Have you ever noticed that when a plane flies overhead, it sometimes leaves behind this cloud-like streak in the sky? Those are called contrails, short for condensation trails. They’re created when water vapor from the plane’s exhaust cools rapidly in the cold air and condenses into ice crystals. They look like clouds because they essentially are clouds–man-made cirrus clouds.  Pretty neat, huh?

Well, naturally, there are a bunch of wing-nuts who think otherwise. Where reasonable, rational people see contrails, they see chemtrails–sinister chemical and/or biological weapons being dumped on an unsuspecting populace for unknowable reasons by our own government! Now, I’m not exactly what you’d call a fan of the government, but I have a hard time believing that the same people who couldn’t stop a buck private from spilling the beans about, well, just about fucking everything, could mange to cover up the fact that they’re equipping every commercial airliner in the entire damn country with spray devices to sap us of our precious bodily fluids or whatever the fuck the crazies think.

Thankfully, the nutters have devised a strategy for clearing away the chemtrails.  It turns out, all you have to do is walk around your back yard with a spray bottle full of vinegar and spritz the air randomly, and in ten to thirty minutes, the chemtrails disappear.

No really!  They really think this! Never mind that ten to thirty minutes is just about how long your bog standard contrail hangs around anyhow.  Never mind that there’s no possible fucking way the vinegar you sprayed into the air in your back yard could even get to 30,000 feet in any appreciable quantity in that (or really, any) amount of time in order to do whatever it is it’s supposed to do to clear off the nasty chemtrails. And, never mind that it sometimes just doesn’t work (because contrails sometimes hang around longer than thirty minutes depending on atmospheric conditions,) it is an undeniable fact that vinegar kills chemtrails!

Honestly, though, I think that’s just a waste of good vinegar. I bet there’s an easier way to get the same results. So, I offer this experiment to anybody who believes that vinegar kills chemtrails. Next time you see chemtrails in the sky, go outside and shout “I’M A FUCKING IDIOT!  I’M A STUPID ASSHOLE!” over and over for about five minutes. I give you my personal guarantee^* that the chemtrails will disappear within thirty minutes! Unless they don’t. In which case, try again later!

—

*_{Void where prohibited. You must be of legal age to receive guarantee assurance. Offer not valid in CA, HI, or MA. You must submit video documentation of your failed attempt in order to make a claim. Persons making a valid claim will be summarily laughed at.}

I was sitting at a stop light this afternoon when I saw this:

Bacon-free WiFi? Screw that! I want WiFi with EXTRA BACON. Why would you even advertise that you’ve gone and taken bacon away from something? That’s insanity. Come on, BK, step up to the plate. Put the bacon back in your WiFi!

However you say it, it sucks:
 

 
Yes, that is indeed Nickelback doing a cover of the Flock of Seagulls song “I Ran (So Far Away).” I think if you go to Google and type in “things that suck” this video comes up as the first three hits. Okay, it doesn’t, but it goddamn should.

And yet… I’ve watched that thing like four times now. I can’t stop watching it. I’d say it’s like a train wreck, you have to look even if you don’t want to–except, it’s not like that at all. I kind of like the singer’s voice (it’s not the usual Nickelback asshole, it’s one of the other dudes in the band singing) and they actually make the song groove OH FUCK I THINK I LIKE SOMETHING NICKELBACK DID! ALSO FLOCK OF SEAGULLS! AHH!! I AM SCARRED FOR LIFE!

I spent the holidays visiting family, and as a result I got a crash-course education in this relatively new genre of reality television I like to call “buying and reselling shit” or alternately “free market economics 101.” The best known of these shows is probably “Pawn Stars”, which follows the exploits of a family of pawn brokers (grandfather, father, and son) as they buy stuff from people and resell it for about twice what they just paid. The best part about Pawn Stars is how during an appraisal the stars will bring in an expert to value the item in question.  Right in front of the customer, the expert will put a dollar value on the item. The pawn broker will then immediately offer to buy the object for around one quarter to one third the stated value. After some haggling, the broker and the customer either agree on a figure (almost never is this number more than one half the expert’s stated value) or the customer will simply decide not to sell at all.

Many people find this distasteful or even somehow wrong, and despite my decidedly libertarian leanings, after enough repetitions of watching this process, I can at least sympathize with the position. It sure doesn’t feel right, on a gut level, to pay someone $50 for something you intend to turn around and sell for $200. However, with a little thought, it’s easy enough to see what’s at the root of this feeling, and it’s basically a misunderstanding of the word “value.” The golden rule of free market economics is that something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. There is no magic “intrinsic value” to be found anywhere. A thing is worth a dollar if and only if I can get someone to buy it from me for one dollar. It follows that value is subjective. Something I might be willing to spend $10 on might not be worth a plugged nickel to you.

