This is my favorite story of the day. Who honestly says they went to Buger King expecting coffee in a white porcelain cup? Sometimes I fondly miss New Zealand more than mere blog posts can express.

dreams

Occasionally I have dreams in which a simple task is frustratingly impossible to do. I try to run, and find I can barely push off the ground, as if my body were mired in molasses (I tried to think of a better high-viscosity liquid to use as metaphor, but molasses still works best, although I'm not sure how many people have actually personally dealt with molasses these days). I'm in a car and try to stop, but the brake pedal feels like a sponge, and the car's deceleration is much too slow to avoid an obstacle. I try to look at something, but find I can't force my eyelids to stay open.

Last night, I had a dream with a new variation on the theme. I was writing a story and trying to find some information on Google, but I either kept misspelling the term or my connection was stalled. I kept trying over and over, but couldn't get the result I wanted.

I'm not sure if I should be disturbed by this new development in my dream world.

in praise of the things I've liked lately

For no good reason, but perhaps it'll send some traffic their way:

I became a podcast addict while in New Zealand (every time I hear the theme music for a Slate or NPR podcast, my mind flashes back to the streets of Wellington. When I started listening to them, I'd listen to my iPod on the streets as I walked to work.) I attempt to try out new ones every few weeks, although not in a regimented way.

The best I've found lately is from the Australian radio station Triple J. Their New Music Podcast is exactly what I was hoping to find when I stumbled across it. It's a sampling of brand-new music, most from Australian acts and all from bands you've likely never heard of. It beats the hell out of Indiefeed's alt-rock podcast, which is what I used to use to listen to Indie bands I'd never heard of, for two reasons. One, and most importantly, the Triple J podcast is simply an mp3 of the song. Straight up. None of the talking before and after that Indiefeed has - introducing the track, reading the liner notes for a bio of the band - and which is often laid over the opening bars of the track. Triple J just gives you a song to listen to. Perfect. Two, personally I have liked a far higher proportion the songs played on Triple J than on Indiefeed. Oz has some good music, and it's stuff I'll never hear otherwise.

One I've been listening to for a while, but need to list here, is Radio Lab from NPR station WYNC. It's closely related to This American Life, in that they use various sorts of radio storytelling to explore a theme. Unlike This American Life, Radio Lab is less about personal experience and more about abstract scientific concepts talked about in innovative ways. It feels like the hosts are telling you a story about Time, or Sleep, or the possibility of Life in the Universe. There are interviews, there are stories, it all feels very casual - but if you listen very much, you can tell just how much work they put into it to make sure everything sounds just so. They play with noise to create some cool effects, many of which you don't notice on a first listen. I also make sure to get everything Radio Lab co-host Robert Krulwich does for NPR - he's their science correspondent, and his segments are always a little bit off-kilter but in an excellently informative way.


On the Netflix queue, the most interesting thing I've seen lately is a short film, also from Australia, called Harvie Krumpet. The 22-minute film (which you can watch online through the link) follows a man throughout a life of hard luck and a few bright spots. There are a few great dead-pan black humor moments in the writing and the visuals. But what really makes this film great is the tone of it. It follows Harvie through his life, a life which is mostly filled with pain but which Harvie generally gets through by tolerating his situation and occasionally finding joy, such as through his wife an daughter. That's the simplistic summary. The tone, however, doesn't move too far into the tragic senselessness of his pain or the utter hopelessness of a life filled with problems. Neither does it veer the other way, pointing out the bright side and bringing a message of hope. Like life itself, it's filled with bits of both extremes, but mostly it just is. Harvie doesn't always look on the bright side, he doesn't always accept what's happened to him with grace. Neither does he always dwell on his problems. He reacts to both, then generally, sometimes reluctantly, just gets on with life. Very rarely does any work of art balance grimness and light so deftly, without going overboard on either one. Just watch it.

the tradition continues

Mizzou managed to hold onto its second-ever No. 1 ranking just as long as its first No. 1 ranking - a week. We went to the official MU alumni watch party out in Virginia, and got there about an hour and a half early - just in time to snag one of the last seats. A few friends who showed up right before game time had to wait in line outside the bar. When people packed in, there were probably 100-150 people there to watch the Big 12 Championship in the Mizzou section, including a table of Ohio State fans and a pair of Oklahoma fans who were obviously cheering opposite everyone else.

The crowd was loud through the first half, but started to thin out as the second half wore on. By the end of the game, enough pitchers of beer had passed across my table I wasn't perfectly attuned to everything happening around me, but long before the game ended I was having debates about who would be in the Championship.

I haven't been particularly impressed by either Ohio State or LSU most of this season, but I think it's the right match up - there's no one else I can reasonably say should be ahead of either of them.

