Streakhouse, Please

While I rarely dine at fast food restaurants, I do have a soft spot in my heart for their advertisements. This recent Burger King spot is one of my current favorites.





I love the idea of someone who wants a steakhouse burger so badly that he'll gladly wreck his own car and the car in front of him in the line at the drive through just to get his burger a little bit faster. I also love how he didn't bother to actually place an order; he just pulled up to the window and pushed out the car that was already there. Even if this was socially acceptable behavior, it wouldn't have helped him get his steakhouse burger any faster since you still have to actually order your meal before you can pick it up at the drive through window. Finally, the way he politely says "steakhouse, please" with a demented smile on his face once he pushes the other car out of the way is priceless. After completely flaunting the most basic rules of driving and drive through etiquette, he calmly places his order in a completely matter-of-fact way that would lead one to believe that he does this kind of thing every day.

In the Zone

One of my favorite things about flying back home to Michigan is hearing the automated timezone announcement at Detroit Metro Airport. In case you've never heard it, it runs about every ten minutes in the terminal and announces in English, Japanese, and Mandarin that Detroit is in the Eastern Timezone. As far as I know, this is the only message that they bothered to translate into any foreign languages. I can appreciate how confusing it can be for someone who doesn't speak English to travel to the US, but is it really necessary to tell people the name of the current timezone in their native language? For starters, airports have clocks all over the place, so anyone who is confused about the current time after a 12 hour flight from Asia only needs to look around for a few seconds. Never mind the fact that I doubt people who live outside of North America are familiar with the names that we give the timezones over here. I've found that the only people who really need to be reminded that Detroit is in the Eastern Time Zone are certain residents of the northeast who think that the Central Time Zone begins somewhere west of Schenectady.

Bay Bridge

May 8 | 7:31 am | San Francisco

Reservoir Dogs

On my flight back from San Francisco, we flew over the Quabbin Reservoir on the approach into Boston. The sun had just risen and it gave the reservoir a really eerie look. The view of it on Google Maps doesn't really do it justice. It made me think about reservoirs, and led me to conclude, correctly, that the Quabbin and Scituate Reservoirs are the largest inland bodies of water in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, respectively. I thought it was strange that I couldn't name a reservoir in any other place that I've lived until I realized that most of the other places I've lived have been near large and/or Great Lakes. From what I read on Wikipedia, the stories of the creation of these reservoirs sounds fascinating, since they were both constructed in the early part of the 20th century over land that was already settled and populated.

Wi-Infidelity

How's this for irony? I've spent most of this week in the high technology capitol of the world at what is probably one of the largest software developer conferences in the world and today is the first day I've had reliable access to the Internet. Did I miss anything good? I could have found a coffee shop or, *gasp*, actually paid for WiFi access at my hotel, of course, but those things involve work and/or money. I can understand how 15,000 software developers and their arsenal of wireless devices could overwhelm the wireless network at a convention center, but you'd think that if any place could handle that kind of load, the premier destination for high-technology conferences could.

Swedish Fish

The performance of Detroit's Swedish contingent in last night's Wings-Avs game was probably the greatest gift that Sweden has given the world since reasonably priced, some assembly required, particle board furniture. If only Babcock would put three of the Swedish forwards together to create the Ikea line.

My Giant

I just finished watching the first season of Human Giant, MTV's newish sketch comedy show. I had never heard of the show until I read this AV Club review. I haven't watched MTV intentionally in at least 10 years so I was kind of skeptical, but I gave it a chance and I'm glad that I did. It's pretty funny stuff. The sketches are all pretty short, but I think that's a good thing. Sketch comedy is so hit-or-miss that it's better to end a good skit early than let a bad one drag on. The sketches are more conceptual than SNL and a lot more absurd, so I definitely appreciated that. With a three-man cast and not a lot in the way of production values, it's a lot more raw than other sketch comedy shows. The humor isn't all that insightful. They occasionally take shots at pop culture and current events, but it's mostly three guys performing reductio ad absurdum on everyday situations.

What a Drag It Is Getting Old

I may be getting a bit ahead of myself here, but one of the things I think about from time to time is what kind of an old person am I going to be. Will I be one of those old people who reflexively rejects anything new and different? I doubt it, but even at the ripe old age of 31, I occasionally catch myself rejecting new and unfamiliar things without giving them a fair shake.

I was thinking about this a lot today. As you probably haven't heard, the big news in the sports blogosphere right now is las night's episode of Costas Now, on which Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Buzz Bissinger launched a profanity-laced tirade against sports blogs in general and Deadspin's Will Leitch in particular. I don't think I'll ever react to any future forms of media distribution the way Bissinger reacted to sports blogs, but I'm not a professional writer and have no plans to become one, so I don't have as much skin in the game. While I don't think most people really "get" blogging, it seems like it's only professional journalists who feel threatened by what it represents who seem to be lashing out against it. I'm fairly confident that blogging is going to keep getting bigger and will eventually be recognized as a legitimate media distribution channel. In order for that to happen, the blogosphere will need to expand beyond its current sweet spot, which is a celebration of all things embraced by irreverent, nerdy, mostly male, gen X types. It's going to happen, of course, it's just going to take a little while for everyone else to get up to speed.

The thing that I find so exciting about the blogosphere (damn, I hate that word) is that as an irreverent, nerdy, mostly male, gen X type, I feel an immediate connection with so many of my fellow bloggers. As blogging becomes more mainstream, more people will be joining the club, and I'm sure that I'll start feeling some nostalgia for the good old days when you could jump into any blogging comment thread and drop an obscure Simpsons reference and be recognized as a member of a really dorky online fraternity. Of course, the great thing about blogging is that there's plenty of room for everyone. Deadspin doesn't have to disappear when someone starts publishing a more accessible sports blog.

On Average

Here's an interesting state-by-state breakdown of some demographic information and statistics that may or may not be relevant in this year's election. I was kind of surprised to see how average Rhode Island is in a lot of categories (gas price, illegal immigration, poverty, racial distribution, and per capita GDP). I feel like Rhode Island's small physical size throws off a lot of statistics because it has a smaller percentage of its citizens living in rural areas than most states. I was most surprised to see that at 47%, Rhode Island comes in 48th in the percentage of population who are married.

The Milford Academy

Gil Thorp is one of most delightfully absurd comic strips out there. I've been reading it off and on for as long as I've been reading the comics and I've never noticed anything that tied the fictional town of Milford to any particular location. Out of the blue, the past two installments of the Gil Thorp have featured the Mudlarks playing softball and baseball games against two fairly recognizable New York towns, Binghamton and Chenango. Out of curiosity, I checked to see if there is a town named Milford nearby and sure enough, there is. The creator of Gil Thorp hailed from New Milford, CT but never referred to any particular state in the strip. Perhaps his successor is trying not-so-subtly to position Milford somewhere in New York State's Souther Tier.

Fly Like An Eagle

I've recently received a few postcards asking me to submit my current contact information for some sort of a national Eagle Scout database. I've ignored the requests so far, since I'm hesitant to respond to any unsolicited request for information. Besides, they already know where I live. Apparently, I'm not the only Eagle Scout blogger, because others have written about this already. A number of them have expressed reservations about responding to the campaign since they disagree with the BSA's anti-gay stance. While I also oppose the exclusionary policies of the BSA, my hesitance to send in my information stems more from laziness and privacy concerns than ideology. If I ever have a son and the BSA has not changed their policies by then, I'm not sure if I'll encourage him to join scouting or not. I certainly value the experiences that I had as a scout, but at the same time, I don't agree with the way they discriminate against gays and atheists.

