Just because you're Courtney Love and paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you

Courtney Love tells the New York Daily News about the latest subsect of everyone who is out to get her:

One night, Love says, "a flood of guys, at least 10, came to my house. They said there was an ambulance outside, even though we never saw one. I tried to be charming. But one of the guys points a gun at me. My daughter, Frances, ran and hid under the house."

Love says the standoff was defused by a private investigator she'd hired and who later urged her to get tighter security.

Yes, there's a private investigator who backs up her story:

Corroborating Love's harrowing tale are Adam DelMonte and Michael Kenworthy of AC Digital Services, who say they recorded the "blitz" on security cameras they installed in Love's house. "These impostors then flipped the situation on Mrs. Cobain and tried to strong-arm her and scare her into feeling she needed to hire them for protection," DelMonte and Kenworthy assert in a letter. "Fortunately, we were able ... to get them out of her life."

So, there's someone who backs up her story about people turning up demanding money and offering to protect her in return. And he's helping protect her and gets money in return for it.

Love has moved to New York and, with the help of other people she's paying, is seeking to put her affairs in some sort of order. She does realise she's got a challenge, though:

"My biggest problem," she says tearfully, "is that I'm Courtney Love."

Or at least used to be.

Shante didn't

I picked up a story from the New York Daily News last week about how Roxanne Shante had had to battle Warners to get them to honour a clause in her contract to fund her PhD.

It turns out to be less than solid: Ben Sheffer has been digging for Slate and he finds no trace of Shante having completed any degree, much less one funded by Warners:

When told of Warner's denial that it financed her education, Shanté repeated, "Hip-hop paid for my education, kept me from going to the streets." But she was unable to provide detail. "To my knowledge, that [Warner] is exactly where the checks came from. … All I know is that it was done." In a later e-mail, Shanté wrote that she was informed by Cold Chillin's former CEO Tyrone Williams that Warner "along with another party that chose to stay anonymous paid for my education." Shanté did not respond to Slate's request that she put us in touch with Williams.

This seems to be a bit of a shift from "Warners were contractually obliged to pay for my eduction" to "the money I made from music, which came from Warners as far as I know."

It looks like the New York Daily News hadn't really done very much to stack up its story in the first place.

Why there should be no concerns about LiveNation and Ticketmaster merging

After all, it's not like you can't trust them, is it?

Take, for example, their work in New Jersey, where LiveNation decided to bring in a six dollar parking fee per ticket for the PNC Bank Arts Center.

Yes, that's six dollars per ticket. So if four of you go to a gig in the same car, you end up paying twenty four dollars for parking.

The New York Daily News asked why everyone was charged six bucks to park a car - even if they intended to arrive at the venue by taxi, or on foot, or by hovershoes. So LiveNation took the six dollar parking fee off.

And, erm, put the prices of all tickets up by six bucks instead.

And then, when that was noticed, reintroduced the parking fee.

LiveNation reckons it's always been there, though:

"We have always operated under a system at PNC Bank Arts Center where parking is charged as a per-ticket fee. This policy is in place to alleviate traffic issues ... to ensure that all fans can enter the venue in a timely and safe manner," a spokesman said.

Really? How exactly does charging every single person going six dollars "alleiviate traffic issues"? How does a flat fee have any influence on people entering the venue in a timely or safe way?

If the idea was to use a fee to control the flow of cars arriving at the venue, wouldn't you have to make the fee voluntarily? Because otherwise, if people are foreced to pay a parking fee, won't they think 'if I've paid for it, I might as well use it' and be more likely to drive?

Of course, LiveNation know this. Their spokesman knows that his explanation makes no sense. But it's not like he's going to admit "yeah, we're grabbing cash because we're chiselers. What you gonna do about it?"