The Rage Diaries

NBC, you both suck AND blow. Inexpertly, I might add.

I may get the occasional check from their Bravo arm, but that will not stop me from gleefully masticating upon the palsied, fumbling hand that feeds me. What's causing my ire? The seemingly innocuous act of planning ahead.

The Olympics are coming up. My needs are relatively simple: I want to find out when the women's water polo coverage is on and -- more crucially -- which backwater cable outlet this wonderful sport will be exiled to. So I went to NBCOlympics.com, clicked on the TV coverage, went through the little survey so that I might get listings tailored to my specific cable package, and then ...

Nada. I got a grid filled with blank squares. To find out what's on when, you're supposed to click on the squares, thereby taking you away from the grid and making it more difficult to discern which sports are on simultaneously and thus require finessing the TiVo. And although the pull-down menus let you search by day, or channel, or sport, there is apparently no way to get all the comprehensive listings for a specific sport. Instead, you must search day-by-day to find out when your sport is on. This is inelegant, inefficient, and clearly designed by people who are being compensated per search query tonnage.

If my memory is not failing me at this late and uncaffeinated hour, I believe that NBC is a GE subsidiary. I also believe that NBC may be deliberately obfuscating such basic information as "When in the blue fuck is water polo on?" in the hopes that nutballs like me buy several GE-brand televisions, jack up our corresponding cable packages and descend into a panopticon-like environment of watching TV nonstop until Brenda Villa makes her appearance.

What, me, paranoid? No -- merely infuriated that NBC has managed to screw up the easiest thing on the Internet: a grid schedule.

Fiscal fitness -- here's what happened when Ben had to cut expenses

It's one thing to get financial advice from articles, but first-person experience is equally valuable. I asked frequent commenter and longtime friend Ben about the financial challenges he faced when he lost his job right before his second child was due. The Q&A is after the jump.

Fido Dido goes milennial

The NYT has an article today, "Life Is Good for Clothing Company and Its Devotees," that explores the growing number of "Jake" fans -- Jake being the stick-figure mascot for the Life Is Good clothing and accessories line.

I have to admit, it was news to me that Life Is Good had a male-identified public icon, as my primary exposure has been through the long-lived women's athletic gear vendor Title 9 Sports. There, it's all cute icons and the occasional sporty-looking girl stick figure.

But the overall premise, that Jake is something that resonates with people because he embodies the idea that you can be happy with the little things, reminded me of an earlier cartoon-cum-clothing conceit, Fido Dido. From a 1989 NYT article about the character: "The basic message, [Susan] Rose said, is: ''Be relaxed with who you are.''"

Fido Dido popped into existence in 1985. He lives on via used books listings, a licensing firm in Asia and in BBDO's work on a 7Up campaign. (Fun fact: the team that launched Fido Dido then went on to create Angela Anaconda. Who knew?)

Spinning a yarn

One of the side effects of giving up caffeine is that I'm easily overstimulated. I can't go online to blow off steam because I end up falling into some click-and-read-and-click-and-read rabbit hole, and when I'm trying to get out of bed the next day, I'm wondering, "What on Earth made me think 11 p.m. was a fine time to read up on houseplants that detoxify your environment?" If I watch TV, I inevitably end up dreaming about whatever show I was watching, which is in no way restful because I watch a lot of HBO. And reading a book ... I love to read and sitting on the couch to do it before bed is a surefire ticket to me staying up until 2 a.m., chortling deliriously, "What the heck, I might as well finish the book now!"

However, books can be your friends, and when I discovered Katherine Shaughnessy's The New Crewel, it hit me: I could unwind with needlework. It's repetitive enough to be soothing, yet varied enough to be interesting. It doesn't have the built-in handedness bias that has thus far barred from me the worlds of knitting and crocheting. (I am very left-handed. Ask me sometime about the joys of going through elementary school with its right-handed scissors, desks and cursive-writing lessons.)

Shaughnessy's book has a lot of fresh, funky and gorgeous little patterns and she really makes you all fired up about sewing.

A gift for the English major in your life

Are you a stickler for punctuation and a fan of swearwords? Then click right over to The Rut's Cafepress store and buy a Professor of Graffiti poster.

Why I will never be an advice columnist

Because I read this in "Dear Prudence" :

I tearfully explained to him how sad I was that we don't hold each other at night. He then told me that it's uncomfortable for him—too hot and confining. Is it unreasonable to ask a partner to change their sleeping style to accommodate this particular show of affection? Maybe one night a week? Sleeping entwined with my lover is a very tender experience for me, and I intensely don't want to lose this lover, yet I'm finding it very hard to accept that he is unwilling to find a way to make this meaningful act a possibility for us.

And my first response was to tell the letter writer to save that adolescent drama for Cary Tennis.

