Global POV: At the Intersection of Technology and Culture

A very robot Christmas (card)

by David Holtzman

Electronic greeting cards are very lame. For one thing, they look like spam. Friends sometimes send them, but usually they're non-computer literate old people who put in their best set of false teeth and drive their Edsel down to the tellygraph office so they can send a note to the young 'uns.

The worst are people who send them because they're trying to network very cheaply. In other words, you're on the 'C' list; not important enough to rate a phone call once in a while to stay in touch, not even important enough to get a paper card, but they're going to add your email address to their list so you'll know that they're "thinking" of you.

It's too bad that you can't get some kind of USB gizmo that you can plug in and send a bolt of electricity flying across the wires to toast the well-wishers with some real holiday spirit.

Posted on December 27, 2007

View from an airplane

by David Holtzman

I fly a lot, both domestic and international and I thoughtfully read articles talking about trends today which might be a pain in the kiester tomorrow. I hear a lot of talk about the degradation of airline services lately and I think it's mostly deserved, although it not clear who the villains are: the execs, the unions, Dick Cheney (I always include him on a bad guy list.)

There have been some outrageously bad cases in the last year, such as the notorious Jet Blue meltdown that left some passengers stranded for up to ten hours with no facilities. Some states are starting to do something about it...New York has just passed a law that takes effect after New Years that forces the airlines to provide a minimum amount of services such as bathrooms, clean air, food and water to passengers stuck on a plane for more than 3 hours. The state can levy up to $1000 per person if this rule is violated.

Naturally the airlines are going to court to block the law.

I understand their concern. Many of them are in bankruptcy or heading there. The last thing that they need is another unanticipated expense. As corporate officers, they need to protect the shareholders' value.

However, as corporate officers, they have an ethical obligation to "do the right thing", even if it costs them. Bathroom breaks every 3 hours? Come on.

It's not just the money, it's also an attitude. Employees of this industry (and I mean ALL of them), from baggage handlers to flight stewards are rarely friendly, often discourteous and frequently bullying and rude. Of course I'm talking about North American airlines. The European and Asian ones are mostly pretty good on the service front and they usually serve some food even on a quick flight.

What other industry would invent the munchkin can of coke with less liquid in it than a zit?

Perhaps the solution is for the government to nationalize the industry, fire all of the untrained service people like the aging barmaids-in-the-sky, pull the customer service business back from India and clean house. First priority is safety. Second priority is fiscal responsibility. Third should be customer satisfaction.

(And how about some freaking food on five hour flights!!)

Posted on December 18, 2007

Binary bitch slapping

by David Holtzman

Do computers work for us or do we work for them? It seems that we spend a disproportionate amount of time complying with requests made to us by automated processes. Demon dialers call us at home and most of us blithely hold the line and answer the programming with key pressing. We call companies and are confronted with the dialer's cousin--the dreaded voice mail box system ("Press 1 if you're calling about timber wolves, Press 2 if you're calling about wolverines.)

Websites were supposed to make things easier for us, but in many ways they have not. They also try to force us into a rat maze of deterministic choices. Commercial websites do not relate to us by our problems, they force us to constantly choose from their navigation menu, which is another variant of the voice mail menu.

There must be a new paradigm for how to interact with computer systems. We should be able to just blather to a gadget and get a rational response. I'm not sure that this is completely AI in a conventional sense--the software doesn't have to know much about the world, just how to translate our problems with a company into a quality solution. I hope that they don't turn out to be the same thing.

Humans free-form their problems, mixing fact, feeling and opinion along with a little dose of anecdotes ("my car used to act the same way, except that is an ipod. God, it makes me mad when it locks up like that!") Computers need to deal with that somehow. One of the biggest problems with digital thinking is that is presumes that someone smarter than you has thought through all the permutations of what could go wrong. This is why you often go to a product help site and get a lot of "did you turn on the box?" kind of questions, but nowhere can you find a mention of what appears to you to be demonic possession of your Tivo.

Posted on December 11, 2007

Halloween Coulter

by David Holtzman

I just wondered what Ann Coulter would look like as a skeleton.

Posted on October 24, 2007

Swarms of politicians

by David Holtzman

I believe that a great deal of the problems that we face today in America stem from the concept of "professional politicians." These men and women are getting their livelihood from political office and presumably are loathe to give up the money, power and perks. This concept is a relatively new one, mostly in the last 50 years. Historically people would go to Washington for a couple of terms, often after achieving success at something else, even if only running the family estate. After serving their time in DC, they would return to wherever it was they were coming from in the first place.

Now, it's all different. We have politicians that "conveniently" live in certain areas. I know of at least 4 Senators who have almost no connection with their state other than maintaining a residence of convenience there. Many politicians are groomed, some from birth, to take office and keep it. If dishonest, the gravy spigots turn on immediately; if they have some ethics, they have to wait until they're finally voted out by a disgusted electorate, at which point they can wallow in corporate muck as a directors, high priced lobbyists or political appointees.

We need term limits for all offices and campaign financing should be reexamined with an eye towards making it possible for pharmacists, writers, engineers and nurses to be elected.

Posted on September 13, 2007

Check your package

by David Holtzman

Packaging is really getting on my nerves. It seems as if every year the material gets thicker and more cumbersome. I find that a substantial portion of my daily garbage is packaging material. Clamshell packages are dangerous--I've gotten cut several times trying to cut through the plastic. I recently bought an SD memory card that was in a package roughly the size of a shoe box.

Is it all to stop shoplifting? Is it inventory control? Is it to make it easier to shelf-stack the packages?

So often you buy digital goods that come in thick, hefty garbage--software in huge boxes, DVDs in great big marketing blisters and even small, plastic gift cards sold in great big honking packages.

I'm not particularly eco-conscious. My recycling bone is worn to a nub---but retailers have to be stopped.

Posted on August 22, 2007

The benefits of unplugging

by David Holtzman

I am currently enjoying a short, unplugged vacation. I don't answer cell phones. I don't watch television. I watch movies and usually junky ones, too. I don't use IM. I pay attention to the weather and go to sleep after a nice breath of sea air and a brandy.

I dread going back to the city and getting my day time-sliced and being responsive to signals emanating from the wire stuck up my butt.

Yet, I'm typing this on my computer and when I look up the weather on my computer and I watch DVDs on my A/V setup. Some gadgetry is beneficial and relaxing. Some is demanding and intrusive. I think that the secret of life in the digital age is knowing which is which.

Posted on August 16, 2007

The iPhone in hyper drive

by David Holtzman

Tomorrow is the long-awaited release day for iPhones. I'm a bit interested myself although I'm not sure yet how I get out of my existing contract, but then again I'm a gadget freak. How many gadget freaks could there possibly be? 10,000 maybe across the country? So who is doing all of the hyping? Why would most people care about a phone?

After all, there is no feature on the iPhone that will fundamentally change a person's lifestyle, like getting a first Tivo, a Palm Pilot or an mp3 player would have. You would have to dig pretty deeply into the Maslovian hierarchy of needs to find out which itch the iPhone yen is scratching.

Does the iPhone cure cancer, attract women (or men) or provide a mobile bubble of peace and goodwill to mankind? Nope. It plays music and has a cool touch screen. The only way that an iPhone could get a geek laid would be for him to trade it to a knowledgeable hooker for services rendered.

This reminds me of the lunatic hypes surrounding pre-Vista Windows releases. Remember Windows 98 and how Microsoft had a big party across the country with people sleeping in the street in line so that they could get an early copy? What was that all about? I might do that for Led Zeppelin reunion tickets, but nothing less.

The iPhone will not add one day onto your life span, make your children into better people, increase the size of your body parts or get you onto American Idol. It is a gadget. In five years time, it will look as antiquated as five year old shoe-box-sized cell phones look now.

IT'S A PHONE, PEOPLE. GET A LIFE!

I'll buy one, of course.

Posted on June 28, 2007

Cell phone gossipers can just go to hell

by David Holtzman

Having just returned from vacation today, I'm fresh full of bitching and complaining, ranging from poor hotel service to cattle car airplanes. But my biggest hassle when I travel is my loss of privacy--auditory privacy. People just won't shut the hell up.

