Dear "Blaze" who advertised your website in my comments: Go jump in a lake. This is not a day to take advantage of my hospitality.

I'm seriously considering doing the "word verification" thing. One more spam comment is all it will take.

And, since I'm really grouchy right now, I'll go ahead and mention something else that happened last night. I subscribe to "National Geographic" and have for at least 5 years. Well, regularly these days (like once a month) I get a call from someone claiming to represent the NGS, offering to send me out a "free gift" of a world map or somesuch...and with the "free gift" will come videos to preview.

I HATE that kind of thing. I never, ever joined "Columbia House" or any of those other clubs where you have to send back a card by a specified date or else you get the "selection" of the month, and either have to pay for it or arrange to send it back. Now, maybe that's not an issue in a town where the post office is on a person's way to work, but my local post office is about as far out of my way as I can get. And when I go there, it's usually at the same time as this old dude in town who does (apparently) a brisk used-book sales business through Amazon and has about 85 individual packages he needs to have weighed, stamped, and sent. (And there is often only one, and sometimes only 2, clerks on duty). So going to the post office and actually having to SEND something is a big honking deal for me. I have spent 20 minutes of my life waiting on line at the post office. That is no joke.

I also hate the way they word it on the phone call - it's kind of deceptive, they slip that line about previewing videos in there kind of fast and after they've already promised lots of other stuff.

And they don't like taking "no" for an answer. I've been told "Oh, but you have 30 days!" or "Oh, but they're really nice videos!" I DON'T CARE. I have tiny precious amounts of free time, and I don't like feeling obligated to look at something and then either send it back or buy it. I've told them I didn't own a dvd player (true) and that my vcr was broken (a lie, but probably not the kind that makes baby Jesus cry). They didn't seem to buy that, or at any rate, the calls continued.

Seriously - I thought long and hard about re-upping with National Geographic this year just because of that.

Well, anyway, the guy who called last night got on my last nerve. I said to him, "Do you know when I left the house this morning? 7 AM. Do you know when I got home from work today? 7 PM. I DO NOT HAVE TIME to review any videos." He didn't really have an answer for that.

After I hung up, I called the NGS subscriber line - finally got someone. I told her how fed up I was with the calls, how if they continued I'd drop my subscription, that I objected to the fact that I subscribed to a magazine somehow giving a marketing firm the right to harrass me in my home. She took my info and said she'd put me on the list of people not to be called at home.

The kicker? "Ma'am, please understand it can take up to three months for your name to get on this list." Uh-huh. And when you send out the videos, you give the people 30 days to review them before you send them a bill. Something is wrong here.

I think I will probably also e-mail NGS and complain. Maybe even try to find the address of the guy who's in charge (I did that to AT&T when I was getting weekly - WEEKLY - phone calls from them asking me why I had dropped their long-distance service and telling me I needed to come back. One of the call reps even got kind of abusive towards me. I said in the letter, "I would not use AT&T as a long-distance carrier if it were the ONLY carrier out there, and this is why." Miraculously, the calls stopped, and I have not received one since).