XXL BBQ

Update: ESPN iPhone Apps

2009-05-23T14:17:00.002-04:00

Update on the ESPN iPhone apps situation from an anonymous source:

"There are two apps coming very soon.

One will be to basically review sports scores with a minimum amount of detail.

The second is a full app with a HUGE amount of features like player details, play-by-plays, stadium details, etc (don't want to give away too much."

Three ESPN iPhone Apps Coming Soon?

2009-04-30T19:29:00.005-04:00

Sources close too XXL BBQ have reported that ESPN will launch three true iPhone apps as early as June 1. So far, ESPN's iPhone presence has consisted mostly of the iPhone-friendly ESPN Mobile Web where users can follow scores, gamecasts, news, and their fantasy teams (ESPN leagues only). ESPN did launch an actual iPhone app (three versions) which is simply a Photo-Hunt-style game called ESPN Cameraman where players try to identify the differences between two sports-related photographs.

Despite the solid design and usability of the ESPN Mobile Web site, it is simply not as robust an experience as could easily be provided with a locally-running application and many have been wondering why the "worldwide leader in sports" does not yet have an official app for scores and stats. It now appears that this is because the agreement to provide ESPNMVP for Verizon users includes an exclusivity clause which prevents ESPN from creating mobile applications for use with other carriers. It also appears that this exclusivity agreement is about to expire, possibly as early as May 31.

The three applications in development/set for launch were described as follows:

Scoreboard app -- Customizable scoreboard allowing you to follow a specific set of teams/games.
Fantasy app -- Track your fantasy teams.
Fan Locator app -- Find and connect with nearby fans of your team.

Sounds like the apps will be free upon release and although the core stuff like scores, stats and gamecasts is already part of ESPN Mobile Web, I'm sure there will be some bells and whistles not possible with the current mobile site. Also, the ability to locate and avoid Ohio State fans is a service for which we will all be forever grateful.

TweetDeck's-Eye-View of the End of the World

2009-04-28T20:31:00.004-04:00

RT @ThrillerJesus Once upon a time if a giant asteroid hit Japan I'd have just been incinerated without first being alerted via text message http://is.gd/v8yh

My computer screen tonight if the world ends:

Wolfram|Alpha Update

2009-04-13T22:53:00.011-04:00

My previous post about Wolfram|Alpha was pretty sloppy and if you didn't understand it, you are not alone. To clarify, W|A is kinda like a search engine, but it returns actual answers rather than a list of results. Rudy Rucker, who got to see a demo as he interviewed Stephen Wolfram, writes:

"Let me give three random examples. If you enter the query, '3/26/2009 + 90 days' you’ll get a page that gives a date ninety days later than the first date. If you enter 'mt. everest height length of golden gate' you’ll get a page expressing the height of Mount Everest as a multiple of the length of the Golden Gate Bridge. If you enter 'temperature in los gatos,' you’ll get something like the current temperature, a graph of the temperatures over the last week with projections for the next few days, and a graph of the temperatures over the last year.

Wolfram|Alpha can pop out an answer to pretty much any kind of factual question that you might pose to a scientist, economist, banker, or other kind of expert. The exciting part is that you’re not just looking up pages on the web, you’re getting new information that’s generated by computations working from the known data. Wolfram says the response can be so speedy because, 'We’ve found that, of all the things science can compute, most take a second or less.'"

The theory and underlying structure of W|A are rooted in Wolfram's work in science, philosophy and mathematics (see Mathematica and A New Kind of Science). For more information, check the rest of Rucker's article and/or the condensed (one hour) version of the interview.

Says Wolfram, "Just as running Google is like having a reference librarian to help you, running Wolfram|Alpha will be like having a house scientist to consult for you."

Meme Watch: "Steelers to Lose Super Bowl Trophies"

2009-03-25T01:22:00.001-04:00

A satirical piece featuring a proposal from President Obama to redistribute Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl trophies to less successful teams has been making the rounds. This arrived in my inbox today (credit: Mike), traveling via forwarded email, as all right-leaning humor does. Mid-March is the earliest iteration I can find and it's been posted all over the place (you can read it for yourself here).

Anyway, it's basically an attempt at an Onion-style lampooning of Obama based on the premise that his obsession with redistribution knows no bounds. That's fine, whatever. The part that bothered me was I could imagine all these people reading it and thinking, Ha! Socialism in the NFL! Can you imagine? Obama's takin' us all to hell on a hand truck!

For the record, I absolutely do not support the reallocation of Super Bowl trophies. The Pittsburgh Steelers earned theirs fair and square and I don't see how any other teams would get any enjoyment out of them. Real resources like cash and talent are another story entirely. I enjoy NFL football as it exists today and I therefore hope it maintains its "socialist" philosophy which promotes parity in a healthy, 32-team economy. After all, these are policies which have made it the most profitable sports league ever to exist on planet Earth. Policies like:

• a draft : unsuccessful teams are awarded top draft positions for performing poorly

• a salary cap/minimum wage : no player is allowed to be paid too much or too little as agreed upon in negotiations between team owners and the players' union

• revenue sharing : transfer of money from rich teams to not-so-rich teams

The article even has a photo of a Steeler gripping a Super Bowl trophy with a caption that reads, "Steelers must now share their wealth and fruits of their success and hard work." Yes. Yes, that's exactly what they're going to do. That's exactly what every successful NFL team has done since revenue sharing began in 1960.

This is not to say socialism is an inherently good thing. Parity comes at a price. That price, of course, is freedom. The Pittsburgh Steelers are going to have to fork over a bunch of their revenue and even after that, they can't just go hiring anyone and paying players anything they want. They are regulated in a variety of ways and some may feel that regulation goes too far. Perhaps they'd feel more comfortable with Major League Baseball.

Carrying the metaphor to the US economy, it is this decision about the proper balance between socioeconomic parity and individual freedom that has everyone clenching their glutes so tightly all the time. Personally, I'm a fan of heavily taxing the ultra-rich (may require additional tax brackets) and redistributing it to lower class high school grads to prepare them for the workforce (vocational skills training required in tandem with the study of your choice!) because we know what poor, young people who have few opportunities end up doing.

In the end, however, choosing the "correct" amount of redistribution depends on what you think the goal of society is and even then, it's a shot in the dark because all we've been able to prove definitively is that there is no economic system that can help Detroit.

We've also proven that I'll go a long way to tear down a shitty piece of satire. Or practice writing or whatever the hell it is I'm doing with this blog. I don't know, it's late.

Big Buck Hunter in South Florida

2009-03-24T00:27:00.008-04:00

View Larger Map

Had to move back to South Florida from NYC about five months ago and in that time I have only been able to find six Big Buck Hunter locations in the Dade/ Broward/Palm Beach area. This is a serious step down from the lifestyle available in NYC and is a situation that must be dealt with. Please consider this a formal request for all the Big Buck Hunter locations that you know of in Florida. I have heard tell from my brother of a Big Buck Hunter II machine at the Daisy Duke's at Pines and Palm, but Sega CD-calibur graphics are not my thing. We're looking for Big Buck Hunter Pro and Big Buck Safari here.

If you know of any locations in Florida, comment below or click through and comment on the Google map and I'll add them. Here are the six machines that I know of near Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach:

McSorley's : Big Buck Hunter Pro
This is probably my favorite bar in South Florida at this point (ocean air rolling in, shuffleboard table, jukebox) and for that reason I hereby declare it the center of all SoFla BBH activity. See you there.

Parrot Lounge : Big Buck Hunter Pro
The orange gun at Parrot is jacked up, not sure about the green one. This is an alright place I guess, but it's like 150 feet from McSorley's so what are you doing there?

Flanigan's : Big Buck Safari
I've got nothing against Flanigan's, but I probably wouldn't ever go there if it weren't for this, the only Safari machine I can find within 200 miles.

Outdoor World / Bass Pro Shops : big-screen Big Buck Hunter Pro
I know the phrase "big-screen Buck Hunter" sounds real good, but this thing was an enormous disappointment. I believe they do this at some other locations, too, including the Bass Pro Shops in Las Vegas, but anyway what they did was hook the game up to a projector and then convert the guns to Ruger rifles. The problem is they are auto-reload and have laser sites. The reload is slow and there's like a big light in your eyes the whole time. The projector's dim. It's all wrong.

AMC Aventura 24 : Big Buck Hunter Pro
Haven't seen it for myself, but Mickey says it's there and I, for one, believe him.

Unidentified Post Office : Big Buck Hunter Pro
I called the vending company who provided Flanigan's Safari machine and the guy there said he had only one other Buck Hunter machine and it was at a post office, but was only available to the employees. That's right. Postal workers. Perfecting pump-action and aim during their breaks.

-DED

Wolfram Alpha

2009-03-13T10:04:00.004-04:00

The phrase "the next Google" gets thrown around a lot, especially by one of my friends whose favorite pastime is crying victim while on the other hand implying that I, out of sheer dumb luck, will stumble into creating the next big thing on the internet. He may be right, but it will probably have to be the next next big thing.

Remember that time a Jude Law sexbot took Haley Joel Osment to find out how to become a real boy and they sought counsel from a virtual reality Albert Einstein played by Robin Williams? And then Dr. Know told HJ he should hit up Coney Island for 3,000 years even though it's underwater. Well, anyway, we are one step closer to having our own Dr. Know. Like two months close. Enter Wolfram Alpha.

ThruYOU: Kutiman mixes YouTube

2009-03-11T11:50:00.004-04:00

"What you are about to see is a mix of unrelated YouTube videos/clips edited together to create ThruYou. In other words - what you see is what you hear."

This is fantastic: http://www.thru-you.com/

Happy Thanksgiving

2008-11-26T17:15:00.000-05:00

Hummer rear ends Ranger rear ends XXL BBQ.

Fantasy Football Alert!

2008-10-19T16:43:00.000-04:00

Matt Schaub, on pace for 12,000 yards.

Later, New York

2008-10-15T15:09:00.005-04:00

I have been unable for the last several months to land a job that would afford me both NYC rent and my mortgage in Florida, so it's back to Weston for a while. I have run my savings down to an almost frightening figure, but on the bright side I cashed out my 401K before the stock slide and spent it all on booze and Buck Hunter. As I said to one friend, "You know in The Dark Knight, where the Joker slides down a pile of money and then sets it on fire. That's what I'm doing."

In Florida, I'll still be applying for jobs in NY and jobs that require/allow for extensive traveling so I can visit as frequently as possible, but for now I'll just have to settle for hanging out at Fort Lauderdale Beach every weekend.

I'm leaving late next week, probably Thursday or Friday, so this upcoming weekend is my last. Two more trivia nights: tonight and then next Wednesday, which I think will be the closest thing to a going away party I'm going to have. Everyone is welcome to come. My brother will probably be here, should be good. Get in touch if you wanna hang out.

The Patriot Tree

2008-10-14T00:30:00.001-04:00

"A celebrity journalist is forced to put his money where his mouth is when the CIA asks him to do more than just exchange information."

The Patriot Tree is the latest project from my friend Jeremy and his production team (more of their work here and here and here). The clip is available in high quality on YouTube, so rather than embed it here, I've just posted a screen shot. You can click through, press "watch in high quality" and enjoy.

Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD)

2008-10-09T19:30:00.001-04:00

Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, also known as RSD and Type I CRPS, is a condition where the sufferer is plagued with an unending and intense pain usually following an injury or nerve damaging event.

Imagine you sprain your wrist or break a bone, but as time goes on, despite your body having recovered from the original injury, the pain itself has only intensified. It is an amount of pain wildly disproportionate to the original injury. Then the pain spreads to your hand and forearm and is still creeping. It is the worst pain you have ever felt and are likely ever to feel. Worse even than cancer pain or childbirth or amputation. Here it is labelled "Causalgia" on the McGill Pain Index:

This week, a friend of mine is in Germany undergoing one of the more controversial and extreme methods of treatment for RSD. Ketamine therapy is somewhat of a last resort for RSD patients after it is clear that the condition is not going to fade on its own (it sometimes does) and after months or, in Liz's case, years of physical therapy and an unbelievable regimen of medications: drugs to treat the pain and other issues (bone softening, muscle atrophy, etc.) caused by the disorder, drugs to counter the side effects of the first set of drugs, etc.

After low-dose and "awake technique" ketamine treatment comes the most extreme level of this relatively new approach which involves putting the patient into a medically-induced coma for several days in the hopes of "rebooting" their nervous system. Fans of House, M.D. will remember the brief period when Dr. House was relieved of his chronic leg pain as a result of receiving this coma-style ketamine therapy. The real world results have sometimes been that dramatic: the patient wakes up and the disorder is gone. Sometimes forever. For others, the pain reduction is only partial or the pain returns within a few weeks or months. And for some, the pain actually increases in the long term.

As I said, this is a fairly new and untested treatment; I believe Liz and her roommate at the clinic are the 51st and 52nd patients to undergo this version of the therapy. The reasons it works for some and not for others and what determines the degree to which it might be effective in any given case are still unclear, but whether you call it praying or wishing or hoping, please do it this week with Liz and Brandy in mind. They have both had RSD for over five years and have now been in their medically-induced comas for around 36 hours.

The Politics of the A-11 Offense

2008-10-07T18:45:00.005-04:00

The A-11 offense is an American football offensive scheme developed in 2007 by Kurt Bryan and Steve Humphries, two high school football coaches in Piedmont, California. Piedmont High School draws from a smaller talent pool than much of their competition, so the coaches dove deep into the high school football rule book, explored every option and ended up creating the A-11 system in an attempt to "even the playing field."

Basically, the system calls for everyone on the offense to have a jersey with an eligible receiver number. They then line up according to the rules governing scrimmage kick formations, the formations used on punt and "quick kick" plays. Effectively, all A-11 plays are fake punts and the upshot of all this is that you have 11 players on the field, all of whom may or may not go out as receivers. You don't magically get to have ten receivers running around, only five or six can move downfield on each play, but the defense has no idea which five it's going to be. On the downside, you typically have no quarterback protection. This, I guess, is what you have to do when everyone on your team is built like a wide receiver: make everyone a wide receiver.

Needless to say, this development has been nearly as controversial in the high school football universe as the advent of the forward pass was to the clowns who played pass-less football a hundred years ago (Teddy Roosevelt got involved!).

Anyway, when I read that ten states actually took the time to ban the A-11 offense, a new and different idea which was a clear threat to the status quo of the high school football establishment, I couldn't help but think what kind of states they must be. Here they are:

Which brings us to tonight's debate. Despite the nearly meaningless national polls the major networks show us, according to the electoral college math on basically any predictive site you check, McCain is now a giant underdog. And while he’s trying everything else in the book and will probably drop a lot of references to Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko and Chicago's notoriety for political corruption, I think there may be one hail mary play that hasn't occurred to John McCain. Tonight, I recommend he make one last ditch effort to really energize his base by supporting a nationwide ban on the A-11 offense.

More Amateur Bailout Bullshit

2008-09-30T22:49:00.007-04:00

I got an email today from a friend who was basically asking whether this video (Burning Down The House: What Caused Our Economic Crisis?), which has gotten very popular in the last few days, is true.

While it does appear that the Democrats and their Community Reinvestment Act may have played a small part setting up some incentives even before mild to excessive greed showed up, they got plenty of help from others, including Republicans. What the video presents is a tiny fraction of the whole story and the political leanings of its producer are obvious. In the past week or so, the right has tried to nurture this meme (particularly via this video) that it was the Democrats' blind attempts to get poor people into homeownership that is solely responsible for the whole thing.

As most people know by now, leaders all across the political spectrum, as well as many many economists, financiers, mortgage companies, lenders, borrowers, homeowners, securities rating agencies, money managers, bankers and investors all came together to make this crisis possible. Perhaps the best explanation, or at least the most complete I've heard in under fifteen minutes, is from Elizabeth Warren of Harvard Law who disputes this idea that it was poor people buying homes they couldn't afford that caused the entire meltdown:

"A lot of people, because they call this 'subprime,' immediately jump to the notion 'this is about poor people trying to get into houses they really couldn't afford, this is about people trying to reach beyond their means.' Let's be clear: in 2002, when we're starting up this slide, 80% of subprime mortgages were refinances. They were mortgage brokers who persuaded current homeowners, with Alan Greenspan as the number one cheerleader, to 'get out there and tap your home equity.' And people tapped their home equity. Yeah, they tapped it with a sledgehammer."

I recommend watching the entire panel discussion at Harvard because all six speakers (and they appear primarily to be fiscal conservatives) make several insightful points. I insist you at least watch Warren who starts in around 28:40.

**Thanks to Leela for the Harvard panel video.

$30B, $85B, $700B, a dollar ...

2008-09-29T23:58:00.006-04:00

... all for the bail out, stand up and holler!

So the bailout (in its current incarnation) was voted down today, several House members claiming they were receiving emails and letters from their constituents at a ratio of "100 to 1" in opposition to the bill. This would mark the only time I know of that civilians actually appear to have turned the tide on a critical vote as it was happening in Congress. That's kinda cool, but why the opposition? What does the public know about economics?

Not a whole lot, myself included. A quick scan of the internet for recent stories concerning the bailout and the comments that follow them reveals that the narrative many people have come to accept is that this is a bailout for rich people. The thinking goes like this:

There are a bunch of rich people (the bad guys). They set up a system that made them rich while inflating home values. They then ripped off a bunch of poor people (the good guys) and kicked them out of their homes. Now the rich guys are feeling some kind of financial pinch as a result of the unpaid mortgages. Regular people are being asked to hand over $700B to save the rich guys. There is no nuance. There are a bunch of victims and a bunch of villains and that's it. The rich people are totally responsible. Let them lose this one.

