Category Archives: Peeves

Humbug: Top Five Worst Christmas Songs

Paul and Linda, “simply… having… yadda-yadda…”

And now that my temper is up, I may as well go on and abuse every body I can think of.
— Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Is that headline a contradiction in terms? Should it be, “Bottom Five?” Or would saying that, with “Worst” — which I feel compelled to use — be redundant?

Whatever.

But before I get to my list, allow me to complain that we are not in the Christmas season. This is Advent. Even though I was sick at home with a cold the first Sunday, and late the second Sunday, and therefore missed the candle-lighting ritual at Mass both times, I know this is Advent. You know how? I can read a calendar. Christmas starts on the 25th (remember how we used to call it Saturnalia, o fratres mei?), and ends on the Feast of the Epiphany.

Silence kindly created this image of me as Scrooge to go with this post.

Oh, you say only the Church calls it that? Well, let me clue you in: The Church invented Christmas. In fact, Protestants refused to celebrate it for generations because it was seen as so Catholic. Even Santa Claus is a saint. So there.

Speaking of which, one category of song you won’t see represented here is the kind that isn’t really a Christmas song at all; it’s really a winter song. Take “Jingle Bells,” please. (OK, I don’t really hate “Jingle Bells;” constant repetitions of it when I was a small child conditioned me to associate it with festivity. It’s just an illustration of my point, so bear with me.) Does it say anything about Christmas? No, it doesn’t. OK, there’s the sleigh — but it’s not, specifically, Santa’s. It’s a run-of-the-mill sleigh. It’s drawn by one horse, not by reindeer.

Or, worse yet, “Frosty the Snowman.” Is there a single Christmas allusion in it, direct or indirect? No, there is not. It’s about winter. Ditto with “Let it Snow,” which was thrust upon me one morning this past week.

Moreover, it’s about winter as we in South Carolina seldom experience it. Oh, sometimes we get a dusting of snow — in February. I, having spent most my life in the South (or in the tropics), have never experienced a white Dec. 25th. Granted, we had a nice blanket of the stuff fall on the second or third day of Christmas in 2010, but that’s an exception that proves the rule.

Songs like that are about winter in a particular part of the world, which is not here. So where’s the relevance?

Mind you, it’s not that songs must contain Jesus, Mary and Joseph, much less the Three Kings (who in any case should not be heard from before Jan. 6) in order to make the category. I’m happy with Santa, or the elves, or the reindeer, or a Yule log, or a tree… something, anything, that relates it to the actual holiday.

But enough about what the list is not.

Here’s the actual list:

“The Little Drummer Boy” — OK, you’re thinking, how could anybody hate “The Little Drummer Boy?” Well, I have since I first heard it, sometime in the mid-60s. It had been around since 1941, but I first heard it in about ’65 or ’66 (I remember being puzzled by it when we lived in that old converted barracks in New Orleans) — and then heard it and heard it and heard it. Everybody covered it; it was in everybody’s special Christmas album, and seemed to turn up on every Christmas special on the tube. What’s wrong with it? Let’s start with this: Where did a drummer boy come from? I’m not demanding that everything have a biblical basis — after all, I’m a Catholic. But how does a drummer boy make sense? Maybe a shepherd boy with a lyre or Pan pipes, but a drum? Who brings a drum into a home — or temporary quarters — where there’s a newborn? Mary didn’t have enough problems with having to give birth in a shed, and having to lay her baby in a filthy feeding bin, and all these strangers tramping through the place? The song suggests Mary and the baby dug the drumming. Yeah, right. Had I been there, I’d have been the third shepherd, the grumpy one, raising his crook menacingly and saying, “Go ahead, kid. Say ‘pa rum pum pum pum’ one… more… time…”
“Wonderful Christmas Time” — You know, “Simply… having… a WONderful Christmas time…” The greatest offense against music ever committed by Paul McCartney. He is absolved by all his really great stuff, but this monotonous bit of tinsel should never be heard again.
“Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” — Do I have to explain? Yeah, it’s satire. But I’m pretty sure I thought it was bad satire the first time I heard it. And every repetition grates a little more.
“Santa Baby” — When I was a young lad, they used to have these cartoons in the December issue of Playboy — in those days, as you may have heard, it was filled with interesting articles — that would feature these mostly or entirely nude, extremely pneumatic bunny girls in some sort of sexual situation with Santa Claus. And I always found that offensive. It felt like a form of libel of a beloved figure. Santa should be nothing if not G-rated. “Santa Baby” has always seemed like the musical counterpart of those cartoons. Not to mention the fact that it’s probably the most materialistic of all “Christmas” songs.
“Santa’s Super Sleigh” — OK, I’m cheating here. But I was having trouble coming up with a fifth — I’m really not as much of a Scrooge as I’m letting on to be here — and in tribute to Nick Hornby I always try to do Top FIVE lists. But I think this is OK because Nick himself invented this song for his novel About A Boy, and it was recorded for the film version. It’s a deliberately bad song that the protagonist hates to hear (even though it’s the reason he doesn’t have to work for a living). But I believe if the actual song marketplace had come up with it, rather than it coming from a novelist’s imagination, I would still dislike it.

