14
Mar
12
Mar
Geraldine Ferraro accuses Barack Obama of being a token.
TOMORROW’S NEWS
Dennis Kucinich Accuses Barack Obama Of Shortness
Bob Dole: “Barack Obama Is Too Old To Be President”
Is Barack Too Dull To Be President? John Kerry Says So
Dick Cheney: “Can We Trust Barack Obama?”
Barack Obama’s Name Sounds Dirty, Says Tom Vilsack
EDIT TO ADD: Something Awful goes into more detail about the future.
12
Mar
The legal decision for Adbusters v. CBC just became available to read, and it’s… interesting.
The case, in brief, is thus: Adbusters, which for those not aware is a public advocacy organization with an anti-consumerist bent, tried to buy advertising time on Global Television and the CBC for their “buy nothing” ads. CBC aired one of them once; Global refused to air any of them. Adbusters then sued both of them, saying that the two had violated their Charter right of freedom of expression by not airing the ads. (Press release here.)
“But wait,” you say, “only the governments of Canada and the provinces and their various creatures of law, such as territories and municipalities, are bound by the Charter.” And in this you are correct. Adbusters attempted to argue that the CBC is a governmental body by virtue of the fact that it’s a crown corporation, but that one fails the smell test pretty quickly; simply being funded by the government doesn’t automatically qualify an organization as a creature of government. Universities are publicly funded, and they’re not subject to the Charter either – the Charter‘s primary purpose of existence is to define the protections Canadian citizens have from the government. (Which, incidentally, for those not well-versed in Canadian constitutional law, is a huge topic of debate – the argument over the worthiness of negative freedoms versus positive freedoms is continual and ongoing. And loud, at least within a law school.)
So that argument was bad, and it probably tainted Adbusters’ (IMO) better argument: that since the airwaves are public, broadcasters are de facto maintaining a public resource. If Adbusters had gotten the judge to agree on this point, it wouldn’t be inconsistent with existing law either; Canadian jurisprudence recognizes that private organizations performing governmental duties are subject to the Charter. (Hospitals are an excellent example: most are privately maintained corporate bodies, but as the primary deliverers of government-funded health care in Canada, they’ve voluntarily undertaken a statutory duty and are thus agents of the government. Witness the difference between this and the CBC – there’s no legislation saying there has to be a CBC, after all, as any number of right-wing media watchdogs will complain repatedly.)
Of course, the judge struck down that argument too – I won’t get into the details, but suffice it to say Adbusters didn’t have a good argument for suing private entities, and the judge was referring to Canadian caselaw that I’ve studied in a first-year constitutional law course, so you know this wasn’t exactly advanced legal reasoning here.
However, there’s probably a case to be made for suing the government, because the government’s the one putting this policy (or lack thereof) in place which restricts public expression on the airwaves. The problem here is that Adbusters asked to add the CRTC as a defendant, and the CRTC isn’t a crown agency. It’s an unincorporated commission. In Canada, if you want to sue the federal government, you’re suing the Crown (or, well, Parliament really, but you get the gist) or an agency it’s created under statute and given power (the Army, the RCMP, et cetera). The CRTC isn’t a creature of statute, hence you can’t sue it. This was honestly kind of a dumb mistake (and in the writeup of the decision, I note that Adbusters withdrew the motion to add the CRTC as a defendant when the judge pointed this out, which is as close as the legal world gets to an admission of having fucked up).
So, moral of story: Adbusters is currently trying to portray the failure of their relatively weak (and in at least one respect pretty stupid) line of legal attack as a victory for the status quo. They’re obviously going to appeal the decision; if they’re smart, they’ll attempt to add Parliament or the Ministry of Heritage as a defendant, because that’s who they should be suing. However, the problem with Adbusters is that although I happen to agree with a great deal of their politics, they are sadly a bunch of self-righteous schmucks who think they’re a lot more clever than they really are.
11
Mar
Pamela “Craziest Bitch On The Internet” Atlas approvingly quotes some nutbar here:
The reality is that the Palestinians in the disputed territories are different from us, because the majority of them are evil. By that, I mean that the problem isn’t just their leaders and the terrorist thugs, the problem is the average person on the street. The butcher, the school teacher, the traffic cop — the majority of them are vile, sick, twisted, evil excuses for human beings and that’s why there is no peace in the region.
