HyperBlah!

Don't make an offer on this house! MLS# 5649965 | 527 Haycock Run Road Kintnersville, PA 18930

2010-04-20T09:14:00.006-04:00

Just a heads up to anyone who googles this MLS in Haycock Township and winds up here.

MLS# 5649965
527 Haycock Run Road
Kintnersville, PA 18930
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/527-Haycock-Run-Rd-Kintnersville-PA-18930/9008405_zpid/

We made an offer on this house. We started @ $225,000 and raised it to $230,000 with a $5,000 seller assist. Upon which, the woman accepted the offer.

During the inspection phase, the water tests showed an unacceptable level of chlorophyll bacteria in the water supply. Further, the septic inspection failed as there is sewage leaking into the drainage ditch on Haycock Run Road.

We proposed that the woman fix the septic as a contingency on our purchase. In response, she ceased all contact with her Realtor for over a month and left us in limbo with our $3,000 deposit, which also left us unable to make offers on other homes. To date, we have yet to receive our deposit back.

The price of a new sand mound will run about $30,000 dollars for this home. Based on our experience, the woman has absolutely no intention of making this repair and will subsequently hang any potential buyer up for weeks.

Note that after making us suffer and waste over $1,200 dollars on inspections, she has jacked up the price to $230,000 dollars.

Our entire experience in dealing with this house has been an expensive nightmare. Please take heed and steer clear of this house in your search for a new home. You'll be glad you did.

I have the reports. Please contact me if you would like to see them.

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... I Should Say

2010-03-26T12:51:00.000-04:00

Over the past few years, I have expressed a great deal of frustration, and, at times, all-out anger at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. There have been times and incidences where I have been quick to point out what I perceived as weakness, ineffectiveness, and even opulence in reference to Speaker Pelosi’s performance in Congress. Further, I have been critical of what I felt she was doing in the blogosphere.

I believe that I am entitled to have felt much of this frustration; however, I feel it is important for me to say that by now residing beyond the threshold of her contribution to one of the most important accomplishments government has gained in my lifetime, I apologize and want to express my deep appreciation for the sum of her tenure to date. Therefore, my appreciation for her work on this virtually nullifies my personal problems with her leadership. It can be said that after it was all said and done, I was wrong.

Sometimes— many, many times, I personally miss the forest for the trees. Try as I may to be objective (as Mr. Lange had reminded me on a few occasions,) things that I feel are critical on any given day act as blinders toward my scope of the larger picture. As much as I’d like to think my efforts immunize me, there are times (like this) where I must admit that I can be as fickle as anyone else, and worse, that some words and actions have come from this flaw.

Her strength & efforts during this often horrid process— her tireless work to unify an extremely diverse Party anatomy in the House, in my opinion, were essential components of why we are all sitting here today with smug satisfaction.

While I hold strong to the belief that no person is infallible based on his or her past heroism (See John McCain;) at this point, I am directing my most sincere gratitude and admiration to Mrs. Pelosi. At this point, she's golden in my book, and I can't thank her enough.

Thanks Madam Speaker & all the best.

Predictions for the 2012 Presidential Debates.

2010-02-07T12:16:00.000-05:00

Pete Hoekstra Should Be Worried About The Security of His Shit

2010-01-05T07:20:00.000-05:00

Dear Pete, why would I trust your national security-ness when you can't even secure your own shit?

Time and again, folks like Pete (and Joe Lieberman) demonstrate a total lack of competence in dealing with the most basic of modern tasks. Is that not indicative of a broader and much more dangerous incompetence?

It's a smidge too late in the game to fall for the GOP's fake 'tough on security' nonsense when they can't even run their own lives. None of this is a shock though. I.E.

Logo Ideas

2010-01-04T16:40:00.000-05:00

Just doing some logo goofing here.

How Newt Gingrich Operates

2010-01-04T10:33:00.013-05:00

For years, Former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich has buzzed about like a fly in a window, trying to penetrate the glass and recapture the insider-omnipotence he lost when his crusade against President Clinton led to the exposure of his own infidelity and was forced to face the political consequences for it. Sadly, it seems that despite harsh revelations of a person’s true character, in the political world, folks are just plain immune to spiraling into oblivion; likely a direct result of the bankrolls of the entities that had successfully purchased the politician in question. For Newt, it seems someone has decided to open the window a crack.

