Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Occasionally I post on my blog with the tag what's in your wallet? It's my tag for posts about credit cards, specifically using credit cards to earn frequent flyer points, cash back, elite status, and other perks. Have you ever wondered why I use that tag? It's a meme from years ago.

The phrase is a reference to a hilarious series of commercials by Capital One, a big credit card issuing bank, back in the 00s. They showed a horde of Viking raiders in modern-day settings. The narrative was that paying high fees on other credit cards is like being plundered. Here's one of the earliest commercials, from 2000:



Each ad ended with the memorable punch line, "What's in your wallet?"

Once the tagline was established as a popular meme, the commercials become more lighthearted. They shifted to showing the Vikings trying to fit into the modern world while enjoying the perks of their travel credit cards. Here's a commercial from 2003:



The ad campaign continued wth the anachronistic, fish-out-of-water theme for several more years. Capital One shifted its ad messaging, from "People are getting plundered by credit card fees from other banks," to, "So many people have switched to Capital One that these Viking raiders have had to find real jobs." Here's one from 2006:



The Viking ads continued until about 2010. Capital One kept using the punchline "What's in your wallet?" for at least a few more years. They switched to a conventional talking-head ad format, though, with celebrity spokespeople such as Samuel Jackson and Jennifer Garner telling us why CapOne cards are better than others. The Viking commercials are classic, though. And I continue using the meme as a tag for writing about profitable use of credit cards.

I had yet another ordeal with a mobile phone company today. This time it was Verizon. I was on the phone for 90 minutes trying to troubleshoot why my new Verizon home internet service wouldn't connect. I was transferred multiple times, spoke to a total of 5 agents, and the best they could do was file a ticket and tell me my service should be fixed within a week. A week?! It's not like they have to come and replace equipment; this is just an account activation glitch.

As I've been dealing with the lying, incompetent fuckers at T-Mobile and Verizon over the past week I've thought many times about a classic Saturday Night, Live skit about the phone company. This one's an oldie... over 45 years old oldie! But it's still remarkably on the nose today.



The skit stars Lily Tomlin reprising a recurring character she played on Laugh In. Her punch line here, "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company," sums up the frustration we all have with phone companies— and every other company today that's a corporate behemoth with a virtual monopoly. Today it's not just phone companies but also Google, FaceBook, Amazon, etc. If you don't like it, too bad. The alternative is another company that's just as bad or one that's even worse.

The past few weeks have been tough. With active Covid-19 infections at all-time highs and even our boosted vaccines not as effective against the now dominant Omicron strain as their 90+% shield against Alpha and Delta, we've cut back on even the modest social outings we were engaging in in November and early December. We've paused having friends over (fully vaccinated friends) and visiting friends' houses. We've almost entirely stopped dining indoors at restaurants. We mostly cook at home, and when we do go out a few times a week it's to sit outdoors— which depends on good enough weather— or take it home. For me, especially, with a work-from-home job, I feel closed in. There are many days I don't even leave home

As I was feeling bored— actually not just bored, more like at wits' end— a few days ago I stumbled across this gem from an old text conversation with a friend.



This totally describes January 2022... but it's from May 2020!

Sigh. The fact that I've been here before doesn't make it better. Part of what drives my frustration now is the fact that it's actually worse. It's worse because in May 2020, as much as we sacrificed, we also had hope. Hope that the Coronavirus might be over in a few months (it's wasn't). Hope that a vaccine would rescue us (it arrived sooner than expected!). Now we're over a year past the rollout of the vaccine, and it's like we've gone backwards to near Square 1. And it's all because of the stubborn, deeply misinformed 30% of the country who refuse to get vaccinated. Their personal "freedom" to foolishly put their health at risk also puts everyone else's health at risk. I'm not just bored but also angry because it didn't have to be like this.

How stupid does this restaurant think its customers are?



This is a real restaurant in my town: the Le Plonc wine bar.

For those who don't know "plonk" (which plonc is French for) is a derogatory term for cheap wine. Swill. And this restaurant thinks it can attract a clientele who're like, "Ooh, it has a French name, it must be good!" without recognizing the barely-different-in-a-foreign-language name?

This reminds me of one of the gags from the classic 1991 Steve Martin comedy film, L.A. Story. Martin's character repeatedly tries to get reservations at the city's hottest restaurant, whose name sounds like "Le Dioh". When he finally get in there and walks up to the building the audience finally sees the name is actually l'Idiot. The Idiot.

In this case you'd have to be l'idiot to drink le plonc.