How I Learned Stop Worrying and Love Gentrification

There's an anti-gentrification campaign going on in Providence right now. The idea that gentrification is a problem that is destroying urban America and needs to be resisted at all times is really something that I have trouble wrapping my head around. I'm willing to concede that development isn't always done in a way that is beneficial to the community, but the idea that anything that might displace the economically disadvantaged needs to be vociferously opposed seems incredibly counterproductive. I think there are plenty of cities out there, Providence included, that wish their biggest problem was gentrification.

I think the last paragraph of this is post is very illuminating. The author of this post (who is also quoted in the article referenced by the post) has a more nuanced view of gentrification than a lot of anti-gentrification activists, yet he is still basically saying that even if development helps a community in some very tangible ways (good jobs and affordable housing), the underlying problem is still there because the development will somehow ruin the character of the neighborhood. To me, that seems like a completely unrealistic standard for development in all but the most wealthy and/or historic areas, never mind blighted inner-city neighborhoods. As an aside, not surprisingly, The Onion has the best take on the matter.

The 'S' is for super and the 'U' is for unique...

I've been a geography geek for most of my life. I attribute at least some of it to my interest in sports. I learned where most of the major cities in the US were located by following the sports teams that played in them. Baseball was my first love and the only sport I really cared about until I was in the fourth or fifth grade. I had a baseball dice game that I used to spend hours playing as a kid. When I got really ambitious/bored, I would create my own baseball league. I'd create a handful of teams, give them names, and even design logos that I would draw on a map of the US. I'm pretty sure that my suburban Detroit hometown always had a franchise. In general, I liked to give franchises to places that didn't have big league ball teams. The only one of my expansion teams that I can remember are the Idaho Potatoes. Where am I going with this story? As most sports fans probably know by now, in all likelihood, the Seattle Sonics are going to be moving to Oklahoma City. For a number of reasons, this whole thing reminds me of the obscure baseball expansion franchises I created as a kid. They'll be the first major pro sports teams in Oklahoma and one of the few between the Mississippi River and the west coast (outside of Texas, Denver, and Phoenix). In terms of population, the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Statistical Area has about 1.2M people, which is not huge but it's larger than several other MSAs that have major professional sports teams. It's also much larger than Boise, the presumptive home of the Idaho Potatoes.

While OKC is about to join the ranks of medium-sized cities with major professional sports teams, in my opinion, Seattle is about to join an even more interesting club. Once the Sonics leave town, Seattle will have only two major professional sports teams despite being the 15th largest MSA in the country (and one of the few large non-sunbelt MSAs growing at an appreciable rate). Eventually, taxpayers somewhere are going to get sick of subsidizing sports arenas for billionaire sports owners. From what I know about the situation in Seattle, I don't think that's what happened here, but I could see it happening in a place like Seattle. Now that you can follow your favorite teams from anywhere on earth, hometown allegiences are not as important as they once were. Take an MSA that is full of transplants who didn't grow up following the local team and add an especially shameless owner who is trying to extort taxpayer dollars for a underachieving team in a sport other than football and possibly, baseball, and I think that a city just might be willing to give said team the heave ho.

In Your Face

Here's an article about the latest trends in charitable giving. Instead of trying to coax people to pull money out of their pockets, charitable organizations are setting up websites that allow you to do things that you normally do online and capturing a portion of the advertising revenue. For example, instead of performing a web search through a regular search engine, you perform it through some charity's website. The charity sends your search off to a normal search engine and collects a small amount of money from advertisers for each search request that is brokered through their site.

One of the people profiled in the article is Dave King, a friend of mine who has created Lil' Green Patch, a Facebook application that works in a similar fashion. Instead of performing searches, you send virtual plants to your friends. For every 10 plants that you send, 1 sq foot of rainforest land in Costa Rica is saved. I've been using Facebook for a couple of months now and tending my own Lil' Green Patch, though I have to confess that I haven't been much of a virtual gardener. For whatever reason, I can't really get too enthused about sending virtual plants to people. In general, I've found that my personality is not all that compatible with Facebook. I have a pathological aversion to talking about myself and bothering other people, and really, what else can you do on Facebook other than talk about yourself and bother others? I realize that my fear is largely irrational, so maybe Facebook will help me get over my fear of annoying people. If anyone out there wants some virtual plants, let me know.

Snow Day

April 19 | 3:45 pm | Tuckerman Ravine - Mt. Washington - NH

Callafornia

April 13 | 3:49 pm | Golden Gate Park - San Francisco

Buc the Trend

We and a group of friends have been having themed potluck dinner a few times a month for a while now. Tonight's theme was coffee, and we found a good recipe for a coffee meat rub that gave me a chance to fire up the grill for the first time this season. We used Uncle Buc's Coffee Meat Rub on some pork chops and they came out very well. Of course, how could any recipe named after Uncle Buc (the official film of my 13th birthday) not be good? The coffee flavor wasn't very strong; I wouldn't have known that the chops had been rubbed in coffee had I not known the recipe. We didn't bother broiling the coffee, but other than that, we didn't stray from the recipe. We grilled ten medium-sized pork chops so we doubled the recipe, but we have a ton of rub left over, so we probably could have gotten by with a single batch.

The Friendly Skies

I'm not someone who is on an airplane nearly every week, but I think I fly more than the average person. Even though I've racked up my fair share of frequent flier miles, I don't really have a lot of aviation horror stories. I don't know if I'm lucky or everyone else is just complaining about things that aren't really that big of a deal. We just got back from California, and our flight out was about as bad as things go for me when I fly, but in the grand scheme of things, it really wasn't that bad. We were scheduled to fly into San Jose via O'Hare on Friday night. Bad weather in Chicago delayed the first leg of our flight by about two and a half hours and by the time we finally arrived in Chicago, our flight to San Jose was long gone. Fortunately, the last flight to San Francisco was delayed by an hour and it had a lot of open seats, so we managed to get on that plane. We landed in San Francisco at 1 AM PDT and managed to finagle a change to our rental car agreement so we could pick up the car in San Francisco and drop it off in San Jose. We drove down to San Jose and checked into our hotel around 2:30 AM. So other than being awake for about 24 hours straight on Friday/Saturday, having to pay an extra $100 to pick up our car at one airport and leave it at another, and having to wait until Saturday afternoon before getting our checked luggage, nothing bad really happened. I'm not saying that air travel is all fun and games; we have friends who have "celebrated" more than one Christmas while stranded at O'Hare. I've just found that even when things go bad while traveling, it's usually not as bad as it sounds.

Is it Art?

We recently visited the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. The new building is stunning and the exhibits inside are also quite good. It's a major improvement from the old location. I was very impressed with their permanent collection. They featured a lot of young artists whose work was both interesting and accessible, which is not something that always goes together in contemporary art. I was also very amused by the Understand Modern Art Breath Spray for sale in the museum gift shop. Of course, I wasn't amused enough to buy a bottle of it, but the packaging is pretty hilarious. It's nice to see that they can present contemporary art and have a sense of humor about the whole thing.

Today is the Greatest

I just finished watching A Great Day in Harlem. It's a documentary about a photograph, which sounds like a strange proposition, unless you're familiar with the photograph in question.



The photograph was shot in Harlem back in 1958 by the legendary photographer Art Kane and it features nearly every important jazz musician who was working in New York at that time. It's hard to appreciate the gravity of this photograph without being fairly knowledgeable about jazz history. Like the picture, this documentary is probably only of interest to jazz aficionados and photography buffs.

The movie was filmed in 1994, presumably on a small budget, and it definitely shows. What the film lacks in production values, it more than makes up for in content. The filmmakers were able to interview a lot of the surviving members of the photo, many of whom were near the end of their lives (Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Milt Hinton, Art Farmer, etc.). The interview footage was fascinating and was complemented by archival footage of the musicians and home movie footage of the making of the photo that was shot by Milt Hinton's wife. I was especially impressed with the footage of some fairly obscure musicians. There was some great Stuff Smith footage, a great but largely unknown jazz violinist. Vic Dickinson, an incredible trombone player whom I had never heard of, was also featured.

