I've had my fair share of love/hate relationships with towns, but I can honestly say "I Hate This Fucking Town."

I'm not quite to 95 theses to tack on their door yet, but I'm getting there. Here's the current list of grievances:

1. Citing us for "disturbing the peace" because our dogs had been barking all day. Never mind that the porch was littered with animal crackers, and it was obvious that the dogs were being taunted. Nope, our fault.
   
   
2. Citing us for parking on our own property.
   
   
3. Not bothering to inform us that a new statute had been passed requiring house numbers on our alley-facing fence. Good thing we got the paper and read to page A-12 that day
   
   
4. Posting a no-parking zone on our side of the block between the hours of 8a and 12p on Thursdays (other side on Mondays) because of street cleaning, and then cleaning the street at 6:45a those days. Real helpful.
   
   
5. Cashing my payment of a ticket received because I failed to move my car on a Thursday because I was sick in bed, forgetting that they cashed my ticket, and then issuing a warrant for my arrest and demanding $150 because of court costs. Also, the warrant would have been executed before the payment actually arrived for them had I tried to pay. Instead, I was forced to go through my records in order to tell them they fucked up.
   
   
6. Wasting my taxpayer dollars in order to inform me that I had 10 days to remove the trash from behind my house, because I had put it out there outside of "18 hours before or after your scheduled trash pick up." If I didn't, they were going to send someone over to remove it for us! Now, I'd put my trash out on a Wednesday night, and our scheduled pick-up is Friday morning. That means the issue had already resolved itself by the time I got the letter Friday afternoon. And, according to the letter, I could have simply waited until the trash truck had passed, taken my trash out, left it there for a week, and still been in compliance with city regulation. Either way, they wasted 42 cents, the cost of the paper, and however much they paid their secretary to type and send it, just to tell me to remove trash that the trash removal company had already taken. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
   
   
7. And the most recent abuse of municipal code: We've been a little behind on some things. I let my inspection slide a month over by accident, and V's inspection expired on the last day of April (that'd be yesterday), and I'd forgotten to get it in on time. Too bad! While there were no repercussions for me, she got a ticket for $25 for parking on the street with an expired inspection. Guess when the ticket was written? 3:08 this morning. It's not enough for them just to write the ticket, no, they paid a parking officer double time to write tickets for expired inspections three hours after they expired at midnight.

So, fuck this town. I can't wait until I no longer have to pay inflated income and property taxes for miserable, malicious service that does nothing to serve the common good. I'm still waiting for the disintegrating curb to be fixed. Maybe that $25 you poached from me can get you cracking on fixing that? Hmm? Yeah, probably not.

-pb

I love to hear right-wing economists screaming and ranting and raving about the "free market" and "letting the market decide" and so on and so forth. Of course, the second someone's stock portfolio takes a hit, they're shrieking for someone, anyone (specifically the government) to come save them.

However, it's a disaster in slow motion for the economy when this actually happens (as we've seen over and over again). Bear Stearns is a example. The free-market advocates demanded a hands-off approach that allowed them to risk enormous sums of money in an area that anyone should have been able to tell you was a bad bad bad place to risk enormous sums of money. Of course, no one was thinking of the long term. They never do. When the inevitable crash came, they all looked shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED! How could this have happened? How could anyone have foreseen this?

So, as Bear Sterns was going down in flames, investors cried out for a life preserver from the Fed. "Save us!" they cried. "Save us from this catastrophe that has befallen us that we could not have foreseen or prevented, given our level of nearsightedness and greed!"

And the Fed stepped in. $2/share, $10/share, whatever. The business failed. It should have been allowed to go all the way down.

The argument, however, is that if Bear Stearns had been allowed to collapse, it would have sparked a chain reaction that would have devastated the economy. Uh, sure. Bear Stearns was trading at over $160/share the week before it imploded. What exactly is the difference on the grand scale between $10 and $0? Not much. The only thing the Fed did was dump a sandbag on top of the levee and pray that the hurricane would just go away. The next investment bank that goes down (and it's likely to happen soon) will simply expect a bail-out. And when this crisis passes, as they do, firms such as this will have learned an important lesson:

Fuck it up as much as you want, Uncle Sam will bail you out!

