someone just because a cop thinks they’re up to no good–well, that’s the issue at the heart of profiling). But we’re not talking about an arm of the Medellin cartel now. We’re talking about a bike race. And when it comes to doping enforcement, apparently anything goes.

At least that’s how it looks: Not even the little squib offered by L’Équipe, the unofficial news organ of cycling’s dope narcs, offers anything (English “translation“) about why Papa Schleck was pulled over, and there’s no hint in any of the coverage I’ve found that the police have had to explain their behavior.

Technorati Tags: ,

My Walk to Work

Most days, I ride BART from Berkeley to the station at 16th and Mission streets in San Francisco. 16th and Mission is a tough corner in a tough neighborhood. When I was an editorial writer for the San Francisco Examiner in the early ’90s, I wrote a piece about an Irish immigrant who was beaten to death with a baseball bat at an ATM near the corner. That kind of mayhem is rare, I think, but a lower-level kind of chaos, characterized by drug dealing, purse snatching, prostitution, a large population of beggars hanging out, transient hotels, and hairy-looking bars and greasy spoons, is more typical. I’ve been accosted a couple of times in the past six months by women working the street. I spotted one trying to intercept my path one Friday night. She was in high heels, and I sped up to get past her. “Don’t walk so fast!” she shouted. “I’m not going to hurt you!”

For all that, the walk from BART to KQED is still pretty interesting and rarely induces uneasiness for the purposeful walker. In the daylight hours, the biggest hazard is red-light runners and stop-sign jumpers on the major thoroughfares I need to cross–16th, South Van Ness, Folsom, Harrison and Bryant. The walk is about two-thirds of a mile, and I use a route that avoids a vicious block of transient hotels and some very hard-looking dealer types. I wind up on 17th Street. To the west, it rises picturesquely to the Castro and Mount Sutro. Eastward–my direction going to work–it winds up in a knot of streets on the edge of the Mission before crossing a ridge and disappearing into the neighborhood at the northern foot of Potrero Hill. This part of town used to be warehouses and light industry, and today it’s a mix of real and pretend artist lofts, galleries, small theaters, and a few vestiges of the old workshops. Harrison Street, one of the main routes west and south out of downtown, seems to have become what passes for a prominent cycling thoroughfare. I see a few hipster-homesteaders (isn’t it tragic to go by appearances?) riding by every time I’m on the street.

Here are the pictures, to be added to later:

Technorati Tags:

More People Are Watching the Tour, and Fewer, Too

By way of Frank Steele’s Tour de France blog, an item from The Oregonian: “Tour de France ratings down so far on Versus.” The article reports the following Nielsen numbers for this year’s Tour broadcasts:

Live broadcasts (starting at oh-dark-hundred on the West Coast): 230,000 average viewership. 2007 average: 343,000.

Average viewership per broadcast (both live and taped): 143,000 (for 35 broadcast between July 5 and 10). Last year’s average: 171,000 (135 telecasts including both pre- and post-Tour shows; I’ve found some stats (in an article on Tour advertising, here) that suggest that this number was flat from 2006, the Landis year, but down from 315,000 in 2005, the year of Armstrong VII).

That seems clear enough, right? Viewership is down, and thus the item’s headline.

Well, then, check this out: On July 17, three days after The Oregonian was peddling its apples, MediaPost’s Media Daily News offered these oranges under the headline “Tour de France Cycles Ratings for Versus”: “The channel has seen a 16% gain in its cume number of viewers–those who have seen some part of the race over the first 10 days. Versus says that number is 20.8 million versus 17.9 million of a year ago.”

OK, even though I’ve worked in broadcast media, I’m not fluent in Nielsen. I’m not sure how that cume number is derived–whether it represents distinct individuals (as it allegedly does in radio) or whether one person who tunes in to three Tour shows a day for 10 days counts as 30 viewers. I suspect it’s the latter, because if it’s 20.8 million individual American TV viewers, I wouldn’t get so many blank stares when I mention the Tour to non-cyclists. Moving on:

The Media Daily News report also notes the following: that the average viewership of the Versus live a.m. broadcasts is 270,359 this year, which Versus acknowledges is down 13 percent from 2007. At the same time, Versus says the Nielsen rating for the live broadcast–the percentage of the 112 million TV homes in the United States tuned in during the show–is flat from last year at 0.3. Those numbers don’t square with The Oregonian report, which is apparently based on a different span of broadcast days, but never mind. Versus says most of its other Tour broadcasts throughout the day are showing gains.

And the MDN story also gets down to business: Versus says that in the gold-mine demographic, 18 to 34 year old males, the Tour broadcasts are way up over last year: 91 percent higher for the morning show, 108 percent for one of the afternoon (EDT) rebroadcasts, 99 percent for the late-night rebroadcast.

There’s a lot of spin here, all for the benefit of advertisers. Versus is busy trying to show how fewer viewers are really more.

I want to do some historical comparisons with pre-2007 Tours, both on Versus/OLN and the broadcast networks who have offered a Tour summary show on weekends since the ’80s. But due to the late hour and the apples and oranges problems I have with the stats, I’ll put off that project till later.

Technorati Tags: ,

Stage 16: Your Phil Liggett Quote of the Day

Phil’s World: Commenting on some Australian fans waving an inflated marsupial: “There’s the Aussie kangaroo on the far right there, that must be the encampment. Mind you, it looks a bit like Ayers Rock out here just now … or Ulla-ma-roo, as they call it these days.” That would be Uluru, Phil.

Sherwen’s Turn: Paul on Alejandro Valverde descending: Valverde’s going down this like a pinball. He’s absolutely on the edge of his seat trying to get back in contact with the yellow jersey group.”

Technorati Tags: , ,