So far, so good – your standard eliminationist rhetoric, rendering the proposed enemy subhuman, et cetera et cetera, cheeseburger cheeseburger cheeseburger. But then it takes a whole new twist:
Which leads to a very basic question: if this was happening to Americans, how far would we be willing to go to stop it? The truth is, we already know the answer to that question because our ancestors have had to deal with this sort of savagery when Indians tortured and murdered American settlers. Our response was, depending on the situation, to slaughter them and/or force them to move.
Today, in our very civilized world, we look back with shock and horror at what we did to the Indians — and indeed, some of them didn’t deserve what they got. All too often, our ancestors didn’t make much of an effort to distinguish between friendly, peaceful Indian tribes and murderous, cannibalistic savages. On the other hand, their strategy of massacring our enemies was one that has been used throughout the ages and it has been proven, time and time again, to work — and it certainly worked for us.
Look, I generally avoid commenting on the Israel/Palestine situation, for the very simple reason that it is enormously complex and enormously controversial and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to say anything particularly clever that will magically make things better, but I am willing to go on the record as saying that the centuries-long extinguishing of Native Americans was, you know, very bad, and that comparing suggested policy to it in a light where killing lots and lots of Injuns is viewed as an honest-to-god Good Thing is more or less the definition of absolutely fucking insane.
(There are some who might care to compare the respective body counts between the Native Americans and the settler-Americans in this “protracted war” between the “murderous, cannibalistic[1] savages” and the good god-fearing white folks, and then the body counts of the Israelis and Palestinians. Absent of all other considerations and recriminations for crimes both real and imagined, one thing can be unambiguously stated as fact: the body counts for the Native Americans and the Palestinians were/are much, much higher than their opposite numbers.
[1] One might also note that the cannibalistic savages bedeviling the brave settlers were not, in fact, cannibalistic at all.
11
Mar
This is Firestorm.
Now, the more cunning among you may have noticed that this makes Firestorm, at the very least, a ridiculously powerful demigod, one of the most powerful superheroes imaginable. So you would think that his rogues’ gallery would compose some of the most fearsome villains ever created. Right? Right?
But Firestorm can turn it into talcum powder with a thought whenever he feels like it.
But what’s really depressing now is that the Hyena has become DC’s token Villain You Can Kill Off. The Hyena has died, by my count, three times in the last decade. I have no idea if any of them were this particular Hyena. Maybe the whole Hyena curse or disease or whatever it is nowadays is transmissible, and when you get bitten by a Hyena, you become a Hyena (and thus a third-rate supervillain, good enough to be killed by Jason Todd or Deadshot, probably not so good to appear as a threat in The All-New Atom).
Also: he/she/it is presenting. And that is just wrong.
If her weakness turns out to be liquor, how wrong would that be?
And again: turning into spirit animals and magically affecting games of chance versus “I can convert the air above you into giant rocks” is not a good matchup.
But he is going up against Firestorm. Firestorm’s handle is “the Nuclear Man.” Slipknot’s handle is “the guy who’s really good with rope.” I don’t care if it’s fancy super-rope that Slipknot treated with fancy super-chemicals; Firestorm can still turn it into a puff of nitrogen at will.
Later, Slipknot got his arm blown off in an issue of Suicide Squad, but managed to survive. We know this because he showed up (with one arm) in Identity Crisis, as a prisoner who had taken up the worship of Kobra, DC’s very own third-rate cult leader supervillain with world-conquering ambitions. Understand that becoming the sworn follower of a lame-ass dictator wannabe with delusions of adequacy was just about the best Slipknot could manage.
10
Mar
…which has found the “Vertigo plagarism” post:
I think the Civil War remix is sort of his “Rick James” moment- by that I mean it was the bit he did that was so awesome it makes everything else he does or ever will do not as good by comparison.
Well, ow…
10
Mar
My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.
10
Mar
I’ve been getting a few emails recently asking me to do a few more character-based I Should Write The Legion bits, which seems fair because I’ve been concentrating a lot on plot ideas lately. But the thing is – most character issues end up being plot ideas anyway, or at least subplot ideas. Character issues in an ongoing serial adventure narrative should either shape action or initiate it, especially when said narrative is about twenty-plus different characters.
