infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

Wow, Google Transit would have been really, really helpful when I lived carless in Philadelphia. It’s interesting to note the absence of New York or, for that matter, Philadelphia, Boston, and DC. Is it because these systems are too complex or does Google have to do some intellectual-property wrangling before they can add in the data for these systems? Seattle is the only one of the cities on Google Transit I’ve spent any time in, and I hardly know it well enough to see how good its recommendations are. Hopefully SEPTA and MTA will get in the system soon.

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In an earlier post, I praised the FX comedy “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” for doing a decent job of representing life in the city, but one of tonight’s episodes, “The Gang Runs for Office” had an erroneous detail that I thought was worth commenting on. In this episode, the gang convinces Dennis to run for South Philly District 37 Comptroller in an effort to scam his opponent into bribing him. In one scene, Mac walks in on Charlie shooting Dennis with a cheap consumer camcorder and asks what’s going on. Charlie tells Mac, “we’re going to shoot a commercial and get it on public access.” Alarm bells went off in my head because Philadelphia is the largest city in the country without a public access system. If the show were written by people in New York or LA, I might forgive this error, but much of the purported charm of the show is that it was created by people from Philadelphia, a city often off the cultural radar. This mistake strikes me as particularly strange because the show started as an amateur project distributed online. Did the creators never look into producing a public access show?

Despite this lapse, I do enjoy the show for its references to life in the City of Brotherly Shove. The characters often refer to “the Wawa,” and I often wonder if a national audience understands from the context. Wawa is a chain of convenience stores found throughout the Delaware Valley, well, except in black neighborhoods. One thing that distinguishes Wawa from a 7-11 is that in addition to selling soda, cigarettes, and the normal convenience store items, each store has a deli offering hoagies and cold cuts. Although I thought Wawa paled in comparison to the Tulsa-based QuikTrip chain, many Philadelphians seem very fond of Wawa. In this week’s New York Times Magazine Rob Walker writes about customer loyalty to Wawa. According to a recent study by an Ohio State University professor, customers flock to Wawa for the friendly service. I frankly preferred shooting the breeze with Grego at my corner bodega, but Wawa even has a dedicated following online. Walker notes that the We Love Wawa LiveJournal group has about 950 members, and MySpace has a similarly large community. In this context, I suppose it makes sense for “Sunny” to talk about Wawa, but gloss over media access issues.

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Austin blogs are abuzz today with the release of a study that says Austin is the third best-educated city in the US. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that Austin follows Seattle and San Fran in the rankings, considering UT-Austin was for many years the largest college campus in the country. (It’s now the fifth largest.) However, my hometown of Tulsa checks in as the 19th best-educated city, ahead of Columbus, which is home to The Ohio State University. I guess megacampuses can only go so far in raising the collective intelligence of a city, but Minneapolis, with the University of Minnesota, is ranked fifth.

Whenever I read these studies, I’m a little surprised to see really big cities fall at the bottom of the list. It’s not surprising to see Philadelphia come in at number 50 (out of 53). When I lived there, I was confronted with unimaginable stupidity on a daily basis, but I would attribute the low ranking to the white flight that led most of the middle-and-upper class to the suburbs, so much of the city is full of poor neighborhoods and undereducated citizens. Still, New York City comes it at 32, Los Angeles at 41, and Chicago at 39. These cities seem to be full of educated professionals living in the city limits. Perhaps immigration could account for the lower percentages of college and high-school grads.

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Last week, I watched FOX’s rerun of the FX comedy “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and I thought it was dumb. After Time TV critic James Poniewozik’s glowing recommendation, I decided to tune in to the second season’s premiere last night. Besides, I thought it was my duty as a former Philadelphian and student of media to see how the City of Brotherly Shove is represented on screen.

