Category: Commentary

What I think about stuff…

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The Best (or Worst?) Party Ever

It was the 80s. We were the punks, skaters, goths and New Wavers of our high school, which was dominated by rednecks and jocks. There was something of an “us vs. them” mentality which meant that we often hung out as a group, even if we otherwise didn’t get along. And so it was that I went to this skater kid’s 17th birthday party. This guy was the very definition of “tosser” or “spaz”, and I couldn’t stand him. But because he was “one of us”, I felt obliged to go.

Since the party was hosted by his mom, most of us politely either snuck flasks in or left six packs in our cars so we could come back and chug one (or two) in the darkened street. But not Birthday Boy. He’d only done acid once before, and for some reason he decided to take 4-5 hits that night.

His recently divorced mom had just started a new job, and her new boss lived fairly close by, so he decided to stop by and wish Skater Kid a happy birthday. But Skater Kid was tripping way too hard to deal with that shit just then, so he took off running. Through the house. Around the house. Some of us were sitting on or around a sofa in the basement rec room and ZOOM! Skater Kid would run through, hauling ass to the back door. Mom and Boss would follow a few seconds later, with Skater Kid’s mom begging him to “come back here” and asking “what is wrong with you??”. They’d follow Skater Kid out the back door, and we’d go back to our conversation… until Skater Kid would come hauling ass through the room again a few minutes later.

This went on for – no joke – a half hour or so. Then Skater Kid got the brilliant idea of taking off through the woods. By then, everyone at the party knew what was going on, so as soon as some of the smokers outside said that he’d gone into the woods, the entire party went out to the driveway to view the spectacle. Skater Kid’s mom and her boss found flashlights and started following him through the woods.

Most of the 40 or 50 of us could barely contain our giggles as Mom and Boss would be certain Skater Kid was over “here”, but we’d see tree branches move or catch a glimpse of Skater Kid over “there”. We were all dumb kids having a laugh, but eventually the crowd turned on Skater Kid. Skater Kid went from “Hero of the Year” to “Dumbass of the Year” in less than sixty seconds. We started helping Mom and Boss track him down. Eventually Skater Kid emerged from the woods, and instead of getting support from his friends, a couple dudes tackled him and held him down until Mom and Boss came over. Mom announced that the party was over, and I’ll never forget the look on poor Skater Kid’s face – pinned to the ground, eyes as big as saucers – when he finally figured out that the party was indeed over.

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Taco Bell’s Wi-Fi Sucks

My local Taco Bell is in a Sprint “dead zone”. I get voice, and can sometimes get 3G, but never LTE. So I often try Taco Bell’s free wi-fi… which sucks.

I discovered this several months ago. We’d decided on Taco Bell for dinner, and I was tasked with picking it up. Since nearly everything at Taco Bell looks exactly the same in the wrapper, I’ve gotten in the habit of doing two separate orders. This way my GF’s mostly-vegetarian stuff doesn’t get mixed in with my steak and chicken stuff… ‘cos it’s always hilarious when someone thinks she’s biting in to a bean burrito and gets a mouthful of ground beef instead.

Anyway, since I have two orders, it’s easier to go inside than deal with the drive-thru. And it was Saturday night, so the place was busy as hell. I’d been watching a college football game at home. I don’t remember what game it was, but it wasn’t important enough to delay going to Taco Bell, but was important enough for me to want to know the score once I was there. So I whipped out my phone, got on Taco Bell’s free Wi-Fi… and I saw this:

Screenshot_2015-05-09-19-38-34

Yes, Taco Bell uses FortiGuard, a web filtering service often used at companies you wouldn’t work for. So I tried CBSSports.com. Big surprise:

Screenshot_2015-05-09-19-39-15

OK, so sports of any kind are out. Well, how about seeing what’s up on Instagram, then?

Screenshot_2015-05-09-19-35-53

Sweet! Just for kicks, let’s see if Google works:

Screenshot_2015-05-09-19-39-55

Oh nice. As you probably know, Google defaults to HTTPS now, so my browser wanted a certificate. But FortiGuard uses shitty self-signed certificates. I wouldn’t dream of using Taco Bell’s wi-fi to do some online banking in any case, but this just screams “man in the middle” attack, no?

So… Taco Bell, please fix your crappy wi-fi that blocks every site a consumer on the go might actually want to visit, and seems designed for malware and hack attacks. It’s awfully strange that Taco Bell – who built an empire on the backs of drunks and stoners – blocks popular websites, but the the wi-fi at Chick-Fil-A – with their reputation as gay-hating holy rollers – doesn’t seem to block anything.

