I may or may not have snapped this morning after twice being the victim of an unnamed marketing firm’s arbitrary email spamming practices – once with the original spam, then again with a “follow-up” spam two days later inquiring if I still might be interested in the original spam, despite my reply, clearly asking them to remove me from their email list.

Then I may or may not have written the following reply, which I may or may not have sent to the Assistant Account Executive in question and copied her entire senior management team.

I may or may not be a little crabby.
………………………………………………………………….

Hi [redacted]!

Hope all is super well. Thanks for following up on your message from two days ago! :)

It appears there’s been a teensy email mix up here. My records show that I, in fact, responded to your achingly misdirected email regarding holiday travel with children at precisely 12:05pm on November 1st – roughly five minutes after it was received. Being that your firm negligently does not include an ‘unsubscribe’ link in your marketing spam emails, my only recourse was to reply to your email, change the subject line to “REMOVE” and, in case there was any confusion, include a short, kindly note asking you to please remove me from your distribution list. I’ll paste the message below:

“Please remove me from this distribution list.

Thank you,

Leif”

I did this, chiefly, because as any casual visitor to my blog will confirm – by ‘casual’, I’m referring to anyone that’s spent more than zero seconds perusing my blog (i.e. not you) – the only time I blog about travel with children is when they scream and cry and raise hell while sitting next to me on trans-Atlantic flights. And on those occasions, rather than, as you suggested, constructively offer ways the parents might have entertained their children so as not to disrupt 25 sleeping people, I usually fill this space by openly musing about the number of undiagnosed strokes and serious head injuries in the family’s recent ancestry.

I also did this because, in addition to your firm’s utter failure at the aforementioned lack of including an ‘unsubscribe’ link in your marketing spam (which, I shouldn’t have to explain to you, is all but mandatory these days), you seem to have failed/disregarded another base principle of marketing: targeting. See, if you take a little time to “target” your marketing spam email, not only will you likely get better results from your marketing spamming efforts, but you also won’t enrage and alienate the same bloggers you’re hoping will provide you with free exposure – and inspire them to fire off lengthy, sarcastic (yet oddly cathartic) missives after a hard night of drinking and election disappointment.

If you take the targeting step out of the marketing equation, you’re technically no longer marketing. You’re just sending random emails to tons of inappropriate people, historically known as “spamming”, much like I’m demonstrating with this message. Being that you apparently don’t read your incoming emails, I needed to find another avenue to make contact with your organization. Instead of taking a few moments to figure out who exactly in your organization should be receiving this rant, I’m just sending it to every email address I found on your website. So, using your interpretation of the concept, I am now also marketing, with, I can only assume, a similar degree of success.

In the future, I strongly recommend that you:
1.    Read your emails
2.    Carefully internalize the content of those emails
3.    Act accordingly
4.    Have lunch with a blogger and get informed about the basic dos and don’ts of sending inappropriate marketing spam to bloggers, before you burn anymore bridges

Let me know if you’re interested in having me further instruct you on the nuances of marketing to bloggers and/or hints at successfully utilizing email as communication tool.

Oh, and perhaps it bears repeating, please remove me from this distribution list.

Best,

Leif

I heartily recommend World Nomads travel insurance

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I’ve noticed a disconcerting trend lately. And by ‘disconcerting’, I mean annoying. To me. Honestly, this isn’t normally a difficult thing to accomplish, but this particular situation has gotten so out of control in the past year that it warrants both comment and mocking.

Lately, when it comes time for one to write one’s bio, say, on their Twitter profile, or break down their ‘experience’ on their blog’s ‘About Me’ page, people are increasingly turning to ridiculous superlatives and unverifiable labels to jazz things up. Now inserting a little hyperbole into one’s resume has been going on since Pope Pius II put out his 13 volume autobiography, but this new wave of blatant, dizzying exaggeration and unaccountability is starting to reach ridiculous heights. What’s more demoralizing, this transparent embellishing appears to be somewhat effective.

Probably my biggest pet peeve is when people bestow the title ‘guru’ upon themselves, meaning, by definition, “a leader in a particular field”. Really? Are you a leader in your field? And if so, does that mean the other 10,000 people claiming to be gurus in your field are also leaders? Well, that’s simply not possible. ‘Guru’ is just a nebulous, evocative designation that anyone can claim at any time without having to complete any study, training or testing. I could call myself a break dancing guru and no one could (or has the inclination to) prove me wrong. Hell, while I’m at it, let’s tack on ‘brunch guru’ too.