It seems appropriate that the greatest photograph in the history of jazz was itself a product of improvisation. Kane was not even a professional photographer when he got the idea for the shoot. He sent word out across town for the musicians to assemble one morning in front of a brownstone in Harlem and when they started showing up, he wasn't even sure how to get the musicians to stand still long enough to pose for the photo. Like a great jazz solo, everything seemed to come together.

Subprime Time

I heard this story on the way home from work today. It's probably the best summary of the whole subprime mortgage debacle that I've heard or read anywhere. It's a tale of the perverse incentives that drove subprime mortgage brokers to steer clients into risky loans and how borrowers either deceived themselves or were deceived by their brokers (or both) into thinking they could afford the loans that they were taking out. It's a seven-and-a-half minute object lesson in behavior economics.

Abundantly Clear

I just finished reading Brink Lindsey's The Age of Abundance. It's something of a condensed libertarian history of the US, with an emphasis on the postwar period. The crux of the book is the idea that the culture war politics that have pervaded American political discourse since the late 1960s are a product of a libertarian awakening of sorts. The anti-establishment left and the religious right are two sides of the same coin. The rise of mass affluence has given people the chance to spend their surplus time, energy, and money on defining themselves, connecting with people who share their interests and values, and recruiting others to their side. Along the way, the population has become more comfortable with the ideas social and economic liberty, possibly unbeknownst to themselves. While I largely agreed with this thesis before reading the book, I think the book does upend a lot of the conventional wisdom about politics in postwar America, so it could be a very interesting read for anyone who has never been exposed to the writing of Lindsey and his contemporaries.

Super Mario

While you're watching Kansas play Memphis in the NCAA final tonight, make sure to keep your eyes on Mario "The Superintendent" Chalmers. I can't take all of the credit for the nickname, but I have enjoyed blurting it out every time he's made a great play throughout the tournament. If only there was a guy on Memphis named Skinner...

Blog Till You Drop

You may have heard that three prominent bloggers have recently suffered heart attacks; two of which proved to be fatal. While the tone of this article strikes me as a little bit alarmist, it's an interesting look into the lives of these and other online journalists. I say journalists instead of bloggers because the people that were profiled in the story sound more like journalists than bloggers to me. In my mind, anyone who is spending most of their time chasing down leads over the phone and/or in person in an attempt to scoop their competition is more of a journalist than a blogger. A blogger is more of a metajournalist, someone who distills the content produced by journalists into analysis, humor, opinion, or some combination of all three.

All of the blogs mentioned in this article cover the technology industry. I don't really read any of the technology industry blogs so I may not know what I'm talking about, but I suspect that because the technology industry gets so little coverage in mainstream media, anyone who wants to blog about technology really needs to be more of a journalist than a blogger because there's not enough technology content out there for bloggers to collect and assimilate into their blogs.

Timeliness is important in all writing, but I think that anyone who is sweating the milliseconds is more of an online journalist than a blogger. I may be in the minority, but I've always felt that the real value that blogs add to the media landscape is not their ability to cover breaking news in real time, rather it's their ability to offer insightful analysis in near real time and the way they are able to build a relationship between the blogger and the audience. When I want to hear about breaking news, I go to a news outlet. After I've digested the news, I generally head over to my favorite bloggers to hear their take on things. Sometimes, it's even nice to read someone's take on things after the dust has settled a little bit but before it's completely fallen off the front page and that's something that blogs do very well.

I don't think that the unfortunate passing of a couple of bloggers is indicative of a nationwide epidemic, but I would encourage the mothers of bloggers across the country to make sure to go downstairs at least once a week to make sure your sons (and daughters?) haven't dropped dead.

Where You From

The most unique Christmas gift that I received this year was a Genographic Project Test Kit (thank you, Michelle & in-laws). It included some documentation about the human journey out of Africa, an informational DVD, and a kit that I used to collect some of my own genetic material so it could be sent back to the lab for analysis. The results have finally arrived and they confirm something that I've known for a quite a while - I'm very white. I was secretly hoping that I had some kind of unexpected genetic lineage, perhaps an ancestor of mine was the bastard son of an Indian chief and a missionary's daughter or something like that. Still, it's exciting to see the path that my ancestors followed. The results that came back were for my Dad's side of the family. The lab can analyze DNA using genetic markers on the Y chromosome (father's side) or mitochondrial DNA (mother's side), but they can only do one test per kit so I had to choose (women, not having a Y chromosome, don't have that option).

My family's journey began somewhere around modern day Ethiopia about 50,000 years ago. From there, we headed north and crossed the Red Sea. By 45,000 years ago, we were on the Arabian Peninsula, where we headed north for a while before we took a sharp right turn around 40,000 years ago and headed east across Iraq, Iran, and finally stopped at the confluence of the Tian Shan, Hindu Kush, and Himalaya mountain ranges in Tajikistan about 35,000 years ago. Instead of fanning out across Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, we headed north toward Kazakhstan. Some of the population broke off to the northeast and headed for Siberia and eventually, North America, but we tacked to the northwest just east of the Ural Mountains and went on to become some of the first people to enter Europe around 30,000 years ago. We kept heading west through Russia and into Belarus and Poland before fanning out across Western Europe. We then huddled in Southern Spain during the last ice age before spreading back out across Western Europe once the glaciers retreated. After that, it's anyone's guess.

Breakfast of Champions

Wheaties is famous for featuring well-known and inspirational athletes on their cereal boxes. The box that I bought today, however, featured Bob Greene. Who is Bob Greene, you ask? He's Oprah's personal trainer, of course. This is not the first time I've encountered Mr. Greene. While touring the remote eastern side of the island of Maui in 2005, our tour guide pointed to a prime piece of oceanfront property and told us that Oprah's personal trainer was building a vacation home there. I love how Oprah's brand is so strong that even people who are tangentially related to her are minor celebrities. I think a good business school project would be to construct a graph showing how various products and corporations are related to Oprah and then determine how much of the US annual GDP can be directly or indirectly attributed to her business empire. My guess is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30%.

Philadelphia Freedom

We spent the past weekend in the city of brotherly love. It was our first visit to the city as adults. We were there for that most adult of activities, the bachelor/bachelorette party. The women spent the weekend doing whatever sick and depraved things women do at bachelorette parties. We guys spent most of our time in a little place on earth known as South Philadelphia. South Philly is an interesting place. Imagine an hermetically sealed old school white ethnic urban neighborhood that has managed to evolve into the 21st century and probably even gentrify to a certain extent without losing a lot of its character.

We spent Saturday afternoon at the ballpark. After not making it to any major league games last year, I managed to attend a game this year before the season even started. It was the first time I've ever attended a spring training game, if you can call a game in barely 50 degree weather with a 20+ mph wind blowing in from center field part of spring training. The Phillies lost to the Blue Jays 5-3 in a pretty uninspiring game. It was my first visit to Citizens Bank Park. It's pretty similar to most of the new baseball parks. It's more comfortable than the classic ballparks and more attractive than the second-generation multipurpose stadiums, but it feels kind of sterile. My favorite feature as the giant lighted Liberty Bell sign in right field that animates and rings whenever a Philly hits a home run.

Philadelphia is interesting because all of its sporting venues are right next to each other. Citizens Bank Park is located next to site where Veterans Stadium used to stand (it's now a parking lot). Across the street is the old Philadelphia Spectrum. I thought that the Spectrum had been torn down years ago, but it's still being used by Philadelphia's second-tier professional sports franchises (Phantoms, Kixx, and Soul). Behind the Spectrum is the Wachovia Center, where the Flyers and the Sixers play, and across from there stands the Eagles new home, Lincoln Financial Field. It kind of makes sense to build all of these venues next to each other, though it probably gets pretty crowded in the early fall when all four of the major professional sports leagues are in session.

