Category: Ed’s World

“The Door-to-Door Man”: a short story set in the age of “stranger danger”

It’s an ordinary spring afternoon in suburban Cincinnati, 1980.

Eighteen-year-old Michelle Blevins is home with her younger brother when a stranger rings the doorbell.

The stranger is wearing a blazer, tie, and aviator sunglasses. He says he represents a local law firm. He says Michelle’s parents are in trouble.

And he really wants to come inside.

That’s the setup for “The Door-to-Door Man,” my latest original short story for YouTube.

Those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s will remember that this was the era of “stranger danger.”

In some ways, the world was considerably less connected than it is today. There were no cell phones, doorbell cameras, GPS trackers, or Internet searches. If a stranger appeared at your front door, you couldn’t pull out your phone and immediately find out who he was.

At the same time, people were becoming increasingly aware that the world wasn’t necessarily as safe as they had once imagined.

Serial killers, violent crime, and mysterious disappearances regularly made the news. Parents warned their children about strangers. And yet it was still perfectly normal for unfamiliar people—salesmen, repairmen, deliverymen, religious solicitors, and others—to simply walk up to your house and ring the doorbell.

That combination provides the backdrop for “The Door-to-Door Man.”

I’ve been experimenting with writing very short fiction specifically for YouTube: complete stories that can be read or listened to in a single sitting, accompanied by atmospheric visuals.

“The Door-to-Door Man” is one of these stories. It’s a tale of suspense rather than supernatural horror. There are no ghosts, monsters, or paranormal forces here. Just an ordinary young woman, an ordinary suburban house—and a stranger at the door who may not be what he claims to be.

You can watch and listen to the complete story in the video accompanying this post.

If you enjoy “The Door-to-Door Man”…

You might also want to check out my DEADLY BYWAYS series.

Deadly Byways consists of six novels set in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Like “The Door-to-Door Man,” these stories explore the darker side of an era that many of us remember with nostalgia—but which had plenty of dangers and shadows of its own.

The books are available on Amazon and can also be read through Kindle Unlimited.

If you enjoy suspense stories about ordinary people confronting extraordinary dangers—especially stories set against the backdrop of America several decades ago—DEADLY BYWAYS may be for you.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy “The Door-to-Door Man.”

And remember: be careful who you open your front door to.

-ET

Rick Springfield, at almost my dad’s age, is in better shape than me

Rick Springfield is touring this summer, apparently. That alone is newsworthy, given his age. But the 77-year-old performer is also making headlines because of his physique.

There can be no hedging or prevarication here. This guy is in amazing shape for 77. He probably has good genes. But he also works at maintaining this degree of fitness. (I’ve seen some videos about his fitness routines on YouTube, and they’re definitely worth watching.)

From a personal perspective: I’m 58, and Springfield is three years younger than my dad. I can remember the girls in my junior high class, back in 1981, having crushes on him.

It’s all about maintaining good habits as you age.

One more personal note: I might be able to outrun Rick Springfield, but I definitely don’t have his degree of leanness. Now excuse me, while I head to the gym for an extra workout.

-ET

Seth Godin, “the Amazon tax”, and pay-per-click battles to the death

Seth Godin has written an uncharacteristically scathing piece on the Hobbesian state of Amazon advertising. His basic thesis is that Amazon’s reliance on PPC ad revenue has created some perverse incentives.

The company used to focus on delivering the optimal product listings to consumers at the lowest prices. All of this was powered by Amazon’s internal search engine.

This process is known as organic discovery, and it benefited both buyers and sellers.

Organic discovery still exists to a certain extent on Amazon. But now there is something more nefarious and complicated in the mix. Amazon now makes about a billion dollars per week from search ads. PPC (pay-per-click) ads litter every available space on Amazon, including the top of your search results. Because these ads are now so plentiful and prominent on Amazon, anyone who sells there must engage in PPC advertising.

This of course includes new entrants to a particular market, but not only new entrants. Established players must also now invest substantially in defensive advertising on the platform.

Consumers don’t benefit from this excessive ad competition. On the contrary, they end up paying higher prices (because sellers must now recoup high ad costs in product pricing), as well as more limited and shoddier product lines. This is what Seth Godin calls “the Amazon tax”. “Amazon,” declares Godin, “is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.” Make of that what you will.

