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Live or Stay-at-home?
Bill Simmons on why going to sporting events sucks. The leagues need to rethink the stadium experience, it's similar to the problem with movie theaters - staying at home tromps going out. I'd rather attend 1 or 2 games a year, pay more and get *really* good seats or a super high end experience (luxury box). The NFL is especially vulnerable because it's probably the worst live experience around due to the reasons cited below. I would love a couch/lazyboy section with more room, wireless access, plugs for laptops, waitresses, TVs, etc - but down in the stadium seats or an open air box. I'd do that with my buddies once a year in a heartbeat. Of course if you have a good team, it's much easier to get excited about going to the game (cough not the Rams cough). I definitely want to see a Cowboys game this year (my team when STL lost the Cardinals), Jerry Jones understands this problem and is trying to solve it by creating a circus like atmosphere wrapped in a billion dollar stadium.
"Prediction VI: Blackouts of home games will become the signature media story of the 2009 season. You'll hear way too much about it. Here's my take: This isn't about the economy. It's about the fact that it's more fun to stay home and watch football than it is to sit in crappy seats to watch any team ranging from "lousy" to "mediocre." It just is. For many fan bases, here are the two choices every Sunday:
Door No. 1 (more expensive): Traffic, parking, long walk to stadium, lousy seats, lifeless state-of-the-art arena, TV timeouts, dead crowds, drunk/bitter fans, more TV timeouts, hiked-up concession prices, PDAs with jammed signals as you're searching for scores, even more TV timeouts, long walk to car, even more traffic.
Door No. 2 (less expensive): Sofa, NFL package, HD, fantasy scores online, remote control toggling, gambling, access to scores, seven straight hours of football, cell phone calls, beer and food in fridge, no traffic.
I can see going through Door No. 1 once a year just to remind yourself that going to an NFL game sucks. But eight times a year? Unless you had good seats, or unless this was your only excuse to get out of your house and get plastered, why would you? It's a blue-collar sport with white-collar ticket prices. This blackout trend would have happened whether the economy was suffering or not."
A rant about ketchup: the worst fucking user interface on earth
Why in the hell do people use these shitty glass bottles anymore? I would be embarrassed to put one of these atrocities in my restaurant.
It is as though the glass ketchup bottle is an attempt to actively inhibit my use of the ketchup.
The thin plastic nozzle-topped ketchup bottle is the BEST ketchup dispensing device available. With its beautiful jet-stream of ketchup, you can fine-tune the precise amount of ketchup to dispense. And it never gets stuck. There's no shaking of the bottle. No knives. Just a pure unending stream of ketchup.
IT IS VASTLY SUPERIOR:
Even the trusty supermarket dispenser is a huge improvement:
And how can we forget ketchup packets? Always efficient and easy.
Anything is better than the glass bottle.
