This attitude, much to the chagrin of my wife and my boss, has often resulted in minor injuries as I refused to let a ramp tell me what to do.  Being self aware enough to realize this about myself has resulted in minor annoyance by my friends as I refused to do something because I didn’t feel like being hurt that day.

All of this is to say, 50 Shades of Grey, you win, I quit.

50 Shades of Grey is not shocking, it is not sexy, it is not revolutionary. The story of a young, virginal woman introduced to a life of kinky pleasure by an older, dirtier man is as old as time (and, is also the story of Hellraiser when you rip away all of the horror elements).  As mommy’s first bondage reader (more “This Story is Brought to You by the Letter O” than “The Story of O”) it fails based almost solely on its ineptitude.

The protagonist is a rank moron who’s only actual talent seems to be using a thesaurus so that she can look up the most arcane synonym for a word to drop into conversation (“My heart beats a frantic tattoo.”  WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!) and not understand how the world works (MP3 speakers, helicopters need space to take off and land, death by bicycle collision).  As stupid as Anastasia Steele is, everyone else in the book is as big, or bigger, an asshole, douche nozzle, or dick.  Mouth rapists, blackmailers and insane stalkers.

These are the good guys.

It’s all just so horrible and that’s before we even get into how poorly written it is.  For free you excuse an obvious lack of even a cursory edit.  For $2.99 it’s a little more annoying, but you can get over it.  For $9.99 the slapdash state that this book was released in is positively inexcusable.  Seriously, this book should have been edited, by a for real American who gets paid to edit books so that all of the annoying Britishisms were taken out (not that being British is annoying, but hearing an American talk in an obviously British voice is), proper punctuation was used, and EL James was beaten upside the head with her Thesaurus..

It’s easy to dismiss my criticism, of course, “You’re a man, you wouldn’t understand this.”  Maybe.  I love John Cusack movies and I positively adore Lisa Lutz’s The Spellman Files which feature an almost unlovably immature heroine and a cast of supporting characters who are almost all sociopaths.  I even read the comic book that Janet Evonavich wrote.  I think my chick lit credentials are pretty strong.  Also, you’re being sexist.

This book is terrible and worse than being terrible, between my job, a wife, three dogs (including a puppy who is in that “destroy everything” phase) I don’t have much time for reading.  This book has taken away from the time I get to spend reading good books.  I just don’t hate myself enough to keep on with this.

So, there you go, FS0G, you win. You were so terrible that I could not even enjoy you on an ironic, “oh shit, this is the worst thing I’ve ever read” level.  I watched both Hobo With a Shotgun and Evil Bong 3-D last year.  Both were more enjoyable than this (and Evil Bong made me contemplate whether or not it humanity should continue).

I now know evil.  It is EL James.  Never again.  Never again.

We’re in a built-up area of the city and even I know helicopters need space to take off and land.

Please fast forward to the six minute mark.

That was a helicopter landing on top of a Skoda Yeti.  The Yeti is roughly the size of a Ford Escape, give or take.  Because helicopters need space to take off and land.

I’m going to tap a vein if I don’t stop reading this.

We’ve finally gotten to the part where Christian Grey (hot, sexy billionaire) presents Ana Steele (dumbest woman on earth) with the dom/sub contract.  How does this work?  Do you have to get it notarized?  Are there witnesses?  Will it stand up in court?

Well, no.

I am not a lawyer.  I have a couple of lawyers in my immediate family, but I am not one of them and even if I was I am not your lawyer.  I did, however, have to take a business law course to graduate college and I destroyed the curve to the point that I didn’t take the final because even if I got 100% on it it would have *lowered* my final grade.  All of that is to say, I feel pretty comfortable in saying this.

DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America outlaws slavery.  Here’s the money shot, in case you’re too lazy to Wikipedia:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Now the thing is, it just doesn’t make it so that I can marry White women, it also means that you can’t force someone to uphold a contract.  I know that you’re thinking, “whoa, what?” If someone doesn’t uphold their end of a contract you can’t make them do it, because that would be like having a slave.  What you can do is sue someone for damages if they do not hold up their end of the contract.

You hire Guns n Roses to play little Schlomoe’s Bar Mitzvah and Axl Rose freaks out halfway through the first song and causes a riot of 13 year old boys who wreck your house?  You can’t force Axl n Backupband to come back and give you a makeup show, but you can probably get him to give you a refund and pay for your house.

Also, prostitution is illegal in some form or another in every state in the union (yes, including Nevada) and you can’t actually write a legal and binding contract for illegal activity.

I’m saying this contract has no legal weight because you can’t literally sign a contract that makes you someone a sex slave. I’m saying that this contract has no legal weight because, I’m sure, given everything else that’s gone on in this book, someone (like Christian Grey: hot, sexy billionaire, because he’s a giant douchebag) will say something like, “You signed a legal and binding contract, Miss Steele.”  That being said, Ana Steel (because words in your human language cannot describe how stupid she is) will almost certainly say something like, “I signed a legal and binding contract.”

No one signed a legal and binding contract.

There’s a lot more stupid to go along with here, I mean like how Christian tells Ana that he’s monogamous in his relationships, then 10 pages later he tells Ana that he’s monogamous in his relationships and she says, “that’s news to me!”  Because, she is the literary embodiment of derp.

I’m going to get into the sex in the next post.  For the most part the sex in this book (and let’s be honest, the only reason this book exists is to string together a bunch of sex scenes) is the type of overwrought, bodice ripper sex that doesn’t happen in real life or doesn’t happen regularly in real life, anyway.  I pity the husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends of the women who think that this book will revitalize their sex life, much in the same way I pity the girlfriend of high school kid who thinks that the artistic output of Alanah Rae is a guide to good lovemaking.

Look, there really is only one problem.  EL James is to writing what I am to health and fitness.  She continues to use word choices that don’t make sense to describe things that everyone knows.  This become apparent whenever someone in her story gets near a car of any sort.  Cars in this world don’t have stereos, they have MP3 players.

He starts the engine and reverses out of his space in the parking lot. He switches on the MP3 Player.

As opposed to turning on the stereo, because Christian Grey is hella fancy, he’s not rocking a cassette deck with auto reverse.

The music is interrupted by the sound of a cell phone ringing over the MP3 speakers.

What the FUCK is an “MP3 speaker”?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

I’m convinced that EL James is trolling me.  Me, specifically, or anyone who’s ever used a gadget, ever.  Or people who live in the actual world.

She also continues to write characters that don’t make any sense.  Ana is thoroughly shocked and amazed by the Flower Duet.  She has never heard it before.

This would require that she’s never, not once, been near a functioning television set between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day. Next she’s going to tell me that Ana has never heard “America the Beautiful” or “Yesterday.”

Anastasia Steele is a 21 year old college student who is traumatized by shaving her legs and pits, getting her eyebrows done and having her skin buffed. This is a ritual that most women I know would call “why there’s no hot water left when it’s your turn to take a shower.”  I just don’t…she’s a 21 year old, liberal arts student at a college in the Pacific Northwest.  She’s not only not occasionally bi, she’s so incredibly virginal that she’s never masturbated, hasn’t been kissed and doesn’t understand the standard grooming practices of women in 21st Century America. This is not a judgement call on whether these practices are right or wrong, but you want me to believe that KATHERINE KAVANAUGH’S roommate would not be aware of them?

So, dumb.

I’d like to get into the fact that she signed a non-disclosure agreement to not talk about Christian Grey’s sex life to anyone (Christian Grey’s interests are very singular, we know this because he said so like 70 times).  She takes this to mean that she cannot talk to anyone about sex at all.  She believes this because she is a moron, also because she didn’t read the NDA before signing it – despite being told to read it by Grey, in his only moment of real menschenessitude – because she is a moron.

I’d also like to get into the fact that Christian Grey is just so taken by this, completely virginal, naive and idiotic young woman that he just has to have her, contracts be damned!  Also, I’d like to get into how Ana’s deflowering at the hands of a sadistic dom was not at all awkward or painful or embarrassing and was, in fact, the most awesome sex anyone anywhere has ever had.

Ever

I’d even like to talk a bit about how Christian’s mom showed up at his house while he was, literally, mid-stroke and he jumped up like a puppy dog to go see his mother and introduce her to the woman he had been boning the second she stormed in the door.

