Saturday April 9, 2005

GATHER ROUND WHILE I RUN IT DOWN

Having nothing better to do, I decided to listen to music, and throw out some random comments on whatever my X-Box decides to play at any given time. Hey, nobody’s making you read this blog, buddy.

First up on the X-Box: Full of Grace by Sarah McLaughlan

“Full of Grace” is probably McLaughlan’s best tune, but I admit, the only other stuff I’ve heard of hers is her big hits. I like this tune much better than any of them.

Whenever I turn my X-Box on to listen to music, this is always the first song that plays, because it’s the first track I recorded into the jukebox feature and I never skip it. I’ll set it to play, then hit RANDOM so whatever comes next is, well, random… but I never skip this song.

Buffy fans who don’t think they recognize the song actually do; it’s the beautiful, haunting tune that is playing as Buffy heads out of Sunnydale in the final episode of Season 2, after having to exile Angel to a hell dimension, seemingly forever, in order to save the world. I was very taken with the song when I first watched that episode, and spent some time on Buffy boards trying to find out what it was, as, maddeningly, it isn’t listed in the episode’s credits anywhere. Finally someone told me the name of the song and who did it, which led to me buying the only McLaughlan CD I own, or am likely to, a Canadian import full of remixes and B sides, which was the only CD I could find in the music store that had this track listed.

It’s a gorgeous song; you really should listen to it.

Next up: Great Sun Jester by Blue Oyster Cult

Off BOC’s often misunderstood LP Mirrors, this is one of my favorite tracks by the self proclaimed Greatest Garage Band In The Universe. It has somewhat more coherent lyrics than many BOC songs, mostly because it is one of the tunes they based on Michael Moorcock’s fantasy. I’ve never been able to get all the way through anything by Moorcock, but I find these quick little riffs BOC occasionally does on his work to be among their more enjoyable work. And, given that I haven’t ever been able to finish one damn thing by Moorcock, I should advise you that when I attribute Great Sun Jester’s source material to him, I’m taking the word of the Late Great Jeff Webb, a far greater, more knowledgeable, and more dedicated fan of BOC than I will ever be… and, for that matter, I think Jeff liked Moorcock, too. I don’t know; I can’t recollect we ever talked about it all that much.

Even The Losers by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers -- A poignant song that always reminds me of feelings I had after my first girlfriend, Laurie Boris, broke up with me back in 1980. It’s a nicely mixed, well written, deftly performed rocker, too. God, it’s such a drag when you live in the past…. Indeed. But when the present just keeps on sucking, what else can a poor boy do?

Ah, yes… American Girls by Counting Crows. This band seems to do two types of song: melancholy slow stuff about heartbreak and sex, and faster, more melodic, more upbeat tracks about, well, heartbreak and sex. American girls are feathers and noise, playing the changes for all of their boys… It’s exactly what alternative pop music’s big target market wants; stuff that makes you feel like you’ll be 19 years old forever, and so will everyone you date. At my age, there’s really no excuse for continuing to enjoy this pablum, but, well, I do.

You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth by Meat Loaf, off his billion-selling album Bat Out Of Hell. The agonizingly pretentious and honestly quite idiotic prose-poem the track makes you endure at its start (“On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?”) gets more excruciatingly moronic the older I get, but the song itself is still worth the wait. From the opening piano ruffle through that fast ascending power guitar chord cascade to Meat Loaf’s perfectly masterful handling of the vividly painted Steinman lyrics, this bit of musical trivia remains a favorite of mine. A guy I once knew named Karl Wasmuth used to call Steinman’s lyrics “Wagner for 14 year olds”, while I generally think of them as being 50s romance comics for the ear, but either way, sometimes I just have a taste for this kind of schlock. You took the words right out of my mouth… it must have been when you were kissing me… Sometimes you just need to be a little melodramatic about stuff.

Moving on to the strange electronic experimentation of Harry Nilsson’s We Can Make Each Other Happy, honestly, there isn’t much to say about this one. It’s fun to listen to, like most of the rest of Nilsson Schmilsson, Harry’s early 70s break out album that was, according to persistent myth, recorded in a garage, or a bathroom, or a basement, or something. There’s way better stuff than this on the LP ( Nilsson’s original version of “Can’t Live If Livin’ Is Without You” still blows away any and all latter day imitators) but nonetheless, I enjoy it. Which you’d figure, since otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered putting it on my X-box. One very notable thing about the track is the drum work, which is pretty outstanding.

Oddly, the next song the Box skipped to is from the same CD, the infamous Coconut Song. If you’ve ever heard this song, even once, then you either love it or you hate it. This particular LP, and this particular track off it, got played over and over again by my mom and one of her boyfriends when I was a kid, and I’ve always enjoyed it, but I suppose if I’d first been exposed to its odd reggae rhythms and rather silly lyrics as an adult, I’d probably find the whole thing appalling. Still, I enjoy it, and none of you have to come over to my apartment and listen to my music.

