Month: October 2005

In a sure sign of its abandoning any hope of being taken seriously by anyone ever again, the White House decides to go after satirical site The Onion for using the Presidential Seal. This is the sort of rank, head-up-your-own-ass stupidity that you’d expect would be a joke on The Onion’s site, but it is in fact a very real action taken by a very real American Administration which seems intent on proving to the world that there is nothing too silly or ludicrous for the Bush White House to undertake.

I am not happy with UPS these days. Not happy at all in fact.

A few weeks ago I ordered a RAID card through eBay from a company in the US. The price was reasonable (roughly $120) and the shipping not *too* expensive, so I decided to go ahead and do it as it is a little difficult to get 3ware products in Canada.

When I received the UPS notification that the package had come in, I was shocked to find that I was suddenly responsible for “brokerage fees” amounting to over $60 — more than 50% of the product cost. At the time I was pretty pissed and wrote a little blog entry referring to UPS as the “United Ripoff Service”. I also sent a complaint to the Better Business Bureau complaining of UPS Canada’s exhorbitant fees.

Well, that seemed to get the ball rolling. A week after the complaint was sent someone from UPS tried to contact me to find a way to resolve the issues. A few days later I managed to get in touch with Tom [last name withheld], a representative from the Moncton office, and we talked about the issue. As Tom explained the brokerage fee applied because UPS had an agent show up and clear the packages at Customs, but that this was not my only option; alternatives included clearing the package myself, which probably would have been the best way for me to do it as I live near the port of Montreal and work near the airport. So far so good.

Now once this was explained Tom went a step further and told me that the brokerage fee would be waived for my package. I would still be responsible to pay for the taxes on the package, but the additional $44 fee would not be collected for this one package. Clearly I was very happy with this state of affairs. I collected the package, and once that was done I contacted the BBB to inform them that I was indeed satisfied of UPS’s response to the complaint, and removed the anti-UPS post from the web site. Things seemed to be going very well indeed.

Note the use of the word “seemed”. It seems that there is a great gap between what I was told would happen, and what ultimately did end up happening.

Last week I received a letter from UPS. I thought that it must have been a sort of recap of the discussions that had gone on, so I went ahead and opened it, but what I saw inside made me angry. Quite angry.

It was a bill.

Yes, a bill, for $44 and change. It appears that I am being charged with the same brokerage fees which Tom told me would be waived. Now, there can only be three conclusions for me to reach from this incident —

• there was a communications breakdown at UPS which caused the fee to stick, despite my being able to collect the package without paying it (how likely is that?)
• Tom lied to me in order to get me to drop my complaint at the BBB, hoping that I would have forgotten the whole thing by the time the bill came around (that seems a bit much), or
• Tom’s supervisor actively decided to backtrack on the issue and to fuck me in the process.

Now my first instinct was to try and contact Tom to find out what the 411 is on this issue, but he’s now away on assignment until November and won’t be reachable until then. He suggests asking reception for another rep, but when I tried to do this I got a message that the reception was busy and that I should leave a message.

Frankly I’m tired of this shit. Perhaps the UPS people have nothing better to do than try and give me the runaround, but I’m getting the sinking feeling that I’m getting fucked by a very large corporation, and over a frankly petty amount. They know I’m not going to get a lawyer over a $44 incident, and I think they’re just trying to take advantage of that fact.

As such I’m going to refile my complaint with the BBB. I really don’t feel that I have any other choice in the matter. And I’m going to restate here what I previously took off-line — don’t have anything shipped to you from the US via UPS or you will get ripped off, only now I’ve found out that you will also be lied to. Need to have something sent to you from the United States? Ask for USPS (the United States Postal Service) shipping, or be prepared to pay exhorbitant brokerage charges, no matter what UPS tells you. It’s an expensive lesson to learn, so take advantage of my having paid the price for you.

If this sort of shenanigans — you being told one thing and the UPS doing something else entirely — please share your stories with me! I’ll most certainly do a follow-up on this if you do.

Katrina update: nearly 100% of the reconstruction money has been awarded to firms located outside the affected area. This of course means that ultimately the reconstruction money will end up in the hands of firms who have little or no local presence in Mississippi, Alabama or Louisiana. This is doubly true when one considers that any reconstruction efforts will be exempt from laws stating that the jobs they yield must pay at least the prevailing wage for that sort of work in the area, which is already quite meager. Even GOP Representatives are complaining about how nearly all the federal money is going to “large corporate players”. So, it does look like the Bush administration managed to use the hurricane as yet another way by which they can reward their cronies — business as usual prevails. Still, it could be worse, couldn’t it…

Animal-rights people are upset that Kiwi exec accused of sex with rabbits and at least one guinea pig is out on bail. He may be free to walk the streets, but one could argue that his good name has been, well, rather tainted by all this. Imagine trying to live your life while all around you snicker that you’re “that rabbit shagger”…

Dubya in a freefall. See George. See George fall.