I’m not going to go into that, because it makes me want to stick my head in an oven.

I will however go into this.

noun

1.

a low, continuous sound, as of a brook, the wind, or trees, or of low, indistinct voices.

2.

a mumbled or private expression of discontent.

3.

Also called heart murmur. Medicine/Medical .

a.

an abnormal sound heard on listening to the heart, usually through a stethoscope, produced by the blood passing through deformed cardiac valves.

b.

in some persons a similar sound heard when blood passes through normal valves.

4.

Phonetics . a voice quality in which vibration of the vocal cords is accompanied by the escape of a great deal of air, as in the (h) of ahead;  breathy voice.

verb (used without object)

5.

to make a low or indistinct sound, especially continuously.

6.

to speak in a low tone or indistinctly.

7.

to complain in a low tone or in private.

He murmurs, she murmurs, everyone in this book murmurs.  They murmur in situations that it makes no sense to murmur.  If I lived in the world of Fifty Shades of Grey I would spend my entire life going “Huh? What did you say? What?” No one speaks. No one talks.  Nothing is ever said.  Not a damn person yells.  Everyone murmurs, everything, all the time.  How the hell do you murmur in a helicopter while talking to someone?  Helicopters are not quiet.  The effort was made to make the point that a helicopter is hella loud, and yet, still murmuring. In my head, everyone in this book sounds like Christian Bale’s Batman

Robble robble robble robble robble

50 Shades of Grey is obviously not for me.  So, who the hell is it for?

The big story behind FSoG is that it’s finally porn that women can read, secretly, thanks to the growth of e-readers.  It is something that has never existed before. “Mommy porn,” the pundits are calling it.  That makes sense except for the part where it doesn’t.

For this theory to make sense we have to believe that there is a monumentally large group of women who are unable to use the world’s largest collection of erotic materials to find something diddleworthy (that’s not a real word).  To understand how easy it is to find erotic reading materials on the internet (even if you can’t figure out how to Google “BDSM erotica”) go here and type in any common, English noun.  Sort by price – lowest to highest – and try not to find smut in the free to $2.99 price range, often written by the very women who we are told are the FSoG demographic.

You can’t do it.

Fifty Shades of Grey costs $10.  The economics doesn’t make sense, but that Anastasia Steele is monumentally dumb does.

EL James is not a good writer, she admits this.  She also admits to being confused and surprised that FSoG has been a hit.  That being said, it surprises me that it generated buzz, but not that it was a hit after it generated buzz.  There are no characters in FSoG, there are only character types. There is nothing to Anastasia Steele, she is a blank slate, readers can relate to her because she’s empty, there’s nothing about her stop you from completely projecting yourself on her. This is a woman who’s goal in life is “to get a job.”

Similarly, Christian Grey is a bad boy, he’s a stalker, he gives mixed signals.  You know that he’s going to need to be saved from himself by the love of a good woman and that woman is you Anastasia. It goes on and on, KATHERINE KAVANAUGH (seriously?!?!?!?!?!?) is the alpha female/rich friend that you wish you had who doesn’t mind the fact that you, basically, leech off her. Jose “DIOS MIO!” Rodriguez is that one minority you know, also super hot but just in the friend zone.

This is a poorly written, rote, romance book that appeals to women who want to be “edgy” because all of their friends are “edgy.”

Eh, could be worse.

I’ve read chapters four and five without putting a gun to my head.  Ready. Set. Go!

So, here’s the thing, below is the entirety of what happened in the fourth and fifth chapters of this book.

Isabella Swan Anastasia Steele (wait, the hell, she didn’t even change THE NUMBER OF SYLLABLES IN THE PROTAGONIST’S NAME this is the laziest shit ever.  No wait, I’m sure that she did so to protect the delicate meter of the…no, seriously, I can’t even finish that sentence, laughing too hard.  Moving on) goes to work at the mom & pop hardware store where she knows everything about everything they sell, but she doesn’t actually use tools, she leaves that to her dad, because penis. Christian Grey “just happens to be in in the area” and stops by the store to stalk the fuck out of Ana pick up items which could be used for home improvement, disposing of a body or a fun time in the ol’ pleasure dungeon.  He then slips Ana his cell phone number.

