Friday, October 27, 2006
World Series Winners
I watched maybe 20 total minutes of this year's baseball playoffs, but since 15 of them were earlier this evening, when I turned on the TV just in time to see the 9th inning of the Cardinals
triumph in game five, I'm motivated to say something. I follow baseball idly, I just never watch since it bores me. I was therefore peripherally aware that Detroit had a huge lead, choked horribly down the stretch, and was lucky to make the playoffs at all. I also knew that St. Louis did the same thing over the past month, though I still had every confidence they would enjoy their semi-annual shellacking of the Padres in the first round.
At any rate, in light of the way StL and Det finished the season, it's not surprising they were given little hope of advancing through the playoffs. I am surprised just how unanimous the verdict was against them, though. I hadn't seen any playoff predictions this year, but after tonight's game ended the World Series, I checked out the expert picks on ESPN.com. Or at least I tried to; they were nowhere to be found on their main baseball page, and I eventually had to turn to google (via the handy quick search bar in Firefox). It's
not a pretty picture.
Of the 19
experts listed, not only did no one pick a Det/StL World Series, not one of them even picked
either team reach the World Series! Every single expert picked the Yankees to beat Detroit in the first round, and 18 out of 19 picked San Diego over St. Louis in their first round series. And the one guy who picked StL over SD, Enrique Rojas, got both first round AL series wrong, and was sure NY would beat StL in the NLCS anyway. I often joke about why I don't bet on sports, but if ever you needed more evidence, this year's baseball playoffs provided it. Almost complete expert agreement, and almost complete error.
Then again, if you're a "bet the underdog" type you could have rode that horse to some substantial profits this October.
Labels: baseball, gambling, sports
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Lap Dance Barbie?
This article cracked me up until I read it, and grew disgusted at the idiotic and misleading moralizing contained within. It's being billed as a UK store selling a pole dancing kit to children, but when you read the article it's clearly no such thing. It's a pole dancing kit, but it's not for children, who wouldn't really have any idea what it was anyway. (Unless they'd been watching recent Budweiser commercials on US TV, that is.) A quote.
The £49.97 kit comprises a chrome pole extendible to 8ft 6ins, a 'sexy dance garter' and a DVD demonstrating suggestive dance moves.
The kit, condemned as 'extremely dangerous' by family campaigners yesterday, was discovered by mother of two Karen Gallimore who was searching for Christmas gifts for her two daughters, Laura 10, and Sarah, 11. Mrs Gallimore, 33, of Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, said yesterday: "I'm no prude, but any children can go on there and see it. It's just not on."
Dr Adrian Rogers, of family campaigning group Family Focus said yesterday that the kit would "destroy children's lives". He said: "Tesco is Britain's number one chain, this is extremely dangerous. It is an open invitation to turn the youngest children on to sexual behaviour.
Dr. Rogers there can't seriously think that a nudity-free ad for a pole dance kit on a major store's website ranks in the top billion most corrupting things on the Internet, can he? Of course not; he knows how stupid this is, but this is how the religious right works to control morality and make sex seem dirty; they trot out the hoary, "Think of the children!" argument, like a scoundrel wrapping himself in the flag.
So seriously, should major department stores not sell anything that adults will like that's not appropriate for children? Perhaps we should ban lingerie, since some four year old might see lace panties and lose her innocence. Right there, beside Mum, in the Intimate Apparel section! The article mentions the damning fact that Tesco also sells a strip poker kit. For adults. The horror! (Incidentally, who the hell needs a kit to play strip poker? Are the rules too complicated or what?)
I don't know whether to be depressed or relieved that the UK has moralistic prudes as stupid as those in the US. It's nice not to be a citizen of the dumbest country in the world for a change, but then again, I like to think that other Western Nations have shed most of their religious prudery and are beyond overreacting to this sort of nonsense. Guess not.
In related news, I saw a link to this page of photos
from 1958 Playboy magazine and thought they were interesting, in a time capsule sort of way. They are NSFW, but just barely, and are interesting mostly to compare to what passes for softcore porn these days. Here's this month's (October? November?)
Playboy cyber girl, for the sake of comparison.
I don't find the 1958 models very attractive, but I don't much care for modern Playboy photos either, with their airbrushing, soft focus, and endless parades of vapid busty blondes. I do like that the 1958 women aren't all airbrushed, but their heavy, doll-style make up is pretty hideous. And I thought pretty girls ruining their looks by spackling on linebacker-thick raccoon eyes was a modern phonomena...
