the handy dandy craigslist personals translator

Being that craigslist personals is populated by whores, sluts and gold diggers, here’s my handy dandy translation guide. If you see any of the words or phrases below in a girl’s personal ad, here’s what they truly mean.

BBW: Bring Burgers With.

Looking for Mr. Right: Money makes me horny.

Bored: I ran out of beer money.

Looking for mature..: I have the mentality of a five-year-old.

Old fashioned: No sex. Ever.

Simple: I take only one shower a week.

Country girl: My cooch stinks.

Professional: You do as I tell you, and I will lead you around by your dick. Also, no sex, and pay my bills.

Real: I’m fake.

Anyone out there: ..that I can sucker into believing I’m not a pathological liar?

Party girl: I’m addicted to crack. And meth. And paint thinner.

Happy Valentine’s Day. :)

trying e-cigs

For a while I’ve been entertaining the idea of trying e-cigarettes. I’ve known about them for at least two years now, but didn’t bother with it because I wanted something that contained zero nicotine.

For me, the act of smoking is the truly addictive part and not the nicotine. Absolutely none of the anti-smoking products out there cover this. Patches and gum obviously don’t give you the feeling of holding the cigarette in your hand nor the inhaling/exhaling process. E-cigs, on the other hand, do.

I finally found a company in North Carolina that does in fact sell e-cigs with non-nicotine cartridges, blucigs. Yesterday I ordered the starter pack and it will be arriving next week.

Will this be the one that gets me off regular cigarettes permanently? I hope so. I’ve already read a few commentaries from others where they say that once you get used to these, you hate regular smokes afterward, and that’s exactly what I want to happen.

nickel and diming

I usually don’t talk about finances on my blog, but this is one I have to write about.

Fiscally speaking, the one thing that pisses me off more than anything else is when I get nickel-and-dimed when I’m trying to close an account.

Here’s a situation I’ve been dealing with.

I have a loan that I’m trying to close out. Each day this loan acquires interest on it, which is no big deal because I was aware of it. I sent a big payment to pay it off completely. This payment included extra to cover the accrued interest for the time it would take for the payment to arrive.

That didn’t work.

The end amount due after my payment was $1.10.

Yes, you read correctly. One dollar and ten fucking cents. What an insult that is.

So.. I send another payment for $1.75, figuring that would pay it off and close it out.

It didn’t.

Now the amount due is $2.85, more than double the last final amount.

I’m not kidding.

Later on this morning when their office is open I plan on calling these pricks and bitching them out. This is classic nickel-and-diming because their computer system doesn’t know how to handle a payment so low.

Unfortunately I have encountered this before (several times) and it is such a pain in the ass to get fixed – especially when you’re dealing with their computer system that can’t figure out how to process payments properly.

I plan on getting this issue resolved today. And I know it’s going to require yelling at the rep who takes my call. Usually I don’t have to do that, but with this company you pretty much have to in order to make them do anything right.

[edit]

Okay, so I made a phone call and here’s what I found out. This is so dumb it’s just.. well, I’ll tell you what happened.

Usually before I unleash the fury on a call rep when I’m pissed off, I make it a point to be pleasant for at least a few minutes to see if somebody knows what’s going on. Turns out this was the correct course of action.

The $2.85 owed is actually not owed. It’s a credit. Or not. The rep told me the amount would be waived…? Waived for what? Charging me fees out of thin air from a computer fuck-up on their end? Gee, thanks.

SUPPOSEDLY, all this shit will be resolved by this Friday, so I’m not out of the woods yet.

Going to call back and confirm on Friday they un-fucked their fuck-up. Then I’ll be happy never to do business with these retards ever again.

when i say go away, it means go away

Well! I haven’t posted one of these in a while. It’s yet more fun with an ICQ’er who doesn’t know when to quit.

Before continuing, for those that wonder why I even bother leaving the web-aware feature on in ICQ, it’s because I do periodically make good friends on it. But in order to encounter good people you have to deal with the crappy ones. That’s just the way it works.

And if you’re wondering why I don’t block every idiot I come across in ICQ, if I did my block list would be 1,000+ long, so I don’t bother.

Many Non-US ICQ users are desperately seeking any American to chat with because they want to learn English. That is their only goal. They want to mooch off you for free English lessons just by chatting with them. It took me a long time to figure this out, because no matter many times you say “no”, no matter how many times you throw insults at them (and trust me you will after being bothered enough), no matter what you do, they just keep coming back for more. When I finally realized it was for English learning only, that was the piece of the puzzle I was missing.

Something new I’ve tried recently is, “sorry, no free English lessons, go away”. It’s very effective.

Here’s one that happened today with this genius.

Oh, and by the way, this genius has bugged me for three days in a row before I finally put the “no English lesson” drop on him.

The funniest part is that during the conversation, the genius claims he’s “his mother”, then proceeds to tell me “fuck you”. Classy broad, isn’t she?

588644428
10:34 PM
can talk to do?

Rich
10:34 PM
sorry, no free English lessons, go away

588644428
10:35 PM
Americans are so unfriendly to do?

Rich
10:35 PM
sorry, no free English lessons, go away

588644428
10:36 PM
Oh my god  In my impression that the United States is very humorous and generous

Rich
10:36 PM
sorry, no free English lessons, go away

588644428
10:37 PM
I am his mother do not you teach me English!!

Rich
10:37 PM
sorry, no free English lessons, go away

588644428
10:39 PM
I am an American friend said that the Americans are very warm, it seems not the case

Rich
10:39 PM
sorry, no free English lessons, go away

588644428
10:40 PM
F

Rich
10:40 PM
sorry, no free English lessons, go away

588644428
10:40 PM
u

Rich
10:40 PM
sorry, no free English lessons, go away

588644428
10:40 PM
c

Rich
10:40 PM
sorry, no free English lessons, go away

588644428
10:40 PM
k

Rich
10:40 PM
sorry, no free English lessons, go away

588644428
10:40 PM
y

Rich
10:40 PM
sorry, no free English lessons, go away

588644428
10:40 PM
o

Rich
10:40 PM
sorry, no free English lessons, go away

588644428
10:40 PM
u

Rich
10:40 PM
sorry, no free English lessons, go away

588644428
10:40 PM
!

Rich
10:40 PM
sorry, no free English lessons, go away

Ah, the joys of copy and paste. Beautiful thing. Truly. Have CTRL+V, will travel. :-)

music format transitions

In March I’ll turn 35 years old. Hard to believe.

I have the fortune of having seen the music industry gone through four different formats.

Records to tapes to CDs to MP3s

Before I was a teenager a lot of people still bought records. In fact I remember seeing full-sized 33 speed LPs of popular 1980s glam bands of the time in record stores. In my preteen years I literally saw the end of the vinyl record because there was only a small part of the store dedicated to it. That small part got smaller, and smaller, and eventually was removed completely.

Audio cassettes, better known as just tapes, was what replaced vinyl records. It was the way to buy music for at least a good 10 years. During my teens I bought many tapes.

CDs slowly but surely replaced tapes, but the transition was really long. This was mainly due to the fact CDs were (and still are) so expensive. In fact, they were so expensive that some artists in the 90s revolted against it. It was not uncommon to see some CDs – single discs mind you – for $26 each. It was pretty ridiculous. The same artist on tape wasn’t more than $12 at the most.

On top of that, most people didn’t have CD players in their cars. Oh sure, they’re common now, but back then it was wickedly expensive.

Two things ushered in the MP3 era. The internet and the iPod. And I know for a fact the record industry was dragged into that kicking and screaming all the way. They did not want to convert to a virtual product because it simply doesn’t make as much money as CDs do, and still doesn’t.

The record industry loved CDs for the longest time because copying them was difficult and expensive, therefore resulting in more sales. But that’s obviously not the case now.

Digital music only sells now because the record industry was forced into doing it. Nobody wants to spend $20 or even $10 on a CD anymore when you can buy digitally for half (or less than half) the price.

And that DRM thing.. what a laugh that was. It’s a good thing that’s mostly gone now.

The vinyl was always the best format

Vinyl had the longest run of being a popular format compared to any other. Tapes didn’t even last two decades as the popular format. With CDs, same deal. Vinyl on the other hand had many decades of being the #1 music sale format before it was cast aside.

The vinyl format has such a dedicated fan base that there are teenagers today who prefer it over anything else. Why? Because it’s (to them) different, interesting and the decidedly simple format does have the best sound.

If the record industry wanted to give themselves a boost in sales, the answer is simple. Bring back vinyl. Work deals with manufacturers to put good record players for sale in Wal-Mart and Target so people can buy one. Besides which, they can be manufactured for next to nothing so sales of them would make companies a lot of money.

People would genuinely appreciate those big sleeves with the nice artwork and the retro-yet-awesome way of playing records. It would totally work.

See, here’s the thing. When you buy a vinyl record, it just makes you happy. By nature they’re round, and round things psychologically feel better to the mind than square. In addition, you can put your hands all over them without worry of damaging playback. The artwork as mentioned is something really, really cool. Heck, the Alice Cooper School’s Out sleeve actually folded into a miniature school desk. Seriously! It was cool.

But the most important thing about a record is that you’re paying for something good. It is worth paying for. You just don’t get the same feeling from a cold digitally perfect CD. It’s just not the same.

I’m not even a record collector and I know this.

To the music industry: Seriously, you guys and gals, bring vinyl back. You want a physical product out there that makes money. Vinyl is your answer.

Copyright ©1975-2010 menga - Today is Wednesday, March 17 2010; the time when you loaded this web page was 5:44am UTC. This blog is authored from Tampa Florida - a place where all the cool people are :-) If this web site has not been updated in the past 30 days, you can safely assume I'm sick, dead or finally got a life interesting enough to get away from the computer. On a final note, remember to save your shit.