So when the expert gives his appraisal, the “value” he is quoting is what he would expect to find the item priced at in a retail store, such as a thrift store or pawn shop. Or, in the case of more high-dollar items like antiques or collectibles, what the item might be expected to fetch at auction. So of course the pawn broker isn’t going to give you $100 for an item he expects will only sell for $100 after sitting in his shop for awhile. For him, the value of the item is the dollar amount he can pay and still be able to sell the item at a profit that allows him to pay his overhead (lease/mortgage, staff salaries, utilities and such) and still come out a little ahead. Nobody should walk into a pawn shop expecting full retail price for whatever it is they have. If you have a comic book you figure to be worth $1,000, don’t expect more than about $500 from a pawn broker, at best. And honestly, in today’s world, unless you needed cash absolutely instantly, nobody except a complete fool would take a rare collectible to a pawn shop to sell it. You’d list it on eBay or Craigslist, and likely get close to full “retail” value for it if it’s really a sought-after item. The power of the internet has brought the marketplace to you, rather than you having to sell to a middle-man. In a sense, you are acting as your own pawn broker, and thus getting to keep all the profits for yourself.

However, some people still find this distasteful. And the situation only gets worse when you add old people into the equation. The show “American Pickers” follows two antiques dealers as they drive around looking for junk piles to rummage through. What they tend to find are older, often retired or semi-employed people who have a lifetime worth of crap piled up in the garage or the shed or barn. They then paw through these items, pick out the good stuff, and offer to buy it for a fraction of what it’s “worth.”

The big difference between this and “Pawn Stars” is that in this case, the dealer came to the customer, not the other way around. When a customer walks into a pawn shop, he generally knows what he’s getting into. The rules of the road are pretty clear, so to speak–you have something you want to sell, and this guy here is in the business of buying. When someone shows up on your doorstep asking to look through your junk, the situation isn’t as clear. To be fair, the guys on American Pickers have a flyer they give to people which likely identifies them as antiques dealers looking to buy stuff–but since they don’t actually show the flyer in the show (that I’ve seen) that’s just a guess.

The big difference, though, is that often the people doing the selling haven’t the first clue what the retail value of their item is. Generally when you have something you intend to sell, you take some time to figure out what you should ask for it. You don’t want to ask $100 for something that usually goes for more like $30, because it likely wont sell and you’ll be wasting your time. Similarly, you don’t want to ask $100 for something that generally goes for $500, because you’ll be short-changing yourself.

Most people would agree that if you intend to sell something, you should do your homework first. If you put something on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $100 and it gets snapped up instantly and re-listed for $1500, well, you didn’t do your homework. Some people would still argue that the buyer acted immorally or was somehow “wrong,” but these people are what we call idiots. There’s no burden on the buyer to do the seller’s homework for him. However, what about the specific case of a person who isn’t looking to sell–someone just comes up to him and offers him $100 for his pocket lint?

Well, most of us would probably go through some kind of mental process similar to this: “$100 for pocket lint!? Is this guy nuts? Holy crap, I better take his money before he wises up! …wait a minute though, what does he know that I don’t know? Maybe I should google ‘pocket lint’ and find out if it’s suddenly worth a ton of money for some stupid reason…” Either way, though, you’re often unsure what to do. Take the $100 now, and worry about finding out if you got duped later, or spend the time to find out if you’re getting duped and risk letting the person come to his senses in the meantime?

This is basically American Pickers in a nutshell.  Some guy comes to your door, and offers you $50 for a rusty tin can he found in your shed. Grab the money and run before he wises up, or risk losing the $50 because you took the time to go do some research to find out what rusty tin cans go for these days, and meanwhile the weird collector wandered away?

There is a certain class of people for whom this kind of thinking is especially difficult, however. We call these people “old people.” Old people don’t always think well in the first place. And even when all their gray cells are still in working condition, they often don’t have the tools at their disposal that other people have, because of a lack of knowledge about technology. This isn’t to say that all senior citizens are computer illiterate. Of course they’re not. But they do, as a group, tend to have less understanding of and ability to use things like Google in order to do a quick sanity check on the price of pocket lint.

