He turns and says, "And when you go", and Son at the fridge turns and reveals himself to be in Goth Mode, with spiked hair, eye-liner, pale skin, etc. Dad continues "to wherever you go." The ad closes with Son dancing at a club, and one of the crowd of cell phone support guys is dancing along till "Can You Hear Me" guy glares at him.

Heh, it is pretty cute.

Help help, I have an amazingly clueless question about credit cards & interest rates. I am looking at the Amazon.com credit card, which has 0%APR for the first six months, and then a variable rate (which is currently 15.74%). Is that good? I have no idea.

Depends. Are you planning on moving debt onto the card and paying it off in six months? Then you should go for it. Are you planning on carrying a balance? Then probably not. That 15.74% is probably prime + 9 or so. That means that if interest rates continue to creep up you'll be paying more and more and more....

The question is whether you want to use credit cards for emergencies, for convenience, or for a floating line of credit. This dictates how you are going to use the cards. For the first, you're going to use it as a security blanket (or velvet cape, whatever you prefer), so you're going to want a relatively low interest rate and a big credit limit. For the second, your credit limit will probably be smaller, but the interest rate shouldn't matter because you're paying it off every month. You definitely want no-fee, though. For the last, you want a low, low interest rate, since you'll effectively be servicing a loan every month.

I need to start (re)building my credit history. It's now clean (after being very, very bad), but it's ... non-existent. (All the bills & household credit cards are in Pete's name, for the reason that my credit was HORRIBLE.)

You'll probably have as much trouble as I do. Everything is in Susan's name because I can't get a card. It's not bad credit, it's just no credit.

The Amazon card should be fine if you're going to pay it off every month. And you get a $25 gift certificate every time you charge a certain amount ($1000? $2500?)

The Amazon card should be fine if you're going to pay it off every month.

That would be the plan. Heck, that's what we do with the household credit card right now.

My mother just sent me a massively forwarded (layers and layers of forwarding)"How not to get raped" email.

How do you say "You have got to be fucking kidding me" to someone whose house you will be at in less than a week?

The ad closes with Son dancing at a club, and one of the crowd of cell phone support guys is dancing along till "Can You Hear Me" guy glares at him.

You know Sprint Guy would have just smiled at him. If Sprint hadn't FIRED HIM, that is.

My sister went to WMU!

So of course it is rainy and nasty and I hate driving in the rain in the dark and so what happens? One of the wiper blades breaks. So I get to drive to the screeEEE screeeEEE of metal brackets scraping on glass for 3 miles. I really should have replaced those blades last week. I'm still twitching.

Don't they show it in goth clubs in a never ending loop?

Here, they just show Bettie Page videos and then ambient. Over and over again. I never need to buy any of the Bettie videos, because they are burned in to my memory.

Here, they just show Bettie Page videos and then ambient. Over and over again. I never need to buy any of the Bettie videos, because they are burned in to my memory.

Huh. I guess this exposes how little I've gone to any rock/dance clubs in the last umpty years since I still associate them with Rockamerica videos blazing away in all corners.

You know Sprint Guy would have just smiled at him. If Sprint hadn't FIRED HIM, that is.

They fired SPRINT GUY! Those bastards!