News: E-Bay Buyer Blows Chunks

Moon Knight: E-Bay's fist of Vengance

So.

Like many of you, I’ve bought and sold stuff on E-Bay from time to time.  Really, at this point, who hasn’t.

Most of the time it goes fairly well.  I win, I pay, they ship, we post feedback and life goes on.  Sometimes things get broken or hung up in shipment.  Sometimes your buyer flakes out and doesn’t pay.

And sometimes, things go like this.

Friday LinkFrogging – 12/18/09

Welcome back friends and neighbors.  You favorite GonzoGeeks are going to give you one last dose of LinkFrogging this year/decade.  We’ll be taking the next two Fridays off for Christmas and New Years Day, but rest assured, your daily dose of links and cheesecake will return in 2010.

Speaking of cheesecake, with the movie Avatar opening today, it seemed like a great chance to serve up Sigourney Weaver.  In addition  to appearing in James Cameron’s multimillion dollar 3-D sci-fi epic, Ms. Weaver has some other serious geek cred.  She starred as Dana Barrett in the two Ghostbusters movies, she was in the Star Trek parody/homage Galaxy Quest, and, of course, she was Ripley in the Alien Quadrilogy.

Merry Christmas to all and on to the links.

El Paso natural gas traders sentenced to prison

Hooray! Now that’s out of the way and everyone know’s where I stand, let me continue.

Most energy commodities traded are settled on the basis of a third-party price report.  I used to be a price reporter. It’s not a terrible job…except for having to deal with people blatantly trying to manipulate where you end up placing the price all day every day. Your part in the process is to talk to enough people who actually participated in the market (be it gasoline, vacuum gasoil, LPG, benzene, crude oil, natural gas… whatever) on that particular day to be able to throw out the bad data points and post a price accurately reflecting where trades occurred.

Ah, the smirk of repentence. Michelle Valencia, sentenced to 57 months in August 2008

Some days went by quick and easy: no contention, lots of activity = clear price. Other days you’d spend the entire time being threatened, belittled, cajoled, flattered, etc., by people obviously on the ‘wrong’ side of whereever the market was moving. And that’s the thing they never got: how transparent and desperate they were. Anybody doing the price reporting job reasonably well KNOWS where the market is, and no amout of tom-foolery is going to make it anywhere else.

Because of this, when I read Tom Fowler’s article in the Houston Chronicle today and see things like former managing director James Brooks saying: “I am a sinner. If I have caused anyone pain or suffering I pray in the name of my Lord Jesus Christ they forgive me. I made a mistake of listening to another man. I trusted him blindly,” my reaction is “Fuck you. Happy you found ‘Jesus’ because you obviously were unacquainted with him at the time. Maybe he’ll save your ass in the hereafter, but in the meantime go rot in jail. You were a greedy son-of-a-bitch and got what you deserved. You were trying to maximize YOUR paycheck asshole.”

The Iron Man 2 Trailer is out!

And the only word that can adequately describe it is…BADASS!

I caught it last night during Entertainment Tonight and now I can’t wait for May to get here.

My boys are equally excited.

Mickey Rourke as Whiplash is going to be epic.

There are also quick shots of the Black Widow, War Machine and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury.

Not to mention Garry Shandling as a US senator.

A link to the trailer can be found…

I Have Arrived and You Should Believe the Hype

Enough!

Seriously!

Just fucking enough already!

We were out Christmas shopping over the weekend and I saw this magazine cover staring at me from several different racks.

Why in the blue hell does this woman get to tell “her side of the story?” 

Let me tell her side of the story.  I hooked up with a famous married guy and now I’m using OK! magazine as a stepping stone on my way to a Playboy pictorial and eventual obscurity followed by a season on Celebrity Fit Club.

Let’s just get something straight.  Just because you helped Tiger Woods bust a nut, you’re not famous.  You’re a star fucker and an attention whore.

Go away!

Friday LinkFrogging – 12/11/09

Welcome back kids. It has been quite a week here at homebase. I lost a load of links when I lost my PC. I’m not sure how that’s going to affect our final count today, but we’ll see.

We also welcome a new Geek to the herd this week. Aamir comes to us on a strong recommendation from Chris and we’re glad to have him in the fold. Look for him to start posting very soon.

And before we get to the links, it wouldn’t be LinkFrogging without our weekly slice of cheesecake. This week that cheesecake is Tina Fey. Love her or hate her, Tina is seeminly everywhere. Her take on Sarah Palin may have single-handedly submarined the former Alaska governor as a potential vice-presidential candidate. On a recent episode of David Letterman, when asked about a story that she was a virgin well into her 20’s her response was…”couldn’t give it away.”  It disarmed Letterman. That’s hard to do. Tina can be seen on NBC’s 30 Rock each Thursday night.

On with the links.

The Ultimate Fighter – Heavyweights, The Ultimate Finale

Big Country

 

That’s a fine figure of a man. – my wife upon seeing Roy Nelson post fight.

So we’ve come to the end of our three month MMA journey.  Roy Nelson will face Brendan Schaub for the title of “The Ultimate Fighter.”  We’ll also have Kimbo Slice in action, as well as Marcus Jones, Matt Mitrione, James McSweeney and Darrill Schoonover.

The show was three hours long, so there were some non TUF fights, including a disputed decision in the fight between Matt Hamill and Jon Jones.  Jones appeared to have won the fight, but the referee disqualified him for an illegal elbow.

Let’s take a look at our TUF related matches, shall we?

iPod First Anniversary, #18-20

Fulcrum: ‘Man Of Air,’ ‘Brief Satisfaction’ (Stones adaptation), ‘Figurehead’ (The Cure cover)

KEY LYRIC: But it takes 47 hands to hold the birds in the air
That left me with 4 to spare
For the people, planes and insects, the clouds and the smog
And I could not hold them all
So I let you down
I let me let you down

 Album: Fulcrum

Year: 2003

Produced, mixed, and engineered by: Steve Cashman and Blake Simpson

NOTES: Written and recorded by my senior-year college roommate and one of his friends from med school. Was so much NOT what I expected that I never talked with him about it. By the time I went back to it and realized how awesome it was, I’d fallen out of touch. I think I feel an electronic manhunt about to start, again….UPDATE! Manhunt successful. Contact reestablished.

Chickenfoot: Son of Zeppelin

In GonzoGeek’s on-going quest to pimp a band that needs no pimping, please enjoy the following: Jason Bonham  playing drums as Chickenfoot covers Led Zeppelin’s ‘Rock and Roll’ in Vegas over the weekend.

Witness! Chad Smith ‘playing guitar’. See! Jason Bonham drumming. Experience! Sammy Hagar vocalizing. Hear! Joe Satriani shredding. Acknowledge! The presence of Michael Anthony.

The Ultimate Fighter – Heavyweights, Episode 11

There can be only one.

Tonight we were treated to the 2-hour regular season finale and four, count ‘em, four fights.  Factor in all the extraneous drama and it was a big night for TUF.

Things start out with much discussion of Matt Mitrione and the “will he or won’t he” nature of his fight status.  Dana White attempts to make alternate plans for his semi-final match, offering it to Kimbo Slice.  Surprisingly, Slice turns it down.  Kimbo played it safe. 

Meanwhile, Scott Junk finds out he’s got two tears in his retina from his fight with Mitrione and may never fight again. This sends Marcus Jones over the edge and he confronts Mitrione at the training facility.  I really thought Jones was going to hurt him.

But enough of the drama.  Let’s get to the fights.