If you hold this view or something similar to it, then I can see why you might oppose a bailout. In particular, it's difficult for a lot of people to see how -- specifically, mechanically -- they will be impacted if the banks are not rescued. Some of the more common questions out there are, "How exactly do I end up losing my job if some investment bank somewhere is not bailed out? How do I end up on the street?"

I am absolutely not an expert, and I may have this totally wrong, but I think it goes something like this:

People stop paying mortgages they should have never been offered and should never have accepted. Securities made up of those mortgages, incorrectly evaluated as safe, fail. Owners of insured securities that failed (every major bank) go to AIG to collect insurance. AIG doesn't have anything even remotely close to that kind of money. Without "bailout," banks are left holding worthless loans and worthless insurance policies. At this point, bank liabilities (our bank account balances) far outweigh bank assets. Depending on the degree to which this happens, panicky money managers and nervous citizens fearing bank insolvency run on the banks. Seth Rogen writes the Grapes of Wrath 2, the best stoner movie based on the Second Great Depression.

Now, whether or not the panic above would actually occur, sans bailout, is unknown. If everyone remains calm (I'll give you a sign when you should hightail it to the bank; "tippy-toe") and nothing unexpected happens, we will simply enjoy an enormous recession. If a run on all the banks does happen, however, all bets are off. No, you probably won't lose your job. However, your employer's banker having gone under, you also won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so that'll just work itself out naturally. On the bright side, there may no longer be a bank collecting your mortgage.

As a fiscal conservative, I am at first tempted to say let it all fall apart. Let the free market teach everyone a lesson about unqualified lending/borrowing. Easy credit inflated the values of homes and mortgage-backed securities. Perhaps we should just get the giant correction out of the way in one quick, two-decade-long tearing away of cooled GiGi Brazilian Bikini Wax (Microwave Formula) from our collective private area. Be there no doubt, this could be a very painful correction. In fact, it is likely to seriously affect the entire world's economy for a long time to come. Additionally, any resulting domestic deflation (lower cost of goods, lower wages, unchanged mortgage payments ... more foreclosures!) means plenty of people who did not lend irresponsibly nor take on unaffordable loans will feel some/much of the pain. And it's at this realization that my "libertarian" economic stance sort of falls apart. Many responsible citizens could end up being even more unfairly penalized if a bailout is not given a chance and you have to be a really serious market purist to GiGi someone else's potty spot while they go on paying their mortgage like an adult. Count me out.

Carrying the bank run scenario further, somewhere down the line I think someone's gotta get "bailed out" anyway. We can try it now with the big banks, we can wait until it hits the smaller banks causing employers to fall short on payroll and bail them out, or we can wait even beyond that until it hits the most critical businesses: grocery stores, telecom companies, power plants, gas stations and then save them and/or their banks so we can still refrigerate our food. And, come to think of it, have food to refrigerate. Most politicians, economists and financial analysts have been saying that a bailout now is the best option to at least make an attempt at dodging potential financial chaos. Since I don't know shit and I'm not enough of a free-marketer (nor armed sufficiently) to risk possible life in a Thunderdome economy, I'm just gonna go with ... whatever Paul Krugman says.

That'll be (randomly mash calculator buttons) ... $85,000,000,000.00

2008-09-17T17:43:00.000-04:00

Okay, so now that $85,000,000,000.00 has been "loaned" to AIG by the Federal Reserve Bank, you'd think it'd be pretty easy for you to sort out who to vote for. As you look at it now, I know it seems like a small number, but that's just your public school education talking and when the Dow hits 5,000 and there's a Chinese foreclosure sign on your house, you're gonna wonder where all that tax burden came from, so take a close look at some graphs before your bank (if it still exists) repossesses your MacBook.

These charts (and really this entire post) are hijacked straight from chartjunk and the Freakonomics blog. Point is, they show the same data -- how each candidate's plan will affect each income bracket -- but are displayed in two different ways. In Chart A, the height of each bracket is determined by its population, so you can get a sense visually of how many people will be affected by each of the various rate changes:

Chart B is scaled instead by total dollars, thereby illustrating (approximately) how much government revenue is generated or lost by each change. This gives you a sense of which plan "pays for itself" by executing unjust Robin-Hood-inspired wealth redistribution and which plan will require us to keep borrowing from chummy China to sustain our absurd military policy and then of course we'll probably also need to bail out another Fannie or Timmy or Douche Bank or whatever the fuck these things are called. Chart B:

By the way, if you consider yourself a "principled citizen" who wants both a fair tax code and a balanced budget, you'll be mildly disappointed for a few seconds to learn that all the "flat tax" and "fair tax" candidates are out of the race except Bob Barr and I can tell by the blank look on your face that you've either never heard the name "Bob Barr" or each time you have you wondered when and why CNN started covering 19th century baseball because this guy seriously gets less press than McCain's eighth house or Obama's bike helmet.

Anyway, I'm more and more convinced that regulation or deregulation or all this other stuff is totally irrelevant. The world financial system appears to have grown too large and too complex for us to operate with any practical foresight. Or maybe the fundamentals of the economy just got too strong. I don't know, but I want to formally apologize for taking on a mortgage that I may or may not be able to afford when the rate jumps in March 2010. Now pardon me while I convert my savings into Euros and jam it into a Sanka can. Did I mention the sky is falling. Later.

From Wasilla 2 the White House

2008-09-12T09:43:00.008-04:00

I'm no liberal blogger, but after hearing Matt Damon's comments, I just couldn't resist. I've casted Malcolm in the Middle's Jane Kaczmarek and naturally, Tim Conway. Yes, that's a moose in the oval office and yes, he has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Photoshop is the best thing ever.

Matt Damon on Sarah Palin

2008-09-11T13:36:00.002-04:00

Matt Damon puts it pretty succinctly.

AP: O'Reilly is Olbermann's "Nemesis"

2008-09-08T18:14:00.007-04:00

In his story about NBC's decision to remove Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann as hosts of MSNBC's political coverage (David Gregory will take over), AP Reporter David Bauder was actually able to correctly use the word nemesis in reference to real people (not comic book characters). I think he pulled it off:

"MSNBC's decision comes just before Olbermann's "Countdown" show is set to air, on Monday, Olbermann's interview with Barack Obama. That will put Olbermann in direct competition with his nemesis, Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, who interviewed Obama last week and is airing a portion of it Monday in the same 8 p.m. EDT time slot."

Double Standard Much?

2008-09-04T16:28:00.004-04:00

Jon Stewart's job is getting too easy.

Tee hee.

Obama/Biden. Get it.

2008-08-23T03:00:00.001-04:00

A few years ago, I said McCain/Lieberman was my dream ticket because I'd get a centrist who I can trust from the party that most closely (by an extraordinarily slim margin) represents my nutty views and he'd be proving his centricism (centricity?) by picking another centrist on the Democratic side. Oh, how times have changed.

My mid-2000s "dream ticket" has been topped, partly because McCain and Lieberman are starting to look senile, partly because McCain's party will not allow him to pick Lieberman (see Mitt Romney), but mostly because Obama has chosen as his Vice possibly the most presidentially-qualified man in the country: Joe F. Biden (the F stands for 'fucking'; see previous post).

Obama/Biden, y'all.

Abortion Talk Friday!

2008-08-22T19:01:00.007-04:00

Last week, author and megachurch pastor Rick Warren hosted a forum which included sit-down interviews with Barack Obama and John McCain, the presumptive presidential nominees of the two major parties that serve and represent us so fantastically.

Besides newsifying the phrase "cone of silence," the primary upshot of this event was the analysis of each candidate's performance in front of a conservative crowd. Could Obama cover the spread, so to speak, on McCain's home turf?

One of the quotes that got a lot of attention was Obama's response to Warren's query on abortion:

Warren: At what point does a baby get human rights in your view?

Obama: Well, I think that whether you are looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade.

Certainly a poorly worded response: I think the sterile, possibly insensitive sounding phrase "pay grade" can be left out of the abortion discussion, but the spirit of Obama's response is understandable. Having an abortion is a difficult decision and as a Christian, he feels it is one that should be left to the mother and God. As opposed to the president or any other government body. In all fairness to Obama, the question was worded from a pro-life perspective and of course we should expect nothing different from a pastor, but it made it very easy for McCain to respond clearly and concisely with his (?, party's) position and in front of a crowd that largely agrees with it, so he was looking good:

Warren: At what point is a baby entitled to human rights?

McCain: At the moment of conception. (applause from crowd) I have a 25-year pro-life record in the Congress, in the Senate. And as President of the United States, I will be a pro-life President and this presidency will have pro-life policies. That's my commitment, that's my commitment to you. (wild applause)

At a liberal forum, of course, the question may have been worded slightly differently:

At what point does the government gain control of a woman's pregnancy?

And then we'd instead watch McCain dance around that one. He certainly wouldn't respond confidently, "At the moment of conception." You might even hear him utter the phrase "pay grade."

Anyway, all this nonsense got me thinking about something I've been wondering for a while. It involves some as-of-yet non-existent medical technology, but my sense was that we could see it in the next few decades. So I googled 'artificial womb' and lo and behold, it looks like someone's working on it.

My main question is this: if we were to develop a procedure, no more invasive or expensive than an abortion, which allowed transfer of a fetus to another woman's womb or an artificial womb where it could be brought to term and delivered, would abortion remain legal? In other words, once body control issues are made moot, does a pregnant woman still have the right to end the life of a viable fetus?

Exactly how far from this medical development we are is unknown, but the Raelians claim to already have an artificial womb which they call -- seriously -- Babytron. If the Raelians already have it today, I'd say it might actually exist within fifty years. Since this kind of thing is unlikely to develop in the US due to all the human rights we've granted our lab embryos, my money's on Japan.

Anyway, as I said, the right to an abortion is currently predicated on the argument that a woman should have complete control over her body even when a developing fetus' life may be at stake. In a future where fetuses can be removed from the mother at any time and still survive, today's easy-to-understand system of pro-choice vs. pro-life will likely evolve into a four- or five-sided issue. Here are the positions you will have to choose from when some scientist somewhere opens up this can of orphans:

Pro-Life Ultra
"Life and the human rights that come with it begin at conception. Now that we have artificial womb technology, abortion should be outlawed immediately. It would be a sin of omission not to make every effort to bring any viable fetus to term, so sign me and my healthy uterus up to take on any unwanted pregnancies. In fact, why don't you bust out all those stem cell embryos from the 90s because they all just got a new lease on life."

Choice-Life Lite
"If you don't want to carry this fetus to term, that's fine, but if someone else is ready to inherit your pregnancy and raise it as their own, you have no right to just abort it willy-nilly. On the other hand, if no one is interested in actually parenting the child, it's totally up to you, but let's not get in the business of bringing millions of orphans into the world."

Pro-Choice Classic™
"It's my right, even post-conception, to decide whether or not I want progeny on this planet. Whether someone else is willing to carry my fetus to term and raise it as their own is totally irrelevant. As long as it's inside my body, this is totally my jurisdiction and outright abortion is not off the table."

Anti-Orphan
"That pro-parent guy is right and while you're at it, let's euthanize any orphans -- up to the age of 17, let's say -- that no one wants to raise."

Cool Ranch Practical-Communist™

"The genes that allow humans to reproduce should be deactivated at birth. Only couples over the age of 24 with combined SAT scores of 2,000 and a carbon footprint below the 40th percentile will have their reproductive abilities reactivated."

Pro-Hot-Babies brought to you by TMZ

"Put Kate Hudson, Beyonce and that girl from Wedding Crashers in a reproduction compound with ... uh ... let's go Pitt, McConaughey, Kobe Bryant. Set the Marvin Gaye on low, the lights on dim and the artificial wombs on high."

Alright, I'm done. There's your cheery cocktail chatter. Have a nice weekend.

idol

2008-08-19T20:17:00.000-04:00

Welp. At least this rulz.

Jock Itch Running Rampant at USC

2008-08-15T00:14:00.002-04:00

The cause of the jock itch epidemic (pandemic?) at USC has been identified as "the new compression shorts." Sources close to XXL BBQ report that at least one of the punters has been spared.

The Next Batman Villain -or- I Have Dark Knight Fever

2008-07-30T15:40:00.003-04:00

First of all, mad spoilers ahead. If you're the only person in North America to have not seen The Dark Knight, type your zip code in here, press enter and stop reading this.

I think every audience that walks out of The Dark Knight is saying generally the same things: "great movie," "Joker: awesome," this part was cool, that part, etc. Then, almost immediately, out-loud speculation about the next Batman movie begins because we all want more of what we just saw and we want it yesterday. Early indications are that Warner Bros. executives would have to be certifiably insane to not greenlight another movie in this series and director Christopher Nolan and his writing partner David S. Goyer already appear to have kicked around at least one concept for what would be their third Batman project together. But there are so many questions. Let's speculate wildly.

Robin? If So, When?
Christian Bale allegedly stated that he would not be a part of any movie that includes Robin. When asked about it following the release of Batman Begins, Nolan supposedly said Dick Grayson is still "in a crib somewhere" at this point in the Batman story and he doesn't expect to still be directing the series by the time Robin would become involved. However, I think we could see him as early as the third movie, but just to kill his parents off at the Cirque du Soleil or whatever and then introduce him at a real young age. Plant the seeds, make the connection, but shove him in a foster home somewhere and don't address it again until it feels right with the flow of the series. If it never feels right, forget it altogether. You know what -- in fact -- forget everything I just said.

Two-Face: Alive or Dead?
A lot of you are thinking: "Two-Face? The dude is a hundred percent dead. I saw it on a giant movie screen with my own eyes. What's to talk about?" The ending of The Dark Knight was certainly presented in such a way that almost everyone comes away with the strong impression that (Harvey-Dent-turned-) Two-Face is dead. However, I personally believe this door was left open. Gordon has already demonstrated that he is willing to fake his own death, willing to eulogize Dent as a white knight rather than what he became and willing to feign antipathy for Batman and even assign him a body count basically to give him street cred and a license to roam the grey areas of justice delivery. Nolan and Goyer somehow wrapped up the Two-Face story arc while simultaneously leaving it wide open. If you never see him again, he's dead and if you do... hey, Two-Face is a Schrödinger's cat!

The Joker: To Recast or Not to Recast?
The ending of The Dark Knight leaves the Joker alive but neutralized, hanging upside down at a construction site after commenting to Batman that they are simply unable to kill one another and noting gleefully, "We could do this forever." It's at this moment that your heart sinks a bit knowing Heath Ledger cannot reprise his role. "But the Joker is Batman's arch-nemesis," you think to yourself, "and the one villain it's most reasonable to assume could show up prominently in multiple pictures. Surely, Nolan and Goyer intended to leave open the possibility of including the Joker, however briefly, in future films. Right? Right?" Crazed with dreams of a third installment, your mind is just rambling at this point looking for answers, "Is there unused footage of Ledger as the Joker that we can edit into three more movies? Does Heath have a twin brother? Where are we at on cloning?"

I suggest anyone interested in this series read the entire entry for the Joker on Wikipedia. He is absolutely one of the most unique characters ever created. In the comic books, his rejection of order and convention is so complete that he has been known to break the fourth wall, in some cases speaking directly to the reader or turning the page for them, defying even the rules of the media in which he exists. I came across this interview the other day in which Kevin Smith poses a fantastic question-- how is it possible that until now not a single character in movie history had ever stood on a gigantic pile of money, slid down the side of it and then lit it on fire?

The Joker is capable of literally anything at any moment including his own redefinition; to put it simply, he's "flexible." Therefore -- and you're probably not gonna like this -- I think the role of the Joker allows for, perhaps even calls for, multiple actors to reinterpret it within the same series. In an interview together, Nolan said he takes things one project at a time and hasn't given recasting the Joker any thought, but Gary Oldman said they've already done it with the Rachel Dawes character and it's probably what Heath would have wanted. The questions then are who do you allow to and who would be willing to take on this role? I've seen Johnny Depp's name bandied about on the internet and I admit I'd be open to that.

Next Love Interest
Rachel Dawes is dead, so there's a temptation to guess which WiR will be next to catch Bruce Wayne's attention and become the latest villain's bargaining chip. However, I think the villain will leverage something else of value to Batman in the next movie, so I don't think the plot will require a love interest, but then again...

The Next Villain(s)
The day after I saw The Dark Knight, I must have spent two hours skimming a bunch of the Batman-related pages on Wikipedia, learning about the overall mythology and the primary villains because I wanted to have some sense of which characters were at all feasible in the Nolan-verse and what may be in store for entry number three.

There is a lot of speculation that the Riddler is and/or should be the main villain in the next Batman movie and I think this is mostly because Gary Oldman made an offhand reference in the aforementioned interview, but also because the Riddler is probably the most popular remaining Batman villain that seems adaptable as an entirely realistic presence in Nolan's Gotham. Mastermind, puzzles, riddles-- maybe a hacker or something. It's certainly doable, but I am going to predict that the Riddler will not be the primary villain in the third movie.

When asked recently about the next villain, screenwriter David S. Goyer was quoted as saying that at least one idea has been discussed and that he is more interested in the next movie's theme than the next villain, but that the villain goes hand-in-hand with the theme. So we could sit here and run down the long list of other villains and guess which ones can be reinterpreted in a realistic enough way to fit this Gotham City -- monsters like Killer Croc are impossible, biological freaks like Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy would be difficult but possible with big changes, etc. -- but let's instead try to back into the next villain through a theme prediction.