[Note: although the story is set several months ago, the screen caps were taken last week. They’re also out of order relative to the story – see the clock in the corner of the pics – because I didn’t actually start taking the screen caps until I became frustrated with the service and “retraced” my steps via screen cap.]

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Unbundled Cable Will Never Work

A la carte cable – where you pay only for the channels you want – sounds like a great idea. But, as I’ve been saying for years, it’ll never happen, because that’s not how cable TV works.

Right now, anything from 2¢ to $6 of your cable bill goes to each channel per month. Syfy, for instance, costs 27¢ per subscriber per month. But if people could drop Syfy, how many people would, and how much would Syfy need to charge remaining subscribers? Example: under the current system, if Time Warner Cable has 20m subscribers and Syfy’s carriage fee is 27¢/month, TWC pays Syfy $5,400,000 per month. But if TWC went a la carte and 90% of TWC households dropped Syfy, Syfy would only get $540,000/month at the current rate. Syfy would have to charge their remaining subscribers $2.70/month just to get the same amount of revenue from TWC as before. But every increase they make will surely drop the total number of overall viewers: how many people out there love Syfy so much that they’d pay $5.99/month for it? $8.99/month? $10.99/month? $15.99/month? So Syfy gets caught in a death spiral of needing more money per subscriber, but being unable to raise their subscription fee because they’ll lose subscribers. And while going from 27¢ to $2.70/month doesn’t sound like a big increase, keep in mind that it’s going to happen to EVERY CHANNEL ON YOUR CABLE LINEUP. This might not be a big deal for single people, or couples with very narrow interests. But for a family of four – where Dad wants ESPN and NBC Sports, Mom wants HGTV and Food Network, Teenage Daughter wants E! and MTV, and Junior wants Nick and Disney – it quickly adds up. 

So you, the consumer, will get screwed over in the end, ‘cos you’ll end up paying almost as much for a la carte as you do now, only now you’d get 17 channels instead of 200+ channels. Don’t believe me? CNBC ran the numbers; and found that a 17 channel bundle of cable networks could cost anywhere from $16 to $248 per month. And that’s not including broadcast networks, which are a double-whammy for cable providers: providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable are required by law to carry local networks, but since 1992’s  Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act, networks can require payment to rebroadcast that programming. In most a la carte scenarios I’ve seen, cable customers would have to buy a basic “network package” for $25 to $35 a month, then pay anywhere from $2 to $25 per month for each additional cable channel. So a package with just your local broadcast networks and ESPN could cost around $60/month. That’s about the base fee most people pay for their cable now (not including taxes, fees, and equipment charges). And that’s just ESPN – it doesn’t include all of its related networks like ESPN 2 or ESPN U or ESPN Classic. If you included all those, your cable bill would be $112.52/month… just in channel fees. Of course, none of this includes taxes, fees, equipment rental fees, program guide fees, Internet service or home phone service.

And that, my friends, is why a la carte cable simply won’t work.

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Nostalgic Childhood Scars

A couple days ago, a Reddit user posted this picture of a circa 1976 McDonald’s hand puppet toy:

McDonald's puppet

Of course I remembered those things! All of the McDonaldland characters had a puppet, but the distribution of the characters wasn’t equal. Grimace was by far the most common, and Ronald McDonald was the rarest. So a kid with a Ronald McDonald puppet was king of the neighborhood! Another thing I remember is your hand getting really hot and sweaty inside what amounted to a large plastic glove.

Anyway, I got to thinking about it, and I recalled Dolley Madison’s licensing deal with Peanuts. Around the same time McDonald’s was giving away their puppets, Dolley Madison was giving away Peanuts “balloons” inside every box of Zingers and Koo Koos. And just like the McDonald’s puppets, the distribution of the Peanuts balloons was skewed, too. I “made” my mom buy me something like 25 boxes of the treats that summer. I got a dozen Peppermint Patty balloons, six Charlie Browns, 1 Linus and 1 Schroeder. But then, one magical day, Mom came home from the store with a box of Zingers… with Snoopy inside:

Snoopy Balloon
(click to embiggen)

HOORAY! After all that time, I finally had the Snoopy balloon, and Snoopy was bad ass! I was gonna be the King of the Neighborhood at long last! My five year-old self rejoiced!

I eagerly blew up the balloon, and turned to show Gordon, my next door neighbor, my triumph. Before I could even finish turning all the way around, Gordon, being the little bastard he was, slapped his hands together between the balloon, like he was trying to kill a fly. The balloon burst into 2 or 3 pieces. I’d had my precious Snoopy balloon for a grand total of 6 seconds before Gordon destroyed it. Some 38 years later and I’m still like, “FUCK YOU, GORDON!” Little bastard.

