So how was that 24-hour-long Mike Daisey show anyway?

Judging from this (written by my pal Mead Hunter!), pretty good.

Who knew I could be so prescient? On Friday, I entitled a post about Netflix “Notflix” — and now it’s true. I just got an email from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Here’s the summary:  By way of course correction from their 60% price increase, they’re changing the name of the DVD service to Qwikster.

Wow. Thanks for letting me know.  I feel so much better now. Here’s the  way Reed says this will work:

There are no pricing changes (we’re done with that!). If you subscribe to both services you will have two entries on your credit card statement, one for Qwikster and one for Netflix. The total will be the same as your current charges. We will let you know in a few weeks when the Qwikster.com website is up and ready.

Wow. I feel so much better now. Now that there are two separate line items, and two separate names, I wouldn’t at all mind paying 60% more. Neither, I’m sure, will the estimated one million people who’ve recently quit your service or downgraded their accounts. Because now you have two names. Sure, we’ll be paying 60% more, but we will be getting 200% as many names.

Hats off to whoever wrote this line for Reed:  “There are no pricing changes (we’re done with that!).” Having had to find ways myself now and then to dress up bad news as good, I commend you for the attempt, whoever you are. Yay! No pricing changes (which implies “no further increases”), except, waitaminnit, that means you won’t be undoing that 60% price increase. Well, at least we get to keep the 200% of names. And, actually, you did save me some money — because my account is still canceled.

Looks like I’m not the only one who was offended by Netflix’s 60% rate increase. A whole bunch of us took our ball and went home.

My friend Kim Gambino is in rehearsal for a play in Omaha, NE — but she lives in New York. So how has she been attending rehearsal? Via Skype. Another triumph for the marriage of technology and the arts.

James Carville has some advice for the White House:  panic.

I do love the post office, honest, and no, I don’t want it to go out of business, and yes, I understand it’s a fantastic bargain, especially compared against delivery in almost any other nation. And it makes me feel crummy to pile onto them at this, their time of woe, but I have to share this story.

At my business, we moved our office on July 1st. We gave all of our clients plenty of notice, and lots of reminders since then, but some of them have still sent payments to our previous address. I understand why:  It’s easy to update your Address Book or other contact-management program and overlook updating your accounting system (usually, QuickBooks), which means that when you process a payment to us, it defaults to our old address.

This happened recently with a client (and they’re also friends) whose business is seven-tenths of a mile up the street from us. They mailed us a check — to our previous location — on August 26th. It arrived today with a forward sticker on it. The postmark clearly states 8/26, which means it took TWENTY DAYS to be forwarded two miles from our previous address.

By way of comparison:  the Pony Express was able to deliver mail from the Atlantic to the Pacific in 10 days. And that was on horseback.

We’ve gotten dozens of forwarded checks from clients over the past 10 weeks. Some take three days or so. Some take 10 days. This one took 20 days. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this. Here was the theory of someone else here at Counterintuity:  “Maybe the mailman dropped it behind his seat and only just now found it.”

Remember my complaint that TSA was practically performing cavity searches on kids?  Update:  Now they can leave their shoes on.

Here are the 10 best-selling single issue comics of the past 10 years. I doubt that #1 would have anywhere near that sales level now.

In which someone who was caught that day first in lower Manhattan, and then on the New Jersey side, gets a reminder that his little inconvenience is nothing compared with the devastation all around, and shares photos of everything he saw. I can’t find a way to link directly to it, but it’s the post here called “That Day” on, well, this day in September. Thanks to Joe Stafford for letting me know about this one.

It’s one of the best music mash-ups I’ve seen, in which Stevie Wonder’s “Superstitious,” interwoven with Metallica’s “Sad but True,” gives us “Sad but Superstitious.” (Extra points go to the video for incorporating a cameo appearance by Grover.)