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I just got back from an Alaskan cruise with my family. How could I complain about that? Watch me. Everyone present had something to complain about but this was my problem, the internet. When I envisioned being on the cruise I was thinking, “Well I’ll just bring by laptop and if the ship doesn’t have free wireless I’ll just buy a subscription. How bad could it be?” The short answer was *unbelievably* bad.

My quest began after I realized that the internet was indeed not free. This in and of itself is stupid. Even Motel 6 has free Wi-fi. So what you’re telling me is that this cruise ship isn’t as good as Motel Six? Fine, I’ll just get a subscription, or whatever, and it will be worth it for the week. I was under the impression from the ship directory and the ship staff that you purchased “internet cards” at the “internet cafe” and then used them to log on to the internet. So I went to said internet café and found that everything I was told was a lie. First of all, the internet café was not a café at all. Internet cafes have croissants and hippies in them. There were none and the layout of the room looked kind of strange, like a classroom. I went to the front where there was a guy at a desk. I asked him about the cards. He said there were no cards, and that there was a minute rate or I could buy minute packages. He pointed to a placard on his desk that further explained. Then he added, “I’m actually teaching a class right now.” His latter remark confused me. I turned to see where his desk was facing. Most of the computers in the room were turned to face his desk and I saw that there was a grand total of two people in the “class.” At this point I'm thinking, "This is the shittiest internet cafe I've ever seen." The guy at the desk turned his attention back to the class and began to say something about layers. Layers? That means he’s either teaching photoshop or computer aided drafting. I’ve taken about half a dozen classes for various programs concerning the two and I can tell you that the time I’ve spent in them has been the most boring time of my life. It’s certainly not something I would ever consider doing on a cruise. These people don’t need to learn how to use photoshop, they need to learn how to take a cruise. Anyway, back to the internet. Now get this, the minute rate was 75 cents per minute. My first thought was “Holy shit! That has to be illegal somehow.” What can you accomplish on the internet for something reasonable like five dollars? Not much. You can barely check your fucking e-mail. Just the price alone dictates what you will be doing on the internet. You definitely will not be having fun on the internet because if you’re having fun you’re wasting time and time = money. Well I don’t know about you but I think the whole point of the internet is fun. That’s about 97% of the reason I use it. I would have just said screw it if it weren’t for one technicality; I wanted to talk to my girlfriend. My cell phone didn't work when we weren't in port and I sure as shit wasn't going to use the ship’s phones. That left one option other than mail; a *really fast* e-mail. I sat down at one of their PCs and started an internet session. To my absolute horror, I found that the internet was about as fast as dial-up if not a little slower. Now how they managed to get a broadband connection to be the equivalent of dial-up is beyond me. They must have had a crack team of corporate rapists trying to figure out how they could possibly get more money. "Shitty internet connections!" "Excellent idea Johnson. You've got a future around here." Come on! The price is already 75 cents a minute. Call girls are cheaper than that! Can't you just amputate one of my fingers? I just want to contact my girlfriend. What the hell is wrong with that? Why do you get penalized for talking to loved ones? You don't have to be such a fucking asshole.

I ended up using $7.15 worth of platinum diamond-encrusted internet But the only thing I did was read an e-mail and send an e-mail. If you're a math freak you might have noticed that 7.15 is not a multiple of .75 and that's because they actually charge you by the second. That means it's 1.25 cents a second. Now Laeci had sent me two e-mails. One was short and one was a lot longer. Here's a real excerpt from the first e-mail I sent on the cruise; "Sorry I don't have enough money to read your first e-mail." Isn't that sad? That sentence wouldn't even make any sense out of context. Well I could always buy a package of minutes. It's only $ 55 for 100 minutes. Wow, what a bargain! That sounds more like a one year subscription than a minute package. Any given AOL trial disk gives you more time than that for free. Go to hell cruise ship!

I do bite my thumb, sir.

My girlfriend bought me a deck of Shakespeare flashcards. Each one has a memorable quote of commentary from one of his plays. There is also a word missing from the quote. On the back of the card it has the missing word and the context of the quote. She started reading through the cards and of course we couldn’t get any right off the top of our heads. You pretty much have to already know the play. It’s not like you can infer anything from the Elizabethan sentence structure. You could insert any word and it’s an 80% chance that that’s a legitimate sentence. She read one that seemed ambiguously sexual and then said:

Her: “Elbows? I was thinking penis.”
Me: “Yeah, me too. Lets just insert the word penis into every quote.”

So here are my top ten favorite results of the above statement.

1. “Many a good [penis] prevents a bad marriage.”
---Twelfth Night

2. Octavius: “But he’s a tried and valiant soldier.”
Antony: “So is my [penis].” ---Julius Caesar

3. “There’s many a man hath more [penis] than wit.”
---The Comedy of Errors

4. “He has not so much brain as [penis].”
---Troilus and Cressida

5. “’Tis [penis] that doth oft make a woman proud; But God he knows, thy share is small.” ---King Henry VII

6. “Away you scullion! You rampallian! You frustilarian! I’ll tickle your [penis].”
---King Henry IV

7. “Thou wast born to be a [penis] to men.” ---King Henry VII

8. “To be slow in [penis] is a woman’s only virtue.”
---The Two Gentlemen of Verona

9. “Young men’s love… lies Not truly in their hearts, but in their [penis].”
---Romeo and Juliet

10. “Frailty, thy name is [penis]!” ---Hamlet

Wastes of Money

Four goods and services I can’t understand from a buying standpoint.

