Baffling story of the day: New York’s and San Francisco’s mass transit systems don’t want people putting unofficial maps of the systems on their iPods.
The New York Times reported in June that the MTA has begun registering its colorful route symbols as trademarks and has sent more than 30 cease-and-desist letters to businesses that had been using the route symbols to sell such items as bagels, perfume, T-shirts and tote bags.
The financially strapped MTA has a licensing department that has approved about 25 product lines, including neckties and coffee mugs, the Times reported.
Bright also used a map that became outdated when the BART system extended one of its lines and shortened another, said Jim Allison, a spokesman for BART. “We don’t have a problem with people disseminating information about BART,” Allison said. “We do have a problem with people pirating information that is incorrect,” he said.
Unless this is all an effort to shake down iPodSubwayMaps.com, this is inane. Demanding licensing fees to provide this service — even though BART will be doing the same thing for free shortly, allegedly — really misunderstands how much people are willing to pay for this, and thus how much money BART is losing out on.
And “pirating information that is incorrect?” First off, how massively self-important is it to claim that reprinting a subway map is piracy? That’s neither intellectual property nor is it information that BART has a compelling interest in keeping proprietary. In case they’ve forgotten, their mission is to provide affordable and convenient public transporation in and around San Francisco. And iPodSubwayMaps.com will naturally update their maps when they (rarely) change. That’s an insulting load of BS to pass off as a legitimate reason.
San Franciscans or Oaklanders (like, say, Mom and Dad) might be well-served to give a call to their local council members and ask them to remind BART to focus on their mission instead of picking fights with people who are trying to make using BART easier and more convenient.
After thinking the first two-hour episode of Threshold was pretty good, I watched the next one on TiVo Saturday afternoon, after the parade. It was comparable, at best, to one of the bad syndicated sci-fi shows of the 1990s. When they had a military school student in Danville, Virginia (a town I happen to know and was pleased to see mentioned on network TV) talk like an extra from Gone with the Wind, I got worried. Then they said a soldier had received a “Brown Star” during Vietnam. Delete.
In contrast, I had gone into watching Ghost Whisperer knowing it wouldn’t be very good, but I was unprepared for the scale of the awfulness. It was, as expected, mostly a showcase for Jennifer Love Hewitt’s cleavage, for which I can’t fault producers and directors, but I was probably being naive when I was surprised that the script was, essentially, Medium: The Early Years.
The show starts off with Melinda being married to a husband who knows about her powers and is alternately concerned for her and frustrated by her powers. Sound familiar? Except Medium, which just started its second season last week, has some of the best writing of any TV show in recent memory, especially in how the husband and wife relate to one another. (Jake Webber, who plays opposite Patricia Arquette probably deserved an Emmy even more than she did.)
One of the things that makes Medium work is that, while Allison has ghosts appearing to her and all sorts of psychic dreams, her ordinary reality is incredibly mundane. She has three small daughters, who range from adorable to needs-to-be-drowned-in-the-river, a husband who demands real attention from his spouse, dirty dishes, dirty clothes, a frumpy wardrobe, a practical-but-that’s-all haircut and a decidedly non-glamorous lifestyle in suburban Phoenix, Arizona.
Melinda, over on Ghost Whisperer, owns her own fabulous store (which no one shops at, except when the plot dictates), a husband who carries her down the block to the big Victorian home he’s restoring somewhere in the anonymous town of “The Village” (I kid you not) and who, despite no apparent financial means of doing so, drives a big bitchin’ SUV and dresses fabulously.
Now, if this had the sort of loopy sense of humor that Charmed does, it might succeed despite being so freaking dopey. But it doesn’t. It takes itself as seriously as Highway to Heaven and Touched by an Angel ever did, except few conservative Christians are likely to watch an occult show about Hewitt’s breasts. And even they can’t carry this show. It’ll be dead in a matter of weeks, and good riddance. Maybe then the networks will shift things around so that Everybody Hates Chris isn’t up against Survivor, Veronica Mars isn’t up against Lost and Supernatural isn’t up against My Name is Earl.
Well, that was an unusually productive Saturday morning for me.
I wasn’t able to get the camera from the Hesperia Star office, as Main Street being closed diverted most people on the south end of town onto Olive Street (which I normally use as the nearly empty alternative to Main Street), including an awful lot of apparently frustrated little old ladies. Today was the first time I had someone in her 70s willfully blast through a stop sign in front of me to get wherever it is septuagenarians blast off to on Saturday mornings.