Some of my weekends are busy, some are not. Last weekend was some of each. We were busy with the trip we took from Thursday evening through Saturday evening. From Friday alone I wrote 5 blogs about hiking Bassi Falls and the Bunker Hill fire lookout (complete with fire 😨), and camping near the Desolation Wilderness. It could have been six blogs, but when I saw how backlogged I was getting I collapsed the least interesting draft into a sentence or two in one of the other five. After hiking all day Saturday in the Desolation Wilderness, though, Sunday was an easy day at home. We swam in the pool for an hour or two and otherwise mostly just chilled at home.

Fast or slow, weekends can be enjoyable either way. It reminds me of this classic Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, "The Days are Just Packed":



Some weekends the days are just packed with activity, like the first two days last weekend. Other weekends the days are "just packed" in the ironic sense of this comic strip, and that's perfectly fine, too.

This weekend is going to be another "just packed" weekend. Oh, we have bigger plans than sitting in a tree all day waiting to drop a water balloon on that annoying Susie. Slightly bigger plans, anyway. We'll hang out with some friends Saturday and do a bit of shopping. Sunday we have a roleplaying game in the evening and may go hiking locally earlier in the day. Somewhere along the line we'll probably sit for a soak in the hot tub. And for now, 10pm on Friday evening, I'm enjoying the summer evening on the balcony with a glass of fine sipping vodka in hand.

The days are just packed.

The necessity of working remotely during the Coronavirus pandemic has introduced many people to videoconferencing. Newcomers need to be guided on how to do it well, and even veterans need reminders as the year+ long lockdown has led to increasingly lax standards. Here's a helpful guide I saw today:



It's satire, of course. 😂

Hawk and I were browsing through Amazon Prime Video a few nights ago, looking for something new to watch. We found something old to watch: The Carol Burnett Show.

"Wow, that's a blast from the past!" I thought to myself. I remember watching it as a child and finding the skit-based comedy hilarious. My parents enjoyed it, too, as the show was family friendly.

Hawk and I have streamed a few episodes now. Here are Five Things:

1) 1967 In Living Color!

Right away I was struck by how good the video looks, in color, from 1967. The title gag (above/right) is grainy and faded, but the video of the show content itself is vivid and sharp. So much classic TV from that era was never recorded, or was recorded poorly, or was recorded well but then the tapes were damaged, that it's a treasure to find this 54 year old show in such pristine condition.

Part of that, I found out, is that the show was taped. A lot of TV from that era was aired live; that's the root of the problem for why surviving recordings are so hit-or-miss. The Carol Burnett Show rehearsed all week then did two recordings in front of a live studio audience. Takes from the two shows were mixed, combining the better cuts of each, for broadcast.

2) "The Lost Episodes"

What we're streaming on Prime is The Carol Burnett Show: The Lost Episodes. Each episode is a full, original TV broadcast, with a running time of 52 minutes. I point out the running time because a common version of The Carol Burnett Show in syndication cuts down each episode to just 22 minutes, literally editing out more than half the content. It's nice to see full episodes. It shows, among other things, that the show was actually a variety show, not just a skit-comedy show. It had musical guests and song-and-dance numbers. Burnett herself dances and sings, too!

BTW, it's those cut-down-for-syndication shows I remember watching as a child. The Carol Burnett Show aired 1967-1978. Toward the end of that run I would've been just old enough to appreciate and remember such a program. But it was aired in the 10-11pm time slot, and I was too young at the time to be staying up that late. Also, I do remember it being a half-hour program and being focused on skit comedy; no musical guests or elaborate song-and-dance numbers.

3) Q&A, 1967 Style

One of the other aspects of the original show edited out to make the 30-minute episodes was the Q&A session. Burnett began each episode, at least in first couple of seasons (all we've seen so far), inviting audience members to ask her questions. And oh, how 1967 it is! The first question on the first episode was, "What are your measurements?" 🤦‍♀️

To give 1967 people some credit, though, when Burnett minutes later introduced show announcer, Lyle Waggoner, and encouraged the audience to ask him questions, someone quickly shouted out, "What are your measurements?"

OTOH, I think that was one of the cameramen. 😂

A note: this first episode in the Lost Episodes compilation was not the first show aired. I believe it was the fourth broadcast episode. Lucille Ball was the guest star. Having Ball on sure made it feel like a premiere episode, though, as she is a comedy legend and was an important mentor to Burnett.

4) The Musical Guest is Who?