And then the random feature sends me back once again to to the Counting Crows, this time kicking out the oddly arhythmic but subtly seductive Anna Begins, perhaps one of the better lyrical treatments of how scary, and how utterly unexpected, falling in love can be. When kindness falls like rain, it washes me away, and Anna begins to change my mind… seconds when I’m shaking leave me shuddering for days, and I’m not ready for this sort of thing… she’s talking in her sleep, it’s keeping me awake… and Anna begins to toss and turn… and every word is nonsense but I understand them all, oh Lord, I’m not ready for this sort of thing… Nice stuff. I like it.

Then into some Peter Gabriel… San Jacinto, I think. This is one of Gabriel’s overly elaborate, extremely pretentious songs with Very Important Lyrics I don’t understand. I much prefer his more straightforwardly accessible stuff, like Salisbury Hill (which still has Very Important Lyrics I don’t understand, but they are a lot easier to hear and comprehend and sing along with, anyway) and Big Time and Sledge Hammer, but after experiencing just how fast and far Genesis fell when Gabriel left and Phil Collins became their resident musical ‘genius’, well, I have nothing but respect for Gabriel and I’ll listen to nearly anything of his with some enjoyment. Even Shock The Monkey and Games Without Frontiers. This track is better than either of those, but honestly, I’d be having a much better time right now if I were listening to In Your Eyes instead of this bullshit, especially since then I could work in references to Say Anything.

And from there we jumped to Red Rain by the same artist, which… sigh… is probably my cue to stop doing this musical stuff and write a little about my real life. Maybe I’ll get back to this later, when my X-Box is playing stuff I feel chattier about.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

I’m moving. That’s the big secret. It’s been a secret because the woman who is helping me move to Portland, OR wanted to break the news to her ex husband before I announced it on my blog. But she’s done that (and he was, as we were both afraid, a completely immature tool about it, and gave her a double ration of shit about something that’s absolutely none of his business, because, I guess, he just can’t stand to see anyone or anything make his ex-wife happy if it’s not him or something under his direct control), so I may as well release the news to the general public, or at least, as much of the public as reads this thing, anyway.

My friend, whom you all know and love too, as she’s the Tammy who is my most frequent commenter here, and who is in every other way besides that the best thing in my life right now… anyway, Tammy and I had planned to take this a whole lot slower, with me traveling to Portland sometime this summer, maybe, to see how I liked the place and how well she and I got along up close in person, at which point or after, decisions would be made. But things blew up on me at work, as I’ve already detailed, and Tammy was right there as she always is to support me, so I’m moving now. Or, rather, in a week or so, when Tammy drives a truck down here to rescue me and such of my chattels as I decide I want to keep.

It’s a little scary, moving to a brand spankin’ new place without a job lined up, but I’ve heard a lot of stuff about Portland and seen some photos Tammy has sent me. Being closer to Tammy would make Gnome, Alaska habitable, I believe, but even without the delights of her proximity, Portland still looks like a pretty cool place to live.

Mind you, compared to Zephyrhills fucking Florida, the inhospitable regions of Arrakis, or wherever the hell it was the Joads were fleeing from in that really boring Steinbeck novel, would have to seem appealing. But from what I can see, Portland is a genuinely cool place to live. Yeah, it’s a red state, but a lot of conservatives seem to be having their eyes opened up a little bit wider about Their Hero Dubya ($2 plus per gallon for gasoline will do that, and it kind of makes me chuckle that this is what is causing Dubya’s approval ratings to drop, since any head of state anywhere else in the industrialized world who managed to bring gas prices DOWN to $2.39 per gallon, or the equivalent, would have statues erected to his enduring glory by cheering throngs immediately), and many red states may lose that status over the next series of elections. Time will tell… but I’m thinking I’m going to enjoy living in Portland.

In a lot of ways, or at least, a few, Portland is very similar to Syracuse, NY, long mourned home of my heart. Like Syracuse, Portland is a big college town with no professional sports franchises whatsoever. The emphasis in Portland, as far as sports go, is two fold: college basketball and the annual Kentucky Derby. I couldn’t care less about either, and it will be a relief living in a town where you don’t run into a sports bar nearly as often as you run into a church.

Now, as mentioned briefly in passing already, I don’t have a job lined up there, although, thanks to my awesomely competent and amazingly hooked up friend Tammy, I do have a very cheap apartment already in place, and I’m confident I’ll have an income within a few weeks at the most of arriving there (and I’m hoping it will be much sooner).

Most of what I’ve been doing, that I haven’t wanted to talk about, over the past month since quitting my former job is packing. I recently managed to straighten out the last of the roadblocks Southwestern Bell was trying to put in the way of me setting up phone service there, and I’m nearly all packed, so things are pretty much all set.

I tell you this in truth, my friend, my friend… I cannot WAIT to get the hell out of Zephyrhills.

NON COMPETE AGREEMENTS

At my previous job, I was working for a company that contracts to a major telecommunications corporation, providing service and sales support to that major telecommunication player’s customer base. From that position, I’ve had a worm’s eye view lately of a process whereby our local phone service options have just been drastically curtailed. Let me go over this with y’all a little, as I, at least, find it interesting, and, well, kind of appalling.

