Recently in Rant Category

Bet you don't see that title every day. Today's mini-rant and QOTD courtesy of USA Today:

Nearly 3 million homeowners were behind on their mortgages at the end of last year, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) said last week. An additional 1 million-plus borrowers were at risk of imminent foreclosure.

When an ordinary citizen gets in over his head, Mortgage Bankers say, "Awww, that's too bad.". Now that Mortgage Bankers have gotten in over their head, this ordinary citizen is tempted to say the same thing. However, I can only say this from the comfort of my locked-in interest rates on my mortgage, credit cards, and auto loan for the next few years. Hopefully, the crisis will have been dealt with before I need to ask anyone for money again.

First hummingbird sightings at CrabAppleLane:
March 14, 2001
March 17, 2002
March 10, 2003
March 20, 2004
March 12, 2005
March 12, 2006
March 11, 2007
March 9, 2008

Quote of the Day

I can't get you to pay if you've got no skin in the game.

Dennis Lauria, Lender and loan servicer

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "It might be a chick thing. I’m not sure. It could just be a wacko thing."

One of the products I deal with daily is made of glass, plastic, and metal. They usually weigh about 10 pounds and retail from $200 each to about $1500 each. The one I talk about today is worth a little over $500. Included in that retail price is maybe $2 worth of packaging. Also factored into that retail price is the outrageously high number of damage claims due to shipping and handling. They get tossed around. Back in the day, shippers used to mark a package “Fragile” or “Handle With Care”. Apparently, that isn’t enough any more. To the rescue comes a new kind of warning label. I received a package that sported one of these yesterday. Mine was green. As Adrian Monk might say, “Here’s the thing”: The product was in its own box. The shipping genius then fashioned another, MUCH larger box out of two boxes that he/she must have had lying around and placed the product inside of it with no other packing material whatsoever and slapped that green warning label on it. It was kind of like a shoe box with only one shoe in it. If you move or tilt the larger box, the smaller one inside was going to get jostled. The warning label did what it was supposed to do. It was RED when I saw it which meant it received rough handling. Luckily, the product inside was undamaged.

I deal with another product daily that is hazardous. You have to be certified to ship hazardous material but you don’t have to be certified to receive hazardous material. Someone else needs to figure out the logic to that because it still mystifies me. Anyway, these products retail from $600 to $800 and are labeled “Explosive: Ground Shipping Only” or something like that. They get tossed around, too. Not only do they get tossed around but I once received one of these where a shipping genius slapped an overnight air freight label over the “Explosive: Ground Shipping Only” label and put it on an air carrier. That one came to me sometime after the ValuJet crash because I remember thinking about it. The thought that something intended for me could cause an airliner to go down? It bothered me. Hopefully, that sort of thing can't happen any more but yesterday's incident doesn't give me much comfort.

NO ONE IS READING THE LABELS

Got any shipping nightmares? I probably have another couple of hundred but I'd like to hear yours.

Quote of the Day

We had a lot of luck on Venus
We always had a ball on Mars
Meeting all the groovey people
We've rocked the Milky Way so far
We danced around with Borey Alice
We're space truckin' round the the stars

Deep Purple, Space Truckin'

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "The OS-engineering world is pretty small. A surprising number of Windows employees have worked at Apple in the past. And vice versa. Are these guys stealing?"

Trans Siberian Orchestra Tickets - November 10, 2007

What you see above is a set of useless tickets to the Trans Siberian Orchestra concert last night in New Orleans. I purchased the tickets through TSO's own website on September 11, 2007 and received an email confirmation from Live Nation, which I suppose is a ticket broker service of sorts. An excerpt is quoted below:

You have been charged for the following:

Serial # Section Row Seat Price Conv. Fee Date Performance
__________________________________________________________________________________________
1667064211 110 14 10 $39.00 $10.45 November 10, 2007 TSO
1667064313 110 14 9 $39.00 $10.45 November 10, 2007 TSO
1667064428 110 14 8 $39.00 $10.45 November 10, 2007 TSO
1667064536 110 14 7 $39.00 $10.45 November 10, 2007 TSO
1667064678 110 14 6 $39.00 $10.45 November 10, 2007 TSO
1667064705 110 14 5 $39.00 $10.45 November 10, 2007 TSO

