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When last we talked about the subject, I hated Charter because they turned off my internet access for a week and then told me it was my fault. I hated them a bit more in the early summer when the ‘introductory rate’ on my cable/phone/internet package expired and my bills went from $110 to $140+ per month. We luckily escaped the phone/internet Charter hellhole when our apartment building installed in-unit internet access jacks. They contracted with a local ISP that had some kick-ass rates: $250/year for internet and $250/year for phone service (including all-you-can-eat long distance.)

All this to say that I now only have to pay charter $54.99/month for the most basic cable possible. No DVR, no HD, no premium channels. I keep wishing that I could get DirecTV and not have to deal with the most hellish company put on god’s green earth. Actually, I really wish that I could just fucking pay for the 5 channels I that I ever watch (NBC, FOX, ESPN, Cartoon Network, and Spike TV).

It’s not only Charter fucking dumbfuck customer service, or the fact that they charge you many times more than compeititors for the same product AND dumbfuck customer service. As some of you may know, the Big Ten Network recently launched, which by contract carries some of the football games. You woulda thunk that the first priority for the BIG TEN NETWORK would be to get contracts in all of the cities or towns where a FUCKING BIG TEN SCHOOL IS. Big Ten Network knows this, but Charter “Fucking” Communications didn’t like the price so told them to fuck off. What that means: I can’t watch the Wisconsin/Ohio State game this weekend because it will be Big Ten Network-only. That ain’t the punchline, though. I happened to read the Daily Cardinal yesterday and they had a quote from dumbfuck central: Charter Communications:

Charter Communications, Madison-area cable provider, has tried to negotiate the network as part of its line-up, but no deal has been reached since the network’s launch in August.

“Our position is that we are more than willing to carry the network, but due to the high cost of the network, we cannot put it on expanded basic where it goes to everyone and have everyone’s bills impacted by it,” said John Miller, a Charter spokesperson.

According to Miller, BTN ranks as the third highest costing service on Charter’s lineup, which he said might be the reason Time-Warner and Comcast also do not have contracts with BTN.

Mike Vest, media relations manager for BTN, said there are currently more than 30 million households that receive BTN.

“We have more than 150 distribution agreements with cable providers, plus DirectTV and DISH Network,” Vest said via e-mail, stressing these agreements are evidence that BTN is willing to negotiate and “strike a deal.”

HERE’S the punchline: I got a letter from Charter Communications today and it reads, “Charter is committed to providing you greater value - with enhanced programming, more choices, and superior quality for your entertainment services. The following price adjustments reflect the increased value of these services and will take effect on December 1, 2007.”

You motherfucking shitheels.

I will now be charged $59.99 for the most basic cable package. No DVR, no HD, no premium channels. The fucking asshole-eating fuckwad rimjob motherfuckers want me to pay $5 more per month for exactly nothing. Oh! Thanks a lot for adding MTV3 to my cable lineup! It’s really expanding my fucking entertainment value, you giant pieces of shit.

Eat shit and die, Charter Communications. You’re dead to me.

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California was pretty great last week, if hectic. Between work meetings, social get-togethers, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium spacebee and I went from hither to yon and back from Thursday to Sunday. Saturday night our very own madd scientits came up to have dinner with fuddruckus, manders, spacebee, and I at the Fahrenheit Ultra Lounge. The dinner was great, and we stayed afterward to dance to odd 80s-dance-pop-fusion and slurp down $9 crown ‘n’ cokes. We followed that up on Sunday by going to meet some of my old work friends at the Oktoberfest festivities in Campbell (near scientist’s old homestead: pRUNEYARD!)

That brings us to Halloween 2007. For all the pictures, see my Flickr set.

Blammo!

We had some friends over for an evening of Ultimate Fighter marathon, Guitar Hero II, and some beers at the Main Depot. We didn’t end up heading down to State St., in part because we didn’t want to wait in line and pay $7 each in order to walk up and down a street, but mostly because my costume involved going shirtless and it was goddamned cold outside Saturday night. At the Depot, an incredibly drunk man insinuated that I was not man enough (or perhaps, too much man [i’m fat]) to be the boyfriend of a classy dame like spacebee. I whispered in his ear, “Psst, I’m not really a wrestler.” His response, “You think?” Later on he attempted to paw at bellygirl from the bathroom doorway as we left and ended up falling down. He also knocked down a dancing machine while being drunk and almost got his ass whomped. All in all, there was no need for me to do or say anything to this dude: he was gonna get the holy shit beat out of him before the night was over anyways. I hear tell later on of wwhazz and bellygirl at bartime seeing an incredibly drunk man on stilts take 3 giant wobbly steps and then eat concrete. Oh Halloween!

