OKAY, I'M BACK

Okay, I'm back.

There's probably no need to bore you with the details of why Real Art has been on a forced hiatus since last Tuesday except for the fact that I'm pretty angry about it and so I'm gonna rant for a bit. AOL sucks. People have been telling me that for years, but were always a bit vague about how and why AOL sucks. I now have good, specific reasons to believe that AOL sucks. (Quick digression: Frank Zappa talks about how Warner Brothers sucks in the FZ concert movie, Baby Snakes; now that AOL and Time Warner are one and the same, I can feel like I have FZ's wrath on my side here.)

I lost internet access late last Tuesday night. It was either because of Hurricane Claudette or because AOL screwed up my billing when I moved. Or both. One thing is for sure, AOL screwed up my billing big time: my wife and I have been overbilled, but, somehow, AOL figured that I owed them even more money and cut my access at around the same time that some Houston server or network went down because of the storm. Compounding the problem was the fact that the AOL tech support people had been instructed, apparently, to not be entirely forthright about what was going on. I figured that little tidbit out because I ended up talking to 15 or 16 of their technicians--they gave me inconsistent answers; one of their guys accidentally told me the truth, that some third company (not my cable company and not AOL) was the owner of this network or server and so they didn't know how long it would take to fix. Yet another guy told me that the truth teller wasn't supposed to say that and had gone too far...

Confused yet? I sure was.

Anyway, by the time the mysterious network or server problem had been repaired, I still had no access, which stymied the latest of the seemingly endless stream of tech support personnel. Finally the tech guy checked my billing status and said that a block had been put on my account, which was both annoying and strange given that I thought that I had cleared that up earlier in the week (and given that I thought that I had cleared that up right after I moved over a month ago). My wife is the bill person in our house, so she dealt with AOL billing: she found out that we had been overbilled for the month of June to the tune of about fifty bucks. For some reason this wasn't good enough for AOL because they still needed a credit card number and weren't taking mine even though the damned card is good through the end of the month...I still don't know if we're going to get our fifty bucks back!

Warner Brothers sucks; AOL sucks. Corporations suck. Period. Maybe it's time to go to Road Runner, which is still part of Time Warner, which sucks.

Aaaaaugh! The corporate bastards own us all.

And without internet service, I've had to rely on the corporate news media, which suck, all week long. It's been wall-to-wall Kobe Bryant, the new and better pointless diversion to replace Scott Peterson as the sensationalistic and lurid diversion du jour to make us forget about the missing WMDs, the ever rising US soldier death toll in Iraq, Bush's push to destroy our economy while enriching his friends and campaign donors, and just about every other important news story that's not "sexy." In fact, at one point on Friday afternoon (approximately 5:30 p.m. central time), ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, MSNBC, CNN, and CNBC were all reporting on the Kobe Bryant rape story. Even NPR covered the story that day.

Let's all say "O. J." together...

I did catch wind of two rather interesting and weird stories sandwiched between the layers of Kobe orgy: the apparent suicide of British weapons inspector, David Kelley, and the bizarre ruckus that took place in a House Ways and Means Committee meeting about pensions. I'm not totally up on these stories so I refer you to some links provided by the ever knowledgable Eschaton blog.

Click here for the David Kelley story and here for the ruckus story.

God, what a week.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$