Another part of the oh-so-1967 character of the early episodes is the choice of musical guests. Many of them are singers whose style and lyrics are laughably quaint by modern standards. Indeed many of their names are completely unrecognizable nowadays. I mean, it's not even good "Oldies" music. It's bad Oldies music— the dull, sappy stuff of the late 60s/early 70s that was gladly left behind a few years later. Even disco was better than that insipid crud.

5) So Many Stars

While the musical guests on The Carol Burnett Show are hit-or-miss-but-mostly-miss, the guest actors each week are a veritable who's-who of TV stardom from the era. After the first episode in the Lost series featured Lucille Ball and Tim Conway (a frequent guest who'd later become a regular cast member), the second featured Don Adams, star of the classic TV comedy Get Smart (1965-1970).

Unlike on a later well-known comedy variety show, Saturday Night Live, where a guest actor such as Adams would be used mostly for send-ups of his own work, Carol Burnett didn't ask him to spoof his Maxwell Smart character aside from a brief gag about the character's memorable vocal quips during the Q&A session. Instead, she had him play broader comedy parts, such as her husband in a skit about a woman trying to remember where she lost a purse full of important documents (pictured). He also played TV host in a spoof about a variety-comedy show, a la The Tonight Show, trying to air when the studio staff are on strike. It was fun for me, as a person who'd studied TV production many years ago, to spot all the technical "goofs" intentionally inserted in the skit such as the shadow of the boom microphone crossing someone's face, the shadow of a person moving behind the backdrop being seen, and the actors facing the wrong camera to deliver their lines. Aside from the technical bits I enjoyed, it was fun to see Adams as a more versatile comedian than just his inimitable Maxwell Smart character.

I'm looking forward to finishing the first season of The Carol Burnett Show: The Lost Episodes. It does skip around, though, relative to the original broadcast, so we're also looking for how to enjoy the complete original episodes.

The past few days you may have read something about wild stock market gyrations of otherwise unremarkable companies like GameStop— they're still around?— and WallStreetBets (WSB), a Reddit forum. What's happening? Well, think about the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, then think about this as a case of man-bites-dog. Or as I've called it above, "Bros before Pros".



On the surface what you see is that the price of certain stocks has risen meteorically in just a few days, then crashed. The value of GameStop stock (ticker: GME) two weeks ago was about $36. On Wednesday it was trading for 10x that price; yesterday it hit a high of $468— 13x its earlier price— before finishing the day at $197.

Under the surface what's happening is a classic market move called a short squeeze. A number of big investors thought GameStop was overpriced and headed lower, so they shorted it. By shorting a stock they borrow shares to sell, figuring they'll buy them later at a lower price— when the stock falls— to cover their borrowing. But what if the stock doesn't fall? Well, as the price climbs higher, short sellers grow increasingly nervous about their positions. Unlike with simply buying a stock, their potential loss isn't just the money they invested; they could lose many times their original investments. Some of the shorts are squeezed out, buying the stock back to close their positions and limit further losses.

A short squeeze is nothing new on Wall Street. The news here is all about who is making the squeeze. It's not the big-money hedge funds in Manhattan and Chicago. It's an army of small-money retail investors. They're using Millennial-friendly free stock trading platforms like Robinhood and coordinating in social media forums like WSB. WSB, a cesspool of rampant sexism and homophobia (it bills itself as "4chan with a Bloomberg terminal"), has seen its membership swell to over 5 million users in just a week.

Individually, the WSB crowd seem mostly to be small-time investors. The joke is many of them are gambling their Covid stimulus checks on the stock market. Anecdotally, many of them are young (under 30) and investing with small starting portfolios. How are they taking on the billionaire hedge funds— and winning? 

Well, even small investors can move the market... if they a) coordinate and b) target stocks in precarious positions, such as those ripe for a short squeeze.

"Isn't this market manipulation?" you may ask. "Isn't this illegal?" I'm not a lawyer so I won't attempt to answer that question definitively. I will answer a related question, though: Short squeezes happen All. The. Time. But previously they've happened between billionaire firms competing with each other. All that's different here is now it's Robinhood Bros taking on the Wall Street Pros... and the pros have just gotten slaughtered and they really don't like it.

What do you remember most from school, particularly the earlier years? Here's an infographic I made about the lesson we were taught most frequently:



Seriously, we drilled on this at least once a week, but they never taught us how to balance a debit account. Guess which skill I've used exactly never and which I've used multiple times a week for decades.

Though they did teach us, once, to buy the cheapest stereo or end up homeless. 🙄

I've seen a few advertisements online for 2020 commemorative candles. I sense a theme....









Pictures link to source.