Shenanigregarious

Whelp. I pretty much don't blog anymore. So, here's a quick update working backwards.

Last night I did my second public access appearance on a local soccer show. My segment is basically three to five minutes of unscripted shenaniganery. The first appearance I had a slight buzz on and it was on Cristiano Ronaldo getting a pregame mani/pedi. It was pretty easy and discussed his penchant for Ferraris and diving.

Last night's was on the Beckham AC Milan debacle. It was a little more difficult and I was super sober (semi on the wagon right now). It's all green screen and the backgrounds are as public accessy as anyone could ever imagine, but I'm learning how to work with it and look into the camera rather than turning to talk to the guy asking me questions.

So, last night my prep consisted of a text that said "We're going to talk about Beckham tonight." I texted back, "What's our angle?" and received a response that said "B there at 8."

Sweet. We had nothing. So, dude goes through this youtube segment of soccer clips and it's going all wrong and his elephant soccer clip turns out to be just an elephant walking around not playing soccer like it was supposed to. Apparently, he had the wrong clip.

So, we go through our back and forth about Beckham's possible transfer to AC Milan which breaches his MLS contract in an obscene way. It moves on to what was Posh wearing and some other inane topics and scamboogery. At the end, the other dude asks, "Is there anything else that you'd like to talk about?" I reply, "Yeah, I was watching that clip you had of that elephant and I was wondering do you think that Nike makes elephant balls? You know, like elephant balls for elephants to play soccer with?"

At this point, I start cracking up while everyone in the studio is just looking at me stunned because I said elephant balls. Of course, everyone in the studio consists of a dude in suspenders, a guy that looks like he owns a van with no windows for the sole reason of not clashing with his moustache, and two high school volunteers running the cameras. Also, this is more people than will ever watch the show when it airs.

So, I finished the show and took off. I think it may have been my last show. The preceeding show, I caught some guff for repeating the term "Meat Tube" rather than youtube over and over again. To be completely honest, though, it's kind of fun. Painful as hell to watch and I feel really bad for taking the spot of Chess Diva #6 on public access, but that's the business for ya.

Recommended things:
1) I was a huge fan of KEXP and listen to it on Flycast whenever I can at home. Truth is radio died, but is being slowly resurrected via the Interwebs. I listen to KCRW in the morning at work and also enjoy Indie Pop Rocks on SomaFM. I've got a new one out of LA that I listen to now. Apparently, it shutdown and moved to the Internet and it's really good. It's KDLD 103.1. I'd love to hear stuff like this on the radio rather than listen to preprogrammed crap that ClearChannel wants me to listen to. I'd also like to point out that I've never heard Linkin Park on any of the above stations and that is a good thing. They FUCKING suck. You know that you are either older or that radio is super crappy when you've got talk radio going on AM. That's a bad sign.

2) The 33 1/3 book series by Continuum is an excellent way to further enjoy some of the most classic albums ever made. I recommend ordering a few and spending a Sunday with the headphones on while you read one of these. I did the Paul's Boutique edition last week and was floored by how awesome it was. The first section opened up with a history of the origins of the album. The second section broke down the album song by song. It was like discovering a classic album all over again. Paul's Boutique, especially. I remember the first time I heard that album, I was like "What the fuck?" and it turned out to be probably comparable to when the generation before me heard Sgt. Pepper's. It changed everything and just got better with every listen. The album could definitely be described as rich. John Darnielle from the The Mountain Goats wrote the one on Master of Reality by Sabbath and Colin Meloy from the The Decemberists wrote one on The Replacements' Let It Be. I'm working on the Aja entry now and needless to say, there is a glossary.

3) Lastly, I'd like to recommend a wonderful concoction that I stumbled on. Cap'n Crunch (no crunchberries) and Breyer's natural vanilla ice cream. One word describes this: fuckingretarded.

Happy Hump Day. Enjoy yourself.

Shittibank vs. Mint

I recently began using mint.com to manage my finances after using Quicken forever. Quicken was cool and very well integrated online, but mint.com was just way easier to setup and maintain and over the last couple of months has proved to be an extremely positive experience.

So, I was checking out my accounts the other day because I love to watch my money whether it's expanding or failing miserably via my retirement account and I noticed that I had a 14.99% APR on my favorite card. It's black and awesome and used to have an APR of 4.52% which I really liked. I have never missed a payment and pay a lot on it every month as it's my primary bar tab card. I'll admit that it's been misplaced a few times and their customer service has been incredible on it.

The card was lifted in Vegas and they shut down the charges and killed the card swiftly and ably over the phone. I thought that the APR had to be a bug with mint and logged on to my account to check it out and sure enough it said 14.99%.

I checked out my past statements and November's had the 4.52% on it while December's had the 14.99%. I sent an e-mail off to their customer service asking if I had been a bad customer or something and they replied that it was due to the current condition of the financial markets and that I was sent the new terms and conditions and given the opportunity to opt-out if I wanted to. Now, in between convenience checks and bullshit that they send, I didn't read the 32 page fold out statement of terms and conditions, that's my bad. Who reads that?

To their credit, they gave me a second opportunity to opt-out, which to me, screamed that they tried to pull one over on their customers and got called on it. What kind of business outside of the oil business can you justify a 300% rate increase and get away with it? Furthermore, I live within my means. I haven't purchased a home because I can't afford it. I haven't bought a new car because I would rather pay my credit card bills down. Why should I be responsible for them or their customers' negligence?

So, I weighed out my options and decided to opt-out. The opt-out entails keeping my old APR until the expiration date on the card and then the account will close and remain until it is paid off. It will be paid off by that time, so I don't even get why I would choose to keep the 300% rate increase unless I never read the document. Honestly, there were no Pros to those Cons. That would be the best critique of prison writing that any prison writing program critic could ever write.

The question is how many others is this happening to or am I the only one that doesn't read all the mail that his credit card company sends him? Honestly, I've learned that if my bill isn't in the envelope, it's junk. Hmmm. Maybe if they quit sending convenience checks they could save that money that they need to provide their exceptional service and benefits. Then on top of all this, you have the bail out and their private jet they had to send back. Should I be feeling bad for them enough to say "Yeah, man, you've had a rough patch, so let me pick up the tab." They are not your mom-and-pop liquor store that you can justify paying more for convenience because they are a local business. They are not even your uncle with a drinking and gambling program that lost his rent in Reno one weekend.

Regardless, the whole thing kind of pissed me off and made feel a bit vulnerable. The moral? Read your goddamn mail or pay the price. Also, mint.com is pretty rad. I figured out my account had been messed with because they showed me cards that I could get that would be better than those existing.