So why do I hate Tom Brady? Well, it doesn’t help that he played football at Michigan. My loathing of Michigan football is even deeper than that for Tom Brady. But it’s more than that. You see, I dislike all “good-looking” quarterbacks. Tom Brady is already a quarterback. He plays the most important position for the most popular sport in America. He makes millions of dollars because he’s actually really good at it. He has probably spent his entire life, since high school, as the center of adulation and attention. He should not get to knock up famous actresses and then marry supermodels. It’s just not right. If you’re going to be a successful quarterback, you should be homely. Otherwise, this is all just unbalanced. Booo, Tom Brady. Yeah, Kyle Orton!

Basically, though, my argument is seeded in jealousy and an inapplicable standard of justice. That’s just petty and irrational. Luckily, science has stepped in an gave me a plausible, legitimate reason for my prejudices! I think this study has been bouncing around for a little while, but I was only made aware of it recently. As this Deadspin post summarizes from this WSJ article and also this much older Times article (don’t know how long all these articles will stay up, so I’ll just link to all of them), NFL starting quarterbacks are unnaturally attractive. A group of researchers (David Berri & Jennifer VanGilder) looked at the faces of NFL quarterbacks and measured how symmetric their faces were. Studies have shown that facial symmetry is a measure of attractiveness that spans all races and cultures. It is by no means the only measure of attractiveness, but it’s one that can be easily figured out by computers and image analysis (as opposed to having babies of different cultures look at pictures of faces, and seeing what faces they spend more time staring at, which is seriously how research into attractiveness has been conducted).

There are two interesting conclusions from their work. For one, the symmetry level for starting NFL quarterbacks (I assume this is the 2007 or 2008 season) was always higher than 96%, while an average person has a symmetry of 90%. Unless it turns out that genes for symmetry are the same as for good quarterbacking, this suggests that good looking youngsters are steered towards the quarterback position, or at least the good-looking kids gets more snaps and attention during practices.

The second conclusion was that the more attractive quarterbacks get paid more than they should based on performance. As the Times article states :

To put this result in perspective, we found that a “good-looking” quarterback like Kerry Collins or Charlie Frye earned approximately $300,000 more per year than his stats and other pay factors would predict. Meanwhile, quarterbacks like Jeff George and Neil O’Donnell, who, sadly, were not found to have very symmetrical faces, suffered an equivalent penalty.

But it’s not the Brett Favres — the guys often referred to as “the face of the franchise” — who receive the greatest return on their handsome faces. It’s the QBs clinging to the bottom of the roster who get the biggest pay bump from good looks

So you see, my hate of “good-looking” quarterbacks is completely justified. They use their good looks to subconsciously curry favor with coaches and GM’s, from childhood all they way through to NFL retirement age. My “irrational” hate is merely compensation for the favorable treatment they’ve received all their life.

I’ve read the newspaper and blog articles. To this point, though, they’ve just been articles in the WSJ and the Times, though, and haven’t mentioned anything like “as published in the Journal of Sports Externalities” or anything. So it sure looks like this work has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet. Still, it supports what I believe already, so I’m inclined to believe it anyway.

Booooo, Tom Brady!

Virtuosity is horrible. And it is not entertaining

How bad is it, you might ask? I mean, it has Denzel Washington in it. Denzel!

Do not be fooled by Denzel’s presence. This movie is bad. It’s so bad, that well before the final credits began to roll, I was formulating this post in my mind.

Warning: there are spoilers ahead, but clearly I don’t care about spoiling this for you.