Don’t get your history from Donovan: The problem of errors perpetuated in the pop music record

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“Donovan in Concert” — the album cover.

There are some things that just have to be corrected — but never will be, because they were recorded as they are, and will be replayed as they are, as long as there are devices capable of playing them.

“Donovan in Concert” is a long-time favorite of mine. The singer-songwriter recorded it at the Anaheim Convention Center on September 23, 1967. It was released the following year, and some months after that, a teacher of mine — I want to say it was a social studies teacher, although is seems more like something an English teacher would do — wanted us to sit quietly and write creatively for an hour. Or maybe it was study for an hour. I don’t know. In any case, he wanted us to be in a contemplative state, and he played this album. I found it so conducive to the state of thoughtful attention that I ran out and bought it on vinyl.

A few years back, one of my daughters gave me an extended version on CD, and I transferred the sound files to my computer — and thenceforth my phone and tablet.

So I was listening to it today, and was once again really bothered by this spoken intro to the song “Widow with a Shawl (A Portrait).” If you want to go listen to it, it’s technically at the end of the preceding track, “Guinevere:”

This next song, you must imagine, takes place in the 18th century, in England somewhere. This song tells the story of a young lady who is lamenting her lover who has gone to sea. This is in the days of the sailing ships, and when they went to sea, they went away for a long time — 25 years, maybe 30 years. Well, this is a widow — she supposes she’s a widow — and she’s walking along the beach. And this is her song.

Now, I don’t know in which universe English sailing ships went away for 25-30 years, but it wasn’t this one. There was nowhere to go that took that long, even with lengthy stops to refurbish and repair the ship. The survivors of the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe, two centuries earlier, returned after three years. Yes, whalers sometimes deliberately stayed out for years, but by “years,” I mean two or three or four. And occasionally, exceptionally unlucky sailors would be on their way home after a couple of years out, and get pressed into a Royal Navy ship and go out for another year or two.

I suppose there would be cases of a ship that returned to its former port after 25 or 30 years — but it would have been captured by hostile forces, renamed, lived a whole separate life or two or three, been recaptured, and returned as an entirely different ship (having been refurbished multiple times in everything but the bare hull, and much of that repaired), with a different crew, having been through many other crews in the intervening years.

This widow is indeed a widow, and if she expects to have children, much less grandchildren, to comfort her in her old age, she need apply to the authorities to have her man declared dead, and start over. Her man reminds me of something the fictional Jack Aubrey said of Ulysses — he utterly dismissed his excuses for taking 10 years to get home from Troy to Ithaca. Men turned to swine, indeed — it was nothing more than malingering in port, and poor seamanship.

Now that that’s settled, there’s another error that’s been bothering me, although not as long.

In the double disc of live music by The Beatles on the BBC (the first one, not the one just released), a BBC host introduces a song by saying:

The Beatles… with Paul McCartney paying tribute to the Everlys with ‘Lucille.’

It is followed, of course, by Paul doing his best to impersonate Little Richard.

Why the Beatles didn’t stop right there to correct the guy, I don’t know. Why the people who packaged this album used that bit of introduction, I don’t know. But it really, really bugs me that every time someone plays the track, the guy will say that, and will stand uncorrected.

Yes, the Everly Brothers also covered “Lucille,” but it sounded like this — nothing at all like the original. It’s somnolent, morose-sounding by comparison.

Paul McCartney is most definitely, most assuredly, not paying tribute to the Everlys.

OK, now I’ve done my bit to set those things straight. Makes me feel slightly better.

I find errors such as these inexcusable. Yes, I’m well acquainted with errors, and have made a few in my day, with some of them appearing in print. But that was in daily journalism, when there was barely time to write something in stream of consciousness, and no one had more than a very few minutes to check behind you. I am less patient with errors in monthly magazines, and not at all forgiving of them in books.

After 46 years, of course, the Donovan error is an artifact, and to change it would be to change who he was. One can accept it as valid evidence of the dizzy romanticism of Flower Power, which means it does communicate something that was true.

But I’m still glad I set it straight.

Gimme a break. Does a URL really have to be this long?

6 Replies

In a comment on a previous thread, I provided a link to an image that illustrated what I was talking about. Never mind what I was talking about; that’s not the point.