After the game, we went on a South Philadelphia pub crawl. We started at the Pub on Passyunk East (P.O.P.E.). It featured a diverse selection of craft beers, Bell's Two-Hearted Ale on tap, and Operation Ivy playing on the jukebox when we walked in. Needless to say, I was a big fan of this place.

Our next stop was a few blocks up the street at a neighborhood watering hole called The Triangle Tavern. The tavern was empty, sans a few guys who I can only assume are regulars, and by regulars, I mean guys who spend at least 20 hours a week there. The sun was still up when we arrived at the Triangle, but it had long since set by the time we left. Geno's and Pat's, South Philly's world-renowned culinary institutions were conveniently located between the tavern and our final stop for the evening. We stopped at Geno's, if for no reason then we were already on that side of the street. Geno's is a monument to Italian-American culture, where the only thing more over the top than their garish decor is their reactionary patriotism. I have to imagine that there aren't too many illegal immigrants who are crying themselves to sleep because they will never have the privilege of paying $7.50 for a six-inch sandwich with 4oz of chopped steak and a dollop of Cheese Whiz. I was talking to a native Philadelphian a while back who felt that both of Philly's iconic cheese steak shops had gotten a bit too tourist-trappy over the past few years and while this was my first visit to either, I would tend to agree. Still, I was pretty hungry and intoxicated by the time we got there, so everything tasted pretty good.

Our final stop of the night was a place called The Dive. By definition, no bar that calls itself a dive can actually be a true dive bar, and The Dive was no exception. It was full of guys with odd facial hair and the walls were covered with handmade flyers from past shows by bands with ironic names. We drank $9 worth of Schlitz (6 cans) and called it a night.

Survey Says

I received a phone call yesterday evening asking me if I wished to participate in a survey. I gladly obliged, partially because I am a shut-in whose only contact with the outside world is my blog and mis-dialed phone calls, but mostly because I feel like it's my duty to compensate for all of the idiots America's survey takers seem to talk to each time they conduct a survey. Every time I hear about a survey that shows that 90% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth or something like that, I get upset about the rank ignorance that the survey uncovered, but then I get upset that I was never consulted. It's not like me answering the question correctly would have affected the outcome (unless they were using an incredibly flawed sampling methodology), but I feel like those of us who are not crippled by ignorance, willful or otherwise, have a duty to stand up and be counted.

The survey I participated in was about legal proceedings initiated by the town of North Tiverton against the Southern Union utility company over soil contamination resulting from the dumping of toxic coal gasification wastes from as far back as the 1940s. I didn't ask, but my guess is that the survey was paid for by the utility company since the questions were definitely slanted in their favor. It started out with some questions to tease out my political orientation. I was asked about how I felt about Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain as well as I how felt about the Governor of Rhode Island. I was also asked how I felt about Microsoft, National Grid, New England Gas, and the EPA. I get the questions about utility companies and the EPA, but why Microsoft? Perhaps animosity towards Microsoft a good proxy for general anti-business attitudes? After that, I was presented with a "hypothetical" situation where a utility company paid a trunking company to dump toxic wastes in an approved dump site, but the trunking company went ahead and dumped the wastes somewhere else and was asked who I felt should be held liable. This was presented as an either/or kind of question, which I found to be somewhat loaded, so I basically said that while I would hold the trucking company responsible for the illegal dumping, if the utility company didn't do their homework and just sent their waste out without making sure that the company they contracted with was actually going to dispose of it properly, they share some of the blame. I have to give the survey taker a lot of credit, he didn't try to force me to side with the utility or the trucking company, he just took down what I said and left it at that. The survey then ended with some standard demographic questions.

I looked into the story a little bit after doing the survey. I haven't found anything about a rogue trucking company in either of the ProJo articles I found, but this case has been going on for quite a while and I don't feel like doing an exhaustive search. Unfortunately, this wasn't a survey with right and wrong answers so I didn't get to cancel out anyone else's stupidity with my answers, but I still feel like I did my duty.

Shilling For Dollars

I've been seeing these Hyundai commercials a lot recently. In an effort to make buying a new car look like a shrewd financial move, Hyundai has recruited three authors of personal finance books to appear in commercial spots and dispense nuggets of financial wisdom along with a hearty side of condescension. I don't see how these commercials help Hyundai or the authors. These guys may all be best selling authors, but they aren't bringing any star power to Hyundai. In each spot, the writers have to be introduced by the customer blurting out an utterly ridiculous line, such as "Adam Smith? Best selling author of The Money Game?" in order for the viewers to know who they are. The writers may drum up some extra sales for their books by appearing on TV, but they are doing so at the cost of turning themselves into shills for Hyundai. The conflict of interest doesn't rise to the level of a Ford ad campaign I saw a few years ago that featured an automotive writer whose name I forget gushing over the new Ford Freestar, but I think it's still a conflict of interest. Cars are one of the biggest purchases that people make and nearly every personal finance book that I've read has spent some time discussing common financial mistakes that people make when buying cars and how to avoid them. As if all of this wasn't enough, the authors come off like a bunch of know-it-all jerks in these commercials. Adam Smith's "Which one of us is a Rhodes Scholar" retort is especially nauseating. If you're like me and found it a little bit too suspicious that there's a financial writer named Adam Smith, I can save you a trip to Wikipedia by confirming that it is a pseudonym. His real name is George Goodman.

Crazy Straw

There is an irritating linguistic trend that appears to slowly be gaining traction in my office right now. I've been hearing people use the term "straw man" to describe what would more appropriately be called a first draft. The way I've always understood the term matches what Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster have to say, a straw man is not an argument that is made in good faith; it's an easily refutable misrepresentation of an opponent's position. I suppose it's possible that my co-workers are so devious that they are creating straw man arguments designed to discredit all of my work and ideas and cleverly disguising them as a rough drafts, but I kind of doubt it. Anyway, I hope that this fizzles out before it moves its way up the management chain, since I've found that all annoying and grammatically incorrect words and phrases that are used by upper management get parroted all the way down the org chart.

Juno What I Mean

Juno comes out on DVD on tax day (which is coming up, BTW), so it only makes sense that we finally went out to catch it in the theater this past weekend. One advantage of going to see a movie that's been playing for three months is that you don't have to worry about getting a good seat. As it turned out, we were the only two people in the theater for the showing that we attended.

There were a lot of things that I didn't like about this movie. I'll start of with the superficial - why were high schoolers listening to CDs and talking to each other on land line telephones? I was under the impression that everyone over the age of 13 has a cell phone and a lot of them might not know what a CD looks like. Moving on, I found most of the soundtrack unbearable. I didn't mind that all of the main characters were portrayed as a decent, likable human beings, but I thought that the movie had a surprising lack of conflict, especially considering the subject matter at hand. When conflicts did occur, they always seemed to resolve themselves off-camera and everything was back to normal by the time the characters appeared in another scene together.

I still enjoyed the movie, but it didn't really impress me the way it seems to have impressed a lot of people. I really felt like Michael Cera's character was underutilized, but maybe that was on purpose. Had he been more prominent, it would have made the movie into more of a standard teenage pregnancy story.

Seal The Deal

March 23 | 1:26 pm | Narragansett Bay - RI

Take It Off

I guess this explains why everyone at the gym was naked this morning.

Down the Drain

According to MDS, China is retrofitting the facilities that they built for the upcoming Summer Olympics with western-style sit-down toilets after receiving complaints about their squat toilets. I'm kind of surprised that they didn't put sit-down toilets in all of the new construction that they're doing for the summer games. I didn't see very many squat toilets on my visit to China last fall and I assumed that they had pretty much stopped using them in new construction.

