I have to admit, I’m pretty excited because it sounds like Fear Factor is going to be airing a scene from my all-time favorite porno.

All in all it kicks ass.

This week covered Grunge – trying to see where it fit and talking to the artists to see where they felt they fit into the big picture of heavy music and metal. Which leads me to my point:

Back in the day, ‘typical’ grunge folk (the artists, fans, bands – the scene) struck me exactly as the stereotype portrayed them…as whiny, mopey, pretentious faux-intellectuals who took themselves too seriously and were too cool for anything.

Upon seeing these people 20 years later as full grown adults in their 40′s and pushing 50, I was surprised (or maybe I wasn’t) to find that nothing has changed. Except it’s even more eye-roll worthy and rage inducing to see them still acting like that.

I can sum up most of the interviews like this, “Heavy music before us sucked. Heavy music since us is a rip off…and sucks. You’re stupid if you like anything else. Music reached perfection back in my day when I was coming of age and I don’t realize that everyone thinks that about the music they grew up with. I’ve become exactly the walking stereotype I claim to stand against. Get off my lawn.”

These people were lame 20 years ago and they’re still lame today. Not enough of them killed themsleves. But there is hope – many of the bands are getting back together so there just might be some additional overdoses and shotgun blasts in their futures. We can hope, right?

—

And Geico brought back the stupid-ass wee-wee-wee pig for a new commercial and I hope whoever made that decision goes on tour with one of the fucking reunited grunge bands.

They ask these ladies what the numbers from the supposedly missing precinct are. If you factor in those numbers as the missing precinct, it puts Romney in the lead by 14. However, no one on CNN is quick enough to do the math (I’m good like that) and they state that Romney would win by “somewhere around 20 votes” – they then proceed to ask a bunch of questions to the two old ladies about county-wide numbers and different precincts and such. After a few minutes of confusing nonsense they cut to a reporter in Iowa saying she got word that people in Romney’s camp are now saying they’ve been told they won by 14 votes.

Cut back to the CNN studio where they’re treating this like new news and saying that while it doesn’t jive exactly with their numbers, it confirms their lead that Romney wins with the last precinct counted.

It seems so obvious that this is a case of circular reporting. They get these ladies on the phone and do some half-assed reporting. Someone tuned in to CNN gets word to the Romney camp and they start murmuring that CNN has info that, if correct, says they win by 14 and then in turn, CNN then reports that the Romney camp says they think they’ve won by 14.

This is why I don’t bother. At least Fox News is hilariously entertaining in their incompetence…as opposed to frustratingly so.

1. Overall it was a decent 12 show run. It started strong, got better, leveled off and sunk into a slow decline over the last four-ish episodes. The last few were definitely the worst.

2. Regardless of episode quality, it seems obvious that the writers had a general 12-episode story arc in mind. The story was told and it was good. I’m not sure if I care about the baby – or what happens to it though. Which leads me to…

3. Seems like this year was about the house and next season will be about the baby. That’s kind of a neat concept if they go that way. I can imagine a few seasons of 12 or 13 episodes each telling one major story arc and ending with the catalyst for the next story. Again, with that said, not sure I give two fucks about what’s to come with Constance and her grandson.

4. I suggest the house is no longer the focus because it feels like the stories there have been told – at least enough of them. With so many dead roaming the place, it just got sillier and sillier and I think that was a big part of my dislike as the season wore on in the last few episodes. The mystery disappeared and it became more a soap opera about ghosts. If season 2 does stick with the house, I’m not sure how long they’ll hold my attention.

All in all, a pretty cool show. Glad I watched.

We came home on Sunday to find the DVR telling us we had nothing recorded. Odd, since we had a shitload recorded. We tend to record, save and watch in chunks and there was stuff as old as 4 or 5 months on there waiting to be viewed. Even weirder was that it was telling me that 100% of the space was available, but indicated that there was about 17 hours of HD space. That’s weird because the DVR held about 100 hours of HD and 17 hours is about what was left with what we had sitting on the box.

Called AT&T. Essentially, the hard drive went. They sent out a replacement. It came yesterday. It’s a much newer model, has more capacity and seems to handle the ‘whole house DVR’ thing much better than the old box – which would lag and get out of sync. So that’s a nice upside to losing all the shit we had recorded.

My wife took the opportunity to try to weasel some compensation for our loss – it was a longshot, but you’d be amazed at what she has to give at the hotel sometimes, so it was worth a try.

This is where AT&T customer support failed in a major way. After the tech couldn’t help she was given to a supervisor who seemed to be just as unempowered. When my wife asked to go over her head to an actual manager, she was told no managers were in (it was Sunday evening) and to call back tomorrow and she could speak to the manager. The next day, the runaround got even greater with each person on the phone just passing the call along to someone else who wasn’t empowered to try to satisfy our complaint. It finally ended at the supervisor level again where this one offered the most compensation (still not even closer to what felt like an honest effort to appease an angry customer), informed us that the supervisor the night before was full of shit and pretty much lied to get my wife off the phone and pass the problem to the people on the next day and that no one above her on the totem pole would ever talk to a customer because it’s not in their job description.

Pretty much, if a level 1 tech can’t solve your issue to your satisfaction then it gets passed to a ‘supervisor’ and after that…well, sorry.

She suggested we try the AT&T site to contact someone higher up, but you can’t seem to. It just pushes you to the same phone numbers and the same unempowered employees.

Flat out. AT&T doesn’t want to hear it.

That was a little disappointing. Seems to be getting that way more and more. The one that always irks me is the customer survey that only asked certain questions or asks them in a certain way so that you really can’t express displeasure. I can’t think of an example offhand, but too many times when I have an issue with something and try to fill out the customer survey I can’t help but think they’re worded in a way to elicit the ‘correct’ response and keep satisfaction scores high.

But the new DVR is pretty kick ass.

Our seats:

And if you want to be an extra-good stalker, you can watch the show as it aired on TV:

They edited the fuck out of the Orton/Rhodes match. The beatdown went WAY longer live, was rather brutal for the current “PG” product the WWE is selling and had the crowd popping like mad – total ECW-like chants for Orton to keep beating the fuck out of Rhodes. Tons of blood.

Thanks, but I think I’ve planned enough roller coaster vacations to know how it’s done…and it’s done nothing like the video.