Mayor Finds Way To Watch ‘Wire’ For Free

Now that The Wire is ending and everyong is letting you know they watch it so they seem so hip, urban and cultured — and ‘cuz it’s a good show, no doubt — it’s obvious Michael Nutter is going to get in on that action. He’s holding a screening at City Hall on Sunday for the show’s finale. He also got HBO to sanction the showing, so he’s not committing piracy like we’re warned not to on so many FBI and INTERPOL bulletins we can’t fast forward through on some DVD players.

“As a fan, it’s tremendous,” said Nutter. “I want to say thank you to HBO for responding.” Oh, yes, benevolent HBO, allowing this free publicity and endorsement from the mayor of a major American city. The final episode of The Wire airs Sunday at 8 p.m.; you can win tickets for the City Hall screening through a couple of newspapers.

What’s excellent is how angry people are. Oh, wait, it’s the Internet, that’s why things are always excellent. The comment on the Daily News story is angry; the comments on Catherine Lucey’s blog post about it yesterday were angry. Hey, it’s Sunday night at 8. What else is Nutter gonna be doing?

Nutter to screen “The Wire” finale in City Hall [Philly Clout]
Nutter opens City Hall for HBO finale [Daily News]

You Can’t Hope To Silence Phillybloggers, You Can Only Hope To Contain Them

Well well well! Just a few weeks after Inga Saffron reported on 1352 Lofts’ annexation of the sidewalk on South Street¹, good ol’ Rimas Properties is at it again.

This time, someone from Rimas Properties — or some sort of weird person posing as a lawyer for Rimas Properties, which would be awesome — called up Phillyblog and started saying words like “libel” and “slander,” according to one of the co-founders. (If somebody said “slander,” that’s kind of odd, since as far as I know nobody was posting audio files to Phillyblog to bash Rimas.) The posts were taken down.

Naturally, the good users of Phillyblog have exploded in a way that only people on the Internet can, with famed poster EastChestnut asking for a wheelchair so he can pretend to be paraplegic and protest and people getting angry at Phillyblog for not wanting to deal with lawyers angry ‘cuz people called Rimas Properties a cunt or whatever. Oh, and they’re writing letters and trying to organize a protest; as you can see from the photo, the sidewalk isn’t even big enough for Philadelphians over 250 pounds, i.e. most Philadelphians.

In non-Phillyblog advocacy, the Design Advocacy Group is also angry, even though they are probably slim and fit, with all that advocacy and all.

Update: But, damn, is this place nice-looking! Not only that, but you’d get to look out your window and laugh at people trying to squeeze by on the sidewalk, too. Also nice: The Big Green Building, which is apparently powered by its own awesomeness.

¹ Oh, also apparently I bashed ‘em too in PW. And then it was corrected in a letter. I don’t remember any of this, being in an antidepressant- and codeine-induced haze for the past five years.

Where did the “sidewalk grab” thread go? More censorship? [Phillyblog]
1352 Lofts - Letter to City Council [Phillyblog]
Take Back Our Sidewalks! [DAG]