Killing Batteries

I’ve noticed a disconcerting trend lately. And by ‘disconcerting’, I mean annoying. To me. Honestly, this isn’t normally a difficult thing to accomplish, but this particular situation has gotten so out of control in the past year that it warrants both comment and mocking.

Lately, when it comes time for one to write one’s bio, say, on their Twitter profile, or break down their ‘experience’ on their blog’s ‘About Me’ page, people are increasingly turning to ridiculous superlatives and unverifiable labels to jazz things up. Now inserting a little hyperbole into one’s resume has been going on since Pope Pius II put out his 13 volume autobiography, but this new wave of blatant, dizzying exaggeration and unaccountability is starting to reach ridiculous heights. What’s more demoralizing, this transparent embellishing appears to be somewhat effective.

Probably my biggest pet peeve is when people bestow the title ‘guru’ upon themselves, meaning, by definition, “a leader in a particular field”. Really? Are you a leader in your field? And if so, does that mean the other 10,000 people claiming to be gurus in your field are also leaders? Well, that’s simply not possible. ‘Guru’ is just a nebulous, evocative designation that anyone can claim at any time without having to complete any study, training or testing. I could call myself a break dancing guru and no one could (or has the inclination to) prove me wrong. Hell, while I’m at it, let’s tack on ‘brunch guru’ too.

Another rage trigger is when people crown themselves with three or four improbable job titles simultaneously, like social media advisor, financial consultant, interior designer and sommelier. All by the age of 26. Firstly, in the unlikely event that someone is really being paid to perform all of the jobs they’re claiming, there’s no way they could be humanly doing any of them well. Secondly, when did people start getting the delusions of grandeur that allow them to believe they’re experts at anything after so little genuine experience? Albert Einstein, though he made several remarkable breakthroughs in his 20s, didn’t really hit his stride until his 40s. That was Albert “Greatest Fucking Mind of the 20th Century” Einstein. So, I can’t help but be skeptical when someone three years out of college announces that they’re writing a book about how to get rich, orchestrate the perfect marriage or find everlasting happiness.

Unfortunately, much like the heart-breaking popularity of lists, I can’t help but acknowledge that this is probably how things are going to be from here on out and if I want to continue to compete in this arena, I’d better adapt. As such, I’ve started to retool my resume, which I present now for public indulgence, demonstrating how extraordinarily talented I am without citing any supporting evidence.

Leif “It Boy” Pettersen

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HIGHLIGHTS OF QUALIFICATIONS

* Super-genius-level communication skills (except when dealing with idiots).
* Internationally acclaimed writer, with expertise in a broad spectrum of topics, including travel, tech, wine, relationships, food, germs, bros, hos, basketball, TV, radio, juggling, acting, walking, talking, peeing standing up, skim-reading, long division, your mom, parallel parking, annoying things, omelets and boobs.
* Life-long travel badass – visited 428 countries on 11 continents and can drink the water anywhere he damn well feels like it.
* Pointing and grunting fluency in 83 languages.
* Web page design authority/guru/innovator/collaborator/masticator.
* Inventor of blogging.
* World renowned photographer, with over 100 photos posted on the “internet”.
* Adapts quickly to change and new experiences (in bed).
* Highly dependable, punctual, and efficient judge of stupid stuff.

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

- Best-selling author of guidebooks on more than two European countries.
- Work has appeared in dozens of high profile, internationally renowned, award-winning, religion-changing magazines, anthologies, books, web sites and retweets.
- Countless stirring, swoon-inducing appearances on radio, TV and online videos.
- Domestic and international electronic payments wizard, who, if he really wanted to, could have caused a global financial crisis with a touch of a button during his years working for the Federal Reserve System. But he didn’t, because he’s infallibly awesome and loves puppies.
- Consumed over 500 bottles of wine and 2,000 pints of cider, and has never puked up any of it, making him both a consummate journalist and an ideal house guest.

It’s still a work in progress, but you get the idea. If I play my cards right, 2010 will be the year I achieve previously unthinkable riches and fame while performing the bare minimum of actual skilled work, kinda like Megan Fox, except with manners.