My second was to write a response to the letter-writer's new luv-ah. "Dear Solo Sleep Fan: Get out. Now. Ten bucks says she likes to watch you sleep, and we all know how creepy that is."

Let's hear it for lunch

In keeping with this month's theme of how we adjust our budgets, I bring you the WSJ's "Bagging Lunch: the Inflation Effect." The lede:

A few months ago Jessie Snider, 23, began to feel the pinch of the rising cost of gasoline, food and, well, everything. Then she realized the $75 to $80 she was spending each week on lunch was really cutting into her paycheck. So in March she traded sit-down lunches of elaborate caprese salads and angel-hair pasta for brown-bag lunches of leftover stir-fry and turkey sandwiches.

A billion years ago, when I worked at Hotwired, the articles about the place almost invariably reported on the "personal chef" we had who cooked meals. Let me tell you a few things. First, Phil Ferrato is a genius; I still dream of his pasta dishes. Second, the meals were subsidized to the point where all you had to do was pay $3-4 per day for a good hot lunch with salad and a sweet. And third, those meals were usually my main meal of the day; I relied on them to stretch my budget.

So I'm sympathetic to the idea of a lunch outlay. But holy cats, I am a little boggled by the idea of spending $15-16 on lunch daily. For those of you who don't brown-bag -- is this the norm? What do you pay when you go out to lunch?

Vaya con dios, BPP

The NYT effectively gave the Bryant Park Project's two-week notice on Sunday with "Public Radio to Cancel an Experiment." The bad news is broken with little industry context, as this:

It’s an expensive failure — the first-year budget was more than $2 million — and comes at a time when NPR is facing the same financial constraints as other news media thanks to higher costs and a downturn in underwriting.

was actually not as expensive as you might think, given that $2 million had to produce 10 hours of programming weekly for at least 26 weeks. Or so says public radio professional Jesse Thorn, in a well-researched and nuanced post on Metafilter. Credit to him for cutting through a lot of BS arguments there ("I listen to public radio. I never heard of BPP. Therefore, because I never heard of it, it can't be good.") and making a point about what BPP was trying to do:

I listen to public radio too, but you can simply look at the numbers and know that the content, tone and style are borderline hostile to people outside of a very narrow demographic strip. I'm glad some of you are proud to be in that group, but that doesn't excuse public radio from serving people outside of it. That certainly includes young people, but it also includes people who simply have different cultural perspectives, whether it's because of age, geography, race, whatever.

Needless to say, news of the BPP's imminent demise has galvanized we podcast listeners. Thanks to the outpouring of "Nooooooo!"s in the comments, the blog's now posted how you can register your opinion with the higher-ups at NPR. Hint: it does not involve threatening to withhold pledge money.

I am personally skeptical of any write-in campaign's effectiveness, but I'd like to be proven wrong.

What drives me batty about foodie media

So Phil and I were sacked out on the couch the other night, and our TiFaux did deliver unto us the Good Eats episode "Tuna, Surprise." I was pleased, as I currently have twelve 6-oz cans of Starkist in the pantry and am open to finding things to do with them above and beyond the old standard tuna salad.

Sadly, I am still bereft of ideas. The episode focused on Alton advocating that we ditch the humble can for either the pricey tuna-in-a-pouch or the even more pricey tuna-imported-from-Italy. (How pricey, you ask? One four-ounce tin costs $17; I picked up ninety ounces of tuna packed in water -- i.e. fifteen times the quantity -- from Costco for a mere $9.)

This episode stands out as an anomaly, because Good Eats has provided us with many, many great recipes that do not require pricey or hard-to-find ingredients. It has been one of the happy exceptions of foodie media insofar as I am concerned. Our local food section often includes recipes that call for things that can only be mail-ordered, purchased on an installment plan, or procured up in Yreka on the first Sunday of the month between two and four p.m.

Fiscal fitness -- July's theme ...

... will be coming after the jump. See if you can guess based on the articles below.

"At $100 for a Tank of Gas, Some Choke on 'Fill It,' " NYT, July 6, 08
"Fifty Things Being Blamed on Rising Gas Prices," WSJ, July 3, 08
"SUV Drivers Burned Twice: At the Pump, At the Car Lot," WaPo, July 2, 08
"10 Things You Can Like About $4 Gas," Time, July 2, 08
"Fuel Prices Shift Math for Life in Far Suburbs," NYT, June 25, 08
"Americans Enter New Cycle as Tough Times Alter Spending Habits," Marketwatch, June 23, 08
"Sticker Shock at the Supermarket," CSM, June 11, 08
"Downscaling in the Downturn," Knight Ridder/Tribune, May 24, 08
"Consumers Are Dining In More -- At the Supermarket," BrandWeek, May 11, 08
"Driven by Desperation, More People Selling Heirlooms Online," Seattle P-I, April 30, 08