RELATED
SITES:
Ganymede
Ink Syndicate
CannonFilms.com
The Dunsel Report
SYNDICATION:
Atom Feed
BLOG LINKS:
John Gorenfeld
Paul Frankenstein
Jim Steinman
Soul of Trek
True Father
ST XI
ASSORTED
WRITINGS:
"Cannon
Films: The Rise and Fall of Menahem Golan" (2001)
"Fast Company" (2007)
"Last
Man Dancing" (2001)
"Our Alien, HE" (1987)
"Drummer
on Top: The Red Hot Chili Peppers' Chad Smith" (2002)
"Singin'
the Hi-Res Blues" (2003)
BIO:
I
grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and now live in Brooklyn, New York.
I have a bachelor's degree in linguistics from Swarthmore College and
a master's degree in journalism from UC Berkeley. Feel free to email
me at patrick@runkle.info.
From
2000 until 2004, I was the editorial director for ArtistPro,
a music-industry trade publisher in the Bay Area. I also was
editorial director for ArtistPro's short-lived national magazine,
which was distributed to all the members of the GRAMMY organization.
(That includes Phil Spector.)
Current
activities include my band, Ganymede, my trips to Canada, and various other things I do. (See above for links.) I also have a large collection of oversize video boxes from the early 80s.
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As a followup to my recent post about my battle with Cingular over an early termination fee, I am realizing that I may have had an option other than calling customer service every day for a few weeks: I could have filed a federal lawsuit! A New York-only legal war is now ongoing between Sprint Wireless and something called the "Vaad," which is not an alien life form but instead a rabbinical council formed by some ultra-orthodox Jews to procure "kosher phones" for its followers. These kosher phones were to be able to make all sorts of phone calls but not able to access text messaging or the internet, both of which are strictly forbidden. The Vaad sunk $150,000 into the venture, which was apparently fraught with problems on both sides from the get-go. Apparently, Sprint was never fully able to figure out the billing structure, in which individual sect members were to be billed separately for their phone charges, but were to be disallowed from having any sort of control over their accounts were they to call Sprint customer service.
For the Vaad's part, apparently Sprint got a bit irritated when -- and it is impossible to make this up -- "a community activist prepared a newspaper advertisement that both verbally and graphically compared the devastating spiritual effect of the use of Internet-capable cell phones to the devastating mass murder of Jews at Auschwitz." The ad did this by featuring "side-by-side illustrations of crematoria at Auschwitz and a 'flaming' internet-able cell phone" complete with the "unauthorized use of Sprint's trademark." The lawsuit itself features a mind-boggling blow-by-blow description of the Vaad making impossible demands and the company being too incompetent to do anything about it... It is a must-read.
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