Villains!

Here's a rough transcript of a phone call I got around 10am.

AUTOMATED MESSAGE Blah blah blah car warranty blah blah blah expire soon blah blah press one to speak to an operator blah blah blah

Andrew presses one.

OPERATOR Blah blah blah --

ANDREW
Never, ever, ever call this number again, ever.

OPERATOR
...um...your warranty...

ANDREW
Ever.

OPERATOR
Are you sure?

ANDREW
I am absolutely sure. Never call me again.

OPERATOR
Why?

ANDREW
Because you're scam artists. Take me off your list.

OPERATOR
I'm not taking you off the list.

ANDREW
Take me off the list.

OPERATOR
I'm not taking you off the list. (click)

ANDREW
Unbelievable.

And yet it happened. Okay, so I could've been smoother about that. Next time I'm going to identify myself as Colonel Furdell, and inform them that cold-calling a secret military installation is grounds for black-ops firebombing.

Imagine Denholm Elliott in the Indiana Jones movies, but less educated, and that's basically me

A couple of tourists from Chicago made the truly idiotic mistake of asking me for directions today while I was walking downtown. Driving home from work, I realized that, while I didn't technically send them in the exact opposite cardinal direction that they were going for, it still was a far cry from what you would call the "correct" direction. I may have also named cross streets that neither cross, nor perhaps exist.

I'd feel bad, but come on -- they should have known better! My inability to grasp concepts like "north" and "east" should have been clue #1.

Seriously, how did this happen to me? Which part of my brain didn't develop right, so that everyone else has this skill that I've never quite been able to master -- this "knowing where the hell you are" skill, not to mention the "knowing where the hell you're going and how to get there" set.

"I'm doing this as hard as I can"

I don't know why this isn't getting more media coverage -- certainly my station hasn't mentioned it.

Advertisements for the Cartoon Network, involving Mooninites flipping you off, were placed in several major cities. Only in Boston were they assumed to be bombs.

The arrested guys held a press conference in which they refused to answer questions that weren't about hairstyles of the 1960s. (No, really.)

Most insightful quote: 'Assistant Attorney General John Grossman called the light boards "bomb-like" devices and said that if they had been explosive they could have damaged transportation infrastructure in the city.'

These "bomb-like" devices were essentially Lite-Brites with cartoon characters on them. So I guess they were bomb-like in that they, too, were solid matter.

Oh, it's much worse than you think

I'll boil down my travel travails as much as I can to get to the good parts...

As I already mentioned, it was my second leg's half hour lateness that caused me to miss the last flight out of Vegas to Eugene. Around midnight I was given a hotel voucher and told to be back by 5:30am for a morning Delta flight to Eugene via Salt Lake City, so with five hours to kill, naturally I went to Mandalay and played some poker.

Five hours later and $115 richer (assuming you, like me, prefer to count taxi fare as a loss) I returned to the airport. Unfortunately, I was rejected from the Delta flight because of a clerical error -- apparently my ticket number was in the US Airways format and not the Delta format. Standing in about six lines solved this problem -- but then the Delta people told me I was too late for that flight, and they wouldn't be able to get me to Eugene until 7pm or so.

US Airways told me that I could wait that long, or I could hop on a flight to Phoenix, where I would be on standby for a noon flight to Eugene. I expressed concern that, if I didn't make it onto the plane (since they're always overbooked on the holidays anyway), I'd just be stuck in Phoenix for an extra six hours, which would be infinitely worse than being stuck in Vegas with an unused hotel voucher for that long. However I was told that my chances were good. So off to Phoenix I went.

That plan, of course, sucked. I asked for a hotel voucher in Phoenix (because at this point I had been travelling for around 20 hours and needed a nap), but was turned down. I had to sleep on hard chairs in the sunlight while little kids squealed all around me. It was 100% lame.

Possible ideas:

• Pneumatic tubes. You know, like at the bank, but with people. I think that's how they travelled from city to city in Starship Troopers.


• I have a theory that we can bend spacetime by putting something really massive, like a black hole, maybe in the Midwest somewhere. That would bring the two coasts a lot closer together, but maybe only for a few nanoseconds before we all die.


• Teleportation, specifically as seen in The Fly. As in the Southpark episode in which Mr. Garrison invents a new mode of travel that operates by penetrating your mouth and rectum: "Well, it beats dealing with airline companies."

Bank of America: Evil?

Julia and I each just received new credit cards in the mail from Bank of America, to replace the old ones. Problem: we never had old ones, even though their convincing letter claims we've been cardholders since 2003.

