Tasered

Journal of Robert Dziekanski: October 2007

*Translated from Russian

"Today I'm going to the airport to see my mother. I'm looking forward to her cooking cause she always made the best sausages!! It'll be hard to find her though because I can't speak English which means i'll be on my own. Oh well, it shouldn't be too bad. There's security there if anything bad were to happen. I just can't wait to see her!!"

The Next Day:

Obituary for Robert Dziekanski

Mr. Dziekanski died yesterday from a mixure of electical shock to his system from being tasered, as well as the weight of several of homeland securities finest officers tackling and crushing his neck as well as back. He had gone to the airport to meet his mother, and became angry about something, throwing computer equipment around the greeting area. This apparently authorized the use of lethal force"

Alright, the above was totally made up by me, but it seems like something that could have been true. I know that when a guy is throwing things around an airport that it's going to attract attention that will get him knocked on his ass at least. But he should still be able to breath the next day. He didn't try to shoot anyone or smuggle shit onto a plane.

I understand how in this day and age especially, airport's are going to be way more drastic in reaction to things than 8 years ago, but there is too far, and Robert seems to be a victim of that kind of over-reaction.

The most popular male is still behind a hundred popular women

As a guy, I don't really care about reading what some other guy, no matter how famous he is, has done wrong. Mel Gibson throwing racial slurs around interested me about as much as the mating patterns of flies. But when a female star gets in trouble. like Lindsay Lohan snorting blow or Britney Spears being a horrible parent, then at least there's still the attractiveness of a girl. And yeah, I know how sexist that must sound, but that's the only reason that I can see that girls getting in trouble is way more popular than guys.

So if guys only read or listen or watch that kind of stuff if it's about women, and women will read about either sex because they read to get the dirt on what is going on, then it makes sense that media will fixate on the women because as informative as these mediums are, at the end of the day they are a business. And to make the most money, they need to try and get the largest possible target audience.

Although I'm sure that another reason for this lack of testosterone in the public eye is a little bit of sexism, that word seems to get thrown around alot today. If a woman can't do something as well as a man, its labelled sexist to say so. When the positions are reversed though and a man cannot do something as well as a woman, then its because they aren't as skilled. That kind of pisses me off

But whatever. As long as women starlets keep doing things that can be exploited by the media, then men will be a distant second (or three hundred and fourth as the case may be) place.

Video killed the radio star, and Apple killed video apparently

According to http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/10/23/itunes.3b.songs.sold/, Itunes accounts for 36% of the companie's total revenue, and according to http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/23/BUN4SU8RB.DTL&feed=rss.business, it made $6.2 billion in revenue from sales of its iPods, iPhones and Macintosh computers this summer. That figures to be roughly 2 billion dollars for itunes sales. Not only does it make that much money, but it brought the idea of actually paying for music back into existence all by itself. But apparently, no one gave this information to Jeff Zucker. The president and CEO of NBC doesn't seem to be too wild about apple and how little money it makes him. Just a mere 15 millions dollars a year. But I should cut him a little slack. After all, most presidents these days have no clue what's going on around them.

Itunes has become one of the last hopes of both record companies looking to earn money from the bands that they have signed, as well as television studios and movie comapanies to sell their films and sitcoms. With sites like youtube and literally at least hundreds of online places to watch these things, the concept of paying for what you can get for free seems more and more ridiculous.

It's fine if he wants to pull all of his TV shows and shit off of the apple itunes site, but to go and bash what they're doing to the entertainment industry? Its like walking up to a guy and while that guy is helping you fix a flat tire on your car, you blindside him with a baseball bat and then screw his wife.

AND, on top of verbally thrashing apple, he has the balls to complain that he doesn't get any money from the hardware they sell? Then in that case, why isn't he forking over a percentage of the complete season dvd's of Lost to apple?

Or a box set of The Office? 30 Rock? My Name Is Earl?

I'm sure that they've hooked a fair number of viewers into buying the seasons after they have downloaded a single episode on itunes to sample it out. But no, thats not the way things go for good old Jeff. Now he's just going to lose more money when consumers start downloading episodes of all of the series' on his network off of some website that doesn't care about net revenues or potential bankruptcy. Serves him right for that forked tongue of his.