Newt Gingrich is a prime example of this worrisome trend in politics, especially in the House. Further, he is so bitterly contempt; he brazenly admits that his seat and his leadership was, in fact, an “entrepreneurial endeavor.” Conversely, Mr. Gingrich has shown time and again that he has no idea what a true entrepreneur is. Rather, he deliberately uses the word to define his methods, which are clearly little more than a diverse series of confidence schemes used to fleece hard earned and much needed capital from real entrepreneurs who feel they share similar political ideologies.

Conservative or not, folks like me, the real entrepreneurs of the world, have taken on the task of making something from nothing, and often start out having nothing to build something. We devote our lives to getting that boulder over the hill. We spend countless hours becoming ‘jacks of all trades,’ reading books about CSS, or Electric wiring, when we’re striving to sell cupcakes. Folks like Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, come in loaded from the start by enormous corporate tithes and have no earthly idea of how hard it is to get a business moving; but rather, coast in on the high tide of corporate payoff money. Further, folks like him have no intention of ever finding out. The objective of their ‘business,’ after all, is not to actually start or build a business; but to feed on those who put the work in like a parasite, while simultaneously suppressing their growth to bolster the ongoing lock their corporate masters have on markets and have lined their pockets to do so.

When I was a child, I recall receiving a letter from some long-forgotten association, congratulating me for my “academic success.” This entity was so thrilled with my B in Arithmetic (or whatever,) that they wanted to present me with an award and publish my name in a book. All I had to do was persuade my father to fork over a hundred dollars (which was like a million to a poor family like ours in the 1970s) to process my application (Incidentally, the book was extra.)

My father instantly saw this for what it was. It was the latest attempt to fleece poor people out of their hard earned money. Worse, the method of including one’s children to do so was so despicable that it imprinted itself into my young mind to the point where even to this day, I recall it often. Needless to say, I am not in any book anywhere and there is no plastic trophy in a box in my garage.

Rather than working to develop a tangible, worthy idea, or offering any real product or service, Gingrich has instead made a business using this decades-old grift. Amazingly, folks still fall for it, and worse, they seem to be willing to pay thousands rather than hundreds. After the incident at porn, I was really hoping that someone would look into it further. It’s a prime example of how opportunists prey on developing entities.

The best word to describe Mr. Gingrich’s supposed entrepreneurship is “parasitic.” His quest for funds consists on attaching himself to a host and milking as much money from it as he can. It is truly terrifying to witness people’s willingness to undo their collars and allow him to attach himself to them. Perhaps it is due to some form of loyalism that I cannot grasp, and frankly, is representative of a major difference between liberalism and the modern perversion of conservatism: folks who like to build the road vs. folks who like to ride wagons, despite the destination.

Here we have a man who is worthy of slightly less than being body slammed by Bonaduce; yet is welcomed open armed as some sort of top mind on the Sunday shows, where he basically regurgitates bunk from 1994 spiced up with a hint of some ugliness that will bolster the ugliness of the worst of us out there, and then, rides the exposure until it begins to wane. Upon which, he emerges from the proximity to irrelevance he belongs, generally by making a ridiculous, often xenophobic statement, beginning the cycle anew.

Why on earth would anyone be interested by what a deliberate draft dodger has to say about the Revolutionary war? Why would anyone hold a thrice-married adulterer on a moral pedestal? Sadly, at this point, I strongly believe that Mr. Gingrich, et. al. enjoys these elevated statuses simply because there are millions of Americans out there who hate having an African American President and will prop up any idiot who caters to their own ignorance.

Folks like Mr. Gingrich are in fact, anti-business. Their actions inside and outside of government have been paid for devotions to squashing entrepreneurship, eliminating competition, and worse, stagnating upward mobility for every single person or entity outside of those who have paid for their ‘services.’

These self-indulgent practices are what Mr. Gingrich believes to be entrepreneurship, and frankly, folks like me have worked way too hard for him to taint who we are: the real entrepreneurs of the world. I find it offensive that he benefits so greatly from his perversion of what it is to be a real entrepreneur. Where we toil for it; he plays golf in Hawaii under the guise of it.

This kind of thing will continue until someone, somewhere, finally calls folks like Mr. Gingrich on their phoniness and files them under the level of irrelevance they merit. In the mean time, I am hopeful that the fifteen-or-so folks who read this ponder what a person like Newt Gingrich really is and what bringing on his irrelevance can mean to you. It’ll make you wealthier, I assure you.