The point is, when I copied and pasted the URL for the image, I found it was, in my humble and uninformed opinion, longer than was necessary. Here’s the URL:

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

Really. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s 9,903 characters. Or, to stretch it out, nine thousand, nine hundred and three.

Come on. Even if you assign a different combination of letters and numbers to every image ever created in the history of the planet, or ever will be created before our sun goes cold billions of years from now, you wouldn’t need that many characters to designate a specific one of those images.

That’s just ridiculous. TinyURL, anyone?

Were any of these “members” female?

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Note how self-restrained I am. I held myself back from using as my headline, “I got your ‘member’ right here!” Even though that would have better expressed my exasperation.

Clint Eastwood and Rene Russo as Secret Service 'members' in 'In the Line of Fire.'

We used to have “servicemen” in our armed forces. Or, more broadly, military personnel. Now, we have this horrendous construction that drives me nuts every time I hear it: “military members.” That’s the best we seem to be able to come up with as a way of referring generically to soldiers, sailors, marines, and that least ideologically correct of all designations, airmen.

What are we saying? That the military is a club? Like belonging to Rotary, or the Elks? To me, it sounds vaguely insulting to those who serve us in uniform, to refer to them as “members.” Like fingers or toes, or perhaps some even less presentable member.

With the scandal over the weekend involving both Secret Service and military personnel, this linguistic absurdity has been taken to new depths.

To begin with, one assumes that all the agents sent home for consorting with prostitutes were male. And if you read non-American news sources such as Agence France-Presse or the Daily Mail, they go ahead and refer to them as male. That’s because in those countries, the fact that men tend to do certain things that women tend not to do (such as, bring hookers to their rooms) is confronted somewhat more directly, and not treated like a secret of which we must not speak. (Someone is inevitably going to contradict me by pointing to U.S. sources that do mention gender. But the fact remains that, after having read U.S. sources that did not mention gender, the first ones I found that did were foreign. It’s a tendency thing, not an absolute rule.)

I haven’t yet found any stories that tell the gender of the five “military personnel” who were also implicated, but not sent home, supposedly because their skills were too much in demand in protecting the president (rooftop snipers, perhaps?). If anyone has seen such a reference, please share it, if only to satisfy my morbid curiosity.

But whether they are male or (against the odds) female, there are better ways to refer to them than as “military service members,” as the NYT does here in its own stilted fashion:

Five United States military service members who were working with the Secret Service and staying in the same hotel are also facing an investigation because they violated a curfew and may have participated in the misconduct.

The use of such a slightly off-sounding construction has a bad effect on journalists. They become jaded to awkwardness, and therefore their radar doesn’t go off when they inadvertently type something that is not just awkward, but downright nonsensical:

Mr. Obama’s comments came several hours after Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, suggested that more Secret Service personnel members may have been involved in the incident.

Did you catch that? “Secret Service personnel members”? Really? Not “Secret Service members,” which would sound awkward enough, or “Secret Service personnel,” which would have been fine, but the entirely redundant “Secret Service personnel members”!

Why not take it to another level, or two? Why not “Secret Service personnel members people employees,” while you’re at it?

Or… and excuse me for getting radical here… how about if the reporter covering this for you just went ahead and asked the question, “Are any of these people female?” Because if not, you don’t have to perform any of these acrobatics, and can just go ahead and refer to the “men.” And if they are, even an awkward construction like “servicemen and -women” would be less jarring than referring to them as “personnel members.”

Or how about just scraping your fingernails on a blackboard? That would probably get on my nerves less…

If we could just suspend the Constitution long enough to take care of this ONE thing…

32 Replies

I spent Easter weekend at the beach with some of my family. We stayed at the beach house that my grandfather built in Surfside Beach. It’s on a small, narrow freshwater lake — the twins call it “the river” because it is so long and narrow that that’s what it looks like — with the ocean a couple of blocks beyond.

I don’t get there often, but we made it this time. The weather was beautiful. We had the whole day free Sunday (at least, until we had to drive back), having attended Easter Vigil Mass at my cousin’s church in Conway.

Between the Easter egg hunt with the twins and dinner, I managed to find a few quiet moments to lie in the hammock right next to the lake. Conditions were perfect. The breeze was perfect. I put some early Steve Miller Band on my iPhone and set it next to my head (I had no earbuds) as I prepared to snooze. I was right on the verge of doing something unusual for me — thoroughly enjoy the outdoors.

Just then, the roar of a riding lawnmower started up about 20 feet from my head, over on the lot next door. The guy on the mower was not the owner of that property, but a stranger. He was doing this for pay, on Easter Sunday.