Black Cat Fever

Pretty good Packer game last night, too. Spacebee and I watched it at scubby’s new house out in Middleton, on the Ultra High Def TV. Man, watching Favre throw million-yard touchdowns in high def was sweeter than watching it on my dumb ol’ cable. So what if I’m out of the suicide pool, I hedged against a Packer loss so that I’d be happy either way. Say lah vee, there’s always next year, and all that rigamarole.

Man of Mysterio

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So, Spacebee got a hold of some kick-ass Packers tickets to last night’s game against the Bears at Lambeau. The night was Super Fun, in that my brother’s fiance grandly provided us with a free place to park across the street from the stadium and that our tickets were in the end zone and on the aisle. We also got there about an hour and a half early, so we had time to wander the stadium for awhile. Spacebee’s coworker and husband were also there, and my brother and his fiance had tickets as well, so the six of us drank the good drink and kicked it in the Lambeau atrium before game time.

Of course, Green Bay ended up losing the game, and I had to hear a shitstorm from Bears fans all the way out of the stadium, but whatever. Just like the Badgers did the day before, the Packers lack of 2nd half offense and defensive coverage ensured the loss. *shrug* whaddya gonna do? It was the first regular season game I’d been to at Lambeau, and I got to see a touchdown in the end zone we were sitting in, so I got my thrill. The win would have been icing on the cake; I just had a good ol’ time.

Afterwards kinda sucked, though. Late in the evening spacebee brokered a deal at work so that she didn’t have to come in at 7am Monday. We planned on ditching the car at a motel, and partying with the spacebee’s coworker up in Green Bay or Appleton. However, once we tried to get a room we found out that pretty much all of Wisconsin was sold out. We drove out of Green Bay, and stopped at 3 hotels in Appleton (”Sold out, but try Oshkosh!”) and then moved on to Oshkosh (”Sold out, but try Fon Du Lac!”) before deciding to just drive the rest of the goddamned way home. We got in at 4am this morning: ugh. I know that it was kinda stupid to assume we could get a room in Green Bay, but come the fuck on. It was late on a Sunday night; I didn’t expect every single person to stay behind after the game. Plus, R U JOKIN ME that there wasn’t a hotel room as far south as Oshkosh? Whatever, I learned a valuable lesson.

Finally, not to be a dick, but how do you and your wife calculate approximate driving times, wwhazz? You said it would take 3+ hours, but we were going the speed limit the whole way and we got to the Hortonville exit off 41 in about 2 hours, and then at Lambeau in two and a half. Do you guys drive real slow? Do you always hit a ton of traffic?

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I think I’ll keep following up on this as long as the Journal-Sentinel continues reporting on it. I realize that the majority readership of this blog doesn’t necessarily care about an enormous commercial development in Oconomowoc, but I think it sums up nicely the poor decisions going into a lot of real estate development in Wisconsin. I’m starting to tire of good farmland continually being concreted over so that yet another Best Buy, Wal*Mart, Target, Kohl’s, or Pic’N'Sav can go up. I am irritated that in order to build mixed-use communities, America finds the need to build a set of condos and then open up a mega-mall next to them.

So I should really separate my irritability over the entire Pabst Farms concept with my utter disdain for the idea of a gigantic upscale mall that is a short drive from other, existing huge malls yet built for people to flock to from all over southeastern Wisconsin. I don’t suspect any of this would outrage you, dear reader, because frankly I’m the sort of weirdo that only gets really mad about weird stuff like this. So, I invite you to share your reactions even while I guess most of them will amount to, “Calm down.”

On with the show.

Remember when I said:

I’m sure there will be all sorts of backpedaling and reassurances by the Must-Replace-Farmland-With-Malls-At-All-Costs folks that those assholes and their Hummers will have a Chili’s to go to on Wednesday nights in Oconomowoc.

Yeah, it was yesterday. Well, the JS already has a reassuring article about how totally kick-ass Pabst Farms is, even if those jerks from General Growth Properties totally were jerks and canceled their plans for a 1.5 million sq. ft. shopping mall!

At 1,600 acres, Pabst Farms is bigger than Shorewood. Most in the news this week have been 184 of those acres, where General Growth Properties planned, then backed away from, a 1.5 million-square-foot retail complex including a mall, multiscreen cinema and two hotels.

See? JERKS! We’ve got 1,416 acres of awesomeness even without your Jerk Faces!

In the coming days, I think I’ll post on how the continuing housing crash (another place where the cheerleaders won’t stop cheering, even after the game is over and the star quarterback wrapped his Ford F150 around a lightpole on the way home from a party) likely spells doom for the 1,200 planned residences.

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Schadenfreude is powerful shit. For example, I am delighted by others’ housing misfortunes but not so much that I hope my friends are affected. Example two: that goddamned Pabst Farms shit in Waukesha. When last we saw this monstrosity, the developers were attempting to cajole the city of Oconomowoc into giving them ever more liquor licenses. Apparently, swamping an area with booze is terrible when it’s an urban area where you can walk there and back, but delightful when you have shitheads driving their Hummers in from Brookfield to get swamped at the local Cheesecake Factory.

