Oh PayPal, How I Hate You So

So I want to send some money to a friend in Canada. It's a significant amount of money, but no more than many middle-class folks earn in a week. I figure, hey, I have that PayPal account I never use, I'll just do that and zap it'll be there instantly, right?

Oh, no. Not even close.

I start this process last Saturday, where I sign in to my PayPal account and send the money. No problem. About an hour later, I get an email from the recipient, who informs me that, uh, thanks for the cash, but I don't think you meant to send me this. I check email addresses. Damn. She's right. Her email address is one letter off from the correct one -- I have made a mistake, and I'm lucky that the person who got the payment was honest enough to notify me. I email her back, apologize for the hassle, and ask her to deny the transaction. Done. OK, now that that is straightened out, I figure I can resend the amount to the correct address.

Oh, no. This is just getting started.

I try to resend, this time to the (triple-checked) correct email address. Transaction = FAIL. I call PayPal (who do not offer their customers an 800 number -- yeah, it's a 15-minute hold on a long-distance call). The guy I talk to tells me that because the first transaction was denied, the second transaction won't be possible until the pending charge on my credit card is reversed, which makes a weird sort of sense, so I figure I'll wait until EOB and resend in the morning.

The next day, the transaction fails again. I need another form of payment, PayPal informs me. Though I have no way to do so, short of driving to their headquarters and standing in the parking lot with a bullhorn, I wish to inform PayPal that they will never ever ever have my bank account information, no matter how they beg and plead or cajole and demand.

So today I spend a good HOUR (at daytime long-distance rates!!!) on the phone with some lady who claims her name is Joan but, judging by her accent, is more likely named Jalbala (pretty name, means "lotus flower", I think). She is kind, compassionate, well-informed, and completely and utterly unhelpful. I speak to her supervisor, Anna. For the record, Anna is not a bot. But she may as well have been, because she is snide, cold, unhelpful, and completely unsympathetic.

Here's what I learned from Anna-Not-A-Bot:

1. My credit card is now flagged to hell and back by PayPal's ominous-sounding "Internal Security Department" and can NEVER EVER BE USED FOR A PAYPAL TRANSACTION EVER EVER AGAIN STOP ASKING.
2. I mistyped an email address and had a transaction denied. Therefore it is all my fault, nothing they can do, tough shit, so long sucker.
3. There are no humans who work in PayPal Internal Security, only Cylons who do not deign to communicate with meatbags.
4. The only way to resolve this problem is to give PayPal my bank account info.

Um, no. I use a credit card online, because I'd rather risk THEIR money than MY money, and because my card issuer has a phalanx of lawyers just quivering for the chance to sue some hacker into dust.

So I went to Western Union. With a wad of cash. Which they cheerfully accepted. And sent to my friend. Took five minutes. No problem. Even got a smile from the little cutie working the desk.

I'm going to post this, then go to Amazon.com and attempt to purchase a book using my PayPal account. If that transaction is denied, I'm closing the account with a hearty, "Fuck you, PayPal!"

Fanboy Lust

All three of my readers know that I love video games. But I've never been tempted to spend money on the collectible crap that's pushed out into the market along with them.

Until now. That's so awesomely awesome.

Free Speech, Unless You're In High School

This left me flabbergasted.

If I'm reading the story right, the precedent is now that what a teenager says FROM HOME and ON HER OWN TIME and ON HER OWN BLOG is now subject to the whims of school officials under the false flag of "ultimately causing some disruption in the school setting."

Douchebags.