The strangest lavatory related thing that I saw in China was shared washbasins. In several places that I visited, instead of having washbasins instead of the men's and women's restrooms, a shared set of washbasins was placed outside of the restrooms. It didn't bother me, but I don't think it would go over very well in the west. From what I've been able to ascertain, there are a number of culturally significant rituals that are performed at the sinks in ladies rooms across the western world that most women would rather not have to conduct in full public view.

At Last

I tend to be a latecomer to all things online, so it's with equal parts joy and shame that I'm professing my new found love for the social music website last.fm. I had certainly heard of last.fm before, though I'm not sure when or how it entered my consciousness. For whatever reason, I never checked it out until I searched for a recording of Freddie Hubbard's Up Jumped Spring to link to in a post I wrote last week. The first relevant search result that came up was from last.fm and needless to say, I was impressed with what I found. I've really been jonesin' for new music since I'm no longer able to listen to the greatest terrestrial radio station on earth (via the internet) at work anymore and I haven't been making it to very many live shows lately. I've already heard more interesting new (to me) stuff on last.fm in the past two days than I had heard in the previous year. If you're sick of listening to the same old stuff, give it a try.

Irish I Were Drunk

We enjoyed another St. Patrick's day in Newport this year. Pictured above is yours truly in full St. Patrick's day regalia holding a bottle of Newport Storm. We spent the day at the parade, party hopping, and playing da cau in the street. We then hit some of the finer eating and drinking establishments in town before collapsing around midnight. I was pleased to learn that one of the perhaps several drunken neologisms that our group coined on Saturday is a semi-legitimate word. Insinuendo, meaning to insinuate through innuendo, is obviously redundant, but it has a nice ring to it and it has been part of the English language since at least the 1870s, according to this.

Walk and Run

We watched Walk the Line today. We both enjoyed the movie, but we especially enjoyed the music. Neither of us are big Johnny Cash fans, so familiarity with his music is certainly not a prerequisite for enjoying the movie. I really liked how a lot of scenes used music instead of dialog to tell the story. Letting Cash's lyrics and his interaction with June Carter on stage tell the story was a lot more effective that trying to act it out would have been.

I was surprised to learn how much of Cash's early career coincided with the careers of early rock and rollers like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. I've always thought of Johnny Cash as more of a country musician. Early rock and roll has a lot of country music influence in it, of course, so this didn't come as a complete surprise. Had I ever really sat down and listened to Cash's music, I'm sure I would have made that connection.

I also finally finished reading Rabbit, Run by John Updike. It wasn't really on my to-read list, but I received a copy of it at a yankee swap last Christmas and decided to give it a shot. I really enjoyed it, but unfortunately, I read most of it in 15 minute chunks over the past two months. I don't think that's a good way to read anything, but it's an especially bad way to read a story full of such vivid language and rich characters. It's not a heavy book, you could probably read most of it on a long flight, but it's the kind of story that draws you in so completely that you really should plan on spending some quality with the book ever time you crack it open. The other downside is that it's the first book in a series of four and none of the plots threads that were opened in Rabbit, Run are tied up by the end of the book. My copy contains the first two books in the series, and while I'd really like to jump right into the next book (Rabbit Redux) so I can get some closure, I'm going to try and clear a few more titles of off my to-read list before going back. I may even decide to re-read Rabbit, Run and go straight into Rabbit Redux just so I can give the story the attention that I think it deserves.

Spit Take

I don't have anything insightful to add to the Elliot Spitzer discussion, but if someone decides to make a movie about him, I have the perfect actor for the role. I've always thought that actor & comedian Larry Miller was a dead ringer for Spitzer. I have a tendency to see look-alikes that no one else agrees with, but I'm pretty confident about this one.

Stupid Korean Camera

Michelle told me about this interview a couple a weeks ago and I finally got a chance to listen to it. It's a discussion with Stephen Dodson, a linguist who has devoted much of his life to the study of curse words. In the interview, he discusses how curse words evolve within and between languages. He doesn't mention too many curses during the interview, but he does drop a câlice and a tabarnak, two of my favorite foreign language bad words. They are part of the Québécois dialect and literally translate to chalice and tabernacle. I'm pretty sure that tabarnak was the first foreign language curse word I ever learned. I learned it from a classmate in third grade who had recently moved to the US from Quebec. I was in Montreal last summer and walked into a funny t-shirt store that was selling a shirt that had tabarnak emblazoned across the front along with a couple of fleurs-de-lis. I thought about buying it, but realized that it probably wasn't a great idea. For one, I've never really considered apparel that features English swear words to be all that classy, so why make an exception for French-Canadian profanity. On top of that, it's impossible to asses the relative strength of curse words in a language that you don't speak, so I had no way of knowing whether or not most Québécois speakers would find the t-shirt mildly amusing or deeply offensive.

Up Jumped Spring

I realize that spring doesn't officially start for another week and a half, but now that daylight savings time is in effect and I actually see daylight when I leave the office, it sure feels like spring has sprung. Living on the far eastern edge of the eastern time zone means that in the dead of winter, it gets dark here before 5pm. I got an early glimpse a couple weeks ago when I left work a little early, but until that point, I really hadn't noticed that the days were slowly but surely getting longer. It's still seasonably cool here, but being able to see daylight at the end of the workday is quite a boost for the psyche.

If you'd rather celebrate something that actually happened today, you can celebrate the first annual National Registered Dietitian Day. Go eat something healthy.

Into The Clouds

March 8, 2008 | 11:43 am | Sunday River - Bethel, ME

PREMIUM! DUUUUUDE!!

I was pumping gas at my local Shell station recently when I noticed that they only had two grades of gas, regular and premium. It wasn't that they were out of the middle grade, they were no longer selling it. I can't imagine that middle grade gasoline was every a big seller. I tend to be the kind of person who, when offered three product levels, goes for the one in the middle even though the top version is always a better value, but I've never intentionally bought middle grade gasoline. Most manufacturers recommend that you put regular unleaded gasoline in your car, so unless you've driving an exotic sports car, there's no point it buying anything other than regular gasoline. I drove past another nearby Shell station yesterday and noticed that they're still selling middle grade gas, so it's not a company-wide thing just yet. If you aren't sure what I was referring to in the title of this post, check here. I can't think about gas stations or even the word 'premium' without replaying that scene in my head.

Totally Uncommitted

When I went to vote this morning, I was surprised to see that one of the choices for President was Uncommitted. I don't recall ever seeing an option like that on an election ballot before. Given that the only things that was on the ballot today in Rhode Island were the Presidential nomination and the delegates to the conventions, I'm not sure why anyone who didn't want to cast a vote for any of the candidates would even bother showing up. Perhaps it's on the ballot to give people the ability to cast a protest vote if they don't like any of the candidates.

Let's Stay Together

One of my favorite blogs has been running ads for a Christian online dating service called Together Christian. Not being in the market for online dating services, Christian or otherwise, I normally don't pay much attention to these ads, but it's hard to miss this one, thanks to the busty blonde woman in a tank top they used in their ad.



I don't think I've ever seen sex appeal used to sell religion (or in this case, products & services to the religious) in quite this manner before. For what it's worth, the women in the JDate billboard that I blogged about a couple years ago are also wearing tank tops, though they aren't as skimpy as the one worn by the Together Christian woman. What any of this says about anything I'm not about to speculate, but it's always interesting to see how religion is marketed. In 20 years time, this [warning - audio link] Onion story from a couple years back may not seem so far-fetched.

The Loony Bin

March 2, 2008 | 2:51 pm | Loon Mountain - Lincoln, NH

In the Year 2000

I recently had the pleasure of viewing Death Race 2000 for the first time. If you aren't a fan of B movies, you can stop reading right now. If you are a fan, this is definitely a must-see. It was made in 1975 and set in what was then the not-too-distant future and what is now the recent past. In the movie, the America of the year 2000 looks a lot like the America of 1975, except that the country is ruled by an absentee authoritarian regime headed by the inscrutable Mr. President and an annual coast-to-coast, no-holds-barred car race is the opiate of the masses. I didn't realize that it was a Roger Corman picture until the ending credits rolled, but in retrospect, I should have known from the ample amounts of T&A and completely unrealistic gore.

