Category Archives: Rants

Wherein I go off. Categorized so you can ignore it if you like.

Where are the protest songs?

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We’re doing our morning chores when Washington Bullets by The Clash comes on the iTunes mix, and after about half the song, my wife (who did not bring The Clash to our marriage) asks from the other room, “Is this the Clash?”

Inimitable. But it made me wonder, for the umpteenth time in the last four years, where are all the protest songs? What happened to music as a political outlet? And don’t give me John Mayer. That song could have been so much more than it was. Poking sly fun at your own fan base is one thing, testifying against your irresponsible government is another. I want the latter.

Maybe we just don’t hear it on today’s radio. Which is a whole ‘nother rant.

September 11

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Yeah, it’s my birthday.  Thanks.  36.  Oh, much appreciated, and you don’t look a day over 21, either.

Five years ago today, evil people perpetrated a terrible tragedy in this country.  And yes, the world has changed since then.  But make no mistake, the machinations of the conservative US political establishment have changed the world in many more terrible ways than the events of 9/11 did.  How can I say that?  Am I blaming Bush for 9/11?

Don’t be daft.

The world in the year 2000 was full of extremism and terrorism and mass killings and innocent lives lost and habitual persecution and poverty and genocide.  The world in 2006 still has all of that.  Nothing has changed in that regard.  Terrorism wasn’t born on 9/11/2001.  Maybe Americans had their eyes opened–in a horrible, tragic way–that morning.  But it was all there to be seen.

What is new is the pain, suffering, and devastation wreaked by our country since then.  What is new is the belief firmly held by American conservatives, evangelicals, and extremists–and increasingly by the under-educated middle classes hungering for a Shepherd to guide them–a belief that we have the right (some would say the God-given right) to punish other people who disagree with us.  Combine this with the military and economic might of our country, and you have today’s changed world.

A world in which I am both glad and horrified to be an American.

Never, ever use H&R Block, they hire incompetent tax monkeys

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How’s that for an inflamatory title. But you know what, I’m pretty pissed.

Executive Summary: We have gone to H&R Block each of the last two years, and each time the “Tax Advisors” there have screwed up our taxes, such that I have had to come home and do basic research on the Internet, take that research back to H&R Block, and have my tax forms amended or changed. For the privilege of fixing my taxes for them, I have paid them several hundreds of dollars. We will pick a CPA blindly from the phonebook before we go back to H&R Block.

On to the admittedly long and ranting post:

Last year, we went to H&R Block to do our taxes. Yes, I know. Please refrain from comments like, “Well duh, you went to H&R Block, what do you expect!”

The Tax Advisor who helped us was deemed by the people at the office there as the “expert” and the best they had. We were even interrupted once or twice by other Tax Advisors so that he could answer their questions. But when confronted by my wife’s stipend (she’s a Post-Doc) he was flummoxed, and counted it as regular wages. I went home, having paid H&R Block their exorbitant, per-form fees, and chatted with one of my wife’s co-workers, and he said it should have been done a different way. I researched on the Internet, and armed with this information, I went back the next day. I was helped by a different Tax Advisor, who seemed surprised that our first guy had screwed up, and we filed an amended return. As a result we owed $4,919.00 (!) less in taxes last year.

We were pretty upset by this turn of events, especially given how much we paid H&R Block for their services. And we swore to never go back.

This Year

With all the interviewing and traveling and moving and whatnot, we only just now started to think about taxes, and I decided to go back to H&R Block. After all, nothing had really changed in our taxes, so what could there be that would be so complicated? I went armed with our taxes from last year (both original and amended).

It took this year’s tax monkey two hours, with me sitting there the whole time, to figure out our taxes. Let me tell you what they do at H&R Block. You come in at your appointed time. They sit you down with your “Tax Advisor” who fires up a computer with specialized H&R Block software on it. She takes your personal information, then starts asking questions. The computer prompts her with these questions. She fills in boxes on the screen with the numbers you present to her. Sometimes she deviates from script, because she has done this a lot, and knows that you need this document, or you probably had this deduction. But for the most part, she follows the prompts. At the end, the software checks for errors, and she has to actually solve a few problems: this box wasn’t filled in, this form isn’t really required, etc. Seems easy.