I'm also amused by the people who are fuming at Kansas getting picked ahead of Missouri for the Orange Bowl. The BCS keeps giving people the impression it's supposed to put the best teams in the big-money bowls. It's not. It's supposed to put the best two teams in the National Championship game (which it has done with only a small amount of success) and then give the other BCS bowls a pool of eligible teams to choose from, with several restrictions. Bowls pick teams who are likely to sell tickets, fill seats and make money. In every case but the top one. I'm not sure Kansas would travel better than Missouri, but apparently the Orange Bowl was.

why me betting on sports would be a bad idea

This year I've been participating in a Yahoo! contest to pick college football games against the spread. Each week you pick every game with a top-25 team, with the Vegas point spread factored in. Until I was away from my computer and didn't get my picks in two weeks ago, I was doing pretty well - I'd been consistently in the top 5 percent of everyone participating (I believe there's a few hundred thousand picking).

Not counting the week I missed, I've been able to pick the correct winner 50.1 percent of the time. And that puts me in the top 5 percent in the country. That would be a money-losing rate if I was betting these games, especially since the number is slightly inflated - Yahoo! has you pick games between I-A and I-AA schools that Vegas doesn't set lines for, so it's just a straight-up pick (and outside Michigan, a guaranteed correct one). According to an article in the Wall Street Journal a while back, you need to win 53.5 percent of the time to make money in Vegas, because they take a cut of each bet.

Of course, if I was betting, I wouldn't be betting on every game. I'd only bet the ones I felt confident about. And I'd probably end up worse off than if I'd bet every game.

I do miss the New Zealand sports books in every bar. You could even bet on American sports. There, it wasn't even against a spread - instead, you won more money for betting on an underdog than a favorite. I didn't bet a lot, but I did every so often. It was kind of like a lottery with a smaller payout and a few more payouts.

my take on a nationally-obscure sports story

Jeff Bower is out at Southern Miss. Just barely enough of a story to crack the national radar, but the only story that matters this week to a lot of folks I knew in the four years I spent in Hattiesburg covering Southern Miss.

On the face of it, Bower’s departure (termed a resignation, but definitely a forced one) is problematic. He’d been with the school for 17 years as head coach, and a few more as assistant and player. The team had winning seasons something like the past 14 seasons, as well as bowl trips in just about all of those.

Normally, this would be the sort of move I critize whole-heartedly, proof the college atmosphere has become so charged coaches aren’t allowed any breathing room and schools looking for a short-term fix often end up in long-term problems. Coaching changes are generally a crap-shoot; ask Nebraska, Notre Dame, Alabama, Texas A&M, etc., how well their last few changes have gone. And those are programs with a lot more tradition and money than Southern Miss.

There is a bit more to the story, of course. The program has more or less reached equilibrium since 2000, by which I mean Southern Miss is in the top four teams in Conference USA but not the dominant team fans believe it should be. The Eagles haven't been one of those outside-the-BCS teams who've had a major run and garnered notice, like TCU did a few years ago, or Boise State did last year, or Hawaii is doing this year. Southern Miss has had a few decent wins, but generally they get beat when they go and play their one or two SEC opponents each year. Fans don't like this sort of equilibrium. They complain about the lack of offense year in and year out. They worry because the defense hasn't been as good as its reputation. The school just built an addition to the stadium, despite the fact they never sold out the previous 33,000 seats. In the final game this season, announced attendance was 17,000. A few big-money folks have been working behind the scenes for a while agitating for a change, and as far as I can tell from the reports, they seem to have forced the school's hand.

Here’s the thing, though. Who better are you going to get? This isn’t a program most coaches, outside of Bower, are looking to make a career stop. There are positives: Southern Miss is sitting in the midst of fertile recruiting ground, although its competing with the SEC schools for the top-notch area recruits. There’s a decent national reputation and the possibility of making a run through Conference USA and making a Boise State-like splash with a possible BCS ranking. There’s a three-year old new lockerroom and weight room complex, as well as a brand-new addition to the stadium.
What there isn’t, though, is money or a fan base. The 15,000 people who follow the team like to believe they are as rabid as any SEC fan base, and they are convinced there are tens of thousands more who will join them as soon as the team turns some sort of corner. Outside of the impossible, getting an invite to a BCS conference, I'm not sure there's any corner to turn. More people would show up if the team was undefeated late in the year and knocked off a big-name team somewhere along the line, but as soon as the team lost again, most of those would go back to watching Ole Miss, Miss. State or another SEC team on TV.

And if they do luck out and get a coach who can bring them some sort of wild success, they'll be going through this search again as soon as that coach gets hired away by a bigger program. Once you're in the cycle, it's not easy to keep it going - see above and the crap-shoot nature of new coaches.

