I need to get my priorities in order for a number of reasons. Case in point: ordering my priorities is not a priority.
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It’s too cold in here to use my computer today. I… I’m going to try to read a book…
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Here’s a long boring one (page entry, not a book. I wrote that up there later. I don’t even know I am going to write that yet), just like the good old days, if we insist on classifying the old days as good.
It had BETTER be free if there’s a 1 in 5 chance you won’t know. I’m guessing the oblivious Tyrannosaurus is still on the payroll somehow. And Tom Ridge as well. It is not worth noting that green was bad before but now is good, yet I did so anyhow. It IS worth noting that these things aren’t really free, apart from a seven day trial (which is about the same as American Online declaring itself a free service because it mailed out those little discs), and that every page of the site includes a small print disclaimer stating, in essence, that nothing it will tell you for that nonfreeness has any value and that it additionally will not be held responsible for its deceit and uselessness.
Don’t bother reading that. That’s not why it’s there. In summary, it’s not about helping you with your credit, it’s a resource for teachers and people who write about credit and need stuff to refer to. The responsibility-shirking slackers of the internet need not bother. Which makes me all the more curious as to why this was advertising on Galbadia Hotel, the video game/anime mp3 archive.
But what about the score? The only thing it said was free was the credit score! That is true. You can sign up, attempt to get your score, and forget about it. Which also works well, because you’ll be billed automatically as a “member” once the trial ends. Even if you remember to cancel, you’ll still be charged a dollar and the priceless hassle of calling a corporate toll-free number as a screw you processing fee. Although the sources the page the page I link to didn’t bother linking to suggests you can’t even SEE your score unless you give up the membership fee. They have to pay for their ads, after all. And Ben Stein has to eat. One assumes.
Yes, Ben Stein again! As I understand it, he was fired from his job at the New York Dispatch for this sort of thing, though you wouldn’t guess it by the pudgy smirk he has in all of these. He doesn’t even look human anymore. Gosh, he reminds me of someone…
What a greedy, selfish beanst. It can’t stand the idea that I’m complaining about someone else.
Ben Stein is almost a muppet. A wrinkly, Yoda style muppet. Except instead of teaching you about the force he tries to sell you a free midi-chlorian report, when everybody knows the only FREE midi-chlorian report is issued annually by the galactic gargonian skrimpfly flambarrrrrrRRRRRRRRRGH “wookieepedia” is awful!
He’s not even necessarily promoting the thing. He’s just smugging it up off to the side. I don’t know WHY he has to do this after appearing in promotions for both Direc TV AND Comcast, competing companies. Clearly, he wins either way. Next he’s going to show up in an ad promoting not clicking ads.
Look at that! He has a CLIP BOARD! In these days of high-tech doohickery, you can’t go wrong with a clipboard. That means he has important information! It’s not for you, though. I checked, the free trial does not grant you clip board access. Also, I hear that printing Ben Stein in bold across your pelvic zone is an integral component to many “abstinence only” education programs. At least, it couldn’t be less effective than whatever it is those actually consist of and get millions of dollars in government funding to continue failing at.
In fairness, I should say that Stein believes he was fired for criticizing the president, which seems unlikely to me, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised because the exact same thing happened when the last guy was president and deliberately disappointing people. That doesn’t excuse such a termination, and I wish people with positions of influence would grow up and deal with their problems rather than lying and sniveling, but I already said I doubt that’s actually what happened. But regardless of whether Stein was fired over the stated “conflict of interest,” or whether even for that he should have been, what’s important is that he did/does IS scummy, which is all I meant to come here to whine about. This guy is NOT an economist but he wears the label of one even when doing jobs he would never have gotten were he an actual economist rather than some guy people recognize from movies, or failing that, other ads. He is not utilizing expert financial expertise here any more than Gary Coleman was, but he pretends that he is. Regardless of whether anybody falls for the act, it’s dishonest and misleading. He’s not shilling for Pepsi, which will merely destroy your teeth and give you diabetes, but if he was he at least wouldn’t do so with the words “sommelier and dietician” floating beside him.
Anyway, I still see the ads, Ben Stein is still a millionaire and he still doesn’t believe he is anything but the subject of a conspiracy in this.
In his official rebuttal (which you shouldn’t look at unless you feel a void in your life where The Spectator getting in your business and ordering you to subscribe to it may fit), among other things, Mr. Stein claims to have criticized Goldman Sachs back when that could have made a difference and also laments the amount of “sick people” online who get inordinately upset over his antics. Well, I never said he was an idiot. Not recently, I don’t think. However, he also insists early on that there is “avid scientific disagreement” regarding the origin of life in a way that implies Intelligent Design is one of the theories argued by actual scientists, which it isn’t, and then he spends the rest of the page complaining about “neo-Darwinists.” I don’t know what it means when you put “neo” in front of a group name beyond making whoever you’re referring to seem instantly and indefensibly crazy, so I can’t take it too seriously.