A Checklist For Pastor Hagee

I figured that since Jeremiah Wright got a full week of press to demonstrate his asshattery, it would only be fair for John Hagee to get the same. Hagee, you may recall, is the jowly dough-boy who opined from the pulpit that Hitler was an instrument of God for shooing the Jews back to Israel where they belong, and that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for New Orleans holding a Gay Pride parade (then why was the gay part of town the least damaged, I wonder?) Here's a summary of his stupider statements. Oh, and did I mention that McCain went out of his way to seek this idiot's endorsement because you can't be a Republican contender until you get down with the fundies, and digging up and embracing the corpse of Falwell was deemed too aerobic an activity for a 71-year-old man? And then it took McCain three months to reject said endorsement, after Hagee's increasingly insane rants came to light? So with that in mind I've put together a series of talking points for the right reverend Hagee to use when he stops running from the press:

God digs genocide. The genocide in Rwanda was God's way of showing the power of radio and the glory of the machete: a cheap, efficient, and useful weapon, whether clearing brush or butchering the neighbors. Plus, it's just black people -- God doesn't like them much.

Indiscriminate death always benefits the faithful. The Black Plague wiped Christendom's slate by killing all the feebs and weirdos, leaving only the strong Christians to rebuild Europe: just like God wants it. AIDS almost killed off the gays until the damn demon-possessed libruls stepped in and came up with retroviral therapy.

The mind of God is an open book, which only I am privy to read. That's right, MY Bible has stuff in it yours can only dream about. With pictures. And flowcharts. And stuff.

Democrats want to eat your babies. My babies? Yes, your babies. Raw. And they'll set up government-run camps to breed babies for their awful blood orgies during which they summon the spirit of Socialized Medicine and dance around nekkid.

Global warming is either a lie perpetuated by the liberal elite or God's wrath on the liberal elite, I haven't decided which yet. But when I do decide, I'll be sure and let you know what God thinks about it.

In Which I Watch C-SPAN, And Am Disgusted

OK, it's late. I'm drunk.

But C-SPAN flipped my shit tonight.

It's the prototypical Senate subcommittee hearing: the Government Affairs Subcommittee on Government Information, in fact, chaired by Tom Carper (D - Somewhere). Testifying before the committee committee committee (sorry, it's just somehow fun to type that word committee committee committee), the Archivist of the United States, Allen Weinstein, was blase and reflective about Lockheed-Martin's software that the Nation Archives was using to store all government documents.

Wait, what?

Lockheed-Martin?

Really? Rilly? O RLY? 4RL?

Lockheed-Fucking-Martin?

Don't they make airplanes? And land mines, and super-secret-Navy-Seal-tell-you-hafta-kill-you stuff?

Do we really want Lockheed-Martin in charge of the PROGRAM FOR PRESERVING OUR NATIONAL HISTORY?

Worst part of it: the Inspector-General of the National Archives and Records Administration, Paul Brachfeld, quotes a Dave Matthews Bland lyric, and the subcommittee subcommittee subcommittee chairman winks at the motherfucker.

Salient quote: "People would be shocked at the kind of records we hold." Good thing that's all classified, then. Oh, wait, no it isn't.

It's the NATIONAL ARCHIVES.

I Wonder How Many Sermons On The Evil Of Homosexuality He's Preached?

Megachurch minister arrested in Texas for planning to have sex with 13-year-old.

Of course, it isn't the church's fault. I mean, they have 26,000 members and 40 ministers, who can keep up with all of them?

And I'm waiting for the tearful "we have all sinned" court appearance where he'll inevitably ask for forgiveness and seek compassion from his invisible sky wizard, and by extension, the jury.

It must be nice to go through life convinced that not only are you irreparably flawed, but that forgiveness is just a genuflection away. How that must relieve one of responsibility.

I'll bet money this guy will "minister" to other inmates while he's in.

Because he's a man of God.

*barf*

Cory Maye: A ReasonTV Recap

I've blogged about this before, and now ReasonTV is covering the story, based on the admirable reporting of Radley Balko.

This story is a tragic example of how the Drug War ruins lives, for both the cops and the people they are supposed to be protecting.

Click the title for the link.

Plot of GTA V Revealed!

Not really.

This is just what one rabid fanboy (me) think it should be. With a title designed to draw suckers into reading my blog.

OK, Rockstar always ups the ante with every iteration, right? And having built the game systems they can now squeeze out another one (a GTA IV.5, so to speak) like they did with III. So next year, I want to see a GTA game starring....