The basketball team managed to luck out and pick up a big-name coach with some black marks in Larry Eustachy a few years ago. He's helped the team out and picked up some recruits, but the fan base has come along slowly. And I don't see why he'd stay if he wins and shows his personal life is redeemed. Even if he doesn't, basketball is a different beast - if Southern Miss somehow became No. 2 in the conference behind Memphis and earned NCAA tournament bids regularly, he would be lauded as the best thing to ever happen to program.

If a football coach wins the conference and gets to the Liberty Bowl, the fans will see it as a failure because it's not a BCS bowl.

I just don't see this as being a positive for the school. An inevitability, maybe, if enough money was threatened to disappear from the donation pool. But I don't think the fans who have been calling for a new coach for at least the past five years are going to feel any better after the new guy has been there for a few seasons.

Mizzou. Rah?

Missouri actually won a big game. Missouri is actually No. 1 in the country and is the most obvious National Championship contender in the country. Except as far as I can tell, no one expects them to beat Oklahoma.

They opened as an underdog in Vegas. And as this post at the Washington Post's Sports Bog point out, the odds makers say the Tigers are the sixth-best team in the country. (I didn't know how he picked those rankings, so I went through the archives - turns out a firm's oddsmakers actually do conduct a poll out in Vegas.) They also say Oklahoma is the third-best.

I give the Sooners two advantages: 1) they already beat Missouri, although it was at home and the game was competitive; 2) as I stated last week, I don't trust Missouri's sports teams in any context. Actually, I'd be fairly confident in the matchup against West Virginia, so the Tigers might wait until then to dash their fan-base's hopes.

No one is more surprised than I am that this weekend's Kansas-Missouri game is actually meaningful. If my years at Missouri taught me one thing about Tiger athletics, it's that Missouri always found a way to underachieve.
Missouri in my experience is not a team contending for a national title. Missouri is a team that brings out the weirdness in other eventual National Champions - this is the team that brought you Colorado's fifth down, Nebraska's kick, UCLA's 4.8 second drive by Tyus Edney.
This is not a team that brought you any meaningful wins. In 1996, Missouri fans celebrated a season-ending win against Kansas by tearing down the goal posts. Missouri finished the year 5-6, Kansas 4-7.
The next year, Missouri fans tore down the goal posts when they beat Baylor to become bowl-eligible.
Nothing since then has made Missouri fans any more accustomed to success.

Attending Missouri games from 1996-2001 did not teach me what to think about a team two wins away from the national championship game. It taught me to be a little nervous whenever the team was on the field, and especially if they seemed to be about to pull out a win against a highly-ranked opponent.

In celebration of this weekend's border clash, a few other things being a Missouri fan taught me:

* You should not bring beer into the stadium in one of those old sport bottles with a giant plastic straw. It does not lead to a pleasant drinking experience.

* The crowd should not throw empty glass liquor bottles at the opposing band. Even if it is Kansas.

* Goal posts are hard to tear down at first, then suddenly very easy.

* Schools get annoyed when three goal posts are torn down in a season, especially when the wins are over schools like Baylor.

* When a school gets annoyed at having to repeatedly replace the same piece of property, it is likely to defend its property with tear gas.

* Campus rules like no alcohol never apply to alumni who have paid money to the school for a ticket and parking spot.

* When a team goes 30 years without a bowl game, crowds will double when they finally have a winning season.

* It's easy to hate Nebraska and its fans, even though it might have the least hostile visiting fans in the conference. I don't know why. Even now that Nebraska is horrible on the field, this hasn't changed.

* Watching your team get beat badly in a sleet storm is not the best way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

* I fully expect both Missouri and Kansas to lose, leaving both out of the top bowls. That's just the way it always works.

Too much chunky?

On a grocery run the other day, I stopped to pick up some Peanut Butter.

In front of the many options, I was hit by a semantic inconsistency. I was looking for crunchy peanut butter. However, of the two brands taking up the vast majority of the shelf space in Safeway's peanut butter section, one brand offered smooth or Super Chunky, the other smooth or Extra Chunky. Neither, it seemed, offered an option in between.

Do we need the extra adjective? Does the Super or Extra mean anything when there isn't a non-Super or non-Extra option? I suppose it is Extra Chunky, compared to smooth, but anything would be.

I supposed I'm more troubled by the verbal inconsistencies from those marketing to me than most. But when did the adjectives take over my peanut butter?

don't mention it

I find it hard to believe more people aren't upset at the calls to give Telco firms immunity from lawsuits over giving the NSA access to communications without a warrant. This drives me absolutely nuts. I haven't heard any credible evidence that getting warrants is really that hard, and I see no reason why the companies should be let off the hook for feeling it was in their best interests to let the government in. Hell, Qwest didn't buy it, despite apparently losing government contracts as a result.

Today the guy who brought some of this to light was making the rounds around Washington. I don't think an immunity bill will be passed while this is in the news, but I totally expect a provision to be tucked into some massive budget legislation sometime when attention is elsewhere.