I went inside fuming about it, but took solace from the fact that with that riding mower and he being a professional, it couldn’t take more than 10 minutes for him to mow that yard. I even found myself making excuses for him in my mind: Poor fellow must be desperate for the income to be mowing lawns today…

Then I headed back outside and resolved to escape the noise the way Huck Finn escaped the things that he didn’t like about “sivilization.” I got into the jon boat and pushed off with an oar to drift across the lake. It’s only about 40 yards across. As I drifted, I realized to my horror that some unseen fiend was using a leaf blower on the far side. Which sounded even worse.

I turned back as the first guy stopped mowing, only to see that the heathen mercenary had started using a weedeater.

I changed course again and started rowing perpendicular to the line between these two abominations.

As the first guy put down his weedeater and picked up a leaf-blower of his own — to blow the yard trash he had cut out onto the surface of the lake — I paused to write the following on Twitter:

Forget the Constitution: Anyone operating obnoxious power tools on such a beautiful Easter Sunday should be drawn and quartered, then fined.

I was reTweeted and received supportive replies from several folks (one who totally got into the Swiftian spirit of the thing wrote, “And then punished in a manner that could be considered cruel and unusual for such a crime.”). Good to know there are some sane people left in this world.

How’s Cyber Monday going for you?

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For my part, I’m still fighting the battle of the children’s picnic table. I told you about what looked like a happy ending here. And right about that time, I received the following notification:

This is a notification-only email. Please do not reply to this message.

Dear Brad Warthen,

Thank you for ordering from us. Your order number is [bunch of numbers] and has been successfully placed. You’ll soon receive additional emails regarding your order as it is processed.

Here is a review of your order.

Store Pickup summary

The Ready for pickup email typically arrives within 2 hours. Orders placed near or outside store hours may require additional processing time. If you have selected someone else to pick up your order, they will also receive a copy of the Ready for pickup email which provides detailed instructions on what is required to pick up the order….

And so forth and so on. Triumph, right?

But then at 1:33, I got this:

This is a notification-only email. Please do not reply to this message.

Dear Brad Warthen:

Thank you for shopping at Toys“R”Us and Babies“R”Us.

Unfortunately, we were unable to fulfill your order # [same bunch of numbers]. As a result, your order has been cancelled. If you have any questions or concerns regarding your cancellation, please contact Customer Service 1-800-ToysRUs (800 -869-7787) for further assistance.

Order Date: 11/28/11

I’m steeling myself to make that call now.

In spite of this unreality, I’m told that we live in a brave new world of blissful online shopping, and today is that world’s High Holy Day. There are many stories out there celebrating it, such as this one:

A Shopping Day Invented for the Web Comes of Age

Cyber Monday might have started as a made-up occasion to give underdog e-commerce sites jealous of Black Friday a day of their own, but it has become an undeniably real thing — surprising even the people who invented it.

Last year, for the first time, the Monday after Thanksgiving was the biggest online shopping day of the year by sales, and the first day ever that online spending passed $1 billion, according to comScore, a research company that measures Web use.

This year, with a record-breaking Black Friday — shoppers spent $816 million online, 26 percent more than last year, in addition to spending more offline — online retailers are gearing up for Monday to once again be their best of the season…

Yadda-yadda, yadda-yadda, yadda-yadda. I remain less-than-favorably impressed.

Yep, we’ll be staying right here, folks. But you knew that, right?

1 Reply

I’ve lost count of the number of alarming notices I’ve gotten from Go Daddy over the last few months, telling me over and over that Your Domain Name is About to Expire!

Email, snail mail… about all they haven’t done was send somebody around to knock on my door.

Finally, last week, being told yet again that bradwarthen.com would expire on March 13, I double-checked with Gene to see if I actually needed to do anything. After all, in my account at Go Daddy, it said in black and white that I was set to auto-renew.

So I sat tight. Today, I got this via email:

We just want to let you know we’ve automatically renewed the following items according to our agreement…

Which means they’ve taken the $11.62 cents out of my bank account for another year. “According to our agreement,” the one we’ve had all along…

I really don’t see the need for all the unnecessary anxiety each year. Yeah, they want my money earlier if they can get it (I guess). But is it really worth all that trouble?

Daylight Savings Time is unnatural, decadent and depraved!

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OK, now it’s what… not quite 10 a.m…. and I’m running out of steam. Feel the need for a nap. Stopped myself at two mugs of real coffee this morning, figuring I’ll need some later and not wanting to overdo, peak too soon with the caffeine, but now that I’m finally ready to really get started on the day — breakfast, meetings, etc., out of the way… here comes the drowsiness.

Got up this morning in the dark. Shaved, showered, dressed, headed out to the truck to drive to work. Still dark. Took a seat by the window at breakfast downtown, overlooking the city… still dark. Could hardly read the paper. I was halfway done eating before the sun had completely popped above the horizon.