The movie has an unmistakable 1970s feel. The main character, Frankenstein (David Carradine), is the race favorite and the only current surviving champion. Frankenstein is a broken man, both physically and mentally, and a textbook 1970s anti-hero. His main rival, Joe "Machine Gun" Viterbo (Sly Stallone), is a tightly-wound ball of rage. The Resistance, an underground movement that is determined to stop the death race by any means necessary, fills the role of the progressive anti-establishment group. Rather than trying to explain how America wound up in such a sorry state, the movie makes allusions to works such as 1984 and assumes the viewer can fill in the details.

There's an interview with Roger Corman in the DVD extras. He makes a comment about how prophetic the movie turned out to be. I don't know exactly what he was talking about, but I will give him credit for a couple of things. The first is how Mr. President blamed the French for all of the acts of sabotage committed by the Resistance. I'm guessing that the blame the French meme existed before this movie was made, but the way that it was used was nearly identical the our last flare-up of anti-French hysteria during the run up to the Gulf war. The other thing that really stood out was how the political party that ruled the country was called the Bipartisan Party. That name reminded me of the "a pox on both their houses" sentiment that you often hear expressed by pundits and voters. I've always felt like that sentiment is much more common today than it was 30 years ago, so I'll give Corman some credit for that.

Vayama

I came across a relatively new travel website this week. It's called Vayama and it's targeted for international travelers. It seems to have some pretty good deals. We just booked a trip to Europe for early June and saved about 20% off of the prices we were seeing on other air travel websites. The interface could be better, but it's very web 2.0. They have a 3D seat selector that nearly brought my relatively powerful laptop to its knees, but it looks very cool. My other gripe is that, at least for our trip, there was about a 24 hour delay between clicking 'buy' and the itinerary getting ticketed. If you're planning some overseas travel and you don't mind playing the waiting game for a little while after selecting your trip, Vayama might be worth a look.

I Pity The Fool

We went out to AS220 on Tuesday night to catch a screening of I Pity the Fool, a film that explores the ruins of the city of Detroit. For as long as I can remember, Detroit has been like a car accident to me, I know that something horrible has happened but I can't take my eyes off of it. I didn't have really high hopes for the film, but I knew that I had to go see it.

Brent Coughenor, the director, was on hand to introduce the film and presumably answer questions after the screening. I say presumably because we left about 10-15 minutes before it ended. After reading this interview with Coughenor, I feel like we share a similar connection to and fascination with Detroit. We both grew up in the suburbs of Detroit in the 1980s, arguably the nadir of Detroit's long and continuing decline. Unfortunately, the movie didn't really strike a chord with me. It's neither a documentary nor a conventional narrative film. There's almost no dialog and no real characters. It's really more of a filmmakers film, though I have my doubts as to how compelling the cinematography really was.

Even though this film was shot on what I can only assume was a minuscule budget, there was a certain laziness about it that bothered me. There are a number of scenes that take place on sidewalks that were filmed from the other side of the street so passing cars go in and out of the frame throughout the scene. I realize that this project didn't have the kind of money or connections that it takes to get streets cordoned off, but I think that if I were a filmmaker working on a shoestring budget, I would have found a better way to get that shot. There's a sequence about half of the way through the film where one of the "characters" is suddenly at Cedar Point (an amusement park in Ohio, in case you weren't aware). As a once frequent visitor to Cedar Point, that scene had a lot of sentimental value for me, but I don't know how it was supposed to fit in to the film.

If it had only been a visual homage to the ruins of Detroit, I still would have enjoyed it, but it really wasn't all that interesting from a visual or architectural standpoint. The only scene that I really enjoyed is the one that is pictured in the Sifflbog interview. In that scene, a man leaves his house and begins riding his bike down the street. The camera follows him in profile as he rides along what starts out as a pretty nice looking neighborhood by Detroit standards. Soon, the neat row of houses fades away into a more typical Detroit scene of abandoned residential and industrial lots and empty streets. Finally, the man reaches the Michigan Central Station. As he rides around this gigantic hulk of building that is completely devoid of life and activity, you can really feel the isolation and decay that is so pervasive in Detroit.

I can only recommend this film to people like me who obsess over Detroit or people who have never seen the ruins of Detroit first-hand. It's hard for people who have never seen Detroit to fathom the scale of urban decay that has gone on nearly unchecked for the past half century. I had the opposite problem; it wasn't until I had a chance to visit some other big cities as a young man that I realized that not all urban centers were in a state of constant decay. If you want an introduction to Detroit and can't make it there for a visit, I think 8 Mile is a better choice, but if you want to support independent film, you may learn something about Detroit from I Pity The Fool.

Almost Famous

Today's Boston Globe had a story about Rhode Island's nascent high technology economy. There's not a lot of new information in this article, but it was nice to see the Providence Geeks get plenty of mentions. As I type, the picture on the front page of the Globe's technology section, which was taken at last week's geek dinner, features a nice view of my midsection (I'm wearing a blue shirt and holding a 16oz can of 'Gansett in my right hand).

Global Citizen

Back in the day, a friend and I wrote a series of absurd stories about a family that found themselves in ridiculous situations the world over. We would generally think of a ridiculous premise and give it an equally absurd setting. When we decided that one of the characters was to get gravely injured because he fell asleep in one of the cars that was to be destroyed at a demolition derby, we consulted an atlas to find what we thought was an unlikely place for this event and found a city in Romania named Cluj-Napoca. We had a good laugh and I never gave Cluj-Napoca a second thought, until today. I was doing some work and uncovered what appeared to be a bug in an open source library that I was using. I posted a description of the issue to the discussion forum for said piece of software and I soon received confirmation from one of the developers. When I saw in his profile that he was based in Cluj-Napoca, it jogged my memory and brought me back to the story I wrote a good 15 years ago. That's the great thing about the Internet - it gives you a chance to interact with people from the places around the world that you made fun of when you were a kid because you thought they had funny sounding names.

Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die, Bye-Bye

While it's hard to listen to classic rock and oldies on the radio for too long without hearing a song by The Eagles, one Eagles song that you don't hear everyday is James Dean. It's off of their On the Border album, and I've probably only heard it a handful of times, but it's always been one of my favorite Eagles tunes. I heard it in the car yesterday and decided to see what else I could find out about the song and came across this loving James Dean tribute slideshow set to the tune.





It's just a really fun song. You don't have to be an Eagles fan or a James Dean fan to enjoy the tune.

The Queen of Mean

Today's installment of Mother Goose & Grimm is too strange not to comment on. After reading today's cartoon, I went back and read all of this week's strips to see if this was a one-off gag or the culmination of a plot that had been building all week. As I had suspected, it was a one-off, and my failure to find it funny had nothing to do with a lack of context. The strangeness of this strip begins by building a joke around Leona Helmsley. This might be the least timely comic strip ever penned. Helmsley was convicted of tax evasion back in 1992 and she died last year. Why did Mike Peters wait until now to joke about it?

As I've mentioned before, comic strip writers often times resort to tortured setups in order to cram a desired punchline into the final panel. Peters is going for an Exorcist/repossessed-possessed play on words joke, which is bad enough in and of itself, but using a reference to Leona Helmsley's putative dog to make that joke is stretching artistic license well beyond the breaking point. As if all that wasn't bad enough, the sloppy grammar in the first panel introduces an ambiguity regarding whose car was repossessed by the IRS. I realize that dogs can't own cars, but neither can the deceased. It's not like this joke would make any more sense if it was clear who the car belonged to. It's just another piece of evidence to suggest that Peters really mailed it in on this strip.

