It’s not a pretty picture.

Here’s the list — and yes, I have flown most of these in the past year. The list isn’t long enough, and the sniping isn’t nearly enough vicious.

IFC is running “Trail of the Screaming Forehead,” a camp spoof of 1950’s low-budget horror films that  (my honorary Uncle) Rich Roesberg swears is deserving of your time, and of a plug on this blog. It’s on this Friday, so you and I can be the judge of that.

Whatever you think of President Obama’s policies, there’s no arguing the degree of technological change he and his administration have embraced. His campaign was the first to embrace social media on a large scale and win with it. Howard Dean’s campaign was first to do Meet-Ups and micro-donation campaigns. Building upon that, Obama’s campaign added Twitter, Facebook, text messaging and more. Given that increasingly this is how people communicate, I’m glad that the person at the top recognizes it. (And I remember Bush the First’s stunned appreciation of a supermarket scanner that seemed to magically code in his prices! That faux pas showed how out of touch he was.)

I just finished reading a New York Times magazine profile of Obama that began with his signing a piece of legislation with eight different pens, so that there were as many as possible to distribute to supporters. The photo above, from Tech Crunch, shows a man named Sylvester Cann IV asking the president to sign his iPad at a campaign event for Washington Senator Patty Murray. Which he did. Which makes me wonder what gifts future supporters will get, because the pen is going the way of the buggy whip. Two weeks ago on “Fringe,” part of the plot line was the obsolescence in the show’s alternate universe of pens. How did the agents know they’d found the right place to find the culprit? They discovered people using pens. As we do with LPs, some day we will be explaining to young people just what a pen was, and how it was used.

It’s bad enough when public officials misappropriate funds. (“Misappropriate” being jargon for “misdirect” — or “steal.”)

But when the money you’re “misappropriating” is from low-income people, and is intended to assist them with housing, when, in other words, the intention of the money is to help keep families off the street, and so therefore your ill-gotten goods may be shoving people out into a life of homelessness — then you’re loathsome. I’ve seen what despicable is, and it is you.

Here’s what it looks like.

In which a certified trainer takes down Jillian Michaels as “not actually a real fitness trainer — she’s an actress playing the role of fitness trainer on TV and in a line of popular DVDs.”

Choice excerpts:

• “Typical viewers think she’s great, yet the collective jaws of professional trainers hit the floor after witnessing her regular displays of poor technique and unsafe training practices.”
• “The biography on her website goes on and on about her multimedia endeavors, but there is not a single mention of any health-and-fitness education or credentials.”
• “…a bubble on the cover exclaims, ‘Lose up to 5 pounds a week!’ … Sure, if you start off weighing more than a Smart Car.”

I’m forwarding this to my son the weight trainer, and my friend writing the play about the unhappy housewife trying to get fit. I think both of them will love this.

It’s not just hot, it’s sharp! And it’s only a hundred bucks! Get on this, friends. (But be careful when you do.)

In our last installment, I saved $72 by reading my auto service bill. Here’s the story, and as cautionary tales go, I think it’s a timeless one.

In today’s episode, I catch the supermarket overcharging me — twice — and go and get $37 back on just two items.

I do the grocery shopping once a week. I don’t mind doing it, and I get the added benefit of making sure that high fructose corn syrup doesn’t come into the house, at least not on my watch. On Sunday, I asked the supermarket butcher for the large flounder in his display case ($3.39 a pound), and a roast ($3.99 a pound). This particular butcher was a young guy I didn’t recognize. He got those two items together, along with the rest of my order, and soon the kids and I, having completed our shopping, checked out. Whereupon I learned that the total came to $186.44. This was a surprise. Every week, the groceries run me $150, give or take a couple of bucks. I’ve pretty much got it down to a science. Sometimes, as when we’re going out of town, it’s far less. But 20% more? I couldn’t figure out how.

Later, when I had already begun cooking dinner, I figured out how. Here’s what I discovered after comparing my groceries against the receipt:

• While, yes, there was flounder wrapped inside the one paper, just as I requested, it was labeled as Wild-Caught Coho Salmon. Price: $10.99 a pound — more than three times what it should have been.
•  Also, the roast was indeed a roast, but it was labeled as “Beef Loin New York Steak Bone In” at $9.99 a pound — more than twice what it should have been.

So I called the store. The phone rang and rang and rang and rang and rang and rang and rang and rang. And rang. And rang. I refused to hang up. I left it ringing away merrily on speaker phone for about 15 minutes while I prepared dinner. Finally someone picked up, and I got a manager on the phone. I explained the problem — at that point, I knew only about the overcharged flounder/salmon — and said that my kids and I would really like to eat now, rather than drive back to his supermarket. He said no problem, just to mention his name and say he’d cleared it, and anyone could help me whenever it was convenient for me. After I got off the phone, I then discovered the mislabeled roast/steak, and decided to take photos as evidence. Here they are.

This is the wrapped meat:

And this is what was inside. See a bone in there? Does it look like steak? No.

So I’m just back now from taking my receipt, and this photographic evidence, to Albertson’s and a brief meeting with Patrick. Total refund: $37 and change. Which brought my original bill down to — you guessed it — almost $150 exactly.

Remember kids, always check your receipt. There wasn’t any duplicity involved. This was a simple human error. But it’s still humans who are generating many of your receipts.

(With apologies to Al Jaffee and Mad magazine.)

Today I had to drop off a prescription at CVS. (No, it wasn’t so I could cook meth. I could’ve just bought the stuff for that.)

When I handed it over, the order-taker (I’m not sure she was a pharmacist), who never bothered to say hello or even look up at me, said, “When do you want this?”

To which I said, “Instantaneously. Doesn’t everyone?”

Which finally got her to look at me.

Among friends and family, my antipathy for cats is well-known.

Let me put it succinctly:  Cats are worthless.

This isn’t just an opinion. It’s a scientific fact. They don’t greet you at the door, they don’t guard the house, they leave their hair everywhere, they climb onto countertops and tables and other areas associated with food preparation, they shit inside your house but you have to clean it up, they’re picky and demanding about their food, they make you itch and sneeze, and they leave your home smelling like cat and internal cat fluid. I didn’t like Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, except for one section:  the section where bird-lover Walt goes on an interior-monologue tear about how worthless cats are. That page almost made the other ten million words worth reading. It was funny and it was true. Here’s what I say to friends here in Southern California when they complain about their cats: “Remember, coyotes need to eat too.” To me, it just seems like a win-win.

But now I can see one reason to, if not live with a cat, at least associate with them for brief spells. And that’s because I now see that you can humiliate them.