This is mainly for the benefit of Jeremy, since I mentioned this cereal after he complained about a potentially hazardous "Spider-Man 2" toy in a box of Frosted Flakes:



In the over 100-year history of breakfast cereal, how many box designs have not had the full name of the cereal on the front? According to the side panels, the name of this cereal is Shrek 2, but what it says on the bowl there is "Shrek's (not Donkey's)," and then the small white text is "Sweetened Corn Puffs with Marshmallow Pieces." I'm not sure if General Mills had this same cereal out a couple years ago to tie in with "Shrek," but I don't remember it.

And it doesn't have any toy in it, and the computer at the Ralphs checkout accepted that a coupon for "$1.00 off any 3 of the General Mills cereals listed below" could be used on it, even though it wasn't one of the cereals listed (but what seemed like every other General Mills cereal was).

Oh, and by the way, Jeremy also informed me tactfully that the link to the left for this blog's "site feed" was incorrect. But that has been fixed, so those of you who are using a "newsreader" can now enjoy posts like this. Me, I remember when "newsreader" only referred to something that could connect to Usenet. Or, you know, Walter Cronkite.

Target sells 300-watt "Type T" halogen light bulbs for less than half of Office Depot's price. I hope I can remember this eight years from now when I need to buy more.

Someone filed a class-action lawsuit against an apartment complex in which I lived for a year (the Lakeside Apartments, now called Avalon at Media Center, in Burbank, California). Surprisingly, they managed to track me down over three years after I'd moved out to send me a claim form. Now, about nine months later, I got a settlement check. It doesn't come close to covering the difference between the rent amount they were charging and the rent amount they should have been charging, but it's always nice to get a little extra cash.

Original comments...

Jeremy: Thanks for reminding me... I need to send in my claim form!

Anonymous: What were the grounds for the suit? Was it supposed to be rent-controlled in some way?

Jim: No, there's no rent control in the city of Burbank. The suit was filed on the premise that they were charging way too much for rent, based on excessive noise affecting tenants' rights to quiet enjoyment, not to mention termites and other things. Jeremy can vouch for the fact that I definitely had excessive noise affecting my quiet enjoyment, much of it coming through the thin walls from my next-door neighbor's mouth and from the radio he kept in the bathroom.

I just bought a ticket, via ticketmaster.com, to see They Might Be Giants performing at the House of Blues in L.A. in August. The ticket price is $22.50, but various "facility fees," "convenience charges," rustproofing, and undercoating brought the total cost of the ticket up to $36.00. That's an astonishing 60% markup.

While I was in Vegas, I actually ambled over to the box office at the House of Blues there hoping to avoid these service charges, but it turns out that the various Houses of Blues don't sell tickets for each other (and tickets for TMBG weren't on sale yet anyway, as it turned out).

Original comments...

Anonymous: This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarium...

Rebecca: I bought tickets to a concert for my daughter and her friend. The tickets were $9.33 each, total for the 2 tickets was $37.56. Yep, over 100% markup. Ticketmaster sucks.

I went to Las Vegas this week for a get-together of posters from the TiVo Community forum, but managed to get away for a trip to Hoover Dam.

Accidentally, it turned out I had shown up during two weeks of construction work on the elevators in the new visitors' center, so for the first time since 1995, they were taking the general public down to see the generators through the elevators that run through the dam itself. Because the older elevators are smaller, there was a 45-minute wait to get in, but it was perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime event, or maybe a once-every-nine-years event, depending on how often they need to work on those elevators.

And the passageways inside the dam reminded me of certain pedestrian tunnels in the subways in Chicago, but with terrazzo floors and incandescent lights.

Later, I had another happy accident when I filled up a very special Chevron station in Las Vegas. Apparently, in order to protect their Standard trademark in the states where they're allowed to use it, they have one station per state that's branded "Standard"...in fact, I don't think this station said "Chevron" anywhere on it, except maybe on the stickers on the pumps showing pictures of all the credit cards they accepted. (It's on Tropicana Avenue at Industrial Road, just west of Interstate 15, in case anyone's curious.)

Attention ad agency for Miller Lite: I'm available if you need a proofreader, and I think you do.

Original comments...

thatbob: Wow I had to read it about
8 times to catch the
the error.

When I signed up for DirecTV last November, there was an obscure channel I was looking forward to receiving called RFD TV. It's a channel intended for rural viewers, mainly farmers, but they can't prevent people in cities from watching it. (Well, I guess they could, by blocking it in "urban" ZIP codes, but they don't.) The attraction here is that they have a fair amount of train-related programming.

When I had my DirecTV service installed, there was a problem. Although most DirecTV programming is delivered by satellites at 101 degrees west longitude, some programming comes from 110, and some comes from 119. RFD was coming from 119, and it turned out that because of the placement of a certain tree in my apartment complex's courtyard, I can only receive programming from 101.

DirecTV is smart enough to know that I can't get programming from 110 and 119, so my program guide doesn't even list the channels on those satellites. That's why I was surprised when I checked the "WishLists" on my DirecTV/TiVo receiver, and the "train" WishList was being matched by something on RFD.

It turns out that DirecTV launched a new satellite into the 119 position last month, and it's about to go active. That satellite is designed to carry local channels for a bunch of areas of the U.S. While waiting for the new 119 satellite to launch, they'd temporarily put some of those local channels on a satellite at 101. Now that they can move those channels, that opened up some space on 101, so they moved RFD and a few other channels from 119 to 101.

Now, if only I didn't have to wait three days to see any train-related programming on RFD. I just turned it on, and they were talking about soybean futures.