The movie takes place in (presumably) future L.A., where they are testing a virtual reality simulator, apparently for police training. They are using convicts to test out the system (Denzel, an ex-cop, is one of them), and the antagonist in the system, the thing that they are training “against”, is Sid (Russell Crowe), a virtual reality construct designed by its programmer to be an amalgam of history’s most vicious serial killers and psychopaths. Of course, one of those psychopaths just happens to be the killer that killed Denzel’s family (whom Denzel killed, and that’s why he’s in prison), but we only find that out later. Upon learning that the simulator would be shut down, for killing too many guinea pigs, the programmer — who is clearly the 2nd most psychotic person in this movie, yet was never monitored closely — figures out a way to save his precious virtual reality program by getting it implanted within an android. There’s some stupid nanotechnology technobabble, but whatever, Sid is now an android that can heal itself by absorbing glass (because he’s made of silicon, and glass is silicon dioxide). He promptly gets on the loose, surprise surprise, and Denzel is given a conditional pardon if he tracks the guy down, because Denzel is the “only guy who could catch him”. Keep in mind this is not a secretive psychopath who stalks people in the woods and kills him. This is a super-megalomaniac psychopath that lives off the thrill of being the center of attention, for better or for worse. Meaning he kills people publicly, he goes to places where there are lots of televisions and people, and starts executing people. Yeah, Denzel is the only person who can track this guy down.

I don’t mind ridiculousness. All horribleness aside, I enjoyed Armageddon even though it was absolutely terrible, since it at least it embraced it’s terribleness, and with Jerry Bruckheimer as producer, it had lots of explosions and action. When terrorists hacked into the Internets (all of the Internets!) in Live Free or Die Hard, I rolled with it. When Jeff Goldblum disabled alien ships in Independence Day by uploading a virus from his Mac, I could deal with that. I can ignore gaping technological loopholes as plot devices, if the rest of the movie can make up for it. But come on, man.

They know exactly what this guy looks like. They had him in the virtual reality simulator. They could totally broadcast his image as the suspect, and have citizens call it in. Hey, there’s Russell Crowe walking down the street in a zoot suit! Send in the cops! They don’t need Denzel for this. They just need a bunch of guys with guns who will actually shoot the guy executing people instead of running behind him and then yelling at him.

At one point in the movie, Denzel is ‘framed’ for shooting someone, and he’s put in the back of a police truck and driven away. Sid stops the truck, kills the guards, and sets Denzel free because he wants to be chased. Instead of just sitting put, of course Denzel actually leaves. And the police come to the conclusion that Denzel, who was handcuffed and disarmed in the back of a paddywagon, uncuffed himself and shot the guards and escaped. They decide to concentrate their attention on finding him rather than the serial killer who has just gleefully killed multiple people.

A little bit later, Sid hijacks a tv studio. How? Well, he walked into the glass-walled control room of the studio, kills the production crew without alerting anyone, and presses some buttons on the control panel to take over the broadcast. He then starts shooting people on air, deriving enjoyment from watching his instant ratings meter rise. Once Denzel sees this, he rushes to the scene. The police are putting up barricades all around the building. They see Denzel! They decide to just start shooting at him. Apparently, the police commissioner, who found out the truth about Denzel being framed, never sent out the memo that Denzel is still a good guy. A lot of glass was broken. But he makes it to the bullet proof elevator and takes it to the 38th floor, where the studio was. Yeah, the police were busy making sure the building was barricaded, but no one bothered to actually go up to the studio to check out the story of the psychopath in the tv studio shooting people.

Meanwhile, Denzel walks into the studio and shoots Sid. A chase ensues that leads to the top of the building. Where a police helicopter is hovering. Hmm…will the police helicopter shoot at the guy that’s been on the television murdering people….or Denzel? Yeah, Denzel. The guy can’t catch a break. Finally, the copter is called off (instead of being ordered to shoot at Sid) to allow Sid and Denzel to have a final stupid showdown fight. Where Denzel decides to punch and kick the android instead of shooting it. Where Sid jumps from platform to platform, taunts Denzel to follow him, and stomps on Denzel’s hands when he stupidly tries to follow him. When they end up falling off the building but slamming into some windows, and then Denzel tosses Sid through about 6 layers of plate glass, which cuts him up something awful.