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The Funny Names of At

The “at sign” – often called “at symbol” or just “at” – is sometimes called an “atpersand” by pedants or, very rarely, a “strudel”. People who actually care about such things often call it the “commercial at”, from its use in commerce and accounting. This is because the symbol was used to mean “at a rate of”, such as “client says to sell 5,000 bushels of corn @ $6/bushel”.

At Sign

Once you get away from English, things start to get interesting.

In Swedish, the symbol is called “snabel-a”, which means “elephant trunk-a”. Less commonly it’s called a “kanelbulle”, which means “cinnamon bun”. Which is just about the cutest thing ever! I think I’ll start calling them “cinnamon buns” myself! Disappointingly, Sweden’s IT people generally just call it “at” for brevity’s sake.

In French it’s called “arobase”, which comes from “a rond bas” (literally “lowercase round a”), a typographical term. In Quebec French, it’s often called a “commercial”, from its original use in commerce in English-speaking Canada and the United States. Although the “official” term in Quebec French is “arobas”, you often hear TV announcers and commercials use the Metropolitan French term.

Other languages seem to enjoy naming the symbol after animals. In Dutch (and related languages, like Afrikaans) it’s called a “apenstaartje”, which means “monkey tail”. Polish calls it a “malpa”, which means “monkey”. The Greeks call it a “papaki”, which means “duckling”, because the symbol is said to resemble a cartoon duck. In Finnish, the symbol seems to resemble cats: “kissanhäntä” (cat’s tail”) and “miukumauku” (“meow-meow”). And the Russians call it a “sobaka”, which means “dog”. And in Welsh it’s often called a malwen or malwoden, or “snail”.

But the relentless expansion of the English Empire continues. In Thailand, India, Latvia, Indonesia, Georgia (the country), Lithuania, Germany, Iceland, Croatia, Estonia, Hong Kong and Macau and the Irish-speaking parts of Ireland it’s just called “at”, or some local variation, like “et” or “ett” or “ag”.

There’s still room for fun, though: in Greenlandic and Inuit, the sign is called “aajusaq” which means “something that looks like an A”.

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Worlds of Wonder

Hi everybody! I just want to take a minute today to share a Kickstarter campaign that’s close to my heart.

One of my bestest buds in the whole world is trying to open “Worlds of Wonder”, a sci-fi\fantasy bookstore and bar. My friend has been a sci-fi-fantasy nerd since… forever, and has 20+ years of experience opening and managing bookstores. He wants Worlds of Wonder to be a book and comic book shop… but he also wants it to be a place where you can just come and hang out… maybe have a beer and watch some anime on a big screen, or sit on a comfy sofa and play some D&D or Settlers of Catan or what have you.

Unfortunately, I don’t exactly know where he wants to locate this place, I know he’s only looking within the Charlotte city limits (so, not a “where ‘Charlotte’ actually means Mt. Holly or Huntersville” situation), and that he’s narrowed it down to a few locations, mostly on the west side. If I learn more I’ll post it here.

My friend really is a great guy, and he deserves a chance to make something awesome here in Charlotte. If you like sci-fi, fantasy, role playing and\or beer, why not take a couple of moments to have a look-see at their Kickstarter campaign and maybe back them? They have some pretty sweet rewards!

Worlds of Wonder Kickstarter Campaign

Also, here are links to their website and Facebook page:

Worlds of Wonder website
Worlds of Wonder Facebook page

Thanks so much for helping my friend build something really cool in such a cool city!

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Sad News from Myrtle

The Gay Dolphin Gift Cove is a very cheesy gift store in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I made my first visit there in 2009 with some friends – read my review here.

While there, we discovered this ugly-ass pillow:

Gay Dolphin

We went back in 2011, and the pillow was still there:

Myrtle 01 047
(click to embiggen)

And the pillow was still there when Lisa and I went in 2012:

still_there
The Saddest Pillow

My friend William went there earlier this year and reported that the ugly pillow was nowhere to be found. Our hearts sank. How could the ugly pillow be gone? Who would have bought it?

In my heart of hearts, I knew the pillow was still there… William just didn’t look hard enough. So when we went back to Myrtle this week, I searched the store high and low for it, but the ugly pillow was gone. Lisa thinks the store put it in one of their infamous “grab bags”, and she’s probably right. But I want to think that the sad pillow is still there, waiting on a sucker someone to buy it.

