TheFullPint.com is beer news, reviews and discussion. And it makes me thirsty every time I visit it. The site has reviews of beers from all over, and the forum has discussion on beers, including a section just for home-brewers.

For beer lovers, it is a must-visit.

Some of the stuff goes way over my head, but even with my limited knowledge of the process and the vocabulary of beer crafting, there is plenty on the site that I’ve found useful, and at very least, interesting.

And again, it makes me thirsty.

At the risk of making this just a Consumer Complaint blog, I feel the need to share our recent experience with Nebraska Furniture Mart.

Sara and I were there last Saturday, initially just to help my mom pick out a new digital camera. But while we were there, we wandered over to the outdoor furniture department in the back of Mrs. B’s clearance center. Sara happened to notice a dining room set that was not only beautiful, but a bargain.

So what began as assistance for camera shopping turned into a big purchase day, as we bought this table and six chairs for the dining room and another table and chair set for the kitchen.

Wednesday delivery time came, and when the delivery guys were ready to go, the table was a lot smaller than I remembered it. I checked the picture I took in the store, and it had two leaves that were now missing. The delivery guys didn’t have them. They called in to the dispatch, and they had no idea where they were. The person I spoke with said she would try very hard to find them, and she’d call me back before 9pm. But she told me, as we bought this from the clearance center, we bought it “as is.” I reminded her that though we bought it as is, it wasn’t delivered as we bought it.

Around 8:30, she called back, but it was for the follow-up survey. She didn’t realize that she was calling the person she told several hours earlier that she’d be working hard to find the leaves. When I brought that up again, she was a little flustered and then said they had their best guy working on it for four hours and he couldn’t find them. She said they would be willing to come pick it up AT NO CHARGE TO US and refund us, as if that was some kind of generous offer. Alternately, she said she could knock off $80.

This table is small without the leaves. It’s a little table with six chairs sitting around it. It’s not big enough for a dining room table and it’s not big enough for six chairs. So with $80 taken off, it becomes a too-small table that we’d have to put somewhere else and replace with an actual dining room table, so that option was clearly not going to work. I didn’t want to give up on the table yet, for two reasons: it’s an awesome table and chair set that looks amazing in the dining room, and I had trouble comprehending how they could just lose two table leaves and have no idea where they are. So I asked if we could hold off on the pickup in the hopes that the leaves would turn up.

I called back today asking if there was any sign of the leaves. The customer service representative said that our account was set up for a return, apparently meaning that NFM had already given up on any chance of finding the leaves. I scheduled the return and then asked if there was a manager or supervisor I could speak to. She asked if I could just tell her what I had to say.

I explained that this was very, very frustrating for us. We had already found a home for our old table and chair set and moved them out of the house, so we were now worse off than before we bought the new set. And now I was going to have to take off more time from work to be home for their open-ended day-long delivery system. I explained that this made us not want to shop with Nebraska Furniture Mart, because we have no confidence that we’ll actually get what we order, and we feel pretty screwed over by the whole process. I didn’t raise my voice or cop an attitude in the slightest — just tried to get across how frustrating this whole situation had been.

She closed by saying “Well, I could give you a $50 letter that you could use toward another purchase, but you just said you don’t want to shop here anymore so I guess there’s no point in that.”

What kind of awesome customer service is that?

A French software company believes that Sony BMG may be pirating up to 47% of its software!

PointDev, a French software company that makes Windows administration tools, received a call from a Sony BMG IT employee for support. After Sony BMG supplied a pirated license code for Ideal Migration, one of PointDev’s products, the software maker was able to mandate a seizure of Sony BMG’s assets. The subsequent raid revealed that software was illegally installed on four of Sony BMG’s servers. The Business Software Alliance, however, believes that up to 47 percent of the software installed on Sony BMG’s computers could be pirated.

These are some pretty serious—not to mention ironic—allegations against a company that’s gone so far as to install malware on consumers’ computers in the name of preventing piracy.

Regular readers of this site know that I only post werewolf news when it’s good news. So now, for the first time, I have werewolf news.

I’m probably one of the last people to learn this, but there’s a remake of The Wolfman in the works, and it stars Benicio del Toro. I am very excited about this, but not just because there’s a remake happening.

Every modern werewolf movie seems intent on making a guy change into something that looks basically like a big wolf. That’s not cool! A GUY who looks like a WOLF is cool.

Here is an Entertainment Weekly interview with Rick Baker about the process of turning Benny into the wolf. I would’ve added a “So … you got it right this time, huh?” to the list of questions.