***

I’m an author/publisher. I therefore can’t really comment about how this might affect the electric snow blower market on Amazon. I can, however, say something about its effects on the book market. Continue reading “Seth Godin, “the Amazon tax”, and pay-per-click battles to the death”

Dolly Parton and what celebrity deaths really mean to us

As most of you will be aware, Dolly Parton passed away earlier this week. She was 80 years old.

Dolly Parton, born the same year as both of my parents, was already part of the pop culture landscape by the time I was born. As a result, she is one of those celebrities who has been around for my entire life.

I remember hearing her songs on the radio, of course. I also remember the spate of successful movies that she had in the 1980s: 9 to 5, Steel Magnolias, Rhinestone, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Because of my generational identity—and perhaps because of my gender—I was never a fan of Dolly Parton in the same way that I was a fan of Rush and Sylvester Stallone. That said, I have enjoyed much of her output over the years. I even have at least two favorite Dolly Parton songs: “Jolene” and “Islands in the Stream” (her duet with Kenny Rogers).

At this point in life, I’ve lost too many people whom I actually knew to be profoundly saddened by the death of an octogenarian celebrity whom I never knew. I will admit my selfish inclinations here. Dolly Parton’s death represents a passing of yet one more part of the world in which I grew up, a world which I believe to be in many ways better than the one of the 21st century.

My personal perspective aside, Dolly Parton seems to have been a genuinely good person, and everything that she added to our culture was positive so far as I remember. Her presence will be missed. Dolly Parton, 80. R.I.P.

-ET

Can marriage become a bad habit?

One of my childhood friends (we are both 58) recently got married for the third time.

No—before you ask—this is not a case of an older man trading in his same-aged wife for a younger model. All of my friend’s wives have been “age-appropriate”. None of the three were conspicuously attractive, or more conspicuously attractive than the other two. My friend has always been a man of average means and appearance who dated and married at his level.

Many celebrities have made a bad habit out of marriage. Zsa Zsa Gabor was famously married nine times. Mickey Rooney and Elizabeth Taylor both married eight times. Nicolas Cage has had five wives—including the late Lisa Marie Presley, who was married four times. (Presley’s father, Elvis, recognized that he was a bad fit for marriage, and married only once. That marriage ended after six years.)

I grew up Roman Catholic in the Midwest, during an era when “traditional family values” were still more than talking points in the culture wars. My parents had an occasionally argumentative—but basically sound—marriage, and I benefitted from that upbringing.

That said, I would argue that marriage is mostly a young person’s game, and that it should only be done once. Back to my friend. Why, exactly, does a man in his fifties, who has already been married twice (and who has two adult children from a previous marriage) need to tie the knot a third time? Marriage can be a wonderful thing; but it can also become a life-disrupting, expensive habit—for men and women alike.

Most of us are good at some things and not so good at others. We can spare both ourselves and others much grief in this world if we learn to recognize the things that we are not good at. A man who has already failed at marriage twice has demonstrated that he is not well-suited to the venture. Something is wrong with his fundamental process. Either he chooses poorly, or he is incapable of the deep, one-on-one interpersonal union that a successful marriage requires.

I wish my friend well, of course, in his latest marital venture. But I can’t help recalling that old saw about the definition of insanity: that it is the insistence on doing the same failed thing over and over again… yet somehow expecting a different result.

-ET

Online book reviews and ratings: take them with a large grain of salt

About a decade ago, I read a review of Mary Miller’s 2014 novel, The Last Days of California, in a print magazine. The reviewer, a book critic whom I knew by name and trusted, highly recommended Miller’s novel.

I was skeptical. The Last Days of California is a teenage girl’s coming-of-age story. I was a middle-aged man. Not long before that, a young woman in my social circle had recommended John Green’s emotional teen novel The Fault in Our Stars. Against my better judgment, I had purchased The Fault in Our Stars and tried to read it. I was unable to finish—not because The Fault in Our Stars was a bad book, but simply because I was the wrong reader for it.

Nevertheless, I ordered The Last Days of California from Amazon. The book promised to be not only a coming-of-age story, but also a story about the dynamics of 21st-century family life with a little bit of the culture wars mixed in. I was intrigued.

