At other times, he behaves like this. (Everyone needs to wind down, even the caped crusader.) My seven-year-old turned me onto this video. He and his friends have watched it even more times than the Joker has broken out of Arkham.
Another reason Batman always beats Superman: Batman inspires new technology. And he’s insistent.
In other tech news, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Verizon iPhone is probably coming out this summer. According to this site, the new 4G iPhone will probably include a front-facing camera. Which means you’ll be able to email photos of yourself looking delighted to no longer be on AT&T. My contract will be up just in time.
You may have heard that small businesses are banding together in class action lawsuits against the site Yelp, which allows users to rate businesses they have patronized. They claim that Yelp is essentially extorting them by offering to remove bad reviews in exchange for buying an advertising package (which Yelp denies). I’ve met one of the plaintiffs in one of the three lawsuits already in process. I don’t know much about Yelp, but he had my sympathy when I learned that somehow all the positive reviews of his business have slid away, but the awful ones, often posted by people who know each other, remained.
To learn more about the charges against Yelp, click here. Relevant excerpt:
In a complaint filed in San Francisco Superior Court March 12, the owner of a 17-year-old San Francisco business called Renaissance Furniture Restoration claimed Yelp deleted his business’s positive ratings after he declined to buy advertising.
In July, Restoration had 261 Yelp page views and an overall rating of 4.5 stars out of a possible five. The suit alleges that two days after he refused to pay “at least $300 a month” for advertising, six of seven 5-star reviews vanished from the site and his overall rating sank to 3.5 stars. (Read the 15-page lawsuit here.)
The ho-hum rating cost owner Boris Levitt big time. By August, the number of page views driven to Restoration’s website fell to 158 and his revenue dropped by 25 percent.
“People wouldn’t click on a business which only had a 3-star average rating, and I started to lose business,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.
As of Thursday, the company had 4.5 stars again, but just three reviews: two five-star recommendations and a four-star review.
That seems bad enough. But coming your way next week: a Yelp for people. That’s right, a site that allows people to individually rate individuals the way Yelp allows them to rate businesses. Here’s the story on that. Do you have the dirt on any enemies? Here’s your chance to spread it around. Or — if the system functions anonymously, like Yelp — you can just make some up. No one will know it was you (until, I guess, the lawsuit).
Every once in a while I think back to the novel 1984 and ask myself, “How did Big Brother gain that power?” And the answer is clear: We gave it to him. Willingly. Eagerly. But why go to the bother of developing an all-powerful Big Brother when, instead, anonymous rating sites can turn us all into Little Brothers, spreading lies and innuendo with abandon?
As reported here, I had difficulty getting out of Tucson on Friday night. But I was finally able to get home — and hey, my baggage arrived today, so there’s that good news to report too.
After my last post about this travel imbroglio, the airline powers-that-be decided that they didn’t have the necessary equipment on-hand at Tucson airport to fix the plane. So here’s what they did instead: They canceled my flight. Personally, I don’t care about specific flights or flight numbers — that’s their business — I just want to be on a plane that takes me where I need to go in a reasonable timeframe. But that wasn’t going to be, either: By the time they could get me to Phoenix, I would have missed my connecting flight. And so would the other 60 or so of us who were going to be on this little cloudhopper of a plane. So then they decided this:
They would BUS us to Phoenix.
Here’s what I posted on my Facebook wall: OK, the plane is worse-off than thought. Now they’re going to BUS us to Phoenix. Welcome to the 1940s. Best response from a Facebook friend, courtesy of my friend Alan in San Diego: “How William Inge.”
And y’know what? I was still fine with that. Again, not delighted, but not upset — hey, planes malfunction. I get it. By all means, fix it. But then the gate agent did some funny things:
That was the point at which I called the client whose travel agency had booked me on the flight. Once he understood my situation, he called me back almost instantaneously (thank you!) to say that I was now on a United flight headed to Los Angeles. I walked two gates over and picked up a boarding pass from the friendly and rather more competent-seeming gate agent at United.
