Shallow | Center

Philadelphia and the Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Greater Philadelphia had a pretty shitty day yesterday.

First it was revealed that that the teenagers whose beating of a Starbucks manager triggered an asthma attack that killed him were simply looking for some sick fun. The victim, the cops said, "was targeted for no reason."

It's the kind of random crime that makes people flinch from urban living and confirms outsiders' perception of Philadephia as a violent, lawless hellhole.

I mean, Jesus Christ, it happend in the middle of the afternoon in a Center City subway station. Maybe those outsiders aren't that far off.

Then last night, a deranged couple used their 1-year-old to keep police at bay on the Walt Whitman Bridge at the height of rush hour. It was the kind of crazy act that makes people flinch from Philadelphia and confirms outsiders' perceptions of the city as an asylum bursting at the seams with inmates.

Maybe those outsiders aren't that far off.

The region needs a win. I hate to say this, but it'd be nice for the civic well being if Villanova could knock off Kansas tonight. S|C

Philadelphia | What Rocks

PASSION DOESN'T come any purer than at Philadelphia college basketball games. You read about the frenzied, manic atmosphere any time the city teams play each other, and after a while your eyes kind of glaze over the copy. And then you go the Palestra and you sit on one of the backless benches and you encounter a thunder you never knew existed. Even if the teams on the floor are sleepwalking through their respective seasons, they play these games as if a Final Four berth were at stake. Their fans -- students, alumni, pep band, cheerleaders -- act the same way. My senior year at Saint Joseph's, back before the renaissance of the last decade, the Hawks were going nowhere, but somehow they had strung together a good Big 5 season, and in their last City Series game, they downed La Salle to capture the crown. I was an editor at the student paper, and we ran a banner headline on the front page reading, "WE WIN!" Nobody felt it was inappropriate.

Philadelphia | What Sucks

The Local Newspaper Scene: All the Wire Service Copy That's Fit to Print

Dull headlines. Bland wire service copy. Tired, uninspiring commentary. Virtually no young voices. Sponsors'  logos splashed all over what are supposed to be news pages. Smaller news holes.

The return of local, private ownership to the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News was supposed to result in better newspapers. Divorced from the need to meet quarterly earnings expectations, the papers were going to refocus their efforts on the region, giving readers unparalleled insights into the places where we live and work. Instead, we've gotten the sad litany of traits listed above. The decline is breathtaking. The papers have the feel and tone of provincial, small-town rags. And I know that their newsrooms are separate, but by sharing advertising and production staffs, the Inky and DN aren't competing with each other as fully as they ought. The only area of improvement has been in the papers' Web site, and that's only because there was nowhere to go but up. There's a nice selection of multimedia content and blogs, and one can even find updated news stories posted as they're written, a terrific step up from the prior static site. I'd still like to see more news and fewer ads, though.

As for competition, there is none locally. The Bulletin is a joke; City Paper and the Philadelphia Weekly provide important alternative viewpoints and different angles, but as weeklies they lack the resources for comprehensive coverage, and they operate too often with a distracting chip on their shoulders.

If Boston can produce a worthy paper in the Globe day in and day out -- all while operating as a division of a public company, no less -- Philadelphia ought to be able to as well. Now that would be news.

"Philadelphia | What Sucks," an essay about people, places, and things in the region worthy of scorn, will appear each Wedneday in Shallow Center. S|C

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who's the Saddest of Them All?

Philadelphia's Epic Self-Loathing Extends Far Beyond Sports

Phil Sheridan and Bob Ford spent quite a few column inches in yesterday's Inquirer pondering whether we despise Boston or New York more, but it was, of all people, the usually mediocre Frank Fitzpatrick who really nailed it. Fitzpatrick wrote that the place Philadelphians hate most is Philadelphia, and he's absolutely right. His piece examined the effect this self-loathing has had on the regional sporting scene, where we ruthlessly seek to destroy our best players and shamelessly shovel abuse on all who dare believe themselves better than we. Which, since we hate ourselves so, is everybody, or so we perceive.

Philadelphia | What Rocks

The Agency We Love to Hate Should Be a Model for Other Municipal Entities

Praising the Philadelphia Parking Authority for its ruthless efficiency and maddening effectiveness is like saying you like the IRS because it does such a great job collecting taxes. Yet wouldn't it be great if all of Philadelphia's municipal agencies and bodies were as vigilant as PPA? If Philly cops caught bad guys and Philly schools taught students and Philly legislators passed beneficial laws with the alacrity that PPA doles out parking tickets, we might actually have a sanely functioning city instead of the dysfunctional mess we're too often stuck with.