But it’s worthwhile to discuss, so let’s start with my favorite.
Tie onto this the secondary point that being smart, in and of itself, is not a good reason for Brainiac Five to be a dick. Smart people can be wonkishly engaging just as often – if not moreso – than average folks, eager to tell you and explain to you about stuff they know, because they like knowing stuff. There has to be a reason Brainy’s defensive and arrogant and personally combative.
And here’s one more thing that doesn’t make sense: “twelfth-level intelligence.” How many fingers do Coluans have? Ten. They would be most comfortable working with a base ten numerical system, and we know as humans that we’re naturally inclined to create ordering systems in tens: top ten lists and top one hundred lists exist for a reason. Why on Earth would Coluans create a system of ordering and describing intelligence with twelve steps, rather than ten? Believe me, they’d find a scientific excuse to make it a ten-level system. Coluans might be smart, but they’re still prey to basic psychological foibles. It seems to me that the natural inclination of a Coluan would be to invent an intelligence classification system with ten levels, not twelve (and naturally put themselves at the top).
The answer, for me – not that this will surprise some of you – lies in the hidden history.
When Vril Dox overthrew the Computer Tyrants of Colu, way back in the day, the emerging scientific council wanted to thank him. They did so by making him the beneficiary of a new, as-yet untested (but of course it would work) process to elevate his intelligence. The Coluan intelligence ranking method uses processing capacity as its intellectual denominator, and this new process would expand Dox’s intellectual processing capacity by two levels, making him a hundred times smarter than any Coluan – already the species with the highest processing capacity in the known universe. More impressively, the process was genetic, so it would be passed on to Dox’s heirs.
Unfortunately, Vril Dox was kind of an evil bastard. Worse, the process worked, but also led to mental instability. The combination of the two led to the first Brainiac.
Still, Colu wasn’t too worried yet. Sure, Vril Dox turned out to be a bad apple, but the process itself was fundamentally sound, and when applied to a normal Coluan it would no doubt advance their intelligence safely. Vril Dox II was everybody’s proof of this: although only ten times smarter than the average Coluan (“eleventh-level intelligence”) and kind of a cold fish to say the least, he wasn’t insane, and his creation and leadership of L.E.G.I.O.N. proved the case. Colu prepared to start applying the genetic remodeling to its entire populace…
…until Lyrl Dox, Vril II’s son, turned out to be insane from the crib, with twelfth-level intelligence making it even worse. Lyrl temporarily turned L.E.G.I.O.N. into a fascist police force before his father stopped – and lobotomized – him.
Colu was stunned, and the genetic process abandoned forever – but it was now inherently tied to the genetic legacy of the Dox family line. As other Coluan family lines grew in size, the Doxes steadily shrank until they were just a single family. Most of the time, of course, Doxes proved to be brilliant scientists and politicians – maybe a bit unstable or quirky, but nothing dangerous. (Interestingly, a side effect of all of this was that for a Dox, romantic love relationships were the norm – completely the opposite of cool, logical Coluan society, but such irrationality was necessary for the line to survive.) Most Doxes worked quietly at home or subtly in public, their eleventh-level intelligences advancing Coluan – and even galactic – society in prodigious and uplifting ways.
Lyrl was posthumously referred to as “Brainiac Two” and forgotten…. until Brainiac Three, Pril Dox, blew up half of Colu with his anti-bombs in 2421. That set Colu on guard. The Dox line barely survived – and again, in 2706, when Brainiac Four, Orl Dox, created a massive interstellar pirate fleet and led her minions to destroy galactic communication networks in a bid to completely control interstellar civilization as she knew it. The rare glimpses of twelfth-level intelligence in the Dox line became dreaded events, and Coluan society prepared more intensely each time.
Being Coluans, they decided that the gains perpetuated by the Dox line were worth the occasional sacrifice of a Brainiac popping up, so they let it continue. But when Querl Dox was born, and his twelfth-level intelligence was obvious within hours of his birth, this time they took steps. Young Querl was designated Brainiac Five less than a month after being born. He was taught separately from all other Coluan youth, banned from the thoughtcreches, feared and shunned by just about everybody. The title of “Brainiac” became not just a condemnation but an insult, a declaration of advance perfidy.
