On the wrong trick

For the first two years in our house, we handed out Hallowe'en candy before heading out to parties, taking care to extinguish our lights and stash our pumpkins inside before we left. It never proved necessary--even though a good number of our trick-or-treaters didn't seem to think being middle-aged and having children of their own disqualified them from holding out a bag.

The first year, we were struck by the number of people who didn't come in costume, not just the aforementioned parents, but kids from high school on down. I mean, aren't you supposed to at least make an effort? I appreciate that not everyone can afford a costume--I hate to geez, but in the neighborhood I grew up in, most kids made their get-ups.

So far this year, we've had two trick-or-treaters with mustaches. I think the rule should be: If you're old enough to drive to the store to buy yourself some candy, get off my porch.

I've never quite hit on the correct number of pieces to give out. I usually err on the side of too much, but that bit me on the ass last year, when I had to fly down to the CVS and pay a pasha's ransom for the last bag of incredibly unpopular candy, turning off the lights, stashing the pumpkins and hiding by the window, scanning the horizon for vandals, when that ran out. This year I've been giving two pieces to the younger kids and three to the older ones. My neurosis about running out is exacerbated by my wife's carefree way of filching a piece from the basket as she walks by. "Will you please leave that alone?" I'll ask. "Oh, don't worry, there's plenty," she'll say.

Likewise, my Hallowe'en paranoia drives her crazy ("No one's egging the car. Sit down"). Again, where and when I grew up, trick-or-treating was for the younger kids. The older ones devoted themselves to vandalism. I never participated in a pumpkin-smashing or an egging, but I've TP'd a teacher's house or two and put shaving cream on the weird burnout guy on our block's car, till he ran out with no shirt on and chased us down the street shouting obscenities, which permanently cured me of my propensity toward property crimes.

So I guess it's karmic that I married a teacher. This year she thought it would be a nice touch to give out pencils along with candy. Then she skipped off to take our kid trick-or-treating, leaving me with a cloth dragon full of school supplies and a rapidly diminishing supply of Whoppers and Milk Duds.

The pencils have been met with bemusement for the most part. Every kid I've given one to has turned to the adult accompanying him or her and shouted, "He gave me a pencil!" Hoping not to look like a complete hippie wacko, I'd shout, "I gave you candy, too!" Sometimes their mothers said, "That's good!" in the same smiling-as-they-back-away tone I suspect they reserve for religious nuts who hand out Bibles.

I haven't given any pencils to the high school kids, because I'm scared they might egg my house in retaliation. After I gave candy to the last group of teenagers to bound up on our porch and pound on the door (does no one use doorbells anymore?), I heard one of them say to the others, "All that candy he's got in the bag and he only gives out three pieces?"

I suspect I will not be sleeping well tonight.

It's the stinger, not the Song

Back in May, I got a press release that Delta's budget airline, Song, was forming a record label. At the time, I said I couldn't imagine two shakier businesses to go into simultaneously. Today, Delta folded Song. No word yet on how this affects Better Than Ezra.

It pays to ask for the boss

I spoke with a very nice man at Air Tran, who was surprised that my claim was so reasonable ($80), and said he'd send me a check right away.

The parable of the assistant manager

Really, it shouldn't be this big a deal. We gate-checked our stroller. It came out broken. The airline's at fault, right?

Well, yes, with a great big "but."

You see, according to AirTran's Richmond representative, I needed to report the damage within four hours after landing. Which in fact I tried to do. The gate-check ticket said to go to a baggage service center. Air Tran doesn't have one in Richmond. It was past 11 p.m. on Sunday night, there was no one at the ticket counter, so we decided to go home.

On the way, I called the company's 800 number. Because of inclement weather conditions at the time (Wilma was approaching Florida), the system said, please call back later if you're not traveling within the next 24 hours.

The next morning I looked up the company's customer service number, called it, and got the baggage complaints department. Even though it was 9:30 a.m., I got a recording. I left a message including my phone number, my name and my itinerary number. Just for good measure, I sent an email to the customer service line.

Nothing.

Today I called the airline's customer service number again, and was directed to someone at the Richmond counter. I called the guy, who told me I could bring the stroller in and he'd see if they could fix it. Otherwise, I was out of luck because I didn't report the damage within the first four hours of the flight.

The conversation did not go well. I pointed out that I'd tried to do so and had been thwarted. I told him I'd called the customer service number the next morning. He told me I should have read my ticket jacket (the ticket attached to the stroller just said to go to the baggage service center, which as we've established, does not exist), which would have told me to contact the airport.

I said I thought that contacting customer service should count, especially since no one got back to me. He was not impressed. Bring in the stroller, he said, but if we can't fix it, all we can maybe do is give you a discount on a future Air Tran flight. I assured him that such a discount would at this point probably go unused and hung up.

