Batman is not amused at your lack of retail savvy

I don't know how horribly relevant this is or how many of you read comic books anymore (yes, they still publish them and yes, some of us still read them) but I just wanted to make good on the old adage about telling 100 people when something goes wrong as opposed to telling 10 when it goes right and let those of you who might shop there(for your children or for yourselves) that Bedrock Comics on Route 9 in Framingham, Massachusetts doesn't appreciate your business. Or rather, they didn't appreciate mine.

While I've had a multitude of small issues with them since I started shopping there on and off in the spring of 2007, the worst issues are as follows:

They've often told me they're going to order something for me, and when I ask them about it later they act as if this promise to order something is news to them. This doesn't seem like a big deal on it's face, but it's an annoying pain in the ass all the same and it's the first strike against them.

They've told me more than once that a book has sold out or didn't come in when there is a stack of them on the shelf right behind the register, and one of the two guys at the counter just forgot to shelve them… last week. Again, an annoyance. But shopping here has become the death of a thousand papercuts.

Finally, the very last time I was there I was rudely told to stop reading my books before buying them, but not until after they're already rung up my stack and I'd signed the credit card slip. I'm not mad that I was told not to read the books (… yes I am), I'm mad that I was told this after I had purchased (read: PAID FOR) a stack of books.

I understand a "don't read the books" policy, and I appreciate the basic premise. I DO! But as a consumer I also don't have the budget or the time to buy every single issue of everything with an interesting cover. A cover doesn't sell a story, and these aren't one-shot stories I'm reading, so I screen my books. Without screening, my collection would be full of 1 or 2 issues of a thousand some-odd incidental series, all too horrible to name. Yes, I admit your store would sell a lot more issues (assuming I bought everything I'm reading now), but without screening I have to stick to titles I know I want to buy or trade paperbacks that I already know I want; That means I'm not buying doodly squat anymore, unless it's got Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman's name on it.

I probably spend more on comic books and related merchandise in a year than I do lunches in the area, and I was spending a fair amount of that at Bedrock. The shop knows me by sight, and while they've always had smiling faces, they've never treated me like I was anything except an inconvenience to their ebay browsing time.

As much as I wanted to demand a $13.94 refund for my stack when this happened and make this into a scene for the benefit of the unwashed, smelly, mouth-breather who was happened to reading an X-Men comic (and therefore wouldn't appreciate irony if he witnessed it in all it's screaming glory), I'm too old for that sort of thing now. I've grown soft in my desire to see people get their comeuppance.

I'm simply going to write the owner a letter explaining everything I've just told you, and tell him that I'm done shopping there. Am I happy about driving to some place like Somerville, MA for books (Comicazi is an excellent local chain by the way, but they're an hour from my house) or giving a larger chain like Newbury Comics my money? Not really. Well… Yes, I am because Comicazi reminds me so much of EarthWorld Comics back home. But I can definitively state that I'm never going back to Bedrock Comics, and if you're passionate about this dirty, dirty hobby of ours, there probably isn't any compelling reason for you to either.

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Ryan McKern: i need to find a name for my new car.
Jon Yu: you name your cars?
Ryan McKern: you don't name yours?
Jon Yu: why would i name my car?
Jon Yu: it's called "my car"

I've got a lot of things that I want to write about, but right now I've just popped in to mention the following snippets while I expand other ideas into proper paragraphs

• If an apartment is in a building of condos, and the condo association doesn't allow pets, that I understand. It's landlords who own their buildings outright and simply say "no pets" without a willingness to talk about it that irk me. Yeah, your apartment will eventually rent but you're still going to have to shell out to have it painted and repaired when the tenant moves out. If you'd let me move in, I'd have probably done it for you, as well as spackled your walls, changed light bulbs, mopped the floor, and fixed that broken kitchen cabinet that you've been meaning to put a new hinge on for the last decade but just haven't found the time to touch.

• Avoid the words "quaint", "charming", "cute", and "cozy" when looking for a new apartment. They are all synonymous with "horrible".

• The Perry Bible Fellowship book is every bit as awesome as you'd expect.

• The Chronicles of Wormwood is a surprisingly thoughtful story from Garth Ennis. Yeah, it's all drinking and swearing and weird sex. There are no surprises here. But to me, this is the most direct statement about what it should mean to be a modern Christian vs. what most people actually do.

• Kikuichi knives are deliciously simple to sharpen because the steel they use is so good that it just needs a few quick passes over a 1000 grit or finer stone to remove the slight dullness that you might maybe possibly somehow have managed to wear into the "cut off your fingers without actually making you bleed" blade. Good luck finding one at a reasonable price though. The weak dollar-to-yen exchange pretty much guarantees that you're not finding anything from them for as cheap as you'd like.

• While I'm babbling about knives, the Victorinox Forged Professional line is possibly my current favorite line of german cutlery, but so incredibly hard to find in stores. They feel like a perfect marriage of Japanese knife design (little to no return or finger guard on the bolster, allowing the blade to be sharpened all the way to the end of the edge) and European style (thicker spine, flatter top, curved tip) with Solingen steel. It's designed like a Wüsthof or Henckles knife, but actually worth the cost. If the spine of the knife was rounded off for you already, it'd be the perfect European chef's knife. As it is, the 10" chef's knife is the first knife I turn to for large jobs, like this last years Thanksgiving dinner.

• Absolutely unrelated, I miss having a web-hosting account that I could run Simplelog on. While it hasn't been updated properly in almost a year, I really miss having a simple, easy to use and easy to maintain app that I'm comfortable hacking around on pushing my horribly abrupt and disjointed ramblings out to the world.

• Also, it bears mentioning that for the most part, I agree with both Zed Shaw's vitriolic shovel-spade-name-calling (because his points are usually at least in the ballpark when they're not spot on), and his points about things that the Rails "community" is doing to smash its own toes in.