VARIATIONS ON A (SPAM) THEME VII

Babes for your atonement?
Babes for your gratification?
Babes for your happyness!
Explicit Girls for your-person satisfaction!
Explicit Ladies for you satiety?
Extreme Babes for you satiety?
Extreme Girls for you gratification?
Extreme Girls for your-person satiety
Extreme Ladies for you satisfaction!
Extreme Ladies for your-person happyness?
Far beyond the norm Babes for you fullfillness?
Far beyond the norm Gals for you fullfillness
Gals for your gratification
Gals for your gratification!
Gals for your happyness?
Gals for your satisfaction
Gals for your satisfaction?
Girls for your atonement?
Girls for your gratification
Girls for your satisfaction!
Hard Babes for you satisfaction?
Hard Gals for you repletion
Hard Gals for you satiation!
Hard Ladies for you fullfillness
Hard Ladies for yourself fullfillness
Hard Women for you gratification
Hardcore Ladies for you satisfaction?
Hardcore Women for your satiation
Intense Girls for you satiation?
Intense Ladies for you repletion!
Ladies for your atonement
Ladies for your fullfillness
Ladies for your gratification!
Ladies for your satiation!
Women for your happyness?

I was a bit surprised, but "atonement" is a synonym for "satisfaction," at least according to Roget.

I think this is actually two separate sets of spam, but they are sufficiently similar that I am combining them.

If you like this sort of, er, inventiveness see my previous installments, starting with this one. I update them (and this one) continually, as more examples arrive.

CABLE A LA CARTE? NON, MERCI

Poll: TV Viewers Want Choice in Cable
The head of the FCC and some members of Congress have been pushing for the requirement that cable TV companies offer their subscribers "a la carte" pricing. People would be able to choose exactly which channels they'd get, and would pay only for those. 40 percent of the people polled thought it would reduce their cable bills. 25 percent thought it would increase them. Both groups could be right, actually.

There is one overriding fact that everyone should remember: the cable companies are not going to lose money on this deal. Unless they can somehow reduce their costs, they will make sure that they get at least as much revenue with a la carte pricing as with the current tiered system, one way or another. Which basically means that if they get less money from the people who want few channels, they'll have to get more from the people who want a lot.

People like me.

I'm hoping that if a la carte pricing does go through, it will be structured so only those getting a very small number of channels will see their bills go down. If people realize that say, 30 channels a la carte costs about the same as 250 with the tiers, they won't bother. This actually would not be that difficult to justify, if they charge high amounts for very popular channels like ESPN, because ESPN charges the cable companies a lot.

But I'd be happiest if they just leave things alone.

23 SECONDS OF FAME

I was on the LGBT Center's public access cable TV show "Out at the Center" last night. They shot me commenting at the reception for NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn last month.

I, uh, really, uh, have to, uh, learn not to, uh, say "uh" so much when I, uh, do these, uh, things.

POOR LITTLE PRINCE

The UK's Prince Charles is suing a British newspaper because they printed excerpts of his diary. One of the things in the diary was a rant about being uncomfortable in a Club Class seat, flying to Hong Kong. Club Class is British Airways' name for business class, and on a 747 it comprises the upper deck.

Poor Prince Charlie, royally relegated to business class. He should try sitting in a coach seat for 14 hours. He'd never complain about sitting in business class again, I'm sure.

CHRISTIAN TETZLAFF PLAYS BRAHMS

I just got back from a performance of Johannes Brahms' three sonatas for violin and piano played by Christian Tetzlaff and Lars Vogt. It was part of the Lincoln Center Great Performers' Virtuoso Recitals series, at Alice Tully Hall.

First, I should say that Brahms is not very high on my list of favorite composers. I find most of his work pleasant and pretty, but seldom exciting, even in the hands of the best musicians. Furthermore, I seldom go to solo recitals, accompanied by piano or not--I don't remember going to a violin recital since I was in college nearly 40 years ago (I subscribed to a four concert series of touring performers one year. One was a young violinist who had to struggle out on to the stage on crutches. I think his name was Perlman. I wonder whatever became of him.)

So this recital a) was quite unusual for me, and b) did not raise much in the way of expectations going in. I'm still trying to remember exactly why I bought tickets--most likely because my wife was particularly interested in it.

Anyhow, I went. My wife was coming from a class, so we arranged just to meet at the seats. Since I was by myself I decided to save a few bucks and take the bus, instead of a cab. Actually it was two buses, but the transfer worked well. I got there in plenty of time to check my coat--and found the same guy who usually checks coats across the street at Avery Fisher Hall. He said there was no performance there this evening.

I found my seat, in the third row way on the right. It would give me a good view of Tetzlaff--and the underside of the piano. My wife arrived with a few minutes to spare. The musicians eventually came on stage--without a warning to turn off cellphones. They both wore black business suits and black shirts. Tetzlaff added a burnt orange tie.

The first two sonatas were just what I expected--pleasant and pretty. Tetzlaff is a fine violinist to be sure, but sometimes he seemed a just tiny bit tentative, e.g. he sometimes delaying the tiniest bit in starting the vibrato for a note. With an orchestra playing behind him I'm sure I wouldn't have noticed, but with only the piano accompaniment (despite the names of the sonatas the piano was clearly subordinate in all three) it did stick out.

