But then there are the e-mails. When you, almost inevitably, get outbid you get the e-mail from eBay shrieking that YOU HAVE BEEN OUTBID and BID AGAIN NOW!! DON’T LET IT GET AWAY!! AUGHHHHH YOU FOOL!!! And as if that weren’t enough, when the auction finally comes to an end, you get another soul-sucking “tsk tsk” e-mail from eBay to remind you that you lost.

So usually I just look for Buy-it-nows. What’s funny is that eBay then sends you the e-mail congratulating you for winning. Oh yes, I am quite the winner and that made my day. Don’t I feel like a worthy person. What a joke.

I hate eBay.

The funniest thing about this particular call was that as I was hanging up, I heard the caller raise his voice angrily and say “WE AREN’T TELEMARKETERS!” Hmm… you called me up and asked for money… let’s both get out our dictionaries, shall we? Presumably he would have followed that up with a claim that he was an ex-officer, or family member, or something along those lines. Sadly, it probably works on a lot of people who are just in the midst of their impulse to hang up, or they wouldn’t do it. Me, though, I just hung up. It was that line that made me certain it was a scammer, and although I then was kind of morbidly curious about how he would play it out, it wasn’t enough for me to waste any more time with these idiots.

For the most part what charity scam artists are doing is not illegal. They can get in trouble if they run afoul of laws governing phone harassment or outright fraud – IF someone catches them AND can prove it AND bothers suing – but it’s not illegal simply to run an inefficient charity. And in the eyes of the IRS, that is all they are. They get repeatedly exposed and talked about on the news, and people seem to assume that they’re gone after that, but nothing really happens to them. They might start using a different name (scam organizations almost always use a large number of different names), or reshuffle their organization, or move to a different state… or not. And actually, those tricks can work even if they are successfully sued.

As long as they report everything correctly to the IRS, up to and including their abysmal fundraising-expense-to-program ratio, they are fine. Right now, the onus is on the prospective donor to look up the organization’s financial records.

What, you don’t think there ought to be more government regulation on this, do you, you Commie?

I kid, Pinko. You may be in luck. When I was attending seminars in the nonprofit field, I was repeatedly told to expect increased regulation from Congress in the next 5 or 10 years. People are sick enough of hearing about the abuses of nonprofit status that the demand for increased regulation has been growing.

In the meantime, for looking up records on charities, I like Give.org (the BBB’s nonprofit-watching arm). The American Institute of Philanthropy is another very good one, although you have to subscribe to get their detailed reports. It would be worth it if you had a lot of dough to dispense, though. Charity Navigator is ok, but be careful – unlike the BBB and AIP, which both use guidelines and analysis when evaluating charities, Charity Navigator only gives you the public information from the organization’s IRS 990 form, without any additional human interpretation. I did encounter a charity that manipulated their 990 to show one of their fundraising expenses – their staff salaries – as a program expense. Their argument was that they were employing people in need who would be unemployed otherwise, and therefore the salaries were a charitable program. I didn’t buy that argument, and neither did the AIP, who gave them an “F.” But the same organization looked great in Charity Navigator since they told the IRS their salaries were a program expense. And that’s only one way to cheat. Another one is to, for example, report donations of worthless goods.

Avoid GuideStar, which charges a hefty premium subscription fee to offer you what is primarily public information from the 990 along with mission statements and whatnot that the organization submits to the site themselves. If you can get their site to work, which I usually couldn’t.

So what are you looking for? Well, the BBB and AIP give you a rating based on their own established guidelines, if they have enough information. The BBB also publishes the charity’s response to the rating, if they send one, so you can decide for yourself whether or not they’re actually operating in good faith. If you’re looking at financials, a nonprofit really should be able to hit about 80% or more of their funds going to programs. You might be a little more forgiving of this if they are just getting established or suffered some kind of setback beyond their control, but that’s up to you. By contrast, I’ve seen some of the scams report program expenditures in the neighborhood of just 10-20%.