Agonizing over travel insurance? Maybe I can help…

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The dwindling elbow room on my shit list got a lot tighter last week when about a dozen members of Romania’s so-called “news media” pissed me off so much that I didn’t even need Novocain when they drilled out my cavity later that day.

I had no idea what a bunch of hacks these people are. Pitiable, bandwagon, lazy hacks. I mean, I’ve seen people hack before, but these are the hackiest bunch of hacks that ever hacked.

Why am I resorting to cheap name-calling and a thinly-veiled theft of a great Simpsons quote? Well, because a bunch of these hacks hacked me last week during a very, very slow news day with a hack story that displayed the astounding hacky breadth of their hack journalism practices. Now I know how Britney feels. Needless to say I’ll be watching how I exit a car on those days when I choose to go without knickers from now on.

From what I can piece together, my victimization at the hands of these hacks goes like this: some desperate, reading comprehension-challenged hack found the Warnings page on my independent Romania and Moldova Travel Guide web site. They apparently read it quickly, glanced around the rest of the page for a split second, saw that I am a LP author, then made a world record setting, triple-jump hacky leap to conclusion and wrote a story attributing some of my clearly tongue-in-cheek comments to the “Lonely Planet 2008 Guide”.

Based on online posting dates and times, the ’story’ ‘broke’ over at Mediafax, where some hack, we’ll call him Alpha Hack, went so far as to date the alleged LP comments to last Tuesday, suggesting that LP had released some kind of new, earth-shattering Romania travel guide that day, rather than admitting that this was simply the day he stumbled on my 18 month old web site during idle Googling while his Nescafe was still brewing.

The story was then re-printed by Beta Hack over at HotNews.ro, who very clearly did not bother to verify the source or even attempt to re-arrange the words from the original story in an interesting way. Nice one Beta.

Let’s start by dissecting Alpha’s and Beta’s simple tell-it-like-it-is pieces, devoid of an actual point other than to sound vaguely hurt and offended that I stated well-known facts about their country’s problems with taxis, ‘community dogs’, and pick pockets. First, and most importantly, there is no goddamn “Lonely Planet 2008 Guide”. The most recent guide to Romania is a luminary works entitled “Lonely Planet Romania and Moldova”, written by me and Robert Reid, that was released in May of 2007. Assuming one isn’t a hopeless hack, one can independently verify this fact with about 20 seconds of online research. Or better yet, they could have emailed me (since they were trolling my site, where my email address is readily available) or even contact LP if they wanted some kind of eye-catching executive quote.

Also, Alpha Hack committed the cardinal sin of pulling sentence fragments out of context and then rearranging them to suggest that comments I made about the Bucharest menu scam applied to the entire country. And as for the tip I give about keeping close tabs on your backpacks and purses, this is common sense for any country in Europe, not just Romania, but this rudimentary logic was not applied, because Romanian media hacks love nothing more than to hack out stories about how badly foreigners misunderstand their country.

So, primary blame goes to Alpha Hack for bending the facts and not bothering to verify anything before publication. Beta Hack is merely guilty of shameless, pseudo-plagiarizing of Alpha Hack, again without spending even a minute checking any facts.

Then all hell broke loose. Irresponsible, parrot-like hacks in both Iaşi and Suceava – heretofore referred to as the Hacksie Twins – “fleshed out” the story into consternated opinion pieces, written in a tone suggesting that I made everything up and none of this stuff ever happens in their idyllic cities. Again, the Hacksie Twins attributed all the quotes to the LP guide rather than my personal web site and of course neither bothered to contact me.

Then, I was informed that the local radio talk show hacks (The Hackensack Sister’s Breakfast Time Hack Show), who have even worse hack reporting instincts than their print media counterparts, spent the morning droning and bemoaning how foreigners are so ignorant of Romania.

Since not a single person in this motley crew of feeble, hack-happy ‘journalists’ bothered to check a source, they simply succeeded in exacerbating Alpha Hack’s criminally inaccurate article, drawing newer, wildly less accurate conclusions of their own, and writing off my gentle warnings as complete fiction.