But didn’t I say earlier that Sid regenerates by absorbing glass? Yeah, he does. So when Denzel climbs down to taunt the dying android, he obviously doesn’t think back to all the times beforehand where Sid has eaten his way through glass. Or no one at the police department thought to tell him something like “Hey, by the way, this guy is totally immortal if glass is around”. Denzel doesn’t blink an eye at the fact that throughout this movie, he keeps on shooting Sid, and hitting him, and it really doesn’t seem to do anything, despite the fact that he never once shot in him the head, which would have probably ended this stupid movie early.

But there’s one last part of the movie that I need to mention, that put me over the top. The stupid side story is that Denzel is partnered up with a female criminal psychologist, who does absolutely nothing worthwhile in this movie. But she does have a small child that is perfect for a hostage situation. So of course Sid kidnaps the kid, stuffs her in a secret location, along with a bomb. Which is exactly what that serial killer did to Denzel’s family. So the criminal psychologist couldn’t predict that Sid, who was behaving exactly like Denzel’s old nemesis, would do something similar to get to him. Anyways, they do some trickery and figure out where the kid is hiding, and race to there. By helicopter.

Smartly, Denzel doesn’t allow his partner to open the door to the hostage room. He knows its booby-trapped.
“Denzel, the bomb squad will be here in five minutes.”
“No, there’s no time, I need to go in myself.”
There’s no time? You just took an hour detour to trick Sid into telling you where the kid was? Now you’re gonna race back and say that you can’t wait five more minutes?

So then Denzel goes through the ceiling of the room to get the girl. But man…there’s a giant industrial fan spinning, blocking his way. What to do? Oh yeah, he’ll stick his bionic arm in the path of the fan and stop it. Did I forget to mention that he has a bionic arm? Yeah, well this is only the second time in the movie that it’s noted that he has a bionic left arm, and the other time is when he’s scanned at a prison and the computer cheerfully tells the audience that he has a bionic arm. So let’s be clear here : the writers gave Denzel Washington’s character a bionic arm so that he could stop a fan with it. Like, the writing team was just stuck at some point:
Writer 1 : Man, it would wrap this movie so nicely if he would just go through the ceiling and save this little girl, but there’s a big old industrial fan in the way.
Writer 2 : I know! Let’s give him a bionic metal arm!
Writer 1 : That’s ridiculous, we haven’t mentioned it at all.
Writer 2 : Don’t worry, I’ll just slide a mention of it into a scene near the beginning. It’ll make perfect sense.
Denzel does not use this arm to punch people with great force, or bust down doors, or block bullets. He only used it to stop a fan blade (which cut him open), and then used some newly exposed wiring in it to disarm a bomb by connecting two random connectors (literally, he did eeny-meeny-minie-mo over three choices).

Part of the problem is that this movie was released in 1995, and so it’s concept of the “future” is ridiculous. But I can forgive poor predictions of the future from 13 year old films. Here’s one major problem — in this film, which either takes place in the “future” or in an alternate timeline, there’s artificial intelligence, true virtual reality, and self-organizing, self-healing, nanotechnology — all of which is apparently funded by the LAPD. But the rest of the world is exactly the same as it would be in say, the late 1990′s. That’s some imagination there, Brett Leonard. You really showcased your vision.

This is not the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It would take some real soul-searching to decide upon the winner of that distinction. But this movie does not qualify for one category — a movie that is bad, and that made me vocally angry during it’s viewing. This movie is — Yusuke and I came up with this some time ago, I think — angry-bad. A movie that keeps me up until 1 am, writing a supremely long post that no one on the Internets will read in its entirety.

A new category is born.

Not so much with synchronized diving.

I’ve been watching the Olympics the last few nights, and really, synchronized diving seems pretty worthless. It seems that you perform exactly the same dives as you would in individual diving….but you just copy someone else as well. There’s really nothing special about it, and frankly I’m just stunned that it’s a medal worthy sport when, say, cricket isn’t.

The only nice thing about synchronized diving that I can think of is that it’s fairly steroid and cheater proof, unless someone out there uses Siamese Twins or something.