Quite Phrankly ...

Write What You Know? Well, Then, Hello There, Philadelphia

"If you're associated with the Philadelphia media or town, you look for negatives. I don't know if there's something about their upbringing or they have too many hoagies or too much cream cheese." -- Mike Schmidt

SCHMITTY WAS right.

We Philadelphians are a self-loathing bunch, perpetually convinced not only that we're going to fail but also that we deserve every bit of failure to come our way. We are more concerned with what we are not (New York) than with what we are. We tear down our heroes rather than celebrate them, and our civic ethos can be summarized in one contraction: can't. Our successes -- and they're there -- come in spite of ourselves.

It shouldn't be that way, and that's one reason I'm making an effort to recast the focus here on the city and region in which I live and that I love dearly, its many warts and all. I've mentioned before that finding the time to post here has become difficult given my professional commitments, but that's only part of it -- I've also gotten a little fried with writing about the same things for all of these years. So maybe finding some new subjects will revive my passion.

Hot-Stove Hacks

With Rumors Aplenty, a Phan Can't Separate Phact from Phiction

DOES PAT Gillick really think a Wes Helms-Greg Dobbs platoon at third base is the way to go? Are the Phillies really considering bringing back Jon Lieber if the slim pickings in the free-agent pitchers' market bypass Citizens Bank Park? Does Adam Eaton's MRI really disappoint the team the way Gillick lets on in his public comments?

Who knows?

Reading the tea leaves in early November is a fool's errand. For every nugget of truth that Gillick or Ruben Amaro Jr. speaks, imagine how much posturing for the sake of negotiation tumbles out of their mouths. Publicly drooling over Mike Lowell or Garrett Atkins is a sure way to drive up  the respective price each player would command -- how much scratch it would cost to bring Lowell to Philadelphia, how many players the Rockies would demand in a trade for Atkins. It is impossible to discern what the organization truly thinks, and that's not a bad thing. Far better for the Phillies to conduct their business cryptically and field the best possible team come April than to lay their cards on the table now and have little to show for it next season.

True Colors

WE'VE SPENT a lot of time, those of us who blog about the Phillies, venting our spleens about our favorite team's many, many shortcomings. And when I heard that they actually had won their series finale against Colorado, forcing us all to endure another few days of agonizing over the franchise's 10,000th loss, I thought, hey, terrific, we can't even lose right. And then I learned about the team's valiant effort to assist groundskeepers having trouble with a wayward tarp as a rain delay got underway at Coors Field. While just one Rockie got off his ass to help, the entire Phillies dugout poured onto the field, grabbed the edge of the tarp, and safely extracted a groundskeeper who had gotten trapped underneath. I've seen the still photos, but I need to find the video, just to confirm it with my own eyes. That a group of very wealthy young men (and, in the case of coach Jimy Williams, a moderately paid older man) would do something so atypical -- and that they are from Philadelphia, of all places -- are worth celebrating. And I hope that every time someone in the national media mentions snowballs and Santa Claus, and booing and Mike Schmidt, and cheering and Michael Irvin, I hope that every time that happens, he also says, "But then again, the entire Phillies team once helped save a trapped groundskeeper in Denver in 2007" and then plays the video. For once, it's okay that on-field mediocrity yields to off-field character.

A Bone to Pick

LET ME preface this by saying: I'm not anti-Buffalo wing. I'm not anti-beer. I'm not anti-scantily clad women engaging in nontraditional activities with one another. As a matter of fact, I'm pro-all of those. Very pro.

But, sweet fancy Moses, do I hate Wing Bowl.

There is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- redeeming about it. Today is truly a dreadful day to be a Philadelphian, for all that is shameful about our great region is about to be paraded in front of the world. Mindless overconsumption? Check. Public vomiting? Check. Rampant classlessness? Check. Twenty thousand drunkards cheering it all on? Check (times 20,000). A parochial self-satisfaction that confirms every New Yorker's, Bostonian's, Chicagoan's, Washingtonian's, and Los Angeleno's sordid perception of Joe Philly? Check.

Reversal of Fortune

SEPTA made news this week for sparing riders fare hikes over the next year, though it had to dip into its capital budget to do so. Perpetually underfunded, the agency has never seemed to learn that providing better customer service could lure more riders and thus preclude the need to play its annual fiscal shell game. I experienced a small but telling example Wednesday night of how poorly SEPTA's frontline employees interface with customers -- in the process, alienating them and failing to build the kind of goodwill and reputation for reliability that build business instead of driving it away.