You can't get peace and quiet anymore when you travel.

Why? Just like everything else these days, blame it on technology.

The way some people use cell phones drive me crazy.

There's four reasons for using a cell phone:

1. Coordinating something. This is a short and sweet call that sounds like "Meet you at the clock in 15 minutes" or "Half a million by noon or you get another finger in the mail"
   
2. Making a business call. This tends to be 10/15 minutes in length and is a bunch of strung-together Q and A punctuated by a lot of self-important throat clearing and if talking to a salesman, seasoned by ghetto business patois. "Yeah, I'm down with it, dog..600 cases of sani-wipes, blue at 10% off list."
   
3. Normal people talking normally. Most of us use the cell to call our kids, spouses and friends and give them immediate information, saving the details for later. "I had a good time last night, but I did get a restraining order."
   
4. Using the cell phone to extend the range of mindless gossip. This one I don't get, but many people talking on their phone are exchanging no information at all...they are carrying on a conversation that they ought to be having in person. By "ought to have", I don't endorse the idea, just requesting a change of venue. "Then, he said that these shoes matched my eyes and I said, why they're not red...[sound of grande toffee nut latte being snorted out a surgically enhanced nostril]"
   

I saw one too many people lying on the beach, obviously staying at a very nice hotel and gabbing on their phones about television shoes, manicures and mutual friends. Why do people feel the need to do this? The worst part of it is that the kind of talkers that BS on their phone in pubic don't care if you hear them. In fact, it seems that they want you to listen in as they stroll into your little sound bubble at the beach or the bar or the restaurant or the park or walking along the sidewalk or on airplane.

This last piece is actually newsworthy. The FCC is considering allowing cell phone usage on airplanes. The interference issue was never real anyway, and technically all the airlines need to do is to equip the planes with small cell tower equivalents. The real problem is not technical or safety-related, but privacy. I don't want to hear the blabbers and their treacly, intrusive conversations in the air where I'm captive, can't always put headphones on to drown them out and am usually nervous anyway.

There's something special about being at a park and hearing the birds or getting some peace and quiet in an airplane seat. As a culture, we've devalued this right to be auditorally alone and we will soon lose it in every public place.

Posted on April 02, 2007

Skin deep and superficial--American Beauty

by David Holtzman

We Americans have gotten rid of many forms of discrimination since the 60s. Perhaps I'm being naive, and I realize that we haven't obliterated all prejudices, but race, religion and gender have become less of a factor in policy and decision making. Good for us.

But one form of prejudice remains and is seldom talked about--the double standard that we apply between the average looking and the attractive. And by "attractive", I mean women.

Take for instance, the Valerie Plame case. Ms. Plame is at the heart of the whole Scooter Libbey brouhaha and is a professional covert CIA agent. Yet, she is usually described in news coverage as "willowy" or some equally biased word. You don't often hear that kind of adjectival reporting being applied to politically newsworthy men. Can you imagine the words to describe Karl Rove or Dick Cheney? They sort of remind of Borat's producer...you know, the "nutty" one.

Or how about the TV show, "Ugly Betty"? To make the star "ugly", they give her braces and glasses. What's wrong with that?

We don't apply that standard to men. Robert DeNiro is not a great looking guy, nor is Jack Nicholson or Sean Penn. Yet we like them as actors. The pretty boy actors generally aren't. Hugh Grant or Jude Law are not of the same caliber, but aren't believed to be either. Yet it seems that all a great-looking actress needs to do to get an oscar is to wear prosthetic ugly makeup, like Charlize Theron in Monster or Nicole Kidman in The Hours.

And don't get me started on the MYWBG news stories. (Missing Young White Blonde Girl).

Perhaps the Internet will be the great leveler. On Second Life, for instance, you can make yourself appear as anyone that you want to be.

Posted on March 16, 2007

Too many ads

by David Holtzman

I feel advertising messages being pounded into every orifice that I have. This holiday season is the worst and the commercial cacaphony shows no sign of relenting. If I could figure out a way to sabotage advertisers and cost them some money for being so intrusive, I would. If someone can figure out how to make a paying business out of getting back at obnoxious advertisers, please let me know.

