Operation Santa, Next Blog, Never Use Cingular and Must See Thursday

Operation Santa, Next Blog, Never Use Cingular and Must See Thursday

First and foremost, my charity for this holiday season. I normally stick to food banks like Second Harvest or clothing drives in the winter and medical charities throughout the year. But Operation Santa Claus is such a cool idea, I can't believe this is the first I'm hearing of it. So if you guys want something nice to do this Christmas, we who are blessed a hell of a lot more than other people despite the traffic on the Turnpike or the fact that we couldn't buy that cute Prada bag, this seems awesome.

I recently started making use of the "Next Blog" button at the top of the screen. I wish they had a way to avoid all the blogs from Japan. Not that I have anything against Japanese people (stereotypically, I'm a huge fan of their culture, cars, food, and drinking abilities but not their porn because all that post-World War II aggression makes for some really insane porn.) But from what I've seen of pretty much every Japanese blog I've been to, the message center pop-ups, twinkle twinkle little star anime backgrounds, cheesy music and teeny tiny wRiTIng lIKe THis is just a bit much when thrown all together. Maybe if it was just some teeny tiny wrITiNg LikE thIS and a twinkly little anime jpg then it would be okay to handle. But all at once and I just feel like clawing my own eyes out.

I would like to find a blog to read that was similar to my own though. Extra points if it's also a female writing it. But a lot of the ones I ended up on were ultra-liberal virtual altars of people like Hilary Clinton, Madeline Albright and a couple token black women. Because you know, ultra liberal white people still feel a lot of residual guilt over slavery. I mean there's nothing funny about slavery, but it's kind of funny that tokenism can exist even in a weblog over something their ancestors probably had little to do with. I mean let's face it. Most ultra liberal people come from the West or Northeast. They didn't have slaves there. The west wasn't even recognized as part of the country when slavery existed. And if you're from the Northeast and you can trace your family line back fairly far, chances are your ancestors probably fought against the evil plantation owners and their evil sons in a real, live actual war to stop slavery. So it's kind of funny that 500 years later, some chick in Portland is writing up a top 10 women to admire list on her weblog and consciously or sub-consciously making sure that not everyone on there is her own race.

So a couple days ago, my father-in-law got a bill from his old cell phone carrier, Cingular, for exactly two cents. No, not two dollars. TWO CENTS. And if he didn't pay it by December 8th, they were going to issue a late fee that was probably 8000 percent higher than the actual charge. I thought about just calling them and asking them to remove it, but then remembered that when I had Cingular, I never waited less than half an hour to get a customer service person on the phone. So I told my father-in-law he was better off sending out a check for two cents and just eating the cost of the 37 cent stamp. Although if it were me, since my credit blows anyway, I would have just let it go to collections and seen what happened then. Yes, please pay someone 10 dollars an hour, while I evade their first 400 calls, to collect my literal TWO CENTS.

One day when I don't want to start the day off pissed, I'll write a nice long post about the shit I went through trying to use Cingular as my phone carrier. Someone should just do us all a favor and swallow them up. Not that I advocate venture capitalism, since I lost my last job when my company got swallowed up by a competitor that wasn't even as good as us, just that they wanted to stay in the online brokerage business and my company's owners wanted to stay in the millions-of-dollars-in-my-bank-account business.

So I very much doubt that I will be watching The Apprentice tomorrow night. It's not that I don't care about the fate of the remaining contestants now that Andy is gone, it's that I don't care about the fate of the remaining contestants now that Andy is gone. It's for the best anyway. It was the only reality tv show I could stomach watching and now I can go back to hating on the phenomenon that is reality tv, without moral hindrance. I can go back to saying "I fucking hate reality tv" without that little voice in the back of my head going "Riss... but you watch The Apprentice you little hypocrite." Well who am I kidding. The show is right smack in the middle of NBC's Must See Thursday powerhouse line-up. I'll probably end up catching some of it, since I doubt the NBC execs will do me the favor of moving it to a different day so that I don't accidentally end up watching it.