House of Jorob

Tebow, Prayer, and Who Is Listening?

"We should set aside the notion that if we pray, we'll get what we want. That is a false notion of religion."

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/01/09/did-praying-to-john-316-really-help-tim-tebow-win/

 

Phillies Wreckage

Ryan Howard crumpled in the base path, 10 feet up the line.

That image will represent the entire season, in my mind.

Cliff Lee blows  4-0 lead in game 2, and the Cardinals never looked back.

<sigh>

For this, I'm also a hockey fan.

There's always the Flyers.

The Agony of Un-Friending

"So I got this friend," said Wallace.

He handed me another drink. Single malt, neat. I nodded him on.

"Nice guy. Known him since high school. Accepted his friend invitation soon as it hit my mailbag. Why wouldn't I? Half my Facebook friends list is high school reconnections."

"And?"

Wallace plopped onto the couch. The bowl of cheesepuff snacks on the other end of cushions tipped uncomfortably to one side.

"And the guy turns out to be a political yack. Every other Status is a rant against The Liberal Media, or the Socialist Democrats. It's like reading a Pat Buchanan riff four times a day."

I sipped. The scotch was warm on the tongue.

"After three weeks of this, I finally un-friended him. Couldn't take any more. Took me an hour to find the damn friends list controls, the way Facebook rewrites the screens so often."

"Tragic. You never spoke to him again?"

"Hell no. He sent me a new friend request a couple months later. I guess he missed me. Or something. I decided...oh, hell. I don't know. I thought maybe the second time around would be different."

I waited.

"It wasn't. Open shots at liberals--if they sound like they're in favor of ANYthing green, anti-war, or carry a Dem voter registration, bang. Doesn't matter if they're praising their kid for winning the spelling bee--he finds some way to put a damn-the-dem on the story. I get so angry...."

He topped off his mug, watching the last few drops sink into the head. "I engaged him once. On some point that was so far to the right it was off the screen. Obama's first wife was a wood-elf, or something. Didn't matter what I said, he came back with a point that sounded like it countered, only it didn't--it just expanded onto another anti-liberal plank....."

"Wallace," I said. My drink was almost empty and I rose to refill.

"Wallace, I have two words for you to consider."

I topped up three fingers and came back to my chair.

"Professional. Troll. Unfriend the yack and be done with it."

 

Please. If You're Drinking This New Year's Eve, Don't Drive.

Yeah, I know.

I sound like a killjoy.

Humor me.

Between now and Dec 31, take five minutes.

Just five.

And watch this:

Maybe it'll change your mind.

The Happy Meal Suit: If You Liked the Hot Coffee Suit, You're Gonna Love It

Apparently tired of telling her kids that they can't go to McDonalds for a Happy Meal, a mom has lawyered up and sued the fast-food giant.

According to the press release posted on the CSPI site, Monet Parham's six year old wants to go to McDonalds for the toys "based on Barbie, i-Carly, Shrek, or Strawberry Shortcake. The food seems almost beside the point to the kids, says Parham, because the toy monopolizes the attention of Maya and her two-year-old sister Lauryn."

The suit is in California, which has a strong nutritionally-based consumer-protection environment. The suit alleges McDonalds is subverting parental authority, "by bombarding children with advertisements for
Happy Meals with toys, knowing that it will result in kids nagging parents to purchase
nutritionally poor Happy Meals for their children." You can pull a PDF of the suit here. (Be careful. The pdf crashed my Firefox browser twice when trying to open it.)

Parham is quoted on the CSPI site as saying she has nutritional concerns about the Happy Meal.

This is a fast food restaurant.

You're supposed to have nutritional concerns.

And you're supposed to say no to your kids about trips to them.

It's part of the whole, "Dad, rhymes with 'No," thing.

There's a simple, non-lawyered version of addressing the Can't Say No To The Six Year Old crisis, at least as far as the Happy Meal goes. It surely would have handled Parham's nutritional concerns:

• Go to McDonalds.
• Purchase the desired Happy Meals
• Throw away the nutritionally dangerous food
• Distribute the toys until the whiny child is satiated. This should be at age 23, approximately.

 

 

LOST Finale

SPOILER ALERT: If you're timeshifting in order to watch the series finale, DO NOT READ THIS POST.

-------------------------------------

Now then:

You'd think that with over 100 hours of programming and a huge cast, they'd have figured out a better way to end it.

I mean, at least we got to see red doorknobs the last time characters were seeing dead people.

I'm sure that after I put a couple of nights' sleep on this, I'll begin thinking of all the good things about LOST.

But right now, I'm feeling cheated.

The writers took the easy way out, and I'm disappointed.

Lord of the Rings: The Viewer Puzzle

I don't get it.

TBS recently ran a Lord of the Rings marathon--all three movies in a row, same day.

And in my house, this was cause for celebration.

Sure enough, the set was tuned to the trilogy all day.

But here's the part I don't get:

We own the DVD set.

We can watch this any time we want.

And when do we watch it?

When the commercial-filled networks air it.

Unless I pull out the set myself, it never, ever comes out for play.

I'll be pondering this for a while.

Woodstock: 40 Years After

They're gathering at Yasgur's Farm in New York this weekend, kicking off a grand music festival of peace, love and rock and roll....

Please.

Stop.

Woodstock is over.

It's been over for almost half a century.

That's what 40 years is.

<sigh>

Okay.

I'll lighten up.

The concert is the Bethel Woods Music Festival.

I guess the Faithful can't be blamed for wanting to hear at least a passing resemblance of what their musical heroes sound like live.

So, rock on.

Even if it is for only one more day.

Still, I can't seem to shake the mental image of the line of ambulances needed to carry all the stroke and heart attack victims out of the place when the sun's finished baking the over-sixties types.

Credit Card Rigging

Philadelphia Daily News opinion columnist Elmer Smith published a story yesterday dealing with credit card abuse.

Abuse, as in abuse of the consumer by the credit card issuer.

He missed one.

The practice of card issuers to reduce one's credit line.

Works this way:

Customer gets a nice letter from the card issuer discussing how rough these economic times are on banks these days.

It's so very hard on their customers, too.

To that end, your card issuer wants to help you manage your credit.

To you can keep your credit rating nice and high.

Thanks to them.

So they're reducing your line of available credit.

What they don't tell you is what that does to your credit score.

Because of FICO.

FICO pays a lot of attention to the ratio of credit consumed to available credit.

FICO likes it when there's a lot more credit available than consumed.

It works this way:

You've got a $5,000 line of credit from PawYourWallet bank.

You've used $1,000.

You've used 20% of your line.

This is good.

Now PawYourWallet informs you they are helping you out.

They reduce your line to $2,000.

To help you out.

Without spending another dime of your credit line, you are now consuming 50% of your available credit.

If FICO used color, you are now an Orange Alert.

When you go to buy a car, or finance anything else big ticket, you're not going to get the preferred interest rate.

That belongs to people who can manage their credit.

Which you obviously don't know how to do.

You've rung up half your line already.

Blockbuster Video Policies Change Unannounced Except Where Announced

I have a Blockbuster Total Access plan.

A little one: Two discs at a time, 3 instore exchanges per month.

With tax, that's $18.01 per month.

Netflix gives three discs for that amount of money.

But Netflix is still throttling without telling you.

Even after they got sued for it almost three years ago.

Different media, then. Now its streaming vid. Back then it was on the disc-mailing thing.

But I digress.

I meant to say, "But Blockbuster has a store located less than half a mile from my house."

And those instore exchanges are neat.

Were neat.

Blockbuster changed the policy supporting the exchanges without telling me.

Way it used to be--up until last freakin week, anyway:

Bring a mailed vid to a Blockbuster, exchange it for a new one instead of mailing it back.

Take a week to watch this one.

No problem.

Meantime, the wheels of mail-order support started grinding right away, crediting my account with the exchanged vid, and launching the next one in my queue.

If you count it out, that's actually three vids in the cycle instead of two.

That was a feature promoted by Blockbuster--a reason to visit their local stores where they could sell me popcorn and video games.

That's gone now.

In a policy change that went into effect--behind the scenes, as far as I see it--the in-store exchanges now count towards my two-at-a-time rental cap.

Blockbuster's policy change is on their website, of course.

Now.

That's the beauty of the web. You can make page changes and nobody is the wiser unless you tell them you've edited the page.

Or you read the copy.

But I never got word of it in an email. Nor did my account site reflect the change.

Not a word.

I just happened to notice that my Blockbuster queue total now included "unidentified store rental" in my title list instead of the next title in my queue's list.

There's a debate ongoing over who got notification emails and who didn't.

I'm one of the customers who didn't get one.

Bleah.

I can't work up a righteous anger over the change--Blockbuster is doing whatever it can in order to stay alive.

If someone comes up with a decent monthly rental plan that feeds my PS3 I'm on it.

Sony's got plenty of movies and content available online for me.

But it's single-shot rentals only.

And I'm streaky.

And there is that store just a half-mile away......