This banking ripoff is PERFECT for a black person...OR a white person!

You've all seen this by now, I assume...

...and yes, if you haven't figured it out, Red House is a real place, even if the ad didn't actually run on TV.

One of the recurring snide comments I've read in connection with this video is "Only in North Carolina would they even consider running something like this." Because self-awareness is against the law in the southeast, right? Because once you get to Virginia, irony is what you use on your shirts-ony, right? Because the rest of the country is sooooo much more progressive, right? Riiiiiiight?

Let me help you out with something ripped screaming and afraid from the headlines. Like our buddy Ten Gauge, the fine people at the Baltimore branches of Wells Fargo (the banking behemoth that recently ate home-grown Wachovia alive) liked extending credit to everybody. But unlike our buddy Ten Gauge, if the pending lawsuit is to be believed, certain types of now-infamous credit ripoffs were aimed very heavily at minority customers. The declarations of ex-employees claim that African American and other minority communities were targeted for subprime mortgages ("ghetto loans," they called them), and in fact told all kinds of fanciful lies to people who qualified for prime loans to get them on the subprime train.

They focused on African-American churches. Churches, people. I don't know how different it is in the streets of Baltimore, but here in Red House country (where, if you'll remember, black people AND white people buy furniture), the church community is still considered Quite Worthy. They didn't call the game plan "riding the stagecoach to hell" for nothing.

Now consider this: the company that does credit pre-qualifying for Red House claims to offer a non-discriminatory assessment of all applicants, and not following up on what would seem to be a commonsense "play fair" rule is a surefire way to have your name immortalized in an 800+ page legal complaint...as Wells Fargo Baltimore has found out.

So really, who's the chump now? And can't we all just get along? I know of a place where we can, but you'll have to figure out where it is yourself. It's down the road from the Cuban gynecologist who sells cars.

If you cannot control your desktop, you cannot command others...

Y'know folks, when I get into one of these no-talky, no-posty funks, it often takes something very special or very horrifying to drag me out of that hole. This is both of those things. Ladies and gentlemen, Sophos has released an anti-virus tool in Klingon.

A brief musical interlude follows while the implications of that announcement (and the follow-up post which offhandedly mentions (shudder) the upcoming Klingon Kama Sutra...and you thought they weren't flexible) sink in. Sing along if you know the words and aren't afraid to say them out loud...just follow the bouncing bat'leth!


Klingon Anti-Virus: Because to those who are overly cautious, every download is impossible.

BACON DOESN'T BELONG THERE!

Of all the photo blogs I've been pointed to, none drop my jaw as far as This Is Why You're Fat, a celebration (if that's the word) of excess in the kitchen and food that shouldn't go on top of (or inside of) other food. And it's not top-dollar-for-artistically-tiny-portions excess, oh nonono. This is all middle-class everything-from-the-freezer-on-one-dish excess, the kind that you and I can afford...and live to regret. For that reason, no text is needed, although an occasional "BACON DOESN'T BELONG THERE!" would be extremely helpful. Obviously deserving of multiple visits.

Singled out for special mention: the Lovecraftian horror of THE MEAT SHIP.

MEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAT SHIIIIIIIIIIP.


My God...it's full of sausages...

Ho, ho, hoooooooooooo...

Yep, as I type this, that movie is running over on TBS.

Merry Christmas. And don't shoot your eye out.

Jingle All The Way! Then Jingle A Bit Further!

I had an introduction ready to roll for this, but I think a four word description says all you'll need to know: SIX CONTINUOUS HOURS OF "JINGLE BELLS." This was staged by a DJ at a station in Ann Arbor last year to mark the 150th anniversary of the song's publication, and my guess is that you'll feel every single year if you Take The Challenge and listen to the whole thing in one go. Or maybe it's an orange in your stocking instead of an unusually persistent lump of coal. You tell me. And yes, it is from our good friends at WFMU, thank you for asking.