Traffic
Yeah, yeah, this is an obvious one, but you don’t understand. Or perhaps, I didn’t understand. It’s a combination of having enough people here that there are cars on the road all the time, every day, plus the endless, endless, traffic lights. If you don’t make that left turn light, you might as well turn off your car and take a nap, because it’ll be about 15 minutes before you get your turn again. The stoplight system here is most certainly not a system designed to move traffic quickly and efficiently. It’s designed to piss every single driver off equally so as to maintain a sort of evil fairness. Additionally, California does not believe its drivers can handle a middle turn lane, so there is usually a median dividing lanes and U-turns are often needed to access something on the left side of the road.

It’s amazing how important expressways, interstates, and highways are to getting anywhere timely. It seems like there are no local roads that get you anywhere faster. It’s always faster to take the highway, even if you have to drive 5 miles to get to it. What’s really frustrating is that because of all the stoplights, on many stretches of the road a bike is just as fast. That’s one of the reasons I’m going to start biking to work — when the same bicyclist is matching me stoplight for stoplight over 2 miles of road, I’ve lost one excuse for taking the car, and it mostly just comes down to laziness. And sure, I’m lazy, but I don’t like to admit it.

Streetlights

I’ll toss this in with the traffic. A lot of the streetlights in Santa Clara county have a yellow tinge that is exactly the same color as a yellow traffic light. So if you’re driving at night down a street with stoplights, it’s yellow lights all around. It’s just…disorienting.

Warning Labels

(picture taken without permission from ComplianceSigns.com.)
California has stricter toxicity laws than most states, so levels of chemicals that would be acceptable in most states are illegal in California. However, those laws only apply to new products and buildings. Buildings already constructed get warning stickers. So everywhere I go, I see stickers on entrances, “This building contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer.” There’s an entire section on ComplianceSigns devoted to signs about California Proposition 65. Really, the part I find most annoying is the “State of California” part, like California is privy to knowledge that the rest of the states just cannot comprehend.

Accordion Thingies on Gas Pumps

I have to admit, when I first expressed my exasperation over this, I was actually wrong about it’s purpose. The first time I encountered this, I assumed it was a nanny-state restriction designed to make sure that you don’t leave the gas nozzle dispensing gas in your tank and walk away. That is, it made you stand there and hold the nozzle in, preventing the chance of a malfunctioning nozzle causing an overflow and a potentially dangerous situation. I figured that at some point in time, some person left the nozzle in their gas tank, gallons of gas spilled out, and some endangered rodent accidentally died. But then I was advised that despite the pushback of the corrugated plastic, you can in fact leave the nozzle in your tank while it pumps, no added support needed. And then I looked up some information and, you know, actually looked at the freaking thing, and saw that it’s intended purpose is to capture any evaporated gasoline that might escape from your tank while you are filling up. Yeah, they are preventing that small portion of gasoline from evaporating and contributing to air pollution. I would think this would be an amazingly small contribution to poor air quality, but perhaps when you multiply by the number of cars in California and consider that it’s so much hotter there than Illinois, raising the vapor pressure of gasoline, it actually matters. Given that I’m a newcomer to the state, I guess I can give it the benefit of the doubt. Still, it was probably introduced so that evaporated gasoline didn’t disrupt the mating rituals of a particular coastal moth or something.

For the past 5 years or so (plus-or-minus 6 years) I’ve had the good fortune to live in Urbana-Champaign, an area with a very low cost of living. It’s a very livable town, even on a graduate student’s salary. One of the most successful scams in Central Illinois is the wool that local landlords have pulled over student’s eyes, making them think it’s a sellers market instead of a buyer’s market. Many people sign leases in November for an August move-in, and they’re in their new home for about two months before they’re being asked if they want to renew. But for the past three years, I’ve paid about $230 for my share of the rent. Not too bad.

So it’s come as a sort of shock to come to the Bay Area, where housing prices are quite higher. I was prepared for that. But finding a place to live has been such a hassle, in some part because there are so many options spread out over so much area. I’ve been trying to find a place somewhere between Mountain View and San Jose — an area something like 275 mi². My main tools for finding apartments has been Craigslist and Apartments.com, for finding smaller complexes and larger complexes, respectively. I’ve preferred Craigslist because often it’s a little more informative, and other sites are clearly more corporate. Anyways, let’s look at a typical listing.