This will, of course, fuel the next economic crisis. Rinse, repeat. Act surprised the next time it happens. You couldn't have foreseen it. No one could!

Allowing entire sectors of the market to fail really sucks for business. However, it's not all bad for consumers. Take the airline industry. Back in 2001, the airline industry, under the weight of its own stupidity, was having a hard time of things. The new Bush administration, looking for some way to help out megacorporations, found the perfect excuse - 9/11. Holy shit, people! The airline industry is going to go under because no one wants to fly! (never mind that it was pretty fucked up on 9/10, that's UNAMERICAN TALK AND THE TERRORISTS WIN).

So, they bailed out the airline industry. What would have happened if they hadn't?

Well, in the short term, a lot of people would have lost a lot of money as the legacy carriers went bankrupt. Mergers, acquisitions and the resulting layoffs would have put thousands of of work. To gain some sort of revenue, airfares would have skyrocketed. And then, something strange would have happened. Consumers would have decided that this was bullshit.

Amtrak's and Greyhound's ridership would have jumped up (higher than post 9/11, and more steadily). Smaller carriers with lower airfares would have seen an increase in business. Larger carriers would have disappeared. Services would have increased as airfares lowered in order to attract customers. The market would have corrected itself in order to win consumers back, or it would have failed. And how, exactly, is that a bad thing? Isn't that what the "free market" is all about? Isn't that capitalism? If there is no allowance for an entire segment of the market to fail because of its own inability to meet the needs of the consumer, what is the point of a free market? What is the point of private enterprise?

In the end, these bail-outs hurt more people than they help. They immediately saddle the taxpayers with the money required to guarantee solvency, and in the long run, it only validates and perpetuates the validity of the stupid decisions that led to the need for a bail-out. In the case of Bear Stearns, the Fed handed the company over to J.P. Morgan and said "We'll cover 30 billion in losses that you might incur." So, Morgan gets Bear Stearns' entire profitable portfolio and next to none of its losses, while you and I get upwards of 30 billion in debt and no possibility of reward if that debt is less and the portfolio proves to be more resilient than expected. We get the risk, private enterprise gets the reward. And for all the people who were lent sums of money they couldn't afford and told that it was all good, they get eviction notices. Sorry, but the government can't be bothered to help you out. You're not a "market segment," you're just a consumer. And who gives a shit about the consumer? Well, the free market would, because if it didn't, it would collapse. Good thing the federal government won't let that happen!

-pb

Nothing, lass, everything's in PERFECT WORKING ORDER.


( You know it )

Check out USA Kilts for all your kilt needs!

-pb

Anyone have any idea why Ada Bragton, aka janedoe1525, aka Silenteyes, would be IMing me out of the blue and then being cryptic and evasive?

-pb

More on the online Poker Cats Contest

Plz I can has voets for Vegas trip? Kthxbai.

Anyone else on ye olde flist going to see Iris and Seabound at Shampoo on March 12th?

-pb

Line of the night from last weekend:

"Vidi, vici... Veni."

-pb

victoria_fusion and I went to Staples last night to procure her a new grade book. The clerk stuffed a flyer into the bag. Here is the complete text, unedited for your annoyance:

PC Running Slow?

YOUR INVITED!!

Location: King of Prussia Staples
316 South Henderson Road
King of Prussia
Date: February 20th
Time: All Day

Have Staples EasyTech Staff provide a FREE PC Tune-Up and System analyzer. Techs will be onsite all day!
No appointment neccessary.

Finally, a better way.

Call 610-768-9283

ARGH!

-pb

OMFG NEW PORTISHEAD.

We now return you to normal capitalization.

-pb

So, Cloverfield.

Wow.

-pb

So, I kinda like hibachi. However, hibachi sort of requires a bunch of people to make it really fun. However the second, I'm a vegetarian that doesn't like the concept of steak and shrimp being grilled next to my vegetables.

