The Stew

Since Best Buy changed their Reward Zone program for the worse, I’ve been shopping at Amazon.com a lot more. Since I’m cheap, I like to use their free shipping option when I can, which utilizes the United States Postal Service as a carrier.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried tracking a package at the USPS site, but I’ve found it to be little more than a joke. There are plenty of times when the site will say that there’s no shipping information yet, but please check back at night because that’s apparently when the USPS likes to do its paperwork. You can check back to your heart’s content, but every now and then there will be absolutely no tracking information available even on the day that the package shows up on your doorstep.

Even in cases when they actually decide that there really is shipping information, it can be spotty at best. Check out the picture above and you’ll see that Amazon told the USPS to come get my copy of Casino Royale on Blu-ray on April 15. Instead of picking up the package, it was magically transported to St. Paul on the 19th. On the 21st, it showed up at my door.

Compare that tracking information to what you usually get from UPS, and it’s night and day. UPS will let you know when the package was picked up, when it entered their processing facility, when it left their processing facility, when it ended up at another processing facility, when it left that processing facility, when it got on a truck and when it was left on your doorstep. It’s more of what you’d expect when you “track” a package.

So imagine my surprise when the slackers at UPS decided to hand off my Lounge Brigade CD to the USPS for final delivery. The top two thirds of this graphic shows the usual UPS thoroughness — but check out the bottom third. Granted, the USPS only had to move the package within a single city, but that’s a lot more information than I usually get out of them. Too bad I had to go to the UPS site to get it.

Take a look at the last item in this image, and you’ll see one of my complaints about the state of the news media in the U.S.

A long time ago, in a Midwest city far, far, away, I was a journalist of sorts. I worked at a real daily newspaper, writing and editing real news stories. Things were starting to change even then in ways that I thought were for the worse. The O.J. Simpson trial was in full swing at that time, and our newspaper consistently found a way to get information about the many-month trial on the front page. At an editorial meeting, I made mention that the true ”news” about the trial would have been when Simpson was indicted, when the trial started, maybe when the defense started, and when the verdict was read — which makes, perhaps, four incidents that would have warranted front-page coverage as opposed to 143. Everyone in the room looked at me like I was from Mars.

I understand that media companies are for-profit organizations, but frankly all this pandering hasn’t proven to be a bottom-line feeder so much as just an intellectual bottom-feeding. I don’t know if reporting actual, useful news would mean big profits for media companies — but if you’re going to go down anyway, you may as well go down swinging.

The most recent Democratic debate on ABC has been a last straw of sorts in this vein for some media critics. I’ve never seen such harsh words thrown at a TV news outlet: “shoddy” and “despicable,” two words used by the Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales to describe the event, were actually two of the nicest adjectives I heard.

For example, Barack Obama was asked by moderator Charlie Gibson to answer a question presented via video from Pennsylvania resident Nash McCabe:

I want to know if you believe in the American flag. I am not questioning your patriotism, but all our servicemen, policemen and EMS wear the flag. I want to know why you don’t.

In an interview with a blogger from Politico, co-moderator George Stephanopoulos actually defended such questions as being important to voters.

Dumb voters, maybe. Jingoistic, superficial voters, definitely. Is that the voice we want our news media to use in its interactions with newsmakers?

The media has seriously dropped the ball in the last decade, which is part of the reason why the Bush administration has been able to get away with everything from spying on Americans without probable cause to starting an ill-advised and unjustified war. Yes, the media is actually complicit in these despicable acts — both by refusing to examine the administration’s claims and by distracting Americans by talking about things like flag pins.

The media needs to get smarter. They’ll have no incentive to do that if we keep clicking on stories about Martha Stewart’s dog. So, long story short, don’t click on stories about Martha Stewart’s dog. Don’t let debate moderators get away with asking idiotic questions. Demand better.

I did something I swore I wouldn’t do. I’m not particularly proud of it.

I bought a Blu-ray player.

Put down the pitchforks — it’s not totally evil. It’s an HD-DVD player as well.

Actually, in many ways the Samsung BD-UP5000 is a better HD-DVD player than my first-generation Toshiba HD-A1 is. It’s faster to load DVDs and HD-DVDs, the upconversion of DVDs is clearly superior, and… um… it also plays Blu-ray discs.

It’s not perfect. Dolby TrueHD is limited to 2-channel sound for the time being (Samsung promises a firmware update to correct this by May), and HD-DVD menus are a little slow. I’ll live with the slow menus, and while I’d be happier if I were getting lossless 5.1 sound on discs with TrueHD, I’m — on the whole — pretty pleased with the unit.

As for the Blu-ray discs, finally having a player has confirmed in my mind that the wrong format lost the war. The picture on my three (so far) BDs is fine and dandy, and the sound is pretty good to boot. But the menus and extras are, for lack of a better word, “primitive” compared to those on most HD-DVDs. I’m one of those crazy people who likes extras, and being limited to having a really stupid trivia track on The Fifth Element makes me a little sad. Here’s hoping that the Blu-ray folks get their cool Java-based stuff working sooner rather than later.

As unbaked as it is, Blu-ray is clearly the wave of the future. I’m on board — at least until downloads rule the HD world.