Intermission (a seemingly brief one) followed--I was glad the yummy new brownies offered in Avery Fisher Hall were available here, too. I saw one woman in a very nice black lace party dress with cute black and white pumps. Presumably she had attended whatever dinner they had had in the lobby preceding the recital. Then it was back to the seats for Sonata No. 3.

The third was much more to my liking--much more passionate than the first two, rather un-Brahms, in my opinion. It was rather short, and after three ovations they returned to the stage carrying more music for an encore. Tetzlaff announced it would be Antonín Dvorák's Sonatina, Opus 100. Unlike the Brahms works, this piece was a bit familiar to me. I think it might even have been more familiar to Tetzlaff also, because I heard no tentativeness here. It was my favorite part of the evening.

SPAM OF THE DAY

"With Virility Patch your penis will be able to reach from New York to Los Angeles"
But my wife is here with me in New York.

WEIRD WEB SEARCH OF THE DAY

frist rent apartment as install and own apartment in new york city found my blog. They probably meant "first," not "frist," but it's still pretty weird.

CALLING MR. BLACKWELL

The Associated Press says Olympics Figure Skating Outfits Lacking Style. That's putting it mildly. Not even the tackiest drag queen in the world would be caught dead in some of those outfits.

THEY CALL THAT A LOT OF SPAM?

In China Said Cracking Down on Junk E-Mail, it was reported that the official Xinhua News Agency said that 16.8 pieces of junk mail were received by the average Chinese e-mail subscriber. Per week.

16.8 per week? What are they complaining about? I'd be very happy if I had that few per day. My main e-mail address has been getting close to 60 a day lately. And I'm only counting real spam, not advertisements from companies I deal with.

MY TAKE ON THE OLYMPICS (GENERAL)

I haven't written very much about the Olympics. I've been watching them a lot, and enjoying them a lot (I've got USA v Russia in men's hockey on right now), but I think they are far less important than a lot of people seem to.

I used to feel otherwise. I remember watching them on TV all the way back to 1960. I fantasized being an Olympian. I contributed to the U.S. Olympic Committee ("America doesn't send a team to the Olympics, Americans do.") I was enthralled by Bud Greenspan's Olympiad Series on television. I actually went to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, the entire 16 days.

But I have since come to realize that the original ideas behind the Olympics have been overwhelmed--not that they were perfect in the first place. As I have gotten older, I have come to put the stories of the Olympic athletes and their successes and failures in perspective. Each games there are new stories of athletes achieving their life-long dreams. There are new people going beyond their expectations--and many more falling short, frequently dismally short. The Olympic stage does not bring out the best performances in some. There are always controversies, allegations of cheating, doping, judging incompetence if not outright corruption.

The Olympics have become basically one big commercial operation. Sure, there are no sponsors' signs at the venues. But we all know that the the bulk of the money for the games comes from the television networks, especially the American one. They get the money by selling commercial time, promising the buyers large audiences for their ads. To get the large audiences they hype up the American athletes, frequently way beyond reason.

Most of the athletes, at least most of the ones contending for the medals, are full-time professionals. The idea that they are representing their countries is secondary at best, especially for those in the individual events. They are frequently the products of very expensive athlete production operations. For instance, the big alpine ski teams are equipped with hundreds of thousands of dollars of skis. The ski manufacturers will provide them because having their skis used by Olympic racers, especially by Olympic race winners, is great advertising, and will help them sell more skis. And unfortunately, the athlete production operations (with or without the consent of the athletes) are not above cutting corners, such as with doping, to get their people up on the winners' podium.

And this is where I really lost a lot of my enthusiasm for the Olympics. The commercialism I can take. It's the motivation of the athletes I have problems with. Someone once did a poll of Olympic athletes. They were asked if they would take an undetectable drug that would guarantee them a gold medal, but would also cut twenty years off their lives. As I remember, a good majority said yes. I think they also asked if they would take a similar drug that would that would cut their life in half, and nearly 30 percent would use that also. I lost a lot of my admiration for Olympic athletes. I think sports should enhance one's life, not decrease it. I think these people's priorities are out of whack.

I do still enjoy watching them, but it's more like I'm just watching a performance being given for my entertainment. I look at the quest for Olympic glory with a great deal of skepticism. If that's what the competitors want to do with their lives, that's OK, as long as they don't cheat, but I no longer dream of being one--and it's not a life-style I'd advocate for any young person.

JAIL FOR HOLOCAUST DENIERS?

A right-wing British historian has been sentenced to three years in jail by an Austrian court after he admitted he had denied the existence of the holocaust. Now, I certainly think the holocaust existed (I lost an aunt and uncle, and an unknown number of their children), and I think that holocaust denial should be countered whenever it occurs. But I don't think throwing people in jail for it is the right way to go.

I believe in the power of free speech. I believe that if falsehoods such as holocaust denial are freely met with the truth, most people will recognize the truth eventually. Jailing the disseminators of falsehoods just makes them martyrs. It drives their ideas underground, where they cannot be met with the truth, and where they can grow unmolested. Making holocaust denial a crime is short-sighted and counter-productive.

