Magic Jewball

It’s 11am! 11am! It’s starting!

Yes, I’m positively giddy and not in that fake way I usually am when I’m trying to write something entertaining even though I just paid $450 for a new lock. No, seriously, this is sincerely my favorite week of the year and I am just bursting with excitement. It’s the US open! Let me translate this for you non-tennis people.

Americans - It’s the Super Bowl and I have tickets!
Non-Americans - It’s the World Cup and I have tickets!
Non-sports fans - Check out other blogs!

Already, Brother2 took the chillins to Practice Day and they had their picture taken with Nathalie Dechy who you may remember from this post. And tonight, Pious B and I will be off to see the opening night tribute to Althea Gibson plus the Williams Sisters. Unless I can convince Pi to see some men’s matches. We’ll see. Already, Brother2 and I have begun parsing the schedule. I’m guessing I will not get to see Scoville Jenkins this year as he’s playing Roger Federer before I even arrive. Bye, Scoville!

Anyway, just to gear everyone up for the magic that will happen this week, or the stuff that will bore you to tears, here’s a refresher on my US Open coverage from last year.

Becca’s Guide to Attending the US Open

Day 4 at the US Open

Day 5 at the US Open

Day 8 at the US Open

Built to Spill - Happiness

And now, a PSA to tourists. And not that “ha ha, I’m making fun of you by pointing out that you walk slow or wear loud colors or unfold maps in ways that block the whole sidewalk” kind. No, this is real and sincere. Mostly because it’s begun to annoy the hell out of me. See, if you’ve been here you know we use a little thing called a Metrocard to get into the subway (and buses too, but that’s not on my agenda today). You can get them in pay-per-ride and unlimited-for-one-price formats. Say you walk into an entrance of the subway which is kinda dark and kinda empty and there are no humans selling Metrocards, just machines. And a guy who looks like he is either homeless, on drugs, just released from prison, or all three, offers to sell you a swipe of a Metrocard for a dollar (one ride is $2, unless you buy unlimited). Now, I know what you, my wise reader, would do. But what about your friends and neighbors? Why do they always say, “Sure! Thanks! What a deal!”?

After seeing this day after day, I began to ask the tourists (and they always are, seriously) why they do this. Actually, I begin by saying, “um, that’s not legal, you know?” Except for the one guy, who I swear, right in front of his kid said “Yeah, I know, mind your own fucking business,” most people are baffled. “Really?” they say. “How could this be a problem?” I don’t get this at all. How can you not know you’re doing something shady? The ride costs $2, a skeevy person offers to sell it to you for $1. How can this possibly be on the up and up?

Why should I care? Well, there are two reasons. One, I don’t like to come down to the subway after a long day at work and find it full of criminals waiting for their next mark. If people didn’t buy them, they wouldn’t be there. And second, I like you tourists, I really do, you make me look at my city a whole new way, but many times, I’m forced to put up with you. Maybe I’ve mentioned but there are a lot of you, you move slowly, and I have to wait on line behind you at Whole Foods. But I do put up with you because you bring in lots of money. This is the way the world economy works. Next month, the good people of Athens will put up with me because they want my money. It all goes round and round. But when you buy $1 rides from criminals with unlimited cards, that’s $8 (there are four of you on average) that isn’t going to the transit authority. Then there is a shortfall at the MTA. Guess who gets their fare jacked up? You guessed it, me, and all the nice people of New York who have put up with you. Er, your friends and neighbors.

Actually, I got into a whole conversation with a woman who saw me inform the last group of tourists that that was illegal (”really? will we be arrested?”) and asked me incredulously how these people could not know that this wasn’t a good idea. She wasn’t even American originally but had moved from Paris twenty years earlier. Then, as happens to any two strangers in New York who have lived there many years, we both began bemoaning the loss of mom-and-pop stores to the big chains. That’s another lesson for tourists. If you really want to fit in, say, “Remember when this was Shakespeare & Co.? Those were the days.”

Photo by PiratenBraut @ Flickr

Don’t have a lot of room left on your iPod? Here’s an idea, shorter songs! This one’s just perfect. It’s really economical. It gets going right away, almost immediately launches into the lyrics, and packs a wallop of hurt, anger, and new resolve into 2 minutes and 6 seconds. And it has the usual verse/chorus/bridge/chorus thing going on, just shorter. And louder. I always feel like smacking someone who really deserves it when I’m through this song. Luckily the next song on the album is gentler so no one gets decked. You’ll have to arrange your own playlist, however, I can’t be responsible.

Napster:
The Vines - Get Free

Streaming audio available on the iPod Song of the Week page.

Hey, remember this? The Ticketmaster battle? The search for a code? The back-and-forth with the commenter I’d never seen before who thought I was an idiot? The morning spent on the Interweb getting my seats?

Well guess what? The Cure have postponed their tour until mid-2008. Fat Bob, you owe me!

Yes, this was the day I was supposed to see The Cure.

The Cure - The Last Day Of Summer

I know it’s a really cheap shot to look back at predictions of the past and make fun of how un-prescient they were (Hip-Hop is a fad! The dot.com boom will last forever! Poor Steve Jobs will never have a successful product, Why telephone when you can shout across the prairie, etc.) but I can’t help myself. I came across an article in the NY Times archives from 2002 entitled “Internet experts wonder if Weblog technology is a powerful new media species, or just another fad.” Yes, quite. But it had these fabulous final paragraphs:

But even among those whose Weblogs have gained notoriety, there are some who see this trend as ephemeral. Take Mark Hurst, who created a Weblog, goodexperience.com, in 1999 that he said attracted thousands of readers. Mr. Hurst, the president of Creative Good, a Net consulting firm in New York, eventually stopped posting daily remarks on the Web site and instead simply e-mailed a compendium of comments to a subscriber list that now numbers nearly 50,000 people.

”If you want to communicate with people, e-mail it to them,” Mr. Hurst said. ”Don’t force them to come to your site every day to read what you’ve written.”

God, I would never want to do that. So naturally I had to go have a look at goodexperience.com. As you might have guessed, it has a blog. I guess that whole “e-mail 50,000 people” thing didn’t end up being the zenith of communication.

Social Distortion - I Was Wrong