At first I was inclined to think that the only think Philly about “Sunny” was b-roll of the city and references to places — the opening titles feature postcard shots of obvious landmarks like the Ben Franklin bridge, Logan Circle, the art museum, and South Street — but I realized the show had a Philadelphian sensibility after all. The humor of the show isn’t really my style, but I found myself laughing. As I laughed I realized that I was laughing not so much because I thought it was funny, but because it was something my friend Jay would think is funny. Jay is a transplant from Tulsa to Philly and found it easy to fit into the culture of the city, something I wasn’t able to do. I was laughing because I knew Jay would be laughing. I realized that his humor is probably more in tune with the city’s than mine. Other Philadelphians probably enjoy the crude sensibility.

The second episode aired last night also included a plot point that might not be unique to Philadelphia, but certainly reflected the character of the city. A new neighbor buys the property next door to the bar owned by the ensemble of main characters. He informs them that the deed includes property 400 feet into the bar. Thanks to surveying errors or custom, this demarcation had been ignored, and the land had been a part of the bar’s building. The new owner wanted to evict the owners from his land. (This is something that would actually happen in Philly.) I won’t reveal how the issue is resolved, but it certainly reflected the character of one of America’s oldest cities.

There are plenty of things that seem out of place in a show about Philly. The bar is vastly larger than any bar I visited in the city, none of the characters have obvious Philadelphia accents, and there aren’t any black people in the show. The show doesn’t convey the sense of claustrophobia and tension I felt when I lived there, but, for a TV show, it does an admirable job of reflecting “the real” Philadelphia.

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Farmadeliphication seems like a good, if utopian, idea. It proposes taking the vacant lots of the city and turning them into farmland. It’s really pretty surprising how much plant life thrives in Philly, especially West Philly, so it seems plausible that lots could be used as vegetable gardens, if not full-blown farms. Unfortunately, most of the vacant space in Philly is in pretty dangerous neighborhoods, so I might worry that well-meaning people, especially people from outside the neighborhood, might run into trouble.

The pictures do trouble me somewhat. Some show rowhomes standing isolated in farm fields. Would these folks raze North Philly to raise crops? These are neighborhoods that have more than just crime - they have communities and histories. They just happen to be neglected and populated by the same neglected people the world saw on TV during Hurricane Katrina. Are they suggesting these neighborhoods don’t matter?

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Zillow.com is a site that allows users to find data about home prices in a given area. When you search for an address or a neighborhood, it pulls up a satellite map with the residences marked. Clicking on one of the marks will pull up an infobox with lightweight data. (It doesn’t work in Safari.) I’m far from being in the market for a house, but the site did provide me with minutes of entertainment.

I was curious about the house I lived in in West Philadelphia. On occasion, I’d walk past the realtor’s office on Baltimore Ave. and look at the houses advertised in the window. Many houses were listed for less than $50K. I assumed that these houses were distressed “shells” or otherwise needed a lot of work. Information about my old house wasn’t available on Zillow.com, but they had some data about other houses on the street. I was surprised to learn that many of the houses are appraised around $30K. There are some pretty nice houses on S. 45th St, so this was quite a shock. Of course, street crime is a non-trivial issue in this neighborhood, which might drive home prices down, but, regardless, $30K for a 3,000 square foot house seems like quite a bargain! I’m not sure how reliable these prices are, either. I don’t know how often homes are re-assessed in Philadelphia, and corruption is rampant among folks like fire inspectors and tax assessors may be no different. It’s still pretty surprising when you compare prices in West Philly with prices in Austin or even Tulsa.

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Marjorie points to an article that reports Philadelphia has finalized its deal to provide wireless Internet access across the city. The article says that the ISP Earthlink will first install access points in the Northeast section of the city. According to the article, the aim of the project is to make Internet access more accessible for low-income households, so why are they starting in one of the whitest and most suburban sections of the city? It seems like West Philly or the area around Temple University in North Philly would be better choices since they have a mixture of Internet users and under-served populations. When I lived in Philly, I waited for DSL in West Philly while customers in the suburbs had a number of broadband options for years. Starting with the Northeast section doesn’t seem to address the digital divide.

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