London Calling*

So the NFL plays its fourth regular season game in London this week. This comes after the league has mounted various pre-season games in cities all over the world for years. I distinctly remember the Chiefs playing the Vikings in Tokyo back in the mid 90s. There has been talk about the NLF staging the Superbowl in London. The aim of all this is, of course, to expand the NFL's appeal outside of North America. And Goodell has stated he has one ultimate goal with these regular season games in the UK: he wants a permanent NFL franchise based in London.

As the Commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell's title could just as easily be CEO -- part of his job description is to make the NFL as profitable as is humanly possible. The proposed 18 game schedule is certainly a part of that. It makes logical sense for a successful US business to try and make more money by franchising itself in Europe and beyond. McDonadls. Starbucks. The NFL would like to be a big brand in Europe.

So is it a good idea? From a fiscal standpoint it most certainly is. If the NFL wants to keep making more money, the most logical way to do that is expanding the brand overseas. Did anybody see a little movie last year called Avatar? It's the highest grossing movie both here in the States and internationally as well. Avatar made about $750 million in North American. But it made almost $2 billion in overseas markets. In other words, it made nearly 3 times as much money overseas as it did here. That's not an uncommon occurrence with American entertainment exports, that they make at least as much money overseas as they do here. For most American movies, about 60% of their total gross comes from overseas markets. If the league wants to increase revenues, an obvious means for this is to expand the game outside the US.

Are there complications with this? Oh yeah, there are some complications. The biggest one is the issue of travel. I was reading this week about the Donkeys' and 49ers' travel plans for dealing with the jet lag and how they organized their travel to play the game. I know this sound pretty fundamental, but they will also have to travel back after their game tomorrow. So traveling to the UK will affect a visiting team's play this week and also next week as they recover from jet lag. But that's just the visiting team. If you base a team in London, they will have to deal with kind of travel EIGHT TIMES a season. Nine if they adopt an 18 game schedule. Then you would have to travel for two pre-season games. And if you make the playoffs you would have to travel for non-home games as well. You're looking at a team making potentially 12 or 13 jaunts across the pond, 14 or 15 if the expand the schedule. A flight from New York to London is only a couple of hours longer than a flight from New York to L.A. But if a team in the UK had to travel from London to play in San Diego? Those guys will be logging more frequent flyer miles than George Clooney did in Up in the Air.

Would there be a fan base? So far all the games they've staged at Wembley have sold out. So there is at least some interest in it. I'm sure the NFL wouldn't go forward with a UK team if they hadn't studied its chances for success. Plus, London is a huge city, with a population of 7.5 million people. However, you have a situation in the UK where nobody plays youth football. I'm sure the NFL would be more than happy to help fund equipment for youth leagues if that would help expand the popularity. But like the rest of the known world, soccer is king in England. Could an American football team succeed in a city like London? The NFL has already failed at trying to start a league in Europe, but that is partially because the World League was a self-admitted bush league of developmental players -- the fans in Europe weren't getting the best possible NFL product.

Who would they move? Goodell has stated he doesn't want to expand the league from 32 teams, so somebody would have to get relocated to London. Who goes? What division do they play in (I would assume the London team would have to be in either of the Easts)? I know the NFL wants to move at least one team to Los Angeles (there are two different stadium plans underway, one headed up by AEG to build a stadium next to Staples downtown). Jacksonville is usually the first team people mention as a possible LA team. Who goes to London? Buffalo? If London were in the US it would be the second biggest city, nearly as populated as New York. Buffalo has a population of 270,000. One team would have to be relocated. The team owner would have to go along with it. Who moves?

Would players want to live in London? I wouldn't mind it, but you never know if a London team would be able to sign free agents. This is just me, but I would much rather live in London over the following NFL cities: Green Bay, St. Louis, Buffalo, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Nashville, Minneapolis, Dallas, Houston, Detroit, Indy, or Oakland. But that's just me. Would a team in the UK be able to attract talent like a team in the States? London is a great city, with as much to do and see and as much culture (maybe more) than New York. But would a player want to live there? Would a GM and coaches want to move their families there?