See, there is really only one set of phone lines. That physical infrastructure was built by Bell Telephone over the course of the late 19th and early 20th century, and it is that particular set of lines that every analog phone service in existence uses. Because there was only one set of phone lines, back prior to the mid 80s, if you wanted a phone in your house, you called the phone company and they hooked you up. They provided your local service, your local toll service, and your long distance service, which meant most people didn’t really differentiate between these kinds of calls, other than by how much they paid for them… and even that they had no choice regarding; there was only one phone company and it charged whatever the hell it felt like charging (within Federal regulations).

Many of my small audience may well remember when divestiture of the Bell Telephone Company was implemented, forcing Ma Bell to allow competition. Now, as noted, there are only one set of lines, so this competition was pretty much hypothetical. The original phone company was broken up into 4 ‘baby Bells’ – AT&T, Southwestern Bell, Qwest, and Sprint … and they were regional companies rather than nationwide, and, well, there wasn’t much difference, because long distance was still a regional monopoly. It was a lot like cable companies are today. Yeah, they aren’t a monopoly because there is more than one of them, but there is only ever one in any given region, so if you piss off Adelphia, well, you aren’t going to have cable until you move to a different city where another cable provider has the franchise. And then if you piss them off, well, you’re going to live without cable until you move again. So it was with the original divestiture of Ma Bell. Four companies now existed where only one had before, but unless you moved around a lot, it didn’t make any difference to you. Wherever you lived, there was still only one phone company, and if you wanted a phone, you had to deal with them.

Eventually, however, technology increased to the point where Primary Interexchange Carrier, or PIC codes, were invented. These PIC codes basically allowed the baby Bell in any one given region, that ‘owned’ the lines, to resell that service to another provider. If you were in an AT&T region, but Sprint was offering you a better deal, AT&T could ‘pic’ your phone to Sprint. Your calls still went through the same physical lines, but the PIC code told AT&T to bill Sprint for your long distance, and Sprint would bill you, at whatever rates you had negotiated with them.

Sometime in the 90s, it became possible for PIC codes to even apply to local service, as well. At this point, a lot of local resellers got into the business, as well, and all the ‘baby Bells’ set up local/long distance packages so they could resell local service in regions where they weren’t the default ‘baby Bell’. (In industry jargon, we also refer to the local phone provider as the LEC, although I can’t recall just what that means right now… Local Exchange Company, maybe).

This seems complicated, so let me try to run it down a little more clearly. First, there was just one big phone company. Then, the country was divided into four regions, each with its own separate phone company, called a ‘baby Bell’, when it was decided that having only one phone company violated anti-trust laws. Although there were four different phone companies, it didn’t really matter, because in any given region, you still had to deal with the local ‘baby Bell’. Thus, if you lived in New York, you dealt with AT&T. If you lived in California, you dealt with Pacific Bell (a local name for Southwestern Bell). If you lived in Texas, you dealt with Qwest. But you had no options; effectively, there was still only one phone company, whichever ‘baby Bell’ owned the lines in your area.

Then along came Primary Interexchange Carrier codes, or PIC codes. These allowed the local phone companies, or baby Bells, to assign your long distance service to competing companies. With this innovation, you could live in an AT&T area and have Sprint for your long distance, or vice versa. This also allowed long distance only companies to spring up, and a lot of them did, buying and then reselling time in huge bulk form one of the four ‘baby Bells’. Whatever your PIC code was set to, that was who carried your long distance. Those people paid the regional ‘baby Bell’ for time on their lines, and effectively resold it to you.

Nowadays, PIC codes have advanced to the point where local companies can resell local service as well. At that point, dozens of small resellers got into the business, reselling local and/or long distance, usually with fewer bells and whistles than the regional LEC (Local Exchange Carrier, remember, your local phone service provider) would have, thus providing you with a cheaper alternative if you wanted it.

All of this madly frenzied competition in the telecommunications market, however, is entirely dependent on the Federal Communications Commission. Obviously, no company wants any competition it can avoid. Verizon would be absolutely delighted if they were the only phone company on the Eastern seaboard, for example. So the original phone company would never have allowed itself to be broken up if it had a choice. ‘Baby Bells’ would never have allowed competing long distance companies to use PIC codes to provide service to residents of their regions if the FCC didn’t require them to. And no LEC would ever voluntarily resell access to its lines at a competitive rate to another company if it wasn’t required to by Federal mandate.

For a long time… up until late 2004, in fact… the FCC piloted a course fostering as much competition as possible in the telecommunications industry. This had had the positive effect of, well, giving you and me a lot of different choices, or at least, a few, when we went to set up phone service. If, as is the case for many people, you ended up owing the default LEC in your area money because they decided to stick you with a $300 charge for a collect call from somewhere in the Cayman Islands that some guy who was renting a room in your house stiffed you on when the phone was in your name, well, you could still get service from a reseller. (Back in the bad old days of One Phone Company, if you got screwed this way, you basically could never have a phone in your name again. You had to have one of your roommates or your girlfriend or a relative set up phone service for you… or you had to pony up the cash for that $300 phone bill that you always felt very sincerely you didn’t actually owe and shouldn’t have to pay. Often times you might even have good reason for feeling that way, as with the example I gave above of the housemate who ran up a huge bill and then skipped out on you, but the fact is this: utility bills are bills we only grudgingly pay, when we can afford to. The minute a utility bill exceeds our weekly take home, we suddenly discover endless reasons why we shouldn’t have to pay that bill, most of which, psychologically, come down to the notion that it is simply outrageous to our sensibilities that we should have to pay that much money for an intangible but necessary service we all emotionally and truculently feel a truly benevolent government would provide us for free, anyway.)