Maybe his parents could have helped him get past this, but his father, Kell Dox – a kindly, gentle dreamer who took to writing haiku in between his brilliant chronal experiments – died of Nux Syndrome six months after Querl was born. (Nux Syndrome is dreaded in Coluan society – a brutal, random, nonhereditary genetic disease that strips away intelligence before it kills. Praetor Lemnos later created a modified, contagious version of it and unleashed it on Colu.) His mother, devastated by the loss of her husband (Coluans aren’t used to romantic love, remember) and unable to deal with society’s condemnation, fled her son, working in isolated labs and refusing to contact him.
Eventually, Colu decided to just cut its losses in advance and exiled young Querl offplanet. (It wasn’t an official exile – it was an “intellectual exchange program” but everybody knew what it was.) Querl studied everything – everything – he could get his hands on. And eventually he found out about the Legion.
He’d probably tell you that he joined it to make sure that the Legion did what it vitally needed to do – namely, implode the stagnation of the United Planets – properly. And to be fair, that’s what he believes. But he believes it because he can’t admit the real reasons he joined. He’ll never admit to anybody that he joined the Legion because he’s terrified – absolutely fucking petrified – of what he might do when he goes insane and really earns the name Brainiac, and that he wants to make sure that he’s surrounded by the most capable and powerful heroes in the universe when he finally snaps so they can deal with him. (The fact that he might be the first Coluan to ever have stable twelfth-level intelligence is one he’s never allowed himself the luxury of considering.)
And he could never admit, not even to himself, that what he wants more than anything is a family.
10
Mar
(SCENE: The local multiplex. Enter MYSELF and my ROOMMATE, who has requested anonymity for the purposes of this post, and so shall be known as FLAPJACKS. We sit in anticipation of watching 10,000 BC, which we are certain is going to be very, very bad.)
ME: Okay, here we go.
FLAPJACKS: I am stoked.
ME: Be aware that at any point we can theatre-hop over next door if we can’t stands no more.
FLAPJACKS: What are they playing?
ME: College Road Trip.
FLAPJACKS: Isn’t that with Martin Lawrence?
ME: Yes.
FLAPJACKS: …let’s stay here for now.
(VOICE OF OMAR SHARIF begins narrating.)
ME: So there’s apparently a legend that never dies.
FLAPJACKS: Which died, but then Roland Emmerich went on an archeological dig and found stone tablets telling the amazing story and he brought it to life.
ME: A timeless story of true love, and mammoths.
FLAPJACKS: But not true love with mammoths.
ME: Although apparently in this story mammoths are called “manniks.”
FLAPJACKS: It’s so we know that these are old-timey times. The tribesmen speak perfect English, but they have different names for things. Because it is old times.
ME: So apparently this one hunter doesn’t believe in the disastrous prophecy and he’s taking off from his tribe to find a better life for all concerned.
FLAPJACKS: I wonder if that will be a plot point.
(A young girl is brought to the village elder, and a young boy stares at her intensely.)
FLAPJACKS: See? Timeless story of true love.
ME: …it’s kind of creepy seeing prepubescent kids acting like they’re in love.
FLAPJACKS: Well, Roland Emmerich is European. They have different morals than us. That’s why Roman Polanski lives there.
ME: Ew.
FLAPJACKS: I’m not wrong about that.
ME: What type of European is Roland Emmerich anyways? German?
FLAPJACKS: Whatever type is averse to spending money on good special effects.
(The young kids practice hunting.)
ME: Wow. That is one fake looking matte painting.
FLAPJACKS: Be fair – they obviously blew most of their budget on teaching everybody to talk like Zsa Zsa Gabor.
ME: …oh god you’re right. I was going to call you out, but you’re right. They do talk like Zsa Zsa Gabor.
FLAPJACKS: All they need to do is call each other “dahling” and maybe throw in a “mahvelous” or two, and this could be “Hollywood Squares” circa 1983.
(Now everybody is grown up, and the menfolk go hunting after mammoths.)
FLAPJACKS: These are some weak CGI mammoths.
ME: They’re not that bad. I mean, they’re as good as what was in Jurassic Park.
FLAPJACKS: Jurassic Park is fifteen years old. Granted, if I was a teenager again, I’d be stoned, so this would be awesome. But I’m not, and so I recognize these crap special effects for the crap that they are.
