Category: Commentary

Back in 1989, my mother and I went to Australia. Due to the difference in time zones, we were usually out and about in the morning when we wanted to call home. So we needed a payphone.

At the time, Sydney had three types of pay phones: orange payphones, which were all over the place, but could only call within the metro Sydney area; green payphones, which were somewhat rarer, and were able to call anywhere in Australia; and silver payphones, which were located at only a few post offices and banks, and were able to call internationally.

So one morning we were out and about and decided to call home. We asked around for a “silver payphone” but no one seemed to have any idea what we were talking about. Seriously. The first dozen people we asked seemed puzzled by the very question: “You want to… dial another country… from a payphone?”, as if we’d asked how to make toast using an inkjet printer. We finally found someone who directed us towards a nearby post office… only we get there and the phone is out of order. So we ask at the post office, and once again the people there are like: “You want to call the United States… from a payphone? I don’t know if it’s even possible to call another country from a payphone!”

So we start asking around again, and still we’re getting blank stares and puzzled looks. A few people happily give us directions to nearby green payphones, because people in Sydney apparently think that Queensland is a foreign country. Anyway, we eventually find someone who directs us to a shopping arcade around 20 blocks away. And we can’t find a taxi, so we have to walk the whole way (have I mentioned that by this point it’s 95F, that we’d walked past 4,732 orange payphones, or that we’d spent 90 minutes on this seemingly simple task?).

Continue reading “The Ugly American”

Every so often I see a post on a message board wondering whatever happened to a la carte cable – the ability to pick and choose which cable channels you want instead of having to buy “packages” from your cable provider. A la carte cable will never happen, in my opinion, and for two reasons, both of which involve money.

The first has to do with “contracts of carriage”, the agreements between individual cable networks (like Bravo) and your cable provider (like Comcast or Time Warner). Almost all of the carriage contracts currently in place in the United States are based on the total number of subscribers per cable operator. For example, Bravo might let Time Warner carry their programming on its cable network for 50¢/household/month. So if Time Warner has 20 million subscribers, they’ll have to pay Bravo $10 million/month. Time Warner could, at any time, decide to switch over to a la carte programming, but their carriage contract with Bravo would still require them to pay $10/million a month. If only 200,000 households sign up for Bravo under the new plan (giving Time Warner $100,000/month in revenue), then Time Warner will have to make up the $900,000/month difference somehow. Now it’s entirely possible that Time Warner and Bravo could reach some agreement on an a la carte model when negotiating their next carriage contract (such contracts typically last 1-5 years), but guess what? Time Warner would still have to deal with all the other networks and their carriage contracts, all of which might end at different times. It’s a financial and logistical nightmare for cable companies, to say nothing of the fact that many of cable networks are bundled together.

The second reason is related to the first. Let’s say that Time Warner does go with an a la carte lineup. And let’s further say that only 200,000 subscribers opt to receive Bravo. Under the previous carriage contract (50¢/household/month), Bravo would now get $100,000 a month from Time Warner instead of $10 million a month. I’ll admit that 50¢/household/month is an unrealistically low fee for carrying Bravo… but if only 200,000 households sign up for the channel, Bravo would have to charge each subscriber $50/household/month to get the same amount of money that they got under the old contract, and that’s just not realistic, either. And that’s the worry: that smaller, “fringe” cable networks would either disappear completely, or at least have their budgets slashed, if a la carte cable were to happen.

Continue reading “a la carte Cable?”

Are these the people you want managing your money???

Shoemakersville residents no longer have to wonder why their beloved bank, the only one in town, closed in April.

The building at 455 Main St. stands empty because Wachovia Corp. didn’t pay its 2006 municipal and county property taxes or its 2008 Hamburg School District taxes, according to Berks County Treasurer Nelson H. Long.

The corporation, operating under the name Meridian Properties Inc., lost the building in a tax sale Sept. 24, 2008, according to records in the Berks County Tax Claim Bureau.