The proliferation of competition in the telecommunications market had some negative effects as well, namely, phone service became very confusing, and with that confusion came quite a lot more capacity for people to be inadvertently screwed by something they didn’t understand. For example, a lot of people do not understand that when they set up their local phone service, they are not necessarily placed on a cheap long distance plan. If you set your account up with Verizon, they are going to ask you what long distance provider you want, and they are required by law to PIC you to whichever provider you ask for. However, Verizon reps can only give you details on Verizon long distance plans. If you decide to go with MCI as your long distance provider, they will PIC your lines to MCI… but often they will not advise you that you should now call MCI and discuss long distance calling plans with an MCI rep and pick the one you like best.

Now, the local rep is generally aware of one or two calling plans from each long distance company out there, and they will set you up on one of those. But those plans generally suck; you can get much cheaper plans if you call your long distance provider, or go out to their website, and get details on ALL their plans. The local rep isn’t trying to screw you, mind; they have to be aware of one or two different plans from a dozen different long distance companies and can’t (and shouldn’t) be expected to know every detail of every plan of all their competitors.

So, people set up with a long distance company and get put on a plan, and then sometimes they make a lot of calls before they get their first bill, and realize that, for example, on MCI’s Standard Weekend calling plan, sure, they are paying no monthly fee, and that’s why the local rep put them on it when they asked for MCI. And on weekends, the rates aren’t too bad… somewhere between 7 and 12 cents a minute, depending on where and when you call. (Domestic; don’t even think about making international calls on that plan; that bill will turn your hair grey.) But calls during the week in the daytime can be 40 cents per minute; even in the evening, then can be between 20 and 27 cents per minute.

Now these guys asked for MCI because they got something in the mail advertising 5 cents a minute, or 6 cents a minute, or 7 cents a minute, or their first 50 minutes of long distance every month for free, or unlimited calling for $15 per month, or something, and they just assumed they were on that plan. Maybe they asked the local rep for that plan, and the local rep said “Sure, whatever”, but the local rep doesn’t know about that plan, so these people get set up on MCI Standard Weekends, and… well. That first bill comes in, and they’ve made 2500 minutes worth of calls, averaging, say, 15 cents per minute, which is a cool $325 in calls, and they are PISSED.

And that’s just maybe the simplest of the things that can happen in an environment where people have a lot of choices about which local and which long distance provider they have. And a lot of people don’t realize this. Another common mistake people make is when they move, they call the local phone company and say “just set me up with exactly the same service on my new phone number as I had on my old one”. Unfortunately, sometimes when you move, you are changing locals, and the new LEC doesn’t have any idea what kind of service you had on your previous phone. Even if you move within one particular baby Bell’s service area, once you set up service on a new number, you need to call your long distance provider and tell them you have a new number and ask for the calling plan you used to have. If you don’t, well, see above… the local will end up setting you up with the equivalent of MCI Standard Weekends on your new number, and you won’t know you don’t have the calling plan you want until you get your first bill.

On a side note, a great deal of confusion and problems, sometimes quite serious ones, would be avoided if people had some kind of phone, or some kind of phone accessory, that they could attach which would act as a meter, providing them with a digital read out of exactly how much money there were spending whenever they picked up that phone and placed a call. That way, the first time you called your ex-wife back in Beantown after you’d moved to Virginia, and saw the minutes ticking away in 19 cent increments, you would realize “I am not on the 5 cent a minute plan I asked that jackass at Verizon for”. And you would get off the phone and call Verizon and get it straightened out.

But I digress. Despite all this confusion, the simple fact is, competition does keep prices down. If Southwestern Bell knows that people can and will switch over to Qwest or MCI the minute they jack their rates up, they will be much more careful. And, theoretically speaking, companies provide better customer service if they know their customers can and will switch to a competitor fairly easily if they don’t.

I say theoretically because very few of the telecommunications giants provide their own customer service these days. They subcontract the job to low bidder contractors who run call centers in lousy little towns where the standard of living is very low so they can pay people next to nothing to answer the phones for them. Because of this, they have to install extremely complicated electronic switchboards to route incoming calls to these different call centers, who locations and even vending companies change with reasonable frequency, and the contractor is never quite as concerned with maintaining quality as the original company would be. Oh, these contractors have certain stats they are measured on and they want to hit those stats, but, well, when you’re a subcontractor, you aren’t making much money, so you can’t hire particularly good people, and you tend to have very high turnover because call centers are a truly appalling place to work, so, all told, there’s a reason why customer service is at an all time low in the telecommunications industry, and that reason is, all the customer service jobs are being farmed out to low bidder contractors so the stockholders and the CEOs can keep a little bit more money for themselves, and, well, you get what you pay for.

