Shots in the Dark

From the guy who did the cat posters. He’s kind of a genius. The best thing since FU Penguin.

The LA Times notes that its launch has been accompanied by a missing prototype, a suicide and a dubious debut.

The string of woes have [sic] been so striking that some have sought alternative explanations, including the notion that the phone may simply be jinxed. One theory focuses on the number four.

In China, where the iPhone is manufactured, four is considered to be bad luck. That’s largely because the word for four is nearly identical to the word for death. Many buildings in Hong Kong do not have a fourth floor, and people try to avoid phone numbers and license plates with “4” in them.

Interesting. Sort of.

Meanwhile, MacRumors live-blogged Steve Jobs’ press conference regarding the phone.

We knew if you gripped the iPhone in a certain way, the bars would go down, just like every smartphone. It’s a challenge to the industry and we’re hoping to contribute to some solutions over the coming years.

- It’s not much difference, but it’s too much for us, and we want to know why. Jobs’ theory is that when the iPhone 3GS came out, there was already a healthy market for cases that fit it. With the iPhone 4, 80% of consumers are buying the phone without a case, and we can’t make bumpers fast enough.

Sounds good. But will it stop the iBleeding?

- Free cases for everyone who bought or buys an iPhone 4 through September 30th. If you’ve bought one already, we’ll refund you. We can’t make enough bumpers, so we’ll source some third-party cases and you can pick. Apply on Apple’s site starting late next week.

Here’s the trailer for the forthcoming flick about Facebook, The Social Network. Lots of Harvard imagery and talk about the exclusivity of finals clubs. Also: the poor Winklevosses. It’s not their fault they’re preppy.

Anyway, the movie actually looks kinda good—David Fincher is a brilliant director, and that a capella version of Creep is a brilliant choice. The tagline (“you don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies) ain’t bad either. Mark Zuckerberg probably won’t love this film.

The Washington Post reports that Washington is the nation’s best-educated city.

Almost half of adult Washington area residents have college diplomas, and better than one-fifth have graduate or professional degrees. By either measure, the region has the most educated population of any large metropolitan center.

…as a metropolitan area — city and suburbs — Washington is without peer. The District is surrounded by the five best-educated counties in the country, as measured in bachelor’s degrees, a necklace of demographic pearls: Arlington, home to the Pentagon; Alexandria, the upscale Colonial city, classified by the census as its own county; Fairfax County, headquarters of Sallie Mae and the CIA; Howard County, with its massive Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory; and Montgomery County, home to the National Institutes of Health. There are Washington suburbs where seemingly every neighbor is a doctor or lawyer, scientist or spy.

This is not a huge surprise to me, as I’ve always thought that the city attracted many of the nation’s finest. But perhaps this explains some of the gap between DC and the rest of the country—maybe—just maybe—Washington is smarter than, oh, Oklahoma?

That’s sort of what I think, at least, any time I see a Tea Party rally or watch Sarah Palin rally a crowd; that the disconnect in our country is not so much the fault of Washington as it is the lack of education in many American states. (Hello, Alabama.) And in this sense, (American) conservatism and ignorance correlate; you fear what you don’t know.

Just a thought…..

Or not.

MacRumors raises the possibility.

Roman Polanski’s victim, now 48-year-old Samantha Geimer, tells the Los Angeles Times she wants the case to end.

“I hope that the D.A.’s office will now have this case dismissed and finally put the matter to rest once and for all,” she said in an e-mail.

She has said the same thing to the New York Daily News:

“I have no hard feelings,” she said, adding that she just wanted to move on. “I know that he regrets it.”

“I’m happy that it’s over,” her mother tells the paper.

The men involved, who let the matter go for decades, continue to huff and puff.

L.A. County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, who led the effort to bring Polanski back to the U.S., said he was dumbfounded by the decision. “Mr. Polanski is still convicted of serious child sex charges,” Cooley said. “The Swiss could not have found a smaller hook on which to hang their hat.”

Cooley, a Republican running for California attorney general, said he would again seek extradition if Polanski is arrested in any other country.

This is clearly not an issue where people are going to resolve their differences; it’s probably the most divisive thing that I’ve ever posted about on this blog. To me, that alone suggests the futility of spending taxpayers’ dollars on what has become a crusade, driven not by reason or results but by emotion.

It appears that we are left with an awkward detente: Polanski will live out his life in Europe, never returning to the country he most loved and with a permanent stain on his reputation and legacy. His victim will now be able to return to her previously normal adult life. (She’s a mom with three kids.)

This isn’t what people on both extremes would want.

(Here’s a quote from the LA Times that will drive some people nuts: “The great Franco-Polish director will from now on be able to freely meet with his family and dedicate himself to the pursuit of his artistic activities,” said French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, adding that he was “delighted” by the decision.)

But it gives Polanski’s defenders something, and it gives his critics something. Considering the circumstances and context of the matter, that sounds like justice to me.

Here’s the latest from perenially underrated Crowded House, who I’m going to see in a week or so.

I have a new iPhone 4 and love it, and haven’t experienced any of the loss of signal issues many people have complained about. But now Consumer Reports say there’s a hardware problem with the phone’s antenna, and that Apple is BS’ing when it says that signal issues are due to a miscalculation in the signal strength indicator. Not good for Apple!

Here’s CR’s blog post:

Consumer Reports’ engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception. When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone’s lower left side—an easy thing, especially for lefties—the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you’re in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4.

Apple’s explanation for the phone issue never felt quite right. It’ll be interesting to see what they say now.

The Washington Post reports on the newest trend among college presidents: trying to be so accessible to students that they come across as, essentially, their friends.

The Post piece focuses on Steven Knapp, a Yale grad who’s now president of George Washington University in D.C.

Knapp’s big break came in February, when he stopped by a nighttime snowball fight between GWU and Georgetown University, surprising student organizers.

“It was like a Civil War battle. We were all lined up,” Knapp recalled. “I think I was a target, because I got pretty pelted.”

After victory was declared, Knapp made a speech and canceled classes for the next day.

Other college presidents have deejayed at parties, formed a “broomball” team, served hot chocolate to students, and worked out at the student gym.

I don’t know a lot about how Drew Faust interacts with students, but Larry Summers was very much part of this trend, as he saw undergraduates as a political constituency whose support would help him in his fights with the faculty. Summers hosted student pizza feeds and took questions (good), danced at student parties (hmm…), and signed dollar bills for students seeking autographs (deeply offensive, but symbolically telling on both sides).

What’s going on here?

Some say that the trend results from the fact that many college presidents today are Baby Boomers who grew up in the ’60s and are uncomfortable with authority. Others suggest that electronic communication has broken down barriers between students and authority figures.

But the explanation that feels most right to me is the fact that $50,000-plus tuitions create a sense of entitlement among students and parents.

The Rev. Brian Linnane, president of Loyola University Maryland, said he thinks that spiraling tuition has spawned a “consumer mentality” among parents: “I’m paying so much, I want X, Y and Z, and I want the president to be on it.” He recalled one blistering note from a parent who arrived late to a popular campus event and was unable to find parking: “It was like somehow we failed her.”

Is this trend a good thing? I’m not sure. While it seems generally positive for presidents to have more interaction with students, I don’t want to see a college president throwing snowballs. (How long till some college president does jello shots at one of his fraternities?)

I think the question is whether leadership requires some measure of distance between the leaders and the led, and if so, how much?