Another rage trigger is when people crown themselves with three or four improbable job titles simultaneously, like social media advisor, financial consultant, interior designer and sommelier. All by the age of 26. Firstly, in the unlikely event that someone is really being paid to perform all of the jobs they’re claiming, there’s no way they could be humanly doing any of them well. Secondly, when did people start getting the delusions of grandeur that allow them to believe they’re experts at anything after so little genuine experience? Albert Einstein, though he made several remarkable breakthroughs in his 20s, didn’t really hit his stride until his 40s. That was Albert “Greatest Fucking Mind of the 20th Century” Einstein. So, I can’t help but be skeptical when someone three years out of college announces that they’re writing a book about how to get rich, orchestrate the perfect marriage or find everlasting happiness.

Unfortunately, much like the heart-breaking popularity of lists, I can’t help but acknowledge that this is probably how things are going to be from here on out and if I want to continue to compete in this arena, I’d better adapt. As such, I’ve started to retool my resume, which I present now for public indulgence, demonstrating how extraordinarily talented I am without citing any supporting evidence.

Leif “It Boy” Pettersen

________________________________________

HIGHLIGHTS OF QUALIFICATIONS

* Super-genius-level communication skills (except when dealing with idiots).
* Internationally acclaimed writer, with expertise in a broad spectrum of topics, including travel, tech, wine, relationships, food, germs, bros, hos, basketball, TV, radio, juggling, acting, walking, talking, peeing standing up, skim-reading, long division, your mom, parallel parking, annoying things, omelets and boobs.
* Life-long travel badass – visited 428 countries on 11 continents and can drink the water anywhere he damn well feels like it.
* Pointing and grunting fluency in 83 languages.
* Web page design authority/guru/innovator/collaborator/masticator.
* Inventor of blogging.
* World renowned photographer, with over 100 photos posted on the “internet”.
* Adapts quickly to change and new experiences (in bed).
* Highly dependable, punctual, and efficient judge of stupid stuff.

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

- Best-selling author of guidebooks on more than two European countries.
- Work has appeared in dozens of high profile, internationally renowned, award-winning, religion-changing magazines, anthologies, books, web sites and retweets.
- Countless stirring, swoon-inducing appearances on radio, TV and online videos.
- Domestic and international electronic payments wizard, who, if he really wanted to, could have caused a global financial crisis with a touch of a button during his years working for the Federal Reserve System. But he didn’t, because he’s infallibly awesome and loves puppies.
- Consumed over 500 bottles of wine and 2,000 pints of cider, and has never puked up any of it, making him both a consummate journalist and an ideal house guest.

It’s still a work in progress, but you get the idea. If I play my cards right, 2010 will be the year I achieve previously unthinkable riches and fame while performing the bare minimum of actual skilled work, kinda like Megan Fox, except with manners.

Agonizing over travel insurance? Maybe I can help…

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The dwindling elbow room on my shit list got a lot tighter last week when about a dozen members of Romania’s so-called “news media” pissed me off so much that I didn’t even need Novocain when they drilled out my cavity later that day.

I had no idea what a bunch of hacks these people are. Pitiable, bandwagon, lazy hacks. I mean, I’ve seen people hack before, but these are the hackiest bunch of hacks that ever hacked.

Why am I resorting to cheap name-calling and a thinly-veiled theft of a great Simpsons quote? Well, because a bunch of these hacks hacked me last week during a very, very slow news day with a hack story that displayed the astounding hacky breadth of their hack journalism practices. Now I know how Britney feels. Needless to say I’ll be watching how I exit a car on those days when I choose to go without knickers from now on.

From what I can piece together, my victimization at the hands of these hacks goes like this: some desperate, reading comprehension-challenged hack found the Warnings page on my independent Romania and Moldova Travel Guide web site. They apparently read it quickly, glanced around the rest of the page for a split second, saw that I am a LP author, then made a world record setting, triple-jump hacky leap to conclusion and wrote a story attributing some of my clearly tongue-in-cheek comments to the “Lonely Planet 2008 Guide”.

Based on online posting dates and times, the ‘story’ ‘broke’ over at Mediafax, where some hack, we’ll call him Alpha Hack, went so far as to date the alleged LP comments to last Tuesday, suggesting that LP had released some kind of new, earth-shattering Romania travel guide that day, rather than admitting that this was simply the day he stumbled on my 18 month old web site during idle Googling while his Nescafe was still brewing.