The theme of Batman Begins was fear. Young Bruce Wayne learns to confront, overcome and embrace fear, making the introduction of Scarecrow an obvious choice. Ra's al Ghul was more useful for the origin story than as a tight fit with the theme. At the end of Batman Begins, Batman is a full-fledged presence in Gotham City, so the decision was made to explore the city's reaction to him, particularly the response from the criminal world, in The Dark Knight. This is why we see the imposter "Batmen" at the beginning and the calls throughout the film for Batman to turn himself in. The theme of The Dark Knight has been identified as escalation by Goyer and this of course called for the presence of the unpredictable Joker.

So where are we left at the end of The Dark Knight and what might be a fitting theme for a third movie? Harvey Dent, Gotham City's white knight, falls from grace and Commissioner Gordon and Batman agree to make Batman's motives and morality largely questionable in the eyes of the public, giving him a freer hand to deal with Gotham's criminal elements. Batman is chased away by the police and the Bat Signal spotlight is later smashed with a fire axe. For this reason, I think the next episode will be about the search for Batman and attempts to uncover and reveal his identity.

If identity is the theme, then there's really only one choice for the main villain and that's Black Mask. He may be somewhat obscure, but Goyer and Nolan have already shown with Scarecrow and Ra's al Ghul that they have an interest in exploring villains that aren't necessarily the most well known. The character attributes of the Black Mask (a.k.a. Roman Sionis) are perfect for a full exploration of identity issues. Sionis and Bruce Wayne knew one another as children and grew up to become something of business rivals, in fact the Sionis-Wayne conflict has more friction than the one between Batman and Black Mask. You can read his origin story for yourself, but he's basically a criminal mastermind who wears a mask (it's black!) and commands an army of henchmen known as the False Face Society who are all required to wear masks. Eventually, the mask is fused to his face in a fire or something. For much of the movie, the Wayne-Sionis rivalry could coexist parallel to a Batman-Black Mask battle without them knowing one another's alter ego. Bunch of dudes running around in masks. Some nutty title like Behind the Mask or something. It's perfect.

It's also possible to interpret the search for Batman's identity as a puzzle which would call for the Riddler and I think this makes him a decent choice for a second villain, but I don't think it's as much of a slam dunk as Black Mask. Plus, Warner may want to save such a popular villain to carry a later movie not necessarily headed up by Nolan and Goyer. To me, Black Mask is just a more obvious choice if the theme is identity (which I admit is pure speculation). Ventriloquist Arnold Wesker and Scarface the ruthless puppet gangster may also be a solid choice for a movie about identities or maybe Charlatan, the master impersonator.

Anyway, a hundred thousand words later, Black Mask is my big fucking prediction. Happy? Cast Daniel Day-Lewis, please.

Review: Potter's Cottage

2008-07-20T23:08:00.006-04:00

UPDATE [9/26/2011]: This item was originally posted in 2008. Potter's Cottage has since been remodeled. (h/t anonymous commenter)

_____

Almost every year now, I spend a weekend in Key West with a big group of my friends. We rent a house and barbecue and hang out in the pool and get a keg and stuff. Some years we have it on Memorial Day weekend, but this year we held it on the long Fourth of July weekend. Due to limited accommodations for parties of twelve-plus, we ended up renting a place called Potter's Cottage (photos here and here) as well as the adjoined suites. I want to come right out and say that while this was not the largest or nicest place we've ever stayed in (we've also stayed here and here), it was not terrible given our group and the nature of our trip.

However, for others, it may not provide the best experience. Perhaps you are planning a trip to Key West and you are considering staying at Potter's Cottage. Perhaps you are looking at the photos and scratching your head at one or two of them. Perhaps, looking for clarification, you Googled "potters cottage key west" and landed here. Well, if that's the case, then to answer your first question, yes, that is a toilet right out in the open carpet in the loft/master bedroom. Here's the toilet, here's the view looking right from the toilet and here is the view looking left from the toilet over the wall down into the living room. This particular building of the "compound" has two bedrooms downstairs (one trundle bed, one full/double bed) and a nice big actual bathroom. Then, upstairs, it's basically a big open loft, no door or anything, with a queen bed, a little desk, a love seat and Potter's Toilet.

I hope that helps you out, traveler.

Coming Soon: Pay-As-You-Drive Insurance

2008-06-28T16:59:00.008-04:00

As someone who owns a car in South Florida and visits there only a few times a year, I often face the annoying decision of whether or not to purchase car insurance at all. It's several hundred dollars for six months of coverage and my miles driven per year are well under five hundred at this point. Regardless of my extremely low usage, I am quoted the same price for car insurance as when I drove ten or fifteen thousand miles per year and was therefore more than twenty times as likely to be involved in an accident.

For this reason, I've not bought insurance or driven my car in around six months. I've also been tracking news regarding "pay-as-you-drive" insurance plans which now finally look like they are going to be offered nationwide here in the US despite a mixed reception in the UK. Pay-As-You-Drive (PAYD) insurance plans are based on actual miles driven, so two drivers identical in every other way (location, record, habits, etc.) would pay the same amount per mile instead the same amount per six month period.

Yesterday, American auto insurer Progressive posted on their website a press release revealing that they have been testing (in Minnesota, Oregon and Michigan I believe) a device that monitors not only miles driven, but "how" the person drives which I assume means it can see your speed at all times and has some sort of balancing element that can detect reckless acceleration, abrupt lane changes and hard stops. If you do these things a lot, you are a terrible driver, you should be ashamed of yourself and your rate per mile will increase. The device they have created allows them to now offer PAYD plans which they call MyRate and are now available in the states above as well as Alabama.

The good news is that if you are a low-mileage driver or someone who commutes at off-peak times or even if you are just a very cautious driver, you are likely to save money. The incentives created by such a program should lead to social benefits like people driving less (less traffic and lower carbon emissions) and safer, less erratic driving which should lead to fewer accidents. Really, the only bad news is for high-mileage drivers who, even if they stay with their current all-you-can-eat plans, are likely to see increased premiums to make up for the savings of the low-mileage drivers.

The states in which the program is offered seem to be based on each state's insurance code which in some cases is so specific in language as to disallow such plans. It is no surprise then that environmentally- and traffic-conscious California is among the first states considering retooling their insurance laws to allow PAYD insurance. I'm anxious to see this program offered in Florida and even more anxious to find out whether my rustbox '97 Grand Cherokee can accomodate the tracking device.

Meme of the Day: Dimitri is a true pimp

2008-06-26T14:09:00.011-04:00

With 90 views under its belt at this point, I've been blessed with being introduced to the #1 meme of today, June 26th, 2008: the YouTube video "Dimitri is a true pimp."

Dimitri sounds like he is at least in his thirties so this personal style must have worked for him with a woman somewhere along the line, but I'm gonna take a shot in the dark and guess that Olga did not make the "three o'clock deadline." Perhaps she is not "psychologically normal." However, I think a concerted effort could be made by someone at ABC to trace this audio to its source and create the best incarnation of The Bachelor yet which would of course be titled The Bachelor: Dimitri is a true pimp.

Credit goes to my man Blake for forwarding this on to me. I'd like to formally thank him and congratulate him on starting his own blog, Blakes Takes.

**UPDATE 6/27: This whole thing is ruined.

Spoiler: Top 13 Excerpts from My Plot Summary for Wanted

2008-06-24T02:39:00.010-04:00

Monday night, I saw a screening of Wanted starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie and was surprised at some of the decisions that were made story-wise, so I was going to post a plot summary here. It started to get really long and there were only a few items I really wanted to get to, so here they are: the Top 13 Excerpts from My Plot Summary for Wanted. Don't read this if you don't want to know anything that happens in the movie or the ending or whatever.

13. "He hears a noise and fires. Oh no! It's not him, it's the guy who hangs out by the wax baths and straps little bombs to rats!"

12. "Then this happens. Then, right after that, that guy gets a phone call: those assassins were decoys. He looks down and he is standing on an 'X' and a bullet goes through his head, from back to front. The bullet exits his skull, then slows and freezes, then runs in reverse, tracing its flight back, literally miles away, to an apartment so you can see he was shot by a guy sitting on a couch with some insane sharp-shooting device."

11. "Angelina Jolie makes out with him in slow motion."

10. "Bullet has a piece of cloth indicating the Loom of Fate wants Morgan Freeman dead, but he says Couch just wanted McAvoy to have a normal life and then he leaves. McAvoy weighs his options and then he finds a secret room where Couch had all his weapons, maps of the textile factory and drawings of rats with little bombs on them."

9. "Then there's a car chase during which Jolie puts a Viper into a controlled flip over a police barricade. McAvoy says 'sorry' to the police as he looks down at them through the empty windshield frame in midair."

8. "The train car falls several hundred feet, but it's wedged between the mountains just above a river and they are still alive."

7. "McAvoy produces the Loom of Fate's order for Morgan Freeman's death. Freeman reveals several more orders, each one for one of the assassins in the circle, claiming he saved them all and says if anyone wants to be a Loom of Fate purist, then they should turn their gun on themselves. Angelina Jolie smiles and sets a bullet in motion around the room, killing every assassin in the room and tosses her gun to McAvoy before the bullet comes full circle, entering her temple."

6. "It's late and no one else is in the office. Someone is approaching the back of McAvoy's head. A gun! It's Morgan Freeman! McAvoy spins around. It's not McAvoy! A decoy! Morgan Freeman looks down and he's standing on an 'X' of Post-It Notes and he says 'oh, fuck' or something like that and a bullet pushes through his forehead from inside his skull. The bullet freezes, then runs in reverse tracing its flight back (a la Scene 2) many miles, through the hole in McAvoy's boss' donut, to Couch's apartment, McAvoy's new home. During the bullet's backward flight, McAvoy has been explaining how he's taken control of his life. Then he looks into the camera and asks what you, the movie-goer, have done recently that's so great."

5. "His bank balance gives him new found confidence at work where he gives his boss a good talking to and then hits his best friend in the face with a keyboard. As the keys fly through the air, their motion is slowed so that you can see they actually spell out 'FUCK YOU' in midair, the last 'U' being one of his buddy's teeth (long roots)."

4. "He and everyone else in 'The Fraternity' is able to recover from all manner of stab wounds and broken bones because they are in possession of wax bath technology that increases white blood cell activity."

3. "McAvoy gets a dump truck and a shopping cart full of peanut butter. He props up a ramp into the back and pours peanut butter inside thereby attracting the necessary number of rats into the dump truck."

2. "Morgan Freeman takes McAvoy on a tour of the textile factory, ending in the room containing the Loom of Fate which is exactly what it sounds like: a loom that spins fabric and if you look real close at the threads of the fabric, you can read the imperfections as binary patterns that spell out the name of the next person that 'fate' wants killed."

1. "McAvoy pulls up to the textile factory with the dump truck, presumably full of rats with little digital watch bombs strapped to them. He crashes through the gate in reverse and hits the dump button. Yep, it's full of rats with little bombs. In thirty seconds, they have infested every square foot of the complex. The camera swirls around a rat hanging in midair Matrix-style bullet-time suspension as the digital clock on its side reads 0:00.01. The rat squeaks at 0:00.00, then all the rats blow up, killing a couple henchmen and doing some structural damage, but mostly just creating a diversion."

Big Buck Safari

2008-06-21T18:36:00.007-04:00

Big Buck Safari arrived in New York City around two months ago, so I figured I'd offer a little information and repost the NYC Big Buck Hunter map, now updated with locations that have Safari, including The Levee (Williamsburg), Crocodile Lounge (14th between 1st and 2nd, Gramercy?), Black Bear Lodge (Gramercy) and Jake's Dilemma (UWS) where I'll warn you, both guns were terribly calibrated last night. (If you've seen Safari anywhere else, please comment below and I'll update the map. Thanks.)

If you haven't seen it yet, the main difference between Big Buck Hunter Pro and Big Buck Safari, obviously, is the shift from North America, where you're hunting the likes of deer, elk and moose, to Africa, where you can hunt sable, gemsbok, wildebeest, kudu and buffalo. As far as gameplay, the major difference is that each board comes standard with exactly one trophy animal (elephant pictured above), five critters (lemurs, meerkats, etc.) and the critical three "bucks" ("Don't shoot the cows"). Big Buck Hunter Pro, on the other hand, featured a random assortment of critters on each level - anywhere from zero to six, sometimes more - and no trophy animals at all.

For those of you who are disgusted by hunting, you'll be relieved to learn that this is an advanced "video game" simulation and the animals are not real, but are projected on a screen like a very realistic cartoon and in such a way that no actual animals are injured or killed during gameplay. If you are still upset, you should see these things called "movies." They will blow your mind.

Anyway, here again is the NYC Big Buck Hunter map:

View Larger Map

My Threadless Entry: Golden Owl

2008-06-20T12:31:00.008-04:00

So after winning a few logo design contests at 99designs.com I think I'm hot stuff with my four months of Adobe Illustrator experience. Thusly, I've submitted a t-shirt design to Threadless.com and it has now entered the rating phase. It is a golden owl created by superimposing iterations of the golden spiral within one another. If you have a moment, head over to Threadless and buy a barnload* of shirts, submit your own design and rate some designs, including mine, Golden Owl.

*"-load" is now a suffix compatible with all nouns. Likewise with "-storm." Jot that down, Webster.

**NOTE: That's a Threadless guy in the picture, not me.

I've Been Nominated for the Presidential Medal of Freedom

2008-06-17T19:46:00.007-04:00

When I started this blog, there's one thing I knew was inevitable and that was that I would be nominated for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Pappy at Pappy's Porch, a blog which recognizes excellence in all things Buck Hunter, has deemed my Big Buck Hunter Pro map "an especially meritorious contribution" to the New York City Buck Hunter community and society as a whole.

Thank you, Pappy. It is with great humility that I accept your nomination for The Presidential Medal of Freedom. I just hope mine is as beautiful as Bob Hope's (pictured).

FiveThirtyEight.com

2008-06-17T01:02:00.002-04:00

If you're interested in this year's presidential election and/or if you're really into polls or statistics, check out FiveThirtyEight.com, a site currently dedicated to forecasting the outcome of the Obama/McCain race. At first look, it's not plainly evident what some of the graphs mean, but in a nutshell, this site is aggregating every new state and national poll from every major pollster every day and then creating a rolling average of each state's polls. Each poll is weighted by a few factors, primarily the age of the poll and the associated pollster's previous accuracy. The new averages for each state along with their margins of error are then used to run 10,000 election scenarios. Currently, around two thirds of these scenarios are coming up Obama.

FiveThirtyEight.com is run by Nate Silver who also does loads of statistical analysis for Baseball Prospectus, so if you're a fantasy baseball addict, you may want to look up Nate and his PECOTA player performance forecasting system.

Undercover at a Christian "Encounter Weekend"

2008-06-14T17:23:00.004-04:00

As a 12- or 13-year-old, I ended up at a three-day Christian basketball camp (catered by Chick-Fil-A) where hearing the coaches shout "1-2-3-Jesus!" meant that your game of Knockout was over (frown). Within a year or two, I also attended some kinda Christian (Catholic?) conference where a few hundred kids, teens and adults got together with their peers and discussed how great the Christian God was and how they like/love/are loved by Jesus, etc. Popular among my age group was to share the story of when you were "saved" (introduced or most recently re-introduced to Jesus) and who you were saved by, usually a friend from church or school, sometimes a family member. If you weren't really into it, as I wasn't, it was no big deal -- you just sat around saying nothing, hoping you wouldn't be asked to share a religious experience you didn't have.

I say all this because Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone reporter and semi-regular correspondent on Real Time with Bill Maher, recently went undercover at a Christian "encounter weekend" in Texas megachurch country. My own "undercover" Christian experiences occurred in South Florida where I think for most people church is more about tradition than actual belief and religious fervor is notably milder than in Texas or Oklahoma. Anyway, I have no doubt that very little of Matt's experience is exaggerated. His story appears on Rolling Stone's website and looks like it will also appear in his next book. On Maher's show, this Taibbi guy normally wears a grin that makes him seem a little arrogant and he's slightly clumsy with his cocksure snark, but before you call me "pot" and him "kettle," I'll tell you that this piece was a fun read. I've often said most horror movies are actually comedies and this has a similar feel, falling somewhere near that line between funny and frightening.

"Oh, uh, Robby ... Bobby ... and uh, little Billy."

2008-06-12T17:48:00.006-04:00

Yeah, I don't know, I just like the way Shatner delivers this line.

Priceline, send me a dollar.

TED Talk: Photosynth

2008-06-10T17:07:00.005-04:00

This Photosynth/Seadragon imaging system is pretty insane. Sadly, Microsoft is developing it which means it will probably be unavailable for most of the Obama presidency and once it is released, you'll have to have Vista 3 to run it. I don't have a computer with the graphics capabilities to run the demo, but give it a shot if you have XP or Vista.

We can only hope someone at Google is reverse engineering all of this right now, but in the meantime, you may want to consider removing from Flickr any photos of the inside of your house, especially ones that contain objects exposed by open doors or windows. Next thing you know, Photosynth is gonna recognize your Stars of the CW poster through your window in a stranger's photograph and lead everyone on a tour of your sloppy slopshack.

"I just don't want to work against an Obama candidacy."

2008-05-21T00:12:00.003-04:00

McCain staffer Mark McKinnon has stepped down from his position in the campaign because he vowed to do so if Obama were to become the Democratic nominee. McKinnon has said Obama is too good a man to help smear.