I went to a couple of movies with my kids and sat through easily 10 minutes of local ads for irrelevant services and products, poorly made and loud enough to be irritating. Then came the previews of coming attractions--many of which were apparently not coming until summer 2008. Several were of violent movies that I have no interest in seeing and less interest in previewing. The movie started and I was treated to numerous, not-so-subtle incidents of product placement in the film. There were ads on the popcorn boxes, ads in the lobby.

There are video ads on taxis, airplanes and other places where you're captive and can't get away. The percentage of commercials to actual content in network shows has made the use of a product like Tivo almost mandatory.

I don't mind static ads so much, but video and audio commercials are much more intrusive. You can page through a magazine laden with ads and completely ignore them if you want; it's much harder to do that when you're dealing with immersive media like video. Watch some veteran television watchers during commericals--they stare at the screen as intently as they do during the show itself--other than bathroom and snack breaks.

I don't know what the solution is. It will get worse. I've often wondered if it would be legal to advertise in space, because if so, someone would do it. I once read a science fiction story about someone who managed to put an ad on the dark side of the moon where everyone on the planet had to watch. It doesn't seem so far-fetched today.

The solution is probably going to be vigilanteism. I look forward to someone who can make a buck out of pushing back on advertisers.

Posted on December 27, 2006

Clean squeaky teeth

by David Holtzman

I just got back from the Dentist's office and had my teeth cleaned. This is horribly picky, I suppose, but I absolutely HATE the way hygenists get you in the chair, fill your mouth with equipment and then tell you their life's story.

You can't get up. You can't interrupt. You have to lie back while they poke and prod you ("I'm sorry, did that hurt?") and tell you about their cousin's cancer or their boyfriend or their political opinions.

It's one of life's annoyances, like television commercials, except hygenists have no off button.

Posted on November 22, 2006

Treo no hero

by David Holtzman

After a decade of using Palm-powered PDAs, I finally gave up the ghost and bought...a Crackberry. Even though I've been making fun of them for years, Blackberrys make the most sense for my needs right now. What I'd been looking for was a GSM world phone that synced calenders and got email. That's it. Oh yeah, and it can't crash every five minutes, forcing me to juggle a Treo with my hands full, open a battery compartment and stick a stylus into a little hole to reboot the "phone." And sometimes my Treo 650 randomly called people, usually at inappropriate moments. When I heard my son's voice coming out of my pant's pocket once, I had hit my limit.

Treos really do suck. Yet at one point they were the "it" device. Every CEO wannabe had one. Many of us spent serious time learning graffiti just to show everyone at work how cool we were, like college kids mastering chopsticks to impress a date.

So Robotics sold out to Palm. Palm dropped graffiti (effectively) from the high end products and then competed with smartphone companies like Samsung and Blackberry by adding broken features. Buying a Treo these days is disappointing, especially for former fans of the product line.

The blogs are full of complaints with both the 600 and the 650 and I'm sure that the 700 is no better. The weird problems are legendary: crashing several times a day, memory leaks that kill the system and phones that sound like you're making a ransom call using an electronic voice changer.

The problems with the product line are threefold:

1. The operating system releases are buggy and unstable
   
2. The hardware shell always seem to have glaring usability problems
   
3. They've never been great-sounding phones
   

As a long-time supporter of Treos, I'm disappointed at how they've turned out. Oh by the way, the tech support is virtually useless since they will blame the phone provider under almost every cirumstance. "My treo just caught on fire!" "Is it Verizon? We've gotten a few of those today."

Posted on September 21, 2006

Goose livers and human hearts

by David Holtzman

Okay, this is not strictly speaking about technology or even politics; the New York Times has an article today talking about the impending ban of fois gras in Chicago. That's right, the Windy City has decided (for animal rights reasons) to ban sales of the tasty goose liver and have tasked the Health Department to enforce it.

For those in the know, the French make geese fois-grasable by forcefeeding them grain, shoving a food-laden human fist down the birdie's throat. This strange practice causes the goose's liver to expand, often by a factor of 10.