Sooo, any of you vegetarians out there want to do a hibachi night? Any non-vegetarians interested in a meat-free hibachi night?

-pb

"Oooh, this sesame oil is extra virgin!"

"I don't care about the virginity of the sesame oil. I don't care if it's total slut sesame oil."

-pb

The Lakota have declared themselves a sovereign, independent nation

On one hand I'm thinking "good for you!" On the other hand I'm thinking "this is probably not going to end well... again."

-pb

So, I'm about to go all grammar nazi on teh intarwebz at large. I'll admit, I use a spell checker frequently when I post, so I avoid a lot of these nasty pitfalls, but since it's built right into my browser and word processor, I expect the rest of the world to conform to my lofty standards. Please get with the program. Spell checkers take care of typos, but they don't conquer grammar.

I subscribe to a bunch of blogs. Subscribe, but don't typically read. Most of these blogs cover the range of my pinko commie leanings (well, to most people they'd seem to, but most of them just piss me off) and I typically skim the titles and first paragraph for noteworthy content. These are national blogs that have become just as mainstream as the mainstream media, and with that massive exposure comes awesome responsibility. I refer, of course, to speaking and writing correctly in your native tongue.

How the hell do you expect me to take you seriously as a pundit if you can't even differentiate between "there," "their" and "they're?" Come on, people. If you can't speak or write in your native language, you shouldn't be strutting around acting like you know anything about anything else. And I'm not talking about the occasional cock-up, I'm talking about endemic failures in the blogosphere's grasp of the English language and its proper usage.

There's the aforementioned inability to distinguish there, their and they're, but there's also the horrific misuse of the apostrophe. ("Its bad that the Senate can't get it's shit together!" and "That Congressman fondle's little boys!") Then, there are the more egregious violations that I can't even give examples of, because they simply involve sentence structures that have (mostly) English words arranged in a style reminiscent of Lorem Ipsum. What the fuck are you saying? Do you even know? Do you even care that you wrote an entire paragraph that doesn't convey an actual thought?!

Now, there's the very real possibility that I have, in the excoriation of the grammatical prowess of my internet peers, committed such an error myself. However, I make an attempt to not fuck up like that on a regular basis, and these people do not. That makes my errors mistakes, and their errors ignorance.

My mother spent the majority of my formative years working as a proofreader, and she's very good at it. I guess that ability rubbed off on me, because these errors simply leap off the screen at me. Years and years of TSR-printed novels helped me hone this skill. The only problem is, I can't turn it off. When I see errors that I can tell aren't just typos, they crawl into my eyes and burrow into my brain. And once they're in, they cloud whatever it is you were trying to say with a burning rage over the fact that you can't even write English.

-pb

This news story which I first saw yesterday afternoon, bears a lot of similarities to last night's CSI.

-pb

Red-haired Neanderthals? Possibly, scientists say

Grampa?

-pb

Because some guy from Ireland already wrote the words for me:

You can run from love, and if it's really love it will find you, catch you by the heel. But you can't be numb for love, the only pain is to feel nothing at all. How can I hurt when I'm holding you?

All my life, I worshipped her, her golden voice, her beauty’s beat. How she made us feel, how she made me real, and the ground beneath her feet, and the ground beneath her feet.

Love makes strange enemies, makes love where love may please. The soul and its striptease, hate brought to its knees. The sky over our head, we can reach it from our bed. You let me in your heart, And out of my head, head…

What we have we’re gonna keep, always, what we’ve lost we don’t need, always.

Tonight, the moon's drawn its curtains, it's a private show, no-one else gonna know. I'm wanting.
Sunlight, sunlight fills my room. It's sharp and it's clear, but nothing at all like the moon.
Tonight the moon is a mirror-ball, light flickers from across the hall. Who'll catch the star when it falls?

And you feel like no-one before, you steal right under my door. And I kneel ‘cos I want you some more. I want the lot of what you got, and I want nothing that you’re not.

Like thunder needs rain, like a preacher needs pain, like tongues of flame, like a sweet stain, need your love, I need your love.
Like a needle needs a vein, like someone to blame, like a thought unchained, like a runaway train, need your love, I need your love.