$1150 for a 1 Bdrm in Palo Alto. You’re not going to find too much cheaper in the area, unless you go to East Palo Alto (Note: Never go to East Palo Alto). On Craigslist, you can search for items with a picture posting. A lot of listings just put pictures of the outside, which is pretty suspicious, unless they are advertising an outdoor bedroom. But sometimes, it’s just as awesome when they do post pictures of the interior. Check out what they took pictures of — the outside, the floor, the corner of a ceiling, and the kitchen sink. Not the kitchen….the kitchen sink. How underwhelming must this apartment be?

Okay, okay, let’s keep on looking. Hmm…let’s do a search for the words “Mountain View”. Oh, here’s what we get.

Gee, it looks like there’s a large, sunny 1 Bdrm apartment available. Multiple times. Apparently, the apartment manager thinks they will get more responses if they repeatedly post the same damn thing over and over again. Methinks they have not grasped the concept of the online listing. When I see these, I STAY AWAY, because I feel the listing reflects the attitude and personality of the manager.

But hey, let’s go with it. I open up that listing, and it mentions Newport Apartments, and all the amenities. Of course, it’s in Campbell, not Mountain View. Not even neighboring Mountain View. But the description says that apartments do offer “spacious mountain and courtyard views”. Sometimes people put words like that in there to attract more hits, I think. They list a webpage at “http://www.76.162.1.147″, which doesn’t exist, because it’s an IP address with www in front of that. But even though that error is on all twenty of their listings, they do not seem to mind. But yeah, take off the www and you get the real web page. But I will often do a Google search of things like this, and I’ll find something like this.

Doing things like this is what got me to introduced to ApartmentRatings.com, which appears to be the largest ratings web site around for apartments in the U.S. But the awesome thing is that almost unilaterally, all apartment suck. Check out the listing for Newport Apartments here. Overall, maybe a 2.1 rating out of 5, and only 19% of people recommend it. It is quite commonplace to get a rating like this. It’s the comments that are the best. Check out the reviews for this place. As an apartment manager, when you see a comment like “May terrible, painful diseases befall that witch, Leanne and that wank, Walter and bring them to reality with their deeds!” you know you’ve left your mark. A composite ApartmentRatings.com negative rating would say something like :

DO NOT LIVE HERE! They will take your entire deposit, and charge you $2000 more afterwards. All my furniture is inflatable or styrofoam, and I can levitate, but they still charged me $500 for carpet repair. I spent three days cleaning the kitchen with a toothbrush, but they took all of my money. The walls are so thin I can hear whenever the person two doors down sighs. I’m surrounded on four sides by apartments with 20 mexicans in them, and they are all in late-shift web cam mariachi bands. They also sell crack. Everyone has dogs that poop on the sidewalk and into my shoes. Every day someone steals my tires. Every month they raised my rent $300. You can do so much better for the price, although I will not tell you of any better place. Also, the place smells like curry. It was so much better 18 months ago before the management changed.

Every once in a while someone would come along and remind people that noise is something you’re always going to have to deal with in apartments. In general, I found the ratings websites generally useful, but they always need to be taken with a grain of salt. So, I’ve been in California for a week now, and no apartment lease signed yet. I’ve looked at about 9 or 10 places, ranging from laughable to acceptable. Nice places built in the last ten years seem to run higher than my price range, like $1800/month. But hopefully I’ll have some good news soon, and a place to put all my stuff.

This rant is a long time coming, but I feel I need to put it out there. Since we know that this blog is widely read by people “in charge”, I feel it couldn’t hurt to dispense some wisdom, Jeet-style.