Finally, none of this applies to religious organizations since they are not required to report anything to anyone. Occasionally you see one get nailed for fraud, but for the most part they can do whatever they want and tell you whatever they want about what they’re doing. They can, however, voluntarily submit documentation to the watchdog groups. I would not even consider donating to a large operation that did not do this. Otherwise, it’s simply the safest scam around.

One merchant that I opted for all e-mail with was for my Citibank credit card. All went fine for a while, but then, insidiously, sometime in the last couple of years they began mailing me a letter every month to inform me that they had e-mailed my card statement notice.

It reminds me a bit of bosses who call you to ask if you’ve gotten the e-mail they just sent.

Oh, and the best part of this reminder notice is that, in order to ensure there is absolutely no confusion about which card they’re referring to, they also print my account number on each one. Which… yup… necessitates use of the shredder.

Thud suggested there was probably a second option on their website to opt-out of the reminder notice. There isn’t. But they do cheerfully remind me that I have already enrolled in their “All-Electronic Program”!

Still thinking I must be imagining things and that the sawdust may have been incense ash (the two look remarkably similar), I sealed the box in a freezer bag and set it aside. Later I checked again, and not only was there more sawdust in the bag, there was a hole in it. Yes: one of the bastards had decided to eat his way right out. I also found a body, though. I guess the world outside the bag proved too inhospitable.

It’s funny how surprised you can be by the presence of termites in something that is, to be fair, quite obviously made of wood. (For example, Thud’s reaction was “OMFG! Gross!!”) Anyway, the moral is, I guess, to inspect your newly-acquired wooden knick-knacks for termites.

The place I bought it from has already shipped a replacement, and yes, they said they checked it first.

If you can tear your eyes away from the train wreck at the top, be sure to take in the “join” link on the left hand side, which starts out as unreadable red and white text over a full-color American flag image… complete with /blink’s bastard child… which turns to terror-alert code-red red on mouseover.

THEN there are the color and font size choices for the content – big, little, black, red – oh look, a little green – as you scroll down the page. Classic.

So I went and looked up how to make garlic-infused oil. It turns out that it’s super easy to make, as you might expect, and works great for stir fry.

It is also, apparently, one of the very best ways to culture yourself a lively botulism colony. Huh. Although the sites I was reading indicated that it was pretty safe if kept in the back of the refrigerator and used within two weeks, I think I’ll skip it.

Commercially-made garlic oil has strict preparation standards to help keep it safe. However, if you see any at a farmer’s market, I’d avoid it.

Strangely enough, a week ago I had the idea of looking to see if there was a dojo in Blacksburg, and even more strangely, there is. I went to my first class this week.

Thud asked me if it was like the karate class he went to for a while when he was a teenager. “Well,” I said, “I don’t know, I don’t have anything to compare it to.”

“It was like band camp.”

“I don’t know. It was fairly structured, but I never went to band camp either.”

“The instructor was like a drill sergeant.”

“No.”

I went in really having no idea what to expect. I only knew aikido by reputation. I also thought it would be best to try to keep my cup empty, to not spend time thinking up expectations that would probably be wrong.

Aikido class turns out to be sort of like dance class, except that you or your partner always ends up on the floor. And there’s a lot of bowing. What I really admire about the way the classes are run is the emphasis on humility and cooperation. So no, it really doesn’t bear any resemblance to classes where the instructor barks orders at rows of students.

I ended up kind of sore – although I have had worse – and I seem to have strained one of my toes while trying to learn how to fall backwards. Other than that I am pretty keen to continue.

I tried again this morning, and… it did. There is just one entry, and it says:

“elfnoodles is my wife’s blog”

Ah. So it is thudfactor who wears the e-pants in this family. I am a put-in-my-place elf.

And what does Googlism now think of thudfactor? Again, just one entry:

“thudfactor is fun”

I guess…