Man Named "Kevin James" Sent Back to Talking Head Minor Leagues

2008-05-16T00:34:00.009-04:00

"This is pathetic." -Chris Matthews, 2008

TED Talks

2008-04-13T23:42:00.005-04:00

I've been saving this one up for a while and to be honest, it was for no good reason. All you need to know is that there are these things called TED Talks and they are good as fuck. If you hate learning stuff that is like awesome, do not click the links below.

Aubrey DeGray -- You're gonna live to be a 1,000 years old.
David Gallo -- Octopuses have the power of invisibility.
Craig Venter -- We'll be converting greenhouse gases into gasoline in the next 18 months.
Johnny Lee -- At-home digital interactive whiteboards are now available for 80 bucks.
Michael Pollan -- You are a slave to Earth's master race, corn.
James Howard Kuntsler -- The suburbs are pure bullshit.
Juan Enriquez -- You should have been a genomicist.
Steven Levitt -- You're weak and shit.

My suggestion is that you open iTunes, go to the iTunes Music Store, search for "tedtalks" (one word), and subscribe to the video podcast. Then, if you are alone on the trip home from the LES on Fri/Sat night, you just watch these things on the train and even though you're pretty drunk and that haircut came at a serious discount, no one can give you any shit 'cause you're a genius.

Straw Man: Hillary Clinton Supporter

2008-03-27T22:24:00.003-04:00

XXL BBQ: So, you're a Hillary Clinton supporter, huh?

Hillary Clinton supporter: That's right.

X: That's cool, so let me ask you something. Why is Hillary Clinton still in this race? She's not likely to win the nomination and sticking around could cost her party the presidency.

H: You just answered your own question.

X: Excuse me?

H: I said she's staying in the race because she is unlikely to be the nominee, but at least by sticking around she can cost the Democrats the election.

X: I don't get it.

H: Everyone is acting like Hillary is trying to bring down Barack Obama in order to stay in the race, but it's the other way around. She is staying in the race in order to bring down Barack Obama.

X: Because it's a better setup for her in 2012 ...

H: Bingo bango. 2012, baby. The last thing she needs in her life is a successful President Obama. Beat him up while you're still in the ring with him, that's what I say.

X: So you think she'd prefer another four years of a Republican presidency rather than watch another Democrat inherit the party mantle?

H: Is her last name Clinton?

X: Makes sense I guess. Wanna go grab a beer?

H: Sounds good.

Stuff White People Like

2008-03-18T16:18:00.006-04:00

One of the goals of this blog is to spread the newest and hippest internet memes by first discovering them on some other fad-wholesaling blog or maybe Thrillist or something and then waiting a month to post about it. Today's post is a link to Stuff White People Like, a site which may have already gained enough exposure to add itself to the list. Some of the entries are better than others, but here are some good ones:

#64 Recycling
#18 Awareness
#62 Knowing What's Best for Poor People

Booze-noculars

2008-03-13T14:31:00.005-04:00

If you're like me, you like a taste now and then and, every once in a while, you'd like to enjoy a special drink at a special event -- the Olympics, Federer vs. Sampras V, the Magic: The Gathering World Championships. The problem, of course, is that Radio City Music Hall doesn't serve absinthe (yet) and even if they did, I'd be willing to bet you'd encounter the normal 250% markup. Likewise, getting 16 ounces of your favorite liquid past church security has become very difficult since 9/11. Fret not, After 5 has the solution and in my opinion it's not too late to change the name to Booze-noculars.

The Wire

2008-03-11T01:04:00.006-04:00

I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that The Wire, the best television series of all time, concluded Sunday night. The good news is that this show was so deep in terms of character, plot and dialogue, that you could probably enjoy all five seasons from start to finish several times over. I know I'm not the only one immediately watching it all over again, starting at the towers with Bell and Barksdale.

However you get it -- NetFlix, Blockbuster, piratebay -- just get it and watch it and thank me later. Don't read any synopses or series descriptions or anything. There's no summing up this show. Just watch it. And say hi to Omar for me.

Coyote vs. Catapult

2008-03-06T14:00:00.003-05:00

I think this is probably the best Roadrunner/Coyote cartoon ever. In particular, the part involving the catapult. In particular, the part involving hiding under the catapult. That's all.

Dear Deer

2008-02-18T16:19:00.006-05:00

My man Raul directed this. I think it may villainize hunting children as well as the hunting of children a little more than they or it fairly deserve. On the other hand, I've never met a child; maybe they aren't as terrible as the local news make them out to be. Anyway, watch this, especially if you're a ukulele fan because I'm pretty sure that's what's being played.

Dear Barack,

2008-02-13T03:42:00.018-05:00

Alright, Obama. Fine. We disagree on several things, not the least of which being our views regarding the overall role of government -- namely, you think it should do a lot of things and I think it should do very little. But fuck it, I'm on this train and I mean it. You need my help, just comment on this post and I'll be there. That said, if you stab me in the back and you're just like every other one of these jokers, so help me God, I will ... blog about it. And maybe write a letter.

"I know how hard it will be to improve our schools, especially because improving our schools will require more than just money. It will require a change in mindset, a belief that every child counts, that it's not somebody else's problem, a belief that parents have to parent and turn off the TV set and put away the video game."

Do you, Barack? Do you know how hard it's gonna be to get parents to parent? I'm not at all sure you know what you're up against, but like I said, I'm in. Let's give this a shot.

Love,
Drew

NYC Big Buck Hunter Pro Map

2008-01-27T18:43:00.000-05:00

Once the iPhone allows for effective use of Google Maps' My Maps feature, I will be widely recognized as having created humankind's most useful map.

These are all the Big Buck Hunter Pro locations I can find in New York City.

View Larger Map

Chris Matthews vs. The View

2008-01-11T18:03:00.000-05:00

I like Chris Matthews and watch Hardball nearly every day. I DVR The View as well (yes, you read that right; go ahead, read it again) and although she is probably the second or third most intelligent woman on the show, Joy Behar bothers me. I was born in 1979, so I don't know what qualified as funny in Behar's time, but this woman is simply not funny anymore. As my 65-year-old roommate says, "I hate dumb people who think they're smart. I don't care if you're not smart. That's fine. But know how smart you are." I feel similarly about knowing how funny you are. The rest of the ladies, Barbara ... whatever. But Joy? She's annoying.

So, anyway, Joy Behar is not funny and Chris Matthews is great, so today it felt like I got a little gift from the universe when Chris joined my other favorite show, Morning Joe, for a few minutes to defend a recent comment he made about Hillary Clinton the morning after the New Hampshire primary, a comment discovered by someone over at The View:

"Let’s not forget, and I’ll be brutal, the reason she’s a US Senator, the reason she’s a candidate for President, the reason she may be a front runner, is that her husband messed around."

The audience gasped and the ladies did what they do best, wax philosophic about stuff they don't know anything about. Anyway, here's Chris on Morning Joe, holding everyone's hand and walking them through the quote:

BCS Interconference Week Revisited

2008-01-08T00:54:00.000-05:00

A few months ago, I complained that Ohio State and NCAA football fans are stuck in an indefinite BCS loop. Ohio State ends the season as #2, then plays absolutely no one for around 10 months, then beats Michigan, magically making them eligible for the BCS Championship game and the process repeats.

The playoff we all want would correct this, but since the likelihood of a playoff system in the near future is minimal and Jim Tressell is likely to become the only football coach able to sympathize with Marv Levy, I suggested an idea I call BCS Interconference Week where teams who wish to participate in the BCS bowls would be forced to play someone of similar quality based on the previous year's rankings. Most seasons, this would have meant that last year's #1 would play #3, #2 would play #4, and the rest would pair up consecutively - 5 plays 6, 7 plays 8, etc. - with exceptions made for rematches, intraconference games, and duplicate games. I'd like to tweak that idea, making it a little more simple and independent of the previous year's polls.

Here's how BCS Interconference Week should really work:

Forget last year's polls. Put all the conference winners in a hat and pair them up at random. Decide who is at home with a coin toss. Do the same for all the conference #2's, then all the #3's, then all the #4's and then put everyone else #5 and below together in a hat and draw at random ensuring each pairing is an interconference game.

Put all these games in the same week, right in the middle of the season and that's it - we all have a great time watching Hawaii or maybe BYU beat Ohio State, preventing the Buckeyes from going to the championship game and there'd be a shitload of other great match-ups, too, so thank me later, future of college football.

Meet the Candidates

2007-11-22T18:42:00.000-05:00

Since many states allow you to change your party affiliation just weeks before the primaries, you've got lots of choices. What you don't have is time to study the debates and watch Hardball everyday because, let's face it, when you're not watching Curb repeats, you are either sleeping or drinking, often both and often at your part-time job. Now, choosing a candidate is easy even if all you have is 15 minutes! I've oversimplified every candidate's persona into a few hundred words or less. Just pick your favorite, then unscramble the anagram to find out who you're voting for ... y'know, if you were actually voting. Key at the end.

"I've had face to face negotiations with asshole world leaders like Saddam Hussein and I was the governor of a multi-cultural, multi-lingual border state, so I don't know what kind of experience you're looking for, but I probably have it. Amidst the resumes of the current presidential candidates, my governorship is the closest thing you can get to a microcosm of the US presidency. Sadly, I'm not real charismatic, I have a fat face and I stumble over my words at the debates so generally, I come off as harmless. Fuck this, I'm taking Pete Dominici's Senate seat."
Lard chin broil

"I remind you of some guy from a movie or one of your uncles or something ... a high school principal, maybe ... I don't know, some authority figure with a stentorian delivery, but not a total dick. I probably wouldn't completely F everything if I was president, but if you can't even remember who I remind you of, you're not going to single me out of this crowd either."
He did sport chord / Run a nth dunce

"Around a year ago, I was sitting at home counting my Law & Order residual checks when I got a phone call about some preliminary polling that showed the American public wouldn't totally reject a Fred Thompson presidential run. A few months later, I was in a town car surrounded by PR people and a campaign manager chattering on Blackberries and shuffling papers. Anyway, here I am, tangled up in an actual presidential candidacy. Wanna vote for me?"
Forms no depth

"You will never know what I truly believe, but that's okay because my personal beliefs are irrelevant. An elected official is supposed to represent their constituents' views, not their own. I aim to please as many people as possible and while some call this political triangulation, I think my positions are truly a reflection of the median of America's values, I'll be an average of the last 5 presidents and, therefore, if you like the current system or feel it is fundamentally unchangeable, I am the perfect centrist candidate."
Lo, tyrannic Hill

"Change is desperately needed. The US federal government is an ineffective bureaucracy, but there is another choice: far less government. There is not a single thing the federal government delivers effectively so let's reduce it by 80% let's say, to the bare essentials, and return the wasted tax dollars to the citizens of the US. I don't care if the shock to the system means a few states decline into martial law, they should handle almost everything on their own except defense and border security. And by defense, I don't mean policing the world and helping other countries out which is not at all our responsibility. Check the Constitution."
Our plan

"I'm the textbook definition of a military veteran, having been detained and tortured in Vietnam for like five years or something ridiculous. My overall strategy for how to conduct military operations in what I suspected would be a difficult Iraq were ignored from the beginning. When it was finally executed, dubbed a surge, it has seen the success I expected. I'm not sure about domestic affairs, but if your concern is competent military action when necessary and ending our use of torture, I'm your man."
Cinch? No. Jam.

"There's one issue: border control. And the solution is right here in my holster."
Not Democrat

"Change is desperately needed. The US federal government is an ineffective bureaucracy, but there is another choice: far less partisanship. The Middle Eastern threat has been overblown and the red/blue-conservative/liberal-O'Reilly/Olbermann nonsense is strangling us. Let's try the JFK/RFK/MLK thing again, but this time don't shoot me."
Ram back a boa

"What Barack said, except I'm white with the Jack Tripper haircut and a southern accent. Unfortunately, I was mixed up in the last election so there's a fatigue factor, making the messenger of change routine a little less believable. Even if you like me, you probably like Obama better."
Jehads drown

"Look, the system is what it is and no one can change it, but common-sense, practical solutions and compromises are possible on almost every issue, domestic and international, as long as you know what you're doing in the House and Senate and you're keen on diplomacy, which I do and I am because I'm Joe fucking Biden, Congressional veteran."
Jibed one

"Eighteen or so years after Roe v. Wade, crime suddenly plummeted all around the country, especially in urban areas like New York City, because lots of children that would have been neglected and likely to become criminals had simply not been born. This made turning Times Square into a theme park and cleaning up bathroom graffiti in the 90's a short order. I'm just glad I happened to be mayor when all of that went down because it makes me look like a genius when in fact I'm probably not too far removed from every corrupt city mayor of the 20's and 30's. Also, on 9/11, I didn't hit the gas instead of the brakes or generally drop the ball, so, again, I'm looking just like a space-time theorist and everyone's buying it."
I ID urinal guy

"I got a lot of jokes, but I'm not kidding when I say my biggest liability is probably my last name which seriously sounds like it was made up to increase the electability of my giant pumpkin at the town fair. Other than that, I'm real likable, I'm looking better after my gigantic weight loss, my values are consistent with middle America and I even have a unique angle on the environment that should bring a lot of the right into the game. I'm making a push in Iowa, so I don't know, we'll see."
Meek hick beau

"As my home planet was being destroyed, my father hurled an egg toward Earth containing the last viable embryo of our species. Physically, I am the ultimate presidential specimen, born in a suit with suspenders, a power tie and a smooth FM radio voice that has never wavered. Am I more conservative now then I was two years ago as the governor of Massachusetts? If it means I can fulfill the destiny of my species, then hell yes because even my hair looks presidential."
Minty metro

"Pot should be legal, Shirley MacLaine and I saw an unidentified flying object and my wife is disproportionately hot given my tree-trollish physique. I would pass for a wood hobbit long before I'd pass for a president, but I did try to impeach Cheney the other day so at least give me that. Man, I wish I had done that after Scott McClellan started promoting his book and leveling charges at Bush, Cheney and Rove. Please look past my creepy grin."
I, inch dunce, sink

KEY: Bill Richardson, Christopher Dodd / Duncan Hunter, Fred Thompson, Hillary Clinton, Ron Paul, John McCain, Tom Tancredo, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Dennis Kucinich

Dear BCS, Please save (us all from) Ohio State. Love, XXL BBQ

2007-10-19T02:21:00.000-04:00

Does anyone really think Ohio State is the #1 team in the country? Seriously. Anyone?

I almost feel bad for the Buckeyes. I know that sounds strange, especially if you know my alma mater, but I'm serious. Ohio State may be at the very start of a year-after-year Buffalo-Bills-style streak of disappointment in the BCS Championship Game. It certainly looks like they are headed for the 1 vs. 2 game this year and that's gotta be frightening for a team whose last significant win was over a year ago, in September of 2006, when they defeated then #2 (eventual #13) Texas 24-7. Should Ohio State win out (and there's no reason to believe they won't), on January 7th, 2008 as they walk onto the field in the Big Easy, every little Buckeye brain in the country will be suppressing the fear that comes from knowing your last quality win was 16 months earlier.

We all saw what happened last year and there is absolutely no reason to think it is not going to happen again and again to Ohio State. They play no one (that's right, Michigan, I said no one) during the regular season and so on they march into a game they're unlikely to win unless the coaches, writers and computers magically avoid matching them up against the best SEC, Pac-10 or Big 12 team. On they march and yet those are not real smiles on OSU faces. In fact, look more closely because just behind those smiles - those worried, worried smiles - you can see ghosts, echoes of the faces I saw in person (brag) in the fourth quarter of last year's BCS Championship Game. And their only hope to avoid repeating that embarrassment is to lose to Michigan five weeks from now.

But it doesn't have to be this way. And no, I'm not talking about a playoff. No, the machine of tradition and money that is the bowl system is simply too immense and rusted to disassemble. As many argue, instituting even a short playoff would cause each regular season game to become that much less important and "we already have a playoff, it starts in September." Cute. Yeah, I get it. The only problem of course is that some teams have an easier "playoff" than others.

There must be a way we can ensure everyone has been tested at least once (even if it's by a team of marginal Top 25 status) before they declare supremacy and offer up as evidence a win against a Michigan team that hasn't won a bowl game since the '02-'03 season. I'm here to tell you there is a way and the BCS Committee and ESPN can call it whatever they want, but until it materializes, I call it: BCS Interconference Week.

Here's how it works:

Take last year's final AP rankings ...

1. Florida (SEC)
2. Ohio State (Big Ten)
3. LSU (SEC)
4. USC (Pac-10)

Start with #1 Florida. Who was the highest ranked team outside Florida's conference that they did not play last season and are not scheduled to play this season? USC. Bam. There's your primetime game: USC at Florida. Take them off the list ...

2. Ohio State (Big Ten)
3. LSU (SEC)
5. Boise State (WAC)
6. Louisville (Big East)

Next up, Ohio State. Again, the highest ranked team outside the Big Ten that Ohio State didn't play last year and isn't scheduled to play in 2007: LSU. LSU at Ohio State. And on it goes ... Louisville @ Boise State, Auburn @ Wisconsin, West Virginia @ Michigan, Rutgers @ Oklahoma, etc.

Yeah, yeah, I know. "This doesn't fix the BCS! You're gonna end up with 20 two-loss teams! Then how will we ever know who was best!?!?"

Grow up.