Despite the firm conclusions drawn without a minute of research, in reality every single warning on that page has either happened directly to me or was reported by several first and second hand sources, either directly to me or through reader’s emails sent to LP. Hey, I appreciate national pride just as much as the next guy, and I’m painfully aware of how easily the Romanian national conscious gets bruised (I’ve had to start storing my Romanian hate mail on an 80 gig external drive to free up that space on my laptop), but to sit there and suggest that actual events that happened to me are fantasy just because you don’t agree with them is just flat out arrogant and irresponsible. Is this kind of denial of reality in place of prudent investigation really the course of Romanian journalism?

Furthermore, these are not conclusions that I arrived at while sitting alone in an office in America. I f*cking lived in Romania for a cumulative 16 months and have traveled here for several months more. During that time I visited nearly 60 Romanian cities (see the full list here), repeatedly in several cases. There’s a very good chance that I’ve traveled the country more thoroughly and written about its tourism offerings more repetitively than any other modern journalist, local or foreign. My conclusions we drawn from these travels/experiences in addition to lengthy frank discussions with locals who unanimously agreed that the roads are shit, taxis are a problem in Bucharest, ‘community dogs’ exist, emergency medical care could be better and restaurants in Bucharest sometimes try to cheat tourists. Anyone who wants to deny any of this is more than welcome to do so, but since I have voluminous evidence to back-up my comments, you’ll have to present voluminous evidence to back-up yours. That’s how non-hacky journalism works. Even travel writers that have punched their ticket to hell know that.

Finally, none of this uproar would have occurred if the first author had simply included this quote from the introduction of my Warnings page:

“I’ve bobbed and weaved through my fair share of scams and bribe solicitors and I’ve heard loads of anecdotal tales from others, so I’d be remiss in not sharing these experiences with you, even though you’ll probably never encounter them yourself. So, let’s get on with the stories.”

I added the bold text just now for emphasis. Perhaps I should bold it on the web site too to assist reading comprehension-challenged hacks.

As a result of this cheap smear campaign, I’ve gone back and edited the Warnings page. It needed some updates anyway (i.e. the number of ‘community dogs’ in Buch seems to have dropped after the city-wide clean-up for the NATO summit this spring), but mostly I had to take out a lot of the humor and clarify the text so that future visiting members of the Romanian Association of Media Hacks and Hearsay Artists won’t jump to conclusions when they find my web site during a smoke break.

Ya bunch of hacks.

Apart from that unnecessary drama, this Romania tour was absolutely perfect. Traveling the country in May is a real pleasure. Perfect weather and not too hot, though it did hit 90°F one day, which has me nervous about the kind of heat I’ll be facing when I return here for three weeks in July.

I’ll follow-up in a few days with a list of sights and experiences that made this trip so great so as to cleanse the palate from this unpleasant post.

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Yeah, yeah, I’m posting twice this week, so just get over it already. Take your non-mouse hand, reach up and close your mouth before something flies in there and dies.

This relative flurry of posting is partly to make up for my rare, if ever, post frequency while I’m in Romania for four weeks in May and partly because I’m consumed in a stuttering rage of pissed offtitude!! If I hadn’t already launched my stress toy out my 26th story window during last week’s anti-travel writer BS, I’d be liquefying it right now as I transform into the Incredible Freelance Writer Hulk. Yeeeaarrrrgggjackhole!!

The incapacitating feelings of wrath that I’m experiencing right now are heightened because I feel obligated to be pissed off on behalf of every established and aspiring freelance travel writer in regards to the self-righteously obtuse comments recently made by New York Times travel editor Stuart Emmrich about their policy of not accepting stories that were written on the strength of any complimentary services (airline tickets, hotels, meals, etc.). Furthermore, he highlighted a point that I wasn’t aware of previously, that being the Times won’t accept any stories from a freelancer who has ever accepted a comp in modern history! Are you f*cking kidding me??

Well, to be fair, there were caveats. Like say the freelancer in question was bitten on the face three times by a Burmese King Cobra, in which case the Times is willing to overlook that the freelancer didn’t crawl out of the jungle, down the nearest village, hand over his emergency c-note to a black market money-changer so as to pay for the antidote out-of-pocket.