I called BofA to get an explanation, which was, of course, not forthcoming. In the end they decided that what I had received was probably a fraud -- but I'm not buying it. If it's a fraud, it's the most sophistocated and well-financed fraud of all time. In other words, I think BofA was trying to scam me into activating credit cards that have annual fees by hoping I was too addle-minded to realize I don't already have an account with them. Bastards.

Have they been doing this to anyone else, or is it just us?

My theory on why Cheney shot his friend

From what I've read, Cheney's 78-year-old hunting partner was an old pal and a hefty contributor to the Dark Side. So no, I don't think this is all part of some awesome conspiracy to shoot him on purpose out of hate.

Here's how I think it went down...

Cheney sees some quail off to his left. He turns, shotgun raised. These flightless birds are going down.

The birds are moving farther to the left. Cheney turns a little more and his finger starts its gentle squeeze on the trigger. Suddenly, Cheney notices his pal in the extremely bright orange vest, standing in between him and some birds. Some birds that Cheney has vowed must die.

So I figure, in this split second, our VP had to weigh his options. "Yes, I'll injure and perhaps even kill an old man and staunch supporter. But if I don't fire, those birds won't taste sweet death. What to do?" And naturally, being as he is completely evil, he fired.

An Open Letter to the Cell Phone People

Dearest Cell Phone People,

It's bad enough that I have to sit through my friends and relatives telling me oh so insightfully to leave a message after the tone. But then I get this voice, this Gladys Stevens of Omaha Nebraska voice, telling me that I can stay on the freakin' line and wait like an idiot if I want to leave a message. You fools. My dumbass friend or relative just told me to leave a message after the beep. I get that. What does it even mean to leave a "call back number"? Doesn't everyone's cell phone tell them who called anyway?

I hate you hate you hate you. I suspect you had a hand in the 2wenty. And possibly other atrocities throughout history that will go unnamed. I have calculated that at least 2 hours of my life have been wasted listening to your inane female robot voice prattle on about my message-leaving options. That's two hours I could have spent watching Conan the Barbarian, which is an excellent movie with a really good soundtrack. I'm playing the score in my head right now.

Take that, cell phone people.

Yours in anger,
Andrew Furdell

The MGM DVD thing, and why everyone is stupid

Maybe you've heard that a long list of MGM DVDs, supposedly widescreen, are actually chop jobs -- pan 'n' scan transfers cut down to look like real widescreen. It's a good thing I'm here to tell you that's totally stupid.

Pan and scan, for those of you who don't know, is a method of adapting widescreen movies for standard-size TVs. You can't see the whole image at once, so if the important stuff is going on at the left side, we just paaaan over to the left. It's an awful way to watch movies -- I have an old pan and scan Alien VHS that illustrates nicely how awful it is.

So consider this: if your copy of The Princess Bride was really a chop job,

• It wouldn't look nearly as pretty;


• Andre the Giant's head would be cut out of most shots;


• thousands of people would have noticed three years ago; and


• the director's commentary would have been a bit more hostile.

Oh yeah, and: why the hell would MGM go to the trouble of making fake widescreen, when it has real widescreen prints? Duh.

So what's really going on? It turns out the complaint has more to do with the packaging than the DVD transfer.

It seems the packaging on those DVDs claim that widescreen format provides up to 50% more image than standard-format. But some movies are originally shot in a less wide aspect ratio than they intend to be shown theatrically. In other words, sometimes standard format actually shows you more than widescreen -- but it's stuff you weren't supposed to see. Standard format versions of those movies tend to have a lot of boom mikes at the top of the screen.

So in other words, completely frivolous. And no, you don't have to send your DVDs back. So, why do I think everyone is stupid?

Because the things I mentioned should be totally obvious. A widescreen made from a pan and scan would have, what, maybe 40% of the original image? On a close-up you'd just see someone's nose! Come on people! Use your noggins.

Freedom takes another victim

Snopes says it's true, so I guess it must be. Derek Kieper, a 21-year-old senior from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, wrote an editorial for the Daily Nebraskan pointing out that, by gum, brave men died for our right to drive a ton of metal at great speeds without taking the proper safety precautions, and he, for one, was not going to let an oppressive, totalitarian government such as ours tell him to wear a seatbelt.

So, when his friend's Ford Explorer slipped on an icy interstate and rolled into a ditch, what do you think was going through young Derek's mind? That's right: the windshield. Ouch.

Why you should not shop at Best Buy

So I get home yesterday, and I sit down to watch some TV. Those of you who have come to my home and mooched off of my hospitality already know that my set is a widescreen projection TV. No, I'm not bragging; these details are actually relevant to the story.

So I turn on the TV, and lo and behold, there is a spider on the screen. A minor annoyance, to be sure! With courage in my heart, I arose from the couch to vanquish my eight-legged foe. I tried to shoo him off the screen, but it didn't take. That was when I realized: the spider was inside the television. Eeeeek!!

I tried tapping the screen. That made her move her legs a little, but all in all she wasn't too perturbed. (Yes, this was clearly a girl spider. Like Charlotte.) Realizing that my movie-watching enjoyment would be lessened by the ever-present spider, I did something completely futile: I called the lying dipshits at Best Buy, who I am not at all Google-bombing.

How are they lying dipshits, you ask? To answer this question, we must travel back in time to November 2002, when I purchased the set from an Atlanta Best Buy. I also bought a 4-year, $300 protection plan, even though my brother told me I would be stupid to do so. Hey, look, the sales representative was very convincing, okay?

Look, I?m willing to admit when I?m stupid, and I admit: I was stupid. I should have realized something was up, because another sales rep told me the television would only work with satellite TV (which required more hardware and a service subscription), even though common sense told me that nobody would manufacture a television that isn?t compatible with cable. I knew he was lying, at least. I also might have benefited from a more close read of the protection plan, which plainly states that it does not cover intentional or accidental damage, and then proceeds to list a whole lot of other things it doesn?t cover, including ? natch ? insect infestation, which I promise I?ll get back to shortly. The point is, I wasn?t jaded enough yet to realize that total strangers were lying to my face.

Fast forward six months. My roommate insists on using the set?s 4:3 aspect ratio mode to watch regular TV. Neither of us realizes that excessive use of this feature will lead to image burn. Sure enough, the left and right sides of the screen are oddly more yellow than the middle part. Assuming ? and I want to point out that I?m really putting myself out there by posting this, and I don?t need you to make fun of me when I?m in such an emotionally vulnerable position ? assuming that the bulbs needed to be rotated (oh god), I called the Best Buy people. This is when I was informed that the protection plan really only covers, and I quote, ?lightning strike.? I didn?t ask if it also covers lottery-winning.

Understand, gentle reader, that this television was an extravagant purchase, by which I mean ?more than I should have spent, on anything.? So when I looked at that screen with its yellowing sides and realized how much I had spent to watch movies that way, tears welled up in my eyes. Tears?of righteous rage.

It took about three days of phone-calling, ?I want to speak to your supervisor?ing, and all the whining you would expect from a person like me, before I finally got on the phone with someone in a position to make actual decisions. It was the guy who ultimately decides whether a customer gets a replacement unit or not.

What I loved about this guy was that he had emotional depth. None of Best Buy?s other phone people seemed to care about me or my situation, but this guy seemed genuinely depressed. I imagined him, sitting in his office at a distribution center somewhere in the boonies, and in my imagination he looked like a human, live-action Droopy Dog. I told him the whole story.

Seriously, I was almost ready to give him a refund. If the TV hadn?t been so damned expensive I might have let it go, but instead, when he was at his weakest, I did the unthinkable: I dropped the ?you don?t want to lose a valued customer? bomb. I hated myself even as I did it, but my replacement set was on the way. And that was the end of that aside.

So getting back to my more recent problem, which you may or may not remember was a spider behind the screen. I called the lying dipshits, and was promptly reminded that my protection plan does not cover insect infestation.

Long story short: I figured out on my own how to open up the set, and discovered that inside is a magical world of lights, wires, a big-ass mirror, and spider webs; I dispatched of the spider and scooped out about a handful of webbing, which was gross; and I charged myself $90. Then, I renewed my vow to tell the world to never shop at Best Buy.

If you absolutely must buy something from Best Buy, remember always the three rules.

1. Never believe a word the sales representatives say. They are, in ways you can not imagine, lying dipshits. In fact, if one of them tries to talk to you, kick him or her in the shin and spit in his or her eye.
2. For the love of God, do not buy the protection plan. It protects nothing and is a total scam. Best Buy is not your friend.
3. No matter how much they beg, whatever you do, never ever feed a Best Buy employee after midnight. I can?t stress that one enough.

The 90s: A Decade with No Redeeming Value

I'm glad my brother brought up the subject of completely retarded lists made up by cable entertainment channels, because I've been meaning to broach the subject of E!'s 101 Reasons the 90s Ruled.

