Have you looked into SafeLink or similar programs? I qualified for a long time. I had to apply and submit proof of how broke I was. They sent me a free phone. I just needed to go to Target to buy a card (it was either a SIM card or an SD card) for under two dollars and I was set. When my sister upgraded her iPhone, I put the card into her old iPhone and upgraded for free.
I bought this 3 and a hal years ago from Metro and it was free for years. Now its 15 to get 2gb. Because of the Straight Dope, that lasts 4 days.
If I wanted all month it would be 50.
The problem is after this t.p. runs out, I can’t afford more.
My life has always been poverty.
The liver is evil, it must be punished! Spent almost 30 years believing that before reality set in.
My beef is this cold I’ve had for almost 4 weeks. Stayed home a week, went to work for a week, went to urgent care “no, yellow sputum is not necessarily a sign of infection”. Had a telehealth appointment with my PCP on Monday, because the UC blood test showed my A1C had risen to 7.8 - a whole different story. PCP noticed my pronounced cough, told her I’d had it for 3 weeks, yellow sputum & all, she believed me, put me on 2 antibiotics and Alvesco inhaler. Just as well, last time UC put me on an antibiotic (for a UTI), they gave me the wrong one, was ineffective, ended up in hospital for 6 days due to sepsis. At least the meds are helping, I should be back in the office on Monday, rather than trying to work from home.
This is a proper mini-rant – relatively mini, but I’m furious at myself!
Thinking about dinner earlier this evening, I looked in the cold-cuts drawer in the fridge to see which of the President’s Choice Montreal smoked meat or the new stuff I just got from my favourite deli was fresher. The new stuff I just got yesterday was … not there! Two packages of beautifully marbled vacuum-packed Montreal smoked meat – not there!
A furious hunt ensued that included the freezer. Finally, with some trepidation, I looked down into the big insulated grocery bag I used, and there were both packages lying at the bottom, sitting in the kitchen for about 36 hours.
At least I had the presence of mind not to think about it much before they went straight into the garbage. Oh, well, the good news is if I go out tomorrow to get more Montreal smoked meat, I can pick up some sauerkraut, too, and make a sort of Reuben sandwich as well as my traditional ones. But man, I am so mad at my carelessness!
My only consolation is that my friend had the same problem.* We had gone shopping for supplies for a week-long boating trip, which supplies included two beautiful vac-packed steaks intended to be grilled on the barbecue hanging off the boat’s stern rail. We left the groceries at his place where I was to meet him in the morning. Well, in putting everything in the fridge the two steaks had somehow escaped his notice and had been left out overnight. Again, without any further thought, my advice was “garbage!”.
* Note that my friend is about the same age as I am, and thus suspect of similar senility! 
Soooo … maybe applying for a free phone that could ultimately cost you all of two bucks might be something useful to do in your limited spare time?
My car broke down. We park on the street here. My friends tried to push start it, we got the car a bit down the street.
This suburb is old, victorian. It has narrow streets.
When the car would not start, we gave up. But the car was parked on one side of the street, meaning the people on the other side of the street might have to do a slightly awkward manouevre to get onto the parking space on their properties.
Naturally I got a snarky message on the local Whatsapp group.
I can’t fault them for complaining. Just fuck, motherfuckers, complain and then learn to fucking do three point turns. It will help your driving skills.
I mean, I do own an unreasonably large vehicle for such narrow streets, and I do my best not to inconvienice anyone when I do park. But shitfuckers, learn to goddamn drive.
I went to their house, apologised, and free-rolled the vehicle down the street for a less contentious parking space. Well, so far “less contentious”, same WhatsApp group.
Here you go @SuntanLotion:
And to make those 4+gb go farther, do your Doping on the computers and free wi-fi at the library.
I occasionally use a horrible app that attempts to control your life… “Instabridge”. It is basically a heavily ad-supported, probably Chinese “free” internet. You still pay for data, but it runs through their server, VPN-like, so it is really cheap.
It works. It is shit, but it works. Some internet is better than no internet. It does, really, really, try take control of your phone.
But hey. It works, if you know how to avoid it working you.
I am so fucking fed up with Google’s absolutely paranoid obsession about security. And it doesn’t even work properly.
Today I got a Google message on my primary non-Gmail account that I should log in to my Gmail account because it hasn’t been used in 8 months. WTF? I have two Gmail accounts, one of which is used almost daily and the other was logged into just last month. What account “hasn’t been used”? I have no other.
