Friday, October 16, 2009

Breaking the seal

It's been a strange week indeed.

We had French Vogue inexplicably decide that reviving blackface would somehow get a bye in the age of Obama. The jokes were hard to swallow in Tropic Thunder and Downey's blackface there was deployed with irony in full force. "What do you mean 'you people'?" There isn't anything ironic about painting up a white Dutch model for a magazine layout. Fashion fail.

And today we find out some justice of the peace in Louisiana feels he has the right to deny interracial couples a marriage license. But oh no, he's not a racist; he has "piles and piles of black friends" whom are so privileged as to be allowed access to his bathroom. Anybody else feel we might need to search under his house and in the woodshed? Who counts up people by the pile... except, you know, Nazis and Rwandan warlords. And what's his excuse? He's just thinking of the children who, according to our good friend, will never be accepted by either the white or black community. Damn! Do his marriage licenses also include a one-way ticket on a time machine back to 1957? Please, Keith Bardwell, please stop being so helpful.

The battle lines were drawn more sharply surrounding Roman Polanski. On one side, Hollywood (notably minus Jamie Foxx) supports Polanski and thinks that slipping a 13 year old girl a quaalude and then having sex with her against her will is somehow ok when you make great movies. Journalists, on the other hand, found themselves cast again and again this week in the role of saying drugging and raping a 13 year old is not cool, no matter how many Oscars or lifetime achievement awards you may have won. You know how he lured the girl to Jack Nicholson's house? He told her and her mother he wanted to take pictures of the girl for French Vogue! You can't make this stuff up. Please sign this petition to cancel French Vogue. Do it for the children.

Tomorrow morning I will be saying goodbye to Capital One as my bank. They decided to delete all of my scheduled utility and credit card payments via bill pay. When I asked them to take care of the late fees and negotiate to re-establish the 0% interest rates on my cards as they promise in their TOS, they strung me along for 3 weeks and then said "sorry, since these weren't scheduled as auto-payments we won't help you." Which they knew from the beginning when I called on September 22 and on every subsequent call. I had to twist the arm of every rep I spoke with to get them to take a look at the notes left by previous reps. What a nightmare! I'll try to give the uncondensed version in the future so you can know what kind of pointless runaround to expect if you ever call Capital One customer service. I will never bank with Capital One again. Can't wait to see the bank manager's face when I come in to pull out all my money.

And lastly... finally got my LSAT score. Disappointed.