NY Times story

this isn't good

I just saw this on my Yahoo Fantasy Football page:

Bill Williamson, of The Denver Post, reports Denver Broncos QB Jay Cutler did not throw an interception in Week 8. It is the first time in his 12 career starts that he has not thrown an interception.

As a Broncos fan, I can say that's not a good way to start a career.

secrets

A story in Slate nicely sums up just what bothers me about the State Secrets privilege:

It has long been the view of the Bush administration that nothing can be deemed illegal so long as it remains a secret. Never mind that it's a secret only to people living in igloos without wireless service.

Now, I will concede there are things the state or government justifiably needs to keep secret. However, I would also argue that without any oversight, any entity with power who can unilaterally determine what should be secret and what should not will keep secret more than it needs to, and will likely keep secret things which would embarrass or undermine its power, rather than legitimately threaten the larger security of the state. I don't know the best way to balance a need for classified/secret/clandestine arrangements with a need for oversight and some transparency, but I know I don't like the way it's being handled right now.

at least you could try

The new American Express commercial with Tina Fey bugs me. I think the commercial itself is pretty funny, at least the first few times ("No, the other kind of German Shepherds"). But the concept of the whole thing bugs me.

The ad is supposed to show how her American Express card is the only easy thing about Tina Fey's life. That's how they sell it. The problem I have with it is this: they're not showing Tina Fey's life. They're showing the life of Liz Lemon, her character on 30 Rock.

This probably shouldn't be a sticking point with me. It's not like I expect a commercial with Tina Fey to accurately portray her life. But this isn't even trying. And don't people have enough trouble sorting out the difference between celebrities and the characters they play?

Orwell's limited mind

In an article about the Texas transportation department photographing random cars' license plates on certain stretches of highway and then mailing the car owners surveys:

"This is more than Orwell ever imagined," he said.

A quote from the director of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Things like this drive me nuts. I'm as concerned about the erosion of civil liberties in this country as just about anyone. I worry about the effect of the general lack of privacy you can carve out of the information and electronic age. But anyone who's trying to fight the collection of data by government agencies should at least try to make rational arguments, rather than coming off as a kook who doesn't know what he's referencing.

Orwell envisioned a future where the rulers had a two-way link into every home. Where the only place you could be sure of privacy was inside your own head, with silent thoughts. A future where the government not only watched over the populace, but controlled all their access to any kind of information, and where accounts of the past were routinely re-written to reflect the political whims of the present.

I don't think photographing license plates with hidden cameras is more totalitarian than Big Brother.

Gotta' love those former Montana senators...

My home state has had a decent share of crazies in elected office (at least we're not Idaho).

Apparently they stay crazy even after they're out of office.

I, of course, haven't been particularly consistent with this semi-regular feature, and this is a pretty old story, but it strikes me as an indicator of just how different the message coming from the architects of the Iraq War has been compared to the people who have been fighting it.

Iraq victory might not help.

baseball

I know this is three days late, but I had to say something about Monday night's play-in game between the Rockies and Padres I haven't seen anywhere else.

After the Padres tied the game 6-6 in the eighth, every Rockies hitter came up to the plate looking for the solo home run to end the game. For five innings, everybody was swinging for the fences and through the ball.

Then the Padres score two in the top of the 13th, and the Rockies come back with a rally built on doubles. I honestly believe if the Padres scored just one run in the 13th, they'd be playing hte Phillies right now. The Rockies would have kept trying to aim for the fences, with even more desperation. But being down two actually took some of the pressure off the individual hitters and once you string together a few hits everyone feeds off the energy.

Didn't get a chance to see the Rockies win Game 1 against the Phillies. I can't see them keeping this up through the playoffs, but it's fun to watch a team get hot at the end.

damn

Unexpectedly, my external hard drive quit on me the other day (I suppose it never happens expectedly, but I've certainly had more warning of an impending drive failure). One minute, it was cranking along, saving a few episodes of the BBC version of "Blue Planet". Then, after a restart (not a crash, I just decided to shut down and restart the computer) all of a sudden I'm getting messages about the drive not being readable, and for a while the computer wouldn't even see it plugged into the Firewire port.

I ran Diskwarrior, which gave me bad news - it couldn't repair the drive due to serious drive error. It found all the files which had been on the drive, but when I tried to backup what I wanted to save, all I got where copy errors due to a bad disk.

This was a 150 GB Firewire drive, where I'd been keeping all my media files. I'm not too worried about losing some TV episodes I've already watched and all our wedding photos are backed up.

But it was where I was keeping all my music. I can recreated a lot of it from our two iPods, but I'll lose a decent part of the library. Most of our photos are on the laptop's drive, but there were a few photos I had on the now-defunct drive. Also a few other random folders of stuff I wanted to keep but didn't use often, so kept on there to save disk space.

