Not-So-Special Delivery

I'm going to relate a little tale of delivery woe—a tale that has (apparently) reached a happy ending, but one that shows just how exasperating it can be to deal with a poor delivery company.

My free iPod, which you've read about if you're been reading this journal much at all, eventually developed a fault in the earphone jack. The plug wouldn't stay in well, and music developed a distinctly tinny sound. Fortunately, Apple has very good warranty coverage, so I requested a RMA, and back it went. I was even able to get DHL to pick it up at my place of work—at that point, I was impressed at their willingness to alter their delivery route to pick it up. Perhaps I shouldn't have been.

All went well...until it came time for Apple to send it back. Wednesday I got home to find a notice on my door that DHL had attempted to deliver the package while I was away. Well, that was no problem, thought I. The notice said they'd attempt to redeliver. So I arranged with my neighbors to take delivery of the package while I was away. Then I called the delivery company to see where their pickup center was, just in case it was somewhere I could easily get (it wasn't) and to make sure it would be OK to have a neighbor accept it.

This was where I got my first intimation that something was not quite right. If this were a horror movie, you would hear the first ominous musical sting. The DHL person mentioned an address that I had never heard of—somewhere out on the west side of town. I said, "No, no, that's not me. Redeliver it here, tomorrow—I'll sign the form and have my neighbor pick it up." And they said that would be OK.

Yesterday (Thursday) went by, and there was no package. So I called this morning to find out what had happened. Yes, that's right, you guessed it—the delivery company had delivered to that strange address. So I asked them what the heck they were thinking and where that address had come from. Subsequently, they revealed that when the delivery attempt had failed, instead of attempting redelivery the next day like their delivery notice said they would, they looked up "Chris Meadows" in the phone book, called that number, and arranged to deliver there—regardless of the fact that it was a completely different address from what was shown on the package. The name matched, so that was apparently all they cared about.

I, of course, am not even in the phone book, as my sole audio telecommunication device is a cellphone.

The DHL folks gave me the number of this ersatz Chris Meadows, so I called them up. It was a bit weird to say, "Hello, is Chris Meadows there?" when I knew for a fact that I was right here; it was even weirder when the woman who answered the phone said it was her (being male, myself). They were going out of town this weekend, so the upshot was that I arranged to pick up the package from them sometime on Monday. DHL offered to send their driver back by to collect it, but the last thing I wanted was to let them get their hands on my iPod again. It would have been nice to have the iPod for use this weekend when I'm going to be locked into a dormitory to participate in a medical study, but at this point I'm just happy to know that it's safe.

The blame is partly Apple's, of course, for not including my phone number (which I gave them as part of the RMA request) with the return shipping information so that DHL could get in touch with me when the delivery failed. Perhaps some of the blame could even be assigned to my poor confused namesake for accepting delivery of the package when she had no idea what it was. But I would be most inclined to blame DHL, who will apparently deliver to anyone in sight rather than reattempt delivery to the same address twice in a row.

This is not the first time people close to me have had issues with DHL. A friend who was sending a laptop back to Apple for servicing a couple weeks ago found, on checking with the computer store that was supposed to be shipping it back, that the computer had not actually been picked up by DHL after several days. Apparently the computer store and DHL blamed each other for this oversight; in the end, my friend went back down to the store to make sure with his own eyes that the box was picked up by DHL (and that the box that was picked up actually had his computer in it). Of course, that could have been the computer store's fault just as much as DHL's...but after my own experience I'm inclined to wonder.

And my father, who used to run a mail-order business out of a workshop building adjunct to our family's rural home, told how Airborne Express (DHL in its previous life—in fact, the delivery notice on my door still said Airborne Express on it) was the one delivery company whose drivers never could manage to find him, despite his clear directions. Neither UPS nor FedEx ever had a problem finding the place, but Dad tells stories of the Airborne Express van cruising past several times, oblivious to all his attempts to flag it down.

Although this particular story seems to have turned out all right, I can't advise using DHL shipment for anything important—if your name is "John Smith," God only knows who'll end up with your package. Of course, if you're returning an Apple product, you're not going to have much choice.

And never the twain shall Meetup

Meetup has decided to charge the sum of nine dollars a group for the privelage of being a group coordinator, and all the work that entails. I will still be a member of the group, but not the coordinator.

So went a group message from the coordinator of the Springfield, Missouri Harry Potter meetup group, to the other members of the group. This was my first notification (and a Slashdot story followed soon after) that Meetup.com, the site that automates the organization of local get-togethers among groups of people with similar interests, had decided to start charging its groups for the privilege of using it to schedule their meetings. Groups that didn't pay would be cancelled and removed.

I remember back when Meetup.com first got started; it was kind of a new and exciting thing. There was a Slashdotmeetup organized, and a LiveJournal meetup, and a Bookcrossing.com meetup, and various others. But somehow, they never really seemed to get off the ground here in Springfield. I remember one memorable Livejournal meetup where we met in a parking lot, because "Farmer Brothers Coffee" turned out to be not a coffeehouse venue, but the office of a restaurant coffee vendor (which was closed at the time). I met a few interesting people at the Bookcrossing meetups a time or two, but most of them moved out of town. And once I got a job on the evening shift, I wasn't able to do any of the meetups because they all happened when I was working.

Meetup lately sent an apology for the abrupt and startling way in which they worded their original announcement that they were going to start charging, and a link to the explanation of the rationale for the $20 a month meetup fee (act now and pay just $10 a month for the rest of the year). The fee is supposed to be split among attendees, so that each person attending would only have to kick in a buck or two, and it was necessary to cover operating costs of the website. They tried offering value-added premium services, but that just wasn't covering the costs. So there it is.

I'm of two minds about this, really. I can accept that it is necessary for them to have some monetary intake to be able to stay afloat; the dot-com boom is long gone, and no business can stay afloat for very long without money coming in. But Meetup is kind of between a rock and a hard place. The problem is that after so long of having the service available for free, people are used to it—and for Meetup to turn around and charge them now makes them feel like they've just been subject to a bait-and-switch.

What used to be a great method of bringing together people who might otherwise never have met...now feels like a ripoff. Twenty bucks a month for the privilege of getting together—when Meetup.com doesn't even provide the venue? It feels like profiteering at the expense of the community—especially since there are by now plenty of Meetup clones who will provide the bare-bones non-value-added version of meetup's meeting-scheduler (which was all that most people really needed anyway) for free.

Meetup recognizes this, of course. They claim in their announcement,

[None of our competitors] do (sic) such a complete job of helping you grow your membership and hold great events. None are as easy to use or come with such immediate customer support. None are focused on face-to-face events. And finally, none of them care whether or not your Meetups go well. Meetup.com, on the other hand, is 100% dedicated to making your group better.

That's easy for them to say, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the meetups I've gone to locally that actually had anybody there—and the most who ever showed up were five or six. The last meetup I went to, a couple months ago, ended up with just me and the organizer (with whom I was carpooling). We waited for half an hour and headed home, declaring it a total waste of time. And this is how they're dedicated to helping us "grow our events"? What is it I'm supposed to pay them for, again?

When it comes right down to it, this decision of theirs is going to torpedo most of the smaller meetup groups that might have four or five people show up on a good day. They will either use some other meeting-arrangement site, or they will make a mailing list so they can continue meeting without benefit of Meetup's scheduler. And I can't see even the larger groups really wanting to to continue using the service after this. Not because they can't afford it (some meetup groups even pay for private rooms to hold their meetups in as it is), but because of the affront given by the imposition of these new charges.

Kos, of the Daily Kos political blog, opines that "this is [Meetup's] last-gasp desperation attempt to stave off bankruptcy." I think he may be right. I also don't think it's going to work. No matter how you try to apologize and sugar-coat it, no business can survive by offending all of its customers at the same time.

Goodbye, Meetup, you were fun while you lasted.

Girl Genius Goes Free!

Phil and Kaja Foglio have been doing a series of comic books called "Girl Genius," subtitled "A Gaslamp Fantasy with Adventure, Romance & Mad Science." Up to this point, they've been making the comic books available on a print subscription basis.

Well, they apparently came to the conclusion that more money was really in selling the hardbound/trade paperback collections of the comic book than was in printing the comic book as a comic book...and so they've gone to an online-only webcomic publication model, publishing both the back issues and the new issues on a one-page-per-day basis, updated MWF, and thus letting the webcomic drive the purchase of the collection volumes.

They began putting up the new material today, starting with both the first page of the next issue of the new comic, and the first page after the material they already had up for free of the old comics.

I've only actually read the first issue or so, while I was at the home of a friend who'd bought it, so I'm looking forward to the chance to read it all. It's a clever and funny story, and the Foglios do some great art. Check it out!

Not the "Last" Unicorn anymore...

I am astonished. Amazed. Astounded. Totally stunned.

It seems that Peter S. Beagle has written a sequel story to The Last Unicorn. Called Two Hearts, it is supposed to be published in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine later this year.

Beagle has also completed a 7-hour audiobook-on-CD unabridged version of The Last Unicorn, read by Beagle himself, and is offering it in both CD (to ship sometime in May) and MP3 formats. To the first 3,000 people to buy a copy, they will send a free, autographed, hardcover copy of Two Hearts. You can bet I've already signed up before telling you this. (I wish I'd learned about it before April 10th; people who ordered before then got free shipping and even more bonuses.)

I don't know how to describe The Last Unicorn to you. It's one of my favorite books in all the world, for all that I discovered it only a few years ago. People talk about how a story is "magical," or append magic to some adjective like "the Disney magic." Well, I don't know how Beagle managed it, but he captured a piece of real magic in that story. It stands the test of time—a million rereadings cannot wash it away. It even survived the transition to animated form—though perhaps diluted a tad due to the constraints of two hours of time, the magic leaps out at you from the Rankin/Bass animated movie. It cannot help but. Even the soundtrack to the movie, by America, has that magic. (Heck...I named this journal after a line from one of its songs.) Like a unicorn's horn purifies everything it touches...so does the story of The Last Unicorn make the transition across the media. Hopefully the magic will hold true for the upcoming live-action/CGI movie as well.

The only sad thing is that the American-release DVD of the Rankin/Bass movie is sorely lacking, being a poor quality pan-and-scan-only transfer. Fortunately, I'm able to play multi-region/PAL DVDs, so I was able to order the R2 German version.

Here's an article about The Last Unicorn that says a lot more stuff about it, and says it well.

Sigh...I so cannot wait to get those CDs...maybe I should go find my own copy of the book and start reading again. Or maybe I'll just wait so I can have Peter read it to me.

From the past, The Future of Law Enforcement

Last night, wanting to see how VHS looked on the new set, I dug out an old guilty pleasure that I haven't watched in a while. And since this was my first time watching it fresh for some time, I figure I might as well chronicle the experience. I give you: Robocop: The Future of Law Enforcement—the pilot episode of the short-lived Canadian-made Robocop TV series of 1994. Spoilers ahead...but this is a ten-year-old show, so I think it's a little bit too late to worry much about those.

Robocop: The Future of Law Enforcement, reportedly based on the first draft script for Robocop 2 by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner (writers of the original Robocop), ignores the cinematic Robocops 2 and 3 in favor of tying into the original movie (from which a few clips are briefly seen in flashback). There's still a Dan O'Herlihy-esque Chairman (David Gardner) running OCP, and Robocop's partner is still alive—though her name has been changed from the movie for some reason. (Still, Robocop does refer to her having figured out who he was, and a video clip in the opening credits of the TV show (but not the pilot movie) assigns her the movie partner's line, "Murphy, it is you," so she's apparently meant to be the same person.)

As the movie opens, OCP Vice President Chip Chayken (John Rubenstein) and medical-doctor-cum-computer-scientist Dr. Cray Z. Mallardo (Cliff De Young) are working on creating a supercomputer for OCP, to be called MetroNet, that will control the utilities of all of Delta City. Unbeknownst to the Chairman, however, the computer needs a living brain in its control module to do the work—and Chayken and Mallardo are abducting and euthanizing Delta City's homeless (with the help of an anarchistic but none-too-bright youth gang creatively called the Dogtown Boys) in order to obtain one. Their problem is, they just can't seem to find a good brain. (Neither could whoever wrote the script, apparently, but I digress.) Apparently Spock's wasn't available.

When the latest victim is a friend of Robocop's partner Lisa Madigan (Yvette Nipar), and a spunky young runaway (Sarah Campbell) sees Chayken in the act of abducting him, Robocop (Richard Eden) is drawn into the investigation. Meanwhile, after yet another brain transplant failure, Mallardo and Chayken hit upon the idea of using the brain of Chayken's mousy, klutzy secretary Diana Powers (Andrea Roth). This time the transplant takes and MetroNet comes on-line—complete with Diana Powers, whose consciousness now exists as a ghost in the machine a la Alteira Cunningham from the stories in the Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. and CyberGeneration roleplaying games. (And true to the cliché, the mousy secretary has now become a hot cyber-babe, thanks to the removal of glasses, restyling of hair, and addition of a slinky lamé dress.)

Mallardo now decides to use his control over MetroNet to crown himself the new Chairman of OCP. It's up to Robocop to bring Mallardo and Chayken to justice—and rescue Diana Powers before Mallardo, who is none too thrilled that she is still around and foiling his schemes, can delete her from his computer. But will this still be possible after Chayken gives a mutilated killer with a grudge (James Kidnie) a weapon that can kill Robocop?

There are a few things to dislike about this movie (and hence the series) so I'll get them out of the way before going on to the good stuff. First of all, consider that the original Robocop movie was one of the most violent movies made for the mass-market in its day—so violent that director Paul Verhoeven had to cut and cut and cut just to get an R rating. (It would be interesting to see if he still had to cut as much today, in the era of Kill Bill and Sin City, but I digress.) So whose bright idea was it to make this, of all franchises, into a family-oriented TV series? It is just wrong on so many levels to see Robocop step out of a car that just got blown up by a missile, march into a gang-occupied building, and take out thug after thug with a series of...trick shots that drop chandeliers and wardrobes onto them. Yes, that's right. Where the movie Robocop would casually shoot them right through the heart or the eye in an explosion of gore, the TV series Robocop...drops furniture on them. This would make sense for someone with a nonviolent code of honor like MacGyver, but for Robocop it just doesn't. In a way, it undercuts some of the themes of the original movie that explored the connections between violence, machines, and humanity.

Next, let's consider the writing and acting. Where the Robocop movie went for ultraviolence coupled with biting satire, the TV series is written in more of a camp style, like they were applying a light shade of the Adam West Batman treatment. Some of the dialogue is a bit unbelievable, and the rest of it is very unbelievable. Some of the acting is a bit over the top, and some of it is way, way over the top. Particularly Rubenstein and De Young as Chayken and Mallardo—although, in their defense, I suppose it could be argued that a couple of villains whose grand scheme involves mugging indigents for their brains couldn't really be played any other way. A special mention should also be made of Jennifer Dale, who plays Chayken's girlfriend Fanny LaMour (what a name!)—the domineering, Faginish supervisor of a Family Services facility that sends unwanted kids to the Dogtown Boys. This seems to be the kind of role in which she specializes; see my ePinions review of the Once a Thief TV movie for another such Jennifer Dale appearance. And the Dogtown Boys, with their trite catchphrases about "making the square whole" (apparently this feat of geometric rectitude is to be accomplished by killing off elderly homeless people)...well, the less said about them, the better.

And let's not forget the maudlin element. We have the cute runaway orphan who spies Chayken doing his dirty work and doesn't want to go back to LaMour's orphanage, so she ends up getting adopted by the gruff police sergeant (Blu Mankuma). And then we have Nancy and Jimmy Murphy, Robocop's wife and son, the tired, hoary old cliché that has been dragged out and paraded around in every Robocop movie or TV show to come down the pike. Leave the dead (or in this case, cyborged) horse alone, please!

It's not all bad, though. The Robocop TV series might be campy, but as long as you don't go into it expecting another Verhoeven mind-twisting gorefest, you might find you can enjoy laughing at the cheesiness of it all. It might be guilty laughter, or even loud groans, but if you can enjoy badfeelm, this one falls squarely into the "so bad it's good" category. No boring mediocrity here!

The production values of the show are actually pretty good, taking into account its made-for-TV nature and the mid-90s time period. There is some fairly obvious CGI, and a bit of sped-up video, and the computer displays are laughable in the way that Hollywood depictions of computers usually are, but it's clearly got a decent budget and cinematography. The music quotes liberally from the Pouledoris score to the first Robocop movie, which is also good.

And director Paul Lynch occasionally shows a flash of real cleverness amid all the camp. For instance, there is a scene where Mallardo and Chayken sit in a van and discuss what to do about Diana's ghost—while Diana reads their lips via a parking garage security camera. This scene is staged and framed in exactly the same way as the famous scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey where the astronauts sit in a pod and discuss what to do about HAL (who is reading their lips). There is also a sly reference to another Paul Verhoeven film when a character, about to mess with Robocop's memory, says that he will see what he can do about Robocop's "total recall". And watch for an outrageous cameo appearance by a certain sixties sitcom star.

The last vestiges of the satire from the original movies can still be found in the "Media Break" TV news segments and the fake TV commercials that accompany them (some of which were arranged to fall at the end of a real commercial break). Of particular interest are the animated "Commander Cash" commercial, a different one of which would appear in each episode, and a couple of appearances by a Geraldo Rivera-spoof tabloid talk show host named Umberto Ortega.

I suppose I should confess that a major part of this show's appeal for me, back in the days when it was on TV, was the Diana Powers cyber-babe character—not just because she was pretty hot, but because she was similar to a character in one of the stories I wrote about back then. For me, it was almost like seeing something I'd written appear on the screen.

In the end, I have to give the Robocop TV-movie pilot a mild recommendation, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its campiness. It would have been interesting to see what the cinematic Robocop 2 would have been if they had shot with a more violent, less campy version of this script instead of the one they actually used. But that's all academic now. As it is, The Future of Law Enforcement is still quite watchable in spite of its faults. Don't expect anything too great and you won't be too disappointed.

Good luck finding it, though. The only time this show has been released on home video was when the pilot movie and a handful of episodes hit VHS (which is now long out of print). It has never been released to DVD; perhaps the producers feel that nobody would care to buy it. Perhaps they're right. I really feel it's a shame, though. I'd like to be able to have the whole series and rewatch it; I seem to recall there were a few decent episodes in there.