I’m glad I took a chance on The Last Days of California. It turned out to be a wonderful story, even though this is the kind of book I rarely read. (My personal reading tastes veer more toward Michael Connelly and Lee Child.)

But the collective readership of Amazon and Goodreads does not agree with me—at least not the ones who are leaving ratings and reviews. At the time of this writing, The Last Days of California has a 3.5 cumulative average on Amazon and a 3.4 cumulative average on Goodreads.

If I had consulted the online peanut gallery, I would have skipped Mary Miller’s book entirely. Fortunately, by 2014 I already knew the truth about mass online review venues like Amazon and Goodreads.

The Last Days of California, by Mary Miller (Amazon product page, 8/25/2026)

In 2012, it was discovered that John Locke, a bestselling indie author famous for his Donovan Creed series, purchased reviews from review farms. He personally compensated some other reviewers.

Black hat practices like that are harder to carry out in 2026. (There was a widespread backlash over the John Locke scandal, and Amazon took some steps to penalize outright review scammers.)

But gray hat practices persist in the publishing industry. Major publishers and imprints retain lists of friendly reader-reviewers, who can always be counted on to give a particular author a 5-star review. Indie authors are not far behind. Most know better than to specifically compensate for reviews, but there are still indie authors who will raffle iPads for their reader-reviewers. That sends a message—and broadcasts certain incentives. Continue reading “Online book reviews and ratings: take them with a large grain of salt”

The demand side of the porn equation?

Yet another story about a woman who was fired from her day job, after it was discovered that she had a lucrative side hustle as a suburban porn maker.

Heather Boyd, a married, 37-year-old mother of four, made adult content under the pseudonym “Hella Hot Wife.” When her entrepreneurial side hustle came to light, she was fired from her CNA job.

Please note: I am not “outing” Boyd. She has volunteered to appear on an upcoming TLC special entitled “Double Lives of Suburban Wives”. The show will feature interviews with married women who balance ordinary jobs and/or motherhood with autoporning on websites like OnlyFans.

Nor am I here to judge. At least—I’m not here to judge the women who do this.

I do, however, have some genuine questions about the almost exclusively male, demand side of this equation. The “easy money” of OnlyFans has been overhyped in recent years. (The average online adult content creator makes only about $180 per month.) But there is no doubt that some of these women are making huge sums. There is also no doubt that millions of men around the world are tuning in, credit cards in one hand and something else in the other.

This is what I don’t understand. I could understand the demand side, perhaps, if these OnlyFans models were engaged in the world’s oldest profession, providing in-person sexual favors for a fee. But these women are not doing “sex work,” as is so often alleged. What they are doing is better described as “titillation work.”

This is Lucy removing the football just before Charlie Brown can kick the football. It’s a grand tease, men sending digital dollars to women who are hopelessly beyond their reach. Are there really that many desperate, onanistic men in the world? Apparently so.

I would never assert that I am “entitled” to sex with any woman, including the aforementioned Heather Boyd. But if I can’t have it, please don’t wave it in my face. I would gain no satisfaction from having a sexual experience dangled before me on a computer screen—especially for a fee. The male enablers of the OnlyFans boom are sad cases, indeed.

-ET

Caveat emptor and toy soldiers in the 1970s

If you were a comics-reading kid in the 1970s, then you likely remember this full-page Lucky Products ad from the period.

100-pc toy soldier set!

Made of durable plastic!

Each with its own base!

And all of this for a mere $1.75 (roughly $9 to $15 in today’s money, depending on the year).

Many young boys, including some of my friends, ordered the toy soldier sets. They were inevitably disappointed by what they received in the mail, five to six weeks later. While there were a hundred toy soldiers, they were so tiny as to require tweezers to move around. A kid could not really play with such things in any meaningful way.

Was Lucky Products engaged in fraud? Not really. But this was what we might have called a sharp practice. The company deliberately excluded any mention of the sizes of the toy soldiers. And they certainly weren’t going to include any scale photographs in their ads.

Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware. Although I enjoyed playing with toy soldiers as a kid and I saw the Lucky Products ad many times, I was never seriously tempted to send away for this set.

My innate skepticism had already set in by an early age. Part of that no doubt was characteristic of my generation. But I have always been an extremely wary buyer. If something sounds too good to be true, then it usually is. I intuitively grasped that even at the age of nine.