I like fois gras. I also don't like to see animals getting hurt or treated badly, so I could go either way on this kind of thing. However, what I don't like is patronizing legal behavior. Food prohibitions like this one and others such as the ban on unpasteurized cheeses and the old one barring importation of prosciutto are not directly saving anyone's health. The potential problems that result from eating a bad piece of cheese can't be any worse than riding a roller coaster run by shifty-eyed carnies or just eating a couple of dozen raw oysters. And as for the protect-the-animal stuff, I invite anyone to dig just a little bit into how chickens are raised on the DelMarVa peninsula at the Perdue birdie death house and not swear off McNuggets for awhile.

Protectionism is a bad thing. There is a line somewhere and this is not it. Cheap-minded politicians looking to curry favor with crackpot constituents often propose this kind of law. They take advantage of existing enforcement groups created for wholely different purposes, because if they asked for ten million dollars to fund a goose liver enforcement squad, they'd be laughed at the way that they deserve. Hence, the health code inspectors are forced to enforce the fois gras law or police are required to check for illegal immmigrants or the IRS has to punish people who don't pay court-mandated child support. Every occurence of misdirected authority is the result of rodent legislators gnawing at the system long enough to finally draw blood.

This is why I carp and rebel against new surveillance and enforcement groups in government. Imagine all the Homeland Defense apparatus being used for a purpose other than terrorism, maybe to track down illegal movie copiers or pot smokers or maybe take another crack at the prosciutto gluttons.

Sure, today it's a goose's liver. Tomorrow it's your ass.

Posted on August 23, 2006

Vigilante justice

by David Holtzman

I don't understand why spam is still commercially viable. Looking at what I have for spammail today, I have several sTr0nG bUy recommendations for the Equal Gold Trading company, similar touting for Goldmark industries, a diet product called Anatrim from a company named unafento, spam service called Zenith-net and several thinly veiled Viagra ads from a place called iorrestuly (which doesn't resolve to anything in a browser).

So at some point, these are "real" companies, right? Someone is paying the spammers money to drive people somewhere. I assume that these are not people who get their kicks out of misspelling words and vaguely annoying everyone.

So why don't vigilante's blow the "real" companies out of the water? If you can be sure that the advertising business is actually paying for the spam (and not being set up), then surely there are people out there who can make their servers go away for awhile?
In the medium-term view, vigilanteism is the most likely method for successful spam pushback. If the rewards were huge DOS (Denial of Service) attacks, then companies would think twice about seeing spam as an alternative form of advertising.

Now phishing is another problem...

Posted on July 30, 2006

Hotel towel scam

by Melody

One of the things that I really hate about hotels are the little "green" cards saying that if you care about the planet, you'll use dirty towels for a couple of days. You signify this by dropping the towels on the floor or something as opposed to putting them on the rack. The "save-the-planet" messages are written like they were written by a Jewish mother toting a Greenpeace bag and are straightforward in their guilt-provoking prose.

Hotels around North America have unsurprisingly sprung up to the challenge and put the little cards in all their bathrooms. Many of them have gone one better and making the default action "no-towel" unless you do something bizarre, like put a special card on the bed or in one case, actually being forced to call the desk and say that you want fresh towels every day (Earth-Killer!).

The Internet is littered with websites telling hotels how much money that they'll save by doing this, typicall $1 - $1.50 per day, per guest. That's why they're doing it. If hotels could save money by protecting wildlife, you'd have rabbits in your shower. They are not doing it to be good citizens, they are doing it to save $1.50 per guest, per day.

Hotels will spit filthy smoke into the air from a heating system, sponsor seal-clubbing expeditions for their guests or invite the oil industry to have an Exxon Valdez reunion with no shame at all. The towel scam is a cynical attempt to increase their profit margin.

I like clean towels every day. When I spend $200 for a hotel room, I expect them, regardless of what I'm doing to the planet. Can't they just raise the price of the cans of peanuts in the minibar or tack another couple of bucks on inroom porn or something?

Posted on July 24, 2006

A tale of three worlds

by David Holtzman

The world of technology products is a crazy one. Thinking about this other day, I realized that every product is actually designed by and for three completely separate constituencies.

