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Wow! That was more difficult than I thought it would be.

I’ve been thinking about buying a pair of nice bluetooth over the ear headphones.

I’ve got a set of AirPod Pros 2nd Gen and while I like them very much, I don’t like that my ears get annoyed with me if I wear them for more than a couple of hours at a time.

Were it not for that, I’d have them in all the time.

It would be so much easier than listening to the crazy lady screaming about whatever she screams about, or hearing her fella, yelling at the yappy dogs, while grinding away on some piece of metal, driving or “Fixing” a vehicle that’s on it’s last legs.

What he needs to do, is stay out from under the hoods of the various vehicles he’s destroyed (5? I think at last count,) and leave it to a professional. His version of a properly running engine is very different from mine! 3 of 8 cylinders firing, punctuated by 5 consecutive backfires is not proper operation! There’s also the thrilling sound of him running a chain saw at 10 PM. I’m not kidding, I’ll turn the lights off and he’ll start the chainsaw. That motor is also on it’s last legs! One can only hope that when It dies we’ll be spared the restful sounds of him cutting whatever he’s cutting.

Don’t ask…

All I can say is this used to be a quiet neighborhood. This is what happens when you let riff raff move into nice places!

I’ve been in hollers in Tennessee, and Kentucky where folks were dirt poor, and not school educated but they weren’t this kind of white gutter trash.

It’s funny in a way, California can’t even do white trash or rednecks right.

You can see why I might be looking for noise cancelling headphones, that are comfortable in the long term.

There are literally times when I can’t watch TV in my living room due to the noise coming from that white trash. I like having the windows open this time of year, I like the fresh mountain air (even when it is full of pollen).

So I’m faced with, turning up the volume to unbearable levels, closing the windows, not bothering to try to live my life and watch a movie or TV show in my house, or a set of headphones.

I know there are those of you saying, “Why don’t you call the police?”

Hahahahahaha! Where the hell have you people been living? Police? Helpful? Responding to a noise complaint? The police can’t even arrest and hold her for more than 8 hours after she assaults someone. Which she’s done 3 more times since she assaulted me last year.

BTW, if I lived in one of those “Fly Over” redneck places… Let’s just say this whole thing wouldn’t be a problem. Folks go missing in hollers all the time…

I digress, I was considering the Apple AirPods Max. They’re expensive! But I can also buy them from Costco and save $70. I saved $50 on my AirPod Pros at Costco. My concern there is that the Max is generation one and come fall Apple may be releasing a replacement version.

This led me down a rabbit hole of reviews and firmware versions for both the AirPod Max and my AirPod Pros. That’s when I discovered something interesting and strange. I did a search for “Latest AirPod Pro Gen 2 Firmware” then I got articles from last year through this year. I told the browser to limit the results to only this year. You’d think that would narrow your search but oddly it didn’t by much.

I was still seeing articles listing last years firmware as current and it was clear from context, the article had been written last year but the date was today’s date. I looked at several similar articles thinking perhaps there was a current update but there wasn’t.

There was however a shit ton (Technical Term) of ads.

Then it dawned on me, these outdated articles are monkeying with the dates to appear current so they can serve these shitty ads.

This reduces the usefulness of the internet and honestly makes me discount the validity or accuracy of publications MacWorld and 9 to 5 Mac I’m looking right at you!

It occurs to me that because of folks doing stuff like this to keep serving the same 5 ads over and over again, overall the internet is becoming less useful all the time. If the filtering doesn’t work, then the user is faced with a wave of outdated and current information with no ability to determine what is real, and what is useless.

Imagine writing an article about Trump when he was President, packing that article with shitty ads, then updating the date.

A query like “Who is President of the United States” could return Trump, Biden, Obama and Bush. How would someone know? If they had to turn on the TV to figure out who the president is, then the internet would be kind of useless.

All this ad crap and targeted marketing was a bad idea to begin with, and it’s only gotten worse.

I come again to a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the past few years.

“Is the internet’s usefulness eclipsed by having to filter through all the crap to get valid information?”

I’m really wondering. I guess I’ll know when I see an article saying, “Australian farmers pig has piglets with wings, Farmer Stunned!” I’d bet that at least 25% of folks on the internet would read the article, and a lot of them would believe it.

I fell for one the other night, some bullshit about a mystery in some dudes backyard. It was written like some reality show script. A paragraph that said essentially nothing, then a commercial, and another paragraph then commercial. It went on and on, but it was putting ads in front of everyone that was curious late at night.