Our personal photos are on the laptop drive, so we've got them, and I've got another, smaller, external hard drive I backup most of our important documents. I didn't have enough storage space to back up the drive which failed; I got it to be a backup. I've suffered through three major hard drive crashes in the past five or six years. None of them are pleasant.

This spring the drive in our laptop failed. Luckily I managed to salvage it enough to back up what I wanted before sending it off to Apple for a replacement. I think last week our extended warranty ended, and the laptop is acting up again (or is it my imagination?) enough to make me worried for my data.

Time for a new drive. I don't want to keep an army of drive to backup my backups (and I don't want to pay for them, either) but every time a drive fails it reminds me what a pain in the ass it is.

i'm an idiot

I've been listening to NPR the last few days and one of the big stories has been the demonstrations in Burma, or Myanmar.

I couldn't figure out why the commentators kept referring to the country as "Myanmar, formally Burma." The distinction confused me.

After probably three days, I realized the word was "formerly Burma."

I haven't been doing too well at quiz night either.

For those who don't know but might care (a potential audience of, let's see - zero) I'm not a big fan of the current spate of legislation designed to make it easier for the government to spy on people in the U.S. without oversight. Especially since all the arguments this administration has put forth tend to be exaggerated or flat-out wrong.

Such as the push for the recent law to circumvent the need for FISA warrants. Newsweek has an article today on how one of the arguments made to Congress, that the law had helped foil a terror plot, was simply wrong.

The article

great googly eyes

Once upon a time, a Google search on myself turned up a list of articles I'd written for various outlets. A while back, the list became a bit more sparse when the Hattiesburg American put all its archives behind a fee wall (and now you're hard pressed even to find the page where you can pay for my past writings).

There are a few quirky pages the American has kept up, which means this is one of the few remaining easily accessed and searched examples of my work. Had someone told me these articles would be the cockroaches of my career, surviving the destruction of all else, I would have put a bit more thought into them, rather than churning them out as quick as possible to fill sports' quota in an advertising section. They never tell you the important details at the time.

And the new top page on my egotistical Google search is also curious to me. It's a comment left on Ryan's old blog. Nothing against Ryan, but a page of his comments is apparently deemed more important by the Internet community than any other example of my writing. Beware the new media...

Iran

Yesterday on NPR, a story on the problems in Iraq and how the lack of troops available in the future will limit options was followed closely by a story about Iran. The second story included this quote:

Similarly, the Bush administration is divided over how to deal with Iran, with advocates of diplomatic engagement in the State Department — there have been two rounds of U.S.-Iranian talks in Baghdad this year — having to fend off pressure from more hard-line figures, like Vice President Dick Cheney.

It's not clear at the moment who is winning this battle, says Karim Sadjadpour, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The piece indicated the consensus option seems to be that the Bush and Iran administrations are posturing. The implied threats of force on both sides are just political games to get the other to capitulate.

But any talk of action against Iran seems to be ignoring the elephant in Iraq - we don't have enough troops now. So either the "hard-line figures" are posturing or they're willfully ignoring reality. Or both, which seems to be the default setting these days.

does this make sense to anyone else?

Apparently Scottish rugby officials have decided to stop selling game tickets on the day of the game. Only buying in advance will get you in the gate. The closest thing to an explanation this article puts forth is the claim it costs too much to pay the workers to be in place to sell same-day tickets. Also this:

"While there was some public criticism, most commentators accepted the SRU's rationale that experience had shown that far fewer people turn up without tickets than the organisation must allow for when making them available that way."

Huh? Why do you have to allow for a certain number of tickets to be available on the day of the game? You simply sell tickets for the seats which haven't already been ticketed. Bad luck if it's sold out ahead of time.

I can't figure this one out.

in honor of Alberto

This is the sort of thing which has become pervasive in the current administration. It appears from all the news coverage of the past few years Gonzales, along with Bush and Cheyney, has been at the center of causing a culture of secrecy and unchecked powers through the executive branch and the Justice Department.

It's a few weeks old, but here's my story of the day, since it has such a great headline, and such crazy assertions. Like AT&T saying since the government has said AT&T helping warrentless wiretaps is a state secret, and since it's secret, no evidence AT&T unlawfully aided such efforts could possibly be introduced into court.

"I feel like I'm in Alice in Wonderland"

This one makes me laugh more than anything, but it's still a sad statement on something. From an article about high schoolers on Facebook:

“Our school is really interested in its image—they don’t want us to be given a bad name,” says Katie, a Visitation student. She says the school brought in a law-enforcement officer, who told students that “by having a Facebook profile we are jeopardizing our future husbands’ political careers.”

The article

why they dissin' Attenborough?