*     *     *

On a happier note, the Atlanta Braves Nacho Cheese Gift Pack is STILL THERE:

Braves Nacho Gift Set
(click to enlarge)

I’m 99% certain this is the exact same gift pack I referred to in my original review from 2009, and pictured in this post. It has the same “best by” date of 08/31/2008, and has the same 12/06 date code on the price tag:

Braves Gift Pack Close Up
(Click to enlarge: you know you want to!)

Meaning, of course, that this “gift” pack has been sitting on the shelf at Gay Dolphin for almost 8 YEARS!

WHO WANTS NACHOS?

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Advice for Bloggers

For some reason, I enjoy reading food blogs. It’s kind of inexplicable, because food blogs are the most likely to drive me insane. If you’re thinking about starting a blog – especially a food blog – please read this before you start:

HIRE A PROOFREADER – If you want to get payed for riting on you’re blog, yoo shuld hire to proofreeder, or at least have sumone reed you’re stuff before yoo post it up their. I mean, come on, folks… I’m the King of the Rambling Sentence, but I *do* have a firm grasp of grammar basics like “there\their\they’re” and “your\you’re”. It’s amazing to me that some people want to write, but can’t even get past minor stuff like this. There’s a snack blog out there where the author constantly uses the word “yea” (as in, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”) instead of “yeah” (as in, “yeah, these are good.”). I want to stab that guy in the eyeballs… repeatedly. To cope, I have to read all his posts in a mock English bishop voice: “Yea, though Frito Lay hath given unto man these Cheesy Garlic Bread chips, I enjoy them not, for thy flavors offend every living thing that creepeth.”

GET TO THE POINT – I’ll admit that I like writing stories where the first couple of paragraphs seem to have nothing to do with the title. I haven’t actually checked, but I’m certain that every History Blog article starts that way. But the other day I was at a site that reviews Trader Joe’s products. The average review seemed to be around 1,000 words, and 100 to 500 of those words often had nothing to do with the product. If the review was about a frozen food item, then half the review might be about being stuck in traffic, and how traffic has gotten much worse since Barry Schoch took over as state DOT secretary, and why can’t our state have FastPass lanes on toll roads like other states, how SiriusXM has gone to hell since the merger, and why Subaru can’t build a reliable transmission, and.. oh yeah, getting home late was why they were reviewing the frozen item… which was “just OK”, by the way.

Continue reading “Advice for Bloggers”

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20 Things I Love About Charlotte

A Facebook friend recently posted a list of his top 5 favorite things about living in Charlotte, North Carolina. I decided to do my own list… but 5 became 10, 10 became 15, and 15 became 20. You know how it goes.

And so, without further ado… my 20 favorite things about Charlotte!

20) RICHARDS’ BP – OK, so a “good mechanic” isn’t just a Charlotte thing. But here in Belmont we’ve got this independent little garage that’s AWESOME. If there’s a problem with your car, and one fix costs $20 and the other $200, they’ll ALWAYS go the $20 route, unless there’s a good reason not to. They also trust us: “just drive it for a few days and see if the fix we tried works. If not, come back and we’ll try something else. If it does, stop by and pay us whenever”. I’ve been to dozens of repair shops in my life, and this truly is the only one I’ve ever trusted.

19) PRICE’S CHICKEN COOP (link) – No joke: it’s the best fried chicken in the whole world. There are a couple of downsides though. The main one is that it’s take-out only. If you want the hottest, freshest chicken goodness, you have to eat it in your car… especially if you like the potato rounds they give you as a side; they’re not very good after they cool off. Also, they’re cash-only, which is weird in 2014, especially since this place seems to be so big on feeding entire offices.

18) BRING BACK THE BUZZ (link) – The people of Charlotte loved the Hornets… but they really didn’t like the owner, George Shinn. So there were mixed emotions when Shinn moved the Hornets to New Orleans. But then Charlotte got a new NBA team, the Bobcats. But their owner, Bob Johnson, was kind of a jerk, too. Fans wanted the old team back… they wanted the Hornets. So a small but passionate group of fans began a campaign to bring back the name (and if you wonder why Charlotte loves the “Hornets” name so much, read this story on my History Blog). They Facebooked and Tweeted. They hassled the local media about it and made themselves hoarse by going to Bobcats games and chanting “CHAR-LOTTE HOR-NETS!” as loud as they could for as long as they could. And, in the end, they won.

17) MIDWOOD SMOKEHOUSE (link) – There’s this “thing” about barbecue places: fans are always looking for “authentic”, and in the case of barbecue that often means an 80 year-old lean-to located well away from a city, preferably run by an old black man named Gus who’s ornery as hell and only open two days a week. But if you want a normal barbecue restaurant, this is the place. The pork’s pretty good, but the brisket’s divine. The bacon wrapped smoked jalapenos might be the best appetizer I’ve ever eaten, and this is the one place where I always get dessert: warm pecan cobbler! They also have lots of local beers and not a lot of attitude: you don’t have to be “this cool” to eat there.