The story was then re-printed by Beta Hack over at HotNews.ro, who very clearly did not bother to verify the source or even attempt to re-arrange the words from the original story in an interesting way. Nice one Beta.

Let’s start by dissecting Alpha’s and Beta’s simple tell-it-like-it-is pieces, devoid of an actual point other than to sound vaguely hurt and offended that I stated well-known facts about their country’s problems with taxis, ‘community dogs’, and pick pockets. First, and most importantly, there is no goddamn “Lonely Planet 2008 Guide”. The most recent guide to Romania is a luminary works entitled “Lonely Planet Romania and Moldova”, written by me and Robert Reid, that was released in May of 2007. Assuming one isn’t a hopeless hack, one can independently verify this fact with about 20 seconds of online research. Or better yet, they could have emailed me (since they were trolling my site, where my email address is readily available) or even contact LP if they wanted some kind of eye-catching executive quote.

Also, Alpha Hack committed the cardinal sin of pulling sentence fragments out of context and then rearranging them to suggest that comments I made about the Bucharest menu scam applied to the entire country. And as for the tip I give about keeping close tabs on your backpacks and purses, this is common sense for any country in Europe, not just Romania, but this rudimentary logic was not applied, because Romanian media hacks love nothing more than to hack out stories about how badly foreigners misunderstand their country.

So, primary blame goes to Alpha Hack for bending the facts and not bothering to verify anything before publication. Beta Hack is merely guilty of shameless, pseudo-plagiarizing of Alpha Hack, again without spending even a minute checking any facts.

Then all hell broke loose. Irresponsible, parrot-like hacks in both Iaşi and Suceava – heretofore referred to as the Hacksie Twins – “fleshed out” the story into consternated opinion pieces, written in a tone suggesting that I made everything up and none of this stuff ever happens in their idyllic cities. Again, the Hacksie Twins attributed all the quotes to the LP guide rather than my personal web site and of course neither bothered to contact me.

Then, I was informed that the local radio talk show hacks (The Hackensack Sister’s Breakfast Time Hack Show), who have even worse hack reporting instincts than their print media counterparts, spent the morning droning and bemoaning how foreigners are so ignorant of Romania.

Since not a single person in this motley crew of feeble, hack-happy ‘journalists’ bothered to check a source, they simply succeeded in exacerbating Alpha Hack’s criminally inaccurate article, drawing newer, wildly less accurate conclusions of their own, and writing off my gentle warnings as complete fiction.

Despite the firm conclusions drawn without a minute of research, in reality every single warning on that page has either happened directly to me or was reported by several first and second hand sources, either directly to me or through reader’s emails sent to LP. Hey, I appreciate national pride just as much as the next guy, and I’m painfully aware of how easily the Romanian national conscious gets bruised (I’ve had to start storing my Romanian hate mail on an 80 gig external drive to free up that space on my laptop), but to sit there and suggest that actual events that happened to me are fantasy just because you don’t agree with them is just flat out arrogant and irresponsible. Is this kind of denial of reality in place of prudent investigation really the course of Romanian journalism?

Furthermore, these are not conclusions that I arrived at while sitting alone in an office in America. I f*cking lived in Romania for a cumulative 16 months and have traveled here for several months more. During that time I visited nearly 60 Romanian cities (see the full list here), repeatedly in several cases. There’s a very good chance that I’ve traveled the country more thoroughly and written about its tourism offerings more repetitively than any other modern journalist, local or foreign. My conclusions we drawn from these travels/experiences in addition to lengthy frank discussions with locals who unanimously agreed that the roads are shit, taxis are a problem in Bucharest, ‘community dogs’ exist, emergency medical care could be better and restaurants in Bucharest sometimes try to cheat tourists. Anyone who wants to deny any of this is more than welcome to do so, but since I have voluminous evidence to back-up my comments, you’ll have to present voluminous evidence to back-up yours. That’s how non-hacky journalism works. Even travel writers that have punched their ticket to hell know that.

Finally, none of this uproar would have occurred if the first author had simply included this quote from the introduction of my Warnings page:

“I’ve bobbed and weaved through my fair share of scams and bribe solicitors and I’ve heard loads of anecdotal tales from others, so I’d be remiss in not sharing these experiences with you, even though you’ll probably never encounter them yourself. So, let’s get on with the stories.”

I added the bold text just now for emphasis. Perhaps I should bold it on the web site too to assist reading comprehension-challenged hacks.

