T-Mobile Still on the Block for a Purchaser?

So if AT&T can't take over T-Mobile, who benefits (other than Sprint's lobbyists, who probably earned themselves big bonus checks)?

As a T-Mobile customer who dreaded having to put up with AT&T's infamously bad customer service but who very much looked forward to getting an iPhone with the new combo company, I'm obviously split.

T-Mobile has justly famous customer service; I still rave to people about the polite, helpful, friendly customer service reps I dealt with a year and a half ago when I switched my phones with the service. Customer service is something of a telltale sign of corporate intelligence, to me; companies – especially large public companies – tend to treat the front-line customer service staff as expendable, and they pay them poorly. That has always struck me as ridiculous and self-defeating; I likely will never talk to or correspond with the CEO of T-Mobile or Comcast, so their exorbitant salaries improve my service not one bit. But I will talk to and correspond with their customer service reps from time to time, and those are the interactions that determine whether or not I stay with the company and continue to help pump in enough money to overpay the C-suite employees.

And despite whatever the corporate honchos would surely tell us during and after the merger (probably crap like, "We will never cut customer service quality" or "Customer service and excellent customer care are always our top priority" or "We'd rather shoot our grandmother into the sun on a rocket than hurt customer service,"), customer service is exactly one of the places they'd look to get rid of "redundancies" and "excess spending."

iPhone should come to T-Mobile eventually anyway (hopefully before my latest HTC smartphone dies), so if all other things remain normal, I will be a happy customer. But it seems that Deutsche Telekom AG has been looking to unload T-Mobile for some time, so it's probably going to be sold to somebody at some point. And I don't want an iPhone with terrible customer service or coverage. If I wanted that, I'd have switched to AT&T a long time ago.

Watch and wait.

ST:TMP, TESB, Black Hole – Yes, 1980 Was a Magical Time

This was a special issue of Germany's Cinema magazine from 1980. If focused on the big science fiction films of the time, including the current Empire Strikes Back and the very recent Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Black Hole.

Germany's Philipp Lahm and the Gay Soccer Player Question

Germany's national team captain Philipp Lahm is getting a lot of flack these days for his new book, which includes criticism of teammates and competitors. He's backed off on some of that, reportedly, but today the hullaballoo is all about Lahm's comments that gay football players should stay in the closet and not publicly disclose their sexuality, lest they become the target of intense public scorn.

It's accepted as scriptural truth by many on the Left that every gay public figure should be public about their sexuality, because the more people see that gays and lesbians are all around the world, the more quickly prejudice will fall. I frankly tend to agree with that, and in fact I think that's what is causing the steady erosion in anti-gay prejudice here in the United States – more and more people are simply seeing that their neighbor, daughter, police officer, etc., is gay and they're realizing that it doesn't really matter, certainly not in a negative way. But I am also sympathetic to people in the public eye who fear that it would ruin their careers. You know what, it would for many of them. For every Neil Patrick Harris, there's one or more Rupert Everetts, whose advice is strikingly similar to Philipp Lahm's.

Gay-baiting in professional sports is pretty deep-rooted. Even in relatively tolerant Germany, it still makes headlines when the gay issue is brought up. The agent of Michael Ballack, the previous team captain, ridiculously accused the team's failure to win the World Cup on the presence of, in effect, a gay mafia on the team. The public reaction (at least reported in the German media that I was following) is indicative of a good trent; it seemed to treat Ballack's agent as the ridiculous figure he is and was generally supportive of the idea of gay footballers. After all, Germany has an openly gay foreign minister (Guido Westerwelle) in its conservative-liberal coalition government.

But Westerwelle's been known to be gay for some time, and his career isn't in danger, unless he doesn't improve Germany's shaky foreign policy performance. There are a number of popular gay politicians in Germany, including Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit. A young person trying to ensure that they have a career is facing a different constituency, if you will; football fans are fans of the players in a much more personal way than voters are fans of the politicians. And thus Lahm felt it necessary to let his readers know that he himself is not one of the gay players on the national team: "First, I am not a homosexual. I am not married to my wife Claudia for appearances and I do not have a friend in Cologne with whom I really live," Lahm wrote in his book, A Subtle Difference, according to The Local.

I wouldn't be too hard on Lahm, whether he's straight or gay. He's not a raving anti-homosexual. Those people are on U.S. sports teams and running for the U.S. president, they're not popular German football players. Furthermore, Lahm's is not the only voice on this issue; his teammate Mario Gomez has given gay players the opposite advice: Come out, it'll be fine.

More and more, Gomez will be proven correct and Lahm incorrect, but that's just because the public is increasingly tolerant of homosexuality and uninterested in making it a heated topic. So I do hope that gay German soccer players will publicly disclose their sexuality, but I definitely respect the decision of any who decline to do so. Assuming they're not crusading against gay rights while they're in the closet, of course.

Microbes Turn Newspaper into Biofuels

So – HAH! – the print media does have a business model, after all.

It's just, um, not what they expected it to be.

Happy 262nd Birthday, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Today is the birthday of the German writer Johann von Goethe. He is 262 years old today, or he would be if he hadn't died in 1832.

Remembered most for his work Faust (which has been staged, filmed, and otherwise adapted countless times), Goethe produced a number of works in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and was, frankly, a giant of Weimar classicism.

Anyway, this blog frequently concerns itself with broad matters Weimar, so it is appropriate that we send very posthumous birthday greetings to the great von Goethe.

France 24 News Site at a Loss for Words

And you can count how many words they are at a loss for, in the text crawl box that has no headline other than the instructions to the headline writer. Oops.

la tragédie!

As We Approach Second Issue of Galaxis, A Look Back at Issue One!

I've finished writing the last articles for the second issue of Galaxis: The Magazine of Science & Science Fiction. I figure it'll be ready to be digitally "published" and available on schedule, in about two and a half weeks of final production and editing.

So, in the meantime, if you haven't already seen the previous issue of the magazine, here's your chance. You can click on the image below and see the magazine full-screen on your computer. You can also save a copy to your computer or device, and you can print out any or all pages. It's all free.

The first issue features an exclusive interview with physicist Michio Kaku, shorter Q&As with Michael Medved, Mary Doria Russell, and others; plus SF reviews, industry news, an overview of David Gerrold's Star Hunt novels including comments by the author, NASA photos, a look back at the heyday of science fiction movie magazines, and much more. So take a look, send a letter to the editor, and get prepared for the second (and even bigger and better) issue in early September!

UPDATE: Issue #2 of Galaxis is here.

Open publication - Free publishing - More futurism

Cover Issues: Batman & Robin on German & English Starlogs

This post is really just for magazine geeks like me, though Batman geeks might also enjoy it. Below are three magazine covers.

The English-language Starlog #239 from June 1997 features the stars of Batman & Robin.

The same basic cover is used on the German edition of Starlog, though it was released as a special edition ("Starlog feiert Batman & Robin" – "Starlog celebrates Batman & Robin") in Germany. The German Starlogs were put together by the New York headquarters of Starlog Group, with the involvement of some German language translators and consultants.

And, finally, there's a special one-shot English-language Starlog Presents Batman & Other Comics Heroes magazine that utilizes a different cover photo but clearly the designers were enamored of the lettering used on the German magazine title.

All of this plus $3 will get you a cup of coffee, of course, but it's fun to contemplate magazine designs sometimes. Again, for geeks.

Filmfax #45: Your Weekend Cool Magazine Cover

It's Buster Crabbe and the original film Flash Gordon. Enjoy.

NMA Animation's Pox on BART & Anonymous