So in this case, many people would consider that the pickers have an unfair advantage. They not only have knowledge the seller doesn’t have, but they have knowledge the seller has no reasonable means of acquiring. Add in the extra taboo of “taking advantage of the elderly” and you have a show that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. And honestly? I couldn’t do what these guys do. I don’t consider it wrong or even immoral, and yet… something about it just doesn’t seem right to me. If I saw something in an old man’s barn that would sell for $400 on eBay, I’d be more likely to tell the old man that than offer to buy it for $40.

But that’s just me. What do you think?

I went to pick up a bathroom scale at Bed Bath and Beyond today. As I was checking out, the lady asked me “Will you be needing a gift receipt?”

…

I narrowly avoided laughing out loud, but only just. Can you imagine the look on your lady’s face when she unwraps that wonderful gift on Christmas morning? Nothing says “I love you” like saying “you need to lose some weight, tubby!”

As I believe I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been busy playing the shit out of Skyrim for the past few weeks. Like pretty much every Bethesda game ever, it came out of the box (or, in this case, off the ‘tubes via Steam) with a shitton of little niggling bugs. Random crashes, quests not completing properly, things moving around that shouldn’t move (I’m looking at you, mannequins!) stuff like that. Nothing really game breaking (I had to use a console hack to get a quest to move to the next stage once, though) and nothing regular enough to be irritating.

And then patch 1.2 hit. Suddenly, my entire game was FUBAR. I couldn’t fast travel because clicking anywhere on the map just caused the map to close. I couldn’t read any books because once I was in the “read book” screen, I couldn’t get out of it–tab didn’t work, and although Esc took me to the system menu, once I got out of that I was still reading the book. This was not an issue I could live with or work around. So I did what most anybody would do, and I asked Google for help.

It was at this point that I rediscovered how absolutely unhelpful most internet help forums are. I rather quickly found a thread on one of these forums started by a guy who was having my exact problem. It had several dozen responses, so I thought I’d hit the jackpot and would find a fix right away. HA! No, that’s not how it works here on the ‘tubes.  Of the several dozen responses, only a few were actual attempts at solving the issue. One person suggested that maybe the patch had messed up some key bindings. No, that turned out not to be the case–but hey, not a bad guess, so no harm, no foul. Another person sort of insanely suggested going into the game folder and randomly deleting things, letting Steam re-download them, and see if that fixes things! Although that seemed completely insane to me, it was actually not far off from what eventually solved the problem for me (which, by the way, was telling Steam to validate the game cache–Steam found an error in one of the files, re-downloaded it, and everything was fine after that.)

The vast majority of the posts, however, were people being completely unhelpful by saying “I’m not having that problem.” Really? Well, gee, thanks! I’m glad you’re not having this problem.  But guess what? I am! And you just wasted my time by posting that response, dipshit! What on earth possesses people to post that in a thread on a tech support forum? Sure, if this were specifically a forum for developers, it could conceivably be helpful for you to let everybody know you can’t reproduce the problem. But that’s not what we’re doing here! We’re here to discuss the issues we’re having and find out if anybody else has had this problem and if so, how they fixed it. You butting in with “I’m not having that problem” is just about the least helpful thing you can do. But so many people feel compelled to do this–the thread in question had dozens of responses, and most of them were some variation on “I’m not having that problem.”  One guy even went so far as to say “I’ve got the PC version of the game, and I’ve not had a single problem, ever. Just saying.” Really? Really? That’s your contribution to this discussion? To brag about how you not only don’t have this problem, but you don’t have any other problems either? Thanks! While you’re being so amazingly unhelpful, why don’t you go find an AA meeting and let them all know how you’ve never been addicted to alcohol! Or go find a Weight Watchers group and tell them how you’ve never had to diet because you’ve always been skinny! Those are two equally helpful things you could be doing right now!

What really kills me is trying to figure out why these people are even reading the thread! Why are they even on the forum if they’re not having any problems? Do these people really spend all day reading internet forums about issues they don’t have just so they can tell everybody they don’t have them? It makes me wonder if they think that the people reporting the problem are just pathological liars, and they feel virtuous for calling them out on their bullshit by implying “Hey, look, I don’t have that problem, so it’s clear to me that you don’t really have it either–you’re just a whiner looking for attention!” Or, heaven help us all, do they really think they are making a meaningful contribution to the discussion by letting everybody know they have no frame of reference because they weren’t listening to the Dude’s story?