I know this is very confusing and I’m not helping much, but the bottom line is, confusing though it makes our life, competition among telecommunications providers is a good thing, at least, theoretically. It does keep per minute rates for phone calls down, and it should help with customer service… although they way the market works, it’s probably going to take another five or six years of really rotten customer service before one of the big companies decides they can make enough long term money through churn by investing some short term money in good customer service… which would entail hiring good people and paying them enough to keep them around, and, well, investing in enough of those good people so that whenever someone calls them, that phone is answered by third ring by an actual human being who can actually help.

On another side note, I honestly think most of the major telecommunications companies are missing a bet by not doing this NOW. Everybody out there has a phone, and everybody out there is sick to death of the lousy service they get when they call their phone company, assuming they ever actually manage to talk to a live agent. Imagine how much business a company would get if they advertised that, when you call us, a real person will answer the phone and help you. Wouldn’t YOU use that company in preference to nearly any other company, just so that you didn’t have to go through an electronic switchboard every time you dialed an 800 number?

In fact, I tend to think nearly ANY large company that does a lot of customer service in a highly competitive field could benefit from this. Unfortunately, electronic switchboards are a seriously addictive habit for corporations to lose. They are VERY appealing. The minute someone somewhere in the corporate food chain starts crunching numbers and adding up what it will cost to actually hire real human beings to answer the phone, and comparing that to what it costs to have a computer program do it, CEOs eyes light right up. The difference is, no doubt, staggering, and that difference goes right into the shareholders’ collective pockets..

But still… I guarantee you, the first major company that advertises no electronic switchboards, “a real human being will answer your call” and keeps their promise, will be coining money from it. They will get SO MUCH BUSINESS. And that is a huge reason why the telecommunications industry needs as much competition as it can get – because without competition, there will be no reason to provide better customer service, and you and I will keep having to listen to these goddam electronic switchboards for the rest of our natural lives.

However, regardless of how desirable competition may be, suddenly, there is a whole lot less of it in the telecommunications industry than there was a year ago. See, in late 2004, the FCC reversed a few of their previous rulings. Because of the sudden rise in cellular, wireless, and Internet based phone services, the FCC decided that it no longer needed to encourage competition among the various different analog service providers, i.e., the baby Bells and all the different resellers that had sprung up since the mid 80s that were making use of the actual physical copper lines that pretty much all of our phones are connected to. So, regional baby Bells are no longer required to resell access to their networks at competitive rates. So…

Well, let’s put it this way. Where I used to work, when I first started there fifteen months ago, we had a brand spankin’ new local/long distance bundle called… er… well, I’ll call it Total Access, so nobody sues me for violating my confidentiality agreement. Total Access was the wave of the future, the biggest thing since sliced bread, the boat that would bear our major client to inevitable financial triumph and billions of dollars in heady profits in the telecommunications arena. With Total Access, our client could not only provide competitive wireless service, and long distance service, but it could also get into the local service market as well.

Total Access, where it was available, was pretty popular, because it was largely an Unlimited calling package. For one rate a month, you could call anywhere you wanted in the U.S. or Canada and stay on the phone as long as you wanted, and you wouldn’t pay one cent extra. People liked this a lot, and, well, it just goes to give you a small idea of how much money there is in telecommunications, when a company can sell unlimited calling for around $50 per month and still make an enormous profit. Since the infrastructure already exists, there is relatively little overhead in providing people with access to it… you just have to pay your sales people, and your customer service folks. And when you deal with subcontractors for all that, you don’t have to pay much. Which is why telecommunications stock is generally a sound investment.

Total Access, like all reseller packages, was based entirely on the FCC’s declarations that regional providers had to resell their services at competitive rates.

Nowadays, Total Access is in its death throes. At the start of January we stopped accepting new customers (when, all last year, we were practically begging anyone who called us to sign up for it). The current plan is to slowly stop providing any sort of meaningful customer service, while continually jacking up Total Access rates, until finally all the Total Access customers get the news and drop the program. (One very strong indication of this: I used to work on the email team, and one of the goals we have to hit is customer satisfaction, which is measured by surveys that are emailed out to our customers whenever we answer one of their questions, so they can tell us whether they’re happy or not. Starting in January 2005, Total Access customers no longer get sent these surveys, because, well, we simply accept that they are not going to be happy with us, and we don’t care, because we don’t want their business any more.)

It amused me, in a kind of dark, wry fashion, when I was calling around looking for alternative phone providers in the Portland area. I called CommSouth, who provided me with service a few years ago when I lived in Tampa. Turns out CommSouth is no longer accepting new customers – which, as soon as they said it, made me realize that, of course, they too are a reseller… and, yes indeed, those same recent FCC reversals that killed Total Access where I used to work, are having an industry wide effect. If CommSouth, one of the larger resellers of local and long distance service in the industry, is no longer accepting new customers, well… things are looking bleak for resellers.