License to Drive

Growing up in the Detroit area, I thought I pretty much had seen it all when it came to people being obsessed with their cars. It wasn't until I moved out east that I learned about an automotive obsession that for whatever reason, never seemed to take hold in the motor city. The obsession I'm speaking of is the desire to have the smallest possible license plate number. I thought it was specific to Rhode Island, where license plate numbers can be (and often are) passed on to your descendants, but it's even more popular in Delaware, the only state that allows for easy license plate number transferals. Delaware license plate #6 just fetched $675,000 at auction, the most a license plate has ever sold for in the US. That may sound like a lot of money to pay for a license plate, but when you consider that Abu Dhabi's #1 license plate sold for the equivalent of $14.2 million last week, it seems like quite the steal.

Back to the Future

This post is probably the most interesting thing I've read about Kosovo's recent declaration of independence from Serbia. It's just one man's opinion, but often times, news stories gain a lot more poignancy when viewed through the lens of actual human experience instead of history, politics, economics, etc. More than anything else, his post reminded me of one of the things I like most about life in America. For the most part, we don't have to deal with these deep-seated ethnic and sectarian grudges. Our history is short and we're generally pretty ignorant of whatever history we have. While many a hand has been wrung over America's historical forgetfulness and incessant focus on the future, I think that overall, it's better to be too forward looking than too mired in the past.

Look Sharp

In case you haven't heard, The Sharper Image filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Tuesday. My initial thought upon hearing this news was it's about damn time. For as long as I can remember, I've had nothing but contempt for The Sharper Image. I'm not entirely sure why. Could I really have been sophisticated enough as a 12 year old to realize that they sold a lot of overpriced junk to people who equated paying a lot of money for useless products with status? I guess so, and it's only taken the rest of America 20 years or so to catch up with me. I knew a guy in college who used to work at a Sharper Image store, but had to quit after he could no longer maintain the fiction that the products they carried were in any way useful and/or worth the price that they were charging. If only all of his co-workers had been so wise.

Exploding Star Orchestra

I just found out about the Exploding Star Orchestra, Rob Mazurek's new, for lack of a better term, avant jazz supergroup. Not to be confused with the Grateful Dead tribute band Dark Star Orchestra, the Exploding Star Orchestra is a a collection of Chicago-affiliated improvisers. The band includes musicians from just about every band in Chicago that I've been listening to over the past ten years. I've found that bands like this are never greater than the sum of their parts, because the sum of their parts is so incredibly large, but I am pretty impressed what little I've heard of the Exploding Star Orchestra so far.

Dictated but not Led

It's the middle of February again, which can only mean one thing. It's time for Parade magazine's annual survey of the world's worst dictators. I've come to accept the sheer absurdity of a magazine that only tangentially covers anything that could be considered world news the other 51 weeks of the year publishing an annual ranking of the world's worst dictators, so I don't have any additional criticism to offer about the concept. As for the results, let's take a look at the top 10.

1. Kim Jong-Il, North Korea: Kim finally grabbed the number one spot after finishing second the past two years. I can't really argue with this choice. In addition to his pure dictatorial bona fides, he's the only dictator who has a control group against which to compare his misrule. It's hard to say how much better (or worse) most countries would be without their current dictator, but it's pretty safe to say that had the Korean peninsula not been cleaved in two following World War II, the northern section of it would look a lot more like today's South Korea than today's North Korea.

2. Omar Al-Bashir, Sudan: No surprises here as well. I find it strange that Parade decided to mention that the Clinton administration imposed trade sanctions on Sudan in 1997 but exempted gum arabic (of which the US imports 4000 tons annually from Sudan). Are they trying to pin the blame for the Darfur genocide on the Clinton administration? Will leading right-wing websites pick up on this and start selling "No Blood for Gum Arabic" bumper stickers?

3. Than Shwe, Myanmar: He was the biggest mover in the top 5 (up 3 spots from last year's 6th place finish). I was kind of surprised, I figured he would have moved up even higher after last year's violent crushing of the saffron revolution.

4. King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia and 5. Hu Jintao, China: Abdullah and Hu swapped places in this year's poll. I still think Hu is somewhat out of place on this list. He's more of a caretaker than a dictator. Of course, he's the caretaker of a government that brutalizes its own people so he obviously is not without fault, but he will step down when his time comes and be replaced by someone else who will probably maintain the status quo, but it at least gives China a mechanism to gradually ease its way into becoming a freer society, which is more than most of the other people on this list can say.

6. Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe: Mugabe moved up from 7th place last year. In terms of sheer venality, Mugabe should probably be in first place.

7. Sayyid Ali Khamenei, Iran: Khamenei wins the most improved dictator award, falling from third place last year all the way to seventh. This is obviously a result of the minor cooling off in the US versus Iran brinksmanship, but I'm still surprised to see Iran fall this far on the list.

8. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan: Musharraf cracked the top 10 once again after finishing a distant 15th last year. Musharraf is another strange selection. Though he did gain power through a bloodless coup, his regime has gained a modicum of electoral legitimacy and he did resign his military post at the end of last year. Musharraf is very middle-of-the-road as a dictator; Pakistan's instability and geostrategic importance are the reasons for his inclusion on this list.

9. Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan: Karimov moved down one spot from last year's poll, presumably because nothing good enough or bad enough to report happened in Uzbekistan last year.

10. Isayas Afewerki, Eritrea: Afekerki is the biggest surprise of this year's top 10, moving up from 13th last year. His ascension is probably due to Ethiopia's incursion into Somalia last year, which led to accusations of Eritrean support for the vanquished Islamist regime in Mogadishu (under the enemy of my enemy is my friend doctrine) and the resulting flare up in tensions along the volatile Ethiopia-Eritrea border.

The Rookie of the year was Cuba's Raul Castro, who finished 18th in his first full year behind the helm in Cuba. This highlights the key failing of this survey. The Castro regime is every bit as repressive as China, yet China finished 13 places ahead of Cuba. The difference, of course, is that China has the potential to harm the US economically and/or militarily, while Cuba does not. As I've said before, this list needs to decide what it wants to be, a ranking of the worst dictators in the world or a ranking of the worst dictators whose misrule could potentially impact the US.

Some other notable mentions include Belarus' Aleksandr Lukashenka, who at 16th place is Europe's only top 20 finisher, and the world's last reigning absolute monarch, King Mswati III of Swaziland. As if finishing 14th wasn't already bad enough, Parade incorrectly named Mswati the ruler of the nonexistent country of Equatorial Swaziland.

Red Bullshit

One thing I've seen a lot of while traveling abroad but never in the US is television screens on subway trains. I'm sure we'll eventually get them over here, but I'm in no hurry. I haven't minded them on my travels since it's always neat to notice the little differences between your home country and the place you are visiting and, more importantly, I've never been exposed to public transit broadcasting in an English-speaking country, so I couldn't really understand what was being said on TV anyway.

That being said, most public transit programming is commercials, so it's not that hard to understand. While riding the KCR in Hong Kong last November, we saw the following Red Bull commercial.



A few weeks ago, we saw the same commercial on American television. The US version features a different ending, as you can see here.



Michelle and I immediately noticed this difference. I assumed it was yet another example of American reactionary puritanism - bodily functions are sinful and evil but violence is ok. After reading the YouTube comments (hardly an authoritative source, I know), it sounds like Red Bull may have retooled the commercial between when we viewed it on the train in Hong Kong and on our couch in the US.

Roscoe

There's a squirrel named Roscoe who lives in our backyard. How do we know his name is Roscoe? We named him. How do we know that he's a boy? Wild guess. How do we know that it's him in our backyard and not some other squirrel that happened to wander over? No clue. I will note, however, that there is rarely more than one squirrel in our yard at any given time. If there are two, one of them is usually chasing the other away. It at least seems plausible that a squirrel's territory is roughly the size of our backyard (if squirrels are in fact territorial animals) and that we're usually seeing the same squirrel when we look out back.