Ahem.

Well then, it appears that the Housing Crash is starting to take fools like these down with it:

So-called big box stores, such as a Target and Kohl’s Department Store, could replace a regional shopping mall planned for Pabst Farms in Oconomowoc, commercial real-estate industry observers said Thursday.

That’s because western Waukesha County might not have enough residents to attract the types of retailers needed to create a large mall.

Those comments came after the Journal Sentinel reported Thursday that the developers of Pabst Farms are seeking another company to build a large upscale mall at I-94 and Highway 67 in Oconomowoc. Peter Bell, president of Pabst Farms Development Inc., said Chicago-based General Growth Properties Inc., one of the country’s largest mall operators, might be bowing out of the high-profile project.

So, when we last left these geniuses, their Million Dollar Idea was to build an EVEN BIGGER mall in the middle of a cornfield in goddamned Oconomowoc. You know Oconomowoc, right? About 10 miles east of the huge Outlet Mall in Johnson Creek? Or maybe you know it as the place 30 odd miles from Mayfair Mall? The point is, the region doesn’t really need anymore Mega-Ultra-Town-Centres. Especially ones catering inexplicably to the luxury market.

Well shit on a kringle, cuz now we have the worst of all worlds. The stupid shopping center is going up, destroying arable land in the process, but it’s going to have the exact same dumbfuck bullshit that you can find on any commercialzed street in America. Ooo! It’s gonna have a Target? PROMISE? Wow, honey, pack up the kids; we’re gonna hit that Kohl’s in Oconomowoc.

I fucking hate real estate developers.

UPDATE: Looks like the developer has dumped the project all-together. I’m sure there will be all sorts of backpedaling and reassurances by the Must-Replace-Farmland-With-Malls-At-All-Costs folks that those assholes and their Hummers will have a Chili’s to go to on Wednesday nights in Oconomowoc.

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You have just been introduced to my new favorite exclamation. The “move” in question, always performed by a “dick” is to drive a car, truck, or maintenance vehicle across or down the bike path in back of my apartment building. Basically, two streets dead-end into the bike path in question, while the parking lot of my building lies on the other side. So, when an asshole drives down those streets, hits a dead-end, but sees light at the end of the tunnel, they decide to just ramrod their way across a pedestrian-only walkway and use the parking lot as a shortcut.

I don’t know why this pisses me off. It shouldn’t. I think it’s because my office window looks out on the exact place where they Dukes of Hazzard through the off-limits area. I see them pull up to the dead-end. I see them stop. I can almost see the look on their faces when they decide such things as Rules don’t apply to them and then they just gun it. Sometimes people are on the path; sometimes it is empty. No matter what though, I always yell out, “DICK MOVE!”

PS- the exclamation “DICK MOVE, ASSHOLE!” is reserved for when an asshole pulls up to the sign that says “MOTOR VEHICLES PROHIBITED”, gets out of their car and moves the barricade out of the way, and then drives through. It can also be used when someone doesn’t just CROSS the bike path but TURNS ONTO IT and drives away as if it is their own personal highway. DICK MOVE, ASSHOLE!

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So it is that early October is here. GMX, peterstiffly, todder, and myself (possibly more?) all celebrate birthdays this week. As for myself, verily I declare that I am NOT a good friend anymore. I am a thoughtless homunculus, riding the winds of terrible selfishness. Really though, I’m a dick for not calling GMX. I will rectify that… now. Hmm, he answered the phone and then hung up on me. Hope it was an accident.

So, er, on with the show? There aren’t many plans for Number 29. Surprise dinner somewhere, and Spacebee is making me lunch. That’s fine by me; sounds effing delightful.

Peterstiffly, I’m not sure what you’re doing this weekend for your birthday, but maybe we could hook up for the Badgers and/or Packers game. I’ve got no plans to speak of, so HOLLLARIT.

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Well, I went and upgraded whazzmaster.com to WordPress 2.3.  I wasn’t sure what would happen when I attempted to upgrade so I set aside some time today (since I am home from work sick) to give it a go while I shivered in bed.   I just found out that the button to add a link doesn’t work anymore, so that’s great.

But I did make two changes that I wanted to highlight:

1.  Since few people read the post, and instead use wm.com as an all-purpose message board, I’ve moved the Recent Comments section front and center.  It still list the last 10 comments by time submitted.
2. Additionally, you can now post a comment directly from the front page: Simply click the “Add a Comment” link and you can submit a comment directly to that post without loading it and scrolling to the bottom (I guess this is for the truly lazy).

I’ll be doing some other things off and on, but it looks like the shit is stable for the moment.  HOLLLARIT.

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