Since I re-joined Netflix, I’ve been rocking the Watch Instantly feature to watch stuff online, and one of the first things I did was catch up on Heroes, the popular NBC scif-fi-ish show. It resonates with my desire to have superpowers. Although I would definitely be better than all the losers on that show. It really is a pretty good show, so far, although there have been some glaring annoyances. But towards the end of the first season, they introduced a shape-shifter, to which I thought….”Uh-oh.” Putting in shaper-shifters is a bad idea. Now, they used this to fantastic effect a few episodes later, when they went five years in the future and an awesome plot twist revealed that someone was not who they seemed. But in general, I groan whenever shape-shifters come up, because they allow writers to do ridiculous things and then blame it on shape-shifters. This first came to my attention when watching the Mission: Impossible movies, where they have the technology to doppelgang people with lifelike mask and voice modulators. You never know who is who, and who is going to rip their face off. Tedious. If I was in one of these worlds and knew that shapeshifters were about, I would have to take a page of the Harry Potter series, and start verifying identities with pre-arranged passphrases (although Harry Potter was dealing with people under the Imperious Curse, not shapeshifters. God I’m such a dork). Seriously, if you know this technology exists, there is no good reason to trust anyone.

My second gripe has developed as I’ve finished watching the truncated second season of Heroes. One of the superpowers that certain people have developed on the show is super-regeneration, or quick healing. These people will recover from any wound, short of major head trauma. And even then, if the source of the trauma is removed (i.e. remove the knife in someone’s head) they will come back to life. Okay, fine, regenerate. One other person has the power to absorb other people’s powers. So he can regenerate too. Fine. Next, they made is so that if you are hurt or sick, if you get a transfusion from one of these super-healers’ blood, you will be near-instantly healed. Uh…okay. A little bit worse, but okay. And now, finally, even if you are dead (say by gunshot to the head), if you get injected with this blood, you will miraculously come back to life. Now that’s where I draw the line.

I believe that (good) television shows maintain a good relationship with their viewers. There is a certain amount of trust in this relationship — viewers agree to suspend some disbelief, and the writers promise to entertain and put together a storyline that in the end, can make some sense. They might not spell it all out, but viewers can at least piece together some narrative that will at least not be self-contradictory. Stuff should at least be canonical, and most importantly, what you see directly should be what you get. If we see an external shot of a character going into a burning building, and then 10 seconds later, it explodes, I’m willing to accept it if that character appears later on in the series — there could be a host of explanations for their survival, any number of possibilities for what happened in those ten seconds. But when you see a person shot, in the head — through the eye!! — and you see that person fall down, and take their final breath, and then you revive them a day later with some super-blood, some magic juice, you open up a can of worms. From now on, no death is final, no character arc can be safely tied up, because if needed, the writers can revive the character with a enchanted elixir. Plot holes are covered up with an area rug.

Since I’m rambling now, I’ll just take another step and talk about a series of fantasy novels called the Wheel of Time series. I started reading them a number of years ago; I’m a sucker for multi-volume epics. It had a standard fantasy archetype; a long time ago, a great evil was entombed — it is now awakening. There is a singular hero, described in prophecy, who starts out a simple farmboy and then discovers that he’s actually royalty-like, he can do magic, etc. etc. yada yada yada. It had lots of characters and lots of character development. The ultimate evil power had 12 or so disciplines that it unleashes on the world to do it’s bidding, and they try and stop the hero. And it was great! Every book, he would manage to knock off one or two of these guys, and no doubt by the end it would just be him and that ultimate evil. Awesome. But somewhere along the way, the author seemed to figure out that by ending this series, it would stop the flow of money in his pocket. So all of a sudden, the main characters split up and followed their own story arc — no joke, about 7 intertwining ones. Since a new book would come out every 2-3 years, about a fifth of each book was taken up by a recap of what everyone was doing, since it was impossible to keep track of it all. But the straw that burst my literary dam — wait, I think I screwed that metaphor up, oh whatever — was when he started resurrecting evil disciples that had died. Sometimes he resurrected them, and placed them into different bodies. Different genders, even. So now, instead of a nice orderly progression, all chaos. All new characters introduced could actually be an evil minion, one that had died 5 books ago. Originally, the series was targeted for 12 books. Recently, however, the author (Robert Jordan) passed away, after writing 11 books. Some other author is going to take up the mantle, and they will have quite a task — finish the series, close up umpteen story arcs, kill (I assume) all those evil minions and make sure they stay dead. I probably won’t bother to read it.