This isn’t a minor thing, however confusing and inapplicable to your own day to day life it may seem at the moment because I’m explaining it badly. This means that, essentially, when you use a service that we all use, (unless you’re Amish, in which case, you’re not reading this anyway) a little or a lot, nearly every day of our lives, you will have fewer options as to who you buy that service from. It also means that major employers with tens or hundreds of thousands of people on their payroll are very close to going under… because no thriving company decides to stop accepting new customers. No company does that unless they are on the verge of bankruptcy. Now, my former employer’s major client is being hit hard by the death of Total Access, but they’ll survive, because they’re all over the local, long distance and wireless phone industry, too. But CommSouth is nothing but a reseller, just, a very big one. If they can no longer obtain competitive rates from the baby Bells, they can’t stay in business… which means a lot of people in the unemployment lines this time next year, I’d venture to guess.

Now, I have no idea exactly why the FCC decided that cell phones and ‘net phones’, in and of themselves, provided enough competition to standard analog service that they could reverse their previous rulings like this. On the face of it, it doesn’t make much sense. The technologies and types of service are very different. Having a cell phone is not the same as having a house phone. Leaving aside whether or not cell phones actually increase the risk of brain cancer (the research is, so far, inconclusive, but it’s one of the questions doctors ask patients when they are diagnosed with brain cancer, so…) the fact remains that cell phones are simply not as reliable as analog phones with hardwire connections. Cell phones also aren’t as cheap; you pay for every minute you use on a cell phone, whether you call someone or they call you, and buying a cell phone is a much more substantial investment than buying a house phone, these days. As to internet phones -- before you can have a ‘net phone’, you generally have to get a fiber optic high speed direct line Internet connection hooked up to your home. Once you have that fiber optic direct line Internet connection, sure, you can pay a few bucks more for cheap phone service.

All of this is, kinda sorta, competition for analog phone services, yes indeed. But, first, the simple fact is, the technologies are different, the service level is different, and there are still a great many people out there who want an analog phone, and who would appreciate having options they can choose from as to who they will purchase that analog phone service from.

I know, because I’m one of them.

Therefore, the rise of cell phones and ‘net phones’ doesn’t really seem to have much to do with why the FCC would suddenly reverse decades of policy by ruling that regional service providers no longer need sell access to their networks at competitive rates. It’s competition, yeah… but the fact remains, there is still only one analog phone wire infrastructure. If the FCC stops requiring the corporate owners of that copper wire grid to resell access to it competitively, they are, in effect, taking the first steps towards recreating a vast monopoly… at least, on analog phone service.

Why might they do that?

Well, first, the established analog phone companies – the ‘baby Bells’ -- tend to prefer systems that minimize competition. After all, entrenched interests are, by nature, entrenched. They like their balance sheets to be predictable. If there is less competition, there are fewer places for their customers to take their business to, and, as a lovely little bit of serendipity, fewer companies their employees can migrate to, as well. This lets the baby Bells charge their customers more and pay their employees less, which adds up to more money in the pockets of the entrenched CEOs and the entrenched shareholders.

All of who contribute lots of money to political campaigns. Now, FCC commissioners don’t run for office, they are appointed to it, by, I believe, the President… who does run for office. And those appointments do, I believe, have to be confirmed by Congress, members of which also have to run for office.

So the baby Bells like it, because, let’s face it, most people still think of a phone as that thing you plug into the wall in your home or your business. It’s still relatively rare for people to make the leap completely over to cell phone service; most people are still using cell phones as a supplemental convenience. If you are the only analog phone service provider in your area, well, you get more business and can charge more for it, because people do not have the option of going across the street if they think your prices are too high.

Cell phone companies, and internet service providers, are happy with it, too. If there is less competition in the analog market, people are more likely to get disgruntled and switch to an alternative technology. It can only help cell phone companies, whose primary problem is how unreliable their service is compared to the analog phone network, if people are fed up with, say, Qwest, and Qwest is the only analog phone provider in their area. A lot of people may very well think they are willing to put up with dropped calls, if it lets them get away from an analog phone company they are aggravated with. And people are always getting aggravated with their phone companies; it’s the nature of the beast.

Now, net phone companies may well be new, but Internet providers have been around for nearly 20 years at this point, and they are fast gaining entrenched interest status themselves. If cheap phone service is one of the bennies of having your very own high speed Internet cable, well, more people will sign up for high speed Internet cable. And I would imagine Internet providers (like, say, AOL-Time Warner) also contribute heavily to political campaigns.

Beyond that – and this will come off as really paranoid, but so be it – there are very real and valid reasons why those in authority would like to see more people using wireless phone systems, and high speed digital cable Internet access connections. These essentially come down to control and accountability. I do not know if the police need a specific warrant to listen to your cell phone conversations, but it wouldn’t surprise me, since cellular traffic is broadcast via radio waves, if they do not. I know that no warrant is necessary to read email or check things on the Web; the FBI uses a program called PREDATOR, I believe (that name may be obsolete, but they are still doing it, right this second) to scan all emails and everything posted on the Internet looking for specific keywords every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

On the other hand, to listen to your phone calls as transmitted on Ma Bell’s copper wires, they do need a warrant (unless you are suspected of terrorism, in which case, they can do any goddam thing they want, according to the PATRIOT Act, but that’s a different rant).

It is also much harder to track someone on the Internet when they are using dial up than through high speed Internet cable connections. Someone who accesses the Internet through AOL’s dial up switchboard, for example, is pretty much impossible to trace back to their originating phone line. If someone in authority decides they want to find out who is behind a particular AOL (or other dial up service provider’s) ISP, then that authority has to subpoena the internet provider. And sometimes even that won’t work; the most moronic wannabe hacker can generally find a way to set up a fake account on AOL, or with another dial up Internet providers.

On LAW & ORDER: SVU, the detectives always manage to track down the evil pedophile fairly easily once they get his net handle, or his ISP number, but in real life, many such people are smart enough not to put their real names and/or addresses on any Internet account. This is why FBI agents and local deputy sheriffs have to go into chat rooms, pose as 14 year olds, and set up dates with child molesters in order to catch them. A smart, reasonably knowledgeable person can be very elusive in cyberspace.

However, if Dubya has his way, and every single American has high speed Internet access through a physical digital cable registered to his or her name, well, people will become much easier to track on the Internet. Now, I’m not going to cry if this makes it easier to protect kids from predators. On the other hand, a time is coming in our country, and I can see it pretty clearly, where voicing unAmerican sentiments, unChristian sentiments, or even un-heterosexual sentiments, is going to get people in a lot of trouble. I’m not necessarily saying the Secret Service will necessarily come around and lock you up as an enemy combatant… but Halliburton’s Human Resources Department might suddenly decide that your attitude makes you unemployable at this time. And if you voice unChristian sentiments anywhere and they can track such back to you, well, you may suddenly no longer be eligible for any sort of social services… because they will all be coming through Catholic Charities, or the Salvation Army, and those faith based initiatives are not required to provide help to anyone who does not evince a cheerful belief in the divinity of Christ Your Savior.

Back on cell phones for a second – a world in which everyone carries a cell phone is the stuff of John Ashcroft’s and Alberto Gonzalez’s dreams. I swear to God, if these guys had their way, the Feds would be sponsoring a Free Federal Cell Phones Initiative for parolees and the underprivileged everywhere. Why? Because if you have a cell phone, anyone who can access Global Positioning System technology can find you to within something like thirty feet, anywhere you are in the industrialized world. Carrying an active cell phone is the equivalent of wearing an electronic ankle bracelet these days. And paranoid as it sounds, you will never convince me that the people currently in charge of our country wouldn’t love to see every American citizen from the age of 5 on up carrying an electronic tracking badge at all times.

Leaving aside speculations as to why the FCC has decided to stop encouraging competition among analog phone service providers, the fact remains, they have… and if you decide you don’t want to use your regional baby Bell for local service any longer, well, you are going to find your options are now very limited. If you want to get phone service from anyone else, you had better be willing and able to either carry an electronic tracking module around with you at all times, or have a high speed cable running to your house… and resign yourself to the fact that if you do anything, here or in cyberspace, that someone in power doesn't like, they WILL be able to find out who you are, and where you are, pretty quickly.

Okay, I believe I can guarantee no one is going to comment on THAT entry…

THIS MORDANT WORLD

I used to really enjoy Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World strip.

Oh, yeah, every once in a while he’d come out with something that struck me as rather one sided, and that perhaps treated a rather complex subject in a glib, facile, or even shallow manner.

Still, for the most part, I really liked the strip, and tended to agree with the admittedly left wing, often times rather rabidly liberal opinions it posited.

I stopped reading This Modern World when I moved out here to Zephyrhills. No real reason for it, except, well, you can’t get the Weekly Planet out here, which carries This Modern World locally. Zephyrhills does not have anything remotely like a weekly kneejerk liberal rag (it may have had one once, for about seventy seconds, until the lynch mob coaelesced out of the very ether), and if anyone tried to publish This Modern World for a Zephyrhills audience, I suspect it would be a race between the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office and the Zephyrhills Police Department as to which of them could pistol whip the offender to death first.

Now, I could have kept going over to Tom Tomorrow’s website to check it out each week. But… well… the longer Dubya stays in power, and the more horrible the conservative agenda gets… and it’s gotten pretty horrible lately… the more humorless and shrill and generally stupid This Modern World seemed to become. It was as if Dubya and his cronies were sucking all the intelligence and humor right out of Tom Tomorrow. Sad but true.

Plus, back when I first moved out here, Tom Tomorrow was starting to let some friend of his guest write his blog instead of doing it himself, and his friend couldn’t write a lick. I mean, the guy was as earnestly, thoughtlessly, reflexively, irrationally left wing as Tom himself, and didn’t have a shred of Tom’s sense of humor. He was nearly impossible to take.

Beyond that, I used to read Tom’s blog while I was at work. When I moved out here, well, I ceased to have a job where I could access the Internet at work, and I just didn’t much feel like reading Tom’s blog on my own time, I guess.

