Pat and Jim were a couple of drinking buddies who worked as aircraft mechanics in Eagle Pass, TX.

One day the airport was fogged in and they were stuck in the hangar with nothing to do.

Pat said, “Man, I wish we had something to drink!”

Jim says, “Me too Y’know, I’ve heard you can drink jet fuel and get a buzz. You wanna try it?”

So they pour themselves a couple of glasses of high octane hootch and get completely smashed.

The next morning Pat wakes up and is surprised at how good he feels. In fact he feels GREAT! NO hangover! NO bad side effects. Nothing!

Then the phone rings . It’s Jim.

Jim says, “Hey, how do you feel this morning?”

Pat says, “I feel great. How about you?”

Jim says, “I feel great, too You don’t have a hangover?”

Pat says, “No that jet fuel is great stuff — no hangover, nothing. We ought to do this more often.”

Jim says, “Yeah, well there’s just one thing.”

Pat says, “What’s that?”

Jim says, “Have you farted yet?”

Pat says, “No…”

Jim says, “Well, DON’T, ’cause I’m in Denver!!!!!!”

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: I went over to my friend, he was eatin’ a pickle. I said “Hi, what’s happenin’?” He said “Nothin’.” Try to sing this song with that kind of enthusiasm; As if you just squashed a cop. — Arlo Guthrie, “Motorcycle Song”

Happy 4th of July, everybody!

July 13-16, 2006 is the annual Hellfire Rocket Launch from the Bonneville Salt Flats 90 miles west of Salt Lake City, UT. I don’t know if any Barnsonians save me are going to be in the area for it, but these launches are simply awesome. This year, they’re cleared to 15,000 feet for standard flights, and have launch windows to 25,000 feet.

For those unfamiliar with “model” rockets, this is some serious altitude, exceeding that of some surface-to-air missiles.

For all registrants, there will also be ample opportunity to fly all the “small stuff”, from 1/2A size on up. Although this is a regional launch for UROC, Hellfire has grown in popularity largely due to the unique setting: an enormous dry lake bed at over 4200 feet elevation, almost perfectly flat and smooth. It draws high-speed racecars and rocket-launchers alike because, well, where else can you launch a rocket to 25,000 feet and then watch exactly where it lands without it being over a hill or something?

The downside? Salt is intensely reflective… enough so that you’re likely to burn the underside of your chin and ears if you aren’t careful. Bring on the sunscreen!

Anyway, I’m excited. Gotta see if my daughter wants to register and set off her rockets at this event.

Here’s a video (warning: large) of what happens when you combine rednecks, fireworks, and boredom…

http://members.cox.net/thebrinkmans3/fireworkprank.wmv

My wife recently went out and bought a great, big bag of Jolly Ranchers from the store to use as “potty treats” while we are training our two-year-old in how to use the restroom. Of course, being who I am, I had to raid the bag a bit. I tried the cherry, which was OK, the watermelon, which was as good as always, and then started digging around for the lemon ones.

You see, when I was a kid, one of my favorite candies were lemon Jolly Ranchers. I’d tuck them way in the back corners of my mouth and they’d make my jaw ache, they were so sour. But I’d eat them until I got canker sores, because I liked ’em so much.

But alas… digging through a 5 lb bag of Jolly Ranchers… There are no Lemon Jolly Ranchers anymore!

The pain! The horror! In haste, I checked the Hershey’s web site:

http://www.hersheys.com/jollyrancher/hard_candies.asp

ERASED FROM HISTORY! An entire chapter of my youth, gone. My kids will have a hard time believing such a delicious, jaw-lock-inducing treat ever existed now. Lemon Jolly Ranchers are no more, and aren’t even given the decency of being included as part of the “Original Assortment”. The Original Assortment was five flavors, NOT FOUR!

To even get close to it, now I have to buy the “Tropical Assortment” and make do with “Lemon-Lime”.

You know, if I’m gonna enjoy a candy once every decade or so, I’d like for it not to change, plzthxu.

Man, if you think your job is boring, watch this video. It’s not too long, so it should be a short download even on dial-up…

Recent research indicates that you are most likely to win an eBay auction if you snipe, and less likely to win for every bid you place on a particular item. Important stuff to know, particularly for my wife, the eBay queen! Love that gal 😉

Here’s a letter I sent to my former Internet Service Provider this morning. What fun.

Dear Fortress ITX,

I have cancelled my subscription to your service for my VPS at 69.72.159.11.

Let me be very clear on why I did this: you have gone from being a reliable provider with decent customer service and a responsive support staff to a clueless band of wannabes with horrible uptime, overwhelming turnover, and a technical support staff second to EVERYBODY.

You started as jvds.com, a service by geeks, for geeks. It was cool, you kept up, and problems were resolved quickly and personably.

Now you’re just another corporate face without accountability, respect for the intelligence of your customers, or the ability to, at a minimum, keep your machines running without crashing on a daily and weekly basis.

Goodbye.

Sincerely, Matthew P. Barnson Former customer

Recently we’ve been inundated with “0% APR” offers from various credit card companies. After trying two of them out, and being very disappointed, I finally sat down and read all the fine print. And I figured out what should have been obvious at the beginning:

0% APR is only good for the credit card companies. It’s very bad for an individual consumer’s financial health.

Today, before I shredded it, I read in detail the terms of the new “0% APR” Discover Card we received in the mail. Unfortunately, it’s mulch now, so I can’t refer to the exact verbiage, but here are the terms they are not specific about:

1. Your billing cycle is a 25-day cycle, not 30 or 28. This means that, even though they offer a low “0% APR” on purchases, that only applies for the first 25 days of the purchase. I’ll show you why, in combination with the “balance transfer” deal, this is a racket which enormously benefits the credit card company. But at the heart of the system, if you pay your bill on the same day every month, it’s impossible to avoid paying interest on purchases.
2. That billing cycle gives you a moving target for payment every month. Some months, you’ll be paying early in the month, some months, you’re later in the month. Some months, you’ll have to pay TWO payments (one towards the beginning, one towards the end) in order to keep current and avoid late fees and immediate invalidation of your 0% APR! Can you afford two credit card payments a month? This keeps you off-balance, and more likely to lapse into the “default” terms of your credit card, which will usually double or triple your monthly payment.
3. Balance transfers. Oh, these seem like a holy grail for people who, like us, ended up owing a lot on a credit card due to medical expenses while uncovered by health care, and have yet to dig themselves out. Here’s how they actually work, and how that “0% APR” offer is a sweet investment for your credit card company.
4. The 0% APR, even if it’s “for life”, is actually for a limited period, no matter what. You have to jump through some extraordinary minutiae to keep that APR… minutiae which involves racking up consumer debt without any way to pay it off until your 0% APR loan is paid off.
5. There’s a minimum $5.00 to $50.00 balance transfer fee which is immediately applied to your credit card at the CASH ADVANCE rate. That’s 28% interest, and since it’s at the “cash advance” rate (the highest rate), it will be both the first loan taken out, and the very last one paid off.
6. The terms of this Discover card specify that, once the “term” ends, in order to keep the low APR, we’d have to make THREE minimum qualifying purchases or cash advances every month. A minimum qualifying purchase is one that is at least $50.00, and has a rate around 10%, or 28% for cash advances. So you have a $150 minimum purchase requirement every single month.
7. The heart of the racket is this: you always pay off your lowest-interest loans first. Let’s say you have a $10,000 balance to transfer. At “0% interest”, you’ll have a payment around $90 per month, which includes a little interest on that $50 “cash advance” you took out to get the balance transfer in the first place. That little bit of interest is basically the equivalent of the fees they aren’t charging you. It’s only a few bucks a month, but it pays for itself for the credit card company.
8. Balances which carry a 0% interest rate aren’t subject to the same restrictions on payments that balances with interest are. Nice little loophole in the law: they don’t need to make you make 3% minimum payments! This means that, if the rates we’ve seen before are any indicator, at the default payment rate, it’s going to take you TEN YEARS to pay off that 0% interest balance.

Add it all up: you have $50.00 which is going to sit in there for probably the life of the loan. Once your term expires, you have to spend $150 a month on the card, which you aren’t allowed to pay off until you’ve paid off your 0% loan. This means that your monthly rate is going to keep creeping up until you’ve paid the thing off! If your “term” is, say, three months, that means that for the first three months, you are going to have a nice, low $90 payment. Then every month thereafter until you have paid off that balance transfer, your payment is going to creep up by about $5.00. Since you are not allowed to actually pay off those high-interest balances until your low-interest balance is paid off, you’re screwed.

Here’s the math on this one. You do a $10,000 balance transfer at “0% APR”. You fulfill the bizarre payment requirements to the letter, and you start out your loan with what you think is a sensible payment of $170 a month… WELL above the minimum payment they expect. This would pay off that $10,000 in five years, right?

Sure. The first year, everything is going well. You make your fifteen payments (remember that 25-day billing cycle you have to remember?) Heck, you overpay, because like most sensible people you assume $170 a month, and actually end up paying two extra payments in the year. “Cool,” you think, “my balance is down to $7960”.

Well, not really. You have that little $50 that you’re forbidden to pay off. $8010. Plus interest on that $50 for the first year, which adds another $66.00 to your balance (well, it fails to subtract $66.00, so the same difference). $8076. Well, it’s not such a bad deal. For $116, you just paid off a year of debt interest-free. Woohoo!

Then the “three purchases a month” rule kicks in. OK, you’ll play their little game. That second year, you rack up an extra $1800 in consumer debt you’re not allowed to pay off until you’ve paid off the stuff you aren’t getting charged any interest for. You’re still kicking in $170 a month, but the equation has changed: in that time, you just racked up an extra $2K on your credit card, and…

…Congratulations. You are now in the hole $1,000 more than when you started. And your “generous” $170 a month contribution towards your 0% debt now barely covers the interest on your loans.

What a scam.

So put yourselves in our position: a substantial amount of consumer debt, which is mostly because we converted medical debt to credit card debt, along with substantial periods of unemployment during the “bust”. Believe it or not, we got better terms from a credit card company for paying off a massive hospital bill than we did from the hospital.

What strategy would you take to getting rid of that debt in 5 years or less?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a new video called “The Corruptibles“. The major point to this video is one we’ve discussed here many times before: how laws are being shaped by wealthy recording and movie conglomerates to eliminate fair-use rights and ownership of digital media.

So there’s a slightly-hidden funny in the latest Pixar movie, “Cars”. My co-worker, Ken, brought it to my attention, as I haven’t seen the movie yet.

On the body of the antagonist is the proud logo: “HTB”. If you look closer, you realize it spells out “Hostile Takeover Bank”. Hah!

This got me thinking: what other fictional names could we give corporations/organizations that more closely reflect their actual mission? Maybe even with a slogan or fake quotable quote to put it into relief? Here are some of the ones I cooked up.

• MCL: Mafia Connections Limited. “I started dis dry-cleaning bizness in fiddy-tree, and we been laundering ever since.”
• WAC: The Wholly Amoral Corporation. “From day one, we’ve been devoted to the principle of extracting every possible penny from your paycheck. And we’re proud to continue that tradition today.”
• QIC: Questionable Investments Corp. “We lose your money so you don’t have to!”
• SOH: Snake-Oil Health. “Pseudo-science and superstition aren’t just our business. They’re our passion.”
• MLRA: Multi-Level Relationship Abuse, Inc. “In as little as three months, you too can lose a few hundred dollars and drive away those pesky family and friends.”
• BMSC: Behemoth Mega-Software Corp. “Anti-trust legislation doesn’t apply to us, because, look, there’s so much competition in software markets we haven’t entered yet, like diesel mechanics and drywall hanging.”

What can you cook up?