Part of it’s my fault. Decided to give up sleep for Lent. That is to say, decided instead of beer or whatever this time, I would finally start getting up about an hour earlier. Yeah, I know, you’re thinking that Lent isn’t really for self-improvement, New-Year’s-resolution, been-meaning-to-do-that kinds of things, but at Ash Wednesday mass I thought it through, got all the theology worked out in my head (don’t ask me to explain it all; just trust me — it made sense at the time), and this is what I’m doing. Too late to do beer instead at this point.

But the REAL culprit, the one I’m choosing to blame, is my old nemesis Daylight Savings Time.

I’ve always hated it. Sure, I suppose it’s great for people who live for several hours’ yard work after getting home from the office, but I am NOT one of those people. I wish I were. My wife would think more of me if I were, and no one’s opinion of me matters more, but I’m not. Not that fond of sunshine at all, in fact, which is not something I want to admit, what with all that “They that do evil fear the light” propaganda, but it’s true. Sun comes out, my wife looks for sunny spot in the yard and gets to work. I say, “I have to go out in THIS? Where are my flip-up shades?” Me, I love English weather; I think it’s encoded into my gene structure. Clouds, light mist. And it’s good for the crops.

Speaking of crops, it occurs to me that if we were all farmers, we wouldn’t have Daylight Savings Time. What would be the use of it? You have to get up and milk the cows in the dark anyway, and the sooner the sun rises after that, the better. You work the same number of hours regardless, so what does it matter what the clock says? No, DST is a manifestation of this modern economy, a perversion of the natural order. And I, for one, do not have enough generations of evolution behind me to adjust to it.

The thing is, it divorces clock time from any tenuous connection it has to the natural world. Clock time is a fiction, an imposition of false order on reality. Unlike the year, the day, and in some cases the month, clock time — hours, minutes, seconds — have NO basis in reality, aside from the rough relationship between a second and a heartbeat.

There’s only one way it makes sense, and that’s if noon is at the moment that the sun reaches its zenith. We should do like on the old sailing ships. The captain should assemble his midshipmen on the quarterdeck, have them all shoot the sun with their sextants, and when someone says “I make it noon,” and others confirm, the officer of the deck tells the quartermaster “Make it so,” and your day is based in something real. Turn the glass and strike the bell.

Without that, it’s just a lie, every time we allow our lives to be governed by the clock in any way, shape or form while we are in this unnatural state. A lie I can actually FEEL in my bones. And we’ll all be living this lie until the autumn.

The biggest liars of all

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There are cynics among you who think that politicians are inveterate liars. I find that by and large this is not really the case. In fact, one of my biggest problems with many politicians is that when they make campaign promises, they keep them — when they really, really shouldn’t.

This is not to say that all politicians are compulsive truth-tellers. I suppose the field has more than its share of liars, particularly when the penalty for telling voters what they don’t want to hear is so steep.

But even the worst politicians are mere pikers, babes in the woods, pure novices at lying, compared to the fiends who record this message for us to hear, over and over and over again, when we try to do business over the phone:

All agents are busy assisting other customers and your call is important to us. Please remain on the line and the next available agent will assist you.

“Your call is important to us.” Yeah, uh-huh. Right.

Speaking the same language, but only technically

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You know how I just got HD? Well, this process all started with me wanting a Blu-ray player so I could watch Netflix without waiting for the discs to come in the mail.

That part of the project has been… tricky. I’ve spent several late nights in the past week trying to get that one simple thing done.

I thought I’d share with you my conversation — excuse me, “chat,” which isn’t the same thing — about the problem with a tech at Sony. As you read it, imagine unexplained pauses of five or 10 minutes while I wait for short, incomplete answers from the tech. Of course, when I took a couple of minutes to go try what the tech suggested (going through the process on a different browser), I got “Please acknowledge my question, so that I can assist you better.”

Note that, while it’s all in English, there is a distinct… disconnect… in the flow of communication. I get the sense that each comment is being run imperfectly through a translator. And it was amazingly frustrating. I was so desperate to work effectively with this person that I even slipped into a stilted version of English myself, hoping it would facilitate things (“Yes, it persists.” To which I got another deadpan, Hal-9000 answer):

Corinne_ > Hi Brad. Welcome to Sony Online Support. I’m Corinne. Please allow me a moment to review your concern.

Brad Warthen > Here is a full description of the problem:

Brad Warthen > I’m trying to get Netflix on my new Blu-ray player. I have an internet connection, but when it tells me to go to internet.sony.tv/netflix on my computer and enter a password, I run into trouble. That address asks me for my e-mail address and a password. So I enter my e-mail address, and the password that the Blu-ray player told me to use, and I get “The password you entered is invalid. Please enter a valid password.” So I try the password I created when I registered my player, and I get the same message. So I click on “Reset or Forgot your Password” and follow the directions, and you send me a new, temporary password. I’ve done this THREE TIMES now, and each time I enter the new, temporary password minutes (sometimes seconds) after receiving it, and I get “Your temporary password has expired. Please change the existing password at SonyStyle website.” Every time, same message. So what in the world am I supposed to do now?

