Comment of the Week

Vote for comment of the week - votes close Thursday.  Here are this weeks contenders:

Comment #1: a new comment on your post "25 College Diplomas With the Highest Pay":

Is Ms. Adams trying to depress me? Is she mocking my life choices? I hope so. Because it gives me a chance to get on a soapbox for a second about the pathetically short-sights gradient with which articles like this, and maybe American culture in general, measure success. I have worked a lot of different types of jobs on my way to this school, so I can reassure my younger colleagues that rate of pay has NEVER, not even once, been a reliable measure of how good I was going to feel about a job. You take the big payoff jobs so you can do the little ones with your buddies. The environmental movement used to talk about a "triple bottom line" (they still might... are there still environmentalists?), which adds environmental cost/benefit to the traditional business ledger. I believe in looking at pay rates this way, and there is no amount of pay that can balance a ledger of misery. 

Comment #2: a new comment on your post "The arts mean business in Pittsburgh":

Great to know that the investment in arts and culture has such an impact on Pittsburgh's economy, because usually, in other regions, it can be quite the opposite. This is largely also impart due to your audience numbers. Pittsburgh has many tourists and citizens who frequent cultural and arts events, while other regions many now be trying to build their audience base. On a side note, I really didn't know that Pittsburgh attracted that many tourists yearly.

It was also great to see that so many jobs are created from the arts, due to the fact that so often artist usually have to struggle while moving from gig to gig. However what is interesting is that they state the number of jobs that are created, but not the average salary of these jobs. Which I think that I would be more interested in knowing. $400 million in household income overall may seem like a large figure, but when you break that down into the many different people and jobs and pay scales, it may start to look fairly dismal. However the most interesting part was the $74 million in local and state tax revenues which is enough to pay the salaries of almost 1,400 school teachers, firefighters, librarians and police officers. That really shows a great contribution from arts revenue. 

Comment #3: a new comment on your post "Theater: Creating a kid-friendly version of ‘The T...":

I don't like this "kid-friendly" version of the Tempest at all. When I was a little kid I would go to see Shakespeare all the time and I never had a had time understanding what was going on. I didn't need the plot to be boiled down for me to see what was happening. To me it sounds like the only change they have made to make this kid friendly is to cut a few lines with the goal of making the show shorter. These people seem to think that children will not be able to sit still and focus on the play for more then 90min with a 10min break. That is just rude. As a young child I was about to watch long Shakespearean shows with no breaks and I didn't for a moment get distracted or lose focus. I may have been bouncing in my seat, but only because of how focused I was on what was happening on stage. Another problem I have with this show is the idea that having teenage actors will make young children like the show more. This is just silly, a small child has just as much in common with a 16 year old as they do with a 90 year old, maybe less. On the whole I do not like the ways this company chooses to play down to children. 

Comment #4: a new comment on your post "A Call For Enrichment and Education Within the The...":

I must confess that I don't have a passion for the theme park industry. But, I found myself relating to this article, not necessarily because of the subject matter, but because the author calls out to the people in his profession to care about their industry, and actively participate in it, instead of just making a drafting, taking the paycheck, and walking away. He argues that the theme parks cannot be truly entertaining unless the people who design them, test out what they've designed. In the theatre world, designers and managers are increasingly not caring about the production they work on, just their little part; and some don't even like theatre at all, they just do it because they're decent at it. I felt this author's passion, and I related to his call for his colleagues to have that same passion. I love theatre. I love going to see live theatre. I love watching the shows I manage. I care about what happens onstage, and what the audience thinks. There is also a cancer in our industry of lack of passion for the actual industry. People might be passionate about the lights or the construction of the set, but if they don't care about the production, or care about theatre as a whole, how can they produce something of true quality? 

Comment #5: a new comment on your post "New York Costume Ban Proposed By City Councilman":

Proposing a law to ban people from wearing costumes in public, even only specific costumes, seems like an extreme solution to something that hasn't come across as a huge issue. If this law is referring to the pushy people who try to sell you things in NYC while wearing costumes, then there are a heck of a lot more people like that who aren't wearing costumes than those that are wearing costumes. If this law were to pass there would be a lot more to it than preventing those sales people from wearing costumes. Children would not be able to dress up as certain characters for Halloween, or at any other time of the year as children are wont to do. This would also prevent conventions like Comicon from being held in NYC city. Dressing in costume is a huge part of that convention. The same goes for other events and conventions. Would Disney need to acquire permits to put their employees in costume every time they host an event in Times Square? It seems like there are a lot of things that haven't been thought through all the way involved with this law.