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I don’t know what it is about YouTube. The indignation and insultation one can find there either directly or directed at others often achieves a cro-mag baseness that seldom fails to amaze.

I certainly don’t help matters with my “”This Is Why I Hate” series of posts usually video’d from the POV of me on my bike. I’ve “hated” on mopeds, FedEx, bicyclists, motorists, and boy have I been hated on in return.

Now if you know me, you know that one of the few things I hate is hate. But of course those on the YouToobz, they don’t know me. And whether they’re self-righteous or just good ol’ knuckle-draggers they can get pretty inflamed — especially when I push their buttons.

So you can imagine my surprise when instead of the usual “Get the fuck off the road, Lance!” I found this rather reasoned and articulate reaction from user “simplecreativity” to my “This Is Why I Hate: Fedex” post:

Don’t you think this is a bit much? You hate FedEx because they happen to employ some inconsiderate drivers? Welcome to the world, good sir. This is like me saying I hate people who own Fords because someone in a Ford cuts me off on the road. Take it easy. And while you’re at it, slow down. I bet it wouldn’t have been nearly so threatening if, in the great span of time you had before getting there, you applied the brake.

Relax. Not everything is cause for throwing around the word “hate”. Jeez.

I was actually quite impressed that he resisted the urge to just call me a fucktard or a douchebag (as so many other trollios have on that post), and in cordial response I commended him:

Excellent and intelligent argument, sc (accept for that incorrect assumption that I was somehow speeding on my bike, but I can forgive that mistake). For what it’s worth I used “hate” not because I actually hate, but because its such a loaded word. Somewhere on the Youtubes I even have a vid about “hating” cyclists! Cheers.

Did it stop there? Of course not. The fun had only started and it rapidly sped downhill in the ensuing back and forth (laid out after the jump) until he couldn’t help but demonstrate his hate (no quotes) by calling me a jackass and an asshole and cite the hate-filled comments of all the other mouth-breathing trolls as proof of why he was right and I was beyond help.

Tiring of the folly, I respectfully requested he quit while he’s behind fighting a battle he couldn’t win. When that didn’t happen I then asked him semi-politely a second time, and when again he continued his ranting I was left to the inevitable task of blocking him. Good times.

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Chances are what with the internut being what it is and all, I would have eventually stumbled across the video below. But because of the Blogfather Tony Pierce, who is always there to open a door for his readers and say “look inside and check this shit out now,” I got my day brightened that much quicker. Thank you, Tony:

You’ve probably figured out I can be a big manly man huff ‘n puff, stomp ‘n growl blowhard. What you may or may not now is I’m waaaaay in touch with my emotional side. As such before I was even a couple minutes into the vid I was shedding tears of joy over this, while simultaneously being envious at such wonderful creativity, and irrationally jealous at everyone who was a part of it either as a participant or spectator.

Sniffling afterwards, I even left the following comment on the vid’s YouTube page:

That was one of the most profoundly and beautifully celebratory things I’ve ever seen. Just miraculous and exuberant and unique and joyous and brilliant. BRAVO!

Your emotional connection may vary. But I’ll tell you what: If Susan and I ever renew our vows in a big church-set ceremony somewhere/time down the road some variation of this marvel is so on!

UPDATE (7.25): And yeah, prior to this video I never thought I’d ever be caught dead owning a Chris Brown tune, but now  I’m not ashamed to say this video made me purchase the single, “Forever,” off of iTunes — and I bet I’m not the only buyer. Brown oughta send the happy couple a wedding gift, for perhaps helping to revitalize his career.

UPDATE (7.27): Looks like embedding has been “disabled by request,” so if there’s trouble viewing it here, go here instead.

Wowza! Via a post at LAObserved about a wholly defaming and highly suspect slammajam made by an unnamed source about a downtown restaurant on the Eater LA blog, I just learned about something called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which apparently holds harmless from liability any “providers and users of an interactive computer service who publish information provided by others.”

So basically if some anonymous blogger with full intent to defame and malign however baselessly or biasedly writes that someone  who we’ll call “Jonas Dough” is a “raging pedophile and serial killer” I am entirely under no obligation to verify and/or debunk or in anyway research such opinion and am at entirely protected liberty to reprint it verbatim as fact.

Not that I do much in the way of such ax-grindingly libelous and patently damaging garbage like that found in the above-mentioned post at Eater LA, but it’s really good to know I can if I want to.

And by “really good” I mean really lame.