Spoiler Alert: The guy bought a house built in the late 50s, the “Mystery” was that someone who owned the house had put in a fallout shelter. Over time, other owners had added soil and landscaping that buried the hatch. Then the shelter had gotten forgotten about except as a dim rumor. The guy found the original blueprints at the county records office and decided to investigate. The shelter was in pretty good shape so the guy renovated the space. It was pretty cool. The article could have covered everything in maybe 4 well written paragraphs with photos. Instead they took almost 100 paragraphs all of which were poorly written.

I finally went to Apple for the answer. I’d not gone to them in the first place because often asking a simple question in Apple’s support section, does not provide a single Byte of data. You’re still going to have to sort through a ton data that’s not relevant.

By the way, as of 6/28/2023 the current AirPod Pro Gen 2 firmware is 5E135.

I still haven’t decided if I’m going to drop the hammer on headphones…

This is how I lose entire days…

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Okay, not ranting a lot, but…

When did tissue manufacturers forget how to put the tissues in the boxes in a way that you can pull one out of the box at a time instead of arbitrarily wadding.

It’s super weird, I used to think it was because we purchased the cheap stuff. But for shits & giggles I’ve purchased a variety of manufacturers products.

They all have the same problem. I thought perhaps it was the cube shaped boxes versus the rectangular boxes. So I’ve tried both. Same problem…

So apparently even the quality of tissue cannot be guaranteed.

I remember not too long ago, tissues was one of the things that you purchased, put on the counter in your bathroom and didn’t think about again until you pulled the last tissue from the box and realized you’d neglected to purchase a replacement box.

In my case, that meant using paper towels, or grabbing a handful of napkins from Carls Jr the next day at lunch. I tried very hard to only go to the grocery store once a week.

I guess my question is how are we regressing on things that have been stable and functional for literally decades? It’s a box of tissue. Boxes of tissue worked fine, they didn’t need tweaking, they worked well exactly as they were.

They worked so well that Howard Hughes used the empty boxes as house shoes!

I’ve noticed in the case of the cube shaped boxes that the dimensions have been changed. I don’t know why, but I can tell you that Puffs specifically will not fit into a metal tissue box holder I’ve been using without issue for 15 years.

So to all you tissue manufacturers, “What is going on?”

Have you decided to have your tissue manufactured in China? Have the Chinese deviated from specification, as they so often do?

Am I the only one who’s noticing?

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He works hard for da money!!!!

I worked way too hard for my income!

Hunter Biden literally worked his fingers to the bone firing off threatening text messages. For his efforts within a month he got 4 -5 million dollars.

Wow! Obviously I’ve been doing this whole making money thing wrong my whole life. What I should have been doing was threatening high ranking officials of the Chinese Communist Party.

I could have retired comfortably a long time ago.

Does anybody happen to have Henry Zhao’s phone number? I can dash off half a dozen threatening nasty text messages before dinner!

I was thinking perhaps I could go for hush money. There are a lot of really nasty politicians in California, I’m sure I could catch someone with their hand in the cookie jar! Oh wait… They’re 98% Democrats (they have no shame,) so that wouldn’t work. I’d have to find a Republican. In California those are few and far between. Dang! I’ll have to move to another state first.

I’m glad that there’s at least ONE IRS agent who has a sense of morality and duty. I’ll have to make a note of his name for future reference. If I ever get audited, I’ll have to ask for him specifically. He might still be a son of a bitch, but at least he has some vestige of moral compass.

I’m also enjoying in a very dark way that the DOJ, FBI, and Merrick Garland have all been proven liars about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

You’l recall, that was the laptop that these agencies and every media outlet swore on their mother’s lives was Russian disinformation. At the same time, these same organizations, called anyone talking about the laptop Russian operatives and in some cases traitors.

Uh huh…

I think every single one of their people screaming the laptop was Russian disinformation should be arrested…

They clearly were attempting to affect the outcome of national elections, and maybe should be investigated to determine if they were Russian operatives.

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For a completely different rant…

Yeah i know, I’ve been a little angry lately. I’m trying to get it out of my system and understand why I’m so pissed off.

Let’s just say this, I’ve been dealing with a lot lately and for the foreseeable future things aren’t going to let up.

I’m ignoring my Mother about 2/3 of the time. I feel terrible about it but I really can’t take her asking about people and me having to be the grimm reaper, informing her that they are all dead!