Love don't need to find a way, you find your own way. I forget that you can stay, and so I say that all roads lead to where you are, all roads lead to where you are.

-pb

To all the Finns, Swedes, Danes, and Nordmenn on my flist (you know who you are), Merry Leif Erikson Day!

-pb

Has anyone else seen these ridiculously funny Sonic Drive-In commercials? What I'd really like to know is why do they keep running these things in the Philadelphia market when the closest Sonic to Philadelphia is in MORGANTOWN, 40 miles away?!

One restaurant in a 50 mile radius of Center City, and it's not even in the metro area. I JUST WANT A PEACH SMOOTHIE, AND I'M NOT DRIVING TO BUMBLEFUCK TO GET ONE. STOP TEMPTING ME.

-pb

Kidman Was Engaged Between Cruise & Urban

Looks like it's time for me to write that tell-all book about that devil-woman left me in the cold after we swore we'd be together for eternity. Damn you, Nicole! Didn't we almost have it all?

-pb

I came to a conclusion last weekend while watching SciFi's show Eureka. Willful Suspension of Disbelief actually has two thresholds, and how close they are to each other goes a long way to determining how good a story is, particularly science fiction.

The first threshold is the level of disbelief the story is asking me to suspend. The second threshold is the level of disbelief the story is requiring me to suspend.

Take for instance this miserable episode of Eureka, a show I'm currently watching like a train wreck. Eureka is a town where the greatest minds in America live and work and have all manner of scientific mishaps. That's the premise. What the show is asking me to suspend is my disbelief that there is this remote community where scientific advancements, perhaps a hundred years off, are commonplace. Alright, I'll buy that.

In this episode, we learn that the town has some sort of electro-magnetic bubble around it. In an effort to meet a deadline, a scientist steals the power source for her 15-year-old daughter's science fair project and integrates it into a security system. This interfaces with the E-M bubble, supercharging it.

Ok, I'll come along. That's what the show has asked me to suspend. Of course, in that request is the idea that this is real science, just used in ways we haven't yet imagined, but fully plausible. Protective E-M field around an entire town? Ok. Could happen. Might be possible now with a big enough power source.

So, now that they've asked me to suspend my disbelief at one level, the story suddenly demands, with no explanation, that I suspend it farther. The E-M field has gone into overdrive, and it begins pulling objects out of orbit.

Mind you, this super-powerful field isn't yanking cars off the road 20 miles away. It's only pulling stuff from orbit. And what happens to this stuff? it falls right on the field like meteorites, interestingly at a number of angles, indicating at least a 180° field of effect. So, you've asked me to believe that scientists are doing all this fun stuff, but then, inexplicably, you've demanded that I ignore the rules of science and just accept your version. Two thresholds. Nowhere near each other. Bad story.

I won't even go into the rest of the episode, because the resolution is even worse. Not to mention the fact that apparently, the writer of the episode hadn't seen a single previous episode and wrote the characters in any way he saw fit. Main character an average everyman surrounded by geniuses? Let's have him act like a retard! What? He's never acted like a retard before? He's probably the smartest character on the show despite not being a genius like everyone else? Bah, we need to make an IQ joke!

And it's not just Eureka. A lot of stories do this, and don't even think about it. Take the movie Twister. You had me pretty much until the end, and then you rode out the center of an F5 tornado by strapping your belt to a pipe, and survived with nary a scratch. Yeah, ok. You asked me to suspend my disbelief at "Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt aren't actually Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, they're part of a team of tornado chasers." That was it. There was no mystery or unreasonable science. But then, whoa, you demand I believe that they're some sort of super-humans capable of defying nature by driving a truck into a mile-wide tornado and then outrunning it. Sorry, you lose. Go back and rethink that ending. It worked great until then.

-pb

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/16/wife.killed.ap/index.html

A man threw his seriously ill wife four stories to her death because he could no longer afford to pay for her medical care

This man's wife was dying from neurological problems and uterine cancer, was partially blind, couldn't walk and weighed 75lbs. He could no longer afford to pay the $700-$800/week for her treatment, had sold off all of their assets. He carried her to the balcony of their apartment, kissed her, and tossed her over.

