This is what I learned during a visit to the National Portrait Gallery’s presidential portraits room: Many of our presidents looked like actors or movie/TV characters.
Some of the presidents looked like creepy characters, some like dashing actors.
I think McKinley looks like an older Don Draper (same piercing glare). Others think he looks like a vampire.
Our character-actor presidents.
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Damon at Ticketfly sent a prompt response to my open letter about paying $8.75 in service charges on a $20 ticket. Here is Damon’s response, and my reply.
Greetings Josh,
Thank you for writing in and giving us the opportunity to answer your questions.Ticketfly provides a service, for a fee. Ordering through Ticketfly couldn’t be easier and you can do it from the comfort of your home or office!
Tickets purchased on Ticketfly.com are typically subject to a per ticket convenience charge and a non-refundable per order processing fee. In many cases, delivery prices will also be owed.
As we do not collect any of the ticket face value, we use the fee to pay for hardware, employees, training and so on. Basically, the fee is what keeps us running. If you wish to avoid paying the service fee, please contact the venue or promoter of the event to see if they offer tickets directly. This also explains your comparison to companies like Amazon. They do, in fact almost every “retail” outlet, charge a fee. For them it’s called “Mark Up”. Because they own the product they are selling, that mark up is where they get the money to pay their employees, train their staff, pay their rent and so on.
Ticketfly does not claim to be the cheapest ticketing alternative, but we are striving to be the better ticketing alternative.
Please do let me know if you have any other questions.
Thank You
Damon @ Ticketfly
My reply:
Hi Damon,
Thanks for the prompt reply, and for explaining what the service fees pay for.
However, this doesn’t answer all of my questions.
True, Ticketfly does not claim to be the cheapest ticketing alternative. But as I quoted in my first email, the company clearly recognizes that people are frustrated with ticketing services (citing “downright absurd” practices) and makes claims to being different (“We plan to get rid of all those hidden fees”).
Given this:
1. Why does the site talk about killing hidden fees if you still charge those fees?
2. What are some examples of “downright absurd” ticketing practices that Ticketfly does not engage in?
3. What does being a “better ticketing alternative” mean if you charge similar fees as other ticketing companies — fees that are by far the most frustrating thing about buying tickets?
Further, you say that “Ticketfly provides a service, for a fee” — i.e., letting consumers buy tickets “from the comfort of your home or office.” But there are thousands upon thousands of e-commerce websites that provide the same service — letting consumers buy something online — without charging “service” or “convenience” fees on top of the product price. (Of course, in many cases it’s *cheaper* to buy something online versus by phone or in a store.) The vast majority of these sites also have various hardware and overhead costs, but still don’t tack on extra fees.
Given this,
4. How is Ticketfly’s business (or the ticketing business in general) so different from nearly all other online businesses that the company has to charge consumers this fee?
Thanks,
Josh
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Dear Ticketfly,
As a music fan who has long been frustrated by Ticketmaster’s fees and service charges, I was glad to see this statement on your About page before I purchased a ticket recently:
[W]e’ve spent a lot of time examining what works in ticketing and what is downright absurd. We plan to get rid of all those hidden fees and we won’t charge you to print your ticket at home – after all it is your printer and paper!
So I have a few questions:
Sincerely,
Josh Korr
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This is going to sound ignorant, but until today my knowledge of bonsai trees was based entirely on The Karate Kid.
If I had to guess, I’d have said a bonsai tree was some dwarf species or a bush that looks like a tiny tree. A little kitschy, no big whoop. But today Melanie and I went to the National Arboretum’s Bonsai and Penjing Museum, and my ignorance was slightly diminished at the same time my mind was officially blown.
As any non-ignorant person (or Wikipedia reader) must have already known, bonsai (the Japanese term) or penjing (the Chinese term) refers to “the art of aesthetic miniaturization of trees, or of developing woody or semi-woody plants shaped as trees, by growing them in containers” (I would have used a more authoritative source’s definition, but I can’t find one on the American Bonsai Society’s website).
I guess the “semi-woody plants shaped as trees” part could be the “bush shaped like a tiny tree” that I had in mind. But most of the specimens at the Arboretum are literally miniature trees.
Walking through the exhibit is like walking through the forest sets of A Nightmare Before Christmas or Coraline. Except in this case, the trees aren’t painted models with popcorn for blossoms — they’re actually trees!
The other cool thing is that a bunch of the trees are 100 or more years old. One is from the mid 1600s! The age combined with the warped perspective makes the whole exhibit pretty dizzying.
Here are two examples from the Arboretum. But you don’t get the same vertiginous sense of scale unless you’re standing in front of them — or rather, over them.
Update: Here’s a photo that gives a better sense:
If you’re in the D.C. area and, like us, have overlooked the Arboretum because of all the higher-profile things to see in these parts, I highly recommend a visit. (The rest of the grounds are very pretty, too.)
Sidenote: Pat Morita was nominated for an Academy Award for playing Mr. Miyagi??? Wha?
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: activities, Nature, outings, sight-seeing, Washington D.C.
The “church” of Scientology reached a strange kind of mainstream success this decade. Sure, Tom Cruise’s summer of 2005 and indoctrination video might have raised some eyebrows. But Scientology’s reputation seems to have become “the wacky-but-harmless religion that Tom Cruise and John Travolta belong to.”
I’d chalk that up to a few factors: Star power and obsequious entertainment media. American culture’s general shift toward multiculturalism and, for the enlightened majority post-9/11, religious tolerance. A shrug-your-shoulders, post-modern “Scientology is no more bizarre than other religions” attitude among potential cynics. And, of course, the fruits of the group’s notoriously litigious/personally invasive stance toward pretty much anyone who had anything bad to say about Scientology in the ’80s and ’90s.
The St. Petersburg Times’ recent expose, on Scientology’s staff culture of intimidation and abuse allegedly driven by leader David Miscavige, won’t change all that. But if Scientology’s fortunes and reputation decline in the coming years, the paper’s stories recounting defectors’ accusations should mark a turning point.
The group had one possible strategy for persuasively rebutting the Times stories: deny everything. Instead, the hapless response turned into a classic emperor-has-no-clothes moment — the ostensibly matured Scientology revealed (or re-revealed) as a pitiful personality cult that no one should even consider taking seriously again.
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Tina Fey’s awesome Sarah Palin sketches have made Saturday Night Live worth watching this season, even as the show continues its overall post-Will Ferrell stagnation. (Digital shorts and an 80 percent brilliant cast don’t make up for the slavish adherence to a rigid, outdated sketch-comedy model.)
But if the real Palin appears on next week’s show — as has been rumored and now allegedly confirmed by the New York Post’s Cindy Adams — then Saturday Night Live will have proven its intellectual bankruptcy and moral cowardice once and for all.
When it comes to politics, SNL has always focused more on “cuddly caricature-making than worthy satire,” as Slate’s Troy Patterson wrote earlier this year. Patterson quotes Russel L. Peterson’s book Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke:
“The show’s political ‘characters’ are as one-dimensional and ‘lovable’ as any of the other catchphrase-spouting mannequins Lorne Michaels might hope to spin off onto the big screen (Jason Sudeikis as George W. Bush and Darrell Hammond as Dick Cheney in—Night at the Roxbury II).”
This is somewhat defensible in normal times. It’s at best irresponsible in elections like this one. Here’s Peterson again, via Patterson:
“By avoiding issues in favor of personalities and by ‘balancing’ these shallow criticisms between conservatives and liberals, late-night comics are playing it safe but endangering democracy.”
With Sarah Palin, SNL found a politician so shallow and farcical that personality-based satire was actually appropriate. The McCain campaign’s policy proposals deserve plenty of criticism, but the biggest problem with Palin isn’t her policies (or her abuse of power, or her serial lying). It’s that she’s absurdly unprepared for the vice presidency and apparently has little grasp of policy in the first place — that she’s a farce, as Andrew Sullivan put it. In this respect, SNL‘s take on Palin was spot-on: a fauxlksy, beauty-pageant contestant who thinks winks and ignorance are appropriate for a vice presidential candidate.
If Lorne Michaels gives Palin a cameo and SNL‘s writers don’t protest, they will be undermining their own criticism. A cameo would say “Hey, never mind those silly Tina Fey sketches! It’s not so bad that a vice presidential candidate is dangerously unprepared — if it were, we’d never have let her appear on the show!”
If SNL‘s writers and performers do this, they are apologists, not satirists.
If they shrug off their previous personality-based criticism but also won’t criticize the McCain campaign’s policy proposals or recent mob incitement, they simply have nothing to say. (Mocking McCain’s doddering mannerisms and making bogus Williams Ayers mentions, as they did in a debate sketch Thursday, does not count as satire, either.)
And if they put Palin on, they are cowards twice over. First, for mercilessly mocking her on national TV but pretending everything’s peachy when she comes on the show. Second, for not believing a single word they say.
So what’s it going to be, Saturday Night Live: Should we take you seriously, or are you just a big joke?
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I’ve written before about annoyingly substance-free political journalism (and the substance-free politics on which it’s based). Here are two perfect articulations of why this kind of journalism and politics isn’t just annoying — it’s bad for America. First, from Andrew Sullivan:
We have war criminals as president and vice-president, and a constitution staggering after one serious terror attack. But the campaign is about whether Obama is like Paris Hilton.
The threat of Rove and his ilk is not that their petty, deceptive and irresistibly subjective tactics are evil in a petty, deceptive, childish kind of way. It’s that their venial sins distract from their mortal ones. It’s the mortal ones we have to be worried about. And the mortal ones that they are getting away with.
And from Ta-Nehisi Coates:
The housing market is collapsing, Iran is pursuing the bomb, climate change is peeking over the horizon–and we are discussing power-bars and Honest Tea. Look, all campaigns do their share of unfair attacks. And at the end of the day, it’s Obama’s job to come back with a devastating counter. He’s excelled at that all year. I expect him to do no less here. But–and I this will sound totally syrupy and naive–I really thought John McCain was a little better than this.
