Little Willie's senseless ramblings

Monday, March 31, 2008

Ad report card...

I used to do this from time to time, back on my old website (which I don't keep up with too much, because I'm busy keeping up with Blogger, and Twitter, and MySpace, and Facebook). Every so often I just go into stoopid ad overload and have to vent, so...

Vonage: The telephone company is evil who has never done anything for you the customer but raise prices, while we at Vonage have done nothing but violate the patents of Verizon (a very large telephone company) to create our system, which piggybacks on the internet backbone built by (you guessed it) the big telephone companies. In fact, if it weren't for the big telephone companies we at Vonage wouldn't even exist.

J.G. Wentworth: Ok, here's the deal. That "structured settlement" you got is probably some sort of annuity. They're popular because you get your million dollars, yet the payer doesn't actually have to spend that much. It's kind of like a mortgage in reverse (but not a reverse mortgage, which is something else entirely) - instead of receiving a bunch of money then paying it back slowly, someone pays a bunch of money that the annuity pays out slowly. And like a mortgage, they can be bought and sold - at a price. Your million dollar settlement is not worth a million dollars now - depending on payout length and the interest rate it could be worth much, much less (minus transaction fees). Of course, if you need the money now...

net10: Poor Bill, he rescues greyhounds from the pound and what does he get for his trouble - his cell phone company is ripping him off on overage fees!! Evil cell phone company!! Of course, the overage fees are listed in his contract that he was supposed to have read before he signed. They're also printed on all the plan brochures (in regular sized print) so the only person Bill really has to blame is himself. Of course, if he doesn't go into overages, his per minute cost is about 25% of the cost of net10 and other prepaid carriers (who all piggyback their services on the networks owned by the evil cell phone companies).

Volkswagen: They used to have such interesting commercials. Now, there's this stupid ad where a young couple wants to look at a car, but every time they get close some a***ole sets off the horn. Every time I see the ad, I hit the mute button - I don't think that was the goal of their advertising department.

FreeCreditReport.com: I actually like these ads, I can't help but sing along. I'm a little disappointed that the one where he complains about his wife is off the air -- but not very suprised.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Trekkie...

I've always been a fan of Star Trek, although I've never considered myself a "Trekkie". I don't have a costume, I don't belong to any crews, and I don't have every episode memorized. But, for the last year (almost) I've been writing Star Trek fan fiction on the internet.

I've been using Twitter for the first publishing of my story - it's an interestingly limited way to do things. You can post as much as you want, as often as you want, but you can only use 140 characters at a time. Each of the entries appears on my Twitter feed, and the little red square on the sidebar displays the latest one. Occasionally I will gather up the Twitter feeds, add a "director's commentary" and post them on a mySpace page - as well as CGI pictures a friend of my makes for me. And then, because I don't trust mySpace (they've deleted my music page 3 times - no warnings, no reasons), I take the annotated blogs and repost them in a blogger blog. Eventually, I will just create a website for the whole mess on my server - just to make it easier to read.

By being forced to write the story one sentence at a time, I get a lot of chances to modify and extend the story as I go along. I actually have several major plot points mapped out, as well as the ending epilogue already written -- but since they haven't been published yet, I can alter them as I come up with more ideas. The ending has changed several times, as I've added new "complications" to my character's life. I kind of wonder if this happened to Stephen King as he was writing "The Green Mile", or Dickens when he was writing his serials way back when. Of course, they weren't constrained by having to fit into an existing storyline, or by only using one sentence at a time. I'm also not the only person telling stories one sentence at a time, twitterlit and junkDNAfiction are just a couple I've come across.

As I said, I've been doing this for a year -- actually almost 11 months -- and I still haven't finished the first season of the original series. At this rate, I have several years worth of material to work with.

M.M.O.

I was watching TV this morning - American Justice was running the show on the disappearance of Madalyn Murray O'Hair and the leadership of the American Atheist organization. I watched for a while, but it was time to go on the treadmill, so I turned it off. It didn't really matter anyway, I'd seen the show before and knew what happened.

The Christian part of me is saddened by the thought of a person who so completely and totally rejected even the idea of God, that she felt the compulsion to attract others to her cause. The human part of me laughed quietly to myself as she declared during a television appearance that "I'm 76 years old, I'm not going anywhere soon" a mere 5 months before she completely disappeared.

In the end, it seems that it was greed, and her personality that did her in. The greed, while partially hers, was mostly of a former employee who embezzled money from the organization. This is where her personality did her in - unsatisfied with just firing him, she wrote an article in the organization newsletter dragging out his checkered past and putting it on public display. He and an accomplice kidnapped Madalyn, her son, and her granddaughter - coerced them into withdrawing $600,000 from the organization acounts, and converted them to gold coin. Then the accomplice and the O'Hairs were killed (and dismembered) . Of the money taken, only 1 gold coin was left.

Her son Bill - accepted Christ, and is a pastor.