For added fun, when I clicked on the “Sign In” link in the message, just to see what account they were talking about, it just went to a generic Gmail login page that gave me the choice of my two accounts. No, I don’t see how it could have been a phishing attempt because it went to a legitimate Google dot com domain. But my login passwords didn’t work! And yes, I triple-checked, it went to accounts dot google dot com and thereafter to myaccount dot google dot com.
I closed the page and went to my regular Gmail login page and was able to log in. I decided to change both my passwords just in case. But I really can’t see how a scammer can spoof a DNS domain that’s clearly showing in the URL. A scammer can’t just appropriate a subaddress in the Google dot com domain. And yes, it was an HTTPS link.
Very weird. I ended up getting about a dozen or more “security notifications” beeping and bopping on all my devices. I wish Google would just fuck right off with their security paranoia and leave me in peace.
ETA: I’ve worked with, or for, enough large organizations that I can posit what is probably behind this. There is undoubtedly a “team” at Google that is coming up with this shit, and getting bonuses for their “proactive good work”.
Crying Over Spilled Milk- Sort Of
The mini mart I walk to for all my junkfood needs has been out of chocolate milk the past two weeks. When I took the trolley to my new pharmacy, I bought two single serving bottle of local chocolate (both superior to Nestle Quik and cheaper) there. I drank one on Satuday. I could not find the other anywhere. I shrugged and assumed I had drank that one too, and just forgot about it.
Tonight, I was moving my granny cart to get at something. It felt unusually heavy. A quick look confirmed that I had left a bottle of chocolate milk in the cart when I unpacked.
Bah.
I gather the Eagles just won the Super Bowl. I’m assuming that is the case due to all the horn honking, suprisingly loud yelling, and a multitude of fireworks.
I understand Philadelphians being in a celebratory mood. It is after ten pm. It is Sunday. I have to work tomorrow.
Sorry, doc, they did. It will be a long night.
…and tomorrow, the whole thing resets. Something I’ve never understood about sports. Why not give the winning city a new park or fund a public sports-for-youth program? Give something back to the fans from their zillions?
As someone once proposed saying to the raving crowds cheering “we won! we won!”: No, you didn’t. A very small group of athletes won, not you. And probably at least half of them are immigrants that you hate because they’re taking jobs away from Real Americans™, in this case, jobs that pay them more in a single day than you’ll ever earn in a lifetime. And aside from that, probably none of them are from your town or give a shit about it – that’s just the team name.
Truly, sports fanaticism is a strange affliction.
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A team represents a population, usually a city and its outlying area, but sometimes larger. So, fans saying “we won” are justified the same way that a citizen who never fought in a war says “we won” if their country defeated the enemy. In other words, they are correct; they are not implying that they directly partipated in the victory as you are erroneously inferring.
Anything people don’t understand will appear strange to them.
I disagree. When Britons, Americans, and Canadians (and many others) say that “we won” World War II, they mean that “we defeated the Axis powers that would have put Britain and most of Europe under the tyranny of Nazism”. “We won” is celebrating the consequences of enjoying freedom instead of tyranny. There are no consequences to sports victories, except to the actual club which gets rings, trophies, and champagne poured over their heads. All paid for by fans who then go back to work in the salt mines the next day. Or more accurately, some of it paid for directly by those fans, the rest paid for indirectly by those enjoying corporate-sponsored seats in exclusive boxes paid for by the customers of those corporations.
As a former hockey fan (and I still enjoy the game on occasion) I would argue that I do understand the spirit behind sports. It’s entirely justified if your high school team beats another high school team, because those are your fellow students. It starts to become quite muddied at the college level and completely insane at the level of major league sports, where there’s virtually no correlation between the success of the team and their association with the community that they ostensibly represent.
I won’t be hypocritical about this. Back in my working/consulting days, I was happy to accept complimentary premium tickets to Toronto Maple Leafs games for which any tickets at all were almost impossible to get. And part of the reason I was a fan was that I had a pretty good knowledge of the players and their skills and of the management at the time and their strategies, so it was all literally an interesting game – but one that had no actual consequences for me at all.
That was my point: the community that “won” gets nothing but ephemeral bragging rights. Something more enduring is possible and would be nice.
I’m not at all opposed to the idea. And the NFL is always trying to improve its image, and I think it would contribute to that.
