Funny Business...

Oh, did I call it. The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart went right after the Cheney shooting incident, and it was hilarious. I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes. Not to mention he picked right up on that “getting out of the car to hunt” thing, just like I did. They even worked in a bit with the old Nintendo video game Duck Hunt and a great headline pun on the old Aerosmith song, “Cheney’s got a gun.” Absolutely priceless. I’ve mentioned before I really like the internet, and I really like Amazon.com. I had downloaded a fan made X-Men music video from someone called DutchXFan, and they used a song in it by Ilse Delange. Good song, and a good voice, and a country style to the music. I know most country artists, and wondered how I hadn’t heard of her. So I did a little ‘net searching and found out she’s a country artist from the Netherlands, who had recorded in Nashville. A bit more searching and I quickly found out I wouldn’t be finding the album at a local store around here (no surprise there). Jumped over to trusty Amazon, found the album, and ordered it. It took a couple weeks, but I got it the other day, and it’s really good. That’s kind of remarkable. I found out about an artist on the other side of the world via a completely unrelated item, managed to find out all about the artist and her music, and was able to purchase the album and support a singer from another country and never even leave my computer. That’s pretty cool… Same goes for some books I wanted to buy. I went to the local Chapters to see what was available. It wasn’t easy, but I found what I was looking for. I read through them, and wanted to buy them. However, the prices seemed really high. So, I left them there, came home and went to Amazon. Sure enough, I could get the same books for less money even with dollar conversion and shipping. What in the world?! I want to support Canadian stores, but I’m not going to pay $10 a book more than I have to. Two of the books were instructional, but the one was a novel just recently released. Amazon listed it for $14.53US (about $16.85 CAN), the Chapters website listed it for $20.77 CAN, and when I got to the store it was selling for the $31.00 CAN printed on the book! I didn’t have the patience to ask one of the clerks about the discrepancy, but are they actually trying to discourage people from coming to the store? Seems like bad business to me.