I don't live in KC any more, so I don't know what the atmosphere was like there for the World Cup. In LA it was pretty insane. The sports bar across the street from my apartment was serving breakfast at 6 am so fans could come in and watch the games. Most sports bars were open that early. The company I work for is based in the UK and my boss is from England. All the games were on here at work. People had their flags out, wearing their teams' jerseys around. Honestly, it reminded me of Arrowhead. And that's not even close compared to what the atmosphere was like overseas. The thing the NFL might be pushing towards down the road would be a World Cup of American football, where countries sent all star teams to compete against each other once every four years. If American football can be grown outside the US, this kind of event is possible in the future -- remember the World Cup is by far the most successful sporting event in the world.

So the NFL plays its fourth regular season game in London this week. Do you think American football can thrive outside the United States?

*I know the title is a little obvious, but I'm a fan of The Clash. So sue me.

Why is 3D an extra charge?

I went to see Toy Story 3 last week at the Grove here in Los Angeles and it cost me $16.50 to see the movie. This was, of course, due to the additional fee the theater chains are charging for this Avatar-led glut of 3D movies coming out. I've paid the fee before and never really thought anything about it until last week while I was waiting for the movie to start. Why was I being charged an extra $3.50 premium for the 3D?

One of the things that's interesting about the movie industry is tickets are the same price regardless of what you're seeing. A couple of weeks ago I caught the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work at the Arclight. The movie's pretty good but it couldn't have cost very much money to produce. It's just people following Rivers around for a year. However, I paid the same money to see that as I paid to see Iron Man, a movie with an exponentially bigger budget and marketing costs. This would never happen in, say, the world of live theater. Seeing Denzel Washington in Fences on Broadway will cost you more money than seeing an Off-Off Broadway show.

So as I was waiting for TS3 to begin I started to think: what exactly and I being charged for when I pay the 3D premium? It can't be to compensate a bigger budgeted film since something like the Final Destination series' 3D movie would have had a much lower budget than something like Prince of Persia. Is it to pay for the glasses? If Pacific Theaters is charging $3.50 a person for 3D and they are able to use a single pair of 3D glasses for at least 5 screenings a day then they are making $17.50 a day off a pair of 3D glasses. How much can the glasses cost to produce? And why can't I just buy my own pair and bring them to the cinema with me and avoid the upcharge altogether?

I'd never really thought of this before, I'd just played along. But why should there be a premium charge for 3D?

$35 Dollars a Ticket???

I didn't major in business when I was in college, but there are times when I look at the way some companies are run and I just shake my head. How can the people who run them, who get paid mind boggling sums of to make good business decisions do things that are so stupid?

Case and point for me is the music business. The people running the music industry had to see the problems that the internet and digital file sharing was going to cause them. If they didn't see it coming they are even stupider than I thought they were. They had to know that people would be able to share music on the internet. Instead of using it to their advantage and providing a service with that technology (and being proactive) the industry did nothing until they started losing vast sums of money. Their solution? This is the brilliant part: Their solution was to sue their customers. Finally Steve Jobs entered the picture to stop the insanity with a really smart (and simple) idea that became iTunes. Apple offered an online store where people could pay $.99 for a song and (usually) about $9.99 for the whole album. iTunes is cheaper than buying the hard copy CD in a store like Best Buy. As I am writing this, iTunes has sold well over 1 billion songs and is on their way to selling 2 billion. Of course the pinheads that run the music biz are wanting to start charging more money per song. Apple bails them out and their greed makes them blind to the good thing they have.

The movie theater companies are doing things that are just as stupid. Overall film grosses this year were up over last year, but ticket sales are down. Again, I didn't go to business school, but I am clever enough to see that increased ticket prices are making it look like more people are going. The fact of the matter is moviegoing (in the traditional sense of going to see a first run feature in a theater) has been on the decline for years. There are a lot of factors for this. Home theaters are more sophisticated and create a theater-like experience at home. The window of time between a film's theatrical run and its home video release is still shrinking. It used to be about a 6 month gap between the theatrical run and the home vid release. Now it's dwindled to about 3 months. People don't have to wait as long, it makes them more likely to wait and see the film at home. As I mentioned, high ticket prices are also keeping people away. Concessions are ridiculously high as well. In LA it would cost upwards of $75 to take a family of 4 to the movies, if you also got popcorn and soda.