As a result of this cheap smear campaign, I’ve gone back and edited the Warnings page. It needed some updates anyway (i.e. the number of ‘community dogs’ in Buch seems to have dropped after the city-wide clean-up for the NATO summit this spring), but mostly I had to take out a lot of the humor and clarify the text so that future visiting members of the Romanian Association of Media Hacks and Hearsay Artists won’t jump to conclusions when they find my web site during a smoke break.

Ya bunch of hacks.

Apart from that unnecessary drama, this Romania tour was absolutely perfect. Traveling the country in May is a real pleasure. Perfect weather and not too hot, though it did hit 90°F one day, which has me nervous about the kind of heat I’ll be facing when I return here for three weeks in July.

I’ll follow-up in a few days with a list of sights and experiences that made this trip so great so as to cleanse the palate from this unpleasant post.

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Yeah, yeah, I’m posting twice this week, so just get over it already. Take your non-mouse hand, reach up and close your mouth before something flies in there and dies.

This relative flurry of posting is partly to make up for my rare, if ever, post frequency while I’m in Romania for four weeks in May and partly because I’m consumed in a stuttering rage of pissed offtitude!! If I hadn’t already launched my stress toy out my 26th story window during last week’s anti-travel writer BS, I’d be liquefying it right now as I transform into the Incredible Freelance Writer Hulk. Yeeeaarrrrgggjackhole!!

The incapacitating feelings of wrath that I’m experiencing right now are heightened because I feel obligated to be pissed off on behalf of every established and aspiring freelance travel writer in regards to the self-righteously obtuse comments recently made by New York Times travel editor Stuart Emmrich about their policy of not accepting stories that were written on the strength of any complimentary services (airline tickets, hotels, meals, etc.). Furthermore, he highlighted a point that I wasn’t aware of previously, that being the Times won’t accept any stories from a freelancer who has ever accepted a comp in modern history! Are you f*cking kidding me??

Well, to be fair, there were caveats. Like say the freelancer in question was bitten on the face three times by a Burmese King Cobra, in which case the Times is willing to overlook that the freelancer didn’t crawl out of the jungle, down the nearest village, hand over his emergency c-note to a black market money-changer so as to pay for the antidote out-of-pocket.

This is an old peeve of mine that has intensified as I’ve become crabbier and devoid of all empathy in the past few weeks, but it’s being especially tweaked because it’s coming from someone that I’d hoped would know better. Further to Mr. Emmrich’s comments, in case a hapless freelancer has any questions or needs clarification about possible loopholes, the Times has posted their ethics handbook online. Fair enough. For most forms of journalism, particularly for salaried employees, you gotta have something like this. But when dealing with freelancers, particularly in the arena of travel where research expenses are prohibitively high, you’ve gotta find a middle ground.

I don’t know what the Times pays for one-off articles, but I know the national average paid by newspapers is $200-300. I’ll give the NYT the benefit of the doubt, since they’re the Times and presumably have a little bit more money to throw around, and just guess that they pay $400-500 per piece. (Anyone that knows better, please comment below.) Nevertheless, this compensation doesn’t come anywhere near covering the expenses of, say, a five night trip to Copenhagen ($1,500-2,000), never mind the freelancer’s time investment (let’s call it six days of travel and two days of writing), which should be, at a minimum, $25 per hour (or $1,000 per week), what with the self-employment tax and other cruel penalties freelance writers have to deal with like costly individual health insurance that I swear I’ll look into just as soon as I get back from Romania, mom.

I point this out this no-brainer fact, because on the subject of pitching the NYT, Emmrich innocently offers that “The Travel section needs reporters to identify these stories and ferret them out, not people who just want to write up their vacation experiences.”

Oh really? Does it get a little exasperating that all you receive in your submissions inbox are hacks traveloguing their trip to Colonial Williamsburg? Are you wondering why most of these submissions are unprintable, clichéd amateur nonsense? Well since you seem to be genuinely baffled, I’ll tell you: it’s because any idiot can see that it’s mathematically impossible to make a living pitching to you. You can’t expect a professional writer to pay for expenses out-of-pocket for all of the trips they take year round, and then turn around and pay them the shit fee you pay for one-off articles. Maybe a hungry newbie will eat a $700 one-time loss for a NYT byline, but not a professional who has the rest of the year(s) to think about.

