It's Complicated...

...and I don't care.

Last month Sprint launched a new and enhanced website that purported to be an improvement over the existing way that the company interacted with it's customers. Their IT magicians flipped the switch to dazzle us with their latest creation but instead ended up releasing the kracken. For the better part of an entire week, users trying to perform functions as basic as paying their bills, activating a new phone or contacting customer service were met the image of a jaunty yellow construction hat and a perfunctory apology for certain portions of the site being inaccessible.

Following current PR disaster control protocol, the company used social media tools to tweet and blog about the issue, reassuring their customers that they were trying to fix the problem and invoking the one excuse that we in the wider world should consider totally unacceptable: These are complex issues.

Message to any vendor in the tech arena: That's not our problem, it's yours.

It's frankly insulting for companies involved in anything from building websites, to designing software, to providing cable service, to tell us, the users of their products and services, that they're toiling so very hard to fix something. We should be patient because it's, you know, so damn intricate. After all, there are all these lines of code and all this wiring and you should consider yourselves fortunate that we're smart enough to deal with it while all you have to do is pay/buy/subscribe. So quit griping about things not performing as advertised, you just don't understand how clever we are to provide you with this technology in the first place.

IT practitioners are talented professionals, but there's a bit of a god complex at work in their grandiose self perceptions. They picture themselves as somewhere between Gene Kranz and Mr Miyagi.  Too often though, when things go off the rails, they pronounce with cryptic sagacity that if only we understood how incredibly complicated it is to do what they do then we would accept their gifts from Mt. Olympus with nary a complaint. Mix this aloof defensiveness with evasive PR language and what you really wind up with on the other end are angry, alienated customers who simultaneously need and despise you.

All we the users know is that what you offered wasn't what we got. You sold us something that's not working. It doesn't matter to us why, nor should it. We pay for something, it had better do what you say it does. How you make that happen really isn't my concern.

When I pay $40 for box seats, I don't want to hear my slumping $15 million-a-year cleanup hitter telling me how hard it is to hit a breaking ball. Just swing the bat and shut up.

Honor Amongst Thieves

Don't you just love it when they dip into each other's pockets?

According to the complaint, Goldman Sachs essentially designed an investment that was designed to fail, then made money when it did. Lovely.

One of these days we're going to stop admiring the geniuses who grease the economy. I suspect that it's just a giant shell game where they move our money around and get rich doing it, but then I just don't have the sophistication to understand any of what our titans of business and industry are really up to.

Don't Call It A Comeback...

Neglected General Ripper for a while but the normal posting schedule should resume shortly. Planning to make the leap from sporadic to infrequent but we'll see how that goes.

A Gilded Cage

There is much to admire about Roman Polanski the artist.

Brilliant, perceptive, eloquent and courageous. Part of the 60s and 70s cadre of auteurs who's work continues to excite and enthrall. A child of the Holocaust, escapee of communist Poland, bereft husband of the doomed Sharon Tate. He would normally be a sympathetic figure, an inspirational and star-crossed survivor.

But here is an inconvenient truth. In 1978 while he was 44 years old, coming off the masterpiece that was Chinatown, the acclaimed director plied a 13 year old girl with alcohol and drugs. Over her repeated protestations and objections, he then proceeded to have sex with her.

Faced with the prospect of a balky judge who seemed set to renege on a soft plea agreement and instead impose a long term prison sentence, Polanski fled to the safe confines of his native France. There, a limited extradition treaty meant that he could live out his life free of the consequences of his actions in far away California. Until his recent arrest in Switzerland, he may well have done so.

The foibles of the rich and famous are such that they're often just one unfortunate decision or act away from plunging into personal chaos. And when the inevitable occurs, it's almost understandable that those who inhabit the world of the well-off and well-connected look after each other's interests. As their excesses lead to brushes with the law, they close ranks and protect their own. This is particularly true with people blessed with some kind of artistic talent where those who come into contact with greatness are too willing to give reprehensible behavior a pass in light of the body of a person's work.

Polanski's friends and admirers in the business have leapt to his defense, demanding that he be released. The irony of no less than Woody Allen, the subject of his own brush with questionable pubescent coupling, signing a petition to that effect says a lot about the tone deafness of the denizens of the entertainment industry. The director should be spared prosecution because so much time has passed and besides he is, after all, blessed with the kind of gift we all wished we had. Even the victim in the case, then as now, just wants the whole sordid affair to go away.

While the prosecutors in Los Angeles seem determined to make an example of the fugitive, the burning question as to the long term efficacy of delayed justice is one that must be asked. The open and shut case of 30 years ago has further devolved into a battle between those who think that nobody is above the law and those who think that no purpose is served by dredging up decades-old wrongs.

