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21. August 2008 by Ben.
If you’ve been having a good day so far and want to remember what soul crushing despair for humanity feels like, just read this Associated Press story from Ponce de Leon, Florida. You’ll want to punch someone in the face and then probably take up drinking.
When a high school senior told her principal [David Davis] that students were taunting her for being a lesbian, he told her homosexuality is wrong, outed her to her parents, and ordered her to stay away from children.
He suspended some of her friends who expressed their outrage by wearing gay pride T-shirts and buttons at Ponce de Leon High School, according to court records. And he asked dozens of students whether they were gay or associated with gay students.
…
“Davis embarked on what can only be characterized as a witch hunt to identify students who were homosexual and their supporters, further adding fuel to the fire,” US District Judge Richard Smoak recounted in his ruling. “He went so far as to lift the shirts of female students to ensure the letters ‘GP’ or the words ‘Gay Pride’ were not written on their bodies.”
Even if we suspend all morality and humanity for a moment and suppose that a witch hunt for gay supporters were justified, how is it even then acceptable for a high school principle to start lifting up his female students’ shirts? Perhaps they should have taken to writing it under their bras so we could more easily convinct the guy as a sexual predator. More importantly, of course, school principals are not empowered to crusade against homosexuals.
Heather Gillman (in the article’s photograph) was one of the students who protested in defense of the anonymous gay student. Her mother, Ardena Gillman, got it exactly right:
“What happens when these kids get out in the real world after they leave Ponce de Leon and they have a black homosexual supervisor at their job?” she said.
Hold whatever views you want in private, but if you can’t teach tolerance to the children under your supervision in a public school, you should be kept at least a thousand meters away from any place where minors gather.
The district had to pay $325,000 to cover the ACLU’s attorney fees. The students who were sensible enough to stand up and protest should get another $325,000 to invest in improving their school in any way they want – up to and including firing the idiot that runs it.
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7. August 2008 by Ben.
JetBlue’s new Terminal 5 at JFK is about to get a test drive. Over a thousand JetBlue frequent fliers were invited to come to the airport, get tickets, go through security, and wait at assigned gates for imaginary flights to nowhere. It’s all the best parts of travel, without having to actually fly anywhere! If they did that at Logan, I’d be in.
From the Boston Globe, 7 August 2008, describing the new terminal:
The security screening areas span a football-field-size space. There are twice as many X-ray machines as metal detectors…. Rubber floors cover the security space – because it’s more comfortable for shoeless feet than tile or carpeting. A blue wall nearby will hold a bench where travelers can sit to put their shoes back on.
It took four years and $743 million, but we’ll finally have benches to put our shoes back on. It’s about smegging time.
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15. July 2008 by Ben.
This may be one of the most confusing headlines ever written:
Life bans reduced for shoplifting boxers
Go ahead, read it through a few times until you think you’ve got it. Now, which meaning did you choose?
If you guessed #3, you’re right!
I understand the need for economy of language in newspaper headlines, but once in a while you just have to throw a verb or two in there.
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14. July 2008 by Ben.
Zipcar has always paid for all the gas members use – out of the money we pay to drive the cars, of course. This way nobody gets caught with the “hot potato” of an empty gas tank. Everybody pays the same amount for the car, and once in a while you have to take a few minutes to swing into a gas station. Most of the cars I’ve reserved have had nearly full tanks.
This morning, Zipcar announced in an e-mail to Boston-area members (maybe all members) that they have a new procedure for pumping gas. “There isn’t a whole lot we can do to make filling the tank more fun,” they wrote, “but we can make it easier.” Here’s how it worked before:
In the driver’s visor was a gas card with a label on the front with the “Driver ID” number – the same number on every card in every car in the city. You’d use this just like a credit card at the pump, but then you’d have to enter the odometer (which you would invariably have forgotten to check before getting out) and then the Driver ID number.
Here’s the new, “easier” system: There’s still a gas card. You still enter the odometer. You still enter a Driver ID number. Now, though, the Driver ID is your own personal membership number – the number printed on the front of your Zipcard.
This is a horrible idea! It’s certainly no easier than using the shared Driver ID, and it’s much more inconvenient. There’s no other reason for me to know my Zipcard number. It was assigned arbitrarily when I joined, and I haven’t used it since. You don’t need it to reserve cars, and unless you call Zipcar on the phone (which you’d do only in unusual circumstances) nobody will ever ask you for it. Until now. Now, whenever I get gas I’ll have to pull the Zipcard out of my wallet.
Making this worse, the Zipcard is an RFID card, so it’s hidden in the deepest recesses of my wallet alongside my CharlieCard – two items I’ve never removed. To use a car, I just hold my wallet up to the windshield. Admittedly I can’t be sure how many Zipcar members know they can do this, but I can infer from how many T passengers do. Watch a line of people boarding a train and you’ll see at least half of them (probably closer to 70%) hold their wallets or change purses directly up to the sensor. The only people who regularly remove their CharlieCard and tap it directly are those with large purses where the card is buried somewhere inside.
(I did once see a pack of tourists standing at a fare gate trying to figure out which side of the card the sensor needs to “see,” but those are tourists. They also think B and D trains go to Lechmere. Ha! Fools!)
I know, really this is at worst a minor inconvenience. Surely Zipcar’s real motivation was that this scheme makes their administrative processing easier, and I support that. My objection is that they announced they were making it “easier” for us, as though Zipcar members are so stupid we’d never notice the scheme they implemented is, if anything, harder. You have a lot of good policies, Zipcar, but this one was poorly executed.
P.S. Stop addressing me solely by my last name. It makes me feel like I’m in a high school gym class. “Hi Jones. Jones, I want to see more hustle!” If you don’t know my first name, “Dear Sir” would be preferable.