He also claims those who protest the freescore ads have confused it with “other companies that did not have FreeScore’s unblemished record with consumer protection agencies. (FreeScore has a perfect record.)” It’s one of the GOOD credit report scams! I didn’t know any of them had blemishes, actually. I thought they just tricked people legally and got away with it. Also, Freescore is a relatively young site and surely has plenty of blem-like items yet to isshue. One must additionally keep in mind that Benjamin wrote this while still officially involved with the Freescore company, so he had an obligation to defend it and follow its capitalization guidelines lest he be accused of integrity.
At any rate, freeScore makes no effort to distinguish itself from others which also claim to be free but really aren’t. Further, that header image on that page is inexcusably dorky. Is it a crime to be a dork? Perhaps it ought to be.
I am not a “Ben Stein hater left over from the Expelled days.” I was annoyed by him prior to then and found out about it while I was having a problem with his comcast ad that he didn’t seem to think anybody had a problem with. Yes, so, isn’t this all fascinating! Our research/archeology department continues to probe the situation.
I also received a relatively peculiar letter through the mail recently. I must consider its implications.
I saw a preview for that Carol movie. It doesn’t even star Jim Carrey. It stars some unsettling computer-made guy that resembles Jim Carrey and sounds like him but might as well sound like a pterodactyl because that’s not actually him. I assumed the movie was just some superfluous and unnecessary thing, but by Brinna it’s an expensive, crrrrreepy, superfluous and unnecessary thing. You might say “Scrooge is bad. He’s supposed to be unsettling.” But in the tradition of showing Dr. Claw just walking around in the preview for Inspector Gadget, Disney also shows happy Scrooge dancing in the road on Christmas morning, and he looks even scarier than before.
I like gummy worms, how about you?
I do not, however, like gummy, tooth-eating mouth parasites. Neither does the character on the box, from the look of things. Consider that we are talking about the mass consumption of legless, slimy invertebrates, and I only just now got grossed out by it, maybe you should rethink your marketing. Also, that hot dog looks too firm and uniformly colored to be any good. I like hot dogs, but I hate ones like that. The ones that people in tv commercials always stick their tongues out like “wlaaaah” to eat and then bite sideways. Also the really long kind that doesn’t fit in the roll. Those always taste wrong. I don’t trust that mustid application, either. Not that I eat mustard, but I’m open to the idea of trying it at some point. I’m still mentally preparing myself for relish. Why must ard be applied in a spike pattern? Why not like a wave border, or windows 3.1 egypt.bmp style?
This reminds me, it’s about time for an update on a recent matter of great importance:
Hey, do we have enough A Christmas Carols? Do we have enough A Disney A Christmas Carols? Do we have enough Christmas movies with Jim Carrey inappropriately cast as the originally non-wacky protagonist? Do we have enough Jim Carrey movies in which he has mysterious magical powers (I refer to his ability to grow to enormous size and fly around merely by taking off his legs)? This poster suggests that we do not.
I ask because nobody tells me these things. Obviously.
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I just saw what this site’s rss feed looks like. You have my condolences. I cannot function without them.
May 29:
I will mention Mad TV again. My mentioning this could not be too much worse than this entry’s original content regarding Ben Stein.
But that show, I’m not sad to see it go. I’m sad that I didn’t go. That I never was able to give it up. I did, for about three weeks, but then I watched it again and then the final show was the next one so I had to watch that one too, even though it was kind of bad. So many better things to watch, so many better non-watching things to do. Why did I return? What was I expecting? Why can’t I accomplish anything? Why would I take 80 pictures in one day, half of them of my television screen, approximately none of which I will do anything with? Why would I eat so many raisins that I felt ill?
Even when the show was good, was it ever that great? Great enough that if it was bad next time that the positive experience outweighed the negative? Great enough that I could confidently assume that it would not be bad next time? (yes, briefly, in 2005. This tapered off right about the time I started writing about it, requiring me to rebut myself, several times, and by now I am sadly quite used to being the butt of a but (and I should not have said that) )
Was I ever able to share it with one person who didn’t think less of me as a result of it? At least the indifference / scolding I got when I told people I watched Conan O’Brien had to face off against memories of presentations that I often sincerely enjoyed, and with some amount of consistency. Even when he was appearing in ads for Budweiser and the Milk Growers of America and encouraging the participation of an audience it increasingly seemed as if he had just a bit of contempt for I never quite felt dirty.