KATHERINE KAVANAUGH bullies Jose’ (in the one sentence which he is mentioned that doesn’t include the phrase “Dios mio!”) into taking pictures of Christian Grey, billionaire.  This was the one scene in the entire book that was relatable to me.  Jose is a thing photographer who is being forced to shoot people.  I am a people photographer, but The Mrs. very much so thinks that I should shoot more stuff, despite me having almost no actual aptitude for that type of photography. KATHERINE KAVANAUGH also bullies Anastasia into calling Christian Grey to set up the photo shoot.

After the photo shoot, during which Jose and Grey (hey, that rhymes!) have a pissing contest (Grey is constantly screaming “MY DICK IS BIGGER!!!!!” figuratively) he goes to have tea with Ana and by “tea” I mean “he badgers the living hell out of her about her past but gets annoyed when she asks the same.  So she runs away and almost gets hit by a “cyclist,” possibly a tricyclist going the wrong way on the street, which is terrible.  After this terrifying ordeal Grey refuses to kiss her so Ana does the most normal thing a woman can do, she gets completely shitfaced and drunk dials him to ask why he’s sending her mixed signals.  He uses this opportunity to STALK THE FUCK OUT OF HER and have his brother cock block KATHERINE KAVANAUGH’s boyfriend.

The mind reels.

Problem Number One: Anastasia Steele is Not That Hot

One of the problems with writing a book in the first person is that if the narrator is wrong you have to show that she’s wrong.  In this case the narrator describes herself as a too skinny, too pale girl with bad hair who falls down a lot.  There is not a single sentence in this book that has so far lead me to believe otherwise.  In fact, she has fallen down at least once in every chapter of this book.

So why the hell is every guy in this book trying to get in them drawz?

No, seriously, Jacob – the hot, shirtless werewolf Jose – the hot, stereotypical Mexican wants her bad.  Her boss’ brother, who is handsome in an all American boy type of way and is home from Princeton wants her.  Christian Grey, billionaire, wants her.  There are literally, five men in this book, three of them want Anastasia and two of them want KATHERINE KAVANAUGH.

Look, I get women with insane body images.  I have a buddy who, literally, looks like a model who is 100% self conscious about her height.  I have a buddy who is adored by men and women alike because she’s is like the cutest woman in the universe and, easily, looks half her age.  She obsesses about the gray hair that she dyes anyway.  People see what they want to see in the mirror.

But besides a single, “I told you you’re a babe,” from KATHERINE KAVANAUGH we aren’t shown anything to make us believe that Anastasia is anything other than what she thinks she is.

She’s also a moron.

Problem 2: DIOS MIO!

Behaviorally, Jose is a straight up stereotype.  He shouts “Dios mio!” whenever he’s surprised.  When everyone goes out to drink he buys everyone a round of Tequila.  If Jose was Black he’d have brought over watermelon and fired chicken.  I LIKE watermelon and fried chicken, but there’s more to me than an oft hilarious blog and stereotypical speech patterns.  The same cannot be said for Jose.

Problem Three: The World Doesn’t Work Like That

This book was not edited.  It’s clear because EL James does not understand how commas work. There are almost no places in this book where a comma is used in a proper, commaly (that’s a made up word) way.  A comma, a semi-colon and parentheses can be largely interchanged.  In this book a comma is used as a stand-in for a period much the same way that in places not America it’s used as a decimal point.  Maybe that’s the confusion?  I don’t know, if I think about it too hard my brain will ooze from my eyeholes.

This can also be seen in the scene where Bella Ana is almost run down by a cyclist.  This word does not mean what the author thinks it means.  In America a “cyclist” refers to a bicyclist, a person who’s pedaling.  Christian Grey, billionaire was completely shaken by the fact that when Ana fell down in the street she was almost hit by a cyclist and he “shudder to think what would have happened.”

Well, the guy on the bike would have gone ass over tea kettle and likely broken an arm or some teeth.  Anastasia would have gotten a bruise.

Unless the “cyclist” was a MOTORcyclist, but that’s not how a girl from Modesto would have used the word.  Oh yeah, middle aged, Brit with no editor. I forgot.