Those of you who remembered the 90s probably remember that, right up until about '99, it sucked hardcore. Rock music pretty much died for good, with grunge as its death rattle; everybody rushed out to see Best Pictures Titanic and Forrest Gump and motherfucking Saving Private Ryan; and speculators bought stacks of comic books, without particular regard for their quality, paving the way for the Spider-Man Clone Saga -- the absolute most boring and convoluted storyline in all of Spidey's history, and believe me, I'm in a position to know.

The long and the short of it is, we all hated the 90s -- except my bastard roommate Matt. For some reason Matt insists that the 90s were awesome. Matt is clearly mistaken, as can be easily demonstrated by a sample of reasons E! believed the 90s to have ruled.

• The Spice Girls. Ruled. Apparently. (They were #18)


• Number one reason the 90s ruled: Seinfeld. That's right. The best thing about that decade was a sitcom that we're all extremely tired of.


• My favorite reason the 90s ruled: 'We didn't have Paris Hilton.' I'm not even making this up, it was on the list at #9. You can only pretend the 90s ruled by pointing out the awful things about other decades that it lacks. Like, 'less terrorist-collapsed buildings.' Well, slightly less.

Look, I can't convey how ridiculous the idea of 90s nostalgia is on my own. Just take a look at the full list, and hope beyond hope that people never REALLY get nostalgic for the 90s.

Bored? Try Online Petitions

Apparently, the first Google result for the word "jew" is a poorly-designed (aren't they all) antisemitic site called Jew Watch. According to Snopes, Jew Watch has topped the list since 2001, but this hilariously misguided online petition is relatively new.

Somehow, the petitioner got it in his head that if he collected 50,000 names online, Google would remove Jew Watch from its results page. This, in spite of the fact that Google never manually adjusts search results, since doing so would damage the search engine's integrity; and more fundamentally in spite of the fact that online petitions never ever amount to anything.

Now, personally, I'm pretty sure impressionable children aren't rushing to their web browsers, typing in "jew," and clicking "I'm feeling lucky." Even if they did, Jew Watch is an incomprehensible jumble of links in teensy font. I stared at it for several minutes and, though I do seem to be filled with slightly more hate, I don't feel like I'm directing it at any group in particular.

Proving that not everybody who believes in this cause is fundamentally retarded, some folk have been googlebombing a much-more-helpful definition of Jew to the top of the list. It's a shaky battle, with Jew Watch currently on top, but who knows. Personally I'm much more perturbed by the content of MartinLutherKing.org, which I discovered through Jew Watch. The site design is dangerously legible, and its innocent-looking presentation and domain name are really creepy.

What's the bright side of all this? Well, with more than 80,000 signers, there's plenty of hilarious messages on the petition website! This is going to be even more fun than that "Rename 'The Two Towers' To Something Less Offensive" petition from a couple of years ago. Follow me on a journey to Stupid.

Here's a sampling, sorted into categories. With around 90000 signatures, there's plenty for you to read when you get bored. I recommend!

I believe in free speech, but...
"The site is reprehensible,obscene and although I uphold the freedom of speech and religion, I find the support of such hatred unconscionable"
"The First Amendment is a fine idea, but Google, you have a responsibility as the #1 search engine to be a bit more selective about what comes up."
"Freedom of speech is different from promotion of HATE. Google it is time to wake up."
"I don't think that it is always a good idea to deny freedom of speech, but I'll make an exception in this case. Though I think that they are addressing the converted, one needs to rebut the misinformation if it is not removed."

Google does webhosting now, right?
"please remove this .com address"
"I would like Google to refuse to host anti-Semitic websites and any other sites that target and defame groups of people."

Weird threats
"This site is ignorant, shameful & disgusting...My wish for the person who started this site is this...I hope that your only offspring marries a Jew!!"
"either remove this vile site or we remove Google forever"
"having this on Google is outragous...if you don't remove it, we'll use Yahoo" (Ha! Yeah, RIGHT.)

When all else fails, use a clich?
"It is outrageous in this day and age for Google to ignore this form of hatred and racism!"
"Anti-semitism ain't just a river in Egypt" (that one's actually pretty funny.)
"Search Engines should not promote HATE." (I find that one hilarious too, but I'm not sure why.)
"It is the year 2004 already! You would think we would have evolved past these things !"
"Arent there enough problems in this world?"
"its a sad day in our life when a computer company can help spread hate. a very sad day.........."