-ET

The University of Cincinnati and my fiction

I attended the University of Cincinnati between the summer of 1987 and the early summer of 1991, and it is there that I earned my degree in economics. I arrived at UC in a circuitous fashion, and against my better judgment.

I started at Northern Kentucky University in the fall of 1986. NKU was just across the river from where my parents lived. (I was a commuter student throughout my college years.)

NKU provided an extremely pleasant educational experience—at least in those days. NKU had small classes, attentive professors, and a comfortable suburban/semi-rural environment. Oh, and parking was a breeze, too—no small matter when you’re a commuter student.

And of course, I was too foolish to know a good situation when I had it.

I can partly blame the 1980s. Those were placid, commonsense times, especially when compared to the chaotic cesspool that is the American culture of today.

A common trope in teen movies of the 1980s is the bored suburban/small-town teen whose life is so calm and satisfactory that he spends the first part of the movie waiting around for something exciting to happen. You can observe this trope in Risky Business, The Last American Virgin, Footloose, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

As a student at Northern Kentucky University in the 1986-87 academic year, I knew that the University of Cincinnati was an edgier, more tumultuous environment.

To begin with, UC was more than three times as large as NKU. UC was located in the inner city. UC was more “diverse.” (This was not a term that we used in the 1980s, but we understood the concept.)

UC—in the words of one of my friends—was also “a pain in the ass.” The daily commute was twice as long. Parking was a nightmare. Classes were frequently large, and so overenrolled that you might not get in.

I found the inner-city environment to be wretched rather than stimulating. On my drive home in the afternoons, I occasionally passed streetwalkers and drug deals in progress. The area around UC—both then and now—is a high-crime area. The campus itself was safe enough, but students were sometimes assaulted and robbed in the off-campus perimeter.

I briefly contemplated a return to NKU. But by the time I realized that I had made a mistake in coming to UC, I was already stuck there.

This was because of the way that NKU and UC allotted credits. At that time, NKU was on a semester system and UC was on a quarter system. As a result, NKU credits had a high exchange rate when transferred to UC’s system; but when transferring in the opposite direction, you would invariably lose credits.

So I finished my degree at the University of Cincinnati. The experience was far from a total loss, and not only because I earned a four-year degree. At the age of nineteen, I really had spent all of my life in sheltered, suburban, and (let’s be blunt about this) all-white environments. My years at the University of Cincinnati taught me to thrive beyond those confines—a skill that would serve me well in future years, when I entered some much rougher environments.

My time at UC also gave me a sense of gratitude—for the many unearned blessings that had been given to me by a mere accident of birth. These realizations brought both maturity and humility.

Looking back on it all almost 40 years later, I regard my years at UC as beneficial ones. I was there between the ages of 19 and 22. These are the young-adult formative years. It should not be surprising, then, that the University of Cincinnati shows up in my fiction. Below are the major and cameo appearances of the University of Cincinnati in my novels and short stories:

No Sure Thing

Set in 1988, this young adult novel includes many scenes on or around the UC campus of the late 1980s. While I have taken some liberties regarding professors’ names, etc., No Sure Thing provides an authentic look at the UC of the late Reagan era.

The Woman in Crosley Tower

This dark fantasy/light horror parallel worlds novella is set on the University of Cincinnati campus in the summer of 1987. In this story, one of the university’s actual buildings is the heart of the supernatural setting.

Eleven Miles of Night

This horror novel is set in 2013 and is not primarily about the University of Cincinnati. Two UC students, however, are major characters. There are multiple scenes set on campus.

Hay Moon and Other Stories

At least one story in my first short story collection, “Gaia Cried Out,” takes place partly on the UC campus.

***

I am not nostalgic about the University of Cincinnati in the conventional sense. I do not attend alumni events. Nor do I attend UC’s football or basketball games.

The university is, however, often my go-to location when I need a campus setting, especially one set in the 1980s. Thirty-five years have passed since I was last a student at the University of Cincinnati, and I’m still writing about it. UC will probably appear again in future stories.

-ET

21st-century obesity rates vs the buckle-down culture of the 1980s

@kwbogen

Also whyte supremacy. All bodies are good bodies but let’s not pretend we aren’t all being sold something. Exclusivity creates a marketplace.

