I Am Very Tall

I love the Daily Show. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and call it the single best show on television. My guess is that while a good portion of you think it's a fine show, you may not really feel that it rates as the best show. After all, there are a bunch of other quality shows out there, especially the new breed of serials that get us all incredibly involved in complex story lines that may or may not ever pan out (*coughLostcough*). That's all well and good, but the Daily Show is the best, and here's why.

1) The show is hilarious. It clearly stands in the same league as Leno or Conan (never been a Letterman fan, sorry). Judged purely on the grounds of entertainment, the show is quality. Some nights can fall a little flat, and the interviews can sometimes be uninteresting. But the quality levels is consistently pretty good and for a show that comes out four days a week, that's awesome.

2) The show is the left's response to Fox News.

Begin digression: It seems to me that the world of news is increasingly focused on pulling in viewers and less about responsibly reporting what the f*** is actually happening. This has resulted in several types of reporting. There's the heart-on-sleeve reporting, where the news is reported but interpreted by a newscaster with an explicitly stated leaning (think Anderson Cooper, Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly). There's infotainment, where the news is liberally mixed with "stories" that are entertaining, designed to pull in people that normally consider newscasts to be dry and boring (see my previous post on CNN, and Fox news). And of course, there's blatant partisan hackery (see Fox News). The common thread here is that the reporting of the news is increasingly focused on being easily digestable, requiring as little viewer interpretation as possible. End digression.

Fox has managed to do this by blending trashy stories with intense partisan hackery. The trashy stories draw people in. The partisan hackery tilts them towards a particular political direction. If you doubt that they are drawing people in with trashy stories, then head on over to the Fox News website. A quick scan of their stuff shows me these immediately clickable headlines:

* Hot Bods VolleyPalooza: Miami based models battle it out in beach volleyball at Super Bowl event
* Woman: Ex sent me severed kitten head
* Stray dog rescues Ga. woman from crash
* Cops arrest Chewbacca street performer
* Rice rooting for Colts in bowl
* Some meth addicts turn to urine to get high

While a lot of the other news sites have crap on them, I'm going to state with an 85% confidence level that Fox's crap-to-quality ratio is the highest out there.

This is why the Daily show is great. It uses the same formula - mixing entertainment with news - to compete for viewers, but without getting dragged into the morally decrepit cesspool that the Fox News channel has claimed as its favored mudhole.

3) The Daily Show does something that no other show (that I know of) is willing to do - tell the god damn truth. While every other news show on the air incessantly worries about political posturing and appropriate levels of gravitas, the Daily Show consistently focuses on what it considers to be the "real" story and then juxtaposes that with the garbage that the other networks decided to actually focus on. When the other news networks deferentially played the role of Presidential fanboy, the Daily Show showed us clip after clip of the President/Vice President/Secretary of Defense/Press Secretary saying one thing, saying it again, saying it a third time, and then saying he never said it. In essence, it gets us a little closer to the truth, which I think is becoming increasingly elusive in today's world of "Fair and Balanced" reporting.

4) Jon Stewart. While every other show out there seems to have some sort of clear agenda that it's trying to sell, Stewart doesn't seem to have one at all. If anything, his job seems to be to seek and expose hypocrisy and agendas wherever they may be. Maybe I'm just internally overstressing the importance of his single-handedly dismantling "Crossfire," which he seemed to do for no reason other than that it was the right thing to do. Maybe I'm giving him too much credit for backing Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondent's dinner. But I just have a belief in that man that I wouldn't even extend to Barack Obama, were it to come down to it. And the fact that this show can restore my belief in the integrity of television personalities is what makes this show great.

I'm not going to say that him and his show don't have a clear political stance. The Daily Show clearly appeals much more to those leaning towards the left. At one point, I might have found that objectionable - maybe because it smacks of some sort of agenda or partisan hackery. But the truth of the matter is that the show trades in satire: it ridicules stupidity, pompousity and hypocrisy, wherever it may be. And the Daily Show is clearly willing to take a stab at either side of the aisle. Witness the reporting on "the First 100 hours," or Stewart's relatively merciless interview with Joe Biden. While the guy certainly isn't above tossing out soft-balls every once in a while, I trust him to report on what he thinks is right, rather than what will score a political potshot.