This is an old peeve of mine that has intensified as I’ve become crabbier and devoid of all empathy in the past few weeks, but it’s being especially tweaked because it’s coming from someone that I’d hoped would know better. Further to Mr. Emmrich’s comments, in case a hapless freelancer has any questions or needs clarification about possible loopholes, the Times has posted their ethics handbook online. Fair enough. For most forms of journalism, particularly for salaried employees, you gotta have something like this. But when dealing with freelancers, particularly in the arena of travel where research expenses are prohibitively high, you’ve gotta find a middle ground.

I don’t know what the Times pays for one-off articles, but I know the national average paid by newspapers is $200-300. I’ll give the NYT the benefit of the doubt, since they’re the Times and presumably have a little bit more money to throw around, and just guess that they pay $400-500 per piece. (Anyone that knows better, please comment below.) Nevertheless, this compensation doesn’t come anywhere near covering the expenses of, say, a five night trip to Copenhagen ($1,500-2,000), never mind the freelancer’s time investment (let’s call it six days of travel and two days of writing), which should be, at a minimum, $25 per hour (or $1,000 per week), what with the self-employment tax and other cruel penalties freelance writers have to deal with like costly individual health insurance that I swear I’ll look into just as soon as I get back from Romania, mom.

I point this out this no-brainer fact, because on the subject of pitching the NYT, Emmrich innocently offers that “The Travel section needs reporters to identify these stories and ferret them out, not people who just want to write up their vacation experiences.”

Oh really? Does it get a little exasperating that all you receive in your submissions inbox are hacks traveloguing their trip to Colonial Williamsburg? Are you wondering why most of these submissions are unprintable, clichéd amateur nonsense? Well since you seem to be genuinely baffled, I’ll tell you: it’s because any idiot can see that it’s mathematically impossible to make a living pitching to you. You can’t expect a professional writer to pay for expenses out-of-pocket for all of the trips they take year round, and then turn around and pay them the shit fee you pay for one-off articles. Maybe a hungry newbie will eat a $700 one-time loss for a NYT byline, but not a professional who has the rest of the year(s) to think about.

So, now that you’ve alienated 98% of the people that have the skills and qualifications to produce a NYT-worthy piece with your sanctimonious ban on comps, please don’t act surprised when all you receive are missives fired off by ambitious stay-at-home moms. (Not that’s there’s anything wrong with that. I love stay-at-home moms, particularly when they stay at home with their shrieking two year olds, rather than sitting next to me on a trans-Atlantic flight.)

To sum up, you can’t have it both ways. Either you’re gonna have to accept stories that involved comps – and have faith that the writer has the capacity to objectively review a comped service – or start reimbursing freelancers for their travel expenses. Or pay an upfront fee large enough that the writer actually has something left to buy groceries when all is said and done. We’re talking upwards of $1,500 for a short domestic destination piece and $3,500 or more for international destination features. If you expect everyone else around you to bow down to your rules on comps, you’re going to have to start putting out.

Better yet, cut the diplomatic crap, stop pretend-coaching potential NYT submitters and own up to the fact that in a perfect world you’d rather not deal with freelance submissions at all. This way you don’t have to spend one morning every six weeks slogging through the submissions inbox, deleting all those stories about Orlando and Philadelphia’s cheese steak stands, and people won’t waste time and energy sending those stories to you in the first place. After all, as Mr. Emmrich happily admits in the same piece, he has an overflowing pool of gifted, NYT salaried writers on hand that he can tap if he’s ever in a jam and no one can deny that they’re a lot easier to work with than a hodgepodge of time-consuming, one-off freelancer pieces.

Finally, Mr. Emmrich, with all due respect, clearly you’ve enjoyed the security and bulging paychecks of the NYT for a little too long to be authoritatively disseminating sage wisdom on the subject of freelance travel writing. The next time you feel compelled to lecture aspiring freelance travel writers, it would behoove you to emerge from your insulated, salaried Editorial Fortress of Solitude and bring yourself up to speed on the realities of freelance travel writing of the current century. Thank you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have business errands to run that cannot be done until I’ve pancaked over the alarming green tone my skin has taken on and replaced the torn rags that were perfectly presentable Old Navy clothes when I started composing this diatribe.