There is an argument to be made that we are all imperfect and don't fulfill the lofty ideas we hold, or in Polanski's case, the transcendent art we produce. History is, after all, replete with examples of colossal men with feet of clay. The acknowledgement that someone can be flawed in one way yet inspirational in another represents a mature and sophisticated understanding of human nature. That a middle aged man forced himself on a girl barely in her teens challenges our notion of just how much deviation from the tortured artist script we're willing to accept.

Whatever his achievements, Roman Polanski is a rapist. Given the circumstances of the crime, living a life of swanky comfort, personal fulfillment and adulatory bliss hardly seems like justice.

Ok, I'll Say It...

...they can pretend he never existed as much as they want to, but just as I feared, Manchester United have no way of replicating the impact of having Cristaino Ronaldo on the pitch.

It's early days in the season and the standings say that everything is fine. They managed to thump the Spurs while short handed and triumphed on derby day to overcome some spectacular defensive blunders, but what I've seen of the team thus far gives me reason to be concerned. Berbatov has nowhere near the selfless work rate requisite for a striker in the premiership. Sir Alex Ferguson's infatuation with the one dimensional and unrepentantly negative Park continues to mystify. The reliance on Scholes and Giggs, legends now in the twilight of their careers will be costly. The flatlining of Nani and the failure of Anderson to emerge as our version of Michael Essien or Javier Mascherano. Not to mention that Ben Foster evokes the very worst of Fabien Barthez.

But nothing worries me as much as the lackluster play of the midfield.

With CR in the lineup, we had a player that the opposition feared to the point where he would draw constant attention and disrupt the shape of the other team. With the versatility to play right or left, supporting or attacking midfield, or out and out striker, he could befuddle you and leave your defenders scrambling for position all afternoon long. His presence led to acres of space for the other midfield players to rove and dominate. No more. They lack the room to play, the creative spark and yes, the imperious arrogance that we've been accustomed to for the last few years.

Valencia's instincts always take him wide, he just doesn't seem to have the willingness or ability to cut inside looking for shots on goal. Owen is injury prone and it remains to be seen if he can be the impact player he once was. The gamble that these two in combination can replace the irreplaceable is one of the great challenges of SAF's career.

Never thought I'd miss the diving, whining, annoying, supremely skilled, spectacular bastard as much as this. But I do.

"He wasn't a ninja"

The words of Baltimore City police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi describing Johns Hopkins student John Pontolillo after the NJ native went medieval on the ass of career criminal Donald D. Rice. The comment was simultaneously an assessment of the lethal skills of the young man and a tacit acknowledgement that all's fair in love, war and the defense of private property.

Not so fast. The story has elicited responses that are dismayingly predictable.

On the one hand you have the law and order crowd who believe that frontier style vigilante justice rules the day. The kid was just preserving the security of himself and his possessions against the ravages of those too indigent, unambitious and unmotivated to work hard and obtain the material trappings of life in a legal manner. The deceased was a repeat offender on the streets only because of a revolving door legal system that fails to protect its citizens from an obvious menace to society. If Seth Bullock can't impose order then Al Swearengen surely will.

On the other side we have the bleeding heart liberals and the perpetrator's family. Even though he had a long criminal record, the guy didn't deserve to die in a pool of his own blood when all he was trying to do was flee the scene. He only went there to steal and he would never really have hurt anyone. When you find someone committing a crime, call the authorities and let the law sort everything out in a civilized manner. The cops / homeowner / businessman didn't have to kill him to stop him.

In a scene that plays out with alarming regularity, the family wails in grief before the cameras for the nightly news. The agony of an inner city mother bemoaning the loss of her progeny, gunned down by a would be victim is real. Her defense of the fallen relative as being merely a harmless hustler is a wrenching level of naivete given her constant contact with the ravages of street violence.

Should the swordsman end up escaping indictment for the events of that tragic day, there's more to fear from the fallout of this incident. Chances are that the family of the thief will drag the student into court seeking redress for the slaying. Look for the anguished invoking of all the elements that make the story so sadly American. Class, privilege, race, cultural influences, vigilantism, inequality, injustice. All will be laid bare as a sharp legal team scorches the earth in search of a payday.

Pinned against a shed on a late summer night, Donald D. Rice was not a saint, but John Pontolillo shouldn't exactly be elevated to the status of mythic urban hero either.

Sublime

Robert Carlyle is one of my favorite actors. Trainspotting, Ravenous, The Full Monty. He always brings a rouge sensibility to his roles.

In this ad directed by Jamie Rafn for Johnny Walker, the Scottish actor delivers a pretty amazing technical performance. And that's not to overlook the small army of crew and the logistical precision it must have taken to pull this off. A bold concept, some serious planning, lots of dogged implementation and 40 takes later, you've got a mini masterpiece on your hands.

Kudos to the cheeky flourish of doing a dolly-zoom (around minute 4:00), using a handheld camera on a rocky, uneven path and with a subject advancing towards the camera. Outstanding.

Come on lads and lasses, how about we lift a wee dram to this tour-de-force bit of movie magic?