Labels: barbie, moralizing, playboy
Friday, October 20, 2006
The Computer Gods Were Angered
Predicatably enough, after I took my computer's quality in vain in the last post, especially in regards to my antique 60gig hard drive... bad things happened. The drive had been
thrashing a bit lately, making that godawful "whirr ka-chunk, whiff ka-chunk" noise from time to time, but after my last post it suddenly accelerated in frequency, and better yet, the hard drive started locking up entirely. Last night it froze three times in about twenty minutes, and a stuck hard drive is not something Windows takes kindly. It locks out all mouse and keyboard commands, and you've basically got no option but to physically turn off your tower and reboot.
After those three it settled down a bit and I got work done for a few hours, at a "type three words, Control+S" type pace, but then it started crashing again around bedtime. I didn't think it would help, since the hard drive sounded like it was experiencing physical errors, but I ran the check disk repair function... or at least I tried to, since the hard drive locked up in the middle of it. Twice.
I gave up at that point and just got to bed at my usual two hours past bedtime, and when I got up Thursday I'd pretty well decided to get a new computer. This one continued not working when I tried it after rising, but as I watched the chkdsk lock up (at around 12%) and fail three times in a row, I realized that a new computer was kind of pointless, right now. This one is antediluvian, but if I'm going to upgrade I might as well wait a few months and get Vista bundled with a new machine.
I kept thinking about it while I drove to Fry's, and while I browsed their selection. Computers have gotten amazingly cheap since I last paid any attention to new models; there were new machines at Fry's with far better specs than the one I'm now using for around $500. Machine with far more storage space, a better 3d card, more RAM, etc were under $1000, and while I was tempted, I decided to be fiscally-wise and just got a new hard drive. They're damn near free now too, and I picked up a five year warranty Hitachi 160gig drive for $89. And that wasn't even on sale!
Of course the new hard drive was just the beginning of my fun, since I had to open up my tower and vacuum out about a 3rd cat's worth of fur, then install the new drive as the master and boot directly from it via Windows XP. I uncoupled my old one entirely, since it was locking up constantly, and while I didn't know what Windows would do if the slave drive crashed, I doubted it would be a good thing.
Installing Windows was as much fun as ever, and one that was done I hooked up the old drive as the slave, and spent about 3 hours copying files over. The fun part was that the old drive locked up literally every 5-10 minutes, so I'd turn on the machine, quickly click open two explorer windows, scroll down to multimedia/music or whatever I was copying over, and drag a folder or two. Then I'd sit and watch it copy while listening to the old HD thrash and groan, and sometimes keep running, but most of the time now. I'd then turn off the tower, give it a minute to cool off, turn it back on, and start back up where I'd left off, trying to remember which folder I'd been copying when things had locked up.
It certainly beat starting over from scratch with all my files lost, and I had my critical notes files and writing documents and other essential things backed up to zip drives and webservers just in case, but it was still a boring way to kill an evening. Better yet, I still have to spend some hours downloading and unzipping and reinstalling every program I use, and then trying to copy and integrate my backed up files so I don't lose all my archived emails and instant messages and such. Plus I get to re-enter dozens of passwords on all the websites I visit, reset all my custom appearance options, download all the windows security updates and antivirus updates, etc, etc. Computers sure are good at saving time and increasing productivity.
Update: Say what you will about M$, but they certainly crank out more than their fair share of product and security updates. Perhaps they need to because their initial design is so lacking, but whatever the reason, it took me like 4 hours to download and install and update all the OS and security patches released over the 5 years of XP. I feel so much safer now!
Also, this probably isn't news to anyone, but surfing
sucks when you don't have all your ad blockers working! I was wincing at some of my usual sites last night, there were so many huge, horrible ads. Ones with tiny movies running all along the right side border, etc. No wonder people (without appropriate ad blocking software) are always complaining about the ads.
Finally, I was a day late approving the comments from two days ago, since um... my computer was broken, but
bonus points to Kim for hitting her prediction on the head.
Labels: computers
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
This and That
I've been painfully busy of late, mostly with RL stuff, and have been neglecting this blog, along with my review writing and other things. That's probably not going to change very soon, but here's a grab bag of various cool stuff I've seen during my recent surfing.
