Special delivery

Huh. Things are looking up in the environs of the District They Call Columbia.

I confess that I only occasionally look at the ads on Metro cars. I’m either nose down in my mobile, or I’m gazing emptily into the space beyond the window.

But the other morning I glanced up at the big stretch of blue next to the door and saw this:

Then a couple of days later, there was this one:

Now, this certainly looks good—and Lord knows, home delivery of hot and cold running booze is a super-good use of tech. Talk about meeting a market need...

But I went on their website, and—as I expected—they cannot deliver liquor (or even, apparently, beer) to Virginia. Those Baptist Taliban anti-liquor laws. Also, they don’t want you circumventing their state-run ABC (liquor) stores.

(I noticed on their website once that they forbid anyone bringing in more than a gallon of anything alcoholic (including wine and beer) from outside the Commonwealth. If you’re moving from another state or from abroad, you have to fill out some kind of form to get their permission. Yeah, no.)

However, it is possible for MinibarDelivery.com to deliver to my work address, in the District. Which could certainly be a boon. Although my manager might get a little sniffy. (I mentioned once I was going to pick up a bottle of Glenmorangie for… And he interrupted me to ask if I had a problem, and if he needed to contact HR. I stopped telling him anything about anything.)

So I’ll keep this one in my back pocket.

In tequila veritas

You know, I have to say that, when it comes to tequila, I agree with this response:

Winter is here

I’m not even sure how to start this one out. As you know, the season known as The Holidays is upon us. (In the United States, it’s generally considered that Thanksgiving kicks it off, although it might now be starting at Halloween.) This means holiday decorations. And in the District They Call Columbia, the big megillah is the decoration of the White House.

Dunno if there were great expectations of how the unchurched Kleptocrat would manifest his declaration during the campaign last year that there’d be no more “Happy Holidays” crap if he was elected; strictly “Merry Christmas” all the way. But Monday, while he insulted several Navaho Code Talkers under a portrait of Andrew Jackson, his wife invited reporters (and a few carefully-chosen photo-op children) to witness their idea of the season.

Let me just say: clearly, it would be harder to find a whiter Christmas than this, so a perfect expression of the white-supremacist-in-chief.

But don’t take my word for it. Here was Twitter, starting with the rather wistfully hopeful tweet by Melania’s director of communications.

You sort of got the feeling that Grisham was crossing her fingers, praying that she wouldn’t get trolled. However, she was wrong. So wrong.

Because—holy White Witch, how could anyone in the decorating chain of command have thought that this design would be seen as…anything but an evocation of cracking ice and frozen corpses? (Perhaps they hoped we’d be so grateful not to find gold-spray-painted putti covering every surface, interspersed with handwritten paeans by Cabinet members and the Joint Chiefs of Staff declaring their eternal fealty to the orange Chaos Monkey that we wouldn’t say anything about something that emerged from an Ingmar Bergman nightmare? Yeah, no.)

As Elle magazine quipped, decorating's a snap when you get the Orcs involved.

At any rate, Imma just leave these here.

This one I thought particularly apt.

 And a couple of comments:

“It looks like Christmas on the Death Star.”

“This is the actual war on Christmas, right here.”

“About as warm as a penguin’s ass.”

“Treason’s Greetings!”

We can expect more as we proceed through the next month. Kind of like passing into the mines of Khazad-dûm.

Comma gain?

Whether the world ends in a bang or a whimper, I’m beginning to think that the cause will be an argument over the Oxford comma that gets out of hand.

I see cases made for either side passing on my social feeds, and I laugh them off because I’m firmly in the AP Style camp, and whatever anyone else does I know I’m getting into heaven.

However, this one rather struck my fancy, as someone pointed out something untoward in the Royal Navy’s profile, and who might find it disturbing.

Gratitude Monday: security

Huh. As I mentioned last week, I did not go out shopping on Black Friday. However, apparently my American Express card did.

I fired up the email account I use for subscriptions, web transactions and listservs on Friday to find two notifications from Amex of a questionable charge late Thursday. The emails looked legit, having both my actual name as on the account, and appropriate email address, but because I get faux-Amex phishing attempts about once every six weeks, I still didn’t click on the “this is indeed fraud” button, I called their customer service line.

In the process of being verified, I had to haul out my mobile phone, and found three texts and a voicemail from them about the fraud. (Which I’ll have to deal with, because I’ve told them that I very seldom actually have that phone on, so it’s not a good mechanism for communicating with me.) This is an indicator of how seriously on top of things they are.

(By contrast, NatWest Bank in the UK waited two weeks of processing totally out-of-character charges on my debit card before sending me a letter via snail mail to ask if these were, by any chance, legit. They were not happy about having to eat the fraudulent £750, but tough toenails.)

Anyhow, Sean with Amex fraud protection walked me through verifying actual purchases by me and pinpointing the attempted fraud. This followed what I’ve heard is the typical pattern: a $1 charge somewhere to see if the account is active, then a much larger one—in this case, $455.79 at Target online. Amex didn’t let that charge go through, and they made the six attempts to contact me about it.

He also confirmed that the card wasn’t lost or stolen, that I didn’t “lend” it to anyone else, and that no one could have observed the digits. I do practice good security—online buying on SSL sites only (I look), shredding account statements and the like. This was probably someone going through a likely set of account numbers and seeing what would go through (ergo the $1 trial charge; with a construction company…).

Sean took care of the $455.79 plus $1 and then told me he’d send me a new card. At first he said he’d send it via USPS, and it would arrive on the 29^th. That’s just crazy talk, and I told him it would not do. (Seriously, dude? Look at my usage pattern. That puppy gets used four-five days a week. And we’re talking Black Friday and Cyber Monday. What? Are? You? Thinking?) So he put a rush on it, with delivery for Saturday; I had a new, metal card by 0940.

(I really don’t understand that send-it-by-USPS gambit. It’s called snail mail for a reason. And the last time this kind of thing happened—about five years ago—the Amex reps didn’t even mention mail as an option. Overnight it was —as it should be.)

Now here’s the thing: this is not the first time Amex has acted with dispatch when an uncharacteristic purchase shows up on my account. They run an exceptionally tight ship, with algorithms that must be a sight to behold. I shall now have to remember some new digits (when making online or phone purchases, I don’t even have to have my card out; I know the full account number and four-digit security code by heart, which on occasion has been, ah, very helpful), and will have to swap out the card on record with Amazon, but that is a small price to pay for the absence of hassle and reasonable sense of security that Amex has my back.

Definitely something to be grateful for.