Having expressed his dismay at some of the more inconvenient features of The Complete New Yorker, Mr. Jalopy at Hooptyrides proves his determination and gives readers the (risky) key to getting around what he says are invasions of user privacy. Caution: Technical frustration and David Remnick at the door with a tire iron may ensue. As Boing Boing reports:

Mr Jalopy has posted a compelling ruminations on the user-license that come with the DVD-based Complete New Yorker set, as well instructions for de-activating the crippling use-restrictions built into it.

As Mark blogged in December, Boing Boing pal Mr Jalopy of the Hooptyrides blog posted a great review of The Complete New Yorker, a collection he’d hotly anticipated as a fan of the magazine. The problem is that the eight-disc set comes with copy-restriction technology that prevents him from loading it onto his hard drive for easy use, which means that if he tries to read the archive out of chronological order (say, through the subject index), he has to constantly swap discs, which is a gigantic pain.

What’s worse is the license agreement, which requires you to waive your privacy rights to allow “the collection of your viewing information during your use of the Software and/or Content. Viewing information may include, without limitation, the time spent viewing specific pages, the order in which pages are viewed, the time of day pages are accessed, IP address and user ID. This viewing information may be linked to personally identifiable information, such as name or address and shared with third parties.” This is a pretty abusive term-of-service for an anthology of magazines: since when does reading a magazine require a waiver of privacy? Continued.

Our not-so-far-flung correspondent T.D.V. writes:

I was just reading the Talks of the Town for the 1/09 issue, and, fearing that the item about Harlem’s only Starbucks being at 125th and Lenox was false, I embarked upon an intelligence mission. I used to pass one on Broadway near 138th on my way out of the 137th St. City College 1-train stop. I read an article a while back about how all of the local drug dealers, who were standing outside all day, used the restrooms frequently and were excellent tippers. I found an item online [link TK from probably sleeping correspondent] about how a neighborhood group fought last year to have the location stay open despite plummeting sales. Intriguing! I called the old number, and apparently it’s been reassigned to another business, but I couldn’t understand what the name was when the person answered the phone. Hmm. [Update: An inital call suggests it’s been reassigned to another Starbucks, indicating a citywide macchiato-industrial-complex Bloomberg conspiracy. Developing.]

Thanks! Let’s get to the bottom of this. Elsewhere, in the Modesto Bee, Lisa Masson calls Starbucks “America’s favorite drug dealer.” For no other reason except that it’s interesting, here’s Adam Gopnik’s 2004 piece on the transformation(s) of Times Square. I do like Gopnik sometimes, and when he’s good (Ravioli, &c.), he should be rewarded.

Update: The 138th St. Starbucks has indeed gone out of business; if you’re feeling nostalgic, you can see a photo of it here alongside its fallen comrades. Thanks, esteemed clarifier! All this closed-Starbucks talk is making me think of that Starbucks in the East Village—in the Veselka vicinity—that closed to the triumphant jeers of the locals, who took it as a tiny victory for something or other. Alas, another store opened shortly afterward, across the street from the old location. Never mind!

Update update: Reader Joyce Cohen, who, unlike me, is so alert she may not even need skim lattes (not from Starbucks; we don’t have one in Williamsburg yet, although we do have a Subway) to get her eyes open, writes:

The Modesto Bee piece is dated summer 2005, but Jim Romenesko on Starbucks Gossip (starbucksgossip.typepad.com) had already been calling it America’s favorite drug dealer for, I believe, at least a year. I have no idea where the phrase originated.

I am almost certain that the piece about keeping the Harlem Starbucks open was from the NYT City section, only I cannot seem to find it now.

Perhaps another reader would like to go and look for that. I’m liking this editorial role here on emdashes; maybe 2006 will be all about assigning things to other people.

Revisit this emdashes post that tells you how to avoid Starbucks altogether. No, not in the altogether—it’s much too cold out.

Time to listen now!

An extra-long, seasonally anti-climactic edition of post-yuletide chaff brought to you by Ricky Gervais and Steve Merchant; ably hampered by Karl Pilkington.
…
Episode 5 January 2 2006
In which Ricky, Steve and Karl discuss…
Cosmetic therapies and facial prejudice; the penile habits of Papua New Guineans; medical applications of single-wheeled transport mechanisms; consumer demand for Russian iconography; some rather woolly thinking about woolly mammoth and the inevitable Monkey News.

Update: Gervais and co. answer listeners’ questions.

Blogger Ben Shakey writes:

On top of my regular job at a call center for an online Casino, I work 5 hours a week a bookstore. This provides me with a sizable discount toward my addiction to books.

While putting out the magazines this week I saw a new title. MAD KIDS is a version of MAD Magazine targeted at kids. http://www.dccomics.com/madkids/ On the cover this month is Wallace and Vomit. Claymation parodies puked all over the page.

This of course led me to ask “Isn’t Mad Magazine already targeted at kids?” As I recall it was me that read Mad. I don’t recall seeing my father sitting, smoking a pipe with his feet raised on an ottoman, reading “The Eccch-sorsist” parody.

Well, I haven’t read Mad lately. It’s turned into the New Yorker or something. All the Spy Vs. Spy comics are sparse black and white cartoons of the spies standing at cocktail parties trading quips about therapy. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an exhaustive, if readable, discussion on ‘The Lighter Side Of Hippies’. This month’s fold in is written by Joyce Coral Oates. It the first time that I have had to use a bookmark so I didn’t lose my place in the middle of a fold in.

As a side note, when I was younger I submitted some jokes to Mad. They sent the greatest rejection letter anyone could receive. It was a form letter telling me that they try to encourage young talent with nurturing criticism but in this in this case I was just terrible. The form letter had several negative comment with boxes next to them fro the editor to check. I believe that they may have checked “Just not funny for mine”. They may have also called me a clod.

You are downloading The Ricky Gervais Show and Sowerby and Luff’s Big Squeeze, aren’t you? You’re listening right now? There will be at least twelve Gervais/Merchant/Pilkington podcasts (there are already four), and, I hope, Georgina Sowerby and Brian Luff will never stop tying each other up, waxing, going on fictional cross-country trips in search of ten pairs of pants, drinking in the Gay Legs, and scoring badly on the children’s edition of American Trivial Pursuit. As they explain on the Big Squeeze website, “Contains strong language and a mince pie.”

Photo: David Baily

Between Big Squeeze and the Office loons, you’ve got the perfect soundtrack for 2006: ridiculous dialogues with occasional singing, ghostly-farmer sound effects, dead brilliant deadpan, and plenty of monkey news.

That’s what your iTunes can look like if you act now. If you, like me, are deciding what to do with the rest of your life, start by listening to British babble by some of the funniest minds on the continent. Big Squeeze also contains quite a bit of nudity.

Update: Here’s an interview with the scamps at Big Squeeze (you’ll have to click on the link once there), plus some funny pictures of Brian (after listening to dozens of their podcasts, I say you get to use their first names) looking like an indie-rocker and Georgina doing an arabesque. Is that an arabesque? My ballet days were short and painful. Swing, now, that’s another thing. Georgina hints at a past stint on a “naughty chat line”; Brian says he’s turned on by cheese on toast. As they say in their disclaimer, product may contain nuts.

Categories: Gervais, Pilkington, Merchant, podcasts, Comedy 365

Of course, I’m itching to get my hands on Blank, the forthcoming Gladwell parody. (Hi, HarperCollins!) Can one be so sure Noah Tall is a man, I wonder?

Very distressing story in the NY Post. Selim Algar writes:

December 28, 2005 — A home-care aide took advantage of the trust afforded him by an acclaimed Hamptons writer and his wife — using personal information and bank cards to steal their life savings, authorities charge.

Now former New Yorker and Esquire magazine writer Wilfrid Sheed may be forced to sell his tony home in the exclusive Hamptons town of North Haven.

Compounding his ordeal, Sheed, who celebrated his 75th birthday yesterday from a hospital bed, may never walk again after a recent recurrence of polio. The mounting stress, he said, even threatens his ability to write and complete his latest work.

But through it all, the National Book Award nominee has maintained possession of his most precious assets — spirit and humor.

“He [the suspect] did put in an air conditioner for us — maybe that will make it easier to sell the house,” Sheed joked to The Post yesterday from his hospital bed.

Tristan MacLeod, 34, of Queens, was arrested last month and charged with stealing $58,000 from Sheed and his wife, Miriam Ungerer.

Sheed told The Post yesterday he and his wife, a cookbook writer and noted food authority, needed some basic assistance with their daily chores. They met MacLeod through an acquaintance and before long he was living in their home. He served as a driver, bought groceries and helped around the house.

According to police, MacLeod was soon making cash withdrawals with Sheed’s ATM card and opening up accounts using the author’s personal information. Credit cards were used to buy expensive electronic items, which MacLeod would allegedly sell on the streets of Manhattan.

The couple noticed unfamiliar withdrawals on their bank statements and alerted police that MacLeod had suddenly disappeared in October. Cops arrested him on Nov. 17.

“I guess I shouldn’t have been so trusting,” Sheed said from Southampton Hospital. “I really tend to think people, in general, are good.”

The incredible financial shock, Sheed said, was compounded by a recent resurgence of the polio that attacked him in his youth. His old enemy, he said, now threatens his ability to walk.

“I might be in a wheelchair the rest of my life,” he said. “It’s just been so many problems at once.”

I think the magazines should organize a benefit. Here’s Sheed on Thurber.

If you’re even a low-lying fan of J.K. Rowling and you aren’t dowloading MuggleCast, giggle away, but do it. I’m only on my second episode—that would be episode 20—but my hope for the next generation of literary and film critics is assured. These kids (teenagers and a twentysomething or two) are ardent, insightful, polite—WNYC-guest interruptniks could learn a lot from them—articulate, culturally savvy, and hilarious. Which has more practical value, intellectual skill or loyalty? Is it character development or marketing when Emma Watson gets progressively more tarted up in each movie installment, and how does that affect Rowling’s young female fans, long inspired by the idea of Hermione as being above superficial matters like unfrizzy hair? In an institution in which factionalism has been encouraged, do warring subsets necessarily unite after a crisis? The discourse is miles above the level of your average kiddie fansite, and it’s very well produced (how is that possible? I bet they do it themselves). One of the hosts, 16-year-old homeschooler Laura, mentions at the end of the current podcast that she doesn’t own an iPod. She deserves one, and all of them deserve to be well rewarded for creating such an organized and entertaining outlet for the pure passionate excess of young fandom.

Journalist John DeFore, writing about himself in the third person in the Austin American-Statesman, reports on the troubles he encountered while using The Complete New Yorker.

He loaded the program on his computer and began to browse through some of the most brilliant prose ever hawked at a newsstand. A few minutes later, he was having problems. An hour later, reality set in. Mr. DeFore decided to stop trying to sound like a “Talk of the Town” column and start doing what he does best: find fault.

He finds the search function especially trying. Still, he concludes,

The flubs above were assembled not over weeks of nitpicky research, but in three hours of casual browsing. That brief survey also revealed an array of annoying user-interface features (too many big and small ones to list here) of the sort you’d expect from bargain-bin software.

Still, I won’t be letting go of “The Complete New Yorker” any time soon, and I might have purchased a copy even after discovering these flaws. At $100 retail (and a whole lot less through some vendors), the set costs under two and a half cents per issue. Eight cents for each macabre Charles Addams cartoon. Less than a buck per Dorothy Parker entry, and under a quarter per Pauline Kael essay. The whole review.

An emdashes reader recently tipped me off to this series of Complete New Yorker posts at Hooptyrides—which features some fantastic screen grabs and excerpts—about one user’s DVD disgruntlements, some of which overlap with DeFore’s. It’s reassuring to know, after corresponding with New Yorker warrior archangel and Head of Library Jon Michaud, that the DVD archive staff is working on stuff like this more or less around the clock. The Oompa-Loompas, the Keebler elves, the coal-toting Susuwatari from Spirited Away, and even the mighty NYU adjuncts can hardly keep up with them.

From Jon Michaud, the magazine’s unfailingly helpful Head of Library, the answer to the reader’s query about trouble printing archive pages from the complete DVD, and to my own note about trying in vain to print Donald Antrim’s matchless essay “I Bought a Bed”:

I noticed your posting on printing problems with The Complete New Yorker. We have had no such problems here in the library, where we use the archive on a daily basis. I checked with other members of the team who worked on it and it seems that certain printer models do cut off the bottom of the page. One way to avoid this is to save the desired page(s) as a PDF and then print the PDF. This seems to work, though the print quality suffers slightly.

He adds:

The New Yorker‘s paper quality varied over the years, and was noticeably poorer from 1944-1955 or so. This may account for some fuzziness, since the images in the archive were scanned from original issues…. We really want to help users as much as possible and also are eager to learn about any problems with the archive so that they can be fixed in future updates. Anything you or your correspondent tell me will be shared with the group here with the aim of trying to find a solution.

I just tried to print the Antrim and saw that the date and page number were indeed cut off. Printing to PDF preserved the footer material but reduced the print quality a little. The New Yorker has changed its size over the years. The loss of this footer text may be a result of slight re-sizing of the page image to uniform dimensions.

Michaud is everything you would hope the New Yorker library chief would be, and I hope he’s at Pastis right now savoring something appropriately literary-historical, though possibly less head-clouding than Pernod. Please email me any further comments about the technical side of using the archive (or, indeed, anything at all about it), and I’ll print them here. Speaking of print, the current issue of Print includes my review of the DVDs. This is an expensive anniversary issue, but, as always, well worth it.

Also, much, much later: (also added to the original post) The Complete New Yorker troubleshooting page now has this Jon-echoing note.

I am a Mac user, and I can’t get the last 2 or 3 lines of each column on the page to print properly. I’ve already tried adjusting the page size and my printer is working fine. What should I do?
From the print dialog box, select “Save as PDF,” and specify a location where you want to save it. The PDF file that is generated should open in Preview automatically. In the PDF, select Page Setup from the File Menu, and change the scale option from 100% to 95%. Click OK, and then print the PDF file. (You may need to change the scale % more or less, depending on your printer.)