Jonathan Chait explains the political side of this state of affairs in his latest New Republic column:
In the late 1980s, the popular revolt against government that had bubbled up in the mid-’60s began to peter out, sapping the power of straightforward anti-government appeals. And, starting in 1992, Democrats ruthlessly purged nearly all their political liabilities by embracing anti-crime measures, welfare reform, and middle-class tax cuts, and, more recently, by abandoning gun control. What’s left is a political terrain generally favorable to Democrats, which has, in turn, forced Republicans to emphasize the personal virtue of their nominees.
And so, every four years, we have a Democratic candidate campaigning on health care, the minimum wage, education, Medicare, or Social Security, and a Republican candidate campaigning on themes like Trust, Courage, and so forth.
Why journalists play along with this game is another matter.
UPDATE: Michael Grunwald pushed back against this nonsense in a good Time column Monday, and Obama himself had a pretty good rejoinder at a town hall meeting (hat tip: The Plank):
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: advertising, campaigns, Journalism, Politics
I know newspapers like to “protect” readers from “coarse” language (i.e. language real-life people actually speak in their real lives), but I had no idea that you couldn’t say “nuts” (i.e. “balls”, e.g. “Those are balls”) in the newspaper.
Well, apparently you can’t! Even if Jesse Jackson says he wants to “cut [Barack Obama's] nuts off”! At least not if you’re the New York Times.
Jeffrey Goldberg says what needs to be said:
What we have then is a story about a controversy concerning Jesse Jackson’s words that refuses to print the most relevant word. Even though I’m a member of the MSM, I sometimes see why people might go elsewhere for news. At least bloggers believe that their readers are emotionally equipped to handle the presence of the word “nuts” in a sentence.
Gawker has a fun roundup of previous words the Times has avoided, and wonders if there are any “examples of the Times censoring ‘doody’ or ‘wiener’.”
I see that the Washington Post also avoided the horrible word. Kudos to the L.A. Times for having the balls to print “nuts.”
(Incidentally, I’m glad to see that the Barry Louis Polisar song that inspired this post’s title is available for download at Amazon’s MP3 store.)
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So it turns out that moving to a new city tends to take time away from blogging. Who knew?
Over the past few weeks I’ve traded sunny Florida for tornado-filled (maybe) Washington D.C. and the familiarity of daily newspaper journalism for the unpredictable excitement of journalism startups. And while there seems to be a distinct lack of manatees here, living in the city is already awesome. (Anyone else have a pastry chef for a neighbor?)
But the blogging hiatus can’t last forever, so I’m going to ease back into things with some good old linkblogging. Here are some good stories I’ve been reading lately:
The Colonial and even the Civil War-era press had been an unruly thing, prone to vicious attack. The practical matter, however, was that it was largely impractical to sue individual small publishers for sullying your reputation. The resources were not there
As the newspaper and its news organization evolved, they also developed the necessary deep pockets to right social wrongs their journalists might cause.
The rise of the large media company also provided a central place for legal action, promoting efficiency. In return, it made an implicit social contract (too often violated, but still) that it would strive to meet a certain level of professionalism, both to society (by providing a legal and managerial collar around unruly journalists, for instance) and to the journalists (by providing a living wage and decent benefits, ease of production and distribution, and a certain modicum of legal protection in most cases).
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Tagged: Links
I’m a little late to this one, but I finally read “Marry Him!” — a buzz-fishing article in last month’s Atlantic that ostensibly makes the case for settling for a spouse instead of holding out for Mr. Right. Here’s the gist:
Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).
[snip]
My advice is this: Settle!
What stands out from the article isn’t the fact that author Lori Gottlieb herself hasn’t settled (she’s a 40-something who, along with a friend, decided to have a baby with donor sperm “in fits of self-empowerment” — surely the best reason to have a baby). Or her attempt at ironically defusing the shock and vitriol she just knew her taboo-busting article would provoke (“Oh, I know—I’m guessing there are single 30-year-old women reading this right now who will be writing letters to the editor to say that the women I know aren’t widely representative, that I’ve been co-opted by the cult of the feminist backlash, and basically, that I have no idea what I’m talking about.”) Or her repeated undermining of her case for settling.
No, the most notable aspect of the story is that Gottlieb is dispensing romantic advice even though she seems to be the kind of person who believes that life is like a romantic comedy. Or rather, that romantic comedies are true to life, and that adults should draw their lessons about life and love from TV and the movies.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: advice, Atlantic, love, Marriage, Pop Culture, Rants
Oh hi — I didn’t hear you come in! Welcome to my blog (Ed. — for those new to the Internet, that’s short for “blog”), in which I will discuss dogs, daughters, coffee. Nothing much, no big whoop. Also pop culture, video games, media and journalism, some politics mayhap. In real life I’m an editor and writer/blogger at tbt*-Tampa Bay Times/St. Petersburg Times in Florida. You can read my riveting reviews of various snacky comestibles at The Snack Pack. I hope you enjoy my Weblog (Ed. — that’s short for “spider-web log”) stylings and come again!
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Good stuff I’m reading