That doesn’t explain how Christian Grey, billionaire was able to find which bar Anastasia drunk dialed him from by “tracing your cellphone.”  I get it, he’s a billionaire.  Apparently he also has a cave and a rubber suit that he wears to run around a fight crime at night.

Lord, that would be so much more interesting.

Problem Why The Hell Am I Counting: Everyone’s an Asshole

No, for real, every character in this book is a giant, unsympathetic asshole of high assholic order.

Christian Grey – you don’t get to be a billionaire without being a dick.  It’s just not possible, unless you’re born a billionaire.  So, yeah, I get it he’s supposed to be an asshole.  But, he’s also a stalker.  He has all the resources in the world and he utilizes them to keep tabs on a thoroughly average (except in intelligence) college student so he can hit on her, then tell her that she should stay away from him and then send her a small fortune worth of first edition novels loved by virginal girls the world over.

KATHERINE KAVANAUGH – Badgers everyone around her in order to get her way.  Blackmails her “friend” into doing a photo shoot of his romantic rival by threatening to keep a story about his first, big art show out of the school paper.  That’s some assholish shit.  It’s revealed that she’s got rich parents and was, basically, raised to be a douche.  So, you know, that’s not stereotypical.

Jose “Dios mio!” Rodriguez – Drunkenly tries to mouthrape Ana.  No, not like that, he tried to kiss her while she was screaming “no, no, no” at him.  Was stopped by Christian Grey who was busy STALKING THE FUCK out of Ana.  Good thing to, girl can’t hold her liquor.

Anastasia Steele – Actually not an asshole, just really, really dumb

I still don’t know what’s going to last longer this book or my will to live while reading it.

No, no I do.

See you tomorrow.

So why do I find myself reading a book that started as Twilight fan-fiction? Because a friend of mine is over the moon for it and another friend of mine is completely, totally, incredibly in hate for it.  That’s the friend who gave me a copy to read.  (spoilers) I’m now convinced that she’s not so much my friend, but my arch enemy.

Anywhoo

My plan is to read as much of 50 Shades of Gray as I can stomach every night and then comment on it the next day.

Ready? Go!

50 Shades of Gray tells the story of Anastasia Steele, a young, very, very, very stupid English major at Washington State University in Vancouver (Washington, not British Columbia, but it took like 10 pages for us to learn this). Ana gets sent to interview Christian Gray, 27 year old business tycoon billionaire, by her roommate who works on the school news paper.  Ana does not work for the school paper.  From what I can tell Ana’s roomate (Katherine Kavanaugh, really?) is the only person who works for the newspaper and that’s all she does.  Ana also has a friend, Jose Rodriguez (really? REALLY?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?) who’s fifty different kinds of hot for her, but she does not share his feelings, because Ana is not just virginal, she’s damn near asexual.

Problem 1: No One Talks Like This

The book is written in the first person and in the present tense (unless it’s convenient to be in the past tense) with Ana as the narrator.  Ana is a college senior living on the US/Canadian border, later in the story we find out that her mom is in Georgia.  We don’t really know where Ana is from, but wherever it is they probably don’t say things like this:

I shake my head to gather my wits.  My heart is pounding a frantic tattoo, and for some reason I’m blushing furiously under his steady scrutiny.  I am utterly thrown by the sight of him standing before me.  My meories of him did not do him justice.  He’s not merely good-looking – he’s the epitome of male beauty, breathtaking, and he’s here.  Here in Clayton’s Hardware Store.  Go figure.  Finally my cognitive functions are restored and reconnected with the rest of my body.

Back when he was editing comics, Christopher Priest said that he would smack people down for using “Ah” instead of “I” and “in’” instead of “ing” for southern dialect.  It was lazy and there were better ways to show regional dialects than those heavy handed tactics.  To be sure, neither The Mrs. (a native of the tri-state area) or I (born and raised in Alabama) have particularly thick accents, but there are obvious, regional differences in our word choices.  For instance, “The car needs to be washed,” versus, “The car needs washed.”

Anastasia’s cadence, the meter in which she talks only makes sense if she’s British (and a particularly haughty Brit at that) but nowhere in the text are we told that she’s a middle aged Englishwoman, she’s a 20-something American and that’s not right.

It would even be ok if Ana’s meter was consistent, but it bounces back and forth for no apparent reason.  The most obvious thing is she can’t seem to make up her mind whether she calls her roommate “Katherine” or “Kate” in her own mind, while I call different people different things contextually, Anastasia doesn’t, she just bounces around.  That may seem like nitpicking, but it’s not, it’s a symptom of a writer who doesn’t know who her protagonist is, that’s bad.

Problem 2: We’re Stuck in Ana’s Head…and it’s Empty

Ana is a moron, there really is no other way to put it.  Look, I don’t care that she’s the most virginal character to ever be written.  Nor do I care that she spends her life turning down hot guys who want her, because they don’t make her tingle. However, when she meets Christian Grey, who is a 27 year old billionaire who (as mentioned above) is the epitome of male beauty and he flirts with her she is confused as to why she is attracted to him.

I’m straight and if Richard Branson flirted with me I’d be at least mildly intrigued.

This does not take a college education to understand that power is attractive.  Ana doesn’t.  She also is a 20something in 2011 who’s completely technologically inept.  She’s the equivalent to a 40 year old who can’t program a VCR.  It’s almost like she was written by a middle aged person who simply glossed over things that she doesn’t understand or something.

Problem 3: This Book Has as Much Editing as This Website

My destination is the headquarters of Mr. Grey’s global enterprise.  It’s a huge twenty-story office building, all curved glass and steel,an architect’s utilitarian fantasy, with Grey Hose written discreetly in steel over the glass front doors.

There are too many commas in that sentence, there are also not enough commas in that sentence. throughout the book whenever multiple adjectives are used to describe something they are done so, without being broken up by commas.  That’s a basic grammatical rule; it’s not, “a huge twenty-story office building,” it’s “a huge, twenty-story, office building.”  I’m not a grammar nazi, but this is basic stuff.

Problem 4: It’s Like She Has OCD Problem 4: It’s Like She Has OCD Problem 4: It’s Like She Has OCD

If you pulled out the number of times Anastasia flushes over the course of chapter one, chapter one would be five pages long, if you removed the number of times she describes the different smiles of Christian Gray it would be a paragraph and a half. There is so much repetition here.

So much repetition.

I mean things are repeated so often.  It’s almost like someone’s padding their word count.

Will things get better with chapter three? Almost certainly not, but I’m pushing on.

Wait, what?

The Galaxy Player is not a media player.  A media player would probably support one of the more popular video codecs out the box.  This did not. It seems to not support too much of anything out the box.  In order to be able to view a .MOV file I had to download a program, much like I had to do to download podcast.  If I have to add items to recreate the basic functionality of my for real, dedicated (and dying) media players then I have to say this isn’t one of them.

If it isn’t a media player what is it?  Well, the people at work constantly ask me “is that a tablet or a phone?” It’s a PDA.

No, really.  The Handspring Treo was a Handspring Visor (I totally had a blue one) with a cellphone shoved in it.  Windows Mobile phones were Pocket PCs with cellphones attached to them.  This Galaxy 5.0 is a Galaxy Note without a cellphone.  If a smartphone is a PDA with a cellular radio, then if you remove the cellular radio from a smartphone you don’t get a “media player” you get a PDA.  Well, it’s about the same size as my old Dell Axim (which still works, actually, why didn’t I just use it?).  So, all the talk of tablets being the new computing paradigm and the constant repeating of Steve Jobs’ ridiculous truck analogy (the Ford F series and GM’s GMT900 base vehicles still outsell pretty much everything else combined) is really just hooray for PDAs.

Who knew?

Also, the camera on this thing ba-lows.

So far, for something that markets itself as a media player we’ve got fail.  I spend most of my day listening to podcasts, but there is no podcatcher loaded on this thing.  Apparently Google listen will do the job, but it’s terrible beyond words (You’d think that Google, GOOGLE could get the search function right, you’d think wrong).

Lacking a decent, native podcast function I grabbed Doggcatcher, which everyone agrees is the best podcasting utility.  It also cost me five bucks.  This is not a good start.