Seriously people. Fucking THINK before you post. Here’s a simple mental exercise. Before you post to a forum thread asking for help with a specific issue, ask yourself “Is what I’m about to post in any way a possible fix for the problem the original poster is having, or does it at least attempt to help fix the problem?” If the answer is “No,” then DON’T POST IT!

Like many of you out there, I disappeared down the hole of Skyrim for the past couple of weeks. It’s a pretty good game, so far vastly superior to its predecessor Oblivion, mainly because it does not involve closing fixteen hojillion Oblivion gates over and over and over again (worst plot requirement EVER.) However, being an open world game, it does involve a fair amount of walking around. Which, in general, is cool. There’s stuff to see, bandits and wild animals to kill, forts and caves to stumble across and explore, all sorts of fun stuff. I often enjoy just walking around, exploring.

What I do not so much enjoy are freaking escort quests. I’ve run across several of them in Skyrim so far, and I’ve come to dread the words “follow me.” There’s nothing worse than following a stupid NPC who is slowly… wandering… aimlessly… towards… something…. Worse yet, NPCs in Skyrim often appear to be programmed to stop and turn towards you if you get too close to them. So if you’re not careful, you’ll stop your NPC companion cold, forcing you to stop, step away, and wait for him to reset and continue walking. And no matter what he says, where he’s leading you to is never nearby. Oh, it might just be “over there,” but you see, NPCs only walk at once pace: glacial. So even if you could get there in twenty seconds running or even faster riding a horse, it’ll take you more like five minutes to follow the NPC there.

Seriously game designers, don’t do this. If you want me to be somewhere, either just warp me to that place immediately after I accept the quest, or tell me where the place is and let me go there at my own pace. To be fair, at least one escort quest I came across in Skyrim was of this last variety–I was told “you can either follow me or just meet me there.” That’s a step better, but there’s still an issue with that. At least in Oblivion, it was sometimes possible for NPCs who were out wandering the world to die if they got into a particularly nasty encounter with an animal or a group of bandits. You’d think this wouldn’t be possible, that somebody would have thought of this and made sure it couldn’t happen, but no, it happened.  There was one particular shop keeper in Oblivion who, as part of her back story and part of a quest line you could optionally follow, would take a stroll over to another town once a week or so. One day when I was out walking, I randomly came across this poor lady, dead in the forest. She’d apparently wandered into a nasty random encounter with some wild animal and gotten herself killed. This not only made it impossible to do her quests, it made it so her shop was never open anymore! I don’t know if this situation can occur in Skyrim, but I know I’m generally not eager to find out, so when an NPC says “follow me” I groan and curse at the game but do what I’m told.

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of poker. It’s one of the few things I can do year round that I really enjoy doing, and it helps take my mind off everything else that’s going on in my life.

Unfortunately, despite having been playing for years now, I’m not that good at poker. Ever since Black Friday, I’ve been forced back into the local casinos to get my poker fix, which is even worse for me, since although I was a winning online player, I seem to be a break-even at best live player. I’m not sure exactly why, but over my lifetime I’ve definitely lost more than I’ve won playing live, where the opposite was true online.

Anywho, I’ve been playing some live tournaments lately, trying to relearn some of the mad skillz I seem to have forgotten since getting kicked off the online poker rooms. Probably my biggest leak in live tournament play is that I sometimes just completely go nuts and make a horribad play in completely the wrong situation, and it’ll cost me all or nearly all of my chips. Similar to pro player Mike Matusow, I’ll often dump off all my chips in crazy fashion, then walk away muttering to myself about how awful that was.

Last night, I got into it with a player two seats to my left. He’d had my number all night, and was a good player overall. I couldn’t steal his blind, and he always seemed to make exactly the right move against me. I kept fixating on him, wondering exactly what I had to do to win a pot off him. His playbook seemed fairly simple. Whenever I raised from late position when he was in the blinds, he’d call, check to me on the flop, call any reasonable flop bet, then check to me again on the turn. If I checked behind, he’d fire a bet on the river trying to take the pot. If I bet the turn, he’d ponder for a bit, and either call or fold–but he always seemed to know where I was, because he’d call when I was betting with air and fold when I had a hand. I always seemed to need a hand to beat him, and when I had a hand I couldn’t make any money from him because he seemed to know he was behind and would fold. It’s frustrating as hell when someone is clearly reading you very well, and having such a tough player in the blinds made blind stealing (a must in tournament play) nearly impossible.

