The Phantom City

If I wanted to start a series of these, I doubt I could keep track of the numbers past the first hundred.

Anyway, here’s the gist of a story happening in Raleigh. One restaurant in an expensive location closes down. Its ownership group is embroiled in lawsuits. The restaurant had also sold a bunch of gift certificates that have apparently not been refunded.

Second restaurant opens in the same location. Agrees to honor the previous restaurant’s gift certificates at the urging of mall owners, but stops when they realize they’ve already given away $4,500 in free food. (They were absorbing the cost of the certificates.) They had no legal obligation at any time to honor the gift certificates, since they weren’t involved with the previous restaurant. They did it for the sake of creating and keeping good will with customers.

Here’s a quote, from after they stopped taking the gift certificates, from one of those customers who didn’t get her $100 certificate redeemed:

“I’m sorry he got stuck…It’s not my problem…He should have done his due diligence. Or he should have sucked it up and paid out those gift certificates.”

Seriously, that’s the representative quote The News & Observer got from one of those customers whose good will is valued. I’m hoping other people didn’t react the same way, but the misguided anger is amazing.

Anyway, South, the new restaurant, has agreed to take the certificates until August 31. It sounds like the old ownership will pay for them. I haven’t been there — Durham’s more my area — but I’ve heard the food is good. If you’re in the area, try them out. They’ll probably enjoy having folks in who will pay the usual way.

Just in case you don’t know what I look like, I offer here an accurate representation of myself:

Handsome devil, that. All yellow and…ahem…a few pounds less heavy than I would have thought.

It’s from the Simpsons Avatar Creator, on The Simpsons movie site. Their application works even better than the one for South Park, but South Park’s does let you become a pirate, which is cool.

Link courtesy of Best Week Ever, which tries for Paris Hilton, but I think this might work better as Paris in the Simpsons universe:

The Inanimate Carbon Rod.

Scientists have found that all domestic house cats owe their genetic heritage to the Near Eastern wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica. A quote from the story:

Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wild cat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats, and the rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey for her…Seeing she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.

And then the children ran out with an angry mother cat attached to them.

Good times each year to see how useless media consensus really is in the sports world include the two drafts that count (NFL and NBA) and the playoffs of various sports. We’ve got the NBA Draft up tonight, and there appears to be two great players. Which one should go first to the Portland Trailblazers?

Greg Oden. Even though Kevin Durant looked better his freshman season than Oden, and has an NBA-ready game, you don’t get a chance for the combination of size and athleticism Oden supplies very often, particularly when it’s already proven on the highest level of college basketball. (This ain’t Kwame Brown or Andrew Bynum. Who both play for the Lakers. That makes me smile.) Durant’s likely to be a great player, but there might be someone like him available next year. That isn’t likely for Oden.

So, what’s happening? For a while, I kept seeing commentary after commentary about Oden as the presumptive #1 pick. Then I started to see sportswriters switching over to Durant…after all, he was a great player in college, can make an impact right now, and the Blazers need a small forward. C’mon, in most cases those recommendations have nothing to do with Durant’s qualifications; they have a lot to do with wanting to write something new and different from everyone else. Here’s a lesson: It’s almost impossible to be contrarian nowadays. Too many blogs and too many other writers specialize in it. Just write what you think.

Anyway, it’s not like it’s the worst choice in the world. You’re not looking at Sam Bowie getting picked before Michael Jordan; at worst, you’re likely to be looking at Akeem Olajuwon being picked before Jordan.

By the way, check out the NBA Draft tonight. For one thing, you might actually know who some of the players are, thanks to the new age limit. For another thing, there will likely be more talented drafts, but none more talented by design. The age limit pushed two entire classes of players together for one draft. And yet, somehow, Josh McRoberts is still going to go in the first round.

Update: Oden went number 1. Stuart Scott just asked him “Who looks older: You or LeBron James?”

Yeah, it’s great how the free market and competition has a good chance of sorting out any problems we have with net neutrality and Internet access. Or, at least, that’s what the Federal Trade Commission says.

This report recommends that policy makers proceed with caution in the evolving, dynamic industry of broadband Internet access, which generally is moving toward more — not less — competition. In the absence of significant market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area.

Heck, we could even benefit from this competitive marketplace!