Taiwan parliament erupts in violence over media bill. I guess they’ll be referring to mobile phones as “weapons” now!

The cover says “uncensored, pee-in-your-pants fun.” Well, it’s not uncensored by default (you have to select that in the audio options) and I didn’t actualy pee my pants, but Family Guy presents Stewie Griffin: the Untold Story is the funniest thing I have seen in years. I watched it together with a buddy and, without the use of alcohol or any other drugs, we both laughed so hard that we often had to backtrack the DVD to catch jokes we couldn’t hear over our own peals of laughter. It’s that funny.

Of course, if you know Family Guy at all you’ll realize that this particular brand of humor isn’t exactly aimed at the witty “Frazer” set. It’s rude. It’s crude. In more than one instance you’ll find yourself holding your sides whilst shaking your head in disapproval. Evidently Seth McFarlane doesn’t believe that there could possibly be a subject which is off-limits, and the result is an absolutely hilarious 88 minute video which you’ll never see on television.

The plot, insofar as there is a plot to hold together this string of verbal and sight gags can be summed up by this — in the future people can take vacations not just to different places but to different times, and a 35-year-old Stewie Griffin has decided to visit today’s San Francisco. After briefly seeing 35-year-old Stewie briefly on television, young Stewie, thinking that the older guy is his “real father”, goes west to meet the man and ends up gaining a glimpse of the Griffins 30 years into the future where Chris has become a cop married to a nasty bitch, Meg has become a man named Ron, and Peter and Lois end up in a retirement home.

Built around this feature is a side-splitting prologue built on the idea of a movie premiere and which provides countless opportunities for meta-humor which couldn’t be made to fit into the main movie, like an absurdly funny bit in which Stewie is captured as Saddam Hussein by American soldiers and a terribly offensive — yet still oddly amusing — subplot in which Peter takes over directorial and production duties for the show and decides to make episodes on certain unmentionable subjects. It doesn’t really sound like it would be all that funny, but it works.

For all the obvious humor in the video, though, what really makes this one stand out is the number of jokes that are set up and *not* actually done. For example there is the obvious “Stewie grows up to be gay” subplot — hinted at in many episodes of the TV show — which the video seems to go out of its way to avoid mentioning explicitly, a “child abuse in hell” element which is implicitly set up and explicitly denied, and an incest theme which relies on double-entendre and situational gags but which doesn’t actually happens; I guess that’s what makes the difference between an incest joke being funny and another that’s just plain not funny. One could think that this may be a sign of growing maturity for MacFarlane, but that idea is quickly dispelled by his ending the whole video with a triple fart joke.

To be clear: you’ll want to steer clear of this if you’re offended by tongue-in-cheek jokes about the following: sex (in all its forms), violence, familites, Asian female stereotypes, Disney (both Walt Disney and the Disney company), Bugs Bunny actually getting shot by Elmer (repeatedly), the future, the past, Saddam Hussein, people in their 30s who are still virgins, farting, toddlers drinking, drunk wives and girlfriends (they get that one down particularly well), henpecked husbands, nasty women, fat people, greased-up deaf guys, Merchant Ivory films, local newscasts, entertainment journalists, Randy Newman, Blockbuster Video, Roger Moore, Michael Moore, Wilford Brimley, wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube men, wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube men salemen, “The Joy of Sex” books, Circuit City/Radio Shack stores, old people, airport security, Britney Spears and Condoleeza Rice. In short, everything they make fun of on the televised show, plus a few additional topical references to themes that just weren’t around when the original 3 seasons of the show were first made.

I don’t want to give too many details away — a large part of the humor relies on your being shocked by some of the gags — but if what you’re looking or is a video that’ll make you laugh your head off, Family Guy presents Stewie Griffin: the Untold Story is the one you’re looking for.

Amazon product link for Canadian readers

Amazon link for US viewers

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Welcome to the hackocracy. Who *are* those people who run the Bush administration? The New Republic introduces you to the top 15, from “Altoid boy” to, well, the Supreme Court nominee with no experience on the bench. (registration required, or go to bugmenot.com)