You Tube Tools. A site put together a list of a bunch of cool freeware programs to enhance your You Tubing experience. Save videos with one click, convert them to mp3s, easy simultaneous searching of You Tube, Google Video and AOL Video, and more. I've not tried them out, so caveat emptor, but the list looks pretty handy. (I've got to get a new computer; my old 60g HD has been 90% full for like a year, and it's holding me back from stealing content at the speed I deserve.) I don't know if I've mentioned it here before, but if you like Anime, YouTube is your one stop shop. I recently finished watching all 51 episodes of Full Metal Alchemist, and pretty much the full run of every anime series you can think of is available on YouTube, albeit at far lower quality than DVD/file sharing networks. You have to hunt a bit, usually, since these videos are clearly copyright violations and get taken down, but there's always another person ready to upload them.
Here's one Lanth sent me; it's a NYT article about a new digitizing technology that's leaps and bounds beyond the current motion capture stuff. Watch the video if nothing else; it's visually impressive. Their technology isn't quite as good as fully animating a figure, as WETA did with Gollum in LotR, but it's getting better and it doesn't require a dozen video animators to go frame by frame for six months of post production. Plus, as Lanth said, it beats the rubbery, uncanny valley-proving, "soul-destroying motion capture techniques that they used for Polar Express."
Among the recent most popular photos on Yahoo News are a few beefcake shots of US military personnel.
This undated photo released by Freedom Is Not Free shows former Marine Corps Sgt. Rudy Reyes, of Kansas City, Mo. The photo appears on the cover of the 2007 calendar 'Americas's Heroes: Reconnaissance Marines,' with proceeds to benefit veterans. (AP Photo/Freedom Is Not Free, Tim Mantoani)
No, freedom isn't free. I wasn't aware that it cost so much time in the gym, though.
The first trailer for Grindhouse, Quentin Tarentino's and Robert Rodriguez's homage to the low budget gore 'n tits slasher pics of the 70s, is now online and it's unbelievably cheesy, and a hell of a lot of fun. Word is that each director is making an hour long film, and they'll be shown as a sort of double feature, with (newly created) trailers for other such films as filler between the two halves. I don't know if two hours of this stuff will be watchable, but two minutes of it chopped into a trailer certainly whet my whistle.
Starvation is a great diet aid. I've weighed around 170 for several months. In theory this is a good thing, since I get to the gym 4 or 5 times a week and lift weights pretty regularly, so I must have been losing fat while gaining muscle. It was just odd that I kept so consistently between 168-172. That changed a couple of weeks ago, when Malaya brought home some sort of food poisoning from work, passed it to me, and caused me not to eat for about a day and a half. I felt crappy for about three days, getting mostly over it the Friday that I visited Flagship with Lanth. The benefit? I lost about five pounds, and as they say in the diet pill commercials, "I've kept it off!" So for the past two weeks I've weighed 165, and since my extra weight concentrates almost entirely on my would-be pot belly, the difference is visible when I'm shirtless. Lucky Malaya!
This is what's tough about dieting for most people. Those of us who make an effort and exercise and eat to moderation can maintain our weight. It's just damn hard to drop those 10 pounds you want to. You can gain them easily; any weekend spent pigging out on pizza or quesadillas will do the trick, but doing the opposite requires starvation, illness, or a radical diet. Losing a pound a week is possible with long term moderation, but what fun is that?
On the other hand, most people seem to lament their yo yo dieting, as they binge and purge and go up and down, so maybe my theories about maintaining only apply to Malaya and myself.
I don't think I've ever linked to him before, mostly since I've not been blogging about politics that much off late, but I wanted to point to at least one Glenn Greenwald post while I was thinking about it. Pretty much everything he posts is worth reading (if you can spare the time; he's got worse logorrhea than I used to) and finding a recent post worth highlighting is like throwing darts at his archives. I'll go with this one, not because it's about any real burning issue, but simply for how well it demonstrates his skill set. Greenwald specializes in taking a hot argument (usually from the right wing), airing it, then utterly demolishing it with countless counter examples and dozens of links. It's almost scholarly, the way he does it, and the fact that he's worked as a litigator is evident when you see how thoroughly he pwns idiocy with calm, reasoned, unassailable argument.
Another good example is this post, about a Thomas Sowell, a right wing journalist who writes that we shouldn't pay attention to the various ongoing Republican pedophilia and bribery scandals, since they're just distractions from more serious North Korea and terrorism news. As Greenwald exhaustively documents, Sowell spent most of the Clinton Administration obsessing over all things Lewinsky, even going so far as to dismiss Clinton's military strikes against Osama bin Laden as political ploys to distract the media from the more serious issue of whether or not the president got a blow job from a horny, plump, big-haired intern.
