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February 28, 2007
I'm not exactly sure how interesting this is, but I have been engaged for several months in a customer-service tug-of-war with Cingular over a $150 early termination fee that they charged me in November. That was when I left Cingular's high-priced, questionable service for T-Mobile's MyFaves plan, which costs a lot less and allows me to talk a lot longer. Competition in the market needs to be rewarded, so that cell phone companies--the used car salesmen of the 21st century--can improve service and lower costs or face mass desertions of customers. (Interestingly, fierce competition among cell companies in India has reduced average monthly charges there to $11.)
This week, I finally got them to remove the charge. Here's what happened: My original two-year contract ended in September 2006. They insisted that when I upgraded in February 2006 to a new phone, because my old one had stopped working, that there was some sort of new two-year agreement. I knew that I had not actively agreed to such a thing, and presented them with a sort of "What does God need with a starship?" type question: "Where is the proof that I agreed to a new two-year contract?" They got very agitated when I called several times a week asking for actual proof that I had agreed to all of their terms. They insisted that I had either agreed to a two-year contract on their website when I ordered the replacement phone, or when I called to activate that phone. I don't remember agreeing to any such thing, I said, and even if I did, the terms were not made known to me in a way that was acceptable. It's an interesting question of cyberlaw. Anyway, finally one of the customer service managers agreed with me, but only after I complained about being treated unkindly by one of the reps. She removed the charge. Because they made me mad, I am now spreading the word that there are online rumblings that anyone may be able to get out of a Cingular contract because they raised their text-messaging fees. Check it out here. February 21, 2007
I was fingerprinted for a federal employment FBI background check yesterday. As always, dealing with the federal government was funny: The fingerprinting was done digitally with a nifty USB peripheral attached to a crappy Windows XP app that captured the images. Hope they have SP2 installed lol. I think the software was created by this company but I couldn't find the exact model that was used.
As I was reading the stack of hilarious federal paperwork I have to fill out on the way home, things got even more hilarious when I noticed that most of the forms were printed by Unicor Federal Prison Industries, Leavenworth, Kansas. The Unicor site--motto: "Your Partner in Mission Readiness"--could not be more akin to the world as envisioned by Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. February 18, 2007
This video of a Japanese game show made me laugh more than anything has in a long time.
February 15, 2007  I had originally written a post about how the above advertisement, which is splashed all over ads and t-shirts at the national gym chain I go to, contains a misspelled word, at least as far as American English is concerned. Then several people told me that "judgement" is an acceptable alternative. After some research, I am less convinced that this is actually the case. Rather, the conflicting accounts make me think that some schools of thought have simply given up trying to correct it. On that front, does anyone have evidence that "judgement" was an acceptable alternative spelling, say, 25 years ago? (I'm not actually a language maven, but it always amazes me when advertisements contain errors.) February 07, 2007  The Ennio Morricone show at Radio City Music Hall on Saturday night was really remarkable. Although the tickets were a tad expensive for 90 minutes of music, and some pieces were more successful than others, seeing Ennio live in New York was something to cherish. Specifically, I applauded the desire to play some lesser-known works, if only because the general public probably knows just four or five Ennio themes. Included on the program was the theme for the 1971 film Maddalena, a movie that is virtually unknown except for the fact that it yielded two of Ennio's most glorious elegies, the main title "Come Maddalena" as well as "Chi Mai," which would become a hit a decade later when Ennio re-used it for the score to the Jean-Paul Belmondo film Le Professionel. Sadly, "Chi Mai" was not on the program. Other than that, most of the big themes were there: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in America, Once Upon a Time in the West, Cinema Paradiso and of course The Mission. The concert opened with the rhythmic main theme from The Untouchables but sadly didn't go into the heroic end title, which is one of Ennio's best works. "Once Upon a Time in the West," with its soaring soprano solo, was probably the most successful piece of the evening. It was part of the spaghetti western suite, which didn't include anything from A Fistful of Dollars or For a Few Dollars More. Also, the suite from The Mission, which ended the scheduled show, left me a bit cold; not only was the arrangement different, it was too short and didn't have any time to develop. In contrast, it seemed like the suite from Cinema Paradiso, a score I've never really liked, was never going to end. Stephen Holden had some good and bad things to say about the show in the Times. I would probably agree with him; the strangest phenomenon was that there was no new material for any of the three encores. In a career spanning 400 movies, you'd think Ennio could have found something, even if it was the main title from The Humanoid. I guess the problem with film music concerts is that they have to concentrate on themes in general, and themes that people might recognize more specifically. The best composers have always written more than themes, and written some of their best work for individual moments in the most forgettable movies. |