So, now that you’ve alienated 98% of the people that have the skills and qualifications to produce a NYT-worthy piece with your sanctimonious ban on comps, please don’t act surprised when all you receive are missives fired off by ambitious stay-at-home moms. (Not that’s there’s anything wrong with that. I love stay-at-home moms, particularly when they stay at home with their shrieking two year olds, rather than sitting next to me on a trans-Atlantic flight.)

To sum up, you can’t have it both ways. Either you’re gonna have to accept stories that involved comps – and have faith that the writer has the capacity to objectively review a comped service – or start reimbursing freelancers for their travel expenses. Or pay an upfront fee large enough that the writer actually has something left to buy groceries when all is said and done. We’re talking upwards of $1,500 for a short domestic destination piece and $3,500 or more for international destination features. If you expect everyone else around you to bow down to your rules on comps, you’re going to have to start putting out.

Better yet, cut the diplomatic crap, stop pretend-coaching potential NYT submitters and own up to the fact that in a perfect world you’d rather not deal with freelance submissions at all. This way you don’t have to spend one morning every six weeks slogging through the submissions inbox, deleting all those stories about Orlando and Philadelphia’s cheese steak stands, and people won’t waste time and energy sending those stories to you in the first place. After all, as Mr. Emmrich happily admits in the same piece, he has an overflowing pool of gifted, NYT salaried writers on hand that he can tap if he’s ever in a jam and no one can deny that they’re a lot easier to work with than a hodgepodge of time-consuming, one-off freelancer pieces.

Finally, Mr. Emmrich, with all due respect, clearly you’ve enjoyed the security and bulging paychecks of the NYT for a little too long to be authoritatively disseminating sage wisdom on the subject of freelance travel writing. The next time you feel compelled to lecture aspiring freelance travel writers, it would behoove you to emerge from your insulated, salaried Editorial Fortress of Solitude and bring yourself up to speed on the realities of freelance travel writing of the current century. Thank you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have business errands to run that cannot be done until I’ve pancaked over the alarming green tone my skin has taken on and replaced the torn rags that were perfectly presentable Old Navy clothes when I started composing this diatribe.

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Actually, this is a dual post about how pissed off I am about the clusterf*ck happening in Iraq and how everyone should go out and rent NO END IN SIGHT before voting in the presidential elections later this year (apologies to non-American readers, though you all should still see the movie just in case you needed to renew your loathing for the current administration).

If you’re the kind of person that values zero-pulled-punches reporting, but thinks that the over-dramatization and sarcasm in Michael Moore’s films tend to overly distract from the facts, you’re gonna love (to hate) this movie. There’s no carefully selected extreme-case profiles, there’s no flotilla to Cuba to seek treatment and five cent drugs, there’s no guy in a bird costume trying to draw attention to gun control… This is simply a matter-of-fact, indisputable series of interviews with several of the original main players of the Iraq occupation who were either duped, pressured into leaving or fired for trying to avert the disastrous situation that has unfolded in Iraq.

Here’s a plot synopsis that I stole from IMDb: “The first film of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq’s descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality and anarchy, NO END IN SIGHT is a jaw-dropping, insiders tale of wholesale incompetence, recklessness and venality. Based on over 200 hours of footage, the film provides a candid retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by high ranking officials such as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine (in charge of Baghdad during the spring of 2003), Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, and General Jay Garner (in charge of occupation of Iraq through May 2003), as well as Iraqi civilians, American soldiers and prominent analysts. NO END IN SIGHT examines the manner in which the principal errors of US policy, the use of insufficient troop levels, allowing the looting of Baghdad, the purging of professionals from the Iraqi government and the disbanding of the Iraqi military largely created the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today.”

By the end of the movie you’ll be so bent out of shape by the antics of Paul Bremer (dizzying series of totally avoidable f*ck-ups), Donald Rumsfeld (staggering, condescending duplicity), Dick Cheney (acute megalomania) and George Bush (where do I start?) you’ll wanna go out, buy a taser, a bushel of super-fast growing bamboo and 50 feet of hose, then [the remainder of this paragraph was deleted when I was reminded that offering suggestions of retribution and creative torture methods against high ranking officials, even in absurdist jest, may get me arrested because the First Amendment was unofficially annulled in 2001 for everyone with a net worth of less than 50 million dollars].

So, if you’d like a disturbingly factual account of the Iraq occupation and you know how to vent your rage in a socially acceptable manner, it would behoove you to seek out this film. If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can watch it on you PC right now.