It wouldn’t be so bad once, but having to go through the details every time we talk is a super bummer. She also gets mad because she claims that no one told her…

Uh… Some of the people she’s asking about, have been dead for decades. I’m pretty dang sure it came up at least once between then and today.

She of course refuses to believe she was ever told, preferring to remain the victim.

I was thinking to myself perhaps Jesse and I could use a spa day.

He could run around all day with other dogs under a nice trainer’s supervision and then he could go get a bath, nail trim and brushing.

I on the other hand would be in a nice massage, perhaps a salt scrub, and just absolute zen. Perhaps a nice wine or fruity cocktail.

For those old enough to remember the phrase, “Calgon take me away…” I can tell you I’m so far beyond what Calgon could do, I might as well be in another star system.

I need a place where you drop all your tech into a little basket that’s locked up as two burly musclemen open massive golden doors leading out of a reception area and into a place that looks like the garden the Fey played in in “True Blood”

Probably too much to ask… But it’s a nice fantasy…

I mention all of this to frame my mindset as I walked into a Chase Bank branch today.

My purpose was to pay off a HELOC that had been rendered completely useless the moment Washington Mutual was purchased by JP Morgan Chase.

This was not too long before the house burnt and honestly, that HELOC line of credit would have been really helpful during the rebuild.

We attempted to get an explanation from JP Morgan Chase, as to why the credit line was frozen, and also tired to get them to unlock the line of credit. Our household income was over 100K per year at the time.

Note I said attempted to get answers. We couldn’t, and no-one at Chase seemed to understand we weren’t trying to get a new loan, we weren’t trying to change the terms of the HELOC or anything else. We just wanted to know why the line of credit was inaccessible.

The equity in our home was well over 200K at the time the place burned. Then the housing bubble popped.

Fortunately, we had full replacement insurance house and contents. That meant the housing bubble really didn’t do much to us.

On the one hand, the line of credit would have been helpful, on the other hand It’s possible that we could have been hurt by it.

That being said when we opened the HELOC the bank wanted to give us 200K as a line of credit. I told them, “No, lets do 60K which allows for us to make realistic improvements to the house and not start drowning in debt.”

The bankers at the time looked at me like I was insane. The other half said nothing and later wondered aloud how I’d done the math. Turns out I was right and the HELOC was just perfect. Or WOULD HAVE BEEN had the line of credit not been locked for no reason.

Oh JP Morgan Chase… you’ve made an enemy in me…

We’d accessed the HELOC to make improvements on the house among other things. Those improvements were underway when the place burned. That left us with a mortgage, a 2nd in the form of the HELOC and a smoldering pile of charcoal. (I’m over stating it a bit.)

During the rebuild, the insurance company was putting the place back together based on the plans for the improvements and the original blueprints for the house. Generally speaking, It worked out okay.

Chase however never explained themselves, and never unfroze the credit line. So essentially it was a payment on a useless line of credit that should have been rolled into the first mortgage when Chase sold my mortgage to some fly by night loan servicing firm. But that would have been far too logical.

Chase had through the years really pissed me off, repeatedly.

I constantly had the following problems with Chase.

Web access and their Mobile access only worked about 10% of the time. It was so bad that I’d actually get surprised if I was able to log in and would put off banking because their online access was so shitty.

They’d change passwords on my account for my safety and convenience. Yeah, you read that right, Chase would lock me out of the accounts then change the password then force me to call them to get back in.

They also started asking for some silly assed numeric code or security phrase whenever I called them. Apparently they’d change that one too if I didn’t use it enough. But they wouldn’t tell me they’d made the change.

After 4 consecutive debit card replacements that I couldn’t activate, I gave up. The other half did all the ATM shit with Chase.

Excessive fees improperly charged to the account. Then when we’d call them on those fees they’d say, “Ooops our mistake…” But they never adequately explained why they thought those fees should be billed to our account in the first place.

When Chase sold the mortgage I really questioned why I needed Chase Bank in my life.

I stopped dealing with Chase. The Other half would maintain a balance to pay the mortgage and the 2nd and stash a little money automatically every month in the savings account for Christmas. That was it.

He dealt with them and their bullshit much more than I did.

When he died, I started really looking at all the accounts so nothing went wrong.

As I was looking at the Chase account. I realized since Chase no longer held the mortgage I could move the payment to another bank and close the Chase Checking, and Savings. All I needed to do was transfer the balance of the checking and savings account to the HELOC and all three accounts would be out of my hair.

You’d think this would be easy.

Youd be wrong

It took almost 2 hours and 3 different people to work through all of this, at a BRANCH.

