the tindog coffeehouse

Peggy Sue Gerron, the namesake of Buddy Holly’s classic hit “Peggy Sue”, has written her memoirs just in time for the 50th anniversary of the release of the song, and Holly’s widow ain’t happy about it, threatening to sue her to keep the book from being sold. According to Maria Elena Holly, who owns the rights to her late husband’s name, image, and intellectual property, Gerron’s book is unauthorized and threatens to tarnish his reputation.

I grew up in Lubbock, Texas, where Buddy Holly is almost a god, so I can’t say I’m fully impartial here. But seriously, just take one look at Gerron’s website, where you can find “Peggy Sue”-themed ’57 Chevy die-cast models starting at $299.00, and it’s hard to believe that this isn’t just some opportunistic publicity stunt.

Maybe to promote her book, she could go on the next season of The Celebrity Apprentice. Or at least The Surreal Life.

With McDonald’s moving in on Starbucks’ territory by outfitting their McRestaurants with espresso machines, Time took a look at the demographic differences between the two companies’ customers.

Visitors to Starbucks.com skew female: Starbucks’ website has 8.3% more female visitors than does the McDonald’s site. While McDonalds.com visitors cluster in the 18-to-34 age range, Starbucks owns the 35-to-44-year-old group. There’s also a clear income gap between the two: McDonald’s visitors tend to live in households earning less than $60,000 per year; Starbucks customers lean toward households earning over $60,000.

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Former Dateline reporter John Hockenberry has written a lengthy article for Technology Review about what he learned about network television news in the 9 years he worked for NBC. In the article he complains about the decline of TV news from a fact-reporting organization daring enough to embrace new technology to a technology-averse info-tainment machine constantly worried about its viewers’ “emotional center.”

While the article is interesting, it’s hard to take Hockenberry seriously as he doesn’t understand that he’s contradicting himself. He waxes poetic about the good ol’ days of Edward R. Murrow and how the technology of television “would take Americans ever deeper into the battlefield, and even onto the surface of the moon. Communication technologies,” he says, “transformed America’s view of itself, its politics, and its culture.”

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