But there's nothing wrong with our healthcare system.

-pb

So, royalphoenix and sinisterscorpio came by today and shuffled away with the little bundle of mew we found in Northtown Shopping Center on Thursday. Looks likes he's already settled in and happy in his new digs! Having a keh-ten would have been nice, but I'm sure the rest of the zoo would have been less than enthused. I'm glad he's off to a good home!

-pb

So, we went out to dinner at Aman's with the family (if you're looking for Indian, Aman's is the place). As we're leaving, we see this kitten walking around. He's about 6-8 months old, still a bit big in the ears and paws. There's two guys looking at him, and they say he was just pattering around the parking lot. We take a look at him, and he's got a flea collar, but he's pretty dirty. Big spot of what looks like tire dust on his head, paws look pretty dusty. And he's thin. At first thought, I think maybe he's from one of the houses nearby, but I know that's probably not the case unless he's pretty far from home. The closest houses are large apartment blocks that a cat isn't likely to be on the lam from, and the next closest are across 202 and down a bit. That, mixed with the general state of dustiness leads me to believe that this cat was dumped here.

Now, cats are typically untrusting critters, and tend to be a bit standoffish. This one was a bit worked up, obviously hot, but once tactfully approached, very friendly. In fact, this cat is downright mellow.

So, after being told by the two original guys that we "should take him home" (they can't, because they each have two cats, but we've got three and what's one more? Jackasses.), we pack him into the car and head up to Kitty Cottage to see if they'll take him in. We get there at 9. They closed at 8. V. drove and I held him on my lap. Most cats I know climb all over when in the car. Not this one. He just laid their purring his head off.

So, now I've got a kitten in a crate in our bedroom, the only room in the house that is both air conditioned and not going to be occupied with other animals (sorry Persimmon). The earliest we'll be able to get over to Kitty Cottage, due to their hours, is Saturday.

In the meantime, anyone want one of the chillest cats on the planet?

-pb

Heroic Man Rushes Into Movie Theater, Saves 4 Seats

KING OF PRUSSIA, PA—In what eyewitnesses are calling a "selfless display of true courage," moviegoer Michael N. Kincaid, 39, rushed headlong into an empty cineplex Monday to save four seats for the 7:35 p.m. showing of Live Free or Die Hard.

Surely, a giant among men!

-pb

Ok, so my work decided to kaibosh LiveJournal in the filter. The way the filter works, there are two levels of filtering. Level one is it makes you click a button, then lets you through. Level two is it blocks it altogether.

For my first nine months here, when you clicked to pass the level one filter, it gave you 20 minutes to cruise all non-level 2 blocked sites. You could do this eight times per day, for a total of 2:40. About three months ago, they changed that to 45 seconds. No idea how many times per day you can do that, but it's more than eight.

So, LiveJournal was a level one filtered site. Suddenly, it's level two just like MySpace (personal and social networking sites). Piss me off.

I've found a trick that lets me circumvent all filters, but only on the Mac (which I hate using), so I don't do it very often. It's also a pain in the ass and requires me to reboot the PC, which due to our arcane network, takes for fucking ever.

And now, I've just discovered that www.livejournal.com itself is not level two, it's just level one. pbagosy.livejournal.com (and /friends) are level two. So, I can update, but I can't check my friends page or reply to comments. Which explains why I haven't been on LJ land for a bit.

Other things that the filter blocks? The entry for "Sex" on Wikipedia (found that as I was cruising through German numbers). Witchvox (but not the 700 club). Only the Pagan pages on ReligiousTolerance.org (my irony meter asploded).

-pb

So, my birthday is coming up, and if you were at a loss for something to get for me to comemmorate my 30 years on this rock, how about a nice bottle of single malt scotch?

I've had my eye on a nice Auchentoshan Select, but I'd be happy to tour the fine world of Scottish whisky distilleries.