♬ original sound – kwbogen

K.W. Bogen, an author/influencer, declares in a public video that the commonly cited male preference for thin/fit women is a conspiracy of corporations and white supremacy.

Because isn’t everything a conspiracy of corporations and white supremacy nowadays? No doubt the patriarchy had a hand in it all, as well.

Ms. Bogen then goes on to show us her figure (about which I will refrain from comment). She asserts that thinness is “really, really difficult to achieve” without “starving oneself” or taking drugs. (I assume she is referring to Ozempic, though I can’t be certain.)

First things first. Many men do prefer thin, fit women. A smaller percentage prefer women who are “pleasingly plump”. A very small percentage actively seek out heavyset women. (This last group of men is rare; but they do exist.)

But what men like is not the central issue here. On that point, at least, I think Ms. Bogen and I may be in agreement—though for entirely different reasons. Continue reading “21st-century obesity rates vs the buckle-down culture of the 1980s”

Aging rockers and what they can teach us

I was a teenager in the 1980s, and I’m still a fan of the popular music of that era. This summer a number of the rock acts that I grew up with have gone on tour. That’s rather amazing when you think about it. Four decades have passed since I was listening to these same musicians as a suburban teen. I just turned 58, and most of these musicians are now well into their seventies.

This is a phenomenon worth examining not merely for nostalgia’s sake, but for what it can teach us about aging and longevity.

Let’s start with Rush. Rush was founded in 1968, the year I was born. The band had its commercial breakout a few years after that in the mid-1970s, when I was in primary school. I was a huge fan of Rush during their second heyday of the mid-1980s. (Rush remains my all-time favorite band.)

Following the death of Neil Peart in 2020, Rush hired the comparatively youthful (43) Anika Nilles to fill in as their drummer. But guitarist Alex Lifeson and bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee are 72 and 73, respectively.

I watched footage of Rush’s 2026 tour on YouTube and other social media platforms. I’ll begin with the now obligatory observation that yes, Anika Nilles is an amazing drummer, and as good a fill-in for Neil Peart as could reasonably have been expected. But Alex and Geddy seem to have lost little in recent decades. Rush’s music, we should not forget, is technically demanding to perform live. But these two septuagenarians are performing as well as they ever did.

There was, of course, one fly in the ointment. A few concert dates had to be postponed because Geddy Lee was suffering from acute laryngitis and bronchitis. Another thing about touring with a rock band: life on the road is physically demanding—no matter what music you’re playing.

As a counterexample, there is David Lee Roth, the former frontman of Van Halen. At age 71, Roth is a shadow of his former self. He canceled his tour this summer without completing it for unspecified reasons. The most probable reasons, however, were weak ticket sales and negative fan reactions.

David Lee Roth received a lot of criticism for his almost painful-to-watch performances. But David Lee Roth has reached an age when most men are traditionally sedentary grandfathers. We also have to remember that during his salad days he set the bar very high. Anyone who recalls Van Halen’s performances from the 1970s and 1980s will also recall his onstage gymnastics. It simply isn’t possible for a man in his seventies to measure up to that.

Somewhere in the middle are AC/DC and Def Leppard.

Def Leppard’s lead singer, Joe Elliott, is 67 years old. He is no longer the trim, energetic young man who captivated MTV audiences in the 1980s. His voice is still serviceable, but there’s no doubt that time has taken its toll.

All of the vintage members of AC/DC, on the other hand, are now in their seventies. The lead singer, Brian Johnson, was born in 1947. That makes him one year younger than my father—and I’m pushing 60. It is still fun to watch AC/DC perform live. But once again, time has left its mark.

I reiterate: playing live rock and roll on stage in a major commercial venue is both physically and mentally demanding. Most of the population could never do it, regardless of age.

What can we learn from the above examples? First of all, the definition of old has definitely changed. If you take care of yourself both physically and mentally, you can keep going for a long, long time.

But that doesn’t mean that any of us is about to become immortal—or that time no longer counts. No matter how well you take care of yourself, it’s impossible to be at 75 what you were at 35. That’s simply the constraints of time and human biology, which get us all in the end. 

-ET

**View THE WOMAN IN CROSLEY TOWER on Amazon**

On turning 58

I write this post upon turning 58. To be precise, my 58th birthday is August 9.