Viewing tip: remove all throwable, breakable items from the room before hitting ‘play’.

UPDATE: NO END IN SIGHT has been nominated for an Oscar in the ‘Documentary Feature’ category.

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You know what really pisses me off? Idiots. We’ll get to that in a second.

Meanwhile, you know what pisses me off slightly less? Total ass-spanking humiliation.

I was duly informed this week via the South by Southwest Interactive Festival discussion panel selection committee that I am officially less interesting than pet bloggers.

Pet f*cking bloggers.

How’s that for a kill-shot to the self-esteem? Right in the eyeball.

The SXSWi committee could have had me and several other distinguished travel bloggers come and hold court at the festival in March, sign innumerable autographs, kiss babies and add a desperately needed sex-factor to the proceedings, but they decided, unimaginably, that a pet blogging discussion panel would be more stimulating.

So, let me get this straight… Aunt Tippy’s pictures of her cat “Mr. Droopy Pants” wearing a Garfield sweater vest that says “Where’s the lasagna?” is better blog material than me single handedly stranding a dangerously drunk hitchhiker and an asshole gas station attendant together for (at least) eight hours in the middle of nowhere during a Romanian winter? Did I somehow cross over into the Bizarro Internet?

It’s enough to drive a guy to drink (more).

Returning to the subject of idiots pissing me off, what kind of jackhole flies all the way from Montreal to Romania only to get so bent out of shape that he missed out on seeing a replica of the set of “Dallas” (70′s American TV show for those of you too young or too non-American to know) and a mini Eiffel Tower built by a crazy guy with too much money all because I didn’t list it in my LP guidebook that he felt compelled to compose a slam review on the Amazon page?

But that wasn’t enough, before this attention-starved crackpot could post the review, he had to flame bait me with an email to make sure I knew he was going to post the negative review, just in case I wasn’t in the habit of reading the Amazon reviews (which I hadn’t up until that point – who reviews guidebooks anyway?).

I’m half pissed off at myself to start. The first rule of dealing with attention-starved crackpots that write you hate mail is to ignore them. You never reply. Why? Because they’re attention-starved crackpots, and one email from you, no matter how sensible or logical is not going to de-attention-starve or de-crackpot them. So, I was a f*ckwit for even answering his flame bait email, telling me how I’d utterly failed as a guidebook author for not listing the set of “Dallas” as a genuine Point of Interest (POI) in a guidebook about Romania.

Also, I was drunk when I received his email and briefly confused his trite tourist trap needs (meant for day-tripping families from Bucharest by the way, not tourists that traveled 8,000 miles to ostensibly ‘visit Romania’) with another trite tourist trap in Transylvania. Anyway, it’ll come as no surprise that I only succeeded in further attention-starving and crackpotting him by gently pointing out that maybe his time in Romania might have been better spent seeing monasteries, castles and the spectacular outdoors.

Next time go to Disneyland, jackhole.

Oh one other thing, if I may briefly speak on behalf of all guidebook authors… Guidebooks have this little thing called ‘word count limits’. Now it just so happens that I’m an expert on why you shouldn’t exceed word count limits. Guidebook word count limits are set by the publisher after weighing several variables about the destination in question. As such, guidebook authors can only fit a finite number of sights and restaurants in the guidebook before we run out of space. So if you find a mini Eiffel Tower or what you’ve determined to be a great restaurant that isn’t in the book, it’s not necessarily because the author did sloppy research, jackass! Maybe, just maybe, these places were not listed because there simply wasn’t enough space to include them and not due to the author’s flawed work ethic and expertise. Also, perhaps we just didn’t think it was appropriate to include the Hard Rock Café in a Romania travel guidebook, capice?

I don’t openly muse about your voluminous character flaws (except right now), so don’t do the same to me or I’m likely to get pissed off.

Guidebook authors 1, attention-starved crackpots 0.

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F*cking Italy!!!

OK, OK… Let’s just calm down and try to discuss this like rational, levelheaded F*CKING ITALY!!!!!

Here’s Italy’s latest piss me off endeavor:

Last April, I rented a car from a so-called “car rental agency” in Florence through a broker web site called Nova Car Hire, to use for my Lonely Planet research trip (I’m omitting the name of the car rental company until the situation has been resolved). The car rental office is located in the historic center of Florence.

For those of you who have not had firsthand, piss me off, Italy driving experience, most cities have restricted areas in the historic center where only approved vehicles can go. This is so the tiny streets aren’t constantly grid-locked, thereby making more room for the double-wide butted tourists to stagger blindly down the street, get in my way and piss me off.