Corinne_ > I am sorry that the BD Player can not be registerred in the Sony Essential website.

Corinne_ > Thanks for waiting, Brad.

Corinne_ > I’ll be happy to assist you in this regard.

Corinne_ > Do you have a SonyStyle account?

Brad Warthen > Yes.

Corinne_ > Did you try using different Web Brower?

Brad Warthen > No. I just used Firefox.

Brad Warthen > Hello? Are you there?

Corinne_ > Yes, I am online.

Brad Warthen > I said no, I just used Firefox. Is there a preferred browser?

Corinne_ > Brad, it is recommened to open the Eseential website in either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox 3.6.

Corinne_ > Please check the operation with a different web browser.

Brad Warthen > I’m using Firefox. 3.6.10. But I’ll go try IE as well.

Corinne_ > Sure, please go ahead.

Corinne_ > Please let me know if the issue persists.

Brad Warthen > … that is, assuming it still works… I never use IE; I always use Firefox or Chrome…

Corinne_ > Please let me know the result after using Internet Explorer.

Corinne_ > Please acknowledge my question, so that I can assist you better.

Brad Warthen > Yes, it persists.

Brad Warthen > I tried all my passwords, then requested a new one. When I entered the new one, I got “Your temporary password has expired. Please change the existing password at SonyStyle website. ” Again.

Corinne_ > I am sorry to hear this.

Corinne_ > Thanks for the additional information.

Corinne_ > I am really sorry for the delay in response.

Corinne_ > This is a dead lock issue.

Brad Warthen > What does that mean?

Corinne_ > This deadlock issue can handled by our next level of support over phone.

Brad Warthen > OK, what’s the number?

Corinne_ > They are our next level of support and better eqipped to help you resolving the issue.

Brad Warthen > OK. What’s the number, so I can call them?

Corinne_ > They are available at: 239-768-7547.

Corinne_ > Their hours of operation is:

Corinne_ > Mon-Fri 8:00AM-12:00AM (Midnight) ET

Sat-Sun 9:00AM-8:00PM ET

Brad Warthen > OK, I’ll call, and tell them it’s a “deadlock issue.”

Corinne_ > I am sure that they will be more than happy to further assist you resolving the issue.

Corinne_ > Please mention that you have contacted Chat Support Team for the same regard before while contacting the.

Corinne_ > Hence, theyb will be further assist you fixing the issue.

Corinne_ > Thus, you can access Netflix fine in the BD Player.

Corinne_ > Are you able to take it from here?

Brad Warthen > Yes. I was trying to copy the text of this chat so that I’d have the number and times, but the text box doesn’t allow me to select it. Could you e-mail me the info?

Corinne_ > Sure, Brad.

Corinne_ > I’ll forward this chat transcript to your Email ID for future reference.

Brad Warthen > Thanks. Goodbye.

Corinne_ > This Chat Transcript has been sent to: brad@bradwarthen.com.

Corinne_ > You are most welcome.

Corinne_ > It was really nice chatting with you.

Corinne_ > Have great time ahead!

Corinne_ > Good-bye and thank you for contacting Sony Online Support.

Corinne_ > Analyst has closed chat and left the room

So I guess tonight, I’ll be on the phone for several hours.

Pandora needs a “like it a LOT” button (although it’s doing pretty well without one)

9 Replies

Here’s a conundrum…

Pandora, the “internet radio” site that attempts to use your feedback to shape “stations” that play stuff you like, has a pretty simple system for your input: After you enter a song or artist (or multiple songs or artists) that you’d like to hear, it guesses what else you might like based on that, and you click on either a thumbs-down button meaning “I don’t like this song,” or a thumbs-up meaning “I like this song.”

That’s it. No gradations of feedback. It’s way binary; ones and zeros. I try to click on one or the other on most songs. I don’t sit there poised with the mouse, but every few songs I ALT-TAB back to Pandora to catch up with my decisions (except when I’ve gotten lost in my work and lost track of what I was “hearing,” and even then if I’m familiar with the song, I render a judgment).

But I find this frustrating everyone once in a while. Most of my “likes” mean, “I don’t mind if you keep this in my mix.” But every once in a while, they play me something I really, REALLY dig.

