A couple of weeks ago, the Chicago Bears came to my backyard to play a little football. Of course, my backyard is Qwest Field, and around 68,000 of my closest buddies joined me at the game, so it’s a pretty big backyard and not such a big deal that the Bears came.

The Bears have a stud kick returner named Devin Hester. The guy is, put plainly, a stud. Every team in the NFL would like to have him returning kicks for them… although his reputation took a hit the other day when he was tackled on this hit:

The reason this matters (it’s a short video, go ahead and watch it) is that the guy who made that tackle? Seahawks kicker Josh Brown.

I wonder how much of a ribbing Hester took from getting thumped to the ground by the freakin’ kicker.

…which is worse: That Ticketmaster gets away with this, legally, or that I was just stupid enough to pay it:

Standard/Full Price Ticket US $78.50 x 1
Total Building Facility Charge(s) US $1.00 x 1
Total Convenience Charge(s) US $11.60 x 1

Additional Taxes US $0.58
Order Processing Charge(s) US $3.52
TicketFast Delivery US $2.50

TOTAL CHARGES US $97.70

That’s a ticket that “costs” just $78.50, but somehow the total order comes to $97.70. That’s almost 25% more than the original, quoted price for the ticket!

It’s for Van Halen. Hopelessly old 80s butt rock, sure, but I never got around to seeing them during their classic days with Diamond David Lee Roth as the lead singer, before they stunk it up with Sammy Hagar and whoever else. (Only about 2 or 3 of the songs with Sammy were worth listening to.)

Over 10 years ago, Pearl Jam tried to help fans break through the Ticketmaster monopoly. They filed a lawsuit, testified before Congress, and generally did whatever they could think of to crack open the promoters and venues. No luck.

It’s really pretty outrageous. In theory, promoters can use other ticket sellers, and you’d think that in today’s day and age where so many tickets are sold online that someone would come up with a good method for selling tickets… but forget it. Big money talks. They just clobbered me over 17 bucks to order a ticket- an order which, in the big scheme of things, probably cost Ticketmaster less than one dollar to process.

When you’re talking about protecting that kind of profit, no wonder Ticketmaster is so fierce in protecting their business.

…Stephen King is THE MAN.

Check out this quote from him:

Yeah. You know, I just filmed a segment for Nightline, about [the movie version of his novella] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, “You guys are just covering — what do they call it — the scream of the peacock, and you’re missing the whole fox hunt.” Like waterboarding [or] where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear. And yet you get this coverage of who’s gonna get custody of Britney’s kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other shit.

You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West’s mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that’s going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his… wife. And meanwhile, you’ve got Pakistan in the midst of a real crisis, where these people have nuclear weapons that we helped them develop. You’ve got a guy in charge, who’s basically declared himself the military strongman and is being supported by the Bush administration, whose raison d’etre for going into Iraq was to spread democracy in the world.

So you’ve got these things going on, which seem to me to be very substantive, that could affect all of us, and instead, you see a lot of this back-fence gossip. So I said something to the Nightline guy about waterboarding, and if the Bush administration didn’t think it was torture, they ought to do some personal investigation. Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn’t think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture. And then the guy from Nightline said, “Well, obviously you’ve not been watching World News Tonight with Charlie Gibson.” But I do — I watch ‘em all!

Awesome, just awesome. He rips the media, Bush, Musharraf, and brings in the entire torture debate, all in three paragraphs. And he’s 100% right.

The media DOES pick the wrong stuff to cover. We are torturing people with waterboarding, and we can’t even get the new Attorney General to answer a question about whether or not it’s actually torture during his confirmation hearings.

Bush claims that we’re standing up for democracy, but in Pakistan we have a nation, ruled by a strongman dictator who feels okay throwing out the rule of law and declaring himself the only ruler, a nation with plenty of Islamic extremists (including that Osama guy- remember him? Killed 3,000 Americans?) running around free and clear, and they have weapons of mass destruction! WTF, over?

And the media reports more about Britney’s self-done haircut than this kind of big, big, big news.

Guess whose fault it is, at least in part? Ours. We need to demand better. We need to keep watching guys who’re reporting the real deal, and we need to email/write/fax the media outlets that are doing a crummy job. Yes, it’ll be tough, because it’s nearly all of them, but we need to get it done.

I’m zapping off a letter to the editor of the local papers, and to the local TV news stations, and to whatever other media outlets I can find addresses for, with links to King’s comments right now. I hope you do the same.

I think I wrote a while back about how Comcast changed their menu system all around on their tuner/DVR cable boxes. The new system really sucks.

I’m not sure if it’s a new OS, or if just the menuing and such is different, but it hasn’t worked 100% reliably since they switched it. The response time from button-pushes on the remote are slower, too- sometimes terribly so, so you hit the button again, and again, thinking that the signal from the remote isn’t getting to the DVR box… and then all three commands execute rapid-fire, so instead of going the one channel down you wanted you zip down three channels.

The DVR functionality is screwed up, too. A couple of weeks ago, it didn’t record a show (fortunately, it was “Desperate Housewives”, for my girlfriend, so it didn’t bug me at all that it didn’t work… other than the angry screeching, hers, not mine) because it somehow thought that the hard drive was 100% full. Thing was, there were only two shows on the HD; somehow, it was mis-reporting to itself how much space was actually in use- and it wouldn’t record.

Which, by the way, isn’t supposed to happen anyway; most of my shows are set up to only be saved until space is needed, meaning if the HD is full the box is supposed to automatically write over the oldest show on the DVR anyway. Only “Heroes” and “30 Rock” are “Save until I delete” status on my setup. Oh, and “Journeyman”, since it’s turning out to be one of the best shows I’ve seen on TV in a long, long time (I even like it better than “Heroes”, which I love).

Now, when I called to complain, they said that the new system was needed because they’re going to be updating and rearranging their channels in the near future. Okay, I understand, they’ve got to build in future upgrade capability. But why unilaterally force the stuff to people’s box (and there is no choice, they can upload new software to the box whenever they want and you can’t stop them) if the new stuff has known issues?

Turns out Seattle was one of the very first markets they put this new software into, so I guess we get to be the beta testers. Assholes. I didn’t volunteer to beta test their stuff. Sigh.

There are some things about the new setup that are nicer. You can keep watching whatever you’re watching when you’re in the menuing system and the access into the DVR menu is better.

But with the button-push issue (which is random; sometimes it responds more or less instantly like it should, sometimes it doesn’t work worth a damn) and the space issue, the new menu system is handicapped so much that the improvements are far outweighed by the negatives.

I called to complain and they said they’d download some new-and-improved software into my machine. They said the new stuff was taking care of most of the issues. Yet again I’m ticked; if they’ve got new software that works better, why not just load it into the box without me having to call and ask for it? They didn’t hesitate to load the original version! GAH!

Anyway, the new stuff has improved the issues, but only a bit. If the Comcast box doesn’t improve soon, I’ll just get myself an HD DVR and make that work (probably with a Cable Card) instead. The main reason to go with the Comcast box is the price, it’s only a few bucks a month and comes as part of the entire package, but if the functionality isn’t there, why pay for something that doesn’t work?