....Dwayne Forge's lesbian ex-girlfriend.

Think about it. Unless you haven't played the game, in which case you are excused and you should probably go here instead. Dwayne, the surly, chronically depressed ex-con who is crippled with self-loathing rivaled only by his disdain for the system that chewed him up and spat him out, is one of the best characters ever written into a video game. But he shouldn't be the main character -- that would be too close to CJ from GTA:SA. Dwayne is the Greek chorus of the game, and he should be on the sidelines in the next one. And by making the character a lesbian, Rockstar gets to mess with the heads of the player base, while addressing issues of sexism and gender and sexual freedom in a visceral way (rocket-propelled grenades = visceral).

So, here's my idea. Dwayne gets framed and jailed. Maybe he's sitting on Death Row. It's up to his ex, who has accepted herself and changed her life while Dwayne was inside, to free him. She follows a trail that leads from gangbangers to crooked cops to a conspiracy involving the highest levels of government. Remember, this game will take a couple of years to make, at which time we'll be deep into the corruption and treason trials of several key former Bush administration officials (a man can dream, can't he?).

I think it could work.

Sexist Radiohead T-Shirts

At the Radiohead show in Atlanta Thursday night I was standing at the T-shirt booth and wondering just what kind of idiot would pay $40 for a t-shirt. Then my phone rang, and it was my friend Terry asking me to buy him a t-shirt.

"They're 40 bucks, dude," I said.
"I don't care. I want a Radiohead t-shirt."
"They're not all that great. They have slogans written on them. They don't even say they're Radiohead tour t-shirts."
"What do they say?"

I read a few of them to him. They were the kind of cryptic dyspeptic grumbling beloved by Radiohead fans. One, though, stood out. On a plain black t-shirt, in a font that mimicked the electronic CRT displays of the 80s, was printed: "I am trapped in my body and cannot escape."

"That's the one I want," Terry said. I should mention at this point that Terry is trapped in his body and cannot escape. He has inherited spastic paraparesis which has locked his muscles, stiffened his jaw, and left him nearly blind. For him to wear that t-shirt would be a truly blackly humorous form of performance art.

So I told the woman running the kiosk that that was the shirt I wanted.

"It's a baby tee," she said. "A girl's shirt."

"There's not one with that slogan on it in a men's size?"

"Nope. That one's for women," she said.

Wow. So the assumption there is that only women are trapped in their bodies. I understand that body image is a problem that disproportionately affects young women, but still. Also, it's a baby tee. One size: curvy and small. No fat chicks need apply. BBW who are trapped in their bodies will hafta choose a different shirt.

That's kinda sexist, Radiohead.

So I got Terry one that read: "You used to be all right. What happened?"

A Second-Hand Anecdote

A friend of mine is a project manager for a software design firm, and regaled me with this story. This is as told, with only identifying details changed to protect corporate and individual identities:

So we're taking a tour of the data center at a financial institution that's contracted us to do some coding. As we're walking through their server room, the guy giving the tour gestures to a tall black box along one wall. "That's Big Bertha," he said. "We're not sure what it does or why it's here. And the last guy who knew the password died three years ago." We all laughed, but the guy was serious. "It was installed in the late 1980s, we know that much. And we kinda know what it does, because we've checked the data going in against the data coming out. But we're not sure that that's ALL it does, or even how it's doing it. We've lost all the documentation, and there's no one here left who was around when it was installed. Every bit of our data runs through it. When that box goes down, we're fucked. We keep a full bottle of whiskey in the break room so that when that box dies, we can all get drunk before they fire us."

Boy, talk about your "legacy systems". Did I mention that this is a financial institution whose job is keeping track of millions of transactions, all of which seem to get routed through the Mystery Box? I hope it runs for a while longer, because eventually people will start lighting candles before it and worshipping it like a god.

Cognitive Dissonance In The Snack Food Aisle

The other day I went grocery shopping and my head exploded.

