As you may or may not know, I've begun selling paintings on eBay (under the clever eBay id "wriphe"). I started this last year off and on, but now that I've got a little more space around the house to work on several canvases at a time, I'm listing again a little more aggressively. I'll post here when I've got a new painting up for sale (like today, though the painting that I listed today is not the painting pictured below).

The above picture (Batmobiles are awesome) is about actual size on a 1024 x 768 monitor. Nifty, huh?

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Hell, it's my blog I can bitch if I want to. And it's Friday the 13th, so I'll kill someone with a machete while wearing a hockey mask if I want to, too.

PayPal really knows how to get my goat. One month ago tomorrow, I shipped a 24 pound package via USPS Economy Parcel Post to Argentina. (The contents were some Masters of the Universe figures I sold for a friend on eBay.) The buyer has grown impatient after a mere 3 weeks of waiting for an international Economy Parcel Post (read as "slow boat") package and has earlier this week opened a dispute with PayPal for the cost of the item. Of course, this means that PayPal has put a "temporary hold" on my account in the amount of the payment. If this were a $29.50 item, that's be no big deal. But it's not. It's a $295.00 item.

So now, my Paypal account is essentially useless to me until PayPal realizes that I did ship the item, the buyer is just being incredibly impatient, and I'm in the clear. My past experience with Paypal tells me that this will take about 90 days. Meanwhile, PayPal will be hassling me to pay them what I "owe" them (HA!) and I will be unable to take eBay payments through PayPal. As anyone who sells on eBay knows, this means that it is pointless to try to sell anything on eBay. Therefore, no income for me for 3 months.

Once again, let me say to you people out there: PayPal sucks. If you use it, learn to enjoy the sensation of someone grabbing you by the balls and squeezing while ramming a Louisville Slugger up your ass. Fuck you, PayPal.

(Granted, I am well aware that the problem in this case is not actually PayPal, but the dipshit who decided that economy international postage should arrive on his doorstep within 3 weeks of shipping. But since I'm not currently in the mood to travel to Argentina to avenge this disruption in my life, I'm attacking the messenger. PayPal doesn't care.)

On a completely unrelated note, why do MLB and the NFL have Breast Cancer Awareness Months? Exactly how many players in either of those leagues are female? In 2002, only 3,000 more women in the U.S. were killed by accidents than died from killer breasts. (That's less than 10 a day in a country with 300 million people.) When was the last time you heard of an Accident Awareness Campaign? Breast cancer isn't even the largest killer of women in America. It doesn't even make the top 5. Alzheimer's Disease is credited with killing more women than breast cancer. (However, a Alzheimer's Awareness Month wouldn't make much of an impression, as everyone who cared to promote it would forget about it by the time it arrived.) I suggest that breast cancer is so widely championed these days simply because it is the only one of the top ten killers of women that doesn't also kill large numbers of men.

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My brother and I have a debate raging about whether it is possible to sell just about anything on eBay. Check out my listing for a human arm!

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I've opened a second account on eBay. The user ID is sonofwriphe. I'm going to be using this account to sell, well, everything. I've decided to devote my existing eBay account, wriphe, to selling only my artwork.

I have my fingers crossed that I will do well selling art on eBay. (And it's making typing this very difficult.)

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Today I finally listed on eBay those coin paintings I've been working on. We'll see what comes of it. My friend Chris recently completed a great Mego head Batman painting and listed it on eBay and (as of this posting) has received no bids. It's hard to be a starving artists, I tell you.

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eBay isn't worth the trouble, people. If you have never bought or sold on eBay, don't start now. If you have, I have to recommend that you stop.

As most of you know, I've been selling off my possessions for the past year. It's not really paying the bills, but it does provide some spending cash. At least it has until the last 2 months. I'm getting about tired of having buyers not pay or scam me. And I've noticed a distinct downward trend in the amount of feedback I've been getting.

But what has me really mad is that twice in the past 2 weeks I've tried to sell my PSP (I've got a power bill to pay), and twice the auction has closed: the first time to a Nigeria scammer and the second time to a phished account. (The second time, eBay destroyed everything associated with the listing, so if I want to go through the trouble again, I have to start entirely over from scratch.)