-pb

I typically get spam where they just take everything in front of the @ in my email, and assume that's my name. So, I get a lot of spam for "Paul". Of course, I also get a lot of spam addressed to "Info", "Webmaster" and "Beyondthepale".

I got one today that freaked the hell out of me:

Essie - 100% results.

My cat is getting spammed. SHE DOESN'T NEED VIAGRA, ASSHOLES.



-pb

So, we're running a list-building promotion here, and the integral part of it is a flash demonstration piece that cost a shitload of money to make. Once the prospective customer suffers through 1½ minutes of jabber about our products, they get to an entry form. It's very straightforward, and (after a lot of head-beating on the part of the Flash developer), it tells you very nicely to please, for the umpteenth time, enter a valid fucking email address, asshole. Well, it says it a lot nicer than that.

So, this thing's been live for over a week now. The contest ends on July 10th. Suddenly, someone got freaked out that there's no tech support number listed on the thing. zOMGWTFBBQ!!oneoneeleventy! No phone number?! SWEET JEESUS. Planes will fall from the sky.

So, instead of contacting our tech support or customer support departments, who would just kick it up to us anyway, it's decided that the number will go right to the source. DIRECTLY to the source.

That's me.

This thing is so brain-numbingly easy to figure out that MONKEYS could do it. Not even smart monkeys. Monkeys who's primary pasttime is shit-flinging, jerking off and drooling on themselves. Retarded monkeys.

So, I'm just waaaaaiting for the first sub-primate to call up and say "I can't get this thing to work!"

-pb

Alrighty, folks, I finally got off my ass and put up my professional portfolio. Now, hopefully, I can use it to score myself some freelance gigs. And by freelance, I mean paying, not trade. Because trade hasn't been working out too well. It's hard to use trade stuff as a resumé builder (which is primarily why I was doing trade stuff) if the web site you spent all that time developing never goes live and then you find out that they went and got someone else to do their site for them.

So, if anybody knows anyone that's looking for a freelance web developer, let me know!

-pb

Someone was sending a fax a minute ago from the fax machine around the corner from me. The sound really took me back to those heady, halcyon days when (no lie) I could actually tell the connection speed of a modem just by the sound of the handshake.

Oh yeah, I was totally that geek.

-pb

Can someone please explain to me why pets can't speak basic English with correct syntax? They have no concept of proper forms of posessives ("I has a ball!"), tense, plurals ("yous is forgetting to feeds me"), and spelling ("this fud es barf").

I mean, it's cute and all, but sometimes I just want to go after their little word balloons with a red pen!

-pb

Yes, that's right, ::Godzilla roar::. You know the sound, just hear it in your head coming from my mouth.

Got that?

Ok.

The project that has been sloppily munching on the past three weeks of my life has finally, fucking finally gone live. Now, I will float through the air slinging fireballs at screaming victims while my unholy eunuch choir chants menacingly. Seriously, it's a sight to behold.

In other news, I delivered this to a particulary stupid forum poster:

Well go you! You know, with that pearl of wisdom and a dollar, you can buy anything you want off of the McDonald's Value Menu.

-pb

Want to prepare your kids for the worst possible scenario? Not sure how to do it? Well, folks, I can't help you, other than to point out what not to do.

Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

During the last night of the trip, staff members convinced the 69 students that there was a gunman on the loose. They were told to lie on the floor or hide underneath tables and stay quiet. A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweat shirt, even pulled on locked door.

After the lights went out, about 20 kids started to cry, 11-year-old Shay Naylor said.

"I was like, 'Oh My God,' " she said. "At first I thought I was going to die. We flipped out."

File that under "well, that was fucking stupid".

-pb

I'm sorry, head asploded.

-pb

Well, it's 12pm somewhere.

-pb

Seriously. Fuck you.

So, I signed up for Verizon's FIOS service at the store. They were offering it for the same price as DSL, so I would have been stupid to not take it, right? They came out and installed it, plugged it in to my computer, and flames shot out the back and the computer went VROOOOOM! across teh intarnet. It was awesome.

It was all downhill from there.