(BAD PEOPLE come and take away most of the villagers, except for D’leh (the hero), Tiktik (the tough old guy), Ka’Ren (the sidekick) and Baku (the annoying kid). And a bunch of other villagers, including the wise-woman of the tribe. Really, they didn’t get a whole lot of people, really, but they get Evolet (D’leh’s squeeze), so that is what is important.)
FLAPJACKS: Wow, that one bad guy with the one eye stabbed first before entering. That is planning.
ME: And he killed Baku’s mom! And then took off his evil mask. Why would he take off his evil mask?
FLAPJACKS: After you’ve accidentally stabbed somebody, sometimes you just need to take a moment and breathe it all in.
(The four aforementioned people with names chase after the bad people, with Moka tagging along after the three older men surreptitiously.)
D’LEH:Baku! Why are you here?
ME: “I have a convenient revenge subplot!”
FLAPJACKS: “I provide eye candy for the crucial tween-girl demographic!”
ME: “If I don’t come along, who will make the lame poop jokes and destroy suspension of disbelief? You need me, D’leh!”
(Lengthy travel montage.)
VOICE OF OMAR SHARIF: …and they journeyed for many days, and many nights…
FLAPJACKS: “…for what appears to be thousands and thousands of miles…”
ME: “…down, out of the snowy mountain areas, which are apparently right next door to a tropical rainforest…”
FLAPJACKS: “…because nobody could be bothered to disguise the fact that this is New Zealand, practically the only place on earth where you go from “tundra” to “jungle” in twenty feet…”
ME: While we’re dissing this movie, how come the lead bad guy speaks with an obvious vocal distortion? No way his voice is naturally that deep. It’s making the bass generators in the speakers go staticky.
FLAPJACKS: He’s Darth Vader, Mark One.
(Something attacks the slavers in the bushes.)
FLAPJACKS: What are those, I wonder? Sabretooth tigers? I heard there were sabretooth tigers in this movie.
ME: Maybe it’s velociraptors.
FLAPJACKS: Shame on you for suggesting that Roland Emmerich would lazily recycle from other, better movies, the way he’s cribbing this entire scene from The Lost World.
ME: Wait, are you saying The Lost World was good? The movie where the little black girl beats raptors with gymnastics, remember.
FLAPJACKS: It’s better than this. Why does everybody in this goddamned movie have dreadlocks? I mean, I get it, they don’t have scissors or the concept of cutting hair, but how did they figure out dreadlocks?
ME: Dreadlocks are cave-man-y.
FLAPJACKS: Are their fairly obvious body waxings and manicures also cave-man-y?
ME: They’re metrosexual cavemen.
FLAPJACKS: And how do they manage to shave their facial hear so neatly if they can’t cut their dreadlocks?
ME: They’re Rastafarian metrosexual cavemen.
FLAPJACKS: What’s College Road Trip about again?
ME: Well, Raven-Symone wants to go to college…
FLAPJACKS: That is definitely so Raven.
(D’Leh idiotically tries to free Evolet when the slavers are all intently on guard and a chase scene erupts. It turns out the velociraptors are, in fact, actually giant rocs.)
FLAPJACKS: Wow, these giant rocs are very much acting like velociraptors.
ME: Indeed.
FLAPJACKS: Roland Emmerich believes in evolution.
ME: If “evolution” is “stealing outright from Steven Spielberg,” then yes.
(Tiktik gets hurt by the rocs, and everybody but him and D’leh get captured/recaptured by the slavers, who herd their captives into a desert.)
FLAPJACKS: So let’s recap. They’ve gone from what’s pretty obviously supposed to be at least either Central Europe around Romania or possibly the interior of Russia, through a tropical jungle, and now they’re in a desert, presumably in northern Africa. This is a walk you can measure in the thousands of miles. You’d think they’d at least show some stubble.
ME: I wasn’t aware that there was a tropical jungle anywhere between Europe and northern Africa.
FLAPJACKS: Well, this is ten thousand years ago. Maybe it got cut down by the ancient Romans when they conquered everything.
ME: “But, Heroclitus, what about global warming?”
FLAPJACKS: “Look, these prisoners aren’t going to crucify themselves!”