And by really lame I mean that if this kind of full-assed, irresponsible reporting being condoned and allowed to stand by Eater LA’s overlords at Curbed Network simply because there is precedent to do so (and probably because the resulting increased traffic is a cha-ching) then the least I can do is wipe Eater LA’s sister site Curbed LA from my blogroll and delete my account as a commenter.

UPDATE (11:04 a.m.): Eater LA has offered the owners of the restaurant the opportunity to argue the unsubstantiated allegations presented in the post. That’s a bit like Salem giving its alleged witches the chance to argue against their guilt with nooses tightened around their necks.

It almost pains me to spell this out because it’s common fucking sense, but instead  of “equal time” after the defamation (while also leaving it live), the simple and proper and legitimate and fair and ethical action Eater LA should have taken would have been to use the “tipster” accusations as a springboard to contact the eatery’s owners and get their responses to them and then post a balanced item about it. But instead Eater LA and Curbed Network is condoning laziness and irresponsibility and doing so from behind the protection afforded this indecent section of a so-called Decency Act, while snickering as it reaps the benefits from the increased traffic the controversy has generated.

Fellow LA Metblogger David Markland just hipped me to the fact that my post there yesterday remembering when I met Farrah Fawcett, was deemed worthy of inclusion in New York Magazine’s Daily Intel column featuring an online roundup under the headline of “Farrah Fawcett’s Touching Tributes.” Neato!

I had a veeeery disappointing experience ordering our anniversary present via target.com last week. Placement of the four-piece wicker “conversation set” for our front porch was simple enough, but it rapidly descended into a flurry of  form emails informing me of problems with my credit card and requesting I “update” the info — which I did and I was given the e-version of a thumbs up sign only to be told again the next day that there were problems with my credit card and requests to update the plastic. Again.

Gah. So I placed my first call to their customer service and provided them with a different card, which was all good until a day later I got another email that there were problems with that credit card and another request to update it. I was told to ignore that by the customer service rep. So I did.

Then on Monday, I got notice from Target that the card had been declined — this despite having gone through the multiple online and voicemail layers of fraud protection with the card’s bank, verifying that I had indeed authorized the charge. The last straw was one final unspecific email telling me there was a “problem” with my order and now there was a chance it wouldn’t arrive until June 25.

Honestly, having placed the order June 10, I hadn’t expected the furniture  to arrive any early than June 19 — three days after our 4th anniversary — but now June 25!? Oh hell no. So I placed my second call to their customer service to cancel the debacle outright and — par for the course — I was told it was too late to cancel… even though it hadn’t shipped yet. The best they could do was put in a request to cancel and hope it got there in time. If it didn’t my only recourse was to refuse delivery and go through that bother of getting the charge reversed off my credit card.

Of course, the order cancelation didn’t hit and the product shipped so I girded myself for possibly having to take the day off work potentially 10 days down the road to stand before the delivery truck and say “Take back that hell from whence it came!”

Only some how, some way, a miracle happened. The package — all 200 pounds of it — was delivered yesterday and left on the side of the house:

I’m not sure if Target cracked the whip and pushed the delivery company to get it here ASAP, but I’m pretty sure designating it as “OK to leave without signature” was a tactic to make it impossible to refuse and that much more of a burden to return. Tricky.

But all’s well that ends well. Like Sisyphus this morning I rolled the big ass box into the backyard, where most likely this weekend one of my projects will be assembling it.

Happy Anniversary, Bay-Bee!

I love Google ads.  Lovelovelove ‘em! It’s almost endearing how they can be so hamfistedly incorrect in their arrival, like the one above, showing up uninvited and unwanted on the YouTube page hosting my timelapse video of the LA Bike Tour –  not unlike (for want of a better metaphor) the way “Animal House’s” Bluto Blutarski might barge into an otherwise gentile social gathering hosted by the uptights at Omega House and grab a comfy chair with a belch and a smile near the finger sammiches. After spiking the punch. And then drinking all of it. From the bowl.

Because you know, given my sliiiiiiiiight predilection for pure pedal power, pretty much the last thing I’d promote in any way, shape, or form is some sort of goddam after-market internal combustion powerplant that can somehow be mounted to a perfectly good bicycle so that not only does it consume fossil fuels and emit noxious emissions, but it probably pollutes the air with something that sounds eerily like a lawn mower.

In short, I appreciate Google bringing BikeBerry.com to my attention as the LAST place on the world wide inturnip I’ll ever go shopping.

And all I have to say is: Sigh.

