Monday, June 25, 2007

I'm Not Wild About Harry

I know zip about Harry Potter. Haven't read the books, haven't seen the movies. So I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to Keith Olbermann's segment tonight offering his theory as to how the series will end. Since then however, five different people have written me to say that it's a terrific, logical guess. If you'd like to hear this terrific, logical guess, you can view the segment here. And keep in mind that all terrific, logical guesses as to how The Sopranos would end were wrong.

• Posted at 10:10 PM · LINK

J.F.K. Blown Away

Time Magazine is devoting its new issue to remembering John F. Kennedy. Since they apparently didn't need a couple of pages for late-breaking Paris Hilton news, they stuck in a brief debate about whether there was a conspiracy in the death of their cover boy. Given the gravity of the topic, it's an appallingly brief exchange but the "no" argument, penned by Vince Bugliosi, makes some pretty solid points. The "yes" argument, which is by David Talbot, is quite weak, putting its focus not on whether there was a conspiracy but on whether Bobby Kennedy believed there was one. Which is not the same thing.

Thanks to Michael Kelley for letting me know about this.

• Posted at 7:30 PM · LINK

It's Alive!

Or it will be soon.

• Posted at 2:29 PM · LINK

Never Can Say Goodbye

I access the Internet via a Road Runner cable connection. For reasons too boring to go into, I also needed a dial-up connection so I had a subscription for $9.95 per month with a company called AllVantage that offered this...with a real nice online webmail interface and pretty good service. Recently though, AllVantage got out of this business and announced that effective July 19, they would cease offering dial-up Internet access and such, and that all our accounts would be transferred over to PeoplePC, another firm that offers much the same thing at much the same price.

Actually, PeoplePC offers a much less sophisticated webmail interface. In fact, GMail, which is free, offers a better one so the only reason I would need PeoplePC is for the dial-up connection, which I also don't need because the Road Runner people now have those available — also for free — to their cable subscribers. Which is why I don't need PeoplePC at all and decided to cancel it before they billed me. The AllVantage people not only gave them my account but also my credit card info as well, which is either a violation of some law or should be.

The trouble is that as with many such services, cancelling your account involves calling a Cancellation Department. You can't just opt out online because they want you to speak with someone whose job is to talk you out of leaving. (AllVantage does online cancellations. In fact, I don't think it's even possible to talk to a human being who works for that company, assuming there even are any.)

So I just spent an aggravating half-hour on the phone, trying to cancel a PeoplePC account I never signed up for in the first place. I always feel bad when I get annoyed with these employees who have their little script they've been ordered to follow. The lady on the phone seemed nice enough...but she was either not smart enough to realize that she couldn't keep me, or perhaps she just wasn't allowed to make that determination. She kept asking me why I wanted to cancel and what possible reasons I could have for being anything less than thrilled with PeoplePC and didn't I want to keep my account intact and give it a few more months before I did something as drastic as cancelling this account I never wanted in the first place?

I told her I didn't need a dial-up account at all. I told her I never wanted PeoplePC at all. I told her that my attempts to make telephone connection with people there had been uniformly inefficient and resulted in excrutiating hold times. I told her I didn't like their webmail interface and that it didn't serve my purposes. Somehow, she was not empowered to just write me off and close out my account then and there. She still had to put me through more questions and urge me to give them a chance to prove themselves. I kept flashing on all these guys on Fox News Channel telling us that The Surge will work if we just give it more time. And more time and more time and more time...

I think (note the boldface) I finally convinced her to close out my business with them. She gave me a 17-digit "cancellation confirmation number," which of course raises the question of why that number requires seventeen digits. Are that many people cancelling? You can write out the entire population of the planet in ten digits. Why do they need more number combinations than that?

I hope this will be my last message here about PeoplePC. And a warning to you all.

• Posted at 2:22 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Here's a commercial for Twinkles, "the only cereal in the storybook package." Twinkles was an elephant and when you bought his cereal, which was kind of like sugary Cheerios in star shapes, there was a little storybook affixed to the back of the box. The idea was that you could read the Twinkles story while you ate the cereal. I recall neither being very nourishing. A batch of Twinkles adventures were also produced for television on the lowest-possible budgets...spots that split the difference between being cartoons and being commercials. This is one of them.

The narrator of the Twinkles spot is George S. Irving, an actor who was in most of the later Total Television cartoon shows, like Underdog. At last report, Mr. Irving was still actively performing in musical theater in and around the New York area. There's also a commercial in there with a fireman who sounds to me like either Arnold Stang with a cold, or someone doing an okay impression of Arnold Stang. I'm thinking the latter. (And speaking of Arnold Stang, check out this weblog post for a nice profile of that fine comic actor. In the next week or so, I'll try to get time to write up my one Arnold Stang anecdote and post it here.) Anyway, here's Twinkles...

And if you liked that, here's another one. This one's in color...

• Posted at 2:57 AM · LINK