P.P.S. Get some Civic hybrids around here, will ya?
Posted in News, Essays | 2 Comments »
26. June 2008 by Ben.
Suppose that many students in New York public schools own cell phones. Summon all your powers of imagination for this one.
Now suppose that instead of banning phones, the city gives one to every student in the system – a phone called the Million.
During school hours the phone can’t make calls or send texts, but it can be used to do research online and interact with materials teachers distribute electronically. As students do homework and get good grades, they’ll receive an allowance of minutes to call their friends after school.
(via Freakonomics)
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25. June 2008 by Ben.
Boston has been abuzz lately with the sounds of absolutely nobody caring about how Legal Sea Foods advertises its restaurants.
The seafood chain began a campaign in January with ads on Boston cabs featuring its “fresh fish” – fresh like the prince of Bel-Air. The fish said things like, “The cab driver has a face like a halibut.” Nobody particularly noticed. Including the cab drivers.
Then in May they debuted the same campaign on the sides of Green Line trains. Now the fish said things like, “This conductor has a face like a halibut.” Nobody particularly noticed. Except some conductors.
Stephan G. MacDougall, president of the Boston Carmen’s Union, … fielded 40 phone calls from Green Line workers incensed by the ads.
“To say they are angered and offended is to put it lightly,” MacDougall said. “I will tell you this: If they don’t come down, we will not drive those trains.”
With this, a few people began to care. They do have a point: it is offensive and insulting. Even things said as a joke can be offensive. Did we learn nothing from Mean Girls, in which Tina Fey cautions the high school girls, “You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores – it just makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores?” Don’t tell me I’m the only one who watched that movie.
Complaining, however, was the worst move the Carmen’s Union (Local 589) could have made. They have a right to take offense, but it’s rather akin to arguing with the homeless guy about whether or not your drugs smell. Trust me. Nobody ever beat me up in middle school, and I was the guy who wore a vest to school every day. Ignoring the bullies must have worked at least a little. (Except that kid who tried picking on me on the last day of school – he ended up mopping hallways for the first week of summer while I was in Disney World. Seriously.)
Legal Sea Foods CEO Roger Berkowitz threw fuel into the fire the next week, with an “apology” on the radio:
“We should have never, ever said, ‘This conductor has a face like a halibut,’ when the truth is, most conductors don’t look anything at all like halibuts,” Berkowitz says in the new radio advertisement, produced by the New York ad agency DeVito/Verdi. “Some look more like groupers or flounders. I’ve even seen a few who closely resemble catfish. And there’s one conductor on the Green Line that looks remarkably like a hammerhead shark. So we feel very badly about this mischaracterization, and we won’t let it happen again.”
Somewhere in Boston 40 Green Line conductors were out purchasing soapboxes, and 350,000 Boston Globe subscribers were thinking about whether or not Legal Sea Foods was funny – and as a follow-up question whether they felt like some halibut for dinner.
Then Legal threw on the last log:
Initially, the MBTA said two of the five ads had to come down, but, without cause or warning, we found a third ad subsequently had been taken down.
This might lead a company to question whether its First Amendment rights have been violated. Nevertheless, we have bigger fish to fry, and hope that the conductors can accept the ads in the spirit they were created. I doubt any are truly offended. And if so, a halibut dinner is on us.
– Ida Faber, Marketing director for Legal Sea Foods. Printed as a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe, 19 June, 2008
Let’s stop right there. We’re already poised on the brink of raising a generation of illiterate txt spkrs (isn’t that the best editorial ever, by the way?) so let’s clarify something. The first amendment makes no guarantee whatsoever about who can advertise on the T or what those ads can say.
While Legal Sea Foods has a constitutional right to shout at the top of their voice that conductors look like fish, no advertising venue in the country has a constitutional obligation to print it. As Aaron Sorkin says, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.”
Of course, the real purpose of the statement was to keep the dialog going. When it failed, giant ads appeared a few days later announcing that Legal really had sent gift certificates for free dinners to the Carmen’s Union for any conductor who wanted them.
We can only hope this wraps up a publicity battle that was fought absolutely nowhere but the pages of a newspaper, and sufficiently drives up Legal’s sales revenues for the month of June. And the award for Best Supporting Actor goes to: the Carmen’s Union, for making it all possible.
Posted in News, Aaron Sorkin | 2 Comments »
19. June 2008 by Ben.
According to the Globe (June 19, 2008) a man back in December 2007 shined a green laser into the cockpit of a police helicopter, forcing the pilot to take evasive action. He was formally charged yesterday. What struck me particularly was the description of the laser:
The laser Sasso is accused of using was classified by the Food and Drug Administration as a Class IIIb laser, which can cause burns, temporary blindness, and distractions, prosecutors said.
“Do you expect me to fly with this thing in my eyes?” “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to get distracted.”
I don’t mean to suggest that shining a laser anywhere near a person’s face is ever acceptable, just that “distractions” are not a particularly potent argument to advance.
Posted in News, Quips | 1 Comment »
23. May 2008 by Ben.
I’m not sure which is stranger:
(According to Reuters)
Posted in News | 1 Comment »
13. May 2008 by Ben.
Last week, NPR ran a brief story about Christopher Ratte. This father ordered a lemonade for his son (age 7) at a baseball game, and was given a Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
Some suggest this isn’t a realistic mistake, though as a non-drinker myself I can confirm that I didn’t know Mike’s Hard Lemonade was alcoholic until somebody tole me. I doubt I would have thought it unusual to give it to a child.
As reporter Scott Simon reflects, even the $7 price was no clue, since “the price of everything in a ballpark is ludicrous, from a bag of peanuts to the pay of a first baseman.”
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