In my excitement to find out more about The Killers I didn’t end up watching the rest of that episode of Austin City Limits. Sunday night I watched the next act, an Austin-based indie band called Spoon. In the AllMusic entry for The Killers they had Spoon listed as a similar artist, so I thought I might like them too. They are pretty different though. Whereas The Killers have a definite Cure and Oasis influence, Spoon has more of a Elvis Costello sound, though more like “Watching the Detectives” than “Alison”. I think they sound at least a little like X though not rockabilly like X could be, more like “Blue Spark,” at least with the songs they were performing which came from their current CD Gimme Fiction. On other albums they have a little different sound, but I like the spooky funky blues sound of these songs, particularly “The Beast and Dragon, Adored” and “My Mathematical Mind”. Those titles make them sound geekier than they really are.
The Killers
Austin City Limits is a live music show on public television. They have pretty good taste and the show has been around for a long time. Based in Austin, they seem to spotlight a lot of Texas bands. Lyle Lovett has probably been on a lot, Stevie Ray Vaughan was on it. They had The Pixies when they got back together. So if something seems remotely interesting I’ll try to record it. (For a while another PBS show had a similar lineup of well-chosen talent called Sessions at West 54th, but it disappeared after a couple of years.)
T
I’ve always thought it was neat that some of the biggest companies in the world were so old, so powerful, and so well respected that their stock symbol was a single letter. AT&T was one of those: T. Ford is another: F. Citicorp is C. Not all big companies are one letter, for instance, General Motors is GM. And anything on the NASDAQ has to have 4 letters regardless, like MSFT, GOOG, and YHOO. (I found one place that said “M” and “I” on the New York Stock Exchange were being reserved if Microsoft or Intel ever decided to leave the NASDAQ). Other tickers are kind of interesting too: 3M is MMM, Southwest Airlines is LUV after its home base, Dallas’ Love Field.
Anyway, in August 2003 I bought some stock in SBC which had formerly been known as Southwestern Bell, (one of the “baby bells” born when AT&T was broken up). The whole reason I bought it was that no one was providing a decent interest rate at the time, but SBC was offering a 5% dividend every year. Power companies pay pretty good dividends too, but I decided against Southern Company. Things have gotten better lately with interest rates. Paypal is paying 3.9% and ING is paying 3.5%. CD’s are over 4%. But at the time nothing could come close to that, plus SBC was even going up in price, so I bought more later that year. The price has stayed about the same since then, but it does keep cranking out a nice quarterly dividend.
Well, SBC just bought its former parent, AT&T, today. Because so many people haven’t heard of SBC, they are going to keep the name AT&T for the whole company. All of the stock traded under T will become shares of SBC, I guess on Monday. But on December 1 this year, my shares will change their symbol to “T”. For Ted, of course.
Good Potato Chips
At Kroger they have Cape Cod brand potato chips that are kettle fried. One of the varieties is a reduced fat version that has 40% less fat. It is kettle fried too, but also baked. I tried them. They seemed just like regular kettle fried potato chips to me except they use little potatoes that yield small (but almost always whole) chips. They don’t come in nearly the variety of flavors (just plain), but they are worth trying, especially if they are on sale. I think they are just as good as the Ettensohn favorite, Krunchers.
Slow Amazon
After my birthday even though I really liked all of my presents, I decided I still needed to get some headphones, a U2 CD, and a Palm stylus. So I ordered them that night. The headphones and CD were ordered from Amazon, the stylus (I ended up ordering one for each of my two Palms and one extra to defray the shipping cost) from Styluscentral. Monday I got an e-mail from Styluscentral saying my order had shipped. Amazon listed my order as preparing to ship and I was not allowed to change or cancel the order. Today the styluses arrived in the mail. However I checked several times over the last couple of days and Amazon still had my order preparing to ship. When I ordered my AirClick it took weeks for it to arrive and I wasn’t looking forward to that again. I checked out buy.com and nearly placed an order for both of these things for the same price except that buy.com’s free shipping icon disappeared once the headphones were actually in my cart and they wanted $7 for that. Just before writing this entry, Amazon sent an e-mail saying the items had shipped, but that’s still four days before the item shipped. Earlier this year an order of CD’s took 6 days to ship, a headset took 5 days, and it took an amazing 26 days for the AirClick though Amazon warned it wouldn’t ship for 1-2 weeks (still took almost four).
Here’s my solution: don’t let them combine items into one shipment. Even though you would think they have just about everything in a big warehouse somewhere, apparently they have millions of warehouses with one item in each one. So you always end up waiting longer. Also, don’t hesitate to use buy.com who ship faster (on three orders this year they always shipped the next day) and are usually about the same price.