Now that I’ve ended my day of internet silence — and thank you again to everyone here who joined me in helping to make the internet more available to everyone, especially those struggling with slow connections — I thought I’d share this great news. The previously lost Beckett play, “Attack the Day Gently,” has been found! Here are the details.

Thanks to Mark Chaet for alerting me to this!

In which David Byrne talks about his love for music, and his opinion that lyrics are overrated.

As someone who has been listening to Byrne’s lyrics for more than 30 years, I agree with him that it’s often the sound of lyrics (his lyrics, anyway), that’s more important than the meaning. That’s because the songs he’s done both with and without Talking Heads have been largely connotational rather than denotional — they connote a certain mood or situation, most often: a rootless anxiety. (Or, sometimes, a quirky sort of hope.) This displacement from his surroundings puts him squarely in the tradition of postmodern artists where, of course, meaning is less important than immediate impact. Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf and William Burroughs and Donald Barthelme were usually more interested in transmitting a feeling than telling a story. And that sounds like a close approximation of what David Byrne does in his songs.

Thanks to Paul Crist for alerting me to this video.

Interesting — and quick — reading, from LATimes.com:  Six prominent technophiles tell how they think the tablet computer will fare.

Much as I love the current delivery system — books, magazines — I couldn’t help noting in my most recent travels last week that I was lugging around three books and five magazines with me and that, perhaps, an electronic replacement would be more efficient….

Most notable comment in this piece, from the editor of Wired magazine:  “You could do many things right with the Web, but not magazines. Tablets will allow us to do digital magazines that are intelligently designed, flow correctly and have the artistic intent preserved.” What he’s saying is that there won’t be just a portability advantage, and an advantage thanks to linking, but also an artistic advantage. That interests me. Of course, it’s also being said by the editor of what was notoriously the hardest-to-read magazine of last decade. The screaming fonts and colors and the incomprehensible layouts were guaranteed to give you a migraine.

I can’t think of any single cause more worth supporting tomorrow than Blank Screen Day. It asks very little of us — just that we turn off the internet for one hour during business hours — and in exchange it helps potentially billions of people around the world get online and get back to the important work of rebuilding the world economy.

Please join me.

Here’s a link to the site. There’s more information on the G.I.V.E. Initiative, the organization behind this, there and on the Blank Screen Day Facebook page. I’m proud to be involved in this very important cause.

Happy to say I’ll be attending THE conference of the year:  Stark Expo!

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:

1. The “bus” became “a series of shuttles,” each of which “holds nine people.” And it didn’t sound like I was going to be one of those nine people, because:
2. He read out a litany of canceled destinations those   shuttles would be servicing, and while it was a long list, it somehow didn’t include Burbank, and because:
3. When I asked about this, he said, “You never know. Maybe some of these people with tickets have already given up, and we’ll be able to get you on a shuttle. Just hang out.”

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.