Or take this one, about a right wing blogger who is obsessed over high Muslim birthrates, and how large families are a bad thing, and how this means the terrorists are outbreeding us. As Greenwald points out, high birthrates are tightly correlated to most religions. Devout Catholics in the third world are rather notorious for the habit (Irish twins, anyone?), and as Greenwald points out, Orthodox Jews in Israel actually have a substantially higher birthrate than the various Arabs in the area.
Anyway, you get the point. I like his blog and his writing, though I often wish he could make his arguments about 25% shorter. Then again, I wish the same thing about me, so it's not a real serious criticism.Labels: dieting, glenn greenwald, military, uncanny valley, you tube
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Now What?
I'm not much of a baseball fan, but I do pay some attention to the former "National Pastime." I knew the playoffs had started, and I knew my duty, as a morally-upright American sports fan. To root against the Yankees! I can't watch baseball; even the highlights bore me, but I can hope for the evil empire to lose, and since they came into the playoffs with the highest payroll (as always) and the best record (as usual) it looked like I'd be occupied deep into October. Instead, after taking game one in the Bronx, the Yankees exposed their yellow bellies to the sun and lost three straight,
flushing them out short of the world series for the 5th or 6th straight year.
Chant it with me now... Fuck tha... *clap clap* Yankees... *clap clap* fuck tha Yankees... *clap* fuck tha Yankees. *clap clap*
Chaos consumed the Big Apple after their latest post season failure, with reports that notoriously-reactionary owner George Steinbrenner was going to get back to his roots by firing future Hall of Fame manager and dart team goalie Joe Torre, and hiring proven loser and recent quitter, Lou Pinella, or possibly saving some money by exhuming the skull of Billy Martin, bathing it in goat's blood, and sealing within a clear lucite sphere.
That controversy aside, what am I supposed to do now? I wouldn't sit through an entire baseball game under any circumstances, but with no rooting interest besides "who's playing the Yankees?" I'm at a loss. Like most thinking baseball "fans" I sort of support Oakland just due to
Moneyball, and and my old home town Padres haven't officially given up grasping at straws during their annual first round beating by the Cardinals, but really, I could care. My baseball playoffs wish has already come true, and it's all gravy from here on out.
Labels: baseball
Friday, October 06, 2006
300 Trailer
It's completely over the top and ridiculous, and looks like Troy filmed with Sin City's visuals, but it's a hell of a trailer for the worst-titled movie of the year.
300! It's straight eye candy, and I'm not at all sure 90 minutes of it would be sit through-able, but it's fun for two minutes, and I love the score by Nine Inch Nails.
Labels: the 300
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Burn stuff!
Sorry about the lack of posts lately, but I've been painfully busy with real life stuff and lots of non-Internet writing that I can't talk about just yet. At any rate, I happened over something very cool this evening that I wanted to share.
I had one of those "remember an old song you haven't heard in 10 years" moments tonight, as the chorus to that, "let the motherfucker burn, burn motherfucker, burn" song sunk its withered hooks into my parietal lobe and would not be dislodged. So I did what anyone would; I googled the lyrics to see what long-forgotten novelty band recorded it, found it was the Bloodhound Gang, and headed to YouTube, where I immediately found 50 uploaded verions of the song, most of them from Mtv and therefore gelded by censorship. Happily, there were plenty of user versions chock full of profanity, just like mom used to bake them, and the first one I clicked
was this one.
I didn't expect to watch the video, just listen to the song with that browser window minimized, but I did, and not only did I watch it, I sat riveted and without blinking through the entire 4:49. It's a compilation video of short movies from
MicrowaveCam.com, a site I can't believe I had never before visited. Their premise is simple, and if you're like most young men you're probably already giggling with glee as you wait for me to that yes, they stick stuff in microwave ovens and film it blowing up.
The lightbulbs and aluminum foil are fun, I now know how to destroy a CD beyond any hope of reconstruction, and it's nice to see that grapes really do send up ball lighting when nuked. My favorite? It comes at around 2:05 in the video. I'll let you discover it for yourself, but my thought while watching was, "It's like the pet store window in Auschwitz!"
If you're worried, no, of course they don't nuke anything alive. Just lots of mustard packets and oreo cookies and cds and bars and soap and such; usually with pretty spectacular and often surprising results.
As for my original purpose, to flush the song from my head? It worked nicely. I only remembered the chorus, and had forgotten how slow and annoyingly Beck-wannabe all the laconic witty white boy rap verses were, and about half a listen was more than enough to cleanse me, like a sorbet between courses.
Labels: microwavecam.com, you tube
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