R.I.P. my Variety.com scam

Once upon a time, in the days before Pop Whore, Eti and I created what we considered to be the definitive list of Jewish things vs. Goyish things. Here it is if you've never seen it. One item on the list was "Variety is Jewish; Entertainment Weekly is Goyish." This is true. Variety gives you the hard facts about who's doing what and how much money it's going to cost, whereas EW gushes about fashion and trends and where's Samuel L. Jackson's career going, really? Don't get me wrong -- EW is fun to read, especially when there's nothing else to do, and occasionally they have some good stuff. But if you actually want to know what's going on, you need Variety.

Once upon a time, I could read the print edition of Variety every day because I worked in the Industry, and in the Industry everyone subscribes to it no matter how pathetic they are. That guy in the apartment next to you with the paper sign on his door that says "Bob Nickerson Productions" -- yeah, he's a subscriber, I assure you. However, I work in a different place now, and there are no issues of Variety lying around everywhere -- just lots of glossy magazines about what's going on around campus. So I now need the Internet to get my Variety fix. Variety.com lets you get a 2-week trial subscription for free, and you get full access to the site until it expires. And you can keep signing up for these indefinitely, because they never verify your e-mail address. I started doing that a while back, and eventually an amazing thing happened -- the site gave up on me. After I'd done about 9 free trial subscriptions in a row, the tenth one never expired. It went on for months. And months. And months. Normally, accessing the site for that long would cost you just shy of an iPod. But it was free for me. I was the guy who beat the system.

Could it last forever? No. I logged in one day and got the dreaded "Select a subscription plan" screen, meaning: pay up or shut up. Grudgingly, I signed up for yet another free trial with another email address. And after another 2 weeks, it expired.

The gravy train has left the station and I'm not on it. Maybe after another 10 free trials I'll finally catch up with it again.