This mashup was a regular on You Are So Beautiful, Beautiful Robot back in the day – it’s a seamless combination of some of the greatest pop songs ever – but I just this evening discovered that there was a video for it too.

Download the song and visit DJ Earworm’s site for more.

Continuing the theme of digging up old work, this story was from October 2004, but I don’t remember which paper ran it. I think maybe it was the Omaha City Weekly.

They were a band without a country.

And now they’re a band without a label.

After winning the prestigious Mercury Prize for the best album of 1998 with their debut, “Bring It On,” the members of the experimental blues-pop band Gomez found themselves fighting a bit of an uphill battle with the UK press.

“Initially it was very good when we got a whole load of press when we otherwise wouldn’t have,” explained Ben Ottewell, singer and guitarist for Gomez, referring to the instant attention from winning such a prize. “But it kind of dooms you in some way.”

The British music press is notorious for building acts up only to knock them down, and Gomez was no exception.

“There’s definitely some resentment there (within the UK press), and I think it boils down to the fact that we make music, we have fun doing it and we don’t fit too neatly into the scene-based East-end fashion,” Ottewell said.

Ottewell and his four bandmates from Southport, England literally recorded their debut album in a garage in 1997. After a little studio tinkering and strong singles, “Bring It On” was an unexpected response to the dying Britpop movement of the mid-late ‘90s.

“We kind of happened without their say-so,” he said. “The NME (New Musical Express, a British music newspaper) likes to appoint people to their top position, and they didn’t really have that stake in it with us.”

Critics seemed to avoid discussing the music and instead derided the band for their popularity with Americans – achieving success that other appointed media darlings attempted and failed.

The NME’s review of early single “Get Myself Arrested,” for example, didn’t even discuss the song, and instead taunted the band by suggesting they wished they were “dirty Americans.”

“I don’t think we’ve ever really recovered from the press in Britain,” Ottewell said.
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This was a story I did for an April 2006 issue of the short-lived Lincoln weekly, ‘Switch.’

Fifteen years ago, the first issue of the new X-Men series sold over six million copies.

The Comics Journal estimated that more than 9000 comic book stores were in business across the United States.Now, in spite of the success of movie adaptations, a new issue of “X-Men” is lucky to sell 80,000 copies. The number of comics stores has dropped to around 3000. And the cultural presence of comic books has been greatly diminished.

“People come in here off the street wanting change for the meter and say ‘Wow, I didn’t know comics still exist,’” said Larry Lorenz, owner of Trade-A-Tape Comic Center at 145 S. 9th.

Along with Comic World at 233 N. 48th, Trade-A-Tape is one of two Lincoln stores to survive the rise, fall and slight return of the comic book culture over the past twenty years.

Originally dedicated to selling 8-track tapes, Trade-A-Tape was founded in 1975 by Lee Aronsohn, a New York native who ended up in Lincoln.

“Lee had worked at a store in Boulder called Trade-A-Tape that sold music, so he brought that here,” Lorenz said. The store focused on the music, but Aronson sold some comics in the back.

Lorenz, who had sold comics in high school at flea markets with a friend, moved to Lincoln for college in the fall of 1976 and started working at the store.

At the age of 20, he bought Trade-A-Tape from Aronsohn. “The first day I bought it, I switched it around and put the comics up front and the music in back,” Lorenz said. Although he kept the name, the focus has remained on comics ever since.
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I wrote a while back about the problems we were having with how Wells Fargo chose to use our money. Well today, we got a $10 “excess activity fee,” which meant quite simply that we were using our savings account too much. Apparently when the lady at Wells Fargo – who helped us set up our savings account – told us that we could use our savings account to transfer money to our checking accounts when needed, she forgot to mention that if we did that, Wells Fargo would charge us for “excess activity.”

Also, I forgot about an automated payment I had set up and I went and overdrew my account again. But this is the good part – when that automated payment came in, Wells Fargo snuck it back earlier in the register so that it came before two minor charges (which amounted to $7 from McDonald’s and Burger King, which I knew I had money for when I spent it). By doing this, not only did the automated payment overdraft my account, but by nestling it before the $1.87 charge and the $5.08 withdrawals, all of a sudden those became overdrafts too, even though those payments were made when there was plenty of money in the account. But Wells Fargo gets to charge me for THREE $34 overdraft fees instead of the ONE that is justified.

Here are some quotes from friends who have had similar experiences with Wells Fargo:

Last time I made a deposit a couple weeks ago, the teller told me that I should get overdraft coverage, so that I don’t lose any money. I said, “No, thanks, I should be just fine, as is.” I have over nine grand in my checking account.

She replied, “Well, it’s like they say. I’ll never lose my keys, until it happens.” I told her, “I’ve never lost my keys.”

Her response chilled me clean through to the bone: “You will get charged for an overdraft, one of these days.”

What the hell kind of talk is that? I feel for you, man. Wells Fargo sucks.

That used to happen to me all the time. I switched to Bank of America and I haven’t had any problems since.

This happened to me one time and I thought I had taken the extra effort to go make a deposit in the ATM on Sunday and would be fine. By the time i checked my account in the next couple of days I was negative nine hundred dollars. -NINE HUNDRED- I even had checks sent back!! I called customer service and the random lady who would not give me her extention said ” Oh they won’t charge you for any of those. no worries. And she even said- you can still write checks right now- just don’t use your card … This had happened before and the reason was always listed as “Unusual deposit activity” – whatever that means. They would hold my paycheck for TWO WEEKS!! I am sure that so many people just get screwed all the time with this and I don’t even want to think about how much money I lost and weeks I went flat broke because of this crazy scheme!! I imagine that many people don’t go to the bank and just eat the charges.

My grandpa took out a loan from them a few years ago to finance a new truck and they did pretty much the exact same thing. He would make payments on time via checks in the mail and they would just hold the check until they could charge him late fees, it was ridiculous. Yeah, the dude might be old (I think he was in his late 70’s when this happened, not yet in his 80’s) but he’s been a home owner and the landlord of roughly 10 houses for decades. He knows how to take care of his bills and they completely f—– him over. He paid the loan off as soon as he could and won’t deal with Wells Fargo at all anymore. He hates them.

After I got screwed out of hundreds of dollars by Wells Fargo — my $20 overdraft fee turned into a $400 charge, a closed account and me being reported as a credit risk — I switched to Pinnacle and have loved it.

I know I sound like an actor in a small-town bank radio spot, but I’m telling you: They actually treat you like a person at Pinnacle, not just as an account number they try to extract the maximum amount of money from.

this same thing happened to me, only it was a $4 overdraft, I believe. then their charges snowballed, i couldn’t afford their fees, the account was closed and i was reported.

I love First National. I hated Wells Fargo. I give First National an A+ on customer service.

The same thing happened to my friend except she ended up with close to $2000 in overdraft fees. She also signed up for the overdraft protection, but the banker she set it up with screwed something up and Wells Fargo basically told her it’s not their fault their employee is a —- up … she had plenty of money in her savings that could have covered the fees if they would have set up her account right. But they didn’t nor did they care, just that she pay back the money she owed them.

I had trouble with Wells Fargo’s idiocy overseas. Despite the fact that I told the bank multiple times that I would be out of the country, our account was frozen at least three different times. That doesn’t seem like a big deal, but when you’re down to your last couple dollars and standing at the Kuala Lumpur airport ATM being told your account cannot be verified, it’s a bit of a problem.

We also had a similar overdraft problem, and when we called about it, they gave me the same, “maybe if you took more caution when withdrawing” spiel. They also seemed to be charging us arbitrary amounts when we would withdraw for “foreign conversion fees.” One time it might be $3, then two weeks later it would be $12 from the same ATM.

The second we got back we closed the accounts and avoided that place at all costs. I wonder if you went farther up the ladder with your situation if that would matter. Sounds like Wells Fargo is pretty united in their ability to give their customers the ‘ol screwjob.

i work with some ex-wells fargo folks who basically say the place is committed to —-ing people over.

AHH! i’m fed up and leaving too.

I couldn’t sleep tonight, so I played around with public domain footage I found at the Prelinger Archives and made a video for Pablo’s Triangle’s “Girlfriend” using only clips from old stag films and stripper footage (and a little bit of concert footage).

I carefully edited so that there is no nipplage, but if your workplace frowns upon videos of women dancing around in very little clothing, consider this potentially not safe for work.

I also uploaded some old video projects last weekend, including another Pablo’s Triangle song.”Three Four Ben” is now available on the music videos page, and it’s actually a slightly new version with some integrated concert footage. And “December” and a higher-quality version of “Rotchen im Wald” are now up on the short films page.

Usually I’m the only member of our family in the Sunday Journal Star, but this past weekend, my dad was one of the volunteer weather observers in a Sunday feature.

He even gets a joke in — better than the one I had in my cartoon.