But the real culprit in all this is that the theater owners have allowed the moviegoing experience to just flat out suck. Theaters are manned mostly be teenagers earning minimum wage -- you get what you pay for. In our litigious society I am sure these businesses don't want to deal with getting sued if they throw disruptive people out. So essentially they are creating a situation in which a few idiots can ruin the fun for everybody else. Theater chains are trying to squeeze every last penny they can, that' why you have to sit through 30 minutes of commercials before you sit through 15 minutes of trailers.

Worst of all are your fellow patrons. The people are rude and insensitive to the concept that there are other people watching the movie besides them. Cell phones are a huge problem, both people taking calls during a movie or text messaging. Idiotic people take small children to the movie, often to movies that are inappropriate for their kid. The worst I ever saw was 2 white trash morons take a kid that looked 3 or 4 to see Natural Born Killers. Message to parents: having kids means you don't get to do the things you used to. If you can't get a babysitter, STAY HOME. Teenagers ruin movies as well. Suburban parents drop their kids off at movie theaters and malls as if they were some sort of babysitting service. Judging from their kids' behavior, I wouldn't want them in the house either, but I didn't choose to have them. Again, you had kids now deal with the consequences.

These are mild problems by comparison. Violence is not uncommon these days with fist fights, knifings and actual shootings taking place at the movies.

Like the music biz, the big theater chains have been very, very slow to adapt. They have dug in their heels and avoided making the theater going experience superior to waiting 3 months and watching the movie at home. They have been slow to change over to digital and 3D projection and also been slow to utilize formats like IMAX, which simply can't be replicated in a home theater. Of course while improving the presentation of the film costs money, controlling audience behavior is free of charge.

Today Variety reports that the Village Road Show company will start to build some lavish, premium theaters in the US. They will offer valet parking, restaurants and waiter service to your seat in the theater. Theses theaters will also be equipped with state of the art digital projection and sound. And the tickets will cost $35.

What????

$35? To see a movie I can buy on DVD in 3 months for half that? What these guys are failing to see is it doesn't matter if the projection is in pristine digital or if the waiter serves you great sushi. None of it matters if the asshole behind you won't shut up or stop kicking your seat.

In LA we have a theater called the Arclight. It's in Hollywood on Sunset and Vine. It costs $14 to see a movie there, $12 for matinees. It is essentially the same concept, minus the waiters. And wouldn't having waiters coming in and out of a movie be a huge distraction anyway?

The Arclight totally gets it right and I go out of my way to see movies there. They rock.

Simon? Or Paula?

I am hanging out at home tonight, watching a little "American Idol." I like it better than I used to. I am not sure if this is a format change for the show, but the Idols are playing instruments this year, which I always thought should have been a part of the competition. If I ran the show I would take it a step further and allow them to perform their own songs, if they have any original compositions. I think it allows the winner to be a well rounded performer and not just a singer.

This brings me to the judges. Simon Cowell gets a lot of flack from people for being the "mean" judge. But if you really watch the show and pay attention to what he says, he never really makes his criticism personal. He is just very direct in telling the contestants what he thinks of their performance. He is also the most qualified person on the stage and you can tell by watching the reaction of the singers that his opinion means more to them. When he praises them, they beam.

His counterpoint is, of course, is Paula Abdul. Paula was a singer in the 80s, but not a particularly memorable one. She got her start as a Laker Girl and she has a dance and choreography background. Some nights on Idol she appears to have pounded a few drinks before the show. Paula babbles and she almost never offers any real criticism or advice. She goes by the monicker of the "nice" judge. Often she goes on about how pretty the girls look. She has no edge and no real point of view.

Between the two of them, I really think Simon offers a great public service: He tells people the truth. If somebody who can't sing wants to be a singer, he will tell them they have no hope. Some people think that's mean. In interviews I have heard Simon say that real cruelty is to let people go around and embarrass themselves when they have no talent for what they are trying to do. I agree. In the acting game, there are people with no talent who are wasting a lot of time and money pursuing something that just isn't going to work out for them. We live in world where most people are like Paula, unwilling or unable to tell people anything other than hollow, polite platitudes. What we need is somebody like Simon, who will cut through all the crap and tell us what we need to hear, not what we want to hear. Sometimes the truth stings.

As a performer, I want honest criticism. I want to know what I can do to make a scene better or to improve my work as an actor. If I am wasting my time as an actor, I want to know so I can move on with my life.

I want to be surrounded by people like Simon, I want people to tell me the truth, to tell me that, yes, those pants do make me look fat. Billy Joel wrote a song about this. It's called "Honesty." In it he says, "If you look for truthfulness you might just as well be blind." I think he is largely right. It is difficult to find somebody who cares enough about you to tell you things that may hurt your feelings but are things that you really need to know.



I lived in South Florida for 2 years and they have this Air and Sea Show in Ft. Lauderdale that is really cool. It's similar to Fleet Week in New York and on that weekend the armed forces put on a really cool show/demonstration, right on the beach in Ft. Lauderdale. We went one year and while we were there I saw a young woman who was not very tall and must have weighed at least 200 pounds. She was wearing a thong. It was appalling. Actually it was worse than that. It made me massively uncomfortable. The sad thing was she had friends with her and they didn't have the decency to tell her friend that she looked worse than bad, she looked delusional. She looked desperate.

I want my friends to stop me from going to the Air and Sea Show in a thong. Is that sort of honesty too much to ask?

Barack's Pastor

Hillary got what she must have been dreaming of this week when scrutiny fell on Barack Obama as it relates to his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Rev. Wright's controversial remarks in some of his sermons are causing Obama to get some of the tough media scrutiny Hillary claimed Obama wasn't getting. And of course it led to Barack's incredible speech on race, which may go down historically much the same as JFK's 1960 speech to the ministers in Houston who were concerned about Kennedy being a Catholic.

Rev. Wright's comments about race have been fueling a lot of fodder in the media and it makes me really wonder why it was such a big deal. After all, don't we all have associations with people who have differing points of view than our own? My parents and I have different points of view about policy. God knows I disagreed with how some of the principals I worked under ran schools I worked for. So why is there so much guilt by association in the case involving Rev. Wright and Barack Obama?

I think it comes down to the role pastors play in the lives of the average church-goer. I really believe that the average church-goer pretty much falls in line with whatever their pastor says and never questions it. I think America is loaded with people who are intellectually lazy and the church is no different. In other words, people show up on Sunday and expect to have their pastor tell them what to think. The look to their pastor as their spiritual guide (which they should) but they never question what he has to say (which they should not).

Necessity taught me to question my pastor when I was in high school. When you grow up in a small midwestern town you don't always get the sophistication of the big city. The pastor of the Southern Baptist church my family attended had not attended a seminary. I am not sure if he even was a college graduate at all. But I remember very specifically him saying he did not think attending seminary was very important. This is a lot like saying a doctor doesn't need to got to medical school. But hey, this is America and we certainly don't value intellectualism very much at all.

While I was in high school there were two things our pastor said that really blew my mind. The first one involved the creation story found in Genesis. He told his congregation that when the Bible says God created something in a day's time it meant a 24 hour calendar day , which makes God a lot like Jack Bauer. At the time I thought it was ridiculous and I still do. Just look at the loonies running around today that claim the earth is only 3,000 years old because the Bible only accounts for that much history. I love the way Lewis Black describes these people who are "watch the Flintsones as if it were a documentary."

The second thing (and even crazier still) was his assertion that a woman using artificial insemination to get pregnant was an abomination. To this day I am convinced he didn't really understand how artificial insemination worked. I think he thought that a woman would simply get pregnant by getting nailed by a man who wasn't her husband. And to this day I still have no idea what his Biblical argument was to explain how this procedure that had helped so many couples who couldn't have kids get pregnant was somehow Godless. He also spoke once about Darwin having a deathbed change of heart about his writings on Evolution. I am pretty sure he made that one up.

It's dangerous when people take any information at face value without investigating it for themselves. It's really scary when it's information that will impact the moral choices you make in your lifetime. The sad thing is the average Christian is completely illiterate when it comes to the Bible. Most Christians (like most Americans) are simply intellectually lazy. I am not completely sure why this is. It may be they are scared to uncover things about their beliefs that may challenge what they have always held to be true. There are many Christian denominations who only use the King James translation of the Bible as their guide. It doesn't matter to these people that 400 years of scholarship and research has been done and that modern translations are simply more accurate in terms of what the Bible says. The point is the King James Bible says what they want it to say.

I think that is the fear people have about Barack and Rev. Wright; that Barack attended that church because its pastor said thing Barack wanted him to say.

Public Apologies

I work part-time at Starbucks and we sell both the LA Times and the NY Times. Today's headline of the NY Times went a little something like this: "New York Governor Caught in Sex Scandal, Issue Apology." 

This is Gov. Spitzer's press conference yesterday:

He sure does sound sorry, doesn't he?

What is the weird obsession we have in America today with public apologies? I am a member of the public, though not a resident of New York, but any apology aimed at the general public includes me. The Governor doesn't need to apologize to me. He didn't do anything to me.  He needs to apologize to his wife and his kids -- oddly his wife (I think it was his wife, could've been a hired girl) was standing behind him at the press conference where he issued said apology. Aren't pretty much all Americans sophisticated enough about photo ops at this point to realize that she is only there as a symbol? That she is literally standing by her man? She looked completely pissed off, too, which was pretty cool. There is no need for him to apologize to the public.  A simple resignation says it all.  As I write this, however, the governor hasn't even had the good taste to resign.

None of this even addressed the stupidity involved his making arrangements with a hooker himself.  I am not an expert in these areas, but I would think it's not uncommon in the political world for a staffer to handle this sort of thing so the political leader in question might not get caught in a wiretap sting?  

The dictionary on my Mac defines apology as "regretful acknowledgment of an offense or failure."  The key word in that definition is "regret."  If the Governor really regretted his actions he would have issued the apology before getting caught.  There is something inherently disingenuous when people say they are really sorry only when they can no longer be deceptive.  Bill Clinton lied to the American people until he no longer could lie about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.  His apology was totally phony.  If he really regretted his behavior he would have owned up to it before the DNA test made it impossible for him to lie any further.

In our legal system today defendants are given greater leniency if they show some form of remorse.  If a murderer apologizes for killing 13 people it might save him from the needle.  A killer who shows no remorse gets the death penalty.  If the killer were really sorry, wouldn't he or she have turned themselves in?  Or plead guilty and avoided the waste of tax dollars on a trial?  Or maybe not have even killed in the first place?  What possible difference could it make if Hannibal Lecter says "I am so sorry"?  

Sally Kern, a state representative in Oklahoma, was recently "outed" for giving an anti-gay speech to a small group of her constituents. She was not aware that her words were being recorded.  In her speech, Kern states that gays are more dangerous than Jihadists.  Apparently Kern fears our communications systems being destroyed by too many gays calling in to vote for American Idol.  Gay rights groups are outraged and they insist that she issue a public apology.  What possible difference could it make if she issues an empty apology?  The only way an apology is meaningful is if she denounces her own words, which ain't gonna happen.  Any apology she might make would be totally hollow.  

When I was a high school teacher it used to really annoy me how flippant kids were with apologies. The last year I taught I had a particularly obnoxious kid in a class. I would get on him for doing something irritating or stupid and he response was automatic: "Sorry!" He wasn't sorry. He would come into class the next day and do the same thing. I think kids today see these empty apologies and are just following the example