First off, every gadgets is designed to placate lawyers. DVDs that block out menu functions while horrible, meaningless threats flicker on the screen in multiple languages, car GPS systems that disable important functions while the car is moving and force the driver to acknowledge that not looking at the road is dangerous while driving. Code is actually written to satisfy a lawyer. Manuals have significant amounts of gobbledy-gook in them, enough so that it's actually difficult to find operating instructions in English in most of them.

Technological stuff also has to please the marketer. It's very common to have buttons on devices and software functions that seem silly, yet marketers insist on them. That's how you end up with things like graphic equalizers on stereos. Marketers often insist that capabilities be built that make no sense to the developer, but the engineers do it anyway, because in most organizations, they have no power.

Lastly, is the user. Although most gadgets do do what they say that they will do, (radios play, cameras take pictures)., users are often disenfranchised by the other two constituencies, even though the marketers claim to be speaking for them. The truly amazing part, though, is how bad most technology products are at pleasing the consumer. Sure they all do what they say that they'll do, but for how long? How many cell phones lose coverage and PCs need to be constantly rebooted? I'm kind of a gadget freak--an early adopter. Every morning I realize that I could spend the whole day working on my "stuff" if I wanted to--downloading patches, configuring phones, you name it. Hey, life's too short.

What would be nice would be if technology products were built primarily for the user, emphasizing design, safety and maintainability. Especially the latter. I'd love to buy a phone that didn't drop a signal, for instance. I so very rarely run into a tech product that just works out of the box as advertised and doesn't need to be constantly fiddled with. It could be done, but it would take a different design philosophy. Keep the lawyer and the marketer the hell out of the room during product inception. Create a new class of technology worker that is empowered to promote usability and stability and genuinely represents the interests of the consumer.

Posted on May 14, 2006

Cell phone woes

by David Holtzman

To quote Howard Beale, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." I'm not talking about the war or even the Patriot Act; I'm talking about cell phones.

Cell phone service sucks.

It's bad on several levels:

- The coverage sucks. Every carrier has huge dead zones, some in the middle of large metropolitan areas. They're supposed to be a utility...we wouldn't let the power company get away with this.
- The rates suck. They're all over the map.
- GSM sucks. Everyone else in the world has working GSM. It's still a curiousity here outside the big city areas.
- Customer service sucks. Just try and fix a billing problem.

So what I'm wondering is why this is? Is crappy service built into these business models? This kind of thing has become endemic to American businesses and it's not what we used to be known for.

People joke about the perpetual "I can't hear you, I have a bad connection" conversations that are a daily event for most of us.

Isn't there something that Congress or the FCC can do to hold the mobile carriers to some minimum level of service?

Posted on March 13, 2006

Etiquette

by David Holtzman

Etiquette in the Digital Age -- Lesson #1

If someone emails you, email them back, don't call them. If they call you by cell, call them back by cell. Never cross-communicate unless you know a person well. People give you contact information for a reason and often reach out in the method that works best for them at that moment.. More importantly, they will look for a reply on the same medium. It's frustrating to have someone call your work voice mail in response to an email when you're traveling and are only picking up your messages once a day. Most importantly, it's the sign of a newbie.

Posted on January 24, 2006

CNennui

by David Holtzman

I watch CNN every morning when I work out. It's great because I get so angry watching how the station has sunk into the whoredom of media depravity that I find renewed strength and drive. Every time another blonde girl goes missing somewhere I get to another dime on my bench press--it's like a MacLuhanesque-drinking game.

You can't tell what the real news is anymore because they're so obsessed with celebrity stories and SMWP events (Stupid Missing White People). You can go for days without seeing an Iraq story, weeks to get a body count number. For those of us old enough to remember, what a change from Vietnam where Walter Cronkite would shove it in our face every dinner.

I hate the way they have paid advertisements masquerading as news: Rally whats-his-name, a Steven Seagull look-alike who grimly reports each morning that airports are 45 minutes delayed in the name of Travelocity (completely useless information and generally wrong). At Christmas time, they sold airtime to dot coms to report on what peoplle were buying in their little E-elf way. Not news, not even statistically valid.

They simper, they giggle, they titter. The only news show with a laugh track.