First of all, half of you have been rooting for total chaos (aka. 4 or more one-loss teams at the top) since the outset of the BCS and this will give you that almost instantly. Plus, after a single iteration of this process, my prediction is that the Big Ten would fall out of the Top 10 for the foreseeable future. Man, wouldn't it be nice to open a window and air things out like that?

Secondly, there's not going to be a playoff beyond four teams any time soon and with 120 teams in Division I-A football, there's no way to do this without polls and controversy. But let's at least give the voters some valid info by shuffling the deck a bit. Ohio State #1? I doubly fucking doubt it. If Ohio State goes to the championship game this year, it will be because we don't know anything about them except that they didn't lose to anyone outside the Top 20 and they were "#2" last year. Shit, my #15 Gators will have a stronger claim.

Look, I don't care how you do it. Just give me my week of solid interconference match-ups - mid-season or later let's say - then put two teams that are arguably #1 and #2 in the Championship and bring me a round of Crunch Boxes* for my table. Thanks, sweetheart.

*A Crunch Box is a Black Magic shot dropped into half a pint of Stella Artois, then chugged with finesse.

My Questions for the Democratic Candidates

2007-09-25T13:52:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow night on MSNBC, the Democratic candidates for president are going to have their third or fourth televised debate. It'll probably be the last time you see the lower tier candidates like this guy, this dude and this leprechaun.

You can submit questions to the candidates here and maybe my main man Tim Russert will read one. What I want to know is...

Senator Clinton:
Amidst the debates about gay marriage and civil unions, it is taken for granted that an American citizen's marital status is somehow the business of the government. My question is why is it important for the government to know my marital status at all? I pay higher taxes, nearly $3,000 per year, to remain single and I feel it is well worth it, but unfair nonetheless. Shouldn't we all be taxed the same, single or married?

Senator Edwards:
Would you support an initiative to make teacher's salaries permanently equal to senator salaries, but remove the massive red tape protecting bad teachers from termination? Do you think the teachers' unions would support this or fear losing their jobs to more qualified people?

Senator Obama:
Do you truly believe that altering one's personal behavior can at all stem the human impact on the Earth with population growth at its current levels? The world population was 3 billion in 1950. By 2050, we'll be looking at 10 billion. Would you support legislation, national and/or international, that ties reproductive rights to carbon emissions?

I Was on Cash Cab: After Dark

2007-09-06T03:20:00.000-04:00

Enjoy. I'm the gum-chewin'est backseater what Cash Cab ever did see.

Blogger Now Has Video Uploading

2007-08-25T18:47:00.000-04:00

Google's Blogger service now has video uploading, so instead of uploading videos to YouTube or Google Video and then embedding it here, I can just upload them directly.

Let's try it out with this short film, Fight Kids, which is basically only good because of the whiny way I say I'd like one of the kids to get knocked out. Also, New Edition's "Can You Stand the Rain?" was playing on the stereo in the car, so that's a bonus. Enjoy.

Restaurant Review: ESPN Zone in Times Square

2007-08-23T19:29:00.000-04:00

All you gotta know is I expected a theme park version of bar food at a theme park price and, boy, did I get it. And yet, somehow, this lover of shitty bar food was still disappointed, feeling cheap and used as I walked out.

I had a great time when I was at the ESPN Zone in Las Vegas, but that wasn't exactly an eating excursion. I think they had 2- or 3-for-1 Blue Moons, I won a couple hundred bucks at a blackjack table 80 feet from the front door and the Heat beat the Pistons in a playoff game, so the waiter would've had to stab me or something for them to get less than 4 stars that day.

I give the Times Square version two stars and both stars are for the TV's upstairs which would be a great place to watch a game if ever they decide to sell two beers for less than $12.

WARNING: Each story of this place has its own line; my advice is to wait in both of them. You never know when you'll be sat and then kindly asked to get back up and go to a table downstairs. Also, you must have four or more in your party to sit at one of those fancy fucking booths.

Get out of here, ESPN Zone, and stop breathing that clam sauce on me.

More Good News, Especially for iPhone Users: Seeqpod.com

2007-08-13T16:56:00.000-04:00

Thrillist.com sent me something today about Seeqpod which is a ridiculous site for a couple reasons. First of all, if you've ever seen g2p.org, you know many web servers contain mp3's which are technically available on the internet, but don't necessarily have links to them, so you'd never come across them with a normal search. g2p.org uses a simple script to translate your search into a specific type of Google search whose results allow you to directly stream and download these mp3's rather than having to use Limewire or your favorite peer-to-peer or torrent software.

Seeqpod goes a few steps further. First of all, it is pro-actively searching for all these "hidden" mp3's on it's own with something it calls PodCrawler. You can search through PodCrawler's results yourself, build playlists, share them, embed them, etc. I've had difficulty embedding Seeqpod's Flash player on my MySpace page, but I'm hoping that's a MySpace issue. I'm about to find out because I'm going to try to embed the player in this post.

Wish me luck, but the best feature of Seeqpod is that if you visit seeqpod.com on your iPhone, it opens just like a normal iPhone menu, allows you to search for any song, then streams it to your phone. There may be other services like this, but I'm doubtful there's any music service as useful for the iPhone. Within reason, you can listen to any song, any time, for free on your iPhone as long as you have an internet signal. Ridiculous.

Anyway, here's my "desert diner" playlist. Two songs are missing because Seeqpod has not found them yet. But the other four aren't exactly greatest hits and yet there they are. Enjoy.

SeeqPod Music beta - Playable Search

How to Not Be Homeless

2007-08-13T05:00:00.000-04:00

If you ever find yourself suddenly homeless, possession-less and unemployed and you would like to rejoin capitalist society, just follow these steps and tips:

Budget
The key to not being homeless is having a budget and sticking to it. Let's face it, you're not going to have any discretionary income for at least a few days, so no discretionary spending is allowed. All I want you buying for now is food, hygiene-related products and transportation when necessary. No movies, no arcade gaming and you can't have those cool new sneakers you want. And no booze. Oh, and no crack.

Image
Like it or not, image matters. Everyone's nicer and more accommodating to people who look like they've washed their face in the past week. What you want to do is find an easily accessible hose or public restroom where you can get your face and hands nice and clean each day. As a general rule, make sure any skin that your clothes do not cover is dirt- and grime-free.

Smell is also an important factor and there's really only one way to know how you smell and that's to ask. Just ask someone straight out, "Do I smell homeless? I'm serious. I'm trying to rejoin society and this is an important factor in my new budget. Also, do you have any change?" Once you're certain that you've gotten a truly candid response from someone, you can decide how high on your list a stick of deodorant should be or how important it may be to do a load of laundry.

Soon, you will also be saving up for a haircut and a shave. I'm picturing you with a beard and scraggly hair and stuff. You're a mess.

Location
Since transportation is an issue, to the greatest extent you can, you want to locate yourself near a few key services. Ideally, there is a homeless shelter or similar facility where you can sleep for free, but if not, you'll just have to park bench it or whatever until you turn things around. For begging purposes you want to be near a high traffic area, whether it be vehicles or pedestrians. If you've been homeless for some time, you already know this.

You also want to be near a Salvation Army or Goodwill, a coin laundry, a barber shop and a fast food restaurant. It may also be wise to locate near a hardware store where you can be recruited each morning for day labor. That's a cash business which means immediate payment and no taxes which may be more agreeable as you start this process. If you go this route, though, your proximity to that hose will be a significant concern.

You want the fast food restaurant to be a place with one of those value menus where everything's a dollar and although Wendy's has the worst fries, its Super Value Menu was not improperly named and has more variety than similar offers at the other fast food chains. Chili, baked potato, yogurt, salad: the choice is obvious. A lot of people make the mistake of sleeping near a Taco Bell or BK because of the unlimited refills, but - and I forgot to mention this earlier - you should be drinking no soda until you're out of this mess. Juice, milk, Gatorade and hose water only. Anyway, if you find a Wendy's next to a laundry-mat, congratulations friend, you've hit the homeless location jackpot. Find a good place to sleep near there.

Income
It's possible I've underestimated you, and that after hosing yourself down or using the restroom, you are in a position to start applying for jobs, but I doubt it. You've probably learned from an honest passerby that you smell like a dumpster. And not a new dumpster either. We're talking about a dumpster with some serious mileage and a real unlucky assignment, like a shit factory or Rotten Fish, Inc. or something. My point is you're going to need a little bit of money for laundry detergent and enough deodorant to counteract that smell before you go strolling into the lobby of a Fortune 500 company for a sit-down interview, not to mention the money you'll need for food, a haircut and possibly transportation.

The first thing you need is one of those cardboard signs that are so popular among the homeless. Just find a cardboard box behind a gas station or strip mall, then borrow a marker from a clerk at a convenience store. Write this on it:

NEED MONEY
ANYTHING YOU CAN SPARE
LONG STORY, BUT I HAVE 6-POINT PLAN

Make sure your sign is visible everywhere you go. Intersections at rush hour and street corners in heavily urban areas are a good place to start. Don't mope around; you should appear hopeful rather than sad. In areas of heavy foot traffic, if you have a talent that doesn't cost anything to demonstrate, show it off and put a hat or cup at your feet. Save every penny and remember the rules about spending: no crack.

Eating should no longer be a problem and, in fact, you should be running a profitable operation at this point. Panhandling for 14 hours or so should yield at least $20 if you're in the right spot and a Yogurt with Granola, a Sour Cream and Chives Potato, a Caesar Side Salad and a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger should get you through the day at a frugal $3.96 (before tax).

The rest of the change you've collected is gravy. Feel free to spend it on anything that makes you appear less homeless. Again, this is mostly hygiene-related stuff like brushing your teeth (everyday), getting a haircut (go very short), shaving when your beard gets out of hand and using deodorant after your daily hose-off, but if you're not sure you're making progress, ask someone if they can tell you're homeless. If they say yes, ask them what tipped them off and correct those issues one at a time.

Clothes and Laundry
Next comes a trip to Salvation Army or Goodwill which may require a cab ride. A common mistake at this point is to instead take a cab to the airport and steal someone's luggage from baggage claim. This requires lots of trial and error trips back and forth to the restroom to see if the luggage you picked contains clothes relevant to your sex and size, plus it's illegal. And let's say you did get a suitcase full of clothes that fit you. What are you gonna do with this thing, lug it around all day to your landscaping job? You got no house, man.

Anyway, when you see the prices at Goodwill, you'll have the immediate temptation to buy a bunch of outfits with the proceeds from your new $15/day begging/entertaining job, but you have nowhere to put any new clothes so the first thing you need is something to keep your clothes in. A machine-washable backpack is ideal because you're going to have to bring it everywhere you go, including work. It needs to be able to contain all your toiletries, two pairs of jeans, four white T-shirts and as many pairs of socks and underwear as the backpack will accommodate. You may want to buy some of these items new.

A two-jean/four-T-shirt rotation means you'll be doing laundry every third night because, without exception, and as crazy as it may sound to you right now, you have to wear clean clothes every single day. Remember, too, that you'll have to be wearing something while your clothes are in the wash. Wash that backpack from time to time as well. If you haven't been staying near a laundry-mat, doing laundry this frequently might force you to rethink where you sleep.

A funny thing is going to happen at this point because the fact that you are homeless is now almost undetectable. What's going to happen is another homeless person is going to ask you for change. I almost regret telling you about it now and ruining the surprise, but I assure you there is no way to diminish the magic and wonder you will experience in that instant of profound reflection and introspection. All I ask is that you don't get so wrapped up in the moment that you forget to write down the web address for this 6-point plan and give it to him.

Employment
The goal now is to save up money for a deposit on an apartment and that means you need a real job. Hygiene is not generally thought of as a job qualification, but even the best salesman isn't employable in the long term if he refuses to shower and never changes his clothes. You, however, have come a long way, proven your commitment and are now employable at any job you are otherwise qualified for. Go anywhere you like, applying for every job you can. Anything is an improvement on $15/day. Part-time work is fine and in fact may be preferable because it frees you up to continue applying for other jobs and shopping for apartments.

When applying and interviewing, and in general conversation even, be honest about your homelessness. Don't be ashamed. You are overcoming something most people will never have to. On the other hand, don't be cocky about it either. I mean let's be serious: you're homeless.

On job applications, where it says Address, write "00 Homeless Ave" or "N/A," whichever seems funnier at the moment, and have a laugh. It will show your soon-to-be-new-boss that you have a sense of humor about the whole thing and tell him about the scraggly beard you had so recently. Look at you, making friends. If someone asks you out for a beer, go ahead. It is not against the rules to drink a beer with someone who buys it for you, just don't buy it yourself and don't drink alone. I shouldn't have to tell you the same latitude is not extended to crack.

Don't work anywhere that makes you unhappy. Just find a place where the people are halfway fun to work with. You are not paying rent yet and you only have three small recurring costs - laundry, toiletries and Wendy's - so even making minimum wage is going to allow you to save pretty quickly the money you need for the shittiest apartment near the laundry-mat. Make sure the place has electricity and a functioning bathroom and, obviously, make sure you can afford it. Now that you have a place to keep stuff, you can start buying more outfits or a bed.

Congratulations, Scraggles, you are no longer homeless.

The "Rest in Peace, Gangster Video" Network

2007-08-05T15:20:00.000-04:00

We made a video in high school called "Gangster Video," but no one can find it. It features us strangling street barricades and getting arrested and maced by a school cop, so if you come across something like that, I want to be the first to know.

Anyway, a bunch of videos were made after that, like when we were in college and stuff. Below is my favorite, Helicopter Movie, but you can find the rest on my YouTube channel, The "Rest in Peace, Gangster Video" Network.

Also, this one is ridiculously good.

I Made OneCents on AdSense

2007-07-12T17:53:00.000-04:00

I've been blogging for some time now and the internet public has spoken: I can have a penny every six months. Thanks a rot, masses.

How to Activate Your iPhone Without Any Problems

2007-07-03T17:59:00.000-04:00

It's understandable there were going to be some issues with account activations when 400,000 people all try to activate their new phones at once, but having an inoperable iPhone for three days was, as the kids say, "gay." And the cause of my particular issue would never have been solved if I didn't spend two and a half hours on the phone (90% of it on hold) having myself transferred deeper and deeper into AT&T's tech support.

It's a really exciting 65-hour story which I will surely have made into a mini-series (reverse double-helix plot, one centering on me and one following the iPhone debut weekend misadventures of Dueller Johnson with whom, according to uneditable iPhone activation records, I share a residence), but here's the practical advice...

If you get an iPhone and you are going to keep your current mobile number, do not have iTunes process the number transfer, even if you already have AT&T or Cingular service. Just buy your iPhone and activate it through iTunes as a new line of service with the same area code you have now (make sure every address you enter matches the area of your old number). It will activate with no problem and you'll have two working phones, your iPhone and your shitty phone; then, at your leisure, call AT&T customer service and ask them to port in your old number. The port should take around three hours. The End.

Who in the Lovin', Mother-Jumpin' Hell Is Phil Hendrie?

2007-07-01T18:50:00.000-04:00

Judging all comedic performers on consistency, freshness of material, and total hours performed, according to my calculations, Phil Hendrie is statistically the funniest professional entertainer of all time.

Quantitatively, he can only be compared to other daily entertainers like Carson and Letterman, but those guys have (or had) the advantage of a staff of writers and the disadvantageous restriction of performing on national television so it's difficult to say who ranks where. The Stewart/Colbert Hour falls well short on both time and content and Howard Stern is definitely in the conversation, but it is undebatable that Phil is top three or four all-time among broadcast entertainers alive and dead and yet you've probably never heard of him.

You are about to see the word "radio;" resist the urge to stop reading ...

Three hours a day, Monday through Friday, for more than fifteen years, Phil Hendrie hosted a live radio show called The Phil Hendrie Show where he performed his own voice as the host, Phil Hendrie, but he also performed the voices of his guests. A radio microphone in front of him and a telephone in his hand, he interviewed dozens of recurring characters of his own creation and then radio listeners, thinking the voices were real people, called in to talk and argue with the guests.

For example, one of the frequently featured guest voices, Steve Bosell, was notorious for filing lawsuits. Typically, he was motivated by a recent embarrassment of one kind or another (aka. "people makin' [him] look like a fool"). To call this character litigious and frivolous (as many callers did) would be grossly understated. He has sued, among dozens of others, his neighbor, his mother, his wife and his dog on various occasions for charges like, as he put it, "attempted murder of my relationship with my kids." He once asked a judge to legally compel his wife to get breast implants and collagen injections because her looks drove him to seek sexual satisfaction on the internet. And although he did find what he was looking for and was taken to heights of pleasure he had only dreamed of (his words), his cybersex partner turned out to be his neighbor, Roy Hutchins, playing a prank. Lawsuit time.

You can imagine the kinds of calls that would come in when someone like this is on the air. The callers were often irate and therefore entertaining, but the actual premises of each bit were the funniest part of the show.

Hendrie retired in June of 2006 and his show was survived by several years of archived material on The Phil Hendrie Show website. To hear the audio there, you will need a subscription, but there are two free 24-hour audio streams at KBLORadio.com where you can hear old episodes anytime. Like, right now, for example, it would be totally appropriate to stop reading this and visit KBLO and click on one of the two streams on the right or left margins.

According to Wikipedia, Phil first performed a character voice (Egyptian immigrant Raj Fahneen) as a phony guest live on the air in 1990, but I don't think the characters became totally central to his show until he moved to WIOD in Miami in 1992. The show was later moved to LA where it eventually reached a national syndication of around 100 stations, with many more stations having added his program to their line-up only to remove it weeks later as local listeners, disoriented by the fictional voices, demanded the show be canceled.