Yes, I only extracted this from a longer, worse, Mad TV eulogy I’m too indifferent to finish because it mentions Mr. O’Brien and I don’t want to risk having to reword that one part in the event he does something catastrophic on his new show that requires me to distinguish the old one from it. If he does something great it will be easier to delete this part.
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Ben Stein is not an economist. He’s just some guy from tv. Some guy from tv who fits the stereotypical perception of what a smart person looks like. Some guy from tv who had a game show about giving away his money. Would you trust an economist who gave away his money and/or a career to Jimmy Kimmel? He may have majored in economics at Columbia University, but he does not work in the field of economics, and by his own admission has not done that since the Lyndon Johnson administration, and he hated it. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was bad at it, but it certainly might. I’m sure he knows a lot of stuff, but I don’t reckon what he learned in 1960eh is 100% relevant to the financial issues us peons deal with these days, all the less so when it is filtered through a co-endorsement deal for the very worst provider of an outmoded method of television signal delivery* that he shares with Shaquille “I love em I don’t leave em I got a vysectomy and now I can’t breed ’em and I was also Kazaam the rapping genie” O’Neal.
You can call Ben Stein an actor/writer/lawyer/game show host, but don’t just say “economist” and not offer any justification. Please?
Also, this is beside the point, but Ben Stein blames the theory of evolution for The Holocaust. Because, supposedly, scientists researched evolution and scientists also invented gas chambers. This idea almost certainly appeals to people who get offended when guns are blamed for murders and accidental killings done with guns. That’s a tenuous thread of logic.
Bad. Bad science. I don’t know where Ben Stein thinks tv cameras and glasses came from. “Science” is in fact a very vague word and you can attribute to it just about anything. You can even type it in capital letters with an exclamation point at the end and get an instant fanbase on the internet. It’s like the new “69” except it’s actually a reference to a dopey song from over twenty five years ago. In that respect, I suppose, Ben Stein is older than science and knows what’s best for it. Who am I to talk about science, after all? I’m no economist.
I don’t need to go into this much because Ben Stein bothered me long before I knew that he had actual beliefs and opinions, and what they were. I always thought his screen persona was annoying, and discovering that this is actually his true self makes it easier for me to deal with; he hasn’t expended the creative energy necessary to create a character, or even what passes for one in a time when each and every creative person grew up surrounded by half+ century-old infallible merchandising icons who will not step aside for any reason (perhaps Ben aspires to be one?). He’s not trying that hard. He is naturally annoying. He thinks he’s so boring that anything consciously idiotic he does (rapping about how he dislikes Al Gore) or says (such as “cleareyes is awwwwsome”) while being boring is automatically funny, but it isn’t. He thinks that wearing a black business suit and Teddy Ruxpin shoes makes a statement, and it does. That statement is “somebody needs to throw a muffin at me.”
Don’t watch the video attached to that last link. There are plenty of things I could suggest to “you” to watch that would be better than that. I just had to prove that it happened. But at about four minutes, twenty seconds he starts with the “mo-fo” talk and then he tells some really awkward rap-thing about Al Gore not inventing the internet that he had to write on three different pieces of paper for some reason, that he couldn’t be irked to memorize despite it being short and basic and sort of terrible. Jon Stewart appears to be laughing, but there are different types of laughter and many of them are not good. This wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed to me when I first watched it (compare the dates and it seems probable that the memory of this interview in part inspired that other thing I wrote that I linked to somewhere in here), but it’s far from good.
If the best grime you can scrub up on a presidential candidate approaching an election, the bit that you save for last, is that he made some exaggerating statement totally irrelevant to his candidacy then you have misplaced priorities and I don’t trust you to do things for the right reasons. And Gore did help with the internet. He did not create it, he did not develop the technology, but he very much helped to ensure that it would be used, that it would be useful. In comtrast to Comcast, Ben Stein’s current president, which pretends it owns the internet from time to time.
I can just imagine Ben Stein saying to himself in a Ben Stein voice how hilarious he himself would look while dressed like AC DC. But in actuality it’s just embarrassing. I can see him and Lorne Michaels forming a comedy team that’s just them.
*I personally don’t find anything special about the current incarnation of satellite television, but I believe it has greater potential that it just won’t allow me to use due to arbitrary legal trash, yet I can see that changing. Cable service, on the other hangnail, relies on actual physical cables, going from your home to someplace else, and if you decide you don’t like the people who own the cables you have to get the things removed and then have a whole new set of cables put in, in the event you want to risk more cables. Or something like that. Most people won’t bother with that; it’s hassle enough getting the stuff installed to begin with, and cable companies use that knowledge against their own customers. But then satellite things are also such a way; I still need to have cords going from my television machine to the dinkity plastic thing that I don’t own stuck to my house. But it would be easier to wrap that up and send it back, and by the wuh I would if I was paying for it and the only person who used it.