What’s the moral of my stupid long-winded post? Bringing back dead characters and letting shape shifters run amok violate the trust that you, the author has with your fans. You tell a story, either through the visual medium of film or by writing a book. The reader/watcher puts trust in you. Tell me a story. You don’t have to tell me it all at once. Things may not be what they seem — characters can have secret pasts, secret alliances, secret motives, secret secrets. There is a world of opportunity for what you don’t tell us. But if you tell us something, if you show us something, we should be able to take those things at face value. Otherwise, you’re just dicking me with.

But still, it pains me to see companies doing stupid things. For instance, I recently decided to start doing the online rental thing. I liked Netflix‘s independent nature, but the first DVD they sent me on my free trial was the wrong one — bad move. I closed my free trial and moved to Blockbuster, because frankly, it was a better value. The plans were the same price, but in addition to having one DVD out a time, I could have unlimited exchanges; I could get a DVD in the mail, watch it, then go to a brick-and-mortar Blockbuster and exchange it for another movie. They would record my mailed DVD as returned, so I would get the next one faster, and I would have a movie to watch tonight. However, my intuition was correct — it was such a fantastic value, that Blockbuster was forced to change their pricing about a month after I signed up, a decision that was met with much outcry. Outcry that was unnecessary, I thought, since you were getting more for your money with the exchanges. Oh, Netflix had the “Watch Now!” thing going, with online viewing to supplement your account, but the selection of things to watch online was uninspiring to say the least. It was clear that Blockbuster was trying to crush Netflix into the ground by outspending them, but in response Netflix merely lowered prices, not once but twice. To top it off, they pledged to improve customer service by employing more real-live people and giving them the power to make the customers happy. After the latest price increase announcement by Blockbuster, I decided to let Netflix take me back (perhaps not-so-coincidentally, the day after I got the price increase e-mail from Blockbuster, I received a please-come-back letter from Netflix with an offer for free popcorn), and I have to say, I’m impressed with the current service. The Watch Now section has selections that I had in my queue, like seasons one of Heroes and 30 Rock and Red Dwarf, along with some classics. And their response time for receiving movies has been eerily fast — I dropped a DVD in a mailbox on Saturday after the last posted pickup time, and Netflix notified me on Sunday night that they had received my DVD and were sending the next one. Just creepy, man. It just seems clear to me that Netflix obviously has a much more efficient process, but rather than Blockbuster trying to improve their processes, they’re just gonna jack up prices and work hard to piss people off, and hope that Netflix fails. Ah well. At the moment, I will say Netflix has impressed me enough to be :

Which brings me to the last item of note….read about this recently. The summary of the summary is that Circuit City came up with the brilliant idea to save money by firing all their most well-paid salespeople (i.e. senior staff who actually knew what they were talking about or at least knew how to sell stuff), and hiring more entry level people who cost less. The result : a 75% drop in the share price, as sales have plummeted. But don’t worry, folks; the genius executive vice-presidents who approved this idea got $1 million retention bonuses to make sure they don’t leave, as I’m sure they are highly pursued by other companies. Seriously, the only reasons you should go to a brick-and-mortar store are if

• You need the product right away
• You need to see/hold the product before buying it
• You have gift cards
• The store had some expertise that could come to bear on your buying decision

That’s just about it. You shouldn’t go because of price, because it is very rare that you can’t find a cheaper price online, unless shipping is prohibitively expensive, but even then it’s usually offset by a lack of sales tax. So, basically, Circuit City took away one of the only reasons that a person would shop there — to talk to a knowledgeable person who knows what they’re talking about. Or at least a slick salesperson who makes them feel good about making the purchase. But at least they saved all that money so they could give it to their executives. I guess it doesn’t make sense to me — but hey, I’m no businessman.