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Actually, this is a dual post about how pissed off I am about the clusterf*ck happening in Iraq and how everyone should go out and rent NO END IN SIGHT before voting in the presidential elections later this year (apologies to non-American readers, though you all should still see the movie just in case you needed to renew your loathing for the current administration).

If you’re the kind of person that values zero-pulled-punches reporting, but thinks that the over-dramatization and sarcasm in Michael Moore’s films tend to overly distract from the facts, you’re gonna love (to hate) this movie. There’s no carefully selected extreme-case profiles, there’s no flotilla to Cuba to seek treatment and five cent drugs, there’s no guy in a bird costume trying to draw attention to gun control… This is simply a matter-of-fact, indisputable series of interviews with several of the original main players of the Iraq occupation who were either duped, pressured into leaving or fired for trying to avert the disastrous situation that has unfolded in Iraq.

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You know what really pisses me off? Idiots. We’ll get to that in a second.

Meanwhile, you know what pisses me off slightly less? Total ass-spanking humiliation.

I was duly informed this week via the South by Southwest Interactive Festival discussion panel selection committee that I am officially less interesting than pet bloggers.

Pet f*cking bloggers.

How’s that for a kill-shot to the self-esteem? Right in the eyeball.

The SXSWi committee could have had me and several other distinguished travel bloggers come and hold court at the festival in March, sign innumerable autographs, kiss babies and add a desperately needed sex-factor to the proceedings, but they decided, unimaginably, that a pet blogging discussion panel would be more stimulating.

So, let me get this straight… Aunt Tippy’s pictures of her cat “Mr. Droopy Pants” wearing a Garfield sweater vest that says “Where’s the lasagna?” is better blog material than me single handedly stranding a dangerously drunk hitchhiker and an asshole gas station attendant together for (at least) eight hours in the middle of nowhere during a Romanian winter? Did I somehow cross over into the Bizarro Internet?
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F*cking Italy!!!

OK, OK… Let’s just calm down and try to discuss this like rational, levelheaded F*CKING ITALY!!!!!

Here’s Italy’s latest piss me off endeavor:

Last April, I rented a car from a so-called “car rental agency” in Florence through a broker web site called Nova Car Hire, to use for my Lonely Planet research trip (I’m omitting the name of the car rental company until the situation has been resolved). The car rental office is located in the historic center of Florence.

For those of you who have not had firsthand, piss me off, Italy driving experience, most cities have restricted areas in the historic center where only approved vehicles can go. This is so the tiny streets aren’t constantly grid-locked, thereby making more room for the double-wide butted tourists to stagger blindly down the street, get in my way and piss me off.

The Italians enforce access to this restricted area by setting up little cameras and shooting photos of license plates as cars enter the area. At the end of the day the newest/dumbest guy at the police station is supposed to sort through these photos and check them against a list of approved cars. Anyone audacious enough to drive into the historic center without permission gets a ticket sent to their home in the mail, but only after deviously waiting seven months so you have no hope of contesting the violation – que piss me off, no?

In the case of my rental car agency in Florence, I was clearly informed that all of their cars had universal approval to drive in the historic center, because if they didn’t no one could ever return their cars. Sounds pretty reasonable and straightforward, doesn’t it? Ah ha! That is where you are wrong idiota! This is Italy! Making sense is no permesso qua! Pissing people off, however, is a national sport!
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We Americans have a lot of pent up anger. The reasons why this is the case could fill a Michael Moore trilogy, so I’m officially handing that task off to him.

Meanwhile, how’s an ordinary guy supposed to vent this tidal wave of boundless fury, aside from demolishing the occasional pay phone with one’s bare hands? Complain like an early-onset cranky, paranoid old bastard, that’s how.

Accordingly, I’m starting yet another updated-when-I-feel-like-it KB series: “This Is What’s Pissing Me Off Today”. Anything is fair game: News stories, personal offenses, Berliner Schadenfreude, intellectual property thieves, people who don’t signal when they turn left in front of me, you name it.

So let’s get on with the wrath already:
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