Hendrie's devoted listeners waned somewhat in their allegiance when Hendrie, a Democrat, expressed his views on terrorism and the Iraq war. He had already performed voices on The Simpsons, Futurama, King of the Hill and in Team America, but when he left the air announcing his goals to expand his creativity to writing for television and film, and to acting in front of cameras, all bets were off; many of his fans felt betrayed and eventually sweetfeatheryjesus.com, a site originally designed as a shrine to Phil and his characters, became the nexus of anti-Hendrie sentiment. There is now little evidence remaining that the site ever had anything to do with The Phil Hendrie Show at all.

Anyway, this past week (almost exactly one year after leaving the air), Phil Hendrie returned to live radio on TRN-FM, but without the character voices. Sounds like he's going to read headlines and rant which is something he used to do between character bits and which is also pretty entertaining, but it's on from 1am to 4am EST so unless they podcast it or archive it on the site, I won't be hearing much.

Fortunately for any remaining fans, there's KBLO and about 8 years of the character bits archived on his site. Check it out if you like laughing for thousands of hours.

Slate on Celebrity Profiles

2007-06-21T15:15:00.000-04:00

Here's a pretty great Slate story on how writers of celebrity profiles, even when they try to step outside the corniness of the act of writing a celebrity profile by writing about the act itself within the profile, are still writing a corny-ass celebrity profile. Confused? That's because I can't write and this guy can. The end is good.

Here: The Worst Celebrity Profile Ever Written? by Ron Rosenbaum. Also available as podcast (click iTunes under Slate Daily Podcast).

Michael Moore & Sicko

2007-06-19T13:52:00.000-04:00

I downloaded Michael Moore's new film Sicko last week. Sicko, like Moore's previous efforts, is part satire, part propaganda and part documentary. Today, he's probably calling it a documentary, but as he has done in the past, it will suddenly become a satire when a few of the movie's facts, however insignificant, come into question.

That's fine, these are the kinds of movies he makes, but I just feel like the word documentary lends them a credibility they don't have. That is, Moore knows the story he wants to tell in advance of any research or filming. The realities he discovers during filming do not shape his overall message; any truths that do not fit that message are simply omitted and anything that supports his view is exaggerated. Y'know, like Bush did with pre-war intelligence and, in fact, like almost everyone acts when it comes to political matters:

1. Search gut for uninformed opinion
2. Arrive at conclusion
3. Encounter data
4. Ignore contraindicative evidence
5. Exaggerate supportive evidence
6. Act on original gut decision

I know, I get it. You don't have to eat Fox News to know it tastes like shit. I'm just saying, if you liked An Inconvenient Truth, you probably wouldn't sit through more than three minutes of The Great Swindle. And why not? Because you were already a genius before you saw Gore's movie.

All of that said, Sicko is put together well. Moore's perspective is made perfectly clear and although some people need to put away their erections, the movie deserves at least some of the awards it has already received and is sure to get. It was extremely interesting to see the way treatment is delivered to the citizens of Canada, France, the UK and Cuba and I admit health care might even be one service we ought to socialize.

Ambulances and emergency room visits should be provided through taxes, but I'm not totally convinced just yet that we should socialize the whole system and that's because there are almost no socialized programs that work well. Moore lists fire departments and libraries and makes a real stretch by including post offices. Courts, schools, the DMV, the police, the war on drugs, homeland security, prisons, etc. all fail to make his list of great government services and yet confidence abounds that health care of all things should be delivered by a federal agency.

The problem is everyone thinks the US has a private system, which is technically true, but as Moore points out, the infrastructure is rigged. He plays an audio recording of Nixon that's supposed to sound real incriminating, but Nixon's perspective is understandable to any fiscal conservative. In a socialized system, you don't want there to be an incentive for citizens to request treatment when they don't need it. You want incentives to run the other way. Unfortunately, that conversation lead to HMO's and the convoluted system we have today.

If you have health insurance in the US, it is probably through your employer, who you pay for coverage so that they can pay an insurance company who pays an HMO who pays a doctor. That is not exactly pure capitalism. That's at least two layers of third-party payment, a structure which lends itself neither to competitive pricing nor administrative efficiency.

Sadly, the movie never explains how other countries are able to offer these services without astronomical tax rates. Taxes are 5-10% higher (generally) in Europe, but that alone can't pay for this kind of system. It has to be in the drug costs they negotiate with pharmaceutical companies so I guess here in the states, we must be paying for all the world's R&D and then everyone else reaps the benefits. That and/or there's some serious 69-ing going on between the pharmaceutical lobby and Washington, DC. On the other hand, these countries all spend about 8% of what we do on fucking defense so that's really helping us out, too.

Please please please vote for Ron Paul with me.

Mike Gravel: Handling Rocks Just Comes Naturally

2007-06-15T00:56:00.000-04:00

"All right, Mike, let's try that again. Remember, this is a presidential campaign ad, so this time, don't talk at all and um ... I don't know, do something with that rock. Yeah, that one."

The Sopranos Ends

2007-06-11T19:58:00.000-04:00

Perfect ending.

I wish I had noticed which songs Tony decided not to play, but for most of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'," we all were Tony Soprano, living in perpetual suspense even amidst the normalcy of a family dinner. With the chime of every patron's entrance, Tony's eyes were on the door at Halston's. And so were ours.

Portrait of an American family indeed. Well played, David Chase.

(Cut to black.)

Pleading 'No Contest' Over the Phone is Easy!

2007-06-04T17:31:00.000-04:00

Today, I finally resolved my case with the State of Arizona over my unwillingness to respect a three-foot barrier separating me from the same grass on which Chris Leak, Tim Tebow and Urban Meyer conducted a complimentary college football clinic for Jim Tressel, the Ohio State Buckeyes and the rest of the Big Ten.

After jumping the rail at the end of the game, I was handcuffed almost instantly, escorted to a small holding cell, cited for trespassing and released from the stadium so quickly that I beat my friends back to the car. I don't live in Arizona, so I was appointed local counsel who would represent me when court appearances were necessary. Documents were mailed back and forth and, in the end, I was offered a plea agreement where I would plead 'no contest' to third degree trespassing, pay a $303 fine and that would be the end of it.

Today was the final step of the process, a teleconference (recorded I presume) with a judge and prosecuter in Glendale, Arizona, to get my change of plea over the phone. Even until today it was somewhat unclear to me whether the charge was for not having a ticket (I didn't) or for jumping the railing (I did). Turns out it was for jumping the railing. Some have commented that the $303 fine is far less expensive than tickets were that day (around $1250) and that I saved nearly $1000, but it should be noted that even if I had bought a ticket, I probably still would have jumped on the field and had to pay this fine.

Anyway, it's over now and when I'm 38 and stopped for speeding near the Grand Canyon, my kids won't have to watch me get hauled off to jail on a warrant from 2007.

The History of WMD's in Iraq

2007-06-01T13:00:00.000-04:00

Tony Blair:

"In April 1991, after the Gulf War Iraq was given 15 days to provide a full and final declaration of all its WMD.

Saddam had used the weapons against Iran, against his own people, causing thousands of deaths. He had had plans to use them against allied forces. It became clear after the Gulf War that the WMD ambitions of Iraq were far more extensive than hitherto thought. This issue was identified by the UN as one for urgent remedy. UNSCOM, the weapons inspection team, was set up. They were expected to complete their task following the declaration at the end of April 1991.

The declaration when it came was false - a blanket denial of the program, other than in a very tentative form. So the 12 year game began. The inspectors probed. Finally in March 1992, Iraq admitted it had previously undeclared WMD but said it had destroyed them.

It gave another full and final declaration. Again the inspectors probed but found little.

In October 1994, Iraq stopped co-operating with UNSCOM altogether. Military action was threatened. Inspections resumed.

In March 1995, in an effort to rid Iraq of the inspectors, a further full and final declaration of WMD was made. By July 1995, Iraq was forced to admit that too was false.

In August they provided yet another full and final declaration.

Then, a week later, Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamal defected to Jordan. He disclosed a far more extensive BW program and for the first time said Iraq had weaponized the program; something Saddam had always strenuously denied. All this had been happening whilst the inspectors were in Iraq. Kamal also revealed Iraq’s crash program to produce a nuclear weapon in 1990. Iraq was forced then to release documents which showed just how extensive those programs were.

In November 1995, Jordan intercepted prohibited components for missiles that could be used for WMD.

In June 1996, a further full and final declaration was made. That too turned out to be false.

In June 1997, inspectors were barred from specific sites.

In September 1997, another full and final declaration was made. Also false. Meanwhile the inspectors discovered VX nerve agent production equipment, something always denied by the Iraqis.

In October 1997, the US and the UK threatened military action if Iraq refused to comply with the inspectors. But obstruction continued.

Finally, under threat of action, in February 1998, Kofi Annan went to Baghdad and negotiated a memorandum with Saddam to allow inspections to continue. They did. For a few months. In August, co-operation was suspended.

In December the inspectors left. Their final report is a withering indictment of Saddam’s lies, deception and obstruction, with large quantities of WMD remained unaccounted for.

The US and the UK then, in December 1998, undertook Desert Fox, a targeted bombing campaign to degrade as much of the Iraqi WMD facilities as we could.

In 1999, a new inspections team, UNMOVIC, was set up. But Saddam refused to allow them to enter Iraq. So there they stayed, in limbo, until after Resolution 1441 when last November they were allowed to return.

What is the claim of Saddam today? Why exactly the same claim as before: that he has no WMD.

Indeed we are asked to believe that after seven years of obstruction and non-compliance finally resulting in the inspectors leaving in 1998, seven years in which he hid his program, built it up even whilst inspection teams were in Iraq, that after they left he then voluntarily decided to do what he had consistently refused to do under coercion.

When the inspectors left in 1998, they left unaccounted for:
10 thousand litres of anthrax
a far reaching VX nerve agent program
up to 6,500 chemical munitions
at least 80 tonnes of mustard gas, possibly more than ten times that amount
unquantifiable amounts of sarin, botulinum toxin and a host of other biological poisons
an entire Scud missile program

We are now seriously asked to accept that in the last few years, contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence, he decided unilaterally to destroy the weapons. Such a claim is palpably absurd.

1441 is a very clear Resolution. It lays down a final opportunity for Saddam to disarm. It rehearses the fact that he has been, for years in material breach of 17 separate UN Resolutions. It says that this time compliance must be full, unconditional and immediate. The first step is a full and final declaration of all WMD to be given on 8 December.

I won’t to go through all the events since then - the House is familiar with them - but this much is accepted by all members of the UNSC. The 8 December declaration is false. That in itself is a material breach. Iraq has made some concessions to co-operation but no-one disputes it is not fully co-operating. Iraq continues to deny it has any WMD, though no serious intelligence service anywhere in the world believes them."

This is an excerpt from the British House of Commons' debate regarding the use of military force in Iraq, 18 March 2003. Sadly, I cannot quote any of my own nation's leaders on this subject without sacrificing clarity.

Google's Watchful Eye Rolls Through Cooper City

2007-05-30T20:19:00.000-04:00

When Google decided to launch their new Street View feature in Google Maps, they figured a little trip through my hometown Cooper City (Someplace Special) was a good idea. They drove around a few cities with one of those 360-degree cameras mounted on their GooglePrius or whatever. So far, only five cities are included nationwide: Denver, New York City, San Francisco, Las Vegas and Miami (near Cooper City) where for no good reason the Hess at Palm Avenue and Stirling Road struck them as a must-see.

Here's what it feels like to stand in the middle of the country's "most dangerous (as of 2001)" intersection, here's Crocodile Lounge where I lose in trivia each week, and here's the subway station where I recently rolled down about 12 stairs (still made the train!).

Clap It Up, Shitheads

2007-05-24T19:01:00.000-04:00

Giuliani showed up on Letterman the other night and explained that, through the Iraqi Liberation Act, Bill Clinton's policy on Iraq was regime change and he simply didn't get a chance to remove Saddam Hussein:

"In a way, George Bush carried out what Bill Clinton wanted to do and didn't get the opportunity to do."

Um, what? Whether or not you think it was a good idea to remove Saddam Hussein via military force, Rudy's comments were a gross misrepresentation of a resolution which only provided the president with the power to support Hussein's opponents in Iraq, mainly through funding. And yet the Letterman audience starts fucking clapping it up like Rudy's a genius and like they know what the hell he's talking about.

Later in the week, a different but apparently equally dim-witted audience on The View applauded Rosie O'Donnell as she tried to bark down Elizabeth Hasselbeck rather than answer her own highly suggestive questions from last week:

"Six hundred and fifty-five thousand Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists? ... I'm saying that if you were in Iraq and another country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed six hundred and fifty-five thousand of your citizens, what would you call us?"

She actually makes Hasselbeck look articulate and informed. Anyway, her comments have come up again in the days following and Rosie insists she did not mean to imply that U.S. troops are terrorists, but she still refuses to answer her own question: Who are the terrorists? Did she mean Bush? The troops? The U.S.? Yes, innocent people have died in gruesome fashion, but most of the death toll figures you hear are bullshit estimates, not that the concrete numbers are any more inspiring, but the murders over there are mostly Arab-on-Arab attacks. And hey, by the way, answering a direct question with your own leading questions and then denying the implications of those questions also qualifies as wholesale seagull droppings. Time and time again, though, Rosie gets applause after each of her maneuvers.

Last week in South Carolina. Republican debate. The topic of torture is raised and you'd have thought someone was flying a banner on stage that read "Penis Length Contest" because almost every candidate began trying to convince viewers he was Detective John McClane with the "yippie ki yay's" and everything, blowin' up villains and henchmen or knowin' the reason why not. The one guy even made a Jack Bauer reference(!) and there was some jive joke about John Edwards' haircut. And here we go again with the live audience buying into it and cheering and shit.

Seriously, how can the concentration of uninformed dolts be that high in a single room? Where do these audiences come from? I mean one audience obviously came from South Carolina which is fine and I guess, on the bright side, these clap-happy types seem to enjoy congregating, so exterminating them wouldn't be too difficult, but still. I don't know, maybe the meaning of applause has changed. Maybe applause now means "man, I wish that were true" or "now that makes no sense at all."

All I ask is that everyone quit it with the clapping after every self-appointed national advisor delivers his big opinion.

(Applause.)

Local News Treating Spam Forwards as Fact

2007-05-16T02:38:00.001-04:00

On Tuesday, Julia Yarbough of Miami's NBC 6 news went in front of a camera and read straight from a teleprompter a story someone seriously titled "National 'No Gas Day' Lends Lesson In Economics." She cited an online campaign that reached "over 73 million" internet users and the "overnight 30 cent drop in prices" experienced last year when a "gas out" was executed.

That 30-cent drop is something we would all remember so it's no surprise all of her facts came from an internet chain letter.

Most MySpacers saw a bulletin post from at least one of their "friends" in the past few weeks urging them not to buy gasoline on May 15th as part of a nationwide gas out to fuck with oil suppliers. As you may know, this message is simply the newest version of an internet chain letter that's at least 8 years old and, like boycotting specific gas brands, the effectiveness of a one-day gas out was economically debunked long ago by 14-year-olds everywhere. This email tends to reappear every time gas prices spike even slightly.

The problem with the idea, of course, is that if you tell people not to buy gas on a given day, the gas stations simply get busier on the days leading up to and days following the gas out date. Usage-wise, no one makes any sacrifices (which is part of the reason everyone loves the idea so much; "I'll just fill up a day early!") and so no effect is felt beyond giving gas station attendants one slower day at work bookended by a few busier days.

I get that we can't sit down everyone with an email account and teach them the economics behind why a one- or even three-day gas out will go completely unnoticed by oil companies. And I get that people feel helpless about oil prices and this seems like a simple and logical way to hit the suppliers where it hurts. So, yeah, the email makes its rounds, everyone gets excited about sticking it to the oil man (even though 8% of their 401K is probably invested in conventional energy), thousands or millions of people even remember not to buy gas that day, but usage remains unchanged so economically speaking, nothing happens. Whatever, that's fine.

What's not fine is the effectiveness of a one-day gas out being reported on the news as fact.

I'm still racking my brains trying to figure out how this story made it to air. I mean there are editors, right? There has to be an economist on the staff or a cameraman who's heard of snopes.com or something. Yarbough is sitting there on camera quoting facts directly from an internet chain letter and no one cuts her mic. I don't give a shit if you do have to send it back to Tony Segreto. Something tells me he's not going to read me the latest all-caps FWD from his inbox. He knows how to go to commercial and meanwhile we have a reporter literally perpetuating urban legends on live television.

I'm a dick and in my contract it says I'd have to send them an email in a situation like this, so I did:

I love the prank you guys pulled on Julia Yarbough today, sending her out in front of the camera to read "facts" from the latest version of an internet chain letter. That gas out story was a riot. She really thought one-day gas outs work and that there was an overnight drop of 30 cents last year. C'mon, Julia, you'd remember something like that- it was a dead giveaway.

You guys even posted it on the website like a real news story with the video and everything!

That's great- when did you guys decide to go Daily Show with the format?

Drew

http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/nogas.asp

**UPDATE 5/16/07, 12:23 PM -- This post is not as fun anymore because since my email and probably dozens more, NBC 6 has edited both the online article and video to make Julia appear less uninformed. The video is shorter although it retains the original headline and you'll notice the headline on the text version of the story has changed.**

The Battle of Surfaces

2007-05-02T01:18:00.000-04:00

It's no secret (except in America where no one gives a shit about tennis) that Rafael Nadal pwns Roger Federer when they meet on a clay court. Otherwise, Federer is probably the best tennis player in recorded history, at least according to John McEnroe who you may have heard of.

