December 2007 Archives

Damn. I finally find a well made flannel shirt that doesn't have those stupid button down collars. (I’ll make a short story long as I have a glass of wine and there’s a random football game on providing me with benevolent background noises).

Subscribe to a gun magazine and you’ll get on some random catalog list. Subscribe to all of the gun magazines (except the British ones because I can’t read dense 5 pt font for more than a minute) and you receive the mother load of catalogs.

Aside. Why subscribe to every gun magazine? To figure out which ones are worth a damn. $10-$30 for a year long review is a fair price to pay, I think. Conclusion? A good chunk of them are crap.

So back to flannel. The new Orvis catalog arrives. Pricey, and a snob factor but they sell relatively good crap. And they have the elusive normal collar flannel shirt. After a week or two (and with temperatures dropping) I decide to take the plunge and order two of them.

A few days later I receive them and they are damn nice and they will most likely last many years. But Orvis wasn’t happy enough to take my dollars and provide me with their products. They also provided me with The Message. The Message was an insert in the package along with the packing slip.

On one side of the Message was a nice graphic with the title ‘Making Environmentally Responsible Decisions’. And an introductory essay as to the confusion in making the ‘correct’ decisions on things from light bulbs to which fish to eat. And what was The Message?

‘Fear not ignorant consumer! We have made those decisions for you.’

And the reverse side of ‘The Message’?

An essay titled ‘Carbon Credits Explained’. It had Indians in it. Really. And why carbon offsets are awesome. To save the environment and Earth and everything. The Message?

Carbon offsets are awesome! (brushing economic reality under the table).

All I wanted was a Pepsi. Or in this case, two shirts. Instead I received two shirts and a hell of a lot of preaching I didn’t ask for. Thanks Orvis. I might ask if I could get a discount on your products in the future if I just received what I paid for and you could take off the price of sermonizing but I realize that I would be wasting my time. So I’ll just end this so short relationship. Goodbye forever, you sanctimonious jackasses.