jake reminds me of a simple fact that any savvy consumer should know: u-haul sucks, and it will bite you in the ass if you reserve a truck from them. you will, without doubt, get screwed over one way or another. jake cites this story. mr. loops offers this seemingly-common tale of u-haul desertion. when i was moving, i spoke with my friend becca about her move from north carolina to d.c. and how the tire on her u-haul trailer blew out, and how u-haul proceeded to strand her on the side of I-95 for EIGHT HOURS and DIDN'T EVEN WANT TO PAY FOR HER TIRE REPLACEMENT UNTIL SHE FOUGHT IT.

if i can do one good in the world, it can be the promotion of how terrible u-haul is - how they lack any compassion, any organization, any halfway-modern trucks, any semblance of customer service. yet, they never seem to go away, and the complaints about them have been going on for years. what's the deal here? why do they remain so popular? how have better companies like budget not totally snapped up their share of the market?

i don't know. but i do know one thing: we, as the ALL IMPORTANT BLOGGERS, must work tirelessly to change it. screw u-haul!

You know what I really enjoy? When people call into NPR to explain to the world that they don't watch any TV. Bonus points: when they do so within the context of a segment about the new TV season.

Requisite onion link here.

Catherine can't get UPN. Susan doesn't have a TV, and if she did it would mostly serve to confuse. How are we going to maintain our shared pop cultural language? Wouldn't it be convenient if someone put up a BitTorrent site offering easy downloads of Veronica Mars and Lost each week? Yeah. Seems like it would.

In totally unrelated news, I've started working on a hacked-up version of Blog Torrent that allows for the creation of private torrents. It won't provide real security — the tracker won't customize .torrents with unique logins, so this is really just security by obscurity — but it should stop those wandering in from the internet from seeing what on offer. I'll release the customized Blog Torrent to whoever else might want this sort of Darknet functionality.

But having thought about it a little more, this is clearly overkill. It'll be useful for DCist since we may occasionally need to ferry large amounts of video among the staff prior to editing it down, and we don't want it to be publicly accessible to everyone. But you lose out on the speed advantage of BitTorrent if your swarm consists of one downloader and one seeder. Plus, I'm running out of disk space. Running my own BitTorrent operation doesn't really make sense.

So: here's what I suggest. It's really simple.

1. Head to DCist Torrents and click on the "Easy Download" link for any of the torrents listed. Let it walk you through installing the software. It'll automatically detect if you're using a Mac or a PC. Once the download starts, you can cancel it. BitTorrent is now installed on your computer.
2. Each week I will supply links to the Pirate Bay pages for the torrents of the two shows. Go to the one you want, click the link that looks like DOWNLOAD THIS TORRENT, specify a save location, and your download will begin. That should be it.

Easy enough? Okay, you might need to install one other thing in order to play these files. But there's no getting around that. If your download is complete but you can't play the file in Windows Media Player (or its Mac equivalent), just go here and download and run the appropriate file.

A torrent for this week's episode of Lost can be found here.

A torrent for this week's episode of Veronica Mars can be found here.

Note to angry MPAA peons: I'm not linking to a copy of the TV show. I'm linking to a website that links to a torrent that links to a copy of the TV show. I can add some additional degrees of separation if you'd like.