16) ACCENTS – Heel or Hill? Still or Steel? Pen or Pin? I lived here for two years before I found out that a city in the western part of the state is “Blowing Rock”, not “Boiling Rock”.

15) LOCAL BREWERIES – Truth be told, I’m growing weary of bars with beer menus the size of phone books, or beers that take longer for the waitress to describe than for me to actually drink. But a healthy local brewing scene is good for everybody. I really like NoDa Brewing and Birdsong… but in a lot of cases, I Just need a Guinness or a Natty Greene to be happy.

14) NODA (link) – Not the NoDa neighborhood itself. I mean, NoDa is cool and all, and it reminds me of a slightly rough around the edges Virginia Highland circa 1984. But what I really mean is “Sunday Funday in NoDa”: hanging out with my friends… eating tots at Solstice… playing games at The Blind Pig before all the douchebags show up. It’s a great day!

13) THE GERMAN BURGER AT SOLSTICE TAVERN – Truly the most underrated burger in the city. It’s Solstice’s standard beef patty, topped with bacon, sauerkraut and a homemade beer cheese sauce, and served on a pretzel bun. Now if you don’t like that sort of thing, you’re not going to like this. But if what I just described sounds delicious… yes, yes it is! Add some tots on the side and you’ve got a hell of a meal!

Continue reading “20 Things I Love About Charlotte”

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BREAKING NEWS: Becker RESIGNS!

This was just posted on Yahoo! News:

GSU President Resigns; University Future Unclear

ATLANTA (API) – Embattled Georgia State University president Mark Becker, who agreed to a controversial “partnership” between Georgia Public Broadcasting and WRAS, the school’s student-run radio station, has resigned. According to Don Hale, the school’s vice-president of public relations, the resignation will take effect immediately.

At a hastily arranged press conference this afternoon, Becker announced that he would become the next president of Georgia Tech.

“The first thing I plan to do is sell off that silly car they drive around campus… the Wrecky Rambler? What do you call it? Anyway, my main man Bill Nigut collects old cars, and I think he’d like it,” Becker said.

“Then there’s that old whistle thing. I’ll give that to my pal Teya Ryan. It would make a great accent piece for T-Dog’s drawing room, plus she could use the whistle to summon ‘interns’ to bring her coffee or massage her feet,” Becker said, laughing.

When asked about his long-term plans for Georgia Tech, Becker had several suggestions.

“Well, there’s some kind of hot dog stand just across the interstate. I believe we could acquire the 6 acre site and turn it into a small stadium, which we could then lease to Georgia State at a usurious rate. After all, even a 3,000 seat stadium could fit Georgia State’s season ticket holders 8 times over.”

“We’re also looking into converting Bill Dodd Field into a Target. We feel students would benefit from an on-campus shopping experience, plus we could force students to work there for free under some kind of internship program.”

Becker became agitated when a reporter asked why the proposed Target store would be a franchise location owned by a holding company called Becker-Ryan Investments, LLC.

“Look, if you can think of a better way for me to acquire the massive amount of capital necessary to buy the High Museum so I can sell off all of Atlanta’s cultural treasures and turn that building into my personal residence, I’m all ears!”

When asked if he had any regrets about his time at Georgia State, Becker was wistful.

“I only wish I had come here years ago. I could have demolished useless music venues like the 588 Club, the Urbanplex and the Chambray Club. I could have turned them into some sort of corporate franchises that completely lack any local flavor. I could have stopped the Uptown Music Festival. I could have turned that Merry Mack’s restaurant into a Public Storage site. I could have even bought the Fellini’s Pizza chain and converted them into a quick service restaurant concept I’ve been working on called Uwe Boll’s House of Schweinskopfsülze. There are just… so many ways I could have destroyed Atlanta’s culture. It makes me sad to think about it.”

It wasn’t all sad news, though. Becker announced that his investment company had just completed the purchase of Fat Matt’s Rib Shack, an Atlanta institution.

“We’re going to close Fat Mike’s for a few weeks as we convert it to Skinny Mark’s Unflavored Gelatin Yurt. Atlantans are going to love it!”  

Becker’s press secretary later indicated that he is in talks with University of Georgia president Jere W. Morehead to purchase the legendary hedges at Sanford Stadium.

“Lord Becker says his front lawn is looking a bit ‘shabby’.