I think I comment too much. In fact, I know I do. If I see a photo on Flickr or read a post on LAist, or Losanjealous, or Franklin Avenue, or Curbed LA — or any number of personal blogs that I frequent and enjoy on a regular basis — I won’t hesitate to chime in and under my name because I’m not one of those anonymousers that thrive and drive the internest.

Clearly I’m also not someone with a lack of time on my hands, because rarely do I see my fellow LA bloggers commenting elsewhere with the enthusiasm and frequency that I do. They all apparently have lives, and priorities and self-restraint and generally better things to do than run around sharing the comment love (or hate, as the case may be).

Anyway, I got called out for over-commenting by one of them anonymice the other day over on The Eastsider LA blog, a relatively new tenant to the LA blogominiumplexosphere that I  drop by to check out a couple/three times a day to see what’s new and up. It’s become a great resource for things happening in my area (even if we might differ in our constitutions of “east side”).

My comment came in response to a post about a woman walking her leashed dog who was assaulted by an unleashed dog owner in Elysian Park. Feeling threatened by the loose and aggressive animal she ended up tossing a rock at it in frustration and, well, the loose dog’s owner — another woman — went ballistic, slapping her and threatening her.

The unfortunate incident reminded me of a similar one I experienced when an off-leash dog charged us about 15 years ago, while my then 5-year-old daughter and I were walking Shadow out in front of the apartment building I lived in at the time on Burbank Boulevard in Encino. Without going into all the boring details I wound up protecting my kid and my dog, which resulted in me unfortunately injuring the  loose animal and then dealing with its almost equally aggressive owner who came running up the street angry that I dared defend against his free-ranging beast.

Silly me I nutshelled that story in a comment to that Elysian Park assault post, offering it not so much as study in what a badass I am, but instead as a tutorial to the benefits of leashing up your dog, since sometimes it’s the off-leashed animal that suffers the worst of the deal:

A short while later I found a couple shadow-dwelling keyboard peckerheads taking potshots at me:

In my responses, I  tried to be good-naturedly snarky — especially about the “ish” talking. Then the next day I find more asshattedness:

Now, I’m not one to trouble with trolls or be troubled much by them — in fact whereas conventional wisdom dictates igonoring the bastards, I can rightfully be accused of overfeeding them because I find it fun to keep coming back with semi-considerate replies at them and their goadings until they eventually realize they can’t win against me and give up lamely trying.

But I think what the third one (or maybe it’s the same jackass, for all I know) wrote carries with it a kernel of truth:

“He’s like bed bugs but for comments… everywhere and impossible to get rid of.”

How ironic that such hyperbole would come from a representative of the ultimate in deathless internet pest, but nevertheless I think I agree.

And so I’m going to stop, or at least give stopping a try. Sort of. From now on, if I find a post on a blog I frequent — be it a personal one, an “east side” one or one of the larger group/topical/regional blogs I haunt, instead of flailing my fingertips across my keyboard over there and giving pieces of my mind away free, I’ll consider if its worthwhile tapping out my thoughts over here and linking across to it.

While such a drastic scale-back in interaction could be seen as a troll victory, I see it more as bringing the little satellites I launch to a place in-house, where any uninvited chickenshits might think twice before bitchslapping at me, or at least understand that in doing so greater scrutiny can be focused on their reduced anonymity, and far less patience.

Turns out having someone using my debit card fraudulently ended up saving me some money! In my inbox yesterday is an email with the subject line of “Amazon Prime Renewal Alert” and I open it to find Amazon telling me that they’re having trouble charging my renewal fee to the payment card on file — one I’d had to cancel after discovering $500 worth of iTunes charges made on it. Amazon dutifully provided instructions on how I could resolve that membership issue.

Trouble is I was totally blanking on what an Amazon Prime Membership is or that I had even signed up for it. Or that it was costing me money! So I logged on and sure enough I discovered that I’ve been a prime member since 2007, paying $79 a year for the privilege of getting free 2-day shipping and reduced overnight shipping on “millions of items!”

That would be megasuper awesome if I were buying “millions of items,” but looking back at my order histories over these last couple years (19 total)  I’m an occasional  Amazonian at best. I’m not going to do the math, but it’s highly doubtful if my membership paid for itself — or even broke even.

So  I’m left primarily wondering what possessed me to sign up for this program. Certainly I know an under-the-radar “auto renewal” kept it alive in 2008 — and would have done so this year had some bastards not hijacked my account a couple months ago, forcing its untimely demise.

So I guess I have them to thank because otherwise it wouldn’t have been brought to my attention that I was paying Amazon something for nothing.

About 45 seconds in, “Billy C” may or may not be someone you recognize: