CeDeLiGa Update: Noooooo!

I am very sad to report that there is a three way tie in the CeDeLiGa race, with the death of Ted Kennedy. Roger astutely added the cancer patient to his list at the start of the year and it paid off. Although just last week Roger did say that he would rather lose this CeDeLiGa point than lose Kennedy's vote in the senate with the healthcare reform bill in the balance. Ever the political scientist.

I must say I shed some tears this morning for good 'ol Teddy. It is the end of an era.

Well, to the business at hand...the CeDeLiGa standings are as follows: Me - 1 point for Bea Arthur, Jster - 1 point for Ed McMahon and Roger - 1 point for Ted Kennedy. This is the closest race in CeDeLiGa history and with more cancer patients, overweight diabetics, drug addicts and octogenariens remaining on peoples lists it is only going to get more exciting! Stay tuned!

Total Eclipse of the Heart: the flowchart

I can't add much to the sheer awesomeness of this flowchart. Behold:Now it is stuck in your head. And you fucking love it, because the song is that awesome. (Via Yglesias)

It is actually one of my favorite songs ever...

On tickets and scalpers

Driving around today we listened to an old Fresh Air podcast (convicted NPR nerd. Sue me) that had an interview about the evils and frailties of concert tickets, scalping and the heinous duopoly Ticketmaster / Live Nation. Not much that I didn't know about, but the piece was really good, putting the bits and pieces together to show a compelling picture of general assholiness by evil corporations and devious scalpers.

We know how it goes. Hot act has a concert, and sets prices for a venue. Ticketmaster has the tickets, adds outrageous fees and you buy them. The fees are high because they are a de facto monopoly; no one else sells tickets for the new hot band, so you can bitch and moan all you want, they will crush you anyway with an iron fist. On top of that, you have the pack of scalpers getting in and reselling for outrageous prices, making a killing because the shitty Ticketmaster servers crashed on you.

I am not going to waste much time on Ticketmaster; it is pretty obvious by now that they are an evil, despicable corporation that is making a mockery of antitrust laws. If you give a shit about music, call your Senator and Congressman and ask them to go nuts on them as soon as they can. I bet Obama will love to crush that evil corp. I will focus more on the scalpers, and how they are not actually a bad thing - in fact, they are a sign that the artist is a moron.

The problem, however, is that we are not using the correct pricing model for concert tickets - the model is just broken. Bear with me, but it is all a matter of economics: a concert is an event that has a supply of tickets, and a certain level of demand. The supply is fixed (the size of the venue), the demand depends on the price. Each person is willing to spend a certain amount of money to go to a concert; I would go to see Daughtry for free, I would pay real money for first row tickets for Radiohead, and you would have to pay me a heft sum if you want me to go to a Nickelback concert.

When a band is popular, this means you have a good amount of people willing to pay for the seats; probably more that the amount available. If the price is low, pretty much every fan will accept it and try to get in - you will have unmet demand (people with no tickets) that will be willing to pay an extra to get in. Here is when you have scalpers: when the face value of the tickets is too low. The opposite can also happen, as the empty seats in Yankee Stadium this season show; no one wants to buy seats, so you can get to see the Yankees paying less than face value to some idiot that tried to make a killing in the secondary ("second hand") market.

If prices are too low, the artist is leaving money on the table, and some random dude is reselling tickets and making money on their backs. Not too fair. How we can make the ticket system better? One simple idea: auctions.

Let the fans bid for the tickets - simple as that. Have a three to five day window open where you can call your price in a bling auction; if the venue has 3,000 seats, the 3,000 top bids get tickets, paying whatever they called. Seats are assigned from top to bottom; those who paid the most get the best seats, and then we go down from there. Big artists would make a killing; smaller ones would be able to fill smaller venues with certain ease, as mildly interested people would be able to call a low price. If the venue needs a certain revenue, you can add reserve prices (minimum bids). And if you feel like a cool dude, you can always set aside a limited amount of tickets at a low price, to be assigned by lottery, and requiring to show ID to get in to avoid scalping.

This way the artists would get more money, venues will be easier to fill and scalpers would be deeply, deeply screwed, as people will be able to offer the outrageous prices themselves. If you want to further piss them off, have a last minute batch of tickets for auction right before the concert, to make sure that the artist can always get the money.

Would this leave the fans screaming that the artist sold out? Yes, no doubt. So what? Musicians need money. They deserve it. They don't see much from CD sales (yay for rampant piracy and evil labels), so they should milk their wealthy fans if they can. This model, in addition, will be great for cult bands with a rabid fanbase; the crazier your followers, the more they will pay for your tickets.

Still, to make this work, we first need to kill, maim and mutilate Ticketmaster and their iron grip on live music. Call your politicians and yell at them. It is higly satisfying.

So You Think You Can Win an Emmy?

So I definitely was happy with some of the Emmy nominees this year, including How I Met Your Mother & Neil Patrick Harris, Jim Parsons of Big Bang Theory and the Flight of the Conchords. But of course there were many ommisions, including Pushing Daisies and for me the biggest: no So You Think You Can Dance in the Reality Competition category and no Cat Deely in the host category. WTF? SYTYCD is by far better than Dancing With the Stars! The dancers and choreographers are more talented, the format is funner and Cat Deely is cooler than Tom Bergeron.