I called back customer service, which apologized, and gave me the number and email for the guy's boss. I haven't heard back from him yet, and I'm sure he'll take care of this, but it got me thinking about customer service.

Now, it's not this guy's fault that our stroller got broken. It's Air Tran's. It's not Air Tran's fault that this guy was argumentative and dismissive. It is, however, the airline's fault that it directed me to a guy with zero service skills, which basically determines whether or not the company loses a customer. (Perhaps not coincidentally, I bumped into an Air Tran employee with the same name as the guy I talked to before we left. I apologized, and he told me, "You need to watch where you're going.")

I travel a lot, so I know how this is supposed to work. I've already expended a lot more effort on this silly situation than I should have had to. They broke something that belonged to me. I tried my best to get the company to take care of the situation. And goddammit, it looks like this particular model of stroller isn't made anymore.

Okay Air Tran, if you're reading this--better figure out how to get one to my house pronto.

Her best is never good enough

I lost count of Times-Dispatch writers' columns on the Rolling Stones concert at the beginning of the month (though I'd pay at least four bucks to see UR spokesman Randy Fitzgerald in what he calls his "gangsta pants."

But for an even more excellent indicator of what troubles the paper's arts coverage, look no further than Sambora jockstrap-wannabe pop critic Melissa Ruggieri, whose review of last night's Bruce Springsteen concert at the Richmond Coliseum could make even someone who likes the Boss (a category that does not include me) gag.

A few choice moments:

That was the humble, amiable guy who played to a nearly sold-out crowd of 6,000 at the Richmond Coliseum last night, exposing the guts of cherished nuggets such as the opening "My Beautiful Reward" (on pump organ and harmonica) and his newest work, including the Dylan-esque "Silver Palomino" and nonchalantly explicit "Reno."

What kind of mind finds "exposed guts" in "cherished nuggets"? Probably the same type that can't make the connection between "nearly sold-out crowd of 6,000" and "at Richmond Coliseum"--we get artists when the rest of the world starts tuning them out. Instead, our critics swoon like wallflowers asked to service a lazy football player. No ring for you, sweetie.

If the thought of a solo Springsteen sends you racing for the NoDoz, that is understandable this tour isn't designed for the casual fan yearning to scream along to "Born To Run." But regardless of musical preference, it is impossible to deny Springsteen's craftsmanship as a songwriter, communicator and musician, all of which were splayed open for 2½ hours.

Let's skip the first sentence, which sends me racing to find enough sleeping pills so I never have to read Ruggieri again; the nonrestrictive clause "all of which" in this case describes the word craftsmanship, not what Ruggieri sees as the singer's three roles, all of which most critics would rather be splayed open than pretend is unique. Li'l help from the editors, puh-leeze!

Throughout the concert, Springsteen sounded like . . . . Springsteen -- gravelly, but warm, his rough voice turning tender on "The River" and wrung from his throat on "Lonesome Day."

A: Good comparison; B: his rough voice turned "wrung from his throat"? Who'da seen that coming?

Springsteen might not be Hornsby-level on the ivories, but he's no slouch, either, evidenced on "Incident on 57th Street," a request played with a power unexpected from one man behind a piano. That song, like so many in his catalog, perfectly represents Springsteen's mass appeal -- the guys embrace his ruggedness, and the women pretend he's singing to them in his husky, meaningful voice.

This is the kind of insight into pop music that lands you a job for life at a tertiary-market newspaper.

San Francisco

What a beautiful city. I can't believe I never really looked around on previous visits.

Extraordinary machine

Why exactly does the press go bananas whenever Apple makes an incremental upgrade to its products? Jack Shafer took on the press's Apple-polishing in Slate last week.

There's one possible culprit that Shafer overlooks, though, and one that explains why even arguably superior products geared toward Windows users (yes, I KNOW iPods work with Windows, but bear with me) often fail to arouse more than ambivalence--every magazine I've worked at over the past 15 years uses Macs exclusively.

I do, too. Like nearly every single one of my friends, I don't own a PC. Never have. I love that my iBook just recognizes any device I plug in to it--printer, camera, disk drive. I especially love how iTunes has freed me from the tyranny of keeping CDs just because they have one good song, and how my iPod has 8 billion songs on it and is only half full. My icy white laptop, with its glowing sleep-mode light, looks cool when I put it on the conveyer belt at airports. I have all the software I need, and it works very nicely.

Whenever my mom's Dell laptop blows a gasket (which seemed to be every time she turned it on for the first few months she had it), I try to help her figure it out, but Windows is so damn counterintuitive, we often end up calling customer service and talking to some nice person in Delhi. I've never had to so much as email Apple.

So I am exactly the wrong person to write an objective article about Apple products. And I am exactly the type of person who writes about them. So even though I could give a flying crap about the new iPod, I still pay attention. Because Apple's products are a part of my life, and I trust them, and I thereby seriously advise you not to trust my objectivity.

