It was worth it

I just bought some stamps online from the US Post Office because I was running out and I'd sooner pull my own teeth with pliers and no novocaine than go wait at our local PO.

I only bought stamps. To get them, I have to pay a shipping charge of $1.

YOU ARE THE POST OFFICE. YOU SET THE PRICES OF SHIPPING. YOU DON'T HAVE TO CHARGE ANY, IS WHAT I'M SAYING.

I bought it anyway. $1 for enough stamps to keep me out of that local post office for, like, forever, is totally worth it. Plus, I got to choose what stamps I wanted, and I finally got some price-difference covering $0.01 and $0.02 stamps so I can use some formerly-first-class stamps to mail shit, too.

Yes, this was worth posting about on LJ. Happy Friday!

How not to hold the moral high ground

Perhaps you've heard of James Dobson? He's a moral crusader. You know the type--the pseudo-friendly evangelist type that just wants to protect people from their worst impulses, like women working, that sort of thing. He's the sort of curmudgeonly old dude you can't believe is able to survive the daily affront to his delicate sensibilities that is a non-theocratic America.

I happen to reading about a blog post about a horrid abuse of power, wherein a mother asked the police to taser her 10 year old and they did, all because the girl didn't want to shower (!?). The post's author linked this sort of abuse to the kind that is generally encouraged by people like James Dobson. Whether or not you agree with the writer's premise that people who listen to Dobson and enthusiastically spank (if not outright whip) their kids are abusing them, regardless of whether you think spanking is a slippery slope towards having your kids tasered, I think we can all agree that James Dobson is a monster.

Why? Because he wrote this book, with this excerpt in it about how he BEAT HIS TINY DACHSHUND:
( Cut for disturbing content--animal abuse )

This is a grown man who took a belt to a dog the size of a loaf of bread because he felt that was the best way to discipline his dog. I wonder: if he'd had a pit bull or some equally tempered dog, would have been so "brave" as to try and take a strap to it?

Long story short: if you want to pretend that you're qualified for telling other people what behaviors are right or wrong, it is generally not a good idea to write--proudly, no less--about beating up your dog. You. Fucker.

Perhaps it's because of the movies I tend to rent?

ETA: After posting, I went to look at what's coming in the mail to me today. It's Dragonball Evolution--the live-action movie with white people pretending (or not) to be Asian. No wonder I never have to wait for movies!

Someone has been unable to get a DVD through Netflix for almost three months.

How does that even happen? I have never had to wait longer than maybe a couple of days even for something that said "Very Long Wait." I bumped G.I. Joe to the top my queue a few days before going to San Francisco because I thought my brother-in-law would watch it with me. (Turns out he already owned it.) I was mad at myself at the time because I was sure it would never arrive in time--"very long wait" and all. It came like three days later, maybe one whole extra day from the usual two-day turnaround I get on my Netflix movies.

Granted, I live in NYC, and we've got a huge Netflix processing center in Queens on top of the fact that our giant population means that there are always fifteen billion copies of every movie imaginable ready to go at any time. But really? You can be kept waiting for movies? It's always the other way around for me--my movies are waiting on me--and have been to the point that the XBOX is threatening to mutiny if I try to make it load all fifty billion Watch It Now movies I have in my queue one more time.

Other Netflix news: Supposedly Netflix is negotiating with movie studios to arrange a no-rental window on new releases. This is entirely being done to prop up waning DVD sales. It's both a dumb and a smart move. It's dumb in that Netflix risks losing customers who really want new releases as they come out. (Because Netflix, like the old brick-and-mortar video stores of old, gets its new releases on the Friday prior to their general availability, they can mail a new movie such that it arrives on the day it actually comes out.)

It's smart, however, in that I cannot believe Netflix won't get something reeeeeally good out of this. I'm not entirely sure of the power dynamics at work here, but it's the studios who have something to lose. They're not going to pull out from Netflix--that would be suicide--so they don't have much to bargain with. They're going to be the ones coming to Netflix for the favor, and the favor-granter has the power to extract more in return. I wouldn't be surprised if this turned into a cost-cutting measure, where Netflix agreed to the freeze but paid less for the discs or the licensing of streaming movies. If they're smart enough to demand that, that is. The streaming is where so much business is going, but it's hard to get a start in it without a broad, shared base library like Netflix already has (and which Hulu has but weeds out with time). No studio-run start-up streaming sites have taken off. Once again, they need Netflix, and Netflix would be crazy not to milk that for all it was worth.