Last comment: The one criticism that might be leveled at the Daily Show is that it is frivolous, doesn't actually contain any real news, and is pulling American youth away from real newscasts where they might actually learn something. While I certainly wouldn't call the Daily Show a comprehensive newscast, I do think that it provides a (relatively) reasonable amount of news for just a half hour period. To back me up, check out this press release from Indiana University. In brief, a widely cited article claims that the Daily Show is as substantive a news source as regular network news, with "substantive" being defined as discussion of issues. Anyway, this post is long enough. You all can read that for yourself.

Link to press release via Arstechnica

This chart (from a National Geographic study) is a country-by-country breakdown, showing the percentage of people that believe that "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals."

Caveat, this chart is not all-inclusive. It only includes "Western" countries, which seems to include Japan for some reason. I'm sure that if we were to survey some other places, the US might not be second to last.

Even so, I find it incredibly disheartening to think that our country is so behind the times that we are roughly 10 slots behind Poland. If any of you ever makes a Polish joke again, just remember that they're still miles ahead of us in terms of not believing that the Bible is the literal word of God.

One last point. The other disheartening thing about this is that not only are we far behind ranking-wise, the margin is also terrible. Only 40% of us decisively believe that evolution is true. That says something terrible and sad about scientific education and rational processes in this country.

Link via Overcoming Bias

Attentive readers have probably noticed that my articles tend to reference the NYTimes, the Wall Street Journal, or other blogs. I don't, however, reference CNN that frequently. Why is this, you ask? Because CNN tends to be full of crap articles. While they certainly make sure to run stories on all the big stories, they tend to dilute that flow with a bunch of human-interest stories - which I tend to view as crap.

A (biased) sampling of articles looks like this:
* Frat brothers jailed for paddling pledge
* Model Niki Taylor: I was slandered by E! show
* Overly ambitious eagle knocks out power
* Cats lose visiting privileges at women's prison
* Angelina Jolie's mother dies
* Mountain lion victim may need more surgery

While a good chunk of these stories may be interesting, it's really a stretch to call any of these things news. Considering that CNN has global reach, you would think that they'd focus on stories with a bit more import. Who the hell cares about a mountain lion victim and his surgery? Anyway, that's my beef.

Now that I'm done bitching about how retarded CNN is, here's an article that they just wrote on postsecret. For those of you not in the know, postsecret publishes secret-bearing postcards that have been sent in from all over the place. Some of the secrets are funny, some of them are sad. It's all pretty interesting. Take a look.

Sorry about the picture quality, my blog is too narrow. Just click on it for a better view.

This is the essence of a "Natural Selection Speed Date" event that's being held (of course) in New York city. I'm not sure what's more upsetting, the fact that this kind of stuff really happens or that I'm too poor to participate (yes, yes, already have hot girlfriend, blah blah blah).

Students at Tarleton, a college in Texas, had a party on MLK Day where a bunch of white kids dressed up as gang members (or Aunt Jemima), ate fried chicken and drank malt liquor. If it was in the summer, I bet there would have been some watermelon too.

Of course, someone had to go and post photos on facebook. And then the president of the school's NAACP chapter had to find the photos and then send them to the smoking gun. And now a bunch of dumb kids that didn't know any better than to have their racial stereotyping party are all being revealed as either retards or bigots (not that the two descriptions are mutually exclusive).

The sad part is that I'm guessing that these people were spoofing stereotypes of black people and just thought that it would be a funny thing to do while they got hammered. Of course, this is in Texas, so I could be totally wrong.

Oops, did I just make a gross generalization?

Again, this comes courtesy of the Freakonomics blog.

The S.F Chronicle has podcasts with the voice messages left by angry readers. There are a variety of things that the SF Chronicle does that might upset you. What these are, I wouldn't really know, since I haven't read the SF Chronicle since I was about twelve. However, I'd imagine that it would have something to do with editorial slants, the running of some stories versus others, etc. The usual things that make people angry.

The guy on this recording clearly has a very different list of "things that piss me off" than I do.

Drone! Drone! Drone! Pilotless airplane! Not pilotless drone!

Link courtesy of Freakonomics Blog

After thinking a bit about why it is that my blog has not hit any sort of stride, I've landed upon the following: I write a lot like the last thing that I read. Unfortunately, I read a lot of different sources with varying aims, contents, and styles. If I've just gone through Fred Wilson's blog, I'll probably try to write something that's simple, straight to the point, and yet relatively informative (these posts never get posted, because I can't do them). Phonelesscord inspires me to write witty rebukes to political assholishness (I might have written one of these once, I can't remember). The New York Times nudges me towards some sort of educated response to something, whatever it may be (these also go in the trash