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My Favorite George A. Romero Moment:

2009-08-03T20:17:00.002-04:00

Best of the series, too. This scene really hammered home the turning point of his Apocalypse.

Damnit, I missed a once and a lifetime opportunity!

2009-07-29T08:39:00.002-04:00

Note to Microsoft: When The volume is off, we can only guess.

2009-07-01T07:53:00.009-04:00

Phallic Much?

I'm beginning to seriously wonder just what the hell it takes to be a marketing executive for Microsoft.

First off, they decide to compete with Apple's quirky "I'm a Mac" ads by having a millionaire and a billionaire (Seinfeld, Gates) roam the middle class countryside like 2 drunken nobles, popping in on 'subjects' to viscously savor their economic superiority over whomever they encounter. This tone deafness couldn't have come at a worse point in our economic history, and the ads were more than frowned upon by the American people.

The pointless and ire-inducing Microsoft ads featuring Jerry Seinfeld and billionaire founder Bill Gates reminding you how much of your time is wasted using the all too fallible operating system have been withdrawn from the airwaves. The ads featured the two in everyday situations that were meant to show that Microsoft is hip and approachable but just managed to come off as lame.

Now they seem to have mimicked their original marketing incompetence by unveiling their mediocre "Bing" search engine with an ad campaign that is either a full frontal assault on people afflicted with Schizophrenia, or simply an ill conceived attempt to squash the benefit of holistic thought.

In its new ads, Microsoft has people scurrying around acting as if the random interconnectivity of search results is some sort of mental illness; when In reality, what those people are doing is demonstrating knowledge. The ad goes so far as to call Bing a "cure" for "search engine overload." Sadly, "SEO" is what the people of Microsoft are mistaking knowledge for these days.

Worst of all, with a tag line like "The world's first ever decision engine," these geniuses decided to imply that because we are all a bunch of committable sickies, we need a search engine that makes decisions for us, which means to me, Microsoft has spent enormous amounts of money creating an automatic George W. Bush machine. Maybe Bing 2.0 will play a "I'm the decider" sound-bite when we click the magnifying glass. One can only hope.

Microsoft has perpetually reflected an absolute tone-deafness with its products and its supporting ads. I haven't even delved into the "Chandler" anomaly; but still... The worst feeling a person can get from an ad is one of inferiority; especially when the products the company is showcasing are so irrelevant that it has to create a bogus 'condition' to prop its irrelevant features on. If only executives got fired these days. We'd probably see some really neat and useful stuff from giants like Microsoft. Sadly, yacht payments seem to prevail.

We know what we're looking for when we use a search engine. To some of us, those little extras we find on the way are golden. If sifting through involved picking up a 50 lb. box and moving it across the room, I could totally see it as a problem. But alas, it doesn't. Therefore, I've fired up my own decision engine and set it for Google.

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If it's Saturday, it's Running Douche

2009-06-20T08:59:00.005-04:00

I was upstairs, so I didn't get the full ham & egg shot.

Friggin' Hilarious

2009-06-16T21:50:00.004-04:00

And a bunch of good advice to boot.
from Web Designer Depot.

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The Thing About Green:

2009-06-16T11:18:00.007-04:00

I disagree with Mr. Cole: It is about them, but an often isolated and vilified population should know that the world is watching.

When Mr. Cole says:

If someone can give me one legitimate piece of evidence that wearing green boxers is going to help bring democracy to Iran, so help me I’ll wear plaid from head to toe and shoot for world peace.

~Balloon Juice

He is implying, himself that Democracy needs "bringing" to Iran.

It does not. It will not. Iranians are clearly taking action towards their own individual rights. Therefore, I believe while "greening" does not help "bring" democracy to Iran; it serves as a powerful global message to Iranian citizens that we are watching and hoping for the best.

I agree that yes, it is about Iran, but still; why do we sponsor children in Brazil, send local emergency personnel to disaster areas in other states, or, mail Tastycakes to those who suffer from living too far away from Philly? I want someone to know that I care, so, I greened up not to apply; but to amplify.

Running Douche Immortalized in our First Entry.

2009-06-14T09:51:00.000-04:00

Right now, we're sitting here, looking out the window @ "running douche," who graces our window every morning by stopping, bending over, and presenting a pressed ham and egg pose directly at us as we try to have our coffee.

There's a giant field to either side of our house. Still, Running Douche always ensures a show.

Anyway...

I have big plans for this blog, so please check back.

In the mean time: God bless you, Running Douche. May the inseam rise with you on your journeys.