Clearly, it's not worth the effort to sell some things on eBay. And I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth the effort to sell ANYTHING on eBay.

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I'm sitting here, working on preparing eBay listings of Happy Meal boxes and toys that my mother has collected from various restaurants over the past 30 years. I'm also listening to BBC News on NPR cover the growing crisis with the Italian presidency. These two separate and completely different activities have led to this:

Perhaps Sir Shakes-A-Lot should be the new president of Italy, the country whose Supreme Court recently declared that it's ok to rape women if they aren't virgins. He may be spastic, but at least he understands the Chivalric Code.

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True story: I'm walking around my apartment preparing to take a few photos for eBay with my digital camera. I'm also absent-mindedly munching on a handfull of Nabisco Wheat Thins. (That's product placement, by the way.)

I'm a little surprised when I pop a cracker into my mouth and bite down. Unlike your average Wheat Thin, this tastes like plastic. And it's smooth. My first instinct is that I must be chewing on a wrapped prize like you find in cereal boxes and Cracker Jack boxes.

I take it out of my mouth and find that I have just bitten through my camera's memory card. D'oh!

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Selling my old 3-3/4" G.I.Joe figures on eBay has got me thinking: What the hell was Cobra Commander doing?

The stated goals of Cobra were to destroy the American Way of Life on their way to total world domination. I'm not exactly sure how those two goals go together. To rule the world you have to overthrow Coca-Cola and Apple Pie? Rednecks and hillbillies are crucial obstacles to global monarchy? Microsoft seems to be doing fine, and Bill Gates doesn't wear a stupid blue handkerchief on his head.

On TV Cobra Commander was a coward with a speech impediment, which sort of explained why he would want to take over the world. But why did this loser have any followers? You can understand how Dr. Mindbender could combine a bunch of corpses to create a more charismatic leader. And worse yet, in the comics Cobra Commander had a son ("Billy"). Who would sleep with a freak like Cobra Commander? I'm sure Billy had some great genes; 1/2 from a sociopath megalomaniac, 1/2 from a blind, alcoholic hooker. We'll definitely be seeing Billy on Dr. Phil one of these days.

Could Cobra really have been so powerful that the entire U.S. military couldn't stop them? The solution: create a very, very small band of quasi-elite soldiers in useless specialized fields (Muskrat on Swamp Patrol?) to combat the titanic global juggernaut that was Cobra. Regular U.S. hardware and hundreds of thousands of well trained soldiers weren't good enough so the brass hired Canadians to help out in the fight. They never turned to any other country for help. (I always thought that Dial Tone looked a little French with his little mustache, but that's beside the point.) Other countries had to fend for themselves against a cohesive global menace. Russia had it's own anti-Cobra force, the October Guard, who employed even fewer members than the Joes did. Great military powers no doubt think alike. World War 3 breaks out, and the countries of the world decide that 100 soldiers with specializations in "Deceptive Warfare" and "Pirate" are going to hold the line. I feel safer already.

On a side note, the well-groomed chrome-domed Destro was supposedly a master weaponsmith and exclusive weapon supplier for Cobra. You would have thought that he could have made a laser rifle that could hit something. And yet the genius that Cobra Commander was, he kept buying from him.

I played with these toys for years and never once realized how ridiculously stupid it all was. To think that I simply accepted all of this at face value during my formative development. At least no one ever tried to pitch me on the concept of an omnipotent but impersonal universal architect when I was a child. *shudder*. Knowing is half the battle.

Yo Joe!

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Finally, I put content on the Bio pages. It took 3 versions of this site, but now my adoring public will have some scant knowledge about the evil genius behind this site. Not that they really care. (Rule #1: no one cares about your site.)

On a much more interesting note, I just sold a set of Crossbows and Catapults on eBay for $100.00. As much as I'm going to miss those l'il plastic vikings, the cash sure helps to cushion the blow. A lot.

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