We bought a Toyota Prius last year, and get a tax break of some sort for doing that. I expected a box to pop up after something like “Do you have farm income” that might read “Did you buy a hybrid car last year?” But no. I had to bring it up. Fine. When I did, our Tax Advisor monkey had never heard of any sort of tax break for that. She suggested that maybe we just got the warm glow of a planet saved, or something. I insisted. So she looked through her computer and her book and came up with a “Qualified Electric Vehicle Credit” (IRS Form 8834). This must be it, she said, so we filled it out.

Taxes done, I signed over my fees (almost twice as much as last year!) and left with forms to be signed by my wife.

At home, not comfortable with what she had done, I did five minutes of research on the Internet, and came up with this, and this, and this.

Which means she deducted $2,400 from our taxes as a tax credit, when instead it should have been a $2,000 deduction from our taxable income on line 36 of the 1040. Which, I think, means that we will go from getting a decent refund to owing a ton of money.

My beef with H&R Block

Of course I am not happy that I am paying the government more tax. But that isn’t H&R Block’s problem. My problem with H&R Block is that I take my taxes to them because I do not understand some of the intricacies of our investments and whatnot. I take it to them because they are supposed to be the experts. I want the peace of mind that comes from having someone else sign the document and affirm that everything in there is correct.

But twice now, I have had to correct H&R Block. I have had to tell them that they completed my taxes incorrectly. I have had to make them fix my taxes. And as a reward for catching their mistakes, I have had to pay them upwards of $600 dollars.

This is the essence of bad business. I know their business model is built around filling out 1040 forms for people with uncomplicated taxes. But really.

Update after talking to the manager

We’re going back in tonight to fix it, and getting half of our preparation fee back. We’ll see how it goes.

The new AT&T logo is bad

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The new AT&T logo, the one created for SBC’s transformation back into AT&T, a process that rumors say might also swallow up Cingular (formerly AT&T Wireless), that new logo is, well, awful.

Admittedly, the old AT&T logo has a bit of a PAN-AM feel to it, I can see that it certainly needed some updating, but this? The new logo is ugly. The font is ugly. The “3D” see-through nature of the logo is ugly. The differing widths of the lines, especially compared to the original, are clunky and… ugly.

The whole thing is a travesty.

That’s just what I think.

These people are sort of middle of the road in their opinions. Businessweek says “your new blue ‘beach ball’ is full of hot air.” Design Observer has a reflection on the old logo, written a little before the new one came out, and the comments are rife with hatred of the new thing.

Of course, it is nothing compared to the world’s worst logo.

Stupid Omaha

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Both the wife and I are taking the next couple of days off from work, and one thing we thought we’d do, was go to the movies. Grandma is still here, so she can watch the gimpy boys while we pretend we don’t have a child. We wanted to go see Brokeback Mountain, but forgot momentarily that we live in Omaha. City of 650,000. City of eleven movie theaters and 107 screens. Of course, Brokeback Mountain is not playing in Omaha.

Stupid city.

In the interest of fairness, I do have to point out that it isn’t playing in Iowa City, IA, either, but that town has only three theaters and 24 screens. I could forgive them (though only a little, being a progressive college town and all).

Blessed by a Christmas Angel

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So, last night ,when I took the dog out for a walk, I was surprised to see a basket on our front porch, I put it inside, and when we got back, Tiffany and I investigated it. It is a very nice basket, probably a Longaberger basket, with chocolate, a (white) Standard Poodle ornament, a regular Christmas tree ornament, some chocolate, a red Christmas-y hand towel, and a matchbox car.

Oh, and a piece of paper. Let me publish some excerpts:

Someone in the neighborhood is sending you Holiday Cheer. In this bag are goodies sent especially for you. Along with your special goodies, you will find a Christmas Angel 2005 picture. Please hang this Angel in your front window to show that your house has been “Blessed by an Angel.”

and

In the bag you will find some extra fliers and Angels to use when preparing your Holiday Goodie Bag. Please make up a special small bag with goodies for the neighbor that you are going to Bless.

and

As soon as possible, when your neighbor won’t see you, place the Special Angel Bag, along with extra Angel supplies, on their doorstep so that they can pass along Holiday Cheer to someone else in the neighborhood. They too have now been BLESSED BY A CHRISTMAS ANGEL.

Now. My immediate reaction was: how nice, how sweet, but how dare they? After some thought, I have decided that my reaction is just: what were they thinking?