Examples… I have a lot of stations for different kinds of music, but recently I’ve spent a lot of time defining one called “Brad’s All-Purpose Station.” In the “I don’t mind if you keep this in my mix” on that station, I’d include “After Midnight,” “Angie,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” “It’s Money That Matters,” “Long May You Run,” “Oh! Darling,” “Smoke on the Water,” and so forth.

But there are other songs that I want to make sure Pandora knows I really like a LOT more than those songs. It may be an all-time favorite, or a really good song I seldom here and don’t own a copy of, or something I’ve occasionally heard and loved but didn’t know the name of… all sorts of reasons. Into that category I’d put: “Sexy and 17,” Another Girl,” “Baby, It’s You,” “Badge,” “Adagio for Strings,” “Bring it on home to Me,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Gymnopedies (3),” “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (the Al Green version!),” “I’ll Cry Instead,” “In Germany Before the War,” “I’ve Got A Woman,” “Naked Man,” “New Amsterdam,” “Simple Man,” “Werewolves of London,” and others. Oh, and on that last one: I’d much rather hear “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” or “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” but neither has yet been offered.

When I hear one of those, I want to say, Whoa, I’m sorry I clicked “like” on those last 10, because this is what I REALLY like! Don’t just lump this in with those… But all I can do is click again on the “like” button.

OK, so I’m frustrated that I can’t give more nuanced feedback, but here’s the perplexing thing: In spite of that, Pandora does an increasingly excellent job of guessing what I’ll like. As time goes by, I hit that “don’t like” button quite seldom.

Contrast that to Netflix, which gives me five levels of feedback, from one to five stars — and yet remains pretty much clueless as to what I’d like.

Not that I haven’t put the time in… I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve rated 2,144 movies on that site. I keep thinking, Give ’em more data, and they’ll figure me out. But they don’t. You give “Casablanca” five stars, and Netflix assumes, “He likes any movie that’s more than 50 years old.” Yeah, it’s probably a little more sophisticated than that — but not much.

Frustrating. But kudos to Pandora.

Remember when MTV showed VIDEOS?

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This item this morning made me think of something:

NEW YORK – MTV held a solid lead among 15 networks for its representation of gay characters last season, according to a report released Friday.

In its fourth annual Network Responsibility Index, the Gay & LesbianAlliance Against Defamation found that of MTV’s 207.5 hours of original prime-time programming, 42 percent included content reflecting the lives of gay, bisexual and transgender people. This earned MTV the first-ever “Excellent” rating from GLAAD.

“MTV programs like ‘The Real World’ and ‘America’s Best Dance Crew’ have offered richly diverse portrayals of gay and transgender peoplethat help Americans better understand and accept our community,” said GLAAD president Jarrett Barrios.

And the something it made me think of was this: Remember when MTV showed … music videos? As in, that was its entire point?

I loved music videos. Back at the start of the 80s, when I didn’t get MTV on my cable in Jackson, TN, I would stay up late on Friday night (I think it was Friday — or was it Saturday?) and watch a program on TBS that was nothing but an hour or so of videos.

As a new art form, it was awesome. They combined the appeal of popular music with cinema in a way that stimulated pleasure centers in my brain that no other form had yet discovered. It was startling the way those fleeting images filled out and magnified the impact of the music. There was a popular music renaissance based entirely on the fact that new bands were well suited to this form. I found it entrancing. Before music videos, I would tell people that if I could wave a wand and do anything other than be a newspaper editor, it would be to direct movies. In the early 80s, I switched that idle wish to making music videos.

(And yes, I realize that something like music videos existed previously, such as the music sequences in “A Hard Day’s Night,” which spawned a new device in loads of other movies. And then there was the occasional free-standing video — film, actually, in those days, I suppose — with two impressive examples being Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and John Lennon’s “Imagine.” But MTV launched an explosion of the form, and innovated the concept of continuous videos like listening continuously to songs on the radio, with VeeJays instead of DeeJays.)

Of course, once I had access to MTV I could watch music videos any time. My favorite time was when I was working out. I used to go down into the basement gym at The State, get on the treadmill and crank up MTV or VH1, and the time just sped by as I sweated and got healthy.

But even then — the late 80s and early 90s — MTV itself started to betray the new medium, by polluting its schedule with such unmitigated trash as “The Real World.” And look at the harm that has done to the world. Now, we have hundreds of TV channels to choose from, but at any given moment, it seems that more than half of them are showing this putrid garbage that involves appallingly stupid narcissists obsessing about their mock-private lives. It astounds me that even one person on the planet would ever watch this junk for two seconds, much less support it to this extent.

MTV started it all, to its everlasting shame. And it started with such a wonderful product…

Elevator slackers

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Does it bother anyone other than me when slackers stop your elevator to go a floor or two?

This morning, I’m trying to get to a meeting and the first step is to ride down to the street from the 25th floor. And things are looking good, because I’m on the elevator alone.

