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I used to work on the dividing line between “downtown” and “midtown” Atlanta. One of the closest record stores to my work was a branch of the local Turtles Records chain. This location – in the same strip mall as Plaza Theatre on Ponce, for you Atlanta folks – used to be where mid-level musicians would turn up for “meet and greets”.

So one day, I snuck out of work to meet… Nitzer Ebb – a one-hit wonder Eurodance band. This is like admitting to going to meet Chumbawumba, only lamer because every English speaker under the age of 40 has heard “Tubthumping”, while Nitzer Ebb were known only in the “industrial dance” scene. I still have the “Lightning Man” 12″ single they autographed for me. I doubt I could get $1 for it on eBay, even with free shipping. Looking back on it now, it’s almost amusing that I risked my job for a band that 99.999% of America has never heard of, and even their fans haven’t listen to them since 1991.

I also met Maria McKee (lead singer of 80s band Lone Justice) at the same Turtles location. McKee was better known than Nitzer Ebb, so I’m not especially embarrassed to admit that I went to meet her. However, this story is amusing for two reasons.

First, McKee was stoned off her ass. I can spot a pothead from a mile away, and I can tell you that McKee was smoking far better weed than anyone I knew. After coming out and mumbling a few hellos, she started playing a couple of acoustic numbers… only she was wearing this giant silver ring on her “strumming hand”, and at one point it flew off and nailed someone on the forehead. At first she looked completely horrified, but when the guy she hit smiled and handed it back to her she just started giggling like something out of Half Baked.

Continue reading “Meeting Pointless Celebs”

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?”