Well at least SYTYCD dominated in the Best Choreography category, nabbing 4 out of 6 nominations. For those of you who are unfamilier with the show I have posted below the nominees. For those of you who are super fans of the show like me, enjoy once more. BTW, Bleeding Love with Chelsea (now on DWTS) and Mark is my fave because Mark was the love of my life last season. Although Mercy is AMaaaazing.

Tabitha & Napolean: Bleeding Love with Chelsea & Mark


Mia Micheals: Mercy with Katie & Twitch


Tyce Diorio: Adam & Eve with Jessica & Will


Dmitry Chaplin (former cast member): A Los Amigos with Chelsea & Joshua (the winner last season)

Best Potter Movie Yet?

Yup, I am a dorky-ass Harry Potter Fanatic. Last night we went to see the Half Blood Prince and we arrived a half hour early thinking it was pretty early. Not so much. The line to get into the theater was out the door and beginning to round the block when we arrived. By the time we got in the best seats we could find were in the fourth row. But we did not care (hell it was like a bootleg IMAX). The whole audience was ravenous for some Potter!!!

The movie, in my opinion, is the best Potter movie yet. Adaptation-wise, there were definite ommisions (some good, some bad) and additions (most of which were good), but for three distinct reasons the movie worked:

CAST/ACTING: The three leads (Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson) have all grown leaps and bounds as actors. They are so much more natural and you can see their natural comraderie that only comes from working with one another for years. The supporting cast is amazing as always. The new addition of Jim Broadbent as Horace Slughorn was perfection.

HUMOR: This is by far the funniest of the Potter flicks. If I am not mistaken, some of the cheeky lines that got the biggest laughs were not even from the books. The screenwriters should be commended. Slughorn and Luna have some of the juciest comic bits, but teenagers in love/lust are funny enough on their own.

MATERIAL: After rereading the last couple books, although I have strong feelings for Goblet of Fire, Half Blood Prince is the best of the series. It strikes a wonderful balance of mystery, humor, dread, hormones and sadness.

If you aren't a dorky-ass Potter fan I really think you will still enjoy this movie. I think I will be giving it a repeat viewing in the theater myself. If anything, this movie has gotten me out of my Twilight stupor. Go Potter!!

An important movie: Food, Inc.

To tell the truth, I am only a part-time pop culture junkie. An amateur of sorts. I enjoy my pop junk, don´t be mistaken, and I gobble copious amounts of random entertainment in all mediums and forms (videogames are important, darn it!), but my true addiction, the thing that keeps me awake at night and really makes me a nerd is policy and politics.

I am a political junkie. Guilty as charged. Better get out of the way if you don´t like it on social occasions, and avoid leaving any opening for me to start blabbering about legislation.

There is a way to mix and match those two strands of my brain, however: the documentaries. I love them. I don´t care about those about African monkeys, killer bugs and crap like that, but I adore those that involve policy or politics. I loved "The Fog of War" (and know that Robert McNamara is dead, it is worth revisiting), I adored "Boogie Man" (if you know who Lee Atwater is, you will understand why) and I was enthralled with "The Smartest Guys in the Room" (Enron, remember?). They are fun. I love them. They teach you cool stuff.

Sometimes, though, you see a documentary that it is not just fun. It is important. Al Gore made one not long ago; now in theaters there is another of its kind, and you must go see it right now: "Food Inc.". "Super Size Me" might have changed the way you looked at burgers, but this one is going to make you change how you think about food completely, and I mean it.

I don´t want to get too much into detail (this is not my policy blog, after all; go gorge yourself with my wonkery here), but the idea is that the food that we eat is bad. Not bad as we make bad choices and don´t eat veggies; it is more about eating meat that is basically produced in the worst possible farms you can imagine, vegetables that are controlled by giant corporations, and all subsidized by a farm policy that ends up being welfare for rich companies and help for the worst possible food.

Seriously, go see this movie. It is not just fun or interesting. It will make you see things a complete different way by shedding light to a whole bunch of issues that you didn´t even know they existed. I mean it.

Screw MJ: Billy Mays is dead

Billy Mays, king of the pitchmen, master of the spoken word, emperor of the holy TV turd, is dead. He is the one true celebrity big loss this weekend; a man on his prime leaves us, when he was doing his best work.

Billy Mays was awesome. He is the only human being that is allowed to speak in Caps Lock ALL THE TIME EVEN WHEN HE IS ORDERING FOOD AND/OR HAVING SEX WITH HIS WIFE:



Actually, the though of Billy Mays having sex with his wife while selling HIS BIG UNIQUE DICK AND WAIT THERE IS MORE in Billy-Mays-speak is highly disturbing, and I wish I hadn´t put it in your brain. Sorry.

I just did.

Jokes aside, Mays was actually a really impressive individual. He started pitching junk in Atlantic City, and impressed the owner of a little known cleaning product (OxiClean) enough that he decided to put him on TV. He made the brand, and it hasn´t been the only thing he build from the ground.

I really don´t know how he did it (I think his voice is hypnotic, in a bizarro, I am blasting you with the sonic equivalent of a ton of bricks kind of way), but he did sell his stuff. Death of salesman indeed.