TIGHT LINES
SNAPFISHING
with Andrew Spencer
Alocal biology teacher whose name rhymes with Liddle once suggested that yours truly was tinged with bitterness, going so far as to call me a curmudgeon. If memory serves, today marks the approximate one-year anniversary of that unfortunate declaration by young Matt, who was allowed to get away with it because of his youthful naiveté. The comment came on the heels of my suggestion that Christmas was nothing more than a commercialized event that was geared towards the ultimate goal of separating me from the entirety of my net worth. And for this I was called a curmudgeon, as well as a host of other, less-printable names.

Jill, a bonafide Snapfishing pro.

Unflattering epithets aside, I resolved this year - in an ironic twist of New Year's timing, I made a pre-New Year's resolution - to avoid the pitfalls of Christmas Past, and instead stick close to my good buddy Christmas Cheap. I was going along on cruise control, blue skies above me, not a problem in sight.

And then I got blindsided.

My girlfriend Jill, a photographer without a capitalistic bone in her entire body, has developed a reputation for taking pictures of anything that will stay in the frame long enough to be photographed. This is all well and good, especially since the dawn of digital photography. Gone are the days of Jill taking a roll of film and paying to get it developed, all for the sake of getting the best photograph of a flower. Now she can take her digital photos, find the best one and then take that single photo to the Camera Shop to have it printed.

But, at this point, I'd like to refocus your attention to Jill's lack of capitalistic sentiments. I have many photographer friends, and all of them have a particular quality in common. They charge exorbitant rates for taking your picture. I don't begrudge them that, of course, as they've got to make a living, and they're incredibly talented artists - as is Jill. It's just that Jill lacks that killer instinct required for actually charging for a photograph. She'd rather pay to have the prints made and then give them away. It's always nice to find someone so generous, but Jill has a tendency to take it to a fault.

So I devised a plan. I set Jill up with an account on a photo-sharing Web site, so that she could send emails to her friends and invite them to come view her photos. Then they could pay to have them printed. It was a winwin situation: Jill got to share her photos, her friends got the prints. I was glowing in self-satisfaction.

Then one day a package arrived. It was, Jill explained, a Christmas gift. Then another arrived. Then another. I'll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that Jill had discovered a loophole in my otherwise fool-proof plan. Rather than giving away photos, she discovered that she could order coffee cups, notebooks and a host of other unique gifts - all featuring her photographs - for the low, low cost of ten times what the Camera Shop charged her for prints. And, just to make things more consistent, she gave all these things away, just like she did previously with the less-expensive prints. It was nice how it all worked out.

It was only after I discovered that she'd been using my credit card - which I'd had to enter when I registered and, much to my dismay, that I'd opted to store in the account - that I realized the magnitude of this whole thing. But then, as it so often does, the irony hit me square in the face.

The Web site in question is Snapfish.

Kodachrome . . . they give us those nice bright colors, they give us the greens of summers, makes you think all the world's a sunny segue.

You see, friends and neighbors, the creators of this Web site were absolutely ingenious when naming it. They knew that by throwing the word "fish" into the name, they'd automatically reel in a whole boat load *cue the rim shot* of new customers, namely anglers.

Anglers are, by their very nature, drawn to things they don't need that they can't afford. It's that whole mathematical concept of two negatives making a positive. You don't need it multiplied by you can't afford it equals you have to have it. So we buy things that have no conceivable use in our lives - fishing or otherwise - for no explainable reason. The only thing we know is that we must have it. So, you throw the word "fish" into your Web site name, and all of us anglers are drawn to it like lemmings and we gladly throw money at you for things we have no reason to buy or realistic way to pay for. And then we do it again.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to run. Jill is saying something about how she needs to use the computer.

Tight lines. I