The War On The War On Christmas II: The Children's Crusade

“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.” -- A Christmas Carol, and my first post on this sad and sorry topic

This space has always been about pointing out ridiculous things, the nonsense that make us collectively dumber just by the act of taking them seriously. As it happens, I take Christmas very seriously, and there's a pretty solid reason for that. Even on the secular "shopping holiday" level, Christmas is (or should be) about what it would be like if people stopped being jerks for a day and concentrated on really enjoying each others' company, about loving friends and family and being loved in return. And of course, getting to the root of things, it's about whose birthday it is, and thinking about what kind of example he set for the rest of us.

So hopefully, you can understand why I reserve some old-fashioned scorn for the foaming-mouth media frenzy surrounding the so-called War on Christmas. Persecuting a door greeter who said "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" is a massive exercise in missing the point.

If you were with me last year, you'll remember Bill O'Reilly (the only news channel noise machine I pay even the slightest bit of attention to these days...which is to say I usually can't be bothered) declared a preemptive victory in the so-called "War on Christmas," and I celebrated the relative quiet with my favorite Christmas record. Of course, it couldn't last. The moment that atheist placard won a spot next to the Nativity in Olympia, Washington, the lid was off the honeypot, and America's "favorite" professional provocateur couldn't keep his paw out. And frankly, if we're depending on Bill O'Reilly to save Christmas, we'll all be celebrating Festivus ten years from now.

This year's tactic in my ultimately futile drive to return my country to sanity is based on what the Internet was designed to do: routing around the damaged section of the network (in this case, the national discourse) and getting back to things of real meaning. And with Christmas, that means the kids.

Take a moment to watch this Sesame Street clip (they turned off embedding, but the Street shouldn't be directly attached something as tawdry as "Christmas wars" anyway). It's another one of those "Kermit and Grover talking to kids" bits, but notice how they answer the Santa questions without having to think about it too hard, even for a second.

Kid: "Then he gets his keys."
Grover: "What keys?"
Kid: "Santa Claus keys."

There you are. On one side of the fight to stop the fighting, the only fight that really matters, there's a lot of fist shaking, noise making, and red-faced fury. On the other side, there's the Santa Claus keys, the ones that open any door as long as you use them sincerely with goodwill. It's not a fight against politicized factions, although that's how the phony war is being framed. It's a fight against our sadder, darker impulses, the ones that either make us too cool or too jaded to care about anything, or make us care about them in ultimately destructive ways.

Enough with making the crazy. Dream big. Let there be peace on Earth.

Lutz Heilmann Makes Himself FAMOUS!

Lutz Heilmann, a (formerly) little-known German politician and former member of the East Germany Stasi, has joined the sadly never-ending roll call of politicians who just don't get the Internet--which, if you'll remember, is a series of tubes. Heilmann accomplished this through an epic feat of killjoyery, by getting an injunction against wikipedia.de which pulled the site for a few days this week over a claim in his article that he didn't complete his university degree (!!!). That's right, apparently he's fine with the whole Communist secret police thing, but you impugn his diploma at your own peril.

Anybody could've told him what was about to happen, but some people have to learn these things the hard way: the German Internet dropped on his head like a ton of bricks (along with the press...and Slashdot, of course), forcing him to drop the injunction and eat a plate of crow.

Apart from not being able to predict the oh-so-predictable uproar, Heilmann is a 1.0 thinker in a 2.0 world. Consider this:

• wikipedia.de, the local site that the court injunction pulled, isn't actually the German Wikipedia site, but a search engine which passes you off to the main pages. Technically, it's the only site he could act on, since de.wikipedia.org operates under Florida jurisdiction, just like the rest of the Wikipedia family.
  
• Any Wikipedian can tell him that you don't kill a negative article through the court system; you kill it by getting an aide to edit it on the sly for you. Apparently Heilmann actually tried that, but the edits were traced directly to the Bundestag building, which is pretty damn weak. What part of the Stasi did you work for again?
• Instead of the expected search page, German users were greeted not only with the bad news, but an invitation to make a monetary donation to Wikimedia Deutschland. As a result, the contributions spiked roughly 500% over the weekend. Great job!