As the report notes, certain conduct and business arrangements that broadband providers may pursue, including data prioritization, exclusive deals, and vertical integration into online content and applications, can benefit consumers.

I know I certainly benefit from the competition between getting my broadband access from the one cable provider permitted to run cable to my house, whichever DSL provider is willing to work with the only telephone provider permitted to serve my address, and two…count them…TWO satellite providers that, uh, use the same DSL or satellite Internet services.

It sure is great living in this free market made up of tiny monopoly contracts all across the country. I can’t see any problems occurring as soon as the providers are allowed to do whatever they want with network traffic. To get a different selection of providers, all we need to do is move, possibly to another state!

Seriously, we might be entering a time when there is slightly more competition in broadband — maybe wireless — but as long as we have exclusive infrastructures we need to keep them as open as possible. The promise of high-speed data transfer is the possibility of greater choice, not just faster delivery of what Time-Warner, Comcast, or AT&T want us to see. We got that back in the Eighties, one exclusive municipal cable contract after another.

Link courtesy of GigaOM.

Google’s new interface is nice, and it seems like it even works a bit faster. However, I’ve seen a few blogs mentioning they replaced tags with folders — the blog I linked to isn’t one of them — and it appears they just renamed the tags as folders and put a little folder icon next to them.

As I said, the new interface works great, but is there really a large part of the Internet populace that can’t be comfortable with tags unless they have a folder icon next to them?

I haven’t written anything about this horrible crime. I doubt I will write much. But I will say that if you had asked me a few days ago who my favorite wrestler has been since the mid-1990s, I probably would have said Chris Benoit, from the effort he gave in his performances, the odds he overcame to be a success, and the fact he seemed to be a genuinely nice guy from his interviews and what his friends uniformly said about him.

Maybe he just seemed like a nice guy who had the same kind of problems as a lot of people for 40 years. Maybe he actually was that. But the fact that last weekend he killed his wife and child, and then himself…that’s one more thing we’ll never understand about the world, and that saddens me. It sounds from the article linked above like others had the same reaction.

My thoughts and prayers have been for his family and the survivors. Maybe they should be for him as well, but like with other horrendous crimes, I’m not that good a person right now.

So far, I’ve seen one news outlet after another talk about the disappointing opening weekend for Evan Almighty: $32.1 million. That return might not be so bad for a comedy, except this one cost anywhere between $175 million and $220 million to make, according to the same outlets.

Now, personally, I have almost as little interest in seeing Evan Almighty as I did Bruce Almighty. The only difference? I’ll see most things with Steve Carell in them, but I avoid movies with Jim Carrey in them. So, for me, spending that much money on the movie doesn’t seem like a good decision. However, maybe that’s just me?

Oh, wait…Hollywood has this great little tool they can use for decision-making. It’s called revenue, and it comes in numeric form. You know what Bruce Almighty made in the U.S. in box office receipts? $242 million. Worldwide it made $484 million. It was made for $80 million.

Did the studios — the project was dropped by one and picked up by another — really think spending over twice as much money would get them a similar increase in return? Or are they just satisfied pulling profit from foreign markets and DVDs, so the budget for any sequel can be equal to the estimated domestic revenue? (And if that’s the case, why the emphasis on first-weekend returns?)

Oh, by the way, the Wikipedia link just recounts the entire plot of Evan Almighty, so you might want to avoid it if you’re planning to see the movie. Or, like me, you can read it and realize you apparently aren’t missing anything exciting.

U.S. to fingerprint E.U. visitors:

Visitors from European nations traveling with visas or visa-free to the United States will soon have to give 10 digital fingerprints when entering the country, a senior U.S. Homeland Security official said Monday.

Let’s see, the last time I had my fingerprints taken by a digital scanner owned by the U.S. government, it took 30 minutes and continual rewetting of my fingertips because the system was having trouble matching the individual prints to a ten-print scan. Since that was in April, and the machine was fairly new and expensive, I doubt the technology used in the various points of entry has any reason to work much more consistently. I wonder how they plan on handling the extra delays?

Maybe we can work this into some kind of marketing slogan: “Europeans are lining up to get into the United States!”

Nuts, my Cat Interest Quotient just fell off:

Previously, on The Phantom-Thought, Interested Cat.