I didn't understand it for Planet Earth, and I don't understand it now.

I had the good fortune to see the BBC "Planet Earth" series first in New Zealand and then parts of the second season in England.

The show's release dates followed me around the world. The Discovery Channel announced it would be showing Planet Earth, all two seasons worth, a few months after we returned to the States. I'm a sucker for nature documentaries, and I hadn't seen all the newer episodes, so I made it a point to tune in.

Until I heard Sigourney Weaver's voice. The BBC version (shown everywhere but the U.S.) had David Attenborough narrating, as it was meant to be.

I don't understand the point of it all. Or rather, I understand why Discovery decided to go with Weaver, and I don't agree with any of it. Who tuned in just to hear Sigourney Weaver? As relentlessly as they hyped the series, people would have watched the first few episodes if the only soundtrack was a chimp muttering to itself.

The sad part is the marketers were probably right; they might have lost viewers over the course of the show if people were forced to listen to a foreigner rather than a recognizable celebrity voihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifce. At least the comments at Amazon seem to show a significant portion of the American population fear anything delivered in an accent. People who accidently ordered the BBC version of the DVDs complain about being unable to understand Attenborough's thick accent. I can't imagine what they'd say if they were forced to listen to a Scot for a while.

The Discovery marketers are being underhanded again this week. I caught a bit of Blue Planet last night. Once again, I didn't hear the original Attenborough narration.

Of course, Discovery is hyping the hell out of this series as From the Creators of Planet Earth, without mentioning the fact it already aired this series a few years ago. As far as I can tell with a quick search, that time around they did use Attenborough. This time, however, they hired Pierce Brosnan to supply the new narration. As Kirsten said when I told her I thought they'd changed narration, "Why would they replace him with another Brit?" Especially when they're not even using his name to sell the series?

Discovery isn't explicitly mentioning the previously-aired fact, but the promotional material does say something like "with new material." I didn't see the original episodes, but I'm guessing the cutaway interviews with the crew shown during last night's episode weren't in the original. I actually like the extra commentary - the behind the scenes stuff for these series are at least as interesting as the series themselves. But they could have shown the original episode, followed by an hour-long look at how the same episode was shot.

At any rate, if I'm right about the new stuff at least there's some sense to having a new narrator, since the episodes would have had to be re-edited. This doesn't appease my dismay about the Sigourney Weaver thing.

The only explanation for the different Planet Earth commentary I've seen (other than the crass marketing purposes we can all assume) was written anonymously in a message board on the Internet, so it must be true. The gist of it was the U.S. broadcast needed to make more time for commercials than the British broadcast, so it had to be re-edited as well. (Not that I accept this necessitated a new narration track. Shows are edit to cut length all the time - every syndicated episode of the Simpsons is a few minutes shorter than the original to allow more commercial breaks. And on a tangent: I'm amazed that in this great society of ours, such a situation is allowed to continue. I can't believe the wise heads of the networks haven't hit on the obvious remedy: make the prime time shows that much shorter to squeeze in just as many commercials as the syndicated slots do.)

I can't afford a complete DVD library of the David Attenborough series' (although I contemplated buying a bunch of them in China) so for now, I'll just be thankful I have the the Internet.

Charlie The Unicorn

I've been showing this to anyone within reach of YouTube, so I probably should have thrown this up here sooner. Among those who had seen it, the quotes were thrown around fast and loose around the chocolate fountain at our wedding.

It's a land of joy, and joyness...

everyone decided to go for the good news

This morning, I flipped over to the news channels to see what was going on. MSNBC and CNN were blaring coverage of Alberto Gonzales' resignation. Fox News, meanwhile, was devoting a large chunk of airtime to the Georgia team's win in the Little League World Series. The focus of the segment was the Georgia kids going over and hugging the devastated Japanese players who lost the final.
Actual quote from the female Fox anchor: "Oh, look at our little American boys!"

today's news item that just makes me sad...

If I actually can manage to get in the habit, I could pretty easily make this a daily feature. I've got a backlog of such items I could post one a day until at least the end of the month, and new ones come up all the time.

At any rate, here's today's story:

Rolling Stone

Kirsten always complains she wouldn't watch TV if it wasn't for me, that she doesn't really like having a TV.

Yet when I told her I'd finally wired the cable into our basement bedroom, her face lit up.

classic wheel watching

During a Wheel of Fortune discussion at quiz night last week, I realized my fellow attendees didn't remember the classic Wheel tactic of making the contestants spend their money on junk. Otherwise known as "shopping."

It's remarkably hard to find classic Wheel of Fortune clips on YouTube. It's even hard to find clips from the era when Vanna had to actually turn the letters, rather than touching a screen. This clip is back even further, before Pat Sajak joined the show. The shopping takes place at about the 6:30 mark.

It's Comcastic!