I went into the garage one evening a few weeks ago and thought I heard an animal scurrying around. A few days later, Michelle discovered some piles of leaves arranged into a nest-like formation in the garage when she was taking out the trash. On Tuesday, she went into the garage and saw Roscoe and one of his friends inside. They ran to the back of the garage and either hid behind some sheeting or exited through some unknown crack in the wall or tunnel.

As cute as Roscoe is when he steals unripened pears from our pear trees and discards their remains in the grass after taking one squirrel-sized bite out of them, we don't really want him to use the garage as his crash pad. At the same time, I don't want this to turn into a man vs. rodent battle of Caddyshackian proportions. Attempting to squirrel-proof the garage is now on our list of President's Day weekend activities. The joys of homeownership.

Take it Easy

I've always heard that Easy Rider is masterpiece of American cinema. The AFI even went as far as naming it the 88th greatest movie of the 20th century. I watched it this weekend, and I'll have to respectfully disagree with the AFI on this one. I'll defer to fellow Netflix subscriber WR 323380, whose sentiments about the movie matched mine almost exactly. Maybe it was a great movie for its time, but I don't think it has aged very well at all.

Book Report

I like the A.V. Club, but it does have a lot of content that I wind up skipping over because I don't find it all that interesting. Two of the features that I never skip, however, are the weekly Ask the A.V. Club column and The Box of Paperbacks Book Club. Ask the A.V. Club is kind of like the Straight Dope, only entirely focused on obscure pop culture. People write in with vague descriptions of a movie they may have seen part of 25 years ago and the A.V. Club comes back with a detailed description of the movie. The Box of Paperbacks Book Club is a series of book reviews from A.V. Club editor Keith Phipps, who purchased a box of vintage paperbacks and has been reading them one at a time and writing reviews. He has yet to review a book that I've ever read, but being a used book store connoisseur, I have come across many tomes that remind me of the books he's been reading. I've always thought it would be kind of fun to read bad pulp and science fiction novels from the 1950s, but it's not an endeavor that I'm really willing to commit any time to, so it's nice that someone else is willing to do all of that reading for me and give me a snarky review. I've created a couple of Yahoo! Pipes feeds specifically for these features (see the links earlier in this post) if I've piqued your interested but you don't want to deal with sifting through all of the A.V. Club's daily content.

Gung Hay Fat Choy

November 16, 2007 | 2:15 pm | Hong Kong

Dear Sister

I don't how popular last season's Dear Sister SNL digital short was. It didn't seem to generate much buzz, but maybe I completely missed it. We saw it when it aired last season and thought it was hilarious. Check it out here if you missed it the first time. I didn't know this until I searched for it online, but I guess it's a parody of The O.C.. Don't let that prevent you from enjoying it.

Sex, Eyes, and Videotape

I caught a few minutes of the Today Show this morning while I was in the waiting room with Michelle before she went in to get her other eye zapped. They interviewed Eli Manning and Michael Strahan, and I thought Matt Lauer got a good question in when he asked Strahan if he was going to bring a camera to the Superbowl parade. Strahan replied that he was going to bring a video camera and added that he rarely video tapes anything besides his children. If it was the Jerry Springer show instead of the Today Show, this is the point where Strahan's ex-sister-in-law would have come onto the field cursing at Strahan while swinging a chair or perhaps a potted plant, but it wasn't so Lauer didn't pursue that line of questioning any further. For those of you who are not up-to-date on sports gossip, Strahan recently went through a messy divorce where accusations surfaced that he, among other things, secretly video taped his ex-wife's sister while she was undressing.

As for the eye surgery, it went very well once again. She's still recovering, but she's already seen a dramatic improvement.

Spam

We went to see Spamalot at PPAC last week. Neither of us found it to be all that funny. It wasn't horrible, but after seeing it, I can't really see what all of the fuss is about. I think my biggest problem was that while I've never been a huge fan of Monty Python, I've known a lot of people who found the troupe quite amusing and often interjected quotes from their skits and movies into conversations. A lifetime of this has exposed me to most of the jokes that were included in Spamalot, but since I never got to experience those jokes on my own terms, I really didn't appreciate seeing them done on stage set to music. Even worse, I've had the misfortune of meeting several Monty Python fans who happened to be rather annoying (imagine that), so the numbers that they did on stage sometimes reminded me of those people, which did nothing to enhance my appreciation of the performance. If you're a big Python fan, you'll probably enjoy it and you might like it if you've never really been exposed to their humour before. Otherwise, it's probably best to save your money. If you are on the fence, perhaps this timely article from the A.V. Club that names 20 pop culture obsessions ever geekier than Monty Python will help you put things in perspective.

It's my money, and I need it now

I am a connoisseur of the commercials that law firms (mostly personal injury outfits) run on local TV. Their flair for the dramatic and their production details put them in a league that local car dealers and merchants can only dream of. One of my current favorites is J.G. Wentworth's "It's my money, and I need it now!" campaign, currently in heavy rotation in Rhode Island. There's an article in today's ProJo about how some state judges are refusing to approve the lump sum payment for structured settlement deals that firms like J.G. Wentworth broker. The reasoning behind these decisions is that the companies are preying on the financially desperate by offering them lump sum payouts that can be as low as 40% of the total value of the settlement.

I'm certainly not shocked to find out that companies like J.G. Wentworth charge a fairly large premium for their services. It's hard to say whether or not what they're doing borders on usury, but it's obvious to anyone with a bit of economic sense that you're going to have to pay some sort of a premium if you really need your money right now. I don't really envy companies that provide financial services to the poor. While it's true that there are business built on the idea of fleecing the poor and desperate out of what little they have, there are plenty of legitimate business who have to face down charges of exploiting the poor because they need to account for the additional risk they are taking on in their fee structures. If companies are forced to provide financial services to marginal customers at the same rates as other customers, they will probably choose not to do business with poorer customers, and in the end, that hurts poor consumers more than it helps them.

While it's likely that many of the people who appear before Judge Vogel are not acting in their own financial best interest when they choose to convert a structured settlement into a lump sum payout, I don't think that the government should be in the business of preventing people from making bad financial decisions. I'll ignore the irony of the State of Rhode Island lecturing someone about their finances and point out that the state doesn't seem all that concerned about poor people wasting their money on the state lottery or at the state-sanctioned gaming houses in Newport and Lincoln.

Not My Job

This week's installment of Not My Job of NPR's news quiz show Wait Wait Don't Tell Me featured NFL quarterback and NPR listener Joey Harrington. Joey definitely cements his reputation as one of the NFL's more cerebral jocks with his appearance on the show. It's actually a pretty fun interview. You should definitely listen to it, if for no other reason than to hear Carl Kassell say "Joey's a winner" at the end of the show. It'll probably be a long time before someone utters those words again in the national media.

Superbowl of Blogging

Three of my favorite sports bloggers are at the Superbowl right now. That's great news for them and great news for bloggers in general, I suppose. At first, I was somewhat disappointed, since everyone was writing about the same stuff, none of which was all that interesting to me. The blogging soon became a lot more interesting. MJD and Will have mostly focused on slice-of-life Superbowl stories and outsider observations of the Superbowl media circus. MDS has taken a different approach and has apparently been attending every single press conference he has been able to get into and written some really interesting stuff about the Superbowl, the Hall of Fame, the player's union, and even next season. I've really enjoyed the variety of perspectives offered by these three bloggers, from MDS' investigative journalism to MJD's epic bowling matches against Matt Leinart and Derek Anderson, to Will's thoughts on media day. I hope the actual game is as interesting.