The Italians enforce access to this restricted area by setting up little cameras and shooting photos of license plates as cars enter the area. At the end of the day the newest/dumbest guy at the police station is supposed to sort through these photos and check them against a list of approved cars. Anyone audacious enough to drive into the historic center without permission gets a ticket sent to their home in the mail, but only after deviously waiting seven months so you have no hope of contesting the violation – que piss me off, no?

In the case of my rental car agency in Florence, I was clearly informed that all of their cars had universal approval to drive in the historic center, because if they didn’t no one could ever return their cars. Sounds pretty reasonable and straightforward, doesn’t it? Ah ha! That is where you are wrong idiota! This is Italy! Making sense is no permesso qua! Pissing people off, however, is a national sport!

Since Italian bureaucracy can’t distinguish between logic and absurdity, I have taken the time to list all of the problems with this deeply flawed, photo-cop, cross-referencing solution:

1. Half of all Italians can’t be bothered to read their email (the other half don’t reply to emails). And that’s if their internet is working, which it doesn’t for two or three days in an average week. So depending on email for transferring this vital anti-piss me off information is inconsistent at best, hopeless at worst
2. This is a hugely detail oriented system, and Italians, Buddha love ‘em, are not inherently detail oriented – except when it comes to food and espresso preparation, where they are admirably fastidious.
3. Even in ancient Rome, they could process and deliver a traffic violation across town in less than seven months, for f*ck’s sake!
4. No one in an Italian position of authority gives two shits about pissing people off as a direct result of their indisputable ineptitude.

Not surprisingly the system has broken down in my case. When I drove my car into Florence’s historic center to return it on April 30th, not only did the new/dumb cop not successfully locate my car on the list of approved cars, but when he sent the ticket to the car rental agency they clearly didn’t even bother to read the ticket. If they had read the ticket, they might have said:

“Oh $hit, that useless piece of over-sugared espresso Fabrissio f*cked up again and ticketed one of our cars. Send this ticket back. While you’re at it, tell Fabrissio that’s he’s a jackhole and that I’m going to sleep with his wife over lunch.”

But of course that didn’t happen because that would have required the car rental guy to stop thinking about his cigarettes, cell phone and Fabrissio’s wife for a minute. Instead, he just charged my credit card for the violation and went back to his long career of pissing people off and being useless.

So not only am I f*cked, but I’m double pissed off because after this alarming series of group incompetence, not surprisingly, I can’t get any of these people to read/answer my emails contesting the bogus violation. And before you ask, calling them is useless too, because no one who answers the phone in Italy actually has the power to do anything. And the people who answer phones are not allowed to speak directly to the people with power, because then the people with power would have to do something.

Meanwhile, I’ve filed a dispute through my credit card company. Ironically, the gross ineptitude and slo-mo functioning speed of the Italian bureaucracy is probably the only thing that will get my money back. My credit card company gives the merchant 30 days to reply to a disputed charge, if they don’t reply, they just take the money back. I figure these people won’t even read the dispute email until well into January and reply some time after Easter by which time I’ll have my money back and I’ll have moved on and be pissed off about something new.

[UPDATE: Someone actually answered my email! Except they only did so to tell me two lies: 1) That my car rental place is not located in the restricted area of Florence (click the map on the right to expose the lie and, as a bonus, see the name of the car rental agency in question) and 2) that it's possible to reach the car rental office without driving through the restricted area (again see map for actual fact). I'm still contesting and even sent them a copy of this map, though I'm starting to suspect that this may not be a case of staggering negligence, but instead be a lazy scam on the part of the car rental agency to soak customers out of an extra US$83. I can't decide which pisses me off more.]

Moving on, I’m in the throes of a post Michael Moore film Pissed Off-athon. I watched “Sicko” a few nights ago and all of a sudden I’m regretting moving back to America. Now I’m fully aware that Moore’s theatrics, careful editing and subject selection is designed to illicit maximum pissed off-titude (otherwise no one would go see the film), but that doesn’t change the fact that all this showmanship is based on documented fact.

How many other First World (and fading) countries have a government-supported heath care system meticulously designed to soak people dry with membership fees, co-pays and deductibles and then not help them?? It’s infuriating, not to mention a goddamn embarrassment. And they know this, so rather than making some changes so they don’t look like sadistic f*ckwits, they cover for their failings by spreading lies about other countries’ dangerously inadequate heath care systems, like those conniving Socialists in Canada and the U.K.

