Annoying companies

Apropos of the recent taxi/Uber discussion:

http://gawker.com/mayor-bloomberg-vows-to-fucking-destroy-the-taxi-indu-509504360

freepress.net:

The bankrupt Tribune Company is selling its daily newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. Charles and David Koch — billionaire brothers notorious for their extreme politics — may be the buyers.

According to the New York Times, the Koch brothers want to buy these media properties to push their anti-environment, anti-labor and anti-democracy agenda.

We don't need more corporate control of our media and our politics. We need journalism that fights corruption — not hack writing that covers it up.

Stopping the Koch brothers’ bid for the Tribune Company is about supporting the kind of journalism that serves communities and acts as a watchdog against the wealthy and powerful.

Tell the Tribune Co.: Don't sell your papers to the Koch brothers.

Sign The Petition

Aziz Ansari is doing a benefit for bombing victims at the Wilbur Theatre this Sunday. Tickets went on sale at noon today. And, of course, resellers are already trying to make a buck off tickets. At 12:54, the Wilbur warned:

PLEASE DO NOT BUY BROKERED TICKETS FOR THE AZIZ SHOW!
People trying to profiting off of this special benefit show are disgusting.

We are taking action as we speak.

Leave it to the Boston Herald to use the recent tragedy of the Boston Marathon bombing for politics, the politics of transitional assistance also known as welfare. Say what? What does domestic terrorism and welfare have to do with each other?

Well, yesterday the legislature on Beacon Hill was debating a budget and Republicans are, once again, trying to use welfare as a wedge issue. Also yesterday, Chris Cassidy at the Boston Herald broke a front page news story that deceased Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a welfare recipient. Sounds bad, right?

Amanda Fakhreddine snaps a Zipcar ad on the Red Line that promotes the company's utility for booty calls:

Kid sitting next to me asked his mom what that meant #keepitclassy #adfail

Just yesterday:
McDonald's didn't approve those Orange Line ads that got some people upset.

This is the story of how a drug compounding pharmacy NECC in Framingham Mass., under a deregulated Food and Drug Administration regime passed in 1998, is motivated by greed to expand into drug manufacturing by conspiring with clients to create fraudulent patient prescription records on a large scale yielding wild profits, 44 deaths, and 678 people severely ill with spinal and other forms of meningitis due to contamination in its lab. U.S. authorities say NECC shipped thousands of vials of fungus-tainted methylprednisolone acetate to medical facilities throughout the United States.
60 Minutes video:

The Proper Bostonian writes she could deal with a Frye boot store replacing one of her favorite restaurants - Charley's at Newbury and Gloucester. But she will not abide by the arboreal destruction she says Frye committed outside the location - eight trees chopped to bits:

Besides the kousa dogwoods there was a white birch, and other trees. It's a grim scene and a great loss to our neighborhood. ... Since I love boots and live in them, I was looking forward to buying some Fryes from the new store. I know they make spectacular bags, too. Now I think - no, I know - I can never own a pair of Fryes or a bag. At least not until there are twinkling lights on some tall kousa dogwood trees on that corner again. I will miss the trees far more than I will miss the boots or the bag. I'll bet I'm not the only customer they lose over this.

A piqued citizen complains about whoever's slapping ads on cheap bikes and locking them to bike racks, such as this one by the Broadway T stop:

Bike advertisement bike has been locked here for 3 weeks. Remove and cite. They have done this before, and tie up bike racks for people who need them. Outrageous and ridiculous!

Somebody's more than a little tired of the Dropkick Murphys being played at every single major sporting event in town:

It's become ridiculous. I grew up a DKM fan, and still play them with pride for two weeks in March, but this city has turned them into glorified mascots for the B's, Sox, Pats, and C's. Call me old fashioned, but playing fight songs for billion dollar corporations doesn't seem very punk rock to me. This goes double for Steven Tyler.

A concerned citizen on Beacon Hill complained after the Boylston trolley accident this afternoon:

Is the helicopter circling for the T accident really necessary?? I don't think so... it's not medflight just the news being overly obnoxious. Not safe for it to fly over heavily populated areas. I thought there were safety regulations?

The city quickly closed the case:

The city of boston does not have jurisdiction over media helicopters in the area. i believe permission is granted through the federal aviation administration.

The Globe reports.

Copley Square this morning. Photo by Allison Francis.

The Public Garden, maybe, or the Old Granary Burying Ground, perhaps. But obviously not Copley Square or Christopher Columbus Park, which were filled this morning with squishy little ads for a tomato company. Granted, a company that is donating 3,000 cans of their product to a local food drive, but still. As Amy Deveau tweeted:

What a waste! This is a total waste - perfectly good tomatoes sitting on the GROUND. Awful. And people in NY/NJ are homeless! It's just so thoughtless, wasteful, stupid and insensitive. This whole muirglenorganic tomato-gate is making me super stabby this AM. I've never heard of you, but you just lost me as a customer.

And not the normal rat-bringing kind, either.

John Carroll considers one of Legal Seafood's latest ads.

The Globe reports the owner of the Sunset Grill and a couple other Allston restaurants wasn't paying overtime like he should have been, at least according to those pesky feds.

Somebody keeps complaining to the city about casino-bound Brush Hill buses clogging up the street across from the Forest Hills T stop to wait for chip-crazed riders to board. The city's marked the latest complaint closed with this note:

We have spoken to drivers and asked them to co-operate with us nice people. 15 minute limit will be enforced.

An alert citizen looks down and notices one of the stencils with which the stupid network has been defacing our sidewalks, in this case on East 4 Street in South Boston.

Because it sucks.

What's wrong with this picture?

OK, so the Segway guy is finally keeping his tours off the Greenway, if not off Long Wharf, but now he's taken to directing his tours across the Charles River, by way of the gangplanks over the locks at the Charles River Dam.

Kristin MacDougall noticed one of those Segway tours navigating the gangplanks today and complained to the state Department of Conservation and Recreation:

What is up with Segways on the Charlestown Locks lately?! Dangerous to walkers and riders alike.

Tonight, DCR agreed:

They are not allowed on the locks! Please stay clear of them and be safe.

After seeing "Car Talk, the Musical" there tonight, Paul Levy has the bruises to prove it. But he says what's worse is the theater's apparent indifference to a problem that can send people just sitting in their seats plummeting to the floor:

[I]nstead of talking with friends about the wonderful show we had seen and the great performance by talented actors and musicians, we found ourselves talking about the unsafe condition at the theater and what we felt was a poor response to harm that had occurred.

The Boston Globe:

Upper Crust accused of scheming on pay
Affidavit from CFO claims checks forged, pay slashed

After being ordered by the government to pay employees nearly $350,000 in overtime, executives at Upper Crust devised a scheme to wrest the money back, including cashing forged checks and slashing workers’ wages, according to the pizza chain’s former chief financial officer.

Sara photographed the cab line at Logan around 12:45 this morning.

Apparently, people keep calling up McDonald's to let them know a billboard of theirs in Somerville is collapsing. In fact, AdRants snootily informs us, that just shows the public's ignorance of "billboard extensions" - the effect is on purpose.

Via Steve Annear.

The bank declined to admit it jiggered its transaction software to increase the odds patrons would rack up overdraft fees, says it's pleased to move forward and "provide our customers with choices to help them manage their accounts and their finances," the Globe reports.

A fed-up citizen complains about the Western Union flyers now found all over the neighborhood advertising money-transfer services to Latin America, to the point where they've gotten more annoying than the omnipresent phone-book stacks, because at least those stay in one place:

The streets are dirty enough, can't the city fine them for these blowing all over the neighborhood?