Finally, I had my moment of stupid. I was on the button with AQo, and made a raise. Of course my nemesis calls in the big blind, and we see the flop heads up. It comes three small cards, and he checks to me. This was shaping up just like every other hand I’d played against him in the tournament.  If I bet, he’d call. If I improved on the turn and bet, he’d fold. If I didn’t improve and still bet, he’d call. He was frustrating the shit out of me, and all I was thinking was “What haven’t I tried yet?” I’d tried making a standard bet, I’d tried checking when I missed the flop, I’d tried checking when I hit the flop and betting the turn trying to “disguise” my hand–nothing worked, this guy picked it all off, every time.

So I shoved all my chips into the pot, thinking maybe I could just blow him off the hand right here. He immediately called and turned over two jacks. I shook my head, knowing I’d made the worst possible play, and turned over my AQo.

“Why the hell would you shove with that hand?” he said derisively. I opened my mouth to say something (I still don’t know exactly what) but just then the dealer brought the turn, which was an ace.

“Because I knew that was coming,” I said, like a true luckbox asshole. The river was no help to him, so he walked away muttering to himself about how he’d set me up perfectly and still lost.

Now, let me be clear here.  I made a horrible play. I made the play almost entirely because this one guy had been pissing me off all night, which is probably the worst reason to do anything in poker. He truly had set me up and I’d blundered into the trap and still come out unscathed. That’s part of the beauty of poker, though–sometimes the worst hand wins, and if it wasn’t that way, nobody would play.

But here’s the thing that keeps bugging me. The guy claimed he’d put me on AK or AQ, which is what I had, so he’d called with his jacks to see a flop and try to trap me into bluffing off some of my chips.  Then the flop came three rags and I shoved my chips into the middle, and he insta-called. Wait, really? Sure, if you really think I have two big cards and am bluffing (which I was) that was the right play. But… you berate me for making an insane play with two over cards, a bet you can’t believe I’d made.  And yet that thought never entered your head before calling? You can’t believe I’d make a play like that, and yet you called off all your chips banking on the fact that I had, in fact, made exactly that play? That does not really compute.

For the record, I shoved partly because I’m insane, but partly because I didn’t think he had a pair either. His pattern was to call me almost any time I raised his blind, so it’s not like I can assume he has a pair every time he does that. If he has AK and I blow him off the hand with AQ, then I look like a genius.

Clearly next time, I should follow T.J. Cloutier’s strategy, and play only medium pairs so I can flop middle set and bust him.

Every fantasy football league has at least one guy who ignores his team and consistently screws up by playing guys who are hurt or on a bye. Nobody likes that guy. If you weren’t going to participate and at least check your team once a week to make sure you’re not stupidly playing three guys on IR, why did you bother to sign up for the league?

Well, this year, I am that guy in my league. Some real life shit has laid the smack down on my enthusiasm for a lot of things, and fantasy football has taken a back seat for awhile.  Consequently, I’ve been playing Antonio Gates at tight end for the entire season despite the fact that he’s hurt and this week his team had a bye anyway.

This week, though, I looked like a genius. My back up tight end, Chris Cooley, who was sitting on my bench, caught one pass for minus one yard and scored -0.07 fantasy points in my league. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen–I played a guy on a bye and he ended up scoring more points than the best alternative I had.

I fucking rule at fantasy football.

What’s that you say? There are still the playoffs and World Series to go? For some people, the interminable pre-season has ended and the real baseball season has finally started!

Yeah, well, I’m what you call a Red Sox fan, so for me baseball ended last night. Yeah, I like baseball enough that I’ll probably watch at least the World Series, if not the LCS’s, but my attention is going to be spotty at best for the division series round. I know, I should shut up, the Sox have won twice in the last decade, and they’re one of the big money teams in baseball so I should somehow feel like social justice was done because the small market Rays completed an improbable comeback last night to make the post season.

But fuck that. Losing still sucks. Going from being the best team in baseball to a team that can’t take two of three from the Baltimore Orioles when it mattered the most blows chunks. Injuries, regression to the mean, and just plain sucking did them in and gave the surging Rays the wild card spot the Sox had all but sewn up a month ago.

A lot of people think the baseball season is too long, and I’m usually counted among them. In my ideal world, baseball would be over before football season started. But this year I’d really like to have had at least one more game. But let’s face it. The Sox were losing game 163 anyhow, since they had nobody to pitch. So it’s probably for the best they didn’t have to bother.

So fuck the Red Sox anyhow. Maybe next year they can spend ten billion dollars and buy up everybody in the league and play 162 games against whatever farm team prospects are left.  Oh, who am I kidding, they’d still find a way to lose.

Let’s go whoever is playing the Yankees!