Here are the head-to-head records by surface:
Carpet: Federer 1, Nadal 0
Grass: Federer 1, Nadal 0
Clay: Nadal 5, Federer 0
Hard: Nadal 2, Federer 1

What remains unclear is whether Nadal is, on any surface, a special mismatch for Federer and would win most of the time or if it is specifically the Nadal-on-clay scenario that is so troubling for Federer and Roger would prevail most of the time off of clay.

If only there were a way to settle this by removing the surface advantages...

I learned about The Battle of Surfaces 9 hours before the match because, as I mentioned, tennis could disappear from the entire historical record of man and Americans would look quizzically at the mysteriously blank spot in yesterday's sports section and ask, "Hey, wasn't there an article about Dale Jarrett's taxidermy collection here yesterday?"

So, yeah, no one in America knows about this match except about eight people and for that reason, I'll probably never see coverage of it beyond a brief and crude blog entry, written in Spanish by a Mallorcan churro vendor.

But it's basically the best idea in sports since the institution of the Royal Rumble. Thank you, Pablo del Campo, mastermind behind The Battle of Surfaces. And thanks for nothing ESPN.

**UPDATE 5/2/07, 3:02 PM -- Nadal has won the best of three match 7-5, 4-6, 7-6 in a third set tie-break 12-10, so yeah this was one of the great matches ever. Thanks again, ESPN and Tennis Channel for instead broadcasting Cold Pizza and The Best of Roddick: Un-Cut. What the fuck does "un-cut" mean anyway? Is this all the Andy Roddick footage the censors don't want us to see? Maybe it's clips of interview after interview with Roddick spewing racially charged slurs and profanity. Or was this an hour filled with his most pornographic aces and his most disgusting drop shots - tennis technique that was simply too graphic to air during the original matches?**

Karl Rove's Ass, Microscope. Microscope, Karl Rove's Ass.

2007-04-24T13:37:00.000-04:00

I think polite introductions are in order. According to the LA Times, an electron microscope will be jammed in every visible procedural Karl Rove orifice for the next few months as the Office of Special Counsel probes Rove's role (three times fast, go for it) in the U.S. Attorney firings and probably his participation in some other questionable White House behavior.

Rove is one of those guys who, if you took a pencil and drew a line on a piece of paper and told him everything above the line was legal and everything below the line was illegal, he'd shrink himself to microscopic size and set up camp right in there among the fragments that make up the line. Then he'd start rolling the pieces of lead, one by one, into the illegal side and inching his camp forward.

It's not a criminal investigation yet, but here's a rough timeline of the next 6 months or so:

May 2007
Rove is called in for a deposition in which he makes a few firm denials, but more often fails to recall most of his actions between 1998 and May 2007.

June 2007
Rove's deposition denials are found to be inconsistent with new, possibly televised, eye witness testimony and a recovered Outlook archive file (search: krove.pst) containing an email which provides a strong indication Rove acted plainly illegally.

August 2007
Now a criminal investigation, Rove testifies again, this time in front of a committee, C-SPAN, the whole deal, and claims he does not remember sending such an email and that he has often given his password to lower-level White House staffers to update his contacts or his calendar or something.

September 2007
Rove's assistant or some other White House staffer testifies that, indeed, Rove did give his password to her and others although she is not sure who the "others" are. Naturally, she does not recall sending the email herself. "I don't know. It could have been anyone."

October 2007
In another session of televised testimony before a committee, Rove is barraged, especially by Democrats and even by Republicans, about his seemingly false testimony and, at this point, almost assuredly illegal acts. Instead of answering questions, Rove sets a Cooltronix Tune-A-Fish Cassette Player on the table and plays a recording of Alberto Gonzalez's recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Rove then breaks out an iPod, leans back and jams the headphones in his ears. What's he listening to? His favorite album, The Missing 18 and a Half Minutes from the Watergate Tapes.

Seriously, though, all (un)told, no one goes to jail; nothing happens.

BTW: Kucinich. Sharpton. '08.

The Year 2100

2007-04-21T17:20:00.000-04:00

This is how stupid we are about the year 2100. And here's how stupid I am- my predictions:

1. Intense beams of radiation will allow us to transmit energy wirelessly.
2. Time travel will be proven impossible.
3. I'll be alive and the life expectancy of a child born in 2100 will be around 500 years.
4. It will be as if hockey never existed. Baseball will at least be remembered in museums across the Old United States Territory.
5. Humans and dogs will have a single, shared consciousness.
6. The moon will have been destroyed in the second Earth-Mars War.
7. Etc.

How Anti-Gun Control Folks See Things

2007-04-19T17:37:00.000-04:00

"How difficult it was for a criminal to get a weapon is pretty much irrelevant when he's in my house with a gun and I don't have the right to own one."

Vagina Power with Alexyss Tylor

2007-04-18T02:43:00.000-04:00

The original YouTube posting of this video claimed that it aired at 9pm on a Wednesday night, but PeopleTV's schedule says The Alexyss Tylor Show airs on Tuesdays at 5pm. In any case, if you're ever in Atlanta, I suggest you settle in for some informative public television.

The Most Underrated Black Comedian Ever

2007-04-15T20:42:00.001-04:00

David Alan Grier is probably best known for his work on In Living Color, particularly his portrayal of one half of the "Men On" duo (Antoine Merriweather and Blaine Edwards) alongside Damon Wayans. Classic black comedians like Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby are obviously an influence to almost all black comics including Grier, but his brand of over-articulation, over-smiling, over-laughing and game-show-host enthusiasm is his own and enrollment is up at the David Alan Grier School of Comedy Acting.

He's an overactor without being cartoony like a Jim Carrey and without letting his own persona leak through the fourth wall like the Eddie Murphy's and Chris Tucker's of the world.

He receives almost no recognition for his impact on comedy, especially his impact on the stylings of current black comedians and actors, so it is probably fitting that here, on the most unread blog on all the internets, he is honored today.

This Imus Shit Is Boring

2007-04-10T22:54:00.000-04:00

In an advanced society, mature and secure in its racialisms, the Rutgers women's basketball team would simply write a 10,000-word declaration for Imus and he would read it on the air. Plus, he signs it - notarized, framed, bronzed, whatever - and it goes right outside the Rutgers gym:

"Hello. My name is Donald Imus, but most people just call me Imus. Let's face it, Donald is not the hippest name, even for a stetson-wearing hick. Anyway, I'm a ranch-billy born of a long line of hillbillies, river-billies and all manner of inbred backwater-billies. A lot of people listen to my radio show and I've been racking my brains for thirty years trying to figure out why. I'm not funny. Seriously, I'm just not a funny person. I can't even get laughs from real bigots when I go racial with my material. And another thing: the other clowns hanging around this studio every morning? You would not believe the smell..."

You get the idea. I'm riffing here, but the Rutgers ladies would have as long as they want to prepare this thing. It'd be great. Then he reads it, everyone has a big laugh and a couple of beers and it's over.

Or maybe you still fire him. Who cares. Despite not being funny, he and his "comedy show" would just move to satellite. He'd lose the TV gig which means he'd probably broadcast live and direct from his ranch. In that case, his boring sidekicks are probably out of a job. No loss there; they can go back to being teachers or salesmen or whatever.

One thing I am glad to hear is that we can expect a big national conversation about this. I like national conversations because of the great conclusions we always reach when we have them. For example, the universal principles discovered during the four-month Anna Nicole "national conversation" are invaluable lessons that should be posted in every American classroom. And recited instead of the pledge. Maybe just instead of the "under God" part. Yeah, just take out "under God" and put in something about Anna Nicole. Anything. Just like a random headline or something.

... and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, Willa Ford to Play Anna Nicole in Biopic, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

B.J. Novak Pwns Cadbury Schweppes

2007-04-05T15:33:00.000-04:00

Despite Cadbury Schweppes's claim that the size of their Creme Eggs hasn't changed, B.J. Novak from NBC's The Office outed them as the liars they are when last night, on Conan, he compared two eggs: one purchased recently and another two-year-old egg from his Cadbury Creme Egg archive.

From Cadbury's site:

Why has the size of the egg changed?
It hasn't - you've just grown up!

Security Review: University of Phoenix Stadium vs. The Georgia Dome

2007-04-04T18:25:00.000-04:00

Monday, I attempted to attend the NCAA Mens Basketball Final featuring the Florida Gators as they faced off against the 55-year-old face of freshman giant Greg Oden and the Ohio State Buckeyes. Earlier this year, I did the same in Glendale, Arizona where these two teams met for the NCAA (Mens) Football BCS National Championship game. I was able to get into both events without a ticket, so here's a breakdown of how I did it, which venue was easier to get into and what, if anything, it ended up costing me.

January 8th, 2007 GLENDALE, AZ -- Okay, so I was wasted. Fine, whatever. We had a cooler full of beer and we were surrounded by Ohio State fans, two of which were creepily generous with their assortment of candy-flavored liqueueur. Anyway, two half-cups-ful of warm Peppermint Schnapps later, my friends all have tickets and there I am wandering and wondering if I flew to Arizona for no reason.

I was walking around with my finger in the air, berating Buckeyes and finding fellow Gators to watch the game with, somewhere outside the stadium should it come to that. It was about 40 minutes before the game and, at that point, scalpers were asking $1,300 to $1,500 per seat. I figured this to drop to around $1,000 once the game started and my plan was to head over to the designated scalping area in a few more minutes.

Then, some kid was like, "Hey, why don't you just bribe the ticket people up there? When they ask for your ticket, just give them like three hundred bucks or something."

Interesting. It would be a bold move, but not for someone with a .21 BAC. A few minutes later, I was in line, money in hand folded into to approximate shape of a small ticket. The line tapered from twenty-fans-wide to five narrow lanes. But they weren't single file. Wow, I thought, I might make it through without paying.

And I did. But, wait- fuck, that wasn't the ticket check. Must've been security checking purses and backpacks or something.

Oh, shit, here we go. Single file ahead. Every ticket being checked. Fuck. Play it cool, move with the crowd, play short behind this girl, move with the crowd. The ticket agent's looking down at a ticket, quarter-turn pivot move behind the girl, I'm in. I am in. No ticket, no bribe and I am in.

Obviously that was the hard part. Once inside, I just had to find a decent seat. They had security at every aisle, but there were these little platforms along the second-level concourse they had set up with folding chairs so they could sell as many tickets as possible. I found one without an attendant, 50 rows up, at the goal line and slipped in and sat down just in time to watch State's Ted Ginn return the opening kick off for a touchdown. Fortunately, it was your typical SEC domination from there.

Ticket check security level: Subway turnstile
Personal cost: $0.00
Seat: In the first half, Row 50, goal line. In the second half, Row 25, end zone corner.
Field security: Tight.

April 2, 2007 ATLANTA, GA -- Once again, Ohio State fans have travelled long distances to come find out what UF fans and students of the SEC have known about their conference for years: the Big Ten is overrated.

But, the big question, can I sneak in again?

Thirty minutes to game time and I must've gotten in every line around the stadium, but they had double agents at every turnstile. I don't know if one was for bag check and one took your ticket or what, but there was no way I was going to slip by all these people. I conceded defeat and returned to the street where fans were pouring by, hopefully with tickets for sale.

"Distant view, $160.00."
"Nope."

"Normal upper deck view, $360.00."
"Seriously, fuck off."

And then a voice.

"Hey, man I can get you in, no ticket, for $100."
"As long as I can pay you once I'm inside."
"No problem. Wait here for a minute."

The fan smuggler made a phone call, we hung around for a moment, then he said it was time to go. There were a couple others with us, a father and little girl if I remember right and the four of us walked around the side of the stadium. No one was around at all when we got to a maintenance door at what seemed like the "back" of the stadium, if there is such a thing. Another phone call and the door opened from the inside. I stepped in, paid the man his rightfully deserved and well-earned money and walked around the concourse looking for a seat.

Again, every aisle was guarded, but the Georgia Dome didn't have those cool bleachers I could sneak into so I just had to find a good place to stand and watch on as Corey Brewer and Lee Humphrey made it rain.

Ticket check security level: Airline boarding gate
Personal cost: $100.00
Seat: None. Partially obstructed view at times.
Court security: Unknown

Special Feature: The American Terrorists Will Have Won

2007-03-29T17:06:00.000-04:00

A poem by Khalel al-Momed

If we are ever able to vote in a true and free election;
If we ever live peacefully, side by side with the Jews;
When our nightmares become dreams and are no longer interrupted by bomb blasts;
the American terrorists will have won.

When we no longer live in fear of our tribal leaders;
When our speech is truly free, free from instant retribution;
If we ever stop blowing ourselves up in Israeli pizza parlors;
the American terrorists will have won.

When the American Major League of Baseball rewards an expansion team to Basra;
When the release date for Harry Potter is the same in Najaf as it is in New Jersey;
If ever I can successfully order, purchase and eat a McRib in some fucking peace and quiet;
the American terrorists will have won.

Khalel al-Momed is an Iraqi teenager living in Basra with his mother and two brothers.

The Onion to Launch Onion News Network

2007-03-19T16:17:00.000-04:00

The Onion News Network. Coming April 2007.

We're Fresh Out of Horror Movie Concepts

2007-03-16T12:42:00.003-04:00

The trailer for this movie Dead Silence is being jammed down my throat. As far as I can tell, the movie features a dead-but-y'know-alive ventriloquist and her army of puppets cutting out the tongues of people who, I don't know, visit her town or enter her house or something. I'm sure when it all goes down their motive will make lots of sense in a vengeful ventriloquist sort of way.

Anyway, this is one of the worst horror movie premises that I've heard in some time and that's saying a lot because the business of scaring movie-goers has reduced itself to about half a dozen horror movie concepts which, at best, are sometimes merged. What follows is a list of those concepts currently in use. Old-timey monster movies are just that - old-timey monster movies - and do not appear on the list below as they no longer (if ever they did) qualify as "horror movies."

Also, after reading this, try to avoid exclaiming: "Hey, my favorite movie The Sixth Sense doesn't fit any of these!" That's because The Sixth Sense and movies like it (read "The Others") are not horror movies, but are actually twist-ending movies that happen to have ghosts. And they've pretty much quit it with the Exorcist-style demonic possession movies with the exception, of course, of that latest Exorcist so those aren't on here either.

Here are the currently used templates for horror movies:

The Local Victim Legend Horror Movie
A local boy drowns at camp; his mother "avenges" his death. The mother of a boy thought to be dead is killed; he flips. A local slasher is killed by an angry mob in the boiler room where he works; now he can kill you in your nightmares. A fucking ventriloquist gets her tongue cut out for probably no good reason; back from the grave, she's got nothing but puppets and time on her hands. Whatever, you get the idea.
See: Friday the 13th, Friday the 13th II through XXMIII, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Dead Silence

The On Their Turf Horror Movie
Almost all horror movies rely on some form of isolation, but these movies take it to the extreme. Our hero and the victims-to-be he's travelling with have gone somewhere humans are simply not supposed to visit - unreasonable depths of the sea, space, the South Pole, a cave, another planet, a cave on another planet, whatever - and what exactly made them think something cranky and hungry wouldn't already be there calling it home?
See: Pitch Black, The Descent, Alien

The Giant Creature/Swarm Horror Movie
Can't think of a new cool scary monster? Fret not - simply take a creature which already exists and at least double it in size. Suggestions: shark, spider, snake, alligator. Oops, did you pick something too small? Yeah? Well is a million of them too small? I didn't think so.
See: Anaconda, Jaws, Arachniphobia

The Children, Little People & Dolls Horror Movie
Take a few things a child of the 50's might have owned, put them in a dark attic, play a broken jack-in-the-box backwards followed by the very distant echo of children whining an unintelligible old playground chant. Add one survivor, her love interest and six or more victims. Set on "boring" for 80 minutes. Run credits. Seriously though, this category includes any movie that exploits the inherent creepiness of children and the shit they play with.
See: Child's Play, Village of the Damned, Freaks

The Army of Zombies Horror Movie
Zombies are going to get their own category here because there is simply no threat like them and, therefore, no movies like these. If you meet a mob of any other kind of monster, you're dead. Imagine running into two dozen vampires and all you have is a seven iron and a desperate glance from the girl you just met, but she kinda digs you, but the monsters keep interrupting the kiss, but who cares she's probably gonna do you if you can get through this. Two dozen vampires? You're dying a virgin. Two dozen zombies? Shit, you could briskly walk away from two dozen zombies and that seven iron is a killing machine. Zombie mobs get bigger, but never faster or smarter. Forever staggering, their imminence can be presented as "scary" for hours and, for that matter, decades.
See: Anything that ends with "of the Dead"

The Sicko Horror Movie
This one is a catch-all for the movies where the "monster" is really just a human, regular-looking enough to walk into a diner and order a short stack and home fries and yet, in his spare time, he's sharpening his cutlass so he can make socks out of his victim's feet-skin. Besides being a psychopath, this guy often has little to no reason - he's not jealous, it's not "revenge" - to carry on as he does and yet there he is in his basement, cutting the eyes out of magazines between sessions of archiving, by size, his human eyebrow and pinky finger collections.
See: Psycho, Saw, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

World's Smartest Android Schools Me (Probably)

2007-03-14T16:32:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Stephen Hawking delivered a lecture at Berkeley which indicated he believes the universe arose from nothing. The only thing keeping me from being a full-on atheist has been my natural inclination that all of this had to be started by something. I'll reserve judgment until I see the webcast which is available here. Afterward, having understood little, I'll just sort of take Hawkings word for it and go back to the "God = nature/math" school of indifference.