Answers to yesterday's puzzler

1) Holmberg
2) Anger
3) Holmberg
4) Anger
5) Anger
6) Holmberg

Thanks for playing!

Anger or Holmberg

Hey, let's play a game. I'll list several quotations below, and you tell me whether they're the work of fictional Weekly World News columnist Ed Anger or the sadly actual Times-Dispatch columnist Mark Holmberg. Answers later.

1. On the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

   I'M MAD AS HELL at the opportunism and raw thuggery that complicated rescue efforts in New Orleans. It has cost lives, inflamed a wide range of passions and made the entire nation look like spoiled barbarians. Sure, some of the looting was necessary, but WHAT GIVES THOSE SCUM THE RIGHT TO RUN WILD?

   
   
2. On evolution:

   If we teach children that everything the Bible says is dead wrong and to believe a bunch of cold-blooded scientists with microscopes instead, then is it any wonder that every time you turn on the TV, you hear that some nerd has just gone on a shooting spree at school or that teen pregnancy is skyrocketing through the roof?

   
   
3. On The Passion of the Christ:

   If Jesus had come in these times, would his fate have been any different? Hardly. The often mindless, self-absorbed nature of our society can be summed up symbolically in those bumper stickers that proclaim, "I'm spending my children's inheritance."

   
   
4. On Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction:

   I'm mighty glad the FCC has launched a full-scale obscenity investigation, but that's not enough. Our society is being destroyed by this godless sleaze.

   
   
5. On the Catholic church scandals:

   Not only do pedophile priests get a free ride, courtesy of "understanding" bishops, but celebrities who violate our children are allowed to walk the streets free for years -- even after the whole world knows their dirty little secret.

   
   
6. On school violence:

   But, alas, the famous sleuthing brothers of Bayport would likely have to undergo anger-management counseling in today's sissified climate of zero tolerance for any kind of hormonal expression. ... But we're teaching our children to be yellow, aren't we?

   
   

World's stupidest columnist equates mass murder, schoolyard bullying

Mark Holmberg admits his passion for watching children beat one another to death may be "politically incorrect," but just imagine what would happen if we stopped listening to him!

I asked Mychael Dickerson, spokesman for the Henrico school system, when it would be OK for a student to intervene in a fight situation. When blood is spilled? When bone is sticking out?

His response: "We encourage the students to find an adult not to get involved."

Which would seem to indicate that Henrico would've preferred that passengers aboard Flight 93 stayed in their seats, called for help and then watched the plane fly into the White House.

It's really weird that Holmberg didn't get that Pulitzer. Maybe he should have offered to fight his fellow nominees.

The loathsome lisper

Hey you know how I said I wanted nothing to do with either gubernatorial candidate? Now I want to have even less to do with one than the other, which kind of makes up my mind.

Yesterday Jerry Kilgore released an ad criticizing Tim Kaine for defending a candidate on death row. Now, I understand Jerry's frustration with due process, and if it were up to me, we'd just liquify evildoers' brains with radiofrequency cannons on arrest (full disclosure: I own stock in a company that manufactures radiofrequency cannons). But seeing as the governor is supposed to, you know, uphold the law, not sneer at it, I guess I'm going to have to go with the candidate who seems to understand that the right to a competent defense--not a particular strong point of Virginia justice--isn't optional.

The Washington Post editorial page calls this what it is: a low-down, dirty smear. Rumors of a principled editorial page in Richmond remain unfounded.

Kilgore is playing to the basest of instincts--first name-calling, now implying Kaine is a friend of murderers. He's an asshole, and as anyone who's seen Team America: World Police can tell you, those don't make for especially dear leaders.

JetBlue? Bless you!

In some of the best local news I've heard in a long time, JetBlue just announced it will be starting service from Richmond. JetBlue's not just a budget airline, it's also a damned pleasant way to fly (leather seats! good coffee! DirecTV!), as long as, you know, the landing gear descends.

Pucked up

I've been watching the steady erosion in price of Wolfgang Puck self-heating coffees at Kroger, which may now be regretting its deal to exclusively sell them. They started out at about $9 for a four pack a few months ago; yesterday we saw the price had dropped to $2.50 and said, "What the hell?"

It was sort of exciting setting them off, and not just because I take pride in using the share of landfills that vegetarians and people who use cloth diapers yield to complicated packages like this. First you turn the can upside down, then you pop a "top," then you press a button, then you turn it right side up and wonder why nothing's happening. Then you notice that the instruction to "shake first" isn't near the other instructions. So you shake, wondering if you've just sealed your own doom.

The coffee cans heat the contents via a separate chamber containing quicklime and water, which are combined when you press the button.