(D’leh falls into a deep pit trap and falls unconscious. It begins raining thunderously, and he wakes up to see a sabretooth tiger trapped underneath some logs. He decides not to kill it.)
D’LEH: You’d better not eat me!
FLAPJACKS: It’s a giant cat, D’leh. You banking on it having gratitude is not exactly the smart play.
ME: “No, of course I won’t eat you. Not all of you, anyway. Well, not today, I might save some for later. What? I’m a fucking giant cat. At least I won’t play around with your remains too much, okay?”
(Amazingly, the cat does not eat D’leh, and he and Tiktik make their way to an African tribal village, where the cat shows up to protect them from villagers who think they’re enemies, then leaves.)
FLAPJACKS: “I was never here, okay? God, I’d never live this shit down if people found out.”
ME: I assume by “people” you mean “other giant cats.”
FLAPJACKS: Yes.
(After the giant cat leaves, the villagers are impressed.)
NAKUDU THE VILLAGE HEADMAN: You come with us, and eat.
TIKTIK: How do you speak our tongue?
ME: “Writer fiat. Why?”
FLAPJACKS: I wonder what the over/under is on the number of times Nakudu here will be asked to translate for Mr. White Guy Who Never Learned A Second Language.
ME: I know I enjoy nothing so much as watching people translate. Especially in an action movie. I like waiting that extra few seconds for crackling dialogue such as can be found in this movie.
D’LEH: Together, we can defeat these demons.
ME: Yeah, suck on that, Diablo Cody! You show D’Leh a hamburger phone and he’d try to eat it!
FLAPJACKS: After a five-minute scene where he would try to learn what a hamburger is, of course.
(The slavers make their getaway on boats. D’leh and Tiktik and Nakudu and the warriors of half a dozen tribes all head into the desert trying to find the city they’re headed for.)
ME: …why don’t they just follow the river? The river has water. Fresh water. The desert does not have fresh water. This really feels like a pretty simple concept here.
FLAPJACKS: Now, now – if they didn’t go into the desert, then D’leh wouldn’t have to invent star navigation to get them out of it.
(Finally, D’leh and company arrive at the slaver city – where the slaves are building pyramids.)
ME: Wait, they took them to Egypt?
FLAPJACKS: I think it’s not actually supposed to be Egypt, per se. I mean, from the steppes of Eurasia to Egypt would be a trek of, like, a year and a half? And note how everything only looks, like, pseudo-Egyptian.
ME: Didn’t Egypt only really get started around 4,000 BC anyway?
FLAPJACKS: You and your “historical accuracy.” Next up, you’ll be complaining about the fact that the reason the mammoths – excuse me, “manniks” – were disappearing from D’leh’s tribe’s homeland is because the fake Egyptians were stealing them to haul giant stone blocks.
ME: I don’t have a problem with the fake Egyptians stealing mammoths to haul giant stone blocks. But this is a desert. Anywhere there’s a desert means you’re probably a lot closer to actual plain old elephants, which are both more suited for the climate and not way the hell off in the middle of nowhere.
FLAPJACKS: “Manniks.”
ME: Also, if I were D’leh, I’d be all intimidated, because these guys are already up to Masonry and Bronze Working, and my tribe is still stuck at Hunting.
FLAPJACKS: That’s their secret plan – to build the Pyramids so they can discover Universal Suffrage a thousand turns ahead of schedule!
ME: “Shit, they probably have Axemen!”
FLAPJACKS: We are such nerds.
(D’leh sneaks into the city to try and convince the slaves to rise up against their masters, but they don’t want to because they think the slavers are gods.)
ME: Apparently “ancient” is synonymous with “retarded.”
FLAPJACKS: Come now. These are simple folk of their times, who do not understand the concept of “boats,” because nothing floated back then.
(D’leh and his allies sneak into the city again and pretend to be slaves, then stampede the mammoths over the slavers. The freed slaves start destroying all the monuments.)
FLAPJACKS: “…and that, children, is why there aren’t any pyramids in Egypt.”
ME: Can this movie get any worse?
(Evolet gets stabbed by the bad guy slaver, who incidentally is romantically obsessed with her by now. D’leh stabs him to death, then holds Evolet as she dies, but then the wise woman back at the tribe does magic and passes her life-force onto Evolet, who recovers from being shot with an arrow in the back.)