Tom Friend Backpedals on Kobe Racism Innuendo

2007-03-13T02:49:00.000-04:00

Monday afternoon on Jim Rome is Burning, Tom Friend, Petros Papadakis and Rome were discussing whether Kobe is a "dirty player" for his recent elbow-happy "unnatural basketball motions" applied to Manu Ginobili, Marko Jaric and Kyle Korver. Friend had this to say:

"Three times in this amount of time is a trend- okay. This is a guy who came into the league, supposedly he was gonna go to Duke, 1200 SAT's, but then when you have the Colorado thing, the Shaq meltdown and now this. This is the true colors coming out. And I just think that- three white guys he also nailed. What is that about? I mean, so there's just some things going on here."

Then, after a brief comment by Papadakis, Rome pressed Friend:

"Tom, seriously, you do not think that race had anything to do with that, do you?"

"No, I don't. I don't know. I was just noticing it. It's a coincidence I'm sure."

Earlier in the day, the racism charge had already been leveled at Kobe in reader comments following an ESPN article about the third elbow-throwing incident. Kobe's defenders had two predominant arguments:

A. Korver is white, but Ginobli is from Argentina (or Italy or something) and Marko Jaric is Yugoslavian.
B. Who Kobe aggressively elbows is mere coincidence.

I'm not even going to go into the "they're not all white" argument. Check a map plus they look white. Let's just say it was three non-blacks.

Anyway, if you elbow three NBA players in a row without elbowing a black, you're either racist or you're playing the '02-'03 Mavs. Really, though, I like Tom Friend and I'm a little disappointed to see him kinda backing off when his instinct is probably somewhat right here. My guess is that Kobe is frustrated about anyone who guards him with any kind of success, but he finds it particularly annoying when someone who's not even supposed to be good at basketball gets in his face.

Kobe Hater out.

Spoiler Review: Reno 911!: Miami

2007-03-08T20:32:00.001-05:00

I'm a pretty big fan of that show Reno 911! and they just made a movie out of it so I went and saw it. If you plan on seeing it, stop reading. I'm gonna ruin everything.

The plot is pretty basic: every police department in the country has been invited to Miami for a law enforcement conference and when the convention center is quarantined due to a biological attack, the rag-tag Reno Sheriff's Department becomes the only police force in town. The plot is also largely irrelevant - it simply provides an environment in which the usual character-driven antics of the show can unfold. Much of it appears improvised. Here are the highlights:

Sitting on the toilet, Junior drops a shot of tequila into a cup of Pepto Bismol and chugs.
A drunk man enters his neighbor's half-empty swimming pool to physically remove what appears to be a live adult alligator. At the moment he discovers the alligator is dead, the man's head is blind-sided by a second (live) gator's open jaws.
Jones and Garcia are bound and forced to watch a Miami druglord apply a weed-wacker to another man's face.
The Rock blows himself into chunky tomato soup with a grenade.
Unable to catch a chicken, all eight officers surround it and agree the appropriate course of action is for all of them to fire their weapons at the chicken at once.
Asked for his last words, Dangle feels the pressure of the moment and utters simply, "He loved it." Then he starts trying to take it back. You have to see it; it's funny.
Junior and Dangle are driving around in a cruiser among people and umbrellas, sort of lost, when they come to the conlusion: "Yep, we're not on a street. We're in a cafe."

Probably a few I forgot. If you like the show, it's worth watching. If you've never seen the show, do that first and proceed accordingly.

Maybe teachers unions are the problem...

2007-03-08T19:03:00.000-05:00

I still think lack of competition among public schools is the main problem, but Steve Jobs was more right than I thought about these teachers unions. Someone, please explain to me what the big problem with differential pay is.

Duh. Just Use the Alien Technology We Have.

2007-03-01T18:38:00.001-05:00

Former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer is asking world governments to come forward with all the alien technology they've acquired over the years. He says all those aliens like the ones that crashed in Roswell were coming from millions of miles away had to have some pretty impressive fuels and engines. And, hey, why continue to cover up this technology when it might save us from global warming?

Hellyer is 83 and in 2005, he announced he had seen a UFO. Get this guy a pudding and a Sudoku and make sure he's not trying to make a stew out of his socks.

This reminds me of a Phil Hendrie bit where Vernon Dozier was asking extraterrestrials to come down from the heavens and help us with the Isreali-Palestinian conflict. Naturally, adults were too close-minded to join him, so he recruited middle schoolers to help him attract the aliens. How do you attract an alien? According to Mr. Dozier, we know little about aliens, but we do know they're big on anal probing, so if you want to meet an alien, just go out in the middle of a field, drop your pants and point your ass at the stars.

McCain Announces Candidacy on Letterman

2007-03-01T00:38:00.000-05:00

McCain just told David Letterman and millions of viewers that he's going to run for president in 2008 (okay, so I DVR'd it and it was actually 45 minutes ago). Anyway, then he said the official announcement isn't coming until April. I'm not sure what that means, but there are few candidates in the race at this point that I'd strongly oppose. Kucinich and Romney can jam it, but Giuliani, Obama, Clinton and McCain are all fine with me.

Except Clinton.

Lobbyists Are Effective Because No One Cares

2007-02-28T16:13:00.000-05:00

Blunt enlightenment regarding the influence of lobbyists from Wonkette's Ask a Lobbyist:

Do you have ANY ideas how to increase citizen participation and decrease the excessive influence of money from the equation?
Sure, there’s a truly easy way. Fine people who don’t vote. Australia does it. So do 19 other countries. It’s like a non-poll tax. The question is whether the Constitution guarantees the rights of citizens not to vote. It certainly guarantees citizens the right to be ill-informed. But, shit, man, I’d vote in the primaries if I had to pay for the right to think they’re stupid and pointless.

Of course, that doesn’t give you the end result you want (since your question doesn’t exactly sound like it comes from Grover Norquist). I think that if you increase voter participation, you increase the power of incumbency and of attack ads. No one is likely willing to suggest that non-voters are less smart than voters (more cynical, maybe, or just journalists, but not stupider). I don’t think that the amount of money has anything to do with anything in the end. Without voter apathy, the money is pointless. But, lucky for politicians, their constituents care as little about them as they do about their constituents!

So to decrease the influence of money? Can you make people give a shit about government? If everyone was taking 5 minutes a day to pay attention to issues and candidates rather than just watching stupid attack ads on commercial breaks then said commercials would be pointless, right? But Americans are too ADD to give a shit. We want our political information delivered in 30-second or less sound bites, preferably while we’re getting another beer, or with humorous commentary from Jon Stewart. That doesn’t have anything to do with money. But if you’ve got a cure for laziness and political apathy, I’m all ears.

I Knew It: Everyone Younger Than Me Is an A-Hole

2007-02-27T03:18:00.000-05:00

They did the math. The results are in. And it's as we all expected. A study to be released today in San Diego will confirm that what we've been telling ourselves all along is true: "Everybody younger than me is a dick."

This is, of course, according to the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, a test probably designed by a bunch of worthless old people. So, who knows.

Teachers' Unions Suck, But That's Not the Main Problem

2007-02-20T03:11:00.001-05:00

Last Friday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs remarked that the problem with America's educational system was the teachers' unions. Speaking of public school principals, Jobs said:

"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good? Not really great ones, because if you're really smart, you go, 'I can't win.' "

Jobs believes teachers are too difficult to fire and he's right. It's true teachers can't be fired easily and they make more than everyone is usually led to believe, but the bigger problem is that, even if bad teachers were easy to get rid of, public schools are a monopoly anyway, so there's almost no incentive to fire anyone or do anything else to improve quality of education. If you keep a bad teacher, will the students leave? Maybe the relatively wealthy will move to private schools, but not likely the lower middle-class or poor.

Additionally, what incentive do you have to reward good teachers? None. Will a good teacher leave if you don't pay them handsomely? Maybe. Who cares? Hire another teacher. You have no reason to try to hire good ones. It's not like the students can leave. And there's certainly no shortage of aspiring teachers applying for these jobs despite the "low pay."

If running a school was a profit-seeking venture (guess what, it's not!) like these things around town you may have heard of called "businesses," then principals and teachers would have reason to perform well. I'm not even talking about private dollars. This is not Rich vs. Poor. I'm saying make schools compete for the same tax money we are already spending. As it stands, schools have no real incentive to educate anyone well. So why is anyone surprised that they don't?

If you don't want to see the solution to the American education problem, stop reading now. Here's the one-step solution:

1. Attach the tax dollars to the student and let them attend whatever public school they want. If this means everyone is responsible for their own transportation, so fucking be it. If it means enrollment lotteries and not everyone gets their first choice, fine. Great. But give them a choice (any choice, I beg you!), even if it's not their first choice.

Essentially, this is the "school voucher" idea, but without the private schools. Just let kids go where they want and let the tax money go with them. Oh, some people left for greener pastures and fewer kids are enrolled in your school? Okay, tell you what, we're gonna give the money to this other school where people are lining up around the block to attend because three of the teachers are actually jamming information into a couple kids' heads. Do you mind? Well, guess what? We don't care and we're not sorry.

Improv Everywhere: They Cause Scenes

2007-02-18T20:50:00.000-05:00

Improv Everywhere is an NYC-based group who gets its kicks performing various fun and (so far) harmless stunts in public spaces. They are agents on a mission. Most recently, they held No Pants 2K7 (their sixth annual "No Pants" event) where hundreds of fellow agents hang around on subway trains and platforms without any pants and eventually congregate on a single uptown platform before boarding the downtown train.

They've executed dozens of missions including these favorites:

The Moebius - In an unsuspecting Starbucks, seven actors enact a looping sequence of seemingly unrelated everyday events (an argument, a spilled cup of coffee, cell phone with bad reception, etc.) 12 times in a row in about an hour. Thusly, everyone else in the Starbucks enters a time warp.

Best Buy - Eighty or so agents enter a Best Buy dressed in the basic employee uniform - one royal blue polo, one pair of khaki pants, one belt, black shoes - and help any customers who ask. Best Buy management flips, cops are called, everyone else has a good time.

Slo-Mo Home Depot - Over 200 agents enter a Home Depot and begin "shopping." Using synchronized watches, they all simultaneously begin shopping in slow-motion for five minutes, then return to regular speed for five minutes, then freeze in place for five minutes. Employees and actual customers scratch their heads for fifteen minutes.

Man Found Dead in Front of Blaring TV

2007-02-17T20:59:00.000-05:00

Over a year ago, this guy in Long Island died watching television. No one noticed. They found him last week and the TV was still on. Must've had automatic bill payment set up like this Russian dude.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,252591,00.html

PBF Comics

2007-02-17T20:06:00.000-05:00

This guy Nick Gurewitch is fucking fantastic. He draws and stuff and funny shit comes out the other end of the pencil. Notably good ones are: The Adventures of the Man with No Penis, Gotcha the Clown and Deal with the Devil.

Welcome to the Perry Bible Fellowship: http://pbfcomics.com/

Going Blind? Don't Even Worry About It

2007-02-17T17:47:00.000-05:00

However, you may want to save up around $30,000 per eye. You have two years. Good luck.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article1398491.ece

Science vs. Faith: Two Flow Charts

2007-02-17T17:23:00.001-05:00

http://www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/archive/2007-01-15%20--%20science%20vs%20faith.png

I Never Use This Damned Blog

2007-02-11T15:32:00.000-05:00

If you're reading this, you've reached the most remote corner of the internet. In all likelihood, you are the first and last visitor to these bytes. You're in the attic, past the holiday decorations and the opossum's nest, where an eave meets a crossbeam. You're on your hands and knees in absolute darkness with a night-vision microscope. At maximum magnification, you're staring at the texture on some sawdust and there, between the striations, is this blog.

He Hate Me: My Brush with James Posey

2007-01-31T01:27:00.001-05:00

MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, New York City, NY -- Friday night, following the Miami Heat's loss to the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, a few fans gathered in two sections on either side of a court-level tunnel where players from each team were expected to exit the locker room, sign a couple autographs and, who knows, if the planets align, take a picture with a fan without getting too grumpy about it.

There were no assigned seats, just two general areas (one for each team) where a few dozen civilians were scattered around, seated or standing, waiting to see a handful of guys who play basketball for a living. They'd be right up close and in their "street clothes" which usually amounts to a $3,000 suit and about twice that in treasure hanging from their ears, neck and fingers.

Ushers stood around guiding the minor foot traffic and before long, white man and professional basketball player Jason Williams came out and leaned coolly on a railing near the court. He was chatting it up neutrally with a couple women who appeared to be maybe his mom and his girlfriend or something.

A few other girls walked up and I pretty much assumed they were Knicks dancers because they were young enough and hot enough and they entered the area from court-level, opposite the players' through-way. Anyway, they seemed to be lingering around, waiting for a player or three to - I don't know - invite them out for a drink or back to the hotel or maybe to just drop their Applebottoms right there; I don't know the arrangement.

I left the section momentarily, but as I re-entered, I found Williams and the Knicks girls right where I left them. However, a new figure had entered the picture just one row up from where I had been standing: Miami Heat forward James Posey.

Now, I originally didn't plan on trying to get a picture with any players - I was basically just waiting for the rest of my party - but had imagined that if I had the opportunity, I'd probably ask D-Wade to pretend he was talking to me while I pretended to ignore him because I was too busy texting someone. That'd be a pretty good picture and if you don't think so, you're either someone with no sense of humor or someone who just lost to the Knicks by 20. Posey might have been both.

I never even got to my elaborate on my request. Things never made it that far with Posey. I remember only nudging him to get his attention as I asked a friend to "take a picture of me and Posey." When I turned back to face him, he said something like, "Don't push me." I thought he was joking so it took a brief, awkward exchange before I said, "Oh, you're like serious."

At this point, I told him if the "push" actually upset him, I was sorry and we didn't have to take the picture. He said, "Just don't push me." Then we repeated those sentences again, paraphrased, and then I called off the picture altogether and we left the arena.

One friend said he saw the whole thing and claims I "grabbed" Posey which I'm sure Posey would agree with because judging by the look on his face, if someone had done anything like this during the game, he would've been asking for a flagrant and an ejection. Unfortunately, all the referees had gone home and the replay booth was empty, so we'd never know for sure whether I nudged him or grabbed him.

One thing I did know: for several seconds, James Posey hated my guts. So all I figured I could do was find the nearest shot of Cuervo and a Captain and Coke and put them where they belonged.

Sports/Alcohol Make Drew Do Good Stuff -- Chapter 5: Arrested in Phoenix

2007-01-10T03:56:00.000-05:00

Rushing the field after a football game. To those who've tried it, kudos. To those who have succeeded, the highest accolades. But for those of you who have never ventured over the railing, this is for you. They say failure is always the best way to learn and in that vain, I hope my admittedly brief experience can be your first lesson in this storied science. Here are my do's and don't's of field-rushing:

1. DO attend a football game in which your team, the Florida Gators is an underdog, but proves victorious, 41-14, over the Ohio State Buckeyes, a team which basically will never graduate about half it's players while your team, on the other hand, consists of actual college students going to class and getting degrees and everything. If you're short the going rate of $1,250 or simply can't find a ticket, don't worry. You don't need the hottest ticket in the history of college football to enter the hottest game in the history of college football. You can basically just walk in. Be calm and be drunk; it'll all be a blur in the end. But somehow ... someway ... you'll be inside. I did it and you can, too. I'm not kidding and I'm not sorry.

2. DO take time to case the field's security measures and, in general, choose your jump position wisely. This was my first mistake. Ignore yellow "SECURITY" jackets. These people have no cuffs and no real incentive to do anything but sit back and enjoy your attempt at glory. Ideally, you'd have about a 20-yard gap between two slow, unobservant police officers and a generally unobstructed path to the goal posts or the center of the field or wherever else you think you're going. Corners and end zones are good because the crowded sidelines won't be in your way and typically these areas have low rails and are close to field level.

3. DO take a thorough personal inventory. The police are going to do one for you, if arrested, and the discovery of contraband (marijuana, uranium, etc.) will likely append your penalty, a brief stay in the stadium's in-house holding cell and a court date, to be followed by a much longer stay at a much less accomodating venue.

4. DO make a suicide pact with at least two other people in which you all promise to rush simultaneously. I failed to do this. Also, spread the word (quietly, but quickly and confidently) that "everyone's gonna go." True success (the cops simply giving up) will probably only be acheived if you can start an avalanche of fellow fans onto the field. However, three people is a good start and one of you will be near the goal posts or center of the field in no time. There's strength in numbers and, as Thomas Jefferson once asked, "How many pairs of handcuffs can a single officer possibly be carrying?"

5. DON'T go half-assed. Mistake #3. Sad. If you're going to rush a field, just fucking rush it. Rush it with conviction. Rush it straight and hard, rush it long and true. Do not jump the railing and then stand around dilly-dallying, making small talk with the fake security while the real security rushes over with the handcuffs.

I want to see you in a full sprint. Remember, you may get caught and if you do, you might as well be able to enjoy watching yourself later, in HD, running full speed toward Urban Meyer and the trophy when two cops sink your face about three inches into the turf. First of all, it'll look way cool and you can put it on your MySpace and everything. You'll be viral on YouTube three minutes later and you'll be the buzz of the blogosphere for at least eight minutes.

Good luck and go Gators.