Boundary Layer

The best way to find a line is to cross it

Thursday, April 29, 2004

SCI vs Ticketmaster


The String Cheese Incident picks up the flag where Pearl Jam left and does battle with the mighty Ticketmaster colossus.

But the suit filed by SCI Ticketing alleges that an arrangement between Ticketmaster and another online ticketing service, Musictoday, shows that Ticketmaster wants to control any artist-to-fan ticketing it does allow. In the deal, worked out last year, Musictoday promised not to sue Ticketmaster for antitrust violations--as they had threatened to do when the May 2002 letters came out. In return, Ticketmaster agreed to tolerate excessive holdbacks--up to half the house for Musictoday's biggest clients, the Dave Matthews Band, Phish, and the Dead. String Cheese claims that Musictoday and Ticketmaster have colluded to cut others out of the ticketing business. And according to Bert Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute, the deal may prove fateful, much as Microsoft's bundling arrangements did in its antitrust trials: "In the same sense, here you have a monopolist apparently using its monopoly power to discriminate among people that have to do business with it, and giving favors to those who play the game, which is to reduce competition."

A Boom With a View



Before and after satellite imagery of the North Korean city of Ryongchon. (via Fark)

As Seen on Fark



"I'm John Kerry and I approved [of] killing Vietnamese civilians"
"I'm George Bush, and Dick Cheney approved this message"

From this thread at Fark.

Mistaken Identity



While channel surfing I caught this bit of dialogue on Bill Moyer's show NOW:


MAMDANI: Yes, exactly. Because he fits the bill. He fits the...

MOYERS: He's the evil guy?

MAMDANI: ...bill. Correct. He's the evil guy. He's, of course, not an evil guy. He is a millenarian. Is...

MOYERS: A millenarian?

MAMDANI: Right. This is a tendency which believes that the world is about to come to an end. The world is about to change. It will be rescued by a messiah, and the poor shall triumph. And that is part of the explanation of his support amongst the very poor. This is something that a Christian millenarian tendency would easily recognize.

MOYERS: An apocalyptic Christian?

MAMDANI: Yes, yes.

MOYERS: An Armageddon Christian who's waiting for the last great battle between good and evil.


My first thought was that Mamdani was speaking about President Bush. But he was referring to someone else (scroll down to highlighted text).

 
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