But me, Peter, Daily Press ad honcho Kevin Rigney and his wife all piled into a 1959 Ford Thunderbird convertible driven by a friend of a Daily Press employee, and dutifully beauty pageant waved our way down Main Street, followed by several trash trucks from Advance Disposal (which may or may not have been an editorial comment on our work, I’m not sure), who blasted their horns more or less non-stop for 90 minutes.
The Kiwanis Club of Hesperia has been running this parade for a number of years now, and it shows. As we went down Main Street at a stately 5 to 10 miles per hour, we passed a number of Kiwanis announcers, who let the hundreds, maybe thousands in attendance know who each of the floats were.
There were some nice surprises there: While I might expect the announcers to have something nice to say about everyone in the parade, we had several people wave to get our attention and yell how much they like the paper. The Daily Press commissioned a comprehensive readership study earlier this year, so I know what the numbers say about our readership (all very good stuff, although I think it’s probably proprietary info that I can’t share here), but plenty of people don’t necessarily like the paper they read. It’s nice to know that at least a few Hesperians appreciate and maybe even enjoy what we’re doing.
Next year, if I do this again, I’m wearing my Hesperia Star baseball cap, though. I’ve got a pretty serious sunburn.
I have been drafted into riding in the Daily Press/Hesperia Star car in tomorrow’s Hesperia Days parade. How I will take pictures and write a story from inside the car remains to be seen.
OK, a shot at me (or at least, guys like me) was taken on the latest edition of All Songs Considered. In their team review of the new Liz Phair record, it was stated that most of her fans are horny guys who think that Exile in Guyville was a smutty love letter to them, and that they don’t get the irony.
Speaking as a male fan since the EIG days (it came out while I was in Egypt, but the Rolling Stone cover story about her was so intriguing, my brother mailed me a copy of it from New York City), this is nonsense.
For starters, the female commentator (I didn’t catch her name, but she’s apparently a disc jockey on Sirius Radio, on their Outlaw Country channel, of all things) can’t have gone to that many concerts. The two I’ve attended in Los Angeles have been mostly women and gay men, neither of whom, presumably, thought that Liz was trying to sex them up on EIG.
Secondly, you’d have to be a moron to not get that “Divorce Song” and “Fuck and Run,” two of the high points of the record, are somehow happy about sex and relationships. “Divorce Song” is a tough listen, as you’re hearing the apparent penultimate conversation of a relationship, and “Fuck and Run,” in addition to its other baggage, implies she was sexually molested at age 12. Maybe there are guys who would interpret this as love letters to them, but I doubt they’re listening to her — they’re more likely having creepy salacious thoughts about Radio Disney.
For me, though, Liz is the musical equivalent of one of my many female friends. While her life doesn’t exactly mirror the life of Kris or Kathy or Denise or any of the others, it’s got elements that I suspect are familiar to all of them. Her first album is about a girl in college and just after dropping out, singing about the single life. Her second, Whip-Smart, is about her post-collegiate life, centering around the single “Supernova,” which boasts of the sexual prowess of her new boyfriend (who is favorably compared to an F-15 jet in the sack) whom she eventually marries.
whitechocolatespaceegg, her next full album, is about the married Liz, her husband and her new child. But marriage is obviously not all roses, and she has multiple songs about how marriage is real work. “Love is Nothing” is short for “love is nothing like they say,” and “Go On Ahead” talks about a married couple doing things apart so that the marriage will stay together. It’s a shockingly personal album, for all that it is layered with wild metaphors and imagery and psychodelic soundscapes.
The divorce happened, and the self-titled Liz Phair was her next album. Its open move towards a more slick and commercial sound is much-discussed, but it’s really a pretty obvious progression from the slick-sounding whitechocolatespaceegg and even many songs on Whip-Smart. She wasn’t going to always record her music on four-track recorders, folks. The highlight of the album — which talks about being single in her 30s and trying to figure out what comes next in her life — is “Little Digger,” a wincingly personal song about her young son showing a new boyfriend his toy cars, but telling him “this one is my favorite/this one you can’t have/I got it from my dad.”
And the new album, Somebody’s Miracle, carries Liz forward to her late 30s. It comes out in early October.
For me, to listen to Liz Phair albums is like catching up with one of my female friends, bitching about husbands and boyfriends or trying to figure out what the hell they’re going to do with their lives. I don’t think Jessica or Sarah are coming onto me by doing this, it’s about just sharing what’s going on in their lives when we catch up with one another.
I’m looking forward to catching up with her again next month.
LizPhair.com has a media player that includes two songs from Somebody’s Miracle and a music video, along with older tunes.
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