Socialist?? No God, noooooo!!!! Anything but that! Cancel the road trip to Winnipeg! I’ll die for sure!!! OK, these systems have their own flaws, but is anyone denied care? And did you know that Slovenia has better heath care than we do? Really? Slovenia?

I can’t remember the last time I was this pissed off. Oh wait, I know, it was after I watched “Fahrenheit 9/11″. You can’t imagine how relieved I was to be in Australia at the time. “You can’t get me Bush! I’m in Australia! Ha-ha!!” But now I’m back in America for reasons I’m having trouble remembering at the moment. The politicians are right, they can commit any atrocities they want, the public will eventually forget.

So, having no reasonable means of health insurance in this country myself, which would be largely useless anyway, what are my options when I get genuinely sick? Well, according to Moore, I have several. Sneak into Canada, draft someone to be my common law wife (I’m taking applications) and get all the healthcare I need all for the price of two tanks of gas; fly to Slovenia; swim to Cuba or throw myself off a bridge.

F*ck you American healthcare system!! F*ck you and your poorly cared for mothers!!!

[Pant, pant, pant.]

Finally, as I alluded to last week, even though this story broke nearly a year ago, I’m still pissed off about my stupid, wasteful, idiotic government flying 12 billion dollars in cash to Iraq, leaving one sleepy guy to guard it and then acting genuinely surprised when the money disappeared.

So what if it wasn’t US taxpayer money? That’s 12 billion dollars! There was about 12 billion betters ways to put that money to good use.

Even the stupidest kid, born of the stupidest family, in the stupidest town, in the stupidest corner of Alabama, when asked (while riding the shortest bus) what might happen if someone left 12 billion dollars sitting around unguarded, would’ve said “people will take it and use it to buy Mercedes and fund more terrorism, stupid”.

Every year our government redefines stupid. If there was a Stupid Olympics, we’d hold every world record. If they built cars that ran on stupid, Los Angeles would have better air quality than Reykjavik. If there was a Stupid American Idol, there’d be a 200 million-way tie.

What next? Vehemently deny that global warming is happening so we can ride the gravy train of gas and oil for a couple more decades before the whole planet becomes a lifeless, over-heated Water World where we live on rafts and have to filter and re-drink our own pee? No one could be that stupid, right?

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We Americans have a lot of pent up anger. The reasons why this is the case could fill a Michael Moore trilogy, so I’m officially handing that task off to him.

Meanwhile, how’s an ordinary guy supposed to vent this tidal wave of boundless fury, aside from demolishing the occasional pay phone with one’s bare hands? Complain like an early-onset cranky, paranoid old bastard, that’s how.

Accordingly, I’m starting yet another updated-when-I-feel-like-it KB series: “This Is What’s Pissing Me Off Today”. Anything is fair game: News stories, personal offenses, Berliner Schadenfreude, intellectual property thieves, people who don’t signal when they turn left in front of me, you name it.

So let’s get on with the wrath already:

• “‘Hidden costs raise’ US war price” – Holy $hit! Hold on, the report may have been politically motivated. Der! Of course it was politically motivated! Politically motivated to piss me off! This is the quote that made me spit out a perfectly good mouthful of coffee: “The Democrats calculate that between 2002 and 2008 the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan will have cost the average US family of four about $20,900.” That is some Grade ‘A’ piss me off material right there. Imagine what I could have done with that 21K? The mind swirls – and then it gets more pissed off.

• Have you been enjoying my “Don’t Go There” series? Funny, sarcastic stuff, eh? What? I should write a book with this theme? That’s a brilliant idea! Gosh, I hope some jackhole hasn’t already stolen the concept from me, cuz that would really piss me off!!! How much can I sue for blatant intellectual property theft? What do ya think, ten million? Fifteen after you throw in emotional distress and a pissed off-induced stroke? First things first, I’ve gotta sleuth the real name of this so-called “Julian L’Estrange”. That $hit is so made up. Piss me off.

• The TV writer’s strike here in America is pissing me off hardcore. I didn’t move back here so I could watch the same episodes of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” three times in four weeks. Who’s in charge of programming these reruns? Someone sympathetic to the writers obviously, because I’m getting more pissed off every day. I’ve actually been reduced to reading a book for Christ’s sake! Honest to God, a book!! Grrrr!

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