random back from sf post

Why you should short Netflix. That said, they’ve done fine by me. A DVD they sent me got lost in the mail. I filled out a simple form on their site, and presto chango my account is credited. No grilling about DVD thievery, no assumption of my guilt.
Roy Orbison’s little known Confederate-spy period. Roy Orbison: Not blind, not albino.
I love it when journalists are willing to print obviously false statements just to give a story a feeling of “balance.” Take this story, for instance, about how a small Catholic college in Pennsylvania confiscated copies of the student paper because it featured a student column promoting condom use. Here’s the school’s P.R. guy:
“Ken Service, vice president for institutional relations, said La Roche [College] was not trying to stifle student expression or interfere with the campus press.”
Come on! You can argue the relative wisdom of confiscating pro-condom (ooh!) literature. But you can’t with a straight face say it isn’t “interfer[ing] with the campus press” or “stifl[ing] student expression.” It’s obviously those things. If you want to defend those actions, go to it. But don’t tell obvious falsehoods.
Have you seen Kill Bill Vol. 2 yet? (If not, you should. Quite entertaining, particularly in a large crowd, as I saw it Friday in S.F.) If you’re wondering where Tarantino got the black mamba information Daryl Hannah quotes in Budd’s trailer, this is it. “Their volatility is their greatest danger, particularly when cornered or surprised. East Africa’s famed snake expert C.J.P. Ionides cites a reliable account from Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) of 11 people dying in a fracas between shepherds and a single black mamba. One mamba that Ionides captured had killed seven villagers at the same spot. She lived out her remaining years peaceably at the London Zoo.”
Finally, bravo to Julie Bykowicz, whoever she is, for her letter on Romenesko. She decries unpaid summer internships (in journalism, but by extension in all industries). Her point: Only rich kids can afford to work all summer and not get paid for it, so unpaid internships give unfair advantage to rich kids. As a poor kid who couldn’t afford the White House intern/Harper’s Magazine intern/whatever route, I can tell you she’s dead on. She cites this stat: “A survey at a summer intern lunch…in Washington in 1998 found that more than 60% of these mostly unpaid interns had parents earning more than $100,000 a year. Only about 20% of all families of college students earn that much.” So you’re taking only the richest of an already pretty well-off bunch.
Anyway, I’m back from San Francisco. A lovely week. After the conference, ended up roaming the streets until 5:30 a.m. Sunday morning. Went up to Napa, drove up to the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, then got to see Barry Bonds hit his 666th career home run. (Or, as I prefer to call it, his Satan homer.) Anyway, many thanks to the San Franciscans who put up with me, most notably providers-of-sleeping-space Jessa and Lisa.
Now, back to work.