Verizon doesn't know its ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to FIOS. Every time I called the FIOS support number, I talked to four people (I'm being literal here).

First person: Hello! FIOS Support! I have no idea what you're talking about! I'll transfer you.
Second person: Hello! Awesome, I can help you. Oh, this isn't my department. I'll transfer you.
Third person: Hello! I can fix your problem. Oh, you have FIOS. I'm DSL. I'll transfer you.
Fourth person: Hello! FIOS Support, this is Star, and I'll be happy to help you.

Star was like my telephone girlfriend. It got to the point where I would just ask for her. This pattern repeated every single time, even if I asked for Star. Star is apparently the only person in the FIOS department that knows what the FIOS department can and cannot do. Incidentally, she was the one who signed me up.

So, over the course of 9 months, Verizon double-billed me 5 times and screwed up my phone service on BLACK FRIDAY. Needless to say, I was on the phone with them quite often.

When I closed the store, I called to disconnect my service. As I was in a two-year contract with them, I had to pay a cancellation fee, but hey. I called to disconnect on June 28th, 2006. They scheduled the disconnect for July 3rd. The phone and internet did not work after that date. I paid a part of the bill on August 16th, and the balance on September 16th.

So, last month, out of the blue, Verizon calls me demanding money for the service that they've just suspended because I haven't paid the bill since September. Naturally, I tell them that they're smoking crack, because they shut the service off in July and I paid it off in full in September. They say that they're going to have to look into this, and they'll get back to me.

They got back to me today, in the form of a fucking collection agency demanding over $300. No word on their investigation into the matter. No call from them saying "pay or we go to collection". No, they just went right to collections.

Well, the collection agency was very nice and filed a dispute on my behalf with Verizon. They told me to call back in a week to see where they were at. Since it's in dispute, it doesn't go against my credit. Either way, I'm calling Verizon and giving them a load of shit to chew on.

And I'm already looking into Comcast's package for the house. Fuck you Verizon, if you can't even give my business the goddamned common courtesy of not fucking me in the asshole every goddamn chance you get, I'm sure as hell not keeping your shitty ass no-customer service-having motherfucking wires in my house.

And yes, that's how I really feel.

-pb

So, I was waiting for victoria_fusion to get home the other day, and I stepped out on the porch to sit in the nice air. I looked down the block, and saw some blonde woman in a strappy tank top open the passenger door of her car. I couldn't see her face, but my first thought was "hey, who's the new hot white chick on the block?" Then she turned around, and it was victoria_fusion getting the dogs out of the car, and I was all like "Oh, score, that's my WIFE! Bonus!"

=P

Anyways, she's taking a test today, something about the Klingon moon from Trek VI blowing up or something, I don't know, but it's sure to interrupt Sulu's tea, so send her some good vibes!

-pb

Here's a shot from the trip to Montreal:



Sorry for the blurriness, but I was taking that on my camera phone while I behind the wheel. Foreign countries are GREAT! They've got the most whacked out speed limits!

-pb

So, back in February, I made a post concerning my confusion over the unusual amount of Michigan license plates I see on the road. Before I made the post, victoria_fusion suggested that every person from Michigan that we see here is actually going to Ikea. This came out of the time that we went to the Ikea in Conshohocken Plymouth Meeting and saw around 10 Michigan plates in the parking garage.

I rejected this argument out of hand, because the Michigan cars I see on the Turnpike aren't always headed in the direction of Ikea. A lot of the time, they're headed towards New Jersey. So, it couldn't possibly be true. If they're from Michigan and there's just here for Ikea, then they'd be headed West... right?

So, on our way to Montreal, we're going up the Garden State Parkway, and I see a pickup truck with Michigan plates. "I can't get away from them!" I comment. victoria_fusion says "Maybe they're headed to Ikea!"

I was just saying "No, they're not headed..." when we came around a bend and an Ikea came into view.

She says "See! They're on a tour, hitting all the Ikeas on the Eastern Seaboard!"

My next words were "Your theory scares me, not necessarily because it's true, but because now, I can't disprove it."

-pb