consumerist
—>There's about 30 spots left if you want to go to the Consumerist/Consumer Reports party/panel-discussion this Tuesday night from 6-8pm at the 92Y at 200 Hudson in New York, NY. Come Hear Ben Popken, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, MSNBC's Red Tape Chronicles Bob Sullivan, and The Daily Beast's Rachel Sklar. Moderated by Consumer Reports Editorial Director Kevin McKean, the topic is "Defending The Endangered Consumer: High Impact Journalism in a Low-Budget Era." Also in attendance, Consumerist bloggers Meg Marco, Carey Greenberg-Berger, Chris Walters, Alex Chasick and Laura Northrup. Should be a good time. RSVP for a free drink at rsvp@consumerist.com. More »
—>Our post last Friday gave people some great business ideas. We appreciate the offers, but we must insist that you do not try to purchase Consumerist with doodle currency that you have minted yourself, probably while drinking. You can, however, try to bail out the auto industry with it if you want. More »
—>Did you know that you can learn to be helpless? These days, a lot of people are showing signs of a new disease called CLH, or Consumer Learned Helplessness. Here's how it works. More »
—>Committee Caller is a free service that lets you easily call an entire congressional committee. Just select the House or Senate committee, or subcommittee, and entire your phone number. Click the "put me in touch with democracy" button to activate. The system then calls you after it's connected your call to that representatives front office. Press asterisk to end the call. Then rate the call by pressing 0-5, 5 being the best, and the system moves on to calling the next committee member. A neat way to make your voice heard, (like telling them to support the Arbitration Fairness Act), though our primer on writing to Congress is pretty great, too. More »
—>Reader Geoff was at a gas station with his girlfriend when a shady looking dude approached them and started asking for money so he could pay someone to unlock his car and free the 11 month-old kid whom he'd locked inside... in a dark corner of the next parking lot over. Hm. Was he telling the truth? Geoff writes:
Dear Consumerist, More »
—>The Consumerist once promised to help fix capitalism. Today, we will realize that dream. We regularly stress the importance of saving for retirement. 401ks, Roth IRAs, they are good, but uncertain. They caution, "past performance does not guarantee future gains." More »
Hey remember we had that tshirt contest and y'all thought up slogans? Well, we finally beat a draft out of our designer. More »
—>Writing these daily updates on our server woes is starting to feel like delivering State of the Union addresses every afternoon the week after a direct nuclear strike on the heartland of America. "My fellow Americans, while all of Idaho's potatoes have mutated into shambling, blood-thirsty spudstronsities, the good news is that they remain fluorescent but edible." "Many Americans have noticed their pineal gland pustulously expanding into a literal third eye. We ask you all to look at the bright side: not only will you now be able to see invisible Cthulhu monsters ectoplasmically swimming through the air, but at least those freaky Kodak advertisements now make sense." More »
We started another week of Consumerist blogging with a heavy heart; we were sure we were looking at a third week pregnant with the ongoing technical difficulties that we've come to expect from a thoroughly borked Movable Type install, miscarrying a slurry of errors for us every time we lightly pressed upon its belly to make a post. More »
—>Hoisted then atomic wedgied by our own petard! After our recent post about the dangers of contextual advertising in regards to KFC, Consumerist Daniel M. wrote us with a screenshot of our contextual advertising... specifically in regards to our Reader Tries To Cancel AOL post. Click it to the right to see what Daniel saw. More »
No stranger to irony and hypocrisy—we're not sure whether the combo serves as our grist or our mill, a potentially ironic paradox in and of itself—one reader pointed out that in our recent post, "Why Marketers are Douchebags," we forgot to bag one douche in particular: ourselves. More »
—>On March 28th, 2006, a strange Venusian satellite streaked an eerie fluorescent parabola across the sky, irradiating the world's cemetaries, funeral parlors and abattoirs with an extraterrestrial radiation. Four days later, the dead walked, slavering for human flesh and tasty brains. And we were here covering it. More »
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Perhaps more than most other Gawker Media titles, The Consumerist lives and breathes for your comments and tips. Here's some of this week's best threads, along with unfairly out-of-context excerpts. More »
—>We recently used Etsy to commission a hand-knit beanie for just $15 from the lovely Nguyen Le, whose work we had see after a post on BoingBoing detailing her knitted 'power cord' belt. We like commissioning things—it makes us feel important—and it's nice to think that one's money is going directly to the person who made your custom kit. (We're using a picture of Nguyen's awesome Tangerine Felted Bag, because while our beanie is lovely, that bag is ever more so.) More »
