So just to make this clear. We had.

GIANT INFLATABLE BEAVERS.

WILLIAM SHATNER.

And… you cut away for some random Jerry Seinfeld ‘reality’ show?

NBC, this is why your ratings suck.

When you have a HIGH KICK LINE OF MOUNTIES you leave them ON.

I hate it. Hate hate hate it.

Not the concept, exactly, but the implementation leaves much to be desired.

Here is the deal. We live in one of the most densely populated areas in the country. And yet it doesn’t matter: broadband here is just as much of a near monopoly as it is elsewhere. The choice is cable (Comcast), which has hidden quotas and throttles connections randomly if it doesn’t like your downloading patterns, or DSL, which is never as fast as advertised and is administered by a company of imbeciles that thought it could quadruple in size with no problem and is now on the verge of bankruptcy and is being investigated by three states. Fiber is available in other parts of town, but not ours. Satellite wi-fi is a joke.

So the lesser of two evils is the DSL (we really hate Comcast). But it’s spluttery and slow. Stream? Ha ha ha. And here’s where the problem comes in. On some sites, such as YouTube, I can start the video, pause it, and then let the buffer fill with the entire video, allowing me to watch it all without stutters and pauses every one second. On most sites, this does not happen; the amount allowed to be buffered is so miniscule that the video is thus rendered completely unwatchable.

Now, I can see the logic: they don’t want people caching the whole file and then saving it. Except, psst, video people? I don’t WANT your crappy lo-res flash files. I want to watch them and then move on. But you make that impossible for me! So I have to go and find a place where I can download it instead, often in HD archival quality.

So anyway, the latest kerfluffle in the publishing world is the showdown between Macmillan and Amazon.com. As a complete outsider, I understand it as this: Macmillan wants Amazon to charge more for certain e-books, and Amazon wants to keep the price capped at 9.99. Amazon took the unorthodox step of removing the ability to purchase Macmillan material from its site, though they have since supposedly backed down (this is debatable — reports are that some items are still not able to be bought)

I guess my first question is, how is this situation different from Apple’s original effort to force the music industry to cap the price of a song download at .99? I fail to see much of a difference. The music industry howled because, omg, if a song was popular enough, clearly they ought to be charging what the market could bear and no less. They wanted to find the exact balance between volume and price where they maximized profits. Apple thought .99 was a good price point and a psychological barrier, plus -they- wanted to maximize the profits from sales of the portable devices, made by them, tied to their download store.

Sounds pretty much the same to me!

The publishers are on crack if they don’t think this exact situation will happen again if Apple really tries to make an iWords store for book downloads.

I’ve heard a lot of perspectives on the amazon/macmillan showdown, from the side of authors, from the side of retailers, from the side of publishers. But what I haven’t really heard is the side of the consumer. Well, I am neither publisher nor retailer, nor am I an author at this point in my life. What I am is a consumer who has watched the price of books skyrocket over the past 20 years. The rise of the hardcover and the trade paperback have vaulted the price of books that used to be $2 and $3 to $8, $13, $25. I can hardly think of anything else besides college tuition and health insurance that has risen in price at such an astonishing rate.

What does this tell me? Like the health industry, the publishing industry has a model of service that is broken. Their situation isn’t exactly the same as the music industry, though, so I’m not sure the solution can be the same either. In the music industry, most people don’t actually want a whole album. They want the two or three songs that they like and nothing more. Portable music is also a much more flexible format than a physical cd — so in many ways, the downloading consumer is getting a much better product than someone who spends the cash and buys the entire album on cd. (Not including DRM which negates the value of the download completely).

For publishing, this doesn’t work, since no one just wants three chapters out of twenty. You need the whole book or nothing. On the other hand, a physical book is, so far, more flexible than the same book on an ereader. You can write on it. You can share it with a friend. You can resell it. You can donate it to a charity. Taken care of, a book may last for 100 years or more.

You can do none of that with any of the current ebook models. This makes them far less valuable and their price should be lowered accordingly. The accessible lifetime of any current ebook is, by my best estimate, perhaps 5-10 years. And it could be much much shorter. Add onto this that to make an ebook, the distribution cost is pretty much nil. No shipping, no printing, no extra copies that have to be pulped later on. As a consumer, I’m not willing to pay more than $5 for a book in such a limited, crippled format. Which is one reason why I haven’t bought a Kindle and why I have no intention of buying any ereaders until this has been sorted.

This article by the BBC is as good an analysis as I’ve seen so far to explain why the hell Americans behave in the dumbass fashion that we do.

I think they’re wrong in tracing it back to the 60s, however. It goes further back than that. There’s always been a deep suspicion in this country of intellectuals, that they’re secretly making fun or putting themselves above others. You are supposed to become rich and successful due to your hard work or your charming personality or your innate talent rather than your intellectual gifts. What do you need all that book learnin for? There’s a large segment of American society that is deeply deeply suspicious and resentful of anyone who dares think for themselves, or questions ‘facts’ that are presented with no proof or rationality.

True Story: When the H1N1 vaccine came out, there was some debate as to whether or not people should get it. There are some legitimate reasons to decide not to (egg allergy, bad reaction to previous flu shot, compromised immune system), but there were also a lot of absolutely ludicrous statements floating around. In the course of a discussion, someone actually said in all sincerity that the vaccine caused death in 1% of people who got it. The lack of critical thinking skills evidenced by this statement is astonishing. I don’t disbelieve that propaganda of that sort was out there — I just can’t believe that people believed it! But then, people see numbers and their brains shut off. 1%, they think, that’s a pretty low number, maybe it’s true. Except, of course, 1% of even just 1,000,000 (and by that point about 20,000,000 doses had shipped) is 10,000. Even the American media could not fail to notice 10,000 randomly dead people.

I didn’t really listen to it, but I got the highlights.

It all sounded very nice, but I honestly no longer have any confidence that our completely dysfunctional government has the ability to implement anything at all. There was a brief period last year when it seemed like the Democrats might have grown some balls, when they finally realized that people were angry and they had momentum. But as usual, they squandered it all with their usual spineless jackassery. The Republicans, on the other hand, were they to come to power are perfectly capable of passing most of their agenda — except their agenda is ruinous for the average American.

So it seems we’ve gotten to the point where it’s impossible to expect improvement; the best we can hope for is that the Democrats retain power so things aren’t made worse.

And that is really depressing.

Someone said to me earlier that they agreed change needed to occur but that they didn’t think the government was the answer. Fine. Then what is?

Businesses in the US behave as if their employees should grovel and simper that they’ve deigned to employ them at all, let alone grant them a reasonable salary, civilized working hours or any kind of benefits. Change will not come from there: they have no incentive.

Individuals in the US have no power of negotiation; there are so many people equally qualified for jobs, not to mention the fact that their health care is probably tied to their job, that they cannot make any demands without risking personal disaster. Change will not come from there: they have no possibility of success.

Labor unions, which wrought much change in the middle of the last century, have been gutted and their power is low. Change will not come from there: people have been on their own for so long they no longer imagine it could be different.

So I can only assume that the people who think government isn’t the answer are operating on the underpants gnome theory of improvement. Step 1: Imagine a better situation. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Fixed!!

This kind of pie in the sky crap has even less chance of working than trusting the government.

Fail 1: Biker Cop
Sitting on his 10-speed with his little bike-cop uniform.
Perhaps a useful sort of cop in a city, but in a sprawling bedroom community where it can take a half hour to -drive- from south to north?

Fail 2: Annoying Radar Cop
Staking out the Hudson side of the bridge right next to the spot where the speed limit inexplicably drops to 35mph.
Fortunately in spite of his attempts to hide, highly visible from before the speed limit changes.

Fail 3: Lady at Checkout.
Sitting on her motorized cart thingee.
I have no problem with you because of the cart but rather your inability to count. 25 < 14 = FALSE

Fail 4: The Josie Prescott mystery series, by Jane Cleland
I was so excited to discover there was a mystery series set on the seacoast of New Hampshire. I remained thrilled and excited right up until page three of the first book, where the city of Rocky Point, located approximately where Hampton is in the real world, was described as having a population of 100,000. Do you know how many cities of that size there are in the ENTIRE STATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE? ONE. Even Nashua is still working on breaking into six figures. I tried to continue after that, but the lack of basic research evidenced by such a stupid population figure made it impossible for me to get in to the story.

Fail 5: The Jersey Barnes mystery series, by T. Lynn Ocean
I picked this up at the library because the cover made it sound interesting. And it seemed promising through the first couple of chapters — Jersey, unlike many recent series detectives, is a security consultant and has a lot of training and knowledge, so it doesn’t stretch plausibility that she would become embroiled in mysteries. But before too long the repeated references to her ginormous boobs and shounen anime figure had forced me to abandon all hope of continuing.

Fail 6: The Lomax & Biggs mystery series, by Marshall Karp
A blogger I’ve read for years had spent quite a bit of time gushing about this author and how much she adored the series. But the victim in the first book is a child molester, and even though he did die, I was turned off after all the waxing eloquent about how much fun he was having copping feels from little kids. It was too disturbing and it felt creepy.

Everythyng ys cooler wyth more ys.

As I was recently noting over at SiB, I have felt very comfortable mocking and making fun of Twilight, even though I have not actually read the book and have no plans to do so. While my knowledge of it is not intimate, I do know enough to know that my scorn is not heaped upon an unworthy object.

Until tonight, I had a similar relationship with Windows Vista. I had never used the beast, though I had seen it in person a few times, yet I derided it as the biggest piece of crap to come out of Microsoft since Windows Me.

Well, let me tell you, Bob just got a new laptop with Vista on, and I’ve spent the last while playing around with it. And it is the biggest piece of crap to come out of Microsoft since Windows Me.

It is so annoying, slow and has the stupidest set of defaults enabled that anyone could possibly have come up with. Who the hell was in their user testing group? Seriously? Here are my guesses:
* Double agents hired by Steve Jobs
* Clockwork monkeys
* The brilliant minds at CNBC
* Those who think Edward Cullen is romantic and not a creepyass stalker. Sorry, SPARKLING stalker. (Sorry hon, Mitaka did it better than you 20 years ago.)

The first of my radio presets has gone to all Christmas music.

As mentioned a few posts below, I often keep a draft post in Wordpress where I jot down ideas I’ve had for blog posts before I forget them. Ostensibly this list will help remind me later what the idea was when I have some time to write.

Since I basically haven’t touched this blog in about a year and a half, most of these jottings are now as mysterious to me as they would be to anyone else. I present them all, repeats and not repeats, for your perusal as I begin a new draft to hold my gestating posts.

1. J2/J1 asshat in restaurant, mom ‘calm down’
Presumably my brothers were behaving poorly in a restaurant and my mom’s reaction was not what the situation demanded. Beyond that, I have no idea what this meant.

2. funny conversation or story? Not dad backing into van… clifton park pizza?
Alas, I no longer remember even to what story ‘dad backing into van’ refers.

3. Uncle B namedropping. Dean Witter. Ellison. Michelle Pfeiffer.
Filthy Rich Uncle often talks about the famous people he knows or has met.

4. tile in bathroom – egg, clown
At least this one I can explain. In the downstairs bathrom at my mom’s house the vinyl floor has a semi-regular pattern imprinted upon it. It’s sort of faux marble and sort of not. There is one splotch that looks very much like a fried egg, and as it’s near the commode, it’s a spot I have been able to view many times over the years. Nearby is a bit of the pattern that looks like a clown head. Apparently, even though she’d lived in the house for over 20 years, my mom had never noticed these things until I pointed them out one day when we were talking on the phone.

5. joyful voices or whatever
My long overdue review of one of the strangest Newbery winners of all.

6. 2 books – dragonsong, wrinkle in time
These are books that changed my life. I don’t recall if I ever quite got around to explaining why.

7. books w/author name too large
NORA ROBERTS and JAMES PATTERSON, I’m looking at you.