Then, this young, healthy-looking — even athletic-looking — guy stops me on 24, and rides down to 22.

Then, on 20, a young woman (healthy, but not so much athletic) stops me so she can ride down to 17. OK, borderline — but after the young guy, it tries one’s patience.

Back when I worked at The State, which is three stories plus a basement, I never took the elevator. Not because I’m such a health nut but because it irritated me so much if I tried to take the blasted thing from the 3rd floor to the basement, and had to stop two extra times so someone could ride from 2 to 1. (Besides, the elevators at The State were excruciatingly slow — I could easily climb from the basement to 3 before someone could ride it — not air-conditioned, and often smelled of B.O.)

Forgive me for going all religious and self-righteous on those of you not of the same faith, but it’s right there in the Ten Commandments:

Thou shall take the stairs if traveling between one or two floors, barring personal injury, lest incur the wrath of those traveling to the 32nd floor whose trips are delayed due to your laziness.

Other, more modern authorities are stricter, setting two floors, up or down, as the limit.

Frankly, I suspect the thing that caused Moses to lose his cool and smash the tablets probably had nothing to do with any golden calf. It was probably someone violating the above commandment. There’s nothing like trying to get to the bottom of a pyramid when you’re in a hurry to get across the Red Sea, and somebody stops you to go down two floors.

Sheesh.

Talkin’ ’bout the Tolly-Bon

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Was listening to the radio this morning — NPR, probably (I only listen to music on commercial stations) — and the announcer was talking about the pending confab between Presidents Obama and Karzai, and a mention was made of Mr. Karzai’s dealings with the Taliban.

Only the announcer didn’t exactly say “Taliban.” He took a sort of half-hearted stab at pronouncing it the way President Obama does, “Tolly-Bon.”

Here’s the thing about that. Having grown up speaking Spanish as well as English, I approve of people pronouncing words from other languages properly (personal peeve: English-speakers pronouncing “llama” as “lama”).

But when the attempt is lame, it grates. And the president, with his extremely normal American accent, simply does not pronounce “Taliban” the way a man from the Mideast or central Asia would. He sounds like… well, a Texan speaking Spanish. OK, not THAT bad, but it sounds odd, and it’s distracting, and it causes you to miss the rest of what he’s saying while you’re going, “TOLLY-BON?”

Actually, truth be told, it can be distracting even when it’s done perfectly. I always sort of go huh? when, at the end of a report delivered in perfectly accentless broadcast English, I hear the reporter sign off as “Mandalit del Barco.” That’s because she pronounces it with a perfect, extra-intense Spanish accent. And obviously both are natural to her, but it’s still distracting. It’s as though an actor were speaking a line with an Italian accent, and in the middle pronounced two words as a German.

It’s also a bit — showoffy. Because not many people can do it, perhaps. I could have, when I was young and fluent in both. But as I’ve gotten older, it can take me several minutes to get the muscles of my mouth warmed up to read Spanish properly (which I have to do from time to time to proclaim the Gospel in Spanish at Mass). If I try to pronounce “Mandalit del Barco” properly in the middle of a sentence in English, my tongue would trip over my front teeth, and I wouldn’t be able to get any of it out. It’s not so much the “Mahn-da-LEET,” which even a Texan could almost say correctly, but getting the L and especially the R right in “del Barco.” I can’t represent the difference phonetically. They’re just pronounced completely differently in Spanish. The tongue does tricks it’s never called on to do in English. (Here’s a link to a report by her that illustrates some of what I’m saying. It starts with a gringo anchor introducing her, saying her name with a lame American accent, then she goes on to report a story about recent immigrants with a fairly smooth, nondistracting shift between words like “sombrero” and English words — which I guess contradicts my point. But when she signs off at the end, as usual, she really punches the correct pronunciation of her name. It’s like she takes several steps back and gets a running start at it. And maybe that‘s what grabs my attention. Whatever the accent, you seldom hear an announcer so overpronouncing his or her own name.)

Anyway, I have thoughts like those every time I hear her. Which is distracting. I suppose there’s something to be said about the arrogant British habit of pronouncing everything, every foreign name or word, with an English accent, and foreign sensibilities be damned. It at least makes for a smoother delivery, with fewer cognitive bumps in the road. (But, as I said in the previous parenthetical, one CAN pronounce things correctly without distracting, if one is really good. Maybe Ms. del Barco just has an ego thing about her name; I don’t know.)

Something just occurred to me: Maybe the president does that Tolly-Bon thing as a very subtle way of having his cake and eating it. Maybe he makes a lame stab at pronouncing it “correctly” in order to reach out to folks in other parts of the world, but does it with a painfully American accent so as not to sound too alien at home. Could it be?