The complexities were over the top. You’d think that anyone in that branch could pull up a current payoff, then do simple subtraction… But No, the balance the representative was getting on his screen was different from the balance on their mobile application which praise Jesus, was working and displaying on my phone. Finally, they converted the checking and savings account cash to a cashiers check then placed a call to figure out what the payoff was. The phone call provided another completely different answer. So what the fuck?

I’m sorry, if all this crap is in your computers, then why isn’t it available? And why was a cashier’s check necessary? Chase had all the funds, it was a matter of applying them. You know… debits / credits, accounting processes, basic banking that you learn from playing Monopoly… They were very very concerned about the payoff balance which was less than $2500. Trust me the amount of interest was less than a cup of coffee.

But… and this really pisses me off.

These motherfuckers added a $65.00 fee to cancel the lein the HELOC placed against the house.

Are you shitting me? These fucks, in addition to getting interest for all the years the HELOC had a hefty balance, decided to twist the knife one last time at payoff?

JP Morgan Chase, I swear to God, I’ll do my level best to pay off any other debts to you, as quickly as possible. and I will never darken your door or do business with you again.

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Great Job you MORONS!!!!

Thanks a million you TQ2+ (Insert random characters, glyphs, and numbers)

We of the LGB community want a fucking divorce, and we want our LGB community back from you.

We spent a shit ton of time and effort to calm down the church folks and the rabid conservatives. Anyone remember the controversy surrounding Anita Bryant?

We worked super hard getting the majority of people to realize that all we wanted was the ability to have all the rights marriage effortlessly conferred. We didn’t want anything more or less than equality and to live with who we loved.

In a very few short years you motherfuckers in the arbitrary, (I’ll be Trans today,) or gender fuck drag community have fucked us all.

In truth, the majority of the world doesn’t give a fuck about how anyone gets their rocks off. The general population doesn’t care that you’re trans or whatever. Most of us just wish you’d deal with your shit and leave the rest of us out of it. We really don’t care, and just wish we didn’t have to hear about it all day, every day, or deal with your bastardization of the language.

Here’s a simple question for you to ponder. What part of, “I don’t give a shit,” don’t you understand?

That’s coming from a gay guy.

Have any of you morons heard the religious right lately? A lot of them who used to be at least tolerant, sound worse than Westboro Baptist Church now. (Look it up, godhatesfags.org)

They’re quoting the book of Revelations about the vomitous abortion you’ve made of the rainbow flag. By extension they’re trying to rally around taking back the rainbow flag in God’s name.

Personally I don’t think we need a flag anymore and you assholes have sure screwed that pooch (No! Not your friend in Puppy Play Drag! Don’t get me started on this…)

When folks start whipping themselves into a frenzy over a deity who doesn’t make his or her intentions clear, you get rabid revival tent preachers claiming that God spoke to them and demanded action from the faithful.

You want to see what that looks like? Look up gay murders or executions in Muslim countries. There are plenty of videos of their faithful tossing Gays off roofs.

Historically, “Thou shalt not Suffer a Witch to live,” Had some serious consequences during the inquisition and / or Salem witch trials! Remember… It’s a short step to, “Thou shalt not suffer a fag to live.”

You got a sampling of it at the Dodgers Game over the weekend. That crowd was mostly pissed off and offended Catholics.

Great job, you’ve set us back 40 years and you’re too selfish and stupid to recognize the danger or the damage you’re causing.

Moreover, you’re going to have the LGB community siding with the conservatives and religious folks in this battle.

Because…

WE THINK YOU’RE WRONG

We’re tired of hearing about your perceived grievances.

At least those of us honest enough to speak our minds are.

We know full well that there’s a bunch of our ultra progressive brothers and sisters who will excommunicate or cancel us.

I say so what? I’m also pretty sure that there are a lot of folks like me, who resent the annoyance of using your pronouns or trying to figure out which bathroom symbols mean “Men’s room”.

Half the time I’m tempted to go behind a building and piss on a wall. This is especially true if I’m a little tipsy.

One of the new symbols looks like some kind of weird clock and I’m not sure what time it’s supposed to indicate. I really resent having something as simple as taking a piss being made complicated with gender ideology bullshit.

The simplest solution is not new and confusing symbology. The solution is a sign that says, “Bathroom”. If there are two doors with the same signage social convention would have people knocking before attempting entry and waiting their turn.

Ain’t it funny how the old or simplest solutions often work the best?