One of the first things you see on walking into my neighborhood Publix, right after you pass the seasonal display in the front, is a row of two-for-one bins. Crackers, mayonnaise, canned soups, and, today, chocolate chip cookies. Buy one, get one free. There's a variety available: chewy, white chocolate chunk, peanut butter, original. I examined a package more closely.

"REAL CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES!!!" it declares.

Well, yeah. I don't see why that's worth stating, much less bragging about. Of course the package contains real chocolate chip cookies. If it were full of mousetraps, or geraniums, or something, it would probably state as such, too. But the implication is -- there are FAKE chocolate chip cookies out there, just waiting to tempt the witless, innocent cookie consumer. These are REAL, much better than those FAKE ones.

In the right hand corner of the package is a smiling chocolate chip cookie, replete with eyes and chocolatey eyebrows.

That cookie is obviously a fake.

So to advertise the realness of their chocolate chip cookies, the manufacturers have chosen a fake cookie. And they then thought it necessary to reassure them that the cookies were, in fact, real.

I think I may have drooled a bit, then.

I stood there stunned as an ox for a couple of beats.

And yes, then I bought the goddamned cookies. Two packages. They aren't very good, but they are indisputably real.

Planning A Long Trip?

Google can help!

Watch Idiocy Unfolding In Real Time!

Skipping the 20th century entirely, the Birmingham City Council will begin live online streaming video of their meetings next Tuesday.

Watch the sausage getting made here.

Sufferers, Rejoice! A Cure For Depression!

...47...48...49...50...51...

Oh Larry, We're Shocked, Shocked

So now John Katapodis has stated in sworn testimony that money from a computer charity (Computer Help For Kids) he ran with Langford went to pay a gay porn star.

Read it and weep. Tears of laughter and hot, hot shame.

Birmingham OLPC: LULZ FUXXORED D00DZ

Aaaaaaaand we're off, with the national tech media beginning to pick up on the story of Birmingham's new mayor and city council managing to make epic fail from technology designed specifically for

the world's poorest children living in its most remote environments

That's from the OLPC website, which appears borked ATM, perhaps due to some recent troubles. Irony? You're soaking in it.

WhineFest '08

The economy's in the crapper, we're bogged down in a war we can't win, and now I need a real estate agent, a lawyer, an accountant, and a bunch of other besuited parasites designed to rid me of my money under the aegis of "consulting".

Mom was confused and irritable all day, demanding that I take her "home", that I "go find the cat she left at the other house" and that I give her her car keys back if I was just gonna ignore her, dammit.

Hint: there's no other house, there's no other cat, and you haven't driven in over a year, you crazy old bat.

And it never stops. That conversation loops through her head all day, and it erases every ten minutes. So, every eleventh minute it's like SHAZAM! what a great idea she's had! And I hear it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

And then I lose my shit. "GODDAMMIT LISTEN TO YOURSELF ARE YOU CRAZY?" And she looks so lost and confused and hurt that I feel like the lowest scumbag to ever get lippy with his sainted mum.

I need a break.

It's A Miracle!

Someone should sell this dog's ass on Ebay.

W00t! I Got Anonymously Quoted in New York Magazine!

The Givewell debacle over on MetaFilter continues to snowball, and now New York magazine has picked up the story. One of their quotes was one of my snarks. Hooray, my spitefulness and vindictive behavior finally pays off! Well, not really. Since I didn't actually get, you know, PAID. Or attribution, either. Oh well.

Interesting that something I posted less than an hour ago was quoted online elsewhere within the hour, and I began blogging about it minutes later. The Internet is happening in real time, people.

Oh, Snap

Hint to hedge-fund 20-somethings with scammy Internet charity sites: don't astroturf AskMetaFilter and expect to get away with it.

Heh. That's why I love that place. That, and the pancakes.

And you gotta figure that if the founders of that site are as unprincipled in person as they demonstrably are online, their "administrative costs" are probably sky-fucking-high.

Happy New Year, everybody!