FLAPJACKS: Yes. Yes it can.
(Happy reunions all around as the remnants of D’leh’s tribe head back home, with seeds given to them by Naduku so they can become farmers, what with the mammoths not coming around any more.)
FLAPJACKS: Nothing quite like farming on frozen tundra. Why didn’t we go see the Raven-Symone movie with Martin Lawrence in it?
ME: I think technically Martin Lawrence gets top billing.
FLAPJACKS: Nobody puts Raven in a corner!
8
Mar
ME: Hi. My phone got smashed up and I need a new phone but I don’t want to spend a lot of money.
CUSTOMER SERVICE PERSON (of company that shall go unnamed but which rhymes with “Bodgers”): Certainly. What’s your account status?
ME: I’ve been month-to-month with you for a few years now.
BODGERS: I see. So you’re not under a contract?
ME: No.
BODGERS: In that case, the best I can do is offer you (shitty phone) for $100.
ME: Wait, though. I’m willing to enter into a contract in order to get a cheap phone. Or a free one. Whichever.
BODGERS: All right.
ME: Like, I see you’ve got a basic business plan here, $25 for 200 anytime minutes per month. That’s simple and suits me.
BODGERS: Okay, then I can offer you (shitty phone) for $79.
ME: …but it says here on the website that it costs $25.
BODGERS: That’s for a new customer.
ME: But that doesn’t make any sense. I’m offering to enter into the same brand new contract that a new customer would. I just want to keep my existing phone number.
BODGERS: I can’t really do anything. It’s policy.
ME: So you’re saying that if I cancelled my account, then called you right back and created a brand new one, that I could get the phone at the cheaper rate. Or, for that matter, an entirely different phone of better quality, which would still cost less than what you’re quoting me right now.
BODGERS: Yes.
ME: But if I want to keep my existing account, as regards which I have not missed a payment for years, I have to spend extra money to get the same phone that you would give to a new customer for less, regardless of the fact that I’m willing to enter into the same contract that he is.
BODGERS: Yes.
ME: What’s the incentive for me to keep from simply shutting down my account and signing up with one of your competitors, who will offer me a free and nicer phone when I sign into their contract?
BODGERS: To tell you the truth, I’m not really sure.
6
Mar
I was arguing about this at law school today with some fellow students, and I am genuinely unsure of the answer, so I am throwing it to the masses. Hello, masses!
So we were arguing about taxation to begin with, which in turn led to the various costs of living in the United States and Canada as a measure of comparison purposes – me maintaining that they were higher in the USA, someone else that they were higher in Canada. Now, there’s no such thing as a “median cost of living” – well, I suppose there is, but due to regional variation it’s kind of useless as a statistic. So we turned to consumer price indexes.
Consumer price indexes, for those who do not know (and I want everybody to at least be able to follow the thrust of the conversation) are a method of tracking increasing costs of items as a way of partially measuring cost of living. You set a “year zero” – say, 1984. You buy $100 worth of goods in that era with 1984 dollars. Then you track the costs both backwards and forwards – so how much does it cost to buy that same $100 cost of goods in 1974, and 1994, and 1964, and 2004, and so on and so forth.
Now, when we were Googling for this sort of information, we couldn’t find a good CPI for both countries for the same year zero, so – and this is where the argument begins – I suggested instead using math to create a new year zero on the larger (American) CPI for comparison purposes. Now, I’m not going to pretend that this is exactly scholarly and I wouldn’t use it for a paper, but if, say, you want to turn 1996 into your year zero, and in 1996 it took $153 to buy whatever you bought in the previous year zero for $100, then it follows that if you divide every figure on the table by 1.53 you’ll get at least a rough estimate, suitable for back-of-the-envelope type calculation, of what things look like with 1996 as a year zero.
Needless to say, my friends disagreed. They also kind of disagreed with the concept of cross-comparing CPIs from Canada and the United States because you couldn’t guarantee that the same items would be in the $100 “basket.” My counterargument here is that Canada and the United States, in terms of culture and especially merchandise, are at least relatively equivalent in our shopping patterns – not perfectly homogenous to be sure, but close enough, as they say, for government work. Again, I’m just talking for back-of-the-envelope here, not for any real study.
So, my question is – which of us is right? Or right-er?
6
Mar
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