Archive for February, 2009
I Am Lee Harvey Oswald
It’s amazing how every picture of NAZIs is visually engaging. I see three possible explanations for this: (a) only good pictures survived, (b) there’s something about looking back at those people in that time that’s unique and makes the images more interesting than they would otherwise be, or (c) the NAZIs just knew how to pose. Via Reddit.
Poor Ringo
Am I the only person who finds the People Mover at Disney World to be the most fun thing in the park? Plus, no lines! Why am I alone on this?
Radio Radio on SNL
In 1977 Elvis Costello busted into his own Saturday Night Live performance to play Radio Radio:
In 1999 he busted into a Beastie Boys Saturday Night Live performance to play Radio Radio:
Beware performers, your Saturday Night Live performance could be next.
Antiboycott Compliance: “The antiboycott laws were adopted to encourage, and in specified cases, require U.S. firms to refuse to participate in foreign boycotts that the United States does not sanction. They have the effect of preventing U.S. firms from being used to implement foreign policies of other nations which run counter to U.S. policy.”
This is crazy! Who knew we had such laws?
Worst bartender ever: A Berlin barman has gone on trial accused of having served a 16-year-old boy 45 tequila shots, which killed him…. The 28-year-old barman, identified only as Aytac G, allegedly had a drinking bet with the schoolboy, but poured mostly water for himself. Via Barzelay.
Thoughts on Encounter at Far Point Station
- How is it that I’ve never seen this before?
- Why is that when Q puts humanity on trial, three out of the four people present aren’t human? (And one’s an android.) (Retraction, though Tasha Yar is from another planet, she is in fact human… I mis-remembered that.)
- Nobody’s in their proper character.
- None of the actions Picard takes when they meet Q make sense… none. Why does he run? Why does he shoot torpedos? Why do they separate the saucer section? Why do the torpedos take like five minutes to explode? Q didn’t do anything that threatening initially, they reaction was wildly out of proportion to the his actions.
- Riker looks goofy without a beard.
- That trial in the 2070s has a confusing mix of races and philosophies. I don’t get it.
- Warf’s head is too big.
- Why do they called Q “the hostile” when he’s already identified himself?
- Tasha Yar is a crazy person. She just kicks and punches everyone for no reason. She’d be an awful security chief.
- O’Brien seems to have the wrong job and the wrong name.
- Riker is sort of a jerk to LaForge for no reason.
- Picard is sort of a jerk to Riker for no reason.
- Battle bridge? What the? Why would they design the ship so that the entire bridge crew is required to sprint across the ship to a DIFFERENT bridge when trouble errupts? How does that make any sense?
- Who’s writing this thing?
And that was only the first half…
CNN: “America’s economic boom during the 1990s and 2000s created a high demand of day workers needed for anything from building homes to picking fruit and from working at slaughterhouses to working as nannies.”
What type of person hires a day laborer as a nanny? I don’t believe that actually happens. “Oh, gosh, our nanny’s sick today, let’s go pick up a stranger outside the Home Depot and they can watch our precious Timmy this afternoon.” Yegads.
What is a “Real Estate Novelist?”
The Internet has the power to answer any question that I throw at it. A few months ago I was wondering about the three seashells, and it provided an answer. Yesterday I was musing on the meaning of the phrase “real estate novelist” from Billy Joel’s Piano Man, and blammo:
It’s an invented phrase. When I was working in a piano bar in L.A., around ’72, everybody came and dumped their day on you. Paul was a real-estate broker, and he would say, “I’m working on this book.” But he was there every night, crocked out of his skull, and I would think, “How’s this guy getting any writing done, unless he’s doing the F. Scott Fitzgerald bit: knock out a couple of things when he first gets up, after the coffee buzz, and then start drinkin’. ” Maybe he was like the guy in The Shining, and he just kept writing the same sentence over and over.
It’s not really an exciting answer. I kind of wish I didn’t know.
“The American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) is a non-profit, educational organization dedicated to encouraging and communicating economic research and analyses and exchanging ideas in wine economics.”