Despite numerous phone calls, certified letters and even a sheriff’s notification, Wachovia failed to pay $9,600 in delinquent taxes and penalties, Long said.

Even if Wachovia wanted to close the branch (as they claim), why would they let the property be seized and sold for $16,900 when the property is worth $240,000??

via Tax woes spurred closing of Shoemakersville bank.

This is Monica Bellucci:

Even if you don’t understand French, you can probably figure out the headline of this issue of French Elle magazine: Bellucci, and others like Sophie Marceau and Eva Herzigova, are shown without makeup, and without any Photoshopping or airbrushing whatsoever. That’s Monica Bellucci, 100%, completely au natural. Oh, and by the way, she’s 44.

She’s almost too beautiful for words!

Read more about it (and see pictures of some of the other women) here.

Back in the late 80s, I was a huge fan of a British program called The South Bank Show. It was kind of like a “Charlie Rose for musicians and artists” – each week there’d be a long, in-depth  interview with a notable British musician or artist. There were no distractions – just the artist talking about his or her work.

One episode I remember in particular featured Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. The interviewer asked him something along the lines of “you are obviously a homosexual. How come you haven’t done more ‘overtly gay’ music?” Tennant said that PSB tried to not do “gay songs” because they didn’t want to alienate any part of their fan base; that, generally speaking, he felt that pop music was no forum for politics; and that he didn’t feel it was his place to “preach” to people.

I had a newfound respect for Tennant after seeing that interview. So many celebrities these days think it’s their mission to bring news of some “cause” to the “little people” out there, and Tennant specifically addressed how those celebs often come out looking like jackasses, and how he wanted no part of it.

It seems that Tennant still has his head on straight, as the Pet Shop Boys recently declined an offer from PETA to to change their name to the “Rescue Shelter Boys”:

The organization, the People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals (PETA), sent a letter to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe acknowledging that its request, at first blush, might appear “bizarre.”

But, by changing its name, the band could raise awareness at every tour stop of the “cramped, filthy conditions” that breeders keep animals in before selling them to pet stores, PETA said in its letter.

The duo, which has performed under its current name for more than 20 years, reproduced PETA’s written request in full on its Web site.

The musicians said they were “unable to agree” to the request “but nonetheless think (it) raises an issue worth thinking about.”

I decided to take some time off from my unending war against misplaced apostrophes to address an issue I’ve seen cropping up all over the place these days: the misuse of the words “fewer” and “less”.

In a nutshell, you should use “fewer” when you can easily count something, but “less” when whatever it is that you’re talking about cannot be easily measured.

Here’s an easy way to remember the difference: “I have less beer in my glass than you, but I’ve had fewer beers than you”. You use “less beer” because it’s not easy to tell exactly how much beer is in each glass; on the other hand, it’s easy to count how many empty beer bottles there are, so you’d use “fewer” in this case.

Here’s another example: “as the economy picks up, there will be fewer layoffs, resulting in less stress in the workplace”. Since it’s easy to count the number of people laid-off from work, you use “fewer”; since it’s impossible to measure the level of stress in the workplace, you use “less”.

By now, you might be thinking about those signs at the grocery store that say “10 items or less”. Yes, they’re wrong. It’s easy for anyone to count to ten, and counting items is sort of expected if you want to use the express lane. So, in a perfect world, those signs should read “10 items or fewer”. But they don’t.

WASHINGTON Reuters – The U.S. budget deficit almost hit $1 trillion during the first six months of this fiscal year which began on October 1, according to estimates released on Monday by the Congressional Budget Office.

The government likely recorded $953 billion in red ink from October through March including $290 billion for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which was to provide much-needed cash to struggling financial institutions, the CBO said.

Receipts during the six-month period dropped about $160 billion, or 14 percent, over the same period in fiscal 2008. Nearly half of the drop, $73 billion, came from a fall in corporate income tax receipts.

A trillion dollars. And no one is saying a word about it!

via U.S. deficit nearly $1 trillion in first half of FY2009.

“You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when it’s waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.”

– Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas