ticketmaster

muse is coming to town. i got online the other day and bought some tickets. i havnt been a muse fan for that long, but i enjoy what i have heard thus far. i got my 'kroq street team' email that said when the presale tickets were going on sale and that the cheapest tickets were $27.50. i thought that was a great deal, so i rallied up some troops and got online to buy. once online however, i clicked on the 'buy tickets' link only to then have my day completely ruined. sold out? no. not 27.50? no. the link sent me to ticketmaster.com. i hate ticketmaster. i hate them. suppose i have to respect the site because they are making a KILLING. every ticket ever sold to anyone for any event that is occuring anywhere in our solar system is being sold on ticketmaster. if its a ticket, you will have to buy it online. im not even sure if venues sell tickets at a ticket booth anymore. i dont even know what a ticket booth really is. i know what a will call booth is, that is where you pick up your ticketmaster tickets that you had to buy online. they have a complete monopoly. why hasnt george w. stepped in to stop this. forget microsoft and their potential monopoly. deal with ticketmaster.

so lets walk through the enjoyable experience.

first you pick the event you are going to and how many tickets you want. the event will probably be sold out because everyone has to go through this site to get tickets. but this part is relatively easy.


the next part is fun. ticketmaster tests your computer screen eyesight. they give you an image similar to the one above. its some word that is drawn in chalk or something, then they put lines through it and ask you what it says. only its not a word. its some random group of letters, numbers and symbols. you are asked to type in the word. but its impossible to see. why do they do this? everytime i get it wrong i think that they are going to kick me off the system and tell me i am trying to access their system from some illegal computer or internet source. but when youre wrong they just give you another puzzle to try and solve. i mean, what is this? the first one is easy. d. then probably an a. followed by a k, though perhaps an h. then a c. now it gets fun. is that a 7? or a lower case t? if you combine it with the symbol next to it, it might be the symbol for pie. i have no idea what is next to the seven. perhaps a lower case i? an r? probably an r. then an o. maybe a d? probably an o. im going with d,a,k,h,c,7,r,d. submit (i really did by the way).....and wrong. stupid system. im angry and i havnt even started buying.

so once you break their code barrier you get a breakdown of the cost. it tells you how much the ticket alone will cost - $27.50. then right below it there is this $8.50 'convenience charge.' sure buying tickets while eating some snacks and sitting on my couch and watching laguna beach might be considered more convenient than driving all the way to downtown l.a. to buy the tickets at the actual venue, but $8.50 convenient? im not so sure. and why 8.50? is this some economists guess at how much ill pay before i decide to skip out on the next episode of 'my super sweet sixteen' and actually go buy the tickets myself? i suppose because im still on the couch.

next you are asked how to receive the tickets. there are many shipping options and the 'recommended' $2.50 option of ticketmaster emailing you your tickets. this of course is the easiest way to get them and if you need the tickets fast, its really your only option. i dont know why it costs ticketmaster $2.50 to send an email, but they are getting ripped off. i should sent them a gmail invite so they can email for free.

you then go through the whole sign in process and once you think you are done, it gives you a break down of all of your costs and your grand total and you notice there is now an 'order processing charge' for $2.55. now $2.55 isnt too much. but what is this for? and how does it different from the 'convenience charge?' is this the commission the ticketmaster employees make on each ticket?

so now my $27.50 tickets are $41.05 each. do i pay it? of course. i want to see muse. i dont have any other option. challenge it? no way. thats not very american. instead ill just whine and gripe about it to a few friends and sit at home and continue to let it dictate my life. im going out for snacks.

24 - day 2

jack's line, 'i dont know what i believe anymore.'

is the dad a murderer? sentence?
danielle - yes. 10 years.
adam - felony murder. 20 year sentence, he will get out in 12.
zach - murder 2nd degree, but family is alive so its alright. life in jail though.
brittany - yes. 20 years.
kent - yes. death penalty.

1st hour recap: fair. im not totally enthraled yet. fun to watch, but im not hooked on the story yet. im sure fox will throw out some ridiculous cliff hanger at the end of the 2nd hour though to try and hook everyone.


just got the 'trust me' from jack. its a good episode. when he was asking curtis to help him and trust him on using the [ex]terrorist.

how did the guy get to the terrorist facility so quickly? once again a complete disregard for the layout of los angeles. the distance from valencia to palmdale is 45 miles. we dont know where the bus was that he was released from. we do know that he was released from the bus towards the end of the 8 am hour and he arrived in the facility at the beginning of 9 am hour. its possible that he pulled it off, but unlikely that the bus was heading towards an airport in the valencia direction.

will the mom do something stupid? yep!! alright, she somehow got patched throught to ctu and then of course to jack bauer, so she didnt blow everything yet. she got lucky, but i still think she is capable of messing things up.

'dont even think about it, just do it!' zach's quote after ahmed was told to kill the boy. its a good point. he will think about it and somehow the boy will survive.

episode 2 recap: classic 24. they delivered. some serious shock value from them. i didnt see either one of those coming. jack always kills people 'because its necessary,' but i didnt expect the curtis shooting.
and the nuke. didnt think it would actually go off. now i keep on thinking that a nuke is going to blow up at any moment in the distance.

i also think that they will contradict the layout perception that they are making about LA. they probably wont evacuate ctu because they will say it is too far from where the bomb was evacuated, and it probably is pretty far away, but if they needed to drive to it for some reason they could probably get there in roughly 4.3 minutes.

next weeks preview: jack's back. of course.

24

New season of 24
i roped in my roommate adam to watch it with me. he was hesitant at first, but when i told him it was like the 'walker, texas ranger' for the new millenium, he was sold. it helps watching it with adam because we have a similar sense of humor so we both find the same comedy in the uber-melodrama that is 24. so after the first two episodes, here are some of our thoughts:

• why didn’t the guy clip off jack's finger before answering the phone? he had it there between the clippers. why not just snip it off real fast, go and take care of the phone call and come back and take care of the other nine?


• love the fact that jack kicked that guy out of the subway car. thought it would have been really funny if he would have been in a middle car of the train and when he kicked him out of the doors, he would have just kicked him into another car that they guy would have blown up. but this is jack bauer and they were conveniently on the last train. of course.


• all of the terrorists are middle-eastern and probably islamic. that isnt really politically correct. while it may be factually correct, there is no way that fox would have the bad guys be muslim radicals. we all know that the 'real' bad guys will be some white honkeys from kansas, or some wasps or some white european businessmen. some sort of group that the aclu wont get upset about.


• im glad jack has already told someone to 'trust him.' ive missed hearing those words on a weekly basis. granted, its better when it comes before jack is about to do something crazy like kill someone's father and he asks the person to 'trust him,' but its nice hearing it nevertheless.


• it was an interesting twist that they didnt actually trust jack and follow what he said. jack was right of course. nice they did this early in the season. no one, including the president of the united states will question jack for the rest of the season.


• i dont think the president would ever have a goatee.


• it also looks like the president's sister will take on the role as the family relative that is extremely annoying and gets in the way and you hope the whole season that there will be some sort of situation where jack will 'have to kill' him/her, but it never happens.


• just when i thought jack couldnt come up with another way to kill someone, he proves me wrong and does it with his teeth by biting the guy's vein. very unexpected. and also totally ridiculous and high on the comedy scale.


• as with every 24 season, there was plenty of good torture, like the knife in the knee.


• i was annoyed once again that there was a total disregard for the layout of LA. its one of the most populated areas on the planet, its totally spread out, there is hardly any transportation, so everyone drives. nothing is really 'close.' yet jack gets out of his torture cell somewhere in LA, hears that they are going to blow up the wrong guy in 15 minutes and conveniently is only 3 minutes away from the person, so he is able to save him. impossible. i guess in a way it makes sense: jack bauer pretty much defies the laws of nature and physics, so why not defy the laws of traffic that govern LA. i guess i also understand that if they didnt disregard the layout and the traffic of LA, then at least 5 of the 24 hours would be spent watching jack travel from one place to another while listening to ryan seacrest in the morning. that would be boring. though, i do think there would be a little entertainment if in one episode terrorists were killing a ton of people and jack couldnt save the day because he was stuck in traffic on the 405. that would be awesome. they just cut to jack every 15 minutes and he's in the same place just pissed off, swearing and banging his head on the stearing wheel while terrorists run rampant through the city. i would really respect the show more if they had a 'traffic' episode each season. i dont think they are writing their shows with my respect in mind though, so i doubt this will happen.

all in all, it was alright. pretty classic 24. tomorrow night is the other two hours of the four hour premiere, and those hours are supposed to be so 'explosive' (pun probably intended by fox, but im not sure) and crazy that my heart will probably stop beating. so more to come tomorrow.