Complaining about Comcast seems to be something of a favorite subject for Washington D.C. blogs. So far, I haven't dealt with the what I'm sure is horrible Comcast customer service department (our cable internet was down the last two days, but it seemed to be a problem with our cables and router).

I have noticed one fun quirk to the Comcast cable, however. Every time it starts to look like bad weather is on the way, such as this morning when an unusally strong wind caught my attention, one - and only one - channel starts to flip into occasional static. The Weather Channel. Of course.

As readers of my other blog may know, I am a sucker for a Pub Quiz, or Trivia Night, or whatever you call it when you are trying to answer questions while also drinking beer.

I've been out to two different quiz nights here in D.C. (one was in Arlington, if you want to quibble). I could be going out every night Sunday-Wednesday and quizzing, if I could only find people to make a team with me and if I only had the budget to buy the inevitable beers such a task would necessitate.

Most of the time, I've gone to Kitty O'Shea's in Arlington on Wednesdays. The positives here: this is where our few friends in the area are most likely to join in. The negatives: it starts at 9 p.m. on a weekday, which makes working people cringe. It's also nearly impossible to get there easily from our house on public transport.

This week, I managed to cajole a couple friends to join me for a Tuesday night Pub Quiz here in the District. I'm not sure the public transport is much easier (especially to get back home, as the buses run only about once an hour late night) but it starts at 7 p.m., a time I'm hopeful will be easier to rope more people into.

There are downsides at Stetson's. The bar area is tiny - I arrived about 20 minutes before the quiz and not only were all seats taken, the crowd was two or three deep at the bar. This made it hard to get a drink, and meant our team was standing and trying to write answers without a table to set the paper on. It made sense with the number of people packed in on a 95-degree evening the bar also wouldn't have any air conditioning, at least not any effective AC. Still, depsite standing and sweating, I can't help but enjoy the pub quiz. And we managed to make a respectable showing for having just three people. Now I just have to keep at it until I find a team and venue where I can relive my glory days.

ear plugs

Kirsten played a gig with her new band last night at the Red and Black in D.C.

The show could have used better sound and it was abbreviated - the club fit four bands on the bill from 9:45 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. (and is it a D.C. licensing issue which forced the band to quit at 12:30? Bizzarre, when closing time is 2 a.m.). The set was cut to about five songs, which didn't inconvenience many; the crowd at midnight on a Thursday in the out-of-the-way club was pretty sparse.

But what caught my attention was a sign behind the bar - "Ear Plugs, $1." I don't remember seeing a music venue selling ear plugs. At first I thought it was a nice touch for the bar to offer a product geared toward preserving it's clientele's health.

Then I thought it might just be a statement on the quality of bands the club tends to book.

i don't understand...

I haven't done anything to hurt it, or even use it much, the last week or so. I've barely even used it since Monday. So why did my middle toe on my right foot suddenly start hurting yesterday, and feel worse today? What doth it protest?

The Rodenator!

I loved this item in Wired Magazine last month. Who wouldn't want to force a bunch of explosive gases down a gopher hole and ignite them? I wonder if I can rig something up for less than $1,900, though.

The actual movies of the wonder in action are a little bit disappointing:

If you're looking to kick up dust, it appears to work well enough. But the product also has the cheesiest promotional video ever:



Rodenator- Let's kick some gopher ass.

blasphemy of the day

A head shot of Pope Benedict XVI was flashed up on TV the other day. Looking at it, I couldn't help but think he was a dead ringer for Emperor Palpatine.

(And I'm not the only one.)

OD on FotC

I've been gorging myself on Flight of the Conchords lately.
Partly, it's just because I miss Kiwi accents and want to hold onto the New Zealand connection anywhere I can. Partly, it's because they're damn funny.

Since I returned to this country I've been preaching the Conchord message through You Tube clips. Then I found out they'd have an HBO series starting up in June.

I prepared by going to an advance screening (I need to find more of these, I like seeing movies for free) of Eagle vs Shark. The movie has one of theConchords as the lead and one of my New Zealand comedian acquaintances in a role as well.

The HBO show started last week, it's two episodes in (still haven't met anyone here with HBO, so BitTorrent has been my savior).

Also this week I ended up downloading the six episodes from the BBC2 radio series.

This all may be a bit much. I'm just waiting for some of the other New Zealanders to make their way over here.

a thought

the Decemberists have had the top spot on my iPod since I was first introduced to a couple of their albums about a year ago.
I've realized since almost all of my friends also have the Decemberists in their music collection, or at least know who they are. I've also realized I've never heard any of their songs outside of a personal music collection context.

This led to another thought: what is driving dissemination of music these days? In my experience, music has always been spread by word of mouth (at least the stuff that isn't forced onto you by big-label marketing). But growing up in a rural area, I had very little idea there was a whole universe of recorded music existing outside the radio or carried by a national CD retail chain.