This birthday marks a peculiar milestone. I have now reached an age at which I can remember my grandfather.

I passed this milestone with my father decades ago. My parents are only twenty-two years my senior, so I can remember my father at the age of twenty-nine.

But my grandfather? My grandfather was a World War II veteran who experienced the Great Depression. He was truly from a different time.

And yet… my grandfather, born in October 1921, turned 58 in October 1979. I was in the sixth grade then; but I remember late 1979 quite well.

***

This is the point where many people would suggest that fifty or perhaps even sixty (since I’m very close to that milestone too) is the new thirty—or perhaps the new forty. I’ll spare you such bravado. 60 is not the new 30 or the new 40. 60 is 60. And 58 is 58.

That said, I’m relatively fortunate insofar as my health. I’m a lifelong runner and weightlifter, and I’m in reasonably good shape. I’m not going to say that I don’t feel my age at all. But I feel it, I suspect, less than the average man my age.

***

The real problem with reaching this age is not that one feels old, but that the world feels old. I miss times that were more to my liking (even if they were less technologically convenient). I miss many people who are no longer here.

We all eventually reach the stage where the past becomes more important than the future. I suppose I have reached that point. This doesn’t imply a death wish, a state of despair, or a complete indifference to the present or the future.

It does, however, mean that I’ve become a temporal foreigner. I can operate in this era—for the most part—but if I had my choice… I would be somewhere else. Or sometime else.

I suspect that this is part of the normal process of aging. An indifference to the future prepares one for the inevitable day when one will no longer be part of the present. At 58, my journey is more than halfway over. I don’t expect to live to age 116, after all.

I’d like to stretch it out just a little bit longer. But whether that “little bit longer” means three years or 30 years, I’m already grateful. I’ve been blessed with a very good life—better than most.

Wherever you find yourself on your journey, I wish you happy trails, even though it’s my birthday we’re talking about. That’s another thing about being this old. Birthdays are kind of old hat now, too.

-ET

One more American soccer fan

Soccer was regarded as a somewhat newfangled sport when I was an adolescent and teenager in the first half of the 1980s. If you were a soccer fan, people might have suspected that you were going out of your way to be different or “special”.

I once asked my uncle if he ever watched soccer. “Well,” he said wryly, “soccer might be all right if you were a European.”

I fully grasped my uncle’s sentiment, even if I didn’t entirely agree with it. In that time and place, there were only three sports that counted: football, basketball, and baseball.

I ran track and cross country in high school. While no one regarded the running sports as aberrant, no one cared much about them, either. I don’t remember many spectators at our track meets—even when our team was doing well.

My high school got its first boys’ soccer team while I was a student there. The team did quite well, as I recall, winning a state championship in 1984. This was appreciated, of course; but the soccer team still played second fiddle to the football team in the fall athletic season. No one saw this as a great injustice or irony. It was just the way things were.

Soccer has become far more popular in the four decades since then. But it has become popular primarily as a sport that Americans play—not watch. And most of the Americans who play soccer are of student age.

Consider the numbers. The Super Bowl routinely pulls in 123 million to 128 million domestic viewers in the US. Even a World Cup final match struggles to pull in half that… in the US, that is. Globally, about 1.5 to 1.8 billion people follow the World Cup. American football, by contrast, has almost no bounce beyond US borders.

I have never been much into watching other people play sports. (Another thing about the US: our passion for spectator sports has risen in proportion to our obesity rates. But that’s another essay.) My personal disinterest, coupled with my indifference to soccer as an American, prejudiced me against watching the 2026 World Cup. I wasn’t against it; I just didn’t care.

And then I started watching—just to see what all the fuss was about, at first. Somewhat against my will, I got hooked. By the final match between Spain and Argentina, I was a moderately enthusiastic World Cup fan.

I discovered that there are some things about soccer that I particularly like. For one thing, it is one of the few remaining sports that a normal-sized person can play at a professional level. Pro basketball is now a game for people who are almost seven feet tall. I’m only 5’10”. I simply can’t relate to pro basketball. But the average World Cup soccer player is very close to my height.

Soccer is a fast-moving game. This is a quality that it shares with hockey. One cannot watch a soccer game with half one’s attention. One must either focus on the game, or focus on something else. The action is simply that engrossing.