Delivery Fee: $0.00
Order Fee: $5.00
Total Ticket Price: $301.70

You might notice the $10.45 "Convenience Fee" per ticket and the $5.00 "Order Fee". I find it excessive but having tickets in hand before you go to an event is convenient. Also, I understand the need and desire for advance sales and a need for everyone to turn a profit. Tours like this one are expensive and I wish them well on making money in the process. The tickets were mailed to us on November 1, 2007, a full seven weeks after I'd ordered them. That email is excerpted below:

Please allow 7 days for delivery. If tickets have not arrived by mail on November 8th, please call us on Friday, November 9th between 10am-5pm Eastern so we can set you up with Will Call replacements.

We will not be open on Saturday, November 10th, so make sure you can reach us on Friday, November 9th @ 1-800-431-XXXX between the hours of 10am & 5pm Eastern.

November 8 came and went and we had no tickets. As instructed, I called the number on November 9 (The one and only day I get to rectify their problem) and was told by a very nice lady to allow 10 days for delivery. I asked her to look at the date of the event.

Her: "Oh"

Me: "If you are telling people to allow 10 days for delivery, why would you mail out only 9 days before the event?"

Her: ""

Me: "I am charged a $10.45 convenience fee per ticket. If I have to stand in a will call line, I don't consider that convenient, do you?"

Her: ""

Me: "OK, what do I have to do?"

She gives me instructions and, thankfully, I had saved the original email confirmation on my work computer because it had a piece of information necessary to set up Will Call.

Me: "If the tickets arrive today or tomorrow, can I use them instead of going to will call?"

Her: "If they arrive today and you can call us before 5PM Eastern, we won't invalidate them."

That was impossible for me to do and they didn't arrive anyway. They arrived yesterday, the day of the concert. Surprisingly, I walked right into will call. I walked to the arena's will call line and was told I had to go to the Ticketmaster will call line at the other end. I went to the Ticketmaster will call line and was told I had to go to the Live Nation will call line at the next set of open windows. There was no one in line and it worked out fine.

People talk about the RIAA and how they just leech off of the artists and rip off the fans. They do and the sooner they become extinct, the better. Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and the rest of their ticket-brokering ilk can go to the extinction bin, too. More on the concert, a regular Sunday post, and the usual QOTD and BOTD later. I just had to get that out of my system.

CrabAppleLane Red-Shouldered Hawk

Can I just say that having to register for a newspaper's online edition is obnoxious and annoying? Just about all of them force you to do so. The Kansas City Star is the latest one that made me do it. To ALL newspaper publishers, including the local The Times-Picayune: Do you want me to read your online paper, see your sponsor's ads, and maybe click-through them and turn them into revenue for you? If I subscribe to your paper for $25/mo or whatever it is, will you give me free home delivery here in Bush, LA? In time for it to be of any use? And please lose the "In order to better serve you" portion of your spiel. You and I both know it ain't about me. If it was, this feature would be eliminated.

I thought Bob Cook was on the level for minute there. Maybe he is. Regardless, I laughed.

12 days until football season ...

Quote of the Day

Or, after dealing with situations such as Randy Moss and the Love Boat, the Vikings make it a policy only to take players who go to church on Sundays, even if they have to miss games to do it.

Bob Cook, MSNBC.com

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: " Decency Dictates"

Nice photoblog. -Rob

Today’s Quote of the Day is from a piece at MSNBC but the FCC ruling was widely reported everywhere yesterday. I have a hypocritical thing about cell phones. I have one and I use it occasionally. I am not all that happy about everyone else around me having one and USING it. Nothing more pleasant than being in line behind a guy jabbering on his cell phone at a fast food restaurant, interrupting his conversation just long enough to give his order, making the server ask him everything two or three times and making the person on the other end of the phone repeat everything because he’s talking to two people at once and not hearing anything. Public cell phone usage ought to be like public smoking. You should not be allowed to do it around others in enclosed, confined spaces.

Revisiting Jeff Jarvis on New Orleans. It was posted one day after Hurricane Katrina passed through.

Quote of the Day

These days it’s impossible to get on a bus without at least one person hollering into their cell phone, invading the private space of everyone around them. That’s bad enough when one can get off in 10 minutes. To have to suffer through HOURS of such torture, with nowhere to go and miserably cramped conditions — someone is going to explode.

One member of the public wrote to the FCC

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane. - Newt Gingrich"

Drug abuse is very likely going to keep some ballplayers out of their sport’s Hall of Fame in the next few years. Performance-enhancing drugs are frowned on these days in sports. In the world of Rock and Roll, however, performance-enhancing drugs are all the rage. One of this year’s nominees is in rehab. Any kind of Hall of Fame is bound to be flawed. The selection process is bound to be overly subjective. Still, most of them get it mostly right. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a glaring exception. Too many people in the Hall that don't belong and too many people not in the Hall who do.

For instance, Carole King gets inducted along with Gerry Goffin as a "non-performer". Excuse me. Carole King is a terrific performer and Tapestry is one of the great albums of the rock era. I find that to be a back-handed way of putting someone in. And how about Ike and Tina Turner? I suppose a case could be made for Tina. But Ike??? Needless to say, too many of my faves are not in. I guess part of the problem is they actually play Rock and Roll and actually sell records. Not to knock Herb Albert, Louis Armstrong, or Hank Williams but are they really known for their Rock and Roll?

Quote of the Day

Only Van Halen's second lead singer, Sammy Hagar, and ex-bass player Michael Anthony turned up for their induction. Guitarist Eddie Van Halen has just gone into rehab and original lead singer David Lee Roth stayed away in a tiff over what he would perform.

Associated Press via CNN.COM

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "Bradley Delp, the original lead singer of Boston, was found dead in his home in New Hampshire late last Friday. He was 55."

Didn't know that. Bummer. -Rob

Presented (Without comment from CrabAppleLane) from the TimesOnline:

Housework can help you to beat breast cancer, women are told

Via it comes in pints?.

If you’re a blogger who doesn’t care much about your readers’ comments, go ahead and skip this paragraph. To ALL bloggers interested in your readers’ comments: Comment moderation sucks. It kills the conversation. It is tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bath water. None of us like spam or unruly comments and it’s more than a little trouble to get that under control but it is worth the effort to do so. Again, only if comments matter to you. One guy (A BOTD) specifically solicited a comment from me about two weeks ago on his blog. I obliged but it still hasn’t been published as of this writing. That conversation is now over and his readers don’t know I responded. Another place that I used to frequent started using comment moderation a few months ago. Comments got published many days or weeks later (After the conversation was long over) so I stopped wasting my time. Gave them another try a few days ago. Still not published as of this writing and that conversation is over, too. I won’t know if that comment ever gets published in this instance because I don’t intend to waste any more time there. I won’t totally rule out the possibility that these sites were intentionally blocking my comments but I think it more likely they were just lazy or don’t know how to make it work (I don’t think it can work well although City Wendy does a decent job with it). Anyway, that’s the view from CrabAppleLane.

Quote of the Day

Whether you are a Republican, a Democrat or an independent, today is a cause for celebration.

John Boehner, R-Ohio - House Minority Leader

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "Then, like that pretty, yet insecure friend who insists on detailing to you every schlub who blatantly hit on her in the cereal aisle, every suit who grinned at her on the train, and every yogi who inadvertently (inadvertent my ass, she says) grazed her boob while adjusting her shoulders in the Cobra position, I set out to convince myself that my instructor was right:"

I’m disgusted, but not surprised, that O.J. Simpson can get a book published called “If I Did It, Here's How It Happened”. It will be even more disgusting if it hits the bestseller list but I’m optimistic that it won’t happen and the publisher will end up with a warehouse or two full of them. Fox is airing an interview with Simpson in two parts. There is appropriate outrage aimed at Simpson and at the publisher, ReganBooks, for profiting on heinous murders. The other player, Fox, seems to be getting a pass in every story (Admittedly only a few) that I’ve read. They're billing it as "THE INTERVIEW THAT WILL SHAKE THE NATION". Yeah, whatever...

Quote of the Day

I never ate it. Someone stopped me in time.

Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota Senator-Elect

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "It would seem from the Home page that this city's history began around the early 1900's and then was started only for commericial interests."

Bit of a wail today. Our phones and internet were out all day at work yesterday. We’re in a part of New Orleans that was submerged. The infrastructure, particularly the underground components of it, was completely destroyed 15 months ago by Hurricane Katrina and the flood waters that she brought. As it is being rebuilt, service interruptions are quite common. One day it’s the phones, another day it’s the electricity, another day it's the water pressure, you get the idea. We muddled through with cell phones as best we could but they are inadequate for the type of business we do. Just another challenge that businesses in New Orleans face. It is impossible to overstate the difficulties they’re having and yesterday’s was particularly discouraging. Imagine trying to do business when it is almost impossible for anyone to communicate with you. End of wail.

Quote of the Day

I just wanna be your one man
Your one man band

Three Dog Night, One Man Band

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "By the looks of this image you might think I'm some sort of fantastic comedian."

Fantastic photoblog. -Rob

Thought I’d tell you about one of the many hazards of the reconstruction that’s going on all around us and one of the incidents I witnessed. There are a lot of trucks on the road right now. A good many of them pull trailers with various pieces of their equipment. Most of those trailers are open. There are trucks that haul debris with ancient plywood bulging on their sides. Almost all of these debris hauling trucks look like they were cobbled together 50 years ago. A lot of the trucks and trailers are overloaded and they don’t secure ANYTHING except their heavy, expensive equipment. If they hit a bump or if the wind gets underneath the cargo, something will fly out. It could be a box, a piece of wood, a drop cloth, an empty bucket, a shovel, or, well, you get the idea. This poses no danger to themselves because they’re ahead of it. To those of us behind it driving 70mph (Or faster), the debris in the roadway or the ever more fun debris that is still in the air or bouncing on the roadway poses significant danger.

I was in the center lane of I-10 in New Orleans East heading home Thursday night when one such plastic bucket flew out of a truck along with a few pounds of nails. Can’t forget about the nails. It was about 50 yards ahead of me. At 70mph, 50 yards gets here in a hurry. The nails were rolling to the right so I swerved to the left and, thankfully, no one was there. The bucket hit the highway in the center lane and it bounced to the right also. That was right into the lane with the New Orleans Police Department cruiser in it. I must admit I enjoyed the sound of the siren and the pretty flashing lights this time but that guy will probably just pay his $200 fine and continue doing what he’s doing.

Speaking of unsecured cargo and overloaded trucks, wouldn’t there be a whole lot less property damage if gravel was transported in tankers instead of these open dump bodies? In Louisiana, you can’t even recover the property damage to your vehicle that they cause. They put little warning stickers on the back.

Stay back 200 feet
Not responsible for broken windshields

They are absolutely responsible. We just can’t make them pay for it any more.

It appears to be raining on everyone's parade today here in southeast Louisiana. There are four parades scheduled for today, including the normally spectacular Endymion. If they all roll today, they will all be wet and cold. There’s talk of postponing Endymion but there really are no good alternatives for them to roll on before Fat Tuesday.

The hummingbird watch continues.............

Quote of the Day

We don’t know the number of people that will be on the streets, but we pride ourselves in the safety of Mardi Gras, and we’ll work very hard to make sure that record isn’t marred this year.

Captain Juan Quinton, New Orleans Police Department

Blog of the day via Pitcherlady is here.

Quote from said blog: "A table in the granary of Mission San José, San Antonio, Texas."

It's a photoblog. -Rob