I mean, really. When you do something sweet and meaningful like this, you NEED to ask people if they WANT to participate before you FORCE them to do it. Now, some perfect stranger, conveniently made anonymous by the rules of this chain letter, is forcing us to go peer at our neighbor’s houses to see who has been “Blessed” and who has not, then go buy the equivalent of stocking presents for them, “meaningful” presents, then make color copies of the Angel Supplies because we have only one Angel in our kit, the one we are supposed to hang so this doesn’t happen to us again.

Oh, and don’t forget a basket. Then we have to creep out and, this is the worst part in my opinion, we have to inflict this on someone else.

I don’t want to. I appreciate the sentiment, but not the idea that a) Oh, everyone will want to do this, Bill! and b) Nobody could be offended by the Blessing of an Angel! and c) It is no bother at all when you are passing along Holiday Cheer!

But what are my options? We can’t re-gift it. The matchbox car and the poodle make that clear. And besides, then I’m passing this on, and that’s what most offends me about it. We can’t just ignore it, because our anonymous donor will hate us, I think. I have thought to put the basket back out on the porch, prominently, with $40.00 and a note saying, “Thank you for your effort and sentiment, but we do not wish to take part in this year’s Blessing. We are all full up on Blessings. Please take our appreciation, and this money, and Bless someone else. And our poodle is black, not white.”

They should really have asked. What I really want to do is add a note to the Christmas Angel 2005 Picture that says, “Next year, please send us the Opt-out Angel 2006 picture” and copy it and plaster it around the neighborhood at some point in the evening “when your neighbor won’t see you.”

I should note that Tiffany probably feels much as I do, but is a nicer, better person with a healthy sense of guilt/community/holiday-spirit, and so we may end up doing this.

Either way, I’m keeping the angel for next year, so I can pre-empt a 2006 Blessing.

Urinal Rant

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Avert thine eyes, if you are not interested in men’s urinals and the etiquette that surrounds them.

It appears that some men are pre-flushers. That is, when they arrive at a urinal, they immediately haul on the handle to get a good flush going. I don’t know if they need to hear the rushing water to get started, or if they just like a clean urinal before peeing. I don’t care.

What I do care about, is that, when they are done, they flush again. Please. There is nothing nastier than arriving at a urinal to find it full of someone else’s urine.

So if you’re a pre-flusher, would you please also be a two-flusher?

Thank you.

I’d like to note that the auto-flushing urinal is a handy solution to this. I’d like our government to do something about mandating these in new construction.

Bashing TiVo

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Yeah, I know. I’m the ultimate TiVo evangelist. I love TiVo. People who know me know the praises I have sung about TiVo. And yet… and yet. This past week I have come to dislike TiVo, the company.

Let me be clear, lest there be any misunderstanding. Time-shifting television has changed my life, and for the better. The concept, the interface, the simplicity with which TiVo presented this complex idea, was remarkable. Still is. There’s nothing like it in the marketplace. There are competitors, sure. There are HD competitors, and free competitors, and hackacble competitors… but none of them approach the ease-of-use, the interface, the simplicity of what TiVo hath wrought.

That said, this is for the search engines: TiVo sucks! The company, that is.

As you may or may not know, I have a new TiVo. A Series 2 TiVo, which is better than my old one in a couple of ways. First, it is blessed to receive the latest TiVo software update, which added some cool stuff like folder organization in my Now Playing list. (All of Aidan’s Mr. Rogers episodes are lumped together in a folder! Yay!) Second, this new Series 2 TiVo has Internet capabilities. You can hook it up to the Internet so that it can get schedule updates, so that you can schedule shows remotely, so that you can connect two TiVos (if you have two) in your home, so that you can see photos and listen to music from your home computer, and finally, so that you can save (and eventually receive?) movies to/from the Internet/your computer. It is an Internets-connected-glorious-potentiality.

Or not.

To connect to the Internet, you have to buy some additional hardware (because in their wisdom they added a USB port to the Series 2. Not an Ethernet port. A USB port. For which there is exactly one use, attaching a USB to Ethernet adapter. Hello?). $20 for a wireless adapter if you have a wireless network at home, or $25 for a wired one, if you have an ethernet jack nearby. Of course, if you go with the wireless option, you’d best be running either no security on your network, or the easy-to-crack WEP scheme, because the very secure WPA scheme is not supported by TiVo. And if you go with the wired option, be sure to buy only one of the two tested and approved adapters, one of which is no longer made (be sure to find the version 1 adapter, because the current version 2 is not compatible!).