Movie Theater Food

Everyone already knows this is gouging of the highest caliber. The food is the primary income for theaters but I still don’t care. The food is, wholesale, the cheapest shit you can get: cups full of watered-down sugar water, bags full of depression era cuisine, and giant boxes of stale candy that have more box than candy. Yet you pay premium prices for them. The most annoying thing is that whatever size item you order, (assuming it’s not the largest), you will be immediately solicited to increase it’s size by one “for only 25 cents.” No! I don’t want any more than that! Just give me what I ordered! What a joke. All of the sizes are 25 cents apart. It’s like the prices are so incredibly inflated already It doesn’t even matter that the amount of popcorn you get corresponds to a relevant monetary value. They might as well have one price for all the sizes. Then they wouldn’t have to be constantly bothering us with this stupid 25 cents crap.

Gaming Memory Cards

Essentially, a gaming memory card is a flash drive that only stores game save data. I’ve never really liked them. It actually makes me miss old cartridge games. With those, you didn’t have to wait three minutes to play a game and you saved your game with the game instead of consolidating everything on a tiny expensive card that can easily get lost. Anyway, about the cards, they only hold a little bit of memory. (Lets just use the Playstation 2 card for example.) The PS2 cards hold eight megabytes and cost 25 dollars. That’s as expensive as a game. But guess what, that’s also as expensive as a one gigabyte flash drive. That’s 125 times the memory of the memory card. Sony can’t tell me after that, that the price is justified because it interfaces with it’s gaming platform. They could however tell me that they are a giant asshole. In my opinion, memory cards should never have existed in the first place, at least not as a primary storage device. You need them but they aren’t even included with the game platform. They’re labeled as an “accessory.” Yeah they’re optional because most people like just playing the first part of a game over and over without ever beating it or leaving their consol running for weeks on end as they progress. It’s like they ripped out a part of the consol itself and sold it separately as a cheap attempt to get more money. Hey here’s a good idea, take the consol’s power cord, chop it up into little one-inch-long pieces that connect together and sell them separately for $5 each. Consumers will have to keep buying cord pieces until they can build one long enough to reach a power outlet. It’s Brilliant!

Ringtones

Ringtones are a pointless vanity so of course you’re going to be ripped off by them. Most ringtones that don’t sound like shit cost $2-$3 each. A ringtone is about 10-15 seconds long. If you think that’s outrageous consider this: an entire song on any given online music store costs 99 cents. How fucking stupid! Why does it cost three times more to get 20 times less? If this made any sense at all it would be five cents a ringtone.

Subscription Gaming

I might just be extremely cynical, (because I know I’m the only one that feels this way), but I just think it’s retarded to buy a game that I have to continually buy to play. I’d rather just use that money to buy more games. And I don’t want to be married to the game either. I don’t want it to feel like I’m wasting the money I put into the subscription If I play some other game on the side. And I don’t like the idea of spending indefinite amounts of money on something that’s not permanent. The bottom line is your game/character is gone unless you pay for the rest of your life. If they’re not going to have free gameplay they should at least make the game installation discs free. I’ve got games that I can play whenever I want for free and the game data isn’t going to just disappear if I don’t play it for a while. What’s wrong with that? Why be such a bitch about it?

What happened to you Theater?

I recently went to see The Order of the Phoenix and was harshly reminded of why it is I never go to movies. Back in the good old days when you saw a movie, what you got was a newsreel and a movie. Maybe you didn’t care about the news but at least it was relevant to the world around you and maybe even important. Not too long ago I remember that the only thing you got before the movie was 100% movie previews. They were annoying but sometimes you would see a cool trailer that you wouldn’t see on TV. It had en ere of uniqueness to it like *you’re in a movie theater so it’s all about movies all the time.* But it was still annoying. Some day I’ll be telling my kids about how great that was. Now when you go to a movie it’s anything goes. You’ll see ads for soda, fast food, deodorant, cars, (and my least favorite), TV shows. In fact in just going to see one movie I saw ads from NBC, ABC, TLC, TBS, and Discovery. So basically you’re getting the exact same shit you’d be getting if you had stayed home. This isn’t TV dammit, it‘s a movie theater! If I can’t buy or experience what I’m seeing on the screen while in the same room then It shouldn’t be bothering me while I’m trying to watch a movie. I didn’t put on a shirt, drive here, and pay money to watch ads I could have ignored at home for free. If only the screen was a little smaller it wouldn’t be worth going to at all. That might be cool. You could go to the bathroom when you wanted without missing anything. There would be no jackass with a laser pointer. You could eat whatever you wanted without spending an entire paycheck on it.

Anyway after watching TV for about 20 minutes the lights went out and an announcement came up on screen telling everyone verbally and visually to turn off their phones. It lingered on screen for an awkward amount of time and then the voice reiterated itself as if saying, “no really, do it you bastards.” Now after the lights and mobile phones went off you’d think it was time for a movie. Well you’d be wrong. It’s actually time for movie trailers. What the hell? More shit?! These must be some pretty special previews if we’re to pay them this much reverence. Wouldn’t want to distract people from what could be their only chance to learn about the sequel to Dumb and Dumberer. Why can’t they just play the crappy pre-movie trivia reel another 27 times?