Sports teams and fans are symbiotic. A team needs fans to operate, as that’s where revenue comes from, and fans enjoy being patrons. As a fan, you contribute to a team’s success in innumerable ways; buying tickets and merchandise, advertising the team by wearing the merchandise and talking about the team, providing ratings for TV and radio broadcasts, and so on.
And as a fan you invest emotionally in a team. When they win or lose you feel it. You can also join a community of other fans which strengthens those emotional bonds.
That’s what fans get from a team’s success. To say they get nothing as @wolfpup suggested is ridiculous.
For a city hosting a team, I do like the thought of a team giving back. Though the “ephemeral bragging rights” is valuable in itself, as well as the exposure. I don’t think I knew Jacksonville existed before the Jaguars were there, for example. (Though I’m not sure how much prestige you have from hosting that particular team, but that’s another subject.)
That isn’t exactly what I said. Obviously fans get something from a team’s success, or they wouldn’t be fans. One of the main points I was making was that “there’s virtually no correlation between the success of the team and their association with the community that they ostensibly represent.” If my sports team wins a championship, it doesn’t prove that “my city is better than your city”, it proves that a random collection of players who have no affiliation or loyalty to a particular city and might get traded away at any time was better than some other collection of players.
But I get what you’re saying, I really do. Back when I had a real interest in hockey and managed to attend a bunch of Leafs games, the camaraderie and excitement in the building was palpable. I really, really wanted my team to win.
But there were eventually things that soured me on the Leafs and drove me away and made me the cynic that I am. One was the number of times they let me down, despite the difficulty and expense of getting single game tickets. One was a potentially exciting playoff game against the NJ Devils. The Devils scored one goal, and worked to keep that lead for the entire game. The hapless Leafs couldn’t even score one. As fans were leaving after the game, I heard comments like “I want my money back”. Another time, in a potentially exciting game with arch-rivals Ottawa Senators, the Leafs were wiped out in a 7-0 debacle. I had taken my son to that game and I never saw him look more dejected.
Maybe you’re thinking, it takes big money to hire the best players and the Leafs just don’t have it. Wrong. The Leafs are the wealthiest hockey club in the entire league. They have all the money they know what to do with, and more. Know what else they have lots of? Complacency. Top management is only concerned about big profits and as long as they get it, they don’t give a shit about anything else, and that complacency about the game itself inevitably filters down to the overpaid players.
The Maple Leafs are the only hockey club where the GM or head coach has had to say to fans, “of course we care about winning!”. Really? You’re the most profitable hockey club in the league and you haven’t won the Stanley Cup in 58 years. The last time the Leafs won the Cup was just prior to the first wave of expansion, when there were only six teams in the entire NHL – the “Original Six”. At that time the Stanley Cup was practically on rotation among the six; today it’s genuinely competitive. And a good chunk of the time the Leafs don’t even make the playoffs – and it’s not like baseball; in the NHL, to miss the playoffs you really have to work at being useless.
Now let’s talk about game tickets. Forget about season tickets – the waiting time for those is measured not in years but in generations. There is a very small block of seats not held by season ticketholders, mostly in the back section of the upper bowl, and those sell out on Ticketmaster literally within minutes. Pretty much the only way to get single game tickets for the ordinary fan who doesn’t get bribes gifts from corporate clients is to buy them from third-party resellers, a fancy name for scalpers.
So here’s the situation. Toronto is a crazed hockey town full of diehard Leafs fans – despite the fact that the Leafs won’t even let them in the goddam building and can’t win a championship to save their souls.
What motivates those fans is a mystery to me. I’m no longer one of them.
It’s been my observation that it usually works the other way – the team demanding concessions from local and higher-level governments in order to locate in a certain place, like the city building an arena for them at taxpayer expense.
This is another thing that pisses me off. Some years ago Canadian billionaire Jim Balsillie was willing to spend whatever it took to relocate the then-bankrupt Phoenix Coyotes to Hamilton. Rumour was that one of the reasons he failed was that Gary Bettman just didn’t like him, but the more insidious likely reason was pressure from the Maple Leafs organization. Hamilton is right next door to Toronto, and the Leafs apparently felt it was encroaching on their market – a market already far, far larger than they can possibly handle.
I think much of what you’ve complained about in this post is similar to what a number of fans have griped about either their team or another one.
I guess you do understand fandom.
Unquestionably true. So I think any team that tries to “give back” in any truly meaningful way is going to stand out and it’s fantastic PR. The fact that they don’t seems like a missed opportunity to me.