Should you actually get connected (and to be fair, many people have) you’ll then discover that the cool movie saving/sharing feature (called TiVoToGo) is not available for Macintosh computers. Actually, the whole photo and music sharing thing is not either, as TiVo points out that the required software is not compatible with the latest version of Mac OS X (Tiger). It works, with an error or two, some of the time, and there’s a hack you can download to get it to work more reliably, but you have to run it each time you want to share music/photos. Oh, and TiVo Online Scheduling? I was expecting to be able to log into my TiVo and manipulate it remotely, but that is not the case. What you can do is pick a show from an online list and tell your TiVo at home to record it. You can’t change its priority, you can’t see if it will conflict with anything else, it is purely a one-way transaction.

So.

I pay my monthly fee (and TiVo has now added a “service contract” whereby if you cancel service within one year of signing up, you owe them like, $100, all that on top of the $12 monthly), and I get my service. But part of that service includes the cool TiVo Home Media Features: music and photo sharing, TiVoToGo, etc. I can’t get at those features without ponying up another $20 for an adapter. And even then, I personally can’t get them, because of my platform choice.

How much of my monthly fee do you think goes towards these services? Some of the TiVosi would suggest that these are free, because you used to have to pay extra for them, and now they just come with the system, at no extra charge. That seems disingenuous at best, and intentionally deceptive at worst.

I find I am terribly frustrated, disappointed, and even angry at TiVo for what I have to endure as a customer. It should just work. The original TiVo did. You plugged it in, and it just worked. It was glorious. This new box does everything the old one did, without a hitch. But all these new things, these new cool things… you have to pay extra, jump through hoops, pray and fiddle to even get it to sort of work. That’s not the way it should be.

In the end, I feel betrayed. I find I don’t care about the company anymore. I feel like they don’t care about me. The relationship between us is now just about money and service, like the way I feel about my cell phone company, or my cable television company. And to that end, I would be interested in some way to recoup my fees, since it is TiVo’s fault I cannot access these services they promoted to me. Anyone else interested?

George Bush Lied

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I’ve just finished reading the Memorial Day editorial from the Minneapolis Star Tribune. You should read it, too.

[Update: The original Strib editorial is now behind their paid archive, but I posted the full text below.]

First off, kudos to a major news organization for having the will to do this, and on Memorial Day, to boot. I wish more people with positions of power and responsibility would do the same.

George Bush knowingly bent the truth to his own ends, but the American people don’t care. And for the life of me, I cannot figure out why they don’t care. Oh, wait no, they do care… about gas prices. Not about Bush’s aborted AIDS in Africa program. Not about innocent civilians dead around the world due to our direct action. Not about Bush’s administrators receiving accolades and medals while young Americans die overseas due to their incompetent (lack of) decision making. Not about America’s moral standing in the world crushed under the weight of sanctioned torture. No, we care about gas prices that are still among the lowest in the world.

Words fail me.

Update: Here is the text of the editorial (also as a text file):

Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN - startribune.com Last update: May 29, 2005 at 7:25 PM Editorial: Memorial Day/Praise bravery, seek forgiveness Published May 30, 2005 Nothing young Americans can do in life is more honorable than offering themselves for the defense of their nation. It requires great selflessness and sacrifice, and quite possibly the forfeiture of life itself. On Memorial Day 2005, we gather to remember all those who gave us that ultimate gift. Because they are so fresh in our minds, those who have died in Iraq make a special claim on our thoughts and our prayers. In exchange for our uniformed young people’s willingness to offer the gift of their lives, civilian Americans owe them something important: It is our duty to ensure that they never are called to make that sacrifice unless it is truly necessary for the security of the country. In the case of Iraq, the American public has failed them; we did not prevent the Bush administration from spending their blood in an unnecessary war based on contrived concerns about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. President Bush and those around him lied, and the rest of us let them. Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes. Perhaps it happened because Americans, understandably, don’t expect untruths from those in power. But that works better as an explanation than as an excuse. The “smoking gun,” as some call it, surfaced on May 1 in the London Times. It is a highly classified document containing the minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting at 10 Downing Street in which Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair on talks he’d just held in Washington. His mission was to determine the Bush administration’s intentions toward Iraq. At a time when the White House was saying it had “no plans” for an invasion, the British document says Dearlove reported that there had been “a perceptible shift in attitude” in Washington. “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The (National Security Council) had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” It turns out that former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill were right. Both have been pilloried for writing that by summer 2002 Bush had already decided to invade. Walter Pincus, writing in the Washington Post on May 22, provides further evidence that the administration did, indeed, fix the intelligence on Iraq to fit a policy it had already embraced: invasion and regime change. Just four days before Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2003, Pincus writes, the National Security Council staff “put out a call for new intelligence to bolster claims” about Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs. The call went out because the NSC staff believed the case was weak. Moreover, Pincus says, “as the war approached, many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about Hussein’s alleged weapons programs.” But no one at high ranks in the administration would listen to them. On the day before Bush’s speech, the CIA’s Berlin station chief warned that the source for some of what Bush would say was untrustworthy. Bush said it anyway. He based part of his most important annual speech to the American people on a single, dubious, unnamed source. The source was later found to have fabricated his information. Also comes word, from the May 19 New York Times, that senior U.S. military leaders are not encouraged about prospects in Iraq. Yes, they think the United States can prevail, but as one said, it may take “many years.” As this bloody month of car bombs and American deaths — the most since January — comes to a close, as we gather in groups small and large to honor our war dead, let us all sing of their bravery and sacrifice. But let us also ask their forgiveness for sending them to a war that should never have happened. In the 1960s it was Vietnam. Today it is Iraq. Let us resolve to never, ever make this mistake again. Our young people are simply too precious. Copyright 2005 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

Republished here for educational purposes.

Petland

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A couple of years ago in Iowa City, a new pet store opened in a part of town near our house. It was called Petland, and I was interested. The only decent pet store around was a PetCo all the way up in Cedar Rapids. I took a look online, and discovered a whole new world of animal welfare issues. It appears that there are a number of organizations and individuals dedicated to boycotting Petland. They allege that Petland buys their puppies from puppy mills.

See the end of this post for links to information about puppy mills.

Petland argues, in various places, that they do no such thing. Instead, they will tell you that they get their puppies from “local breeders” or “brokers.” The Petland boycotters argue that when pressed, Petland owners rarely produce breeder names, and those that are given out turn out to be “volume breeders” with several hundred dogs. Petland never suggests that they don’t buy from brokers, just that these sources aren’t “puppy mills.”

I volunteered at the ASPCA animal shelter in NYC when I lived there. I worked in adoptions, and it was one of the most difficult things I have done. Before you start volunteering, you are required to attend an animal euthanasia procedure. I’d always been an animal lover, but my time at the ASPCA cemented in me an anger at people who would abuse or neglect an animal. Still today it turns my stomach and makes me see red.

It does not matter to me if Petland’s suppliers are puppy mills in the strictest definition. I would never buy a dog from a pet store because they treat their animals like commodities. Not healthy enough, throw it back. Didn’t survive being trucked from Missouri, well too bad. At least it was cheap. Oh, and they offer to let you return the dog if you’re not satisfied. Like a vacuum cleaner. That blatant disregard for life, that is abuse, in my book.

I refuse to even set foot in the store.

What should you do? Educate yourself with the links below. Go to Petland and take a good look at the animals, the conditions they are kept in, ask some questions about where they came from, and where those people got them.

And if you just want to play with the doggies, remember that the shelter lets you do that, too.

Extensive linking is expected with this kind of issue, so here we go.  These links were updated on March 31, 2008.  Petland Rockford’s site had disappeared, and Petland’s Official site had changed.  Some other links were updated, too.

The best links: See: Inside a Puppy Mill Video and: How to buy a dog and: 5 Easy Steps to Avoid Puppy Mills

Petland’s side of the story See: Petland’s Pet Welfare Questions and: Petland Rockford used to have an “Animal Extremists” page (now via Wayback) but now they have a sanitized Petland Brand web site.

Anti-Petland opinions See: The Voice For Dogs – Petland Campaign and: The Voice For Dogs – Story of Tiva and: The Voice For Dogs – Former Petland Employee and: IDA’s Boycott Petland Site and: Recent news articles on Petland and Puppy Mills

General Puppy Mill Information See: Facts on puppy Mills, from HSUS and: Stop Puppy Mills, by HSUS and: What is a Puppy Mill and: Prisoners of Greed