When I was in high school, the Internet was in its nationwide infancy. It wasn't until my junior year of college I heard the term mp3. It wasn't until I arrived at college I realized people had music collections full of bands I'd never heard of.
Kids today (I love using that term - it pushes me so far into the "old" category it feels like a joke, and I can pretend its ironic and I'm still young instead of the truth) must have a slightly easier time finding the currents of the musical underground. But I think you still have to have a reason for searching it out.

Whether it's online or off, you still discover new music through word of mouth. I think the one difference is now the kids who are outsiders and are in an area without an outsider scene (the goth kids, the punk kids, the fill-in-the-blank kids) can now find the scene online.

It seems like more people are going around or leaving behind the market campaigns. It's what all the "new-media" theorist say. But certainly not more people, I don't think. I'm not sure even the Internet is going to push even close to a tipping point where the big-money marketing becomes just one more voice in the crowd.

things I'm learning from reading "Salt" by Mark Kurlansky

Or, more accurately, things that had never occurred to me before:
* The main reason salt earns itself a book about its historical importance is historically, salt was the only way to preserve food.
* The above fact is fairly obvious when you stop to think about it; refrigeration has only been widespread for less than a century. However, according to the book the practice of canning is only about 200 years old. Growing up, my mom canned fruit andtomatoes every summer. My grandmother canned in greater quantities. Canning was a big part of homestead histories of the U.S. frontier. I had always assumed it would have been in revolutionary times, as well. Nope.
* I'd heard of food being preserved by salt before refrigeration. I didn't realize this meant it was often pickled. Or smoked dry along with the heavy salting. I also never bothered to think about the end result, the fact that salted meat required boiling or soaking in fresh water before eating.
* As it's hard for me to think of salt's place in a world without refrigeration, it's similarly hard for me to think of salt production in a world without large-scale commercial salt factories. Today the industrial production and easy transportation makes it impossible to think of salt as a scarce commodity. But when you're forced to get it by evaporating salt water in large ponds, and you're in a rainy climate, it starts to become a lot harder to get salt in large quantities.

I'm becoming a big fan of books with a single noun as the title. "Stiff". "Rats". "Salt".

finito

The ending of the last "Sopranos" reminded me of the ending of "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace - both were extremely unsatisfying at the time, but grew on me the more I thought about it.
There's something about a story that ends at an arbitrary point, without resolution. Intellectually, I'm all for it, especially with a story such as the "Sopranos", which was about the people involved and how they interacted and reacted to events and people around them, rather than being about the events themselves. Emotionally, however, when you watch or read a story that just ends, you want more.

polls gone wild

News I'd like to see Ryan's take on:

I have a hard time accepting this poll as having anything like a real handle on the population it claims to poll. Not that I think the results are wrong; it seems to me the results could be arrived at by anyone who had read much of anything about the situation in Afganistan. But if the stories on the lack of basic infrastructure are anything close to accurate, how can you do a "poll" of Afgans at all?

This also ties into a story I heard on New Orleans radio today: a telephone poll to find out how many people had suffered a stroke. Doesn't it seem the results would be slightly skewed? I think there is probably a statistically significant number of stroke victims who are either reluctant to answer to phone or phsycially incapable.

complain, complain, complain

One thing I forgot to mention the other day: while we were out at an Alexandria sports bar the draft beer cost $5.40/pint.

There isn't much I miss about living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. But the dollar drafts at The End Zone are the one thing worth pining for. Of course, I understand now the beer costs $1.50, so the nostalgia doesn't get my anywhere, except having to increase my beer budget even when I'm drinking less.

when "new" means "from the last millenium"

In Springfield, Mo., I occasionally tuned the radio to a station billing itself as Springfield's "New Rock Alternative."

During commercial breaks, the station promo would say something to the effect of: "The station for new rock." The first time I heard this promo, the next song was Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under the Bridge."
The second time i hear the promo, the playlist brought up No Doubt's "I'm just a girl," followed by Metallica's "Enter Sandman."
I don't even think I was in high school when Enter Sandman was released. Is it possible to file some sort of false advertising suit here?

if you're looking for Jesus, check the gutter

In the great town of Springfield (city motto: it's close to Branson, and nothing else) is a bowling alley.

The sign on Lighthouse Lanes proudly proclaims: "Where Christians come to play." This makes more sense when you consider in Springfield, "Christians" means "Southern Baptists." So I assume the alley doesn't serve alcohol. I wonder if they have sermons on the side.

And I found its web address. Interestingly, online the alley makes no mention of its motto that's so promenient at the actual site. Instead, the website simply promotes "family-friendly" bowling. Did they feel they would lose business if they touted themselves as a Christian bowling alley on the web? I think they compromised their principles in the wild west of the web.