BIRTH ANNOUNCEMENT

As I previously noted, the parents of the missing and presumed dead Toga, the baby penguin chick-napped from a UK zoo last December, were expecting another child. The egg hatched last Tuesday. The chick has not yet been named.

CLEVELAND CAR RENTAL NOTES

They built this great facility for people renting cars when they fly into the Cleveland airport. The problem is, it's not at the Cleveland airport. It's not adjacent to the airport. It's not even close to the airport. You get on a bus at the terminal and you ride and ride, for miles. Past wide open fields. Past buildings for rent. But I guess it wasn't really that far from civilization. As I was going in (finally) I saw a pizza delivery guy leaving.

---------

So I found the Avis counter (it was the furthest one, of course). There were half a dozen stations for agents there (only one of which was in use, of course). The agent did call out to me that someone would help me shortly. I noticed another Avis employee come out from a doorway behind the counter, but she just went over to a soda machine (excuse me, a pop machine, this was in Cleveland). She bought one and returned to the room behind the counter (I'm guessing to a recently-delivered pizza). Meanwhile, the agent at the counter was explaining each insurance option to this quartet of guys, who debated the pro's and con's of each one at length. Actually I'm just assuming that, because they were speaking a language with which I am not familiar. After a couple of these debates the agent excused himself, walked over to the doorway and stuck his head in, presumably to talk to someone. Then he came back and called out to me that someone would help me shortly. But no one came out of the doorway. I'm guessing it was a large pizza.

Eventually all of the insurance questions were debated and answered, and the fuel service ones as well, and everything was signed and initialed and the quartet departed for the car lot. At last it was my turn. The agent apologized for the wait. I told him I had a reservation and gave him my name. He checked and informed me I was a Preferred Customer, and I should go directly to the lot to get my car. So I had been waiting for nothing. (I did check my Avis card later, and by golly I am Preferred. I never noticed, because I had only rented from Avis here in Manhattan, where being Preferred makes no difference, as far as I can tell.)

-----------

The car I got was a very nice Chevy Malibu. I could adjust the seat and steering wheel to my liking (I like to sit very straight up when I drive). It had good acceleration (not that I'm into jack-rabbit starts these days, but it's nice for getting on highways) and, more important, good brakes. It even turned on its headlights automatically--one less thing to worry about. It also had more buttons than I could possibly learn in a three-day weekend. I don't ever remember driving a car with a "menu" button before.

When I got to my mother's house and went in I noticed yet another button new to me, this one on the key-chain transmitter thingy. It had a circular arrow on it. There were actually instructions for using it on the back: first press lock, then press the circular arrow button for two seconds. I then guessed, correctly it turned out, that this was the anti-Mafia hit button: it would start the car remotely. As a bonus, it would warm up the car before we got in (assuming it hadn't exploded)--not a bad thing when the outside temperature was 9 degrees, as the car informed us. It could also be used to scare the shit out of someone, if you parked on the street and you used it just when they were walking by. But I didn't get to use that feature, because nobody was walking by in the 9 degree weather.

----------

I was not surprised that the highway exit to return the car was a different one from the exit for the airport. I was surprised that there were no gas stations between the highway and the car rental facility. Avis soaked me for a quarter tank at their "fuel service" rate.

And the Avis lot was the furthest one, of course.

AIRPORT SMELLS

An acceptable counter-measure to the kerosene smell of jet fuel is not cinnabons.

AIRPORT ANNOUNCEMENTS

I had some time to kill in the Cleveland airport before the flight back to New York. I started listening to the announcements, because they were a bit different than the usual "now boarding," gate changes, security warnings and "John Doe, meet your party at the baggage carousel." There were a series of ones like, "Will the man who left his cellphone at security checkpoint B please return to claim it." In less than a half hour people also left "a flashlight with a key attached," a leather jacket, and, my favorite, "silver jewelry." Plus one ski glove left at the information desk.

And then there were two different announcements of "Mr. X, will you please return to the Y carousel. You took the wrong luggage."

TV INTERNET

So here I am in a hotel room in Cleveland, waiting for my wife to finish packing. I'm sitting on the bed, with a dinky, little wireless keyboard on my lap, composing this blog entry on the television. The screen resolution must be somewhere around 200X160. There's no mouse--I have to navigate with the arrow keys. PgUp and PgDn have become good friends.

ou have tobe careful that it doesn't skipletters or spaces, especially double leters and capitals. It treats the Del key the same as the backspace.

I gues it's better than nothing.

The biggest news of the trip is that my sister-in-law is now a Justice of the Peace. It wasn't that easy for her to get the position. One of Mitt Romney's minions dragged her feet for some unknown reason (because my sister-in-law is a lesbian? Or just because she's a Democrat? who knows?) So she had her local state representatives start pressuring them (this after her original application with recommendations from the mayor, the chief of police, etc., etc.), and this week the appointment came through.

So if anyone wants to get married in Massachusetts let me know. She's thinking of doing a package deal with my sister, who's a lawyer: a pre-nup and wedding for one low price.