Thank God for Miles O'Brien. He has a dark side, a sense of humor and I suspect, just a little bit weary cynicism about his profession and his job.

Things have gotten reallly bad when you have to watch Al Jazeera to get your news.

Posted on January 18, 2006

Coffee, tea or glee?

by David Holtzman

This week TSA is contemplating changing the rules defining permissable items on aircraft. They're purportedly going to relax the restrictions on sharp objects in favor of monitoring for explosive devices. Small scissors, screwdrivers and tools with blades under 7 inches will be legal again.

Sounds like a great idea to me. TSA has to check 1 in 4 bags anyway because of screwdrivers or nailclippers. This frees them up to prioritize on real threats to the aircraft--explosives. Bombs are much more insidious because they don't necessarily set off metal detectors, can look like any normal device and don't require a lot of space.

The Association of Flight Attendants disagrees. According to the Washington Post, many flight attendants disagree. They quote the association's spokesperson, Corey Caldwell, as saying that:

When weapons are allowed back on board an aircraft, the pilots will be able to land the plane safety but the aisles will be running with blood.

So...Enough. Enough hype. Enough hyperbole. Enough scare tactics.

9/11 was a bully's wet dream and I'm sorry to say that the underpaid, overworked service people that work for the airlines have jumped on we frequent travelers' genitals with stilleto heels.

I have personally seen uncountable incidents of abusive behavior coming from flight attendants and baggage handlers, each time citing "security concerns" as the reasons for things like: asking for a pillow, complaining about a meal or asking for more ice in a bloody mary.

I'm going to say something slightly un-PC here; I liked it a lot better in the 70s when stewards and stewardesses were young and enthusiastic and saw their job as a kick. I hate to fly, really hate it and I was reassured by calm and pleasant people. Today, I get flight attendants who look and act like a hated family aunt. Mean demeanor, unwillingness to help unless pushed and mildly narcissistic tendencies as evidenced by the inter-attendant gabfests that seem to occupy much of the flight.

Sure, attendants get hurt on airlines. Sorry about that, but they're not firemen or emergency medical technicians, they're SERVICE PEOPLE who occasionally have to rise to the occasion and act nobly, just like a waitress that gives a choking restaurant patron CPR.

Stop the scare tactics. If being a flight attendant is that bad a job, find another one. If the airlines are (as I suspect) paying their employees badly and treating them miserably, don't take it out on us. Your personal job disssatisfaction is not a national security concern.

Posted on November 30, 2005

Why doesn't Interpol want me to watch Hellboy?

by David Holtzman

We've become a nation of mandatory consumers. In the 30s and 40, advertising informed us. In the 50s and 60s it entertained us. In the 70s and 80s and 90s it coerced us. Now we're being forcefed our pap whether we like it or not; in the movie theatre, in magazines and yes, on DVDs.

The DVD protocol has a little hook in it that allows the producer to force us to watch the FBI warning that's intimidating us not to become pirates. Arrgh. They set the flag for that part of the DVD and lock out the menu button and the fast forward capabilities.

Okay. This is not good, but at least it was only 10 seconds or so, no worse than the infamous dancing soda pop at the theatres exhorting us to run to the concession stand.

But now, it's the FBI warning and if that's not enough for us world-travellers, we're threatened by Interpol, too. Arrrr.

And now it's commercials, too. The first offender was Disney with the 2000 release of Tarzan. Not the good Johnny Weismuller version, but the sucky modern one. They included four minutes of "must-see" commercials on the DVD.

All the studios are doing it now, commercials, pirate warnings and their stupid vanity logos for their production houses.

Just to make it worse, I have a 5 disc DVD carousel. When I zip through the tray slots trying to find a movie, I have to watch the mandatory couple of minutes on each one. Arrrrr.

I just want my movies. The hell with their ads and their egos and their stupid parochial warnings. Like professional DVD pirates are going to quit and push a broom for a living because they saw a stupid Interpol warning.

I bet that there are people out there in movieland, just wanting to watch their DVDs bought with their hard-earned ducats, who are getting angry. If they weren't going to "steal" movies before, I bet they do now. Paramount, prepare to be boarded. Arrrrrr.

Posted on November 10, 2005