But first I asked USAirways about my baggage. I don’t like to check bags — I make a point of traveling with two carry-ons: my laptop bag and a small rolling suitcase — but for this trip I’d had to check the suitcase because I had to carry on an LCD projector. I also checked the Bose speakers that go with it. For the fee of $110 roundtrip. The USAirways gate agent told me that my baggage was already on a plane, to Burbank. So I got on my new flight, to Los Angeles, and when I disembarked there I shared a cab back to the Burbank airport with another inconvenienced passenger who was supposed to be on my flight, an executive from Hilton. She bemoaned how much worse air travel had become, and wished it would go back the way it was 10 years ago. Here’s what I told her:
Forget it. The good old days aren’t coming back. Real or imagined, the threat of terrorism has thrown major maddening slowdowns in the way of getting onto a plane. But the bigger problem is the airline price war. We’ve all enjoyed the lower fares, but we’re paying the price in other ways: in airlines that purposely overbook (it’s cheaper to provide a voucher or two than have a plane lift off with open seats), that don’t feed you, that don’t offer enough gate agents, that don’t stock enough spare parts, that charge to take luggage.
And it’s not just the airlines: It’s Home Depot (good luck finding customer service or help of any kind); it’s deteriorating roads and bridges (because we don’t have enough tax revenue to maintain them); it’s failing schools (here in Los Angeles the school district and the teachers just agreed to cut another week off the school year as a budget-saving device because the state is, again, “borrowing” education funding); it’s your credit card company (charging higher fees for shorter due dates). It’s everywhere. And we’ve allowed it. We’re not mad enough. In fact, even at the end of this, I somehow couldn’t summon the high dudgeon some small part of my brain told me I was entitled to. No, I expected bad service. I expected that they wouldn’t get me on another flight in time, and I certainly expected my checked bags — which I paid $110 to check — not to arrive Friday night, no matter what they told me. And I was right: They arrived today, Sunday. Friday night what I got was a phone call: “Hello, this is Tucson airport. Um… we seem to still have your bags here from a canceled flight…?” In other words — no, the bags were not already loaded onto the plane, as the gate agent had said.
What finally — finally — pissed me off? When the baggage agent in Burbank told me no, they couldn’t deliver them — I’d have to come pick them up. It made no difference when I pointed out that it would cost me up to $30 to park at the airport to “run in” to get them. Evidently, delivery of your bags when they’ve fucked up is another service they’ve cut.
Neil Gaiman on what it’s like to be a relative nobody at the Oscars.
I know: It looks like a bowl of snot. But actually, it was one of the tastiest things I’ve eaten in quite a while. This is the dish of escargot, served with gorgonzola cheese and artichoke, with a toasted crust, that I consumed Wednesday night in Tucson. I took this photo because my seven-year-old son Dietrich has learned that I like to eat snails and he asks me frequently when I’m going to take him somewhere so he can try them. When these arrived at my table, I thought, “Let me show this kid what he’s in for.” So I texted the image to my household. He still wants to try them. But my wife texted back “Ewwwwwww.”
Sarah Palin is like a parasite that has overtaken the host body of John McCain. He created her, and now he needs her to survive. And in prostrating himself, he’s had to reject everything he once believed in.
I’m awaiting my flight in the Tucson airport, where this message was broadcast: “Attention, passengers waiting to board Flight 2715. Your aircraft is here, but they have identified a potential tire problem. They are investigating, but we thank you for your patience.”
Whenever something like this happens, I always see people get steamed and fret and stomp around. My thought is always: “Yes, please — fix it. I don’t want to take off in a broken aircraft.”
Update: Just got the next announcement. The mechanics have determined a “need to do a dual tire change.” Our potential delay time? “We’re looking at up to two hours. We’re also looking to see how this will impact connections.”
Guess what? Yes — I have a connecting flight. So I suppose I won’t be joining a bunch of playwright-friends to see “Wit” tonight.
I don’t know if or when Jesus Christ is coming back, but clearly we’re all blessed to have Steve Jobs among us. You know the idolatry has hit a high point when the fact that Steve Jobs sometimes emails customers makes it into the New York Times.