Slowly--about four minutes later--the coffee has heated itself to a temperature that's downright drinkable. If only I could say the same about the coffee itself. We got the Mocha Java flavor, which sort of tasted like hot chocolate mixed with Miracle-Gro. Still, we're putting the other two cups in our hurricane kit, because after a couple of days without power, hot drinks are a real treat. Even ones that taste like a rat's ass.

Current affairs

Apparently there's some sort of gubernatorial contest going on. It's hard to know who to vote for--the guy with the gay voice who hates homosexuals, or the shifty guy who says the other one can't be trusted. I could default to the independent candidate--and this is coming from someone who thinks third-party candidates are assholes--but his advertising campaign (click the "We Want Potts" link) suggests he's far too insane even for the job in question.

I find it a completely depressing sign of the state of political debate that Kilgore's strategy seems to consist entirely of giving Kaine the first name "Liberal" and that Kaine's is basically saying "Nuh-uh!"

I don't know where these bozos stand on anything, and I don't care. They're everything people hate about politics, completely dreary party hacks with zero personal appeal, and I'd rather be locked in a never-ending police ride-along with Amiri Baraka and Mark Holmberg than hear either of their names ever again (and I do wish they'd both stop robot-calling me). I will be voting, but only out of a severely overgrown sense of civic duty.

Is Terry Kilgore's mustache running? Now THERE's a candidate I could get behind.

Last did good work 21 years ago....

Ray McAllister adds his distinctive voice to the chorus of folks overjoyed that some antediluvian rockers acknowledged the existence of Virginia.

I'm sure it was exciting for Ray to leave his office for the first time in 60 years, but if I were him I'd stay away from the phrase "phones it in."

The new sheriff

I have high hopes for the new Times-Dispatch executive editor Glenn Proctor, because the Star-Ledger is a great paper, and also because he's an ex-Marine. He'll have his work cut out for him; yesterday I was catching up on the paper's Taylor Behl coverage when I read this howler:

Family members and officials involved in the investigation believe Behl met up with a friend and later had dinner with a former boyfriend and fellow VCU student at the Village Café, a popular grunge bar at Harrison and West Grace streets, also on the north end of the Monroe Park campus. [emphasis mine]

Is there seriously no one at the newspaper who could have caught that the style of music known as grunge hasn't had its own clubs, much less its own bars, in about a decade?

Certainly not the paper's pop-music critic, who's far too preoccupied figuring out how to transform herself into an object of desire for arteriosclerotic rock stars, or its self-proclaimed music expert and cut-rate Mencken impersonator Mark Holmberg, who when reviewing Lamb of God's live DVD offered blazing insights along the lines that such releases are for "fans only" (a: duh; b: the DVD went gold).

Yes, the bar is grungy. No, Tad doesn't hang out there.

It's unfortunate that Proctor won't have any say over the paper's wheezing editorial page (what will it take to send those bilious dopes shuffling off toward the light?) but I'm hopeful that he won't settle for reporters and columnists who leave the building only when sandwiches are involved.

So here's to him pushing the paper's staff to make that second phone call, to scour the public records, to file that FOIA request, to start breaking news that local blogs keep beating them to. In the story, Proctor sums up his philosophy (with elipses, apparently) as "Teams. . . . Break news . . . If we can do it every day, all the better."

This city, and that paper, have well-deserved reputations for wearing down ambition. Here's where that Marine training will come in handy.

Ain't it funny how time slips away?

My goodness, has this mural faded. Check out the photo from 2003, above, and then take a drive down Jefferson St. I know the landlord of this building, and he's a good guy. I think he's waiting to find a tenant before he saves the mural. Let's hope it's soon.

Just don't import their dentists

The missus solves the problem of obesity in the U.S. military, one that presumably does not exist in her native land--"Just feed them British MREs," she suggests.

More sloganeering

From the blog topic that will not die, this time courtesy an email from a shy, retiring sort who's chary about his name appearing in print.

Don't Go Changin'

Smoke 'em – We make 'em

If you're not from here, you never will be

Recycling Calendars Since 1865

Richmond: History Inaction

Richmond: Oddly Self-important

Richmond: Relevant as the Confederacy

Really easy

I realize I'm quite late to this party, but I've been thinking about the call for a new slogan for Richmond. Earlier this year, I mused about the concept of terroir, that palpable impalpability that gives a place essence and sets it apart from anywhere else.

At the time, I didn't have much luck thinking of anything that made Richmond truly special, but I think I've hit on it:

Vaguely dirty place names.

We have a lot of them.

(When did I turn into Ray McAllister?)

So here's my contribution to the new-slogan sweepstakes:

"Richmond: Take Cox to Short Pump or Genito to Varina."

The T-shirt sales alone could finance a thousand performing arts centers. Or you could tax God licence plates, which I'm pretty sure we have more of than any other place, as well.