Beyond all that, Tom tended to ignore my email and refused to plug my blog on his, which is much the same reason I stopped reading Mark Evanier’s blog, too. (Well, Mark Evanier hit a stretch where all he was writing about for days on end was goddam Broadway musicals, and I finally just gave up on him. It’s sad when a man who has dated Mighty Isis, and who reportedly has a totally hot original nude drawing of Rainbow by Dave Stevens stuck to his refrigerator door, has to spend a week or more of one of the better blogs in the world on frickin’ show tunes, but, well, I think he did once, so I stopped going by there. I like Mark’s writing, but when you combine an unwillingness to acknowledge my own obvious if unsung genius with a determination to spend every inch of column space writing about frickin Guys and Dolls, I’m outta there.)

Anyway, Mike Norton has a link to Tom Tomorrow’s blog on his site, and I was bored this morning, and trying to keep myself awake (I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, but am trying to get back on something remotely like a normal sleep schedule, as its doubtful I’ll find third shift work in Portland) so I went over there, and I’ve spent some time reading through all the past This Modern World strips I’ve missed over the past two years or so.

And… well, hell. It’s a four panel cartoon. What, I’m looking for detailed political analysis of extremely complex issues in four lousy panels?

I guess… yeah, I guess I am.

Otherwise, it’s just propaganda, which strikes me as… well, you know… pretty much the problem we few remaining thinking people face these days whenever we try to talk to anyone else. Not the solution. Or even A solution.

Here’s the thing: I’m a liberal, but I try to be a thinking liberal. In fact, I try to be a thinking… whatever. However it is I’m labeling myself in whatever limited context may be under discussion, as much as I can, I try to add ‘thinking’ to it. I try to be a thinking Caucasian, a thinking male human being, a thinking heterosexual, a thinking customer service agent (when that was my job), a thinking SF/fantasy reader, a thinking television viewer, a thinking critic of Silver Age comics.

A thinking intelligent entity.

And so much of This Modern World, even back when I was reading it regularly and mostly enjoying it, simply struck me at the time as… unthinking. As reflexive. As, for the most part, a foregone conclusion. If a conservative said something, This Modern World would insult whatever it was. If a liberal said something, This Modern World would heap praise on it. Conservatives, no matter who they were, deserved and received nothing but invective. Liberals, no matter who they were, merited and got nothing but the utmost approbation. Right wing ideas were heaped with odium and contempt; left wing notions, on the other hand, were described, always, in the most glowing of terms.

Now, there are a lot of conservatives who are pretty vile, and much of what Tom Tomorrow states in his four panel cartoon I agree with. Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are spiteful, hateful demagogues mostly in the business for the money it makes them. Our current Commander in Chief is a wretched, loathsome, contemptibly corrupt hypocrite and coward, and the people pulling his strings are economically and idealistically opportunistic to the point of being outright evil. There is much to despise, discount, and deride about the current illegal conservative regime.

But, you know, Michael Moore isn’t any less of a manipulative, money grubbing huckster simply because he’s the left wing’s manipulative, money grubbing huckster. Calling on school kids to regard their curriculum with healthy skepticism and a continual process of intelligent analysis isn’t evil simply because conservatives ask that these quite positive intellectual processes be applied to the theory of evolution. Not every conservative idea is a bad one – conservatives tend to be strong believers in individual responsibility and in the basic human liberties enumerated in our Constitution. Not ever liberal idea is a winner just because it’s liberal – affirmative action has been singularly idiotic since its inception.

You need to think about these things. You need to evaluate them, and weigh them up. Arnold Schwarzenegger may be a goddam Republican, but his idea for appointing a judicial board to draw up electoral districts, instead of letting the incumbents themselves do it, is an excellent one. And just because Al Franken is a liberal, that doesn’t mean it’s civil, or even particularly brainy, for him to call Rush Limbaugh a big fat idiot on the cover of a best selling book. Limbaugh isn’t particularly big, and he’s certainly not an idiot. Fat I have no argument with, but since I’m fat myself, if you’re going to insult Rush Limbaugh for something, I’m thinking it would be better to do it on the basis that he’s a lying smarmy creep who manipulates the emotionally retarded in order to get money to buy a lot of illegal prescription pain medication, instead of by heaping opprobrium on his physicality, which feature I largely share anyway.

Anyway, wrenching myself by main force of will back onto something that in some way resembles my topic, if I have one: I used to enjoy This Modern World a lot. But I hadn’t read any in a couple of years. So this morning I read a lot of it. And it’s still pretty much the same as I remembered, but, I guess, I’ve gotten less patient with ranting propaganda, even if the ranting propaganda is stuff I mostly agree with.

I think, just once, if Tom Tomorrow said something that was even vaguely original… that in some way departed from the standard liberal bromides… that seemed to reflect the slightest amount of creative or analytical thought on his part… that didn’t seem like he read it on Atros’ blog and decided to adapt it as a four panel cartoon… well, I’d be more impressed.

As it is, I’m starting to wonder if he isn’t just someone who is, like Rush Limbaugh, taking an extreme position for the money and the attention. And if the reason he’s so obviously pissed off might not be that he hasn't yet managed to achieve Limbaugh’s level of success.

And besides all that, if you look at his blog at thismodernworld.com, and check out the entry for April 8, 2005, you'll see he can't even spell the word 'resurrected', the geep.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.