I hardly ever had parties in my bachelor days in an apartment, but when I did, I shoveled all the junk into closets, vacuumed the carpets, and cleaned the kitchen and bathroom with copious amounts of bleach till they sparkled. Neither room had a window or working (read: "ducted to the outside") exhaust fan. When the first batch of friends arrived shortly after I completed the decontamination process, the first comment I heard was: "I feel like I'm being sanitized from the inside out!"

I've got some free home-selling advise for you. Worth every cent, and you've probably heard it before. But I love the sound of my own fingers on the keyboard, so here goes:

If you've got as many "toys" as you imply lying around, get a storage locker for most of them. The place will look a lot cleaner and your buyers won't think of your house as the "hockey house" or the "garage band house" or the "video game place" or whatever. It'll save your realtor the hassle of telling you to "depersonalize" and "declutter" all in one fell swoop, and save you the annoyance too.

The cheapest way to improve your own home's marketability is to get your neighbor to fix up his. Doesn't cost you anything except figuring how to tell him a fresh coat of paint wouldn't hurt. Easier said than done, but a bad looking house nearby makes it harder to sell yours, and a nice one makes buyers think they're safe to remodel or expand without investing more than the neighborhood's max value.

Good luck, and don't forget to paint everything beige.

You can't treat a patient you never see. If you know the doctor is just gonna nag you to lose weight again, why would you go back?

I don't think the OP's trying to be sanctimonious, but admitting to a bias. As they say, that's the first step.

There are, of course, too many docs who don't concern themselves with any aspect of a patient's health till they lose weight. Or quit smoking, or drinking, or doing drugs, or whatever. Sure, all those changes can dramatically affect overall health, but the "magic bullet" approach isn't the right one. Unless one's physician takes a comprehensive interest in your health rather than just tell you to "eat less, fatty", then it's gonna be hard to get the patient to comply with any advice. After all, if the doc just thinks of you as a fat guy (or smoker, etc.) then you'll just think of the doc as the "person who nags me about my weight." Hard to work as a team with that kind of rapport.

As of this posting, the vast majority of ACs took the opportunity to make disparaging comments about the overweight. Classy.

Been there, done that. 1970s.

T-Mobile and Sprint didn't even get nominated for the Consumerist's Worst Company in America tournament this year. AT&T and Verizon both were nominated -- AT&T went all the way to the "Elite Eight" before being defeated by 2-time Tournament Champion EA.

Obviously unscientific, but the contestants were nominated and voted on by disgruntled consumers, so they are representative of "how bad" these companies are.

From a "who's best?" standpoint, in 2012 Consumer Reports ranked the majors in order: Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T. A JD Power report based on "network quality" also put Verizon at the top of the list in most regions. As far as I can tell, the Power report doesn't reflect overall satisfaction, just voice and data performance.

Spectrum auctions that favor the incumbent players in the market (who have the money to "invest" in Congressmen and the FCC) aren't exactly "arbitrary". There's another auction coming up just now, Google "spectrum auctions" to see how Congress, interest groups of various types, carriers, wanna-be carriers, and the FCC are invested in the process. A little tedious, but interesting how these things get done.

(I post with the assumption you are in the US. If not, US tipping practices do not apply, and your local custom may differ, so my comment will likewise not apply.)

Please tell me that you leave an "acceptable" tip for "acceptable" service, and you're not that guy who goes out with his co-workers and stiffs the waiter, leaving everyone else to subsidize you just out of embarrassment. (That's also usually the guy who tries to get the whole table on a single check, so he can chip in just the price of his entree, rounded down. Not the beverage, not his portion of anything he shared, like the cheesy-potato-finger-burrito-fries appetizer. Not the tax. And certainly not the tip. "That service was not excellent".)

Or the retiree who "never left more than a 10% tip, and I'm not gonna give one to these freeloading entitled kids now!"

Perhaps our lawyers should have a talk with AT&T's legal office.

On second thought, a single lawyer would probably be hopelessly outgunned against a team of lawyers who themselves wrote the loophole for the law. And the legal costs just to recover $0.61/month would be prohibitive, to say the least.

No, a class action is the only way to go.

Except for the "no class action" clause in the AT&T's contract.

Well, we're screwed, then.

I guess the only remaining argument for getting a contract-plan for wireless service -- stable pricing for the duration of the contract -- just disappeared.

Now let's just hope that the no-contract month-to-month plans don't disappear.

I might just try that . . .

"Honey, if you let me buy that Tesla, we can use it for backup electricity when the power goes out!"

My grandparents moved out to "the country" in 1940, building a house on a small corner of the then-rented-out family farm. Before they got city water, they had a well, which they maintained after going municipal. Additionally, they had what appeared to be a decorative antique Red Jacket hand operated pump over the well. The pump was, in fact, functional -- provided you already had a gallon or two of water to prime it. As a child, it was big time fun to pump and haul gallons of water to irrigate my grandmother's roses. They allowed me my amusement, despite the fact that my efforts were utterly unnecessary. A water line ran below the frost line from the house to the rose beds for that purpose.

I don't believe they had the functional hand pump in case of power outage, it just remained there from before electrification, and these were people who never decommissioned something that still worked. They "endured" the Great Depression, after all. "Witnessed from a comfortable vantage point," is more like it. Where was I? Oh yeah, even after getting the municipal water they kept the electric well pump and could cut the house over to well water if needed -- a situation that I don't believe ever arose. They had a backup for the backup, even though their most likely course of action in an outage would have been to drive to a hotel in town or stay with friends.

Wouldn't an even better idea be the "Westworld" gun? The one that only shoots bad guys? What could possibly go wrong?

I assume that if you had such a system, you'd "key" it to everyone in the home that you trusted with the weapon. The same idea as giving your whole family their own set of housekeys.

Is that working out as well for you as my one-man air-travel boycott is for me?