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?