I know that some Europeans can become rabid partisans of one team or another. Riots at European soccer venues have been a well-documented phenomenon for years.

I’ll probably never attend a match in person and I’d certainly never riot over the outcome of such a contest. But by the end of the 2026 World Cup, I was enthusiastically rooting for Spain. There were too many instances of poor sportsmanship on the Argentinian side, while the Spanish team struck me as a class act.

Soccer will probably never be as popular in the USA as pro football. The NFL is simply too entrenched in the American psyche. But pro soccer now has at least one new American fan. I’ll almost certainly watch the World Cup in 2030, and probably some additional tournaments in the interim.

-ET

Daniel Ortega: history repeats itself

Which Latin American strongman was most on the mind of the American president in 1986? Daniel Ortega, the dictator of Nicaragua.

Ortega, a Marxist protégé of the USSR, ruled Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. The Reagan administration provided aid to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, often through clandestine means. This led to the infamous Iran-Contra scandal of Reagan’s second term in office.

Time Magazine, March 1986

There was talk in some quarters about direct U.S. intervention in the Latin American nation in the 1980s, though I don’t think this was ever seriously on the table.

Ortega was eventually ousted from within and found himself out of power for seventeen years, from 1990 to 2007. Then he came back into power. Ortega’s second dictatorship has lasted for almost 20 years now.

The 80-year-old Ortega has just declared that Nicaragua will no longer hold elections at all. We’re back to the 1980s.

No, I’m not about to suggest that the US should attempt to force a regime change in Nicaragua. That was a bad idea in 1986, and it’s a bad idea now. From the U.S. perspective, the situation in Nicaragua is a nuisance, not an existential threat.

But we may consider the irony. So much has changed since the mid-1980s. (To consider the matter from a personal perspective, I turned 18 in 1986, the year I graduated from high school. I will soon turn 58.)

There are, however, some constants in this ever-changing world. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

-ET

Debbie Gibson’s bikini and social media marketing trends

Source: Debbie Gibson, Facebook

Debbie Gibson has been showing up in my personal Facebook feed of late, even though I haven’t subscribed to her, and even though I’ve never been a particular devotee of her music.

This is probably because of demographics. I’m a Gen Xer in my 50s. Debbie Gibson is a pop star from the 1980s. Therefore, Meta reasons that I should be a Debbie Gibson fan.

(And just to be clear about this: I never actively disliked Debbie Gibson or her music. But I was never really part of her target audience, either. She specialized in a brand of pop love songs that were written for 14-year-old girls enduring their first serious crushes. Debbie Gibson’s breakout year was 1988. In 1988 I was a 20-year-old male.)

This morning Debbie Gibson showed up in my Facebook feed wearing a bikini. Now once again it is necessary for me to provide a disclaimer. Gibson looks damn good in her swimwear, for a woman of any age. So there’s no “body shaming” going on here.

But the economist in me has to wonder… What compels a 55-year-old woman who has been famous for 40 years to post bikini photos of herself on social media? That might make sense for an up-and-coming, wannabe social media influencer. But Debbie Gibson, who has been famous since Ronald Reagan was in the White House? 

I think it might have something to do with the way media marketing has changed since the halcyon 1980s.

Forty years ago, Debbie Gibson’s marketing cycle looked something like this:

  1. Release an album.
  2. Record a music video.
  3. Appear on MTV.
  4. Do magazine interviews.
  5. Maybe appear on television.
  6. Disappear until the next album.

In the old days, marketing assets were expensive to produce and deliver. Barriers to entry were high. Therefore, marketing tended to occur in high-end, highly curated campaigns.

The internet and social media all but eliminated those barriers to entry. Now everyone, from your local plumber to your next-door neighbor’s daughter, can achieve more marketing presence than would have been possible for Debbie Gibson in 1987. As a result, everyone who hawks their wares online needs to market themselves like your local plumber or your next-door neighbor’s daughter.

There is nothing conspiratorial or sinister about this. Technology and economics are doing their thing.

All of this seems second-nature to anyone under the age of 30. But to those of us who can remember the previous century well, the shift in the media landscape can often be discombobulating. I wonder if Debbie Gibson would agree.

-ET