Television cameras eat IQ

The news tonight was broadcasting footage of the Hollywood Hills fire and they did a regurgitation of NBC4 LA's coverage. First thought, "Damn. Chuck Henry has done some fake bake since I was living in Los Angeles." There's no way that tan came au naturel. Second thought, when you're trying to describe something using a simile it's probably a good idea if your simile is different than what you're describing.

Young man interviewed on camera describing how quickly the fire took off, "And it just started spreading like wildfire."

Um. Duh.

In which I try to figure out my cat... yet again

I'm heading to the bathroom and peek in on the bedroom where S and Rosie are fast asleep on the bed (Rosie is our three year old Yorkshire Terrier). Surprisingly, our six year old cat Tiger is also sleeping on the bed. Surprisingly because he usually doesn't like to sleep close to the dog.

And, rather than thinking how cute this picture is, I immediately start wondering if Tiger is feeling okay. And I think back to his behavior over the past few days and try to figure out if anything is out of the ordinary.

"He did crawl into my lap while I was watching TV earlier. And he doesn't always do that. Does that mean something?"

After going round and round on this train of thought I remember: never try to figure out a cat.

Fitzmas comes early

I started following the Plame story over at Kevin Drum's blog a couple of years ago. But it readily became apparent that the online experts in all things Plame related were working at the lake (http://www.firedoglake.com).

What FDL has done over the past few years is nothing short of amazing. They provide a service that is sorely lacking in the traditional media (detailed exploration and analysis done by content experts constantly being added and improved on by a knowledgeable and engaged community). Their coverage of the Scooter Libby trial was the best out there.

And here's hoping that the firepups are just getting started.

Merry Fitzmas! Salud!

No victory for the grave

Growing up Protestant, it was kind of required that we sang a bunch of hymns. Not surprisingly, I'm partial to them.

One of my favorites is Abide With Me. It's quite a good funeral song (in the way that Pass Me Not was de rigeur at funerals for a while). The money quote:

Where is death's sting
Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still if thou
abide with me.

To see a bunch of castrati singing the song, go here. Not the best version you'll find. But heartfelt, nonetheless.

The Authoritarians

Bob Altemeyer's research on authoritarianism provided much of the meat for John Dean's Conservatives without Conscience. Following the success of his book, Dean asked Altemeyer to put the good stuff down on the printed page.

Here is the result.

Two years?

I don't think I can honestly call this an anniversary since I've been silent for quite some time. With that said, it's been a little over two years since S. set me up with this blog.

Cheers.

Movie tracking: lists

Worldwide Box Office (millions)
1. Star Wars ($4,211.1)
2. James Bond ($3,669.2)*
3. Harry Potter ($3,508.9)**
4. Lord of the Rings ($2,916.6)
5. Jurassic Park ($1,902.1)
6. Batman ($1,624.7)
7. Matrix ($1,624.0)
8. Spider-Man ($1,605.7)
9. Shrek ($1,405.1)
10. Indiana Jones ($1,191.4)
* worldwide totals from third party source (hsbr.net - which is unfortunately off line right now)
** in release

Domestic Box Office (millions)
1. Star Wars ($2,182.9)
2. James Bond ($1,217.1)
3. Harry Potter ($1,112.5) **
4. Lord of the Rings ($1,030.2)
5. Batman ($910.6)
6. Spider-Man ($777.3)
7. Jurassic Park ($767.4)
8. Star Trek ($755.7)
9. Shrek ($708.9)
10. Indiana Jones ($619.5)

Domestic Ticket Sales (millions of tickets)
1. Star Wars (568.1)
2. James Bond (527.1)
3. Star Trek (204.2)
4. Batman (200.0)
5. Indiana Jones (191.1)
6. Harry Potter (185.5) **
7. Jaws (182.6)
8. Rocky (177.2)
9. Lord of the Rings (173.9)
10. Jurassic Park (168.1)

Worldwide Box Office per film (millions)
1. Lord of the Rings ($972.2)
2. Harry Potter ($877.2) **
3. Spider-Man ($802.9)
4. Shrek ($702.6)
5. Star Wars ($701.9)
6. Jurassic Park ($634.0)
7. Matrix ($541.3)
8. Men in Black ($515.6)
9. Mission: Impossible ($501.2)
10. Toy Story ($423.5)

Domestic Box Office per film (millions)
1. Spider-Man ($388.7)
2. Star Wars ($363.8)
3. Shrek ($354.5)
4. Lord of the Rings ($343.4)
5. Harry Potter ($278.1) **
6. Jurassic Park ($255.8)
7. Meet the Parents/Fokkers ($222.8)
8. Men in Black ($220.6)
9. Toy Story ($218.9)
10. Indiana Jones ($206.5)

Domestic Ticket Sales per film (millions of tickets)
1. Star Wars (94.7)
2. Spider-Man (64.8)
3. Indiana Jones (63.7)
4. Shrek (59.2)
5. Lord of the Rings (58.0)
6. Jurassic Park (56.0)
7. Ghostbusters (49.5)
8. Harry Potter (46.4) **
9. Toy Story (46.0)
10. Jaws (45.6)

Movie franchise tracking: why and how and what

I'm going to step back from the previous post.

Why am I tracking box office returns for selected movie franchises? Well, I started paying attention to movie money back when the Fellowship of the Rings came out. I was reading a lot of hype about how life changing this movie was going to be and I was interested if the money made would reflect that. That's when I first found out about the amazingly useful tracking site Box Office Mojo. And it was great fun to watch the daily returns and see the movie climb the charts rapidly and try to figure out whether Fellowship of the Ring or The Sorcerer's Stone would end up with more money (Harry Potter 1 beat out Lord of the Rings 1 by $2.8 million domestically and $105.1 million worldwide - all $ amounts are US$).

Since I had so much fun watching the competition (and it was so easy to do) I hung around for round 2. This time the tables were turned and The Two Towers outperformed The Chamber of Secrets (by $79.8 million domestically and $49.6 million worldwide). Round 3 didn't happen simultaneously, The Return of the King came out in 2003 and The Prisoner of Azkaban in 2004. Even with the slight disparity in average ticket prices, Lord of the Rings 3 handily defeated Harry Potter 3 (by $127.0 million domestically and $329.1 million worldwide). Amazingly, The Return of the King became only the second movie in history to gross over $1 billion worldwide (the first movie was Titanic, which is so far out ahead of any other movie when it comes to box office gross that it's not funny).

One side effect of this obsession with the all-time charts (domestic and worldwide) was the observation that most of the movies at the top of the charts were part of a franchise - 7 out of the top 10 domestically and 9 of 10 worldwide. This got me thinking, "Well, how do those franchises stack up against each other?" Which automatically led to the creation of a spreadsheet.

Rather than deal with every single franchise I decided to set some limits on my data collection. I decided on these limits based on expediency. I went through the worldwide all-time chart and pulled out all movies that were part of a franchise which led to the first rule: for a franchise to be tracked one of the movies has to have made over $200 million worldwide (the lower limit of Box Office Mojo's chart). Then I realized that Box Office Mojo has a franchise page. However, some of these franchises are pretty weeny (The four American Ninja movies made a total of less than $20 million domestically. Not too interesting). So I decided to track a franchise only if one of the movies made more than $100 million domestically (this is the lower limit for Box Office Mojo's all-time domestic chart). But after applying this rule, I found there were still some franchises I felt should be part of the comparison that hadn't made the cut. So I decided to add in any franchise where the domestic total exceeded $200 million (which allowed me to bring longstanding franchises like Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th into the mix). All told, I ended up with 82 movie franchises.

The last bit of supporting information is what data I was paying attention to. Domestic and Worldwide gross were a given but, due to increasing ticket prices, this gives undue (in my opinion) weight to more recent movies. So I also included a column that calculated domestic ticket sales (based on the average ticket prices per year found on this page). And I could also calculate franchise averages for all three of these values.

There you have it. Later I'll talk about some general observations.

Eagerly awaited upcoming movies (for a slightly odd reason)

Hmmm, look what I found… Let’s dust this off a bit. And add some disjointed ramblings.

We don’t go to the movies much anymore. For a variety of reasons: ticket prices too expensive, not much out there we’re interested in seeing, too much of a time commitment, movie going experience kind of sucks, etc. But there are a few movies that I’m looking forward to this year. Not because I plan on watching them. Rather, I’m curious to watch the box office performance.

One of my hobbies is keeping track of the box office performance of selected movie franchises. There are eighty-one franchises that, for a variety of reasons, I collect information on. The numbers that I look at are: the domestic box-office (includes the United States and Canada), the worldwide box-office and the number of tickets sold in the domestic market (I feel this allows a better comparison across years than the dollar figure).

I'm going to have to add a few franchises to the spreadsheet this year. This is because the first movie performed good enough to gain admittance (in all of these cases the particular metric is that at least one movie in the franchise has to make more than $200 million worldwide) and they were just waiting for the sequel to come along. So I'll be tracking Basic Instinct 2, Ice Age 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean 2 but it's more of a formality than anything else.

Of more interest to me are franchises that are on the bubble and may make the cut depending on the performance of the next installment. None of these movies are expected to go crazy worldwide so the particular requirement that I'll be looking at here is a franchise domestic box office total of more than $200 million. Some of these movies are good bets: all Big Momma's House 2, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Origin, The Grudge 2 and Saw III have to do is maintain the previously established box office (70%, 67%, 81% and 67% of the domestic take of the last movie, respectively). Others are long shots and would have to perform significantly better than the first movie (Final Destination 3, Garfield 2, Sin City 2 and Jackass 2). There are a few that really don't have a chance in hell - both Underworld: Evolution and Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion would have to triple the first installment. And then there's The Omen 666 which is triply damned because it would have to make more than the highest grossing movie of the set, the franchise has made less money with each installment and it's been more than two decades since a movie in the series was released. So we'll see.

But the movies that I'm looking forward to most are from series that I'm already tracking. Depending on how well the next installment does, these movies could (and should, in some cases) rise in the rankings. I'll have to go into more detail at a later date but, for the record, these movies are: Scary Movie 4, Mission: Impossible 3, X-Men 3, The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift, Superman Returns and Casino Royale. And I could pretty easily be arm-twisted into going to see a couple of these (hint: This message will self destruct in 10 seconds, or, What's Captain Picard doing in a wheel-chair?). It's the summer sucker in me. Although I guess May isn't technically summer.

Hmmm, all this number talk sure sounds like "sound and fury, signifying nothing", doesn't it? Whatever keeps me off the street, I guess...

Firefly rebroadcast ratings - part two

Okay. Adding in the last few weeks (in other words, cutting and pasting from the earlier entry). And on a related ratings note... Jewel Staite guest starred on Stargate Atlantis this past Friday (too much prosthetic make-up for my taste but the voice was all Jewel - and I thought she did a great job with the so-so-ness that is the norm for that show). Stargate Atlantis was the SCI FI Channel ratings winner for that night. There were 16% more viewers this past Friday than there were the week before. So, Jewel Staite guest stars, increase in viewers. Coincidence? I think not.

SciFi run *:
Serenity, part 1 (07-22-05) - 1.6 million households
Serenity, part 2 (07-29-05) - 1.5 million households
The Train Job (08-05-05) - 1.4 million households
Bushwhacked (08-12-05) - 1.5 million households
Shindig (08-19-05) - 1.5 million households
Safe (08-26-05) - 1.4 million households

Original run **:
The Train Job (09-20-02) - 4.3 million households
Bushwhacked (09-27-02) - 3.8 million households
Shindig (11-01-02) - 3.0 million households
Safe (11-08-02) - 3.1 million households
Serenity (12-20-02) - 2.9 million households


* all ratings information from the SciFi rebroadcast run found at GateWorld.

** all ratings information from the original run of Firefly found at Matthew Wahoske's excellent resource, Nielsen Ratings for Firefly's First Season.

So many options

I've driven the 5 through the San Joaquin Valley more times than I can remember. It's a drive that I really enjoy but I never pay attention to any of the other highways that intersect during the trip. They're just milestones to help me gauge progress.

This Sunday, while driving back from LA, I decided to write down all the state highways that I was passing over and figure out how many of them I've driven on. So, starting from where 99 splits off, here goes...

166 - Doesn't ring a bell.
119 - Never been.
223 - Nada, but wasn't this part of the name of a TV show?
119 - Again? Did I write that down right?
43 - Nope.
58 - Ah-ha! Finally. This one I've actually driven the entire stretch. Going east is fun but once you get over the hills it's basically a straight shot across the high desert. Going west is actually a very enjoyable trip over the hills to the 101. You come out on the 101 just north of San Luis Obispo. Not a trip for those in a hurry.
46 - One of the routes to the 101, probably the second best if you're trying to do it quickly. Takes you right into Paso Robles. And there's the James Dean death site.
41 - I'm sure it's a very nice road but I wouldn't know.
269 - Other than an adolescent giggle every time I see the last two digits, nothing.
198 - One of these is heading west. I think that's this one. A fun drive to 101. Not quick at all. Matter of fact, one of the slower ways to gap the distance. Quite windy and narrow. Brings you in a little south of King City.
198 - I think I've got them in the right order. If so, this heads east and out of my range of experience.
33 south/145 - I couldn't tell you a thing about the 145 but the 33 south is on my to-do list.
33 north - Surprisingly, the 33 north did not make the to-do list. That's probably because I tried to find a gas station along this road one dark night and ended up sweating all the way to the next state highway.
165 - I don't know why this road sounds familiar. My tires haven't graced it. Or, if they have, I wasn't in the car at the time.
152 - This is it. The premier speed route to transition from the 5 to the 101. Less than 45 minutes. I've also taken this east to the 99.

Depressing how few of these highways I've been on. Must. Correct.

The secrets of life

Happiness is replacing the toilet water inlet valve without having to take a trip to the store.

Our valve quit working while I was gone (but it had been giving us notice for quite some time that the ghost was going). The water wouldn't shut off and would pour over into the tube, meaning that the tank was always filling. S had turned off the water to the toilet and called the property manager. Until he got around to sending someone out we would have to turn the water on to flush and immediately turn it off. And since his track record is, how shall I put this, less than stellar the situation could've gone on for days. After recuperating from the trip, this headed my list of things to get done.

I had replaced another assembley in the toilet bowl tank earlier in the year but the only way I could buy the part I needed was to purchase a kit. The kit included a bunch of extra stuff (extra for that job at least). One of the extras was exactly what I needed this time around.

The hardest part of the job was remembering where I left the kit.

Just come out and ask.

Some set up.

We have a neighbor, who we've nicknamed Projecto, who has definite boundary problems. Busybody, project starter, space encroacher, has this goal of renovating the entire complex and trying to get the neighbors to join in the work, etc. One lesson I've learned is to be very careful what I say and do during any conversation with Projecto. When Projecto starts going on about the latest thing any politeness, such as nodding, will be interpreted as agreement on my part that the project should be done. And then the project will get started half-assedly and never finished. And at some point I'll probably step in and attempt to clean up the mess. So whenever I'm in a conversation with Projecto I usually minimize my body language and say pretty much nothing. I'm getting quite good at it.

That's one bit of background.

There's a bathroom attached to the back of the garage under the neighbor's stairs. Small little room with a toilet and sink and window with the door opening on the driveway. It's nice to have around (well, we've used it once or twice in the three years we've been living here when our water was shut off for some work - but it was definitely nice then) and we keep the door unlocked. Or try to at any rate. There have been some problems with transients using the bathroom so periodically one of the neighbors will lock the door. And no one has the key. So we leave the window unlatched. It's a very easy job to bring a chair over, push up the window, get a leg over the sill and onto the toilet, duck through the window, reach over and unlock the door. I don't even have to bring my other leg through the window. Piece of cake. Takes less than a minute total.

Okay. Now we're ready.

I'm sitting out back this morning on a smoke break, finishing up a short story, when Projecto comes around the corner of the house. We make eye contact and Projecto makes a beeline over and starts talking. (paraphrasing), "The bathroom door is locked again." (pause) "I've pried up the window but I'm too big to climb through. (pause) "I've cleaned off the window sill." (long pause) "Maybe I can get C (our upstairs neighbor) to unlock it." (longer pause). My only response throughout this whole monologue is a noncommittal, "Hmmnh."

And then Projecto walks away, over to the bathroom window, kind of hovers in the general vicinity for half a minute or so and then goes back to the front of the building.

As soon as I hear a front door shut I pick up my chair, walk over to the bathroom, unlock the door, bring my chair back to the lawn and sit down to finish my smoke.

Sometimes I really enjoy being petty. I should probably work on that.

Good enough to make it on the netflix queue

You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught
You've got to be carefully taught

from South Pacific (Rodgers & Hammerstein - 1958)

* lyrics from here.

Firefly rebroadcast ratings

This falls under the category of "not enough numbers to attempt interpretation." It just is what it is.

SciFi run *:
Serenity, part 1 (07-22-05) - 1.6 million households
Serenity, part 2 (07-29-05) - 1.5 million households
The Train Job (08-05-05) - 1.4 million households

Original run **:
The Train Job (09-20-02) - 4.3 million households
Serenity (12-20-02) - 2.9 million households


* all ratings information from the SciFi rebroadcast run found at GateWorld.

** all ratings information from the original run of Firefly found at Matthew Wahoske's excellent resource, Nielsen Ratings for Firefly's First Season.

Huh?!?

There are many things I don't even try to understand.

Here's one.

(courtesy of Josh Marshall)

You're fatigued? There's no fatigue in time travel.

So one of the science-fiction series that I have enjoyed is the Timewars series by Simon Hawke. It started off quite fun, very pulpy type reading. And then, somewhere around the sixth installment it got tediuos and now I'm kind of just slogging through them. It doesn't help that the later books in the series are very hard to find and sell for exorbitant prices - compared to the $1.50 that I'm used to paying for used books. So I'm not too motivated to buy them. But if I happen to find one for a couple of bucks, I pick it up.

I found the eighth book in the series recently for $2 so I snatched it up and it went in the reading queue. Well, I just got around to reading it and I'm really disappointed. Maybe it's been too long since I read the seventh book and I've forgotten how bad it is. Maybe it's just that the author is getting sloppy. But there's all sorts of problems with the story.

Here's an example. There's a team of time travellers who have travelled back to nineteenth century England on a stake-out. It's a pretty big team but there's a lot of ground to cover and they're stretched to the breaking point. The author makes a big point about how tired everyone is getting. And that's just crazy. Why should you get tired if you're a time traveller. Couldn't you just clock out to some other time, get a good eight hours of sleep, do some exercise, take a shower, eat a good breakfast, and then clock back a minute after you left? Or stay away for a week. Take a vacation. You've got the technology. Why be stupid and run yourself ragged? There's absolutely no reason for a time traveller to suffer from time constraints.

Maybe I've forgotten the rules of time travel that Simon Hawke set-up at the start of the series where he covered the prohibition against this sort of behavior. Or maybe I'm just a nitpicker ;-)

Firefly Friday

And now the long awaited day is upon us. It's been a little over two and a half years since the show Firefly was last broadcast on US television. Tonight, at 7pm, the SciFi Channel will air the first part of the original pilot episode Serenity, Part 1.

Those of us who watched the original broadcast of Firefly on Fox remember that the pilot episode was the last episode aired. Fox's decision to demand a new pilot episode, and their airing of the episodes out-of-order from what the writer/director Joss Whedon intended, are cited by fans as two of the main reasons the show did not attract many viewers. SciFi, as part of a joint promotional campaign with Universal for the upcoming movie Serenity, will air all of the episodes in order (including three never before seen on US television).

Watch it.



More Firefly/Serenity related stuff:

Charlie McCollum wrote a great plug that came out in today's Merc. Great closing line, "There is some justice in the world."

A Hollywood Reporter article, by Anne Thompson, has been posted on a number of different web sites today. Has a nice quote from the arts editor of the Cal student paper.

The DVD of the television series has been on sale since December 2003. Sales of the boxed set were one of the main reasons Universal greenlit the movie.

The international trailer was just released.

The original trailer was released back in April and has been playing in front of many of the summer blockbusters. The release of the original trailer, in conjunction with the pre-screenings of the movie and a sale on the dvd set over at amazon resulted in a tremendous upsurge in the number of boxed sets purchased.

Serenity's world premiere will be at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Due to overwhelming demind, the film festival added additional screenings.

The first issue of the comic mini-series bridging the time between the last episode of Firefly and the start of Serenity has been in stores for more than a week. There will be three issues in all with nine different cover variants showcasing all of the main characters (well, with the exception of the ship Serenity herself).

The Signal, the first Firefly/Serenity themed podcast, just released their third episode.

Attendees at Comic Con were given a CD containing tracks from the finished score of Serenity. The finished version of the film was also screened to a packed house.

AbbyShot Custom Clothiers is producing a browncoat modeled on the one worn by Nathan Fillion's character. Quite pricey. Kind of a shame because, to be truly authentic, you would need to weather the coat quite a bit and, for how much it costs, I'd want to lock this up in a vault.

Movie lines

I wandered into one of those countdown shows tonight and stayed to watch for a while. CBS was running AFI's 100 Years ...100 Movie Quotes and I'm a sucker for that kind of programming. I toggled back and forth between that and the Giants game and working/surfing on the laptop and reading a re-issue of sixties science fiction stories by Murray Leinster and couldn't have been happier (well, I could've been if I didn't have this damn cough). One cool thing about the countdown was that the top quotes were not dominated by lines from recent movies. Here's the top five:

1. Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.
2. I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.
3. I coulda been a contender.
4. Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
5. Here's looking at you, kid.

It's funny but I've really only watched one of these movies from beginning to end - Casablanca is one of my favorite movies and I watch it at least once a year. Of the others, I've seen bits and pieces from Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and slept through the second half of On the Waterfront. It's a bit embarassing but I've never watched any of The Godfather movies. So that's probably something I should take care of at some point in time.

Actually, I was surprised at how many movie lines I recognized and knew what movie they came from even though I may not have ever seen that movie in it's entirety. I've probably seen less than half of the movies represented by the list. And I recognized close to 90% of the lines. Gotta love cultural memory.

I'd probably add a few to that list just for me personally. There were a couple of lines that me and my friends wore out after seeing them in movies:

I'll make you famous - Emilio Estevez
I'm your huckleberry - Val Kilmer
Inconceivable - Wallace Shawn

And many more if I gave it some thought.

Working against the Big Damn Goal

There’s been a bit of controversy in the Firefly fan community concerning ticket scalpers. This controversy started because tickets for the first pre-screening were auctioned off on eBay. At pretty high prices. And every time another pre-screening sold-out the number of auctions on eBay grew. Fans seem to be debating this topic from a number of different directions (scalping is morally wrong, capitalism rules, this is something the crew of Serenity would do, as long as it’s legal it’s okay, real fans shouldn’t try to make money off other fans, it’s okay if it’s fans who bought too many by accident, and a variety of other perspectives). And often talking past each other. I have a definite opinion on the subject but think the ongoing debate is sorta pointless. It’s going to happen regardless.

So I might as well track the numbers :-)

But first I’ll just briefly state one portion of my opinion on the topic. I think the scalping of tickets for the Serenity pre-screenings is a bad thing for one simple reason: it contributes nothing to the Big Damn Goal. The Big Damn Goal, as I like to call it, is very simple: Serenity 2 and Serenity 3. To accomplish that goal Serenity needs to generate between $60 and $100 million in box-office returns during it’s domestic release. That’s a daunting task. And none of the money spent on scalped tickets goes to that box-office total.

To be fair, we’re not talking about a lot of money. For the first two pre-screenings, a total of around $21,500 was spent by fans on eBay auctions. And all of this was spent on 315 tickets. At an average price of $6.40 (which is what boxofficemojo is using as it’s average ticket price for 2005) 315 tickets would’ve brought in a little over $2000 dollars. Chump change compared to what we need. But, on the flip side, $21,500 could be used after September 30th to buy 3360+ tickets. Which represents many sold-out theaters. Which results in a lot of buzz. Which translates into more ticket sales. It’s almost a given that the people who spent money on eBay auctions are not going to spend the same amount of money on tickets once the movie is officially released. And that hurts the bottom line. Even if only slightly.

So, short answer, scalping Serenity pre-screening tickets is bad for the overall goal. It’s myopic. It’s egocentric. It’s all that stuff and more. And it’s also fun to track. I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet on all the completed auctions just to try to get a feel for what’s going on. It’s a bit too early in the process to make generalizations but there were some anecdotal things I found funny. One thing, in particular, was the different ways in which sellers tried to camouflage what they were actually doing.

There are some people who are purposefully misrepresenting themselves. One seller started off their listing with, “The people I bought these tickets for can't go - their loss is your gain!” Sounds nice and all. Who wouldn’t want to help out a fan? Except that this seller used the same opening line in all five of their auctions. And the listings were posted in a forty minute span. And these five auctions were all for different cities (Norfolk, Charlotte, Columbus, Albany, and Providence). And the seller was located in a different state from any of these cities. The tickets are going to sell no matter what you write. Why did this seller feel the need to lie? Pretty hilarious.

Then there are a group of sellers who are trying to get around existing state regulations concerning the resale of tickets. This is silly because many states have not updated their laws to reflect online auctions. As long as you do not live in the same state as the event you are not affected (at least, that is how eBay interprets things). So they’re going out of their way trying to circumvent something that doesn’t even apply to them. And their attempts are very amusing. Quite a few sellers are auctioning something else (CDs, computer cables, etc) and then giving tickets as a gift to the person who wins the auction.

And finally, there are people who are just hoping prospective buyers don’t read the fine print. A person who individually sold six tickets to the Miami screening was charging a “Buy it Now” price of eight dollars a ticket. Face value! Outstanding! But if you look just a little further down the page you read that the shipping charge was $30! Wow, that’s an awful lot of money to mail a piece of paper. It was probably because the seller was also located in Miami and needed to ship those tickets using overnight air (heh heh). They have since tried a new tactic and have two regular auctions where you’re bidding on a pair of tickets. Not surprisingly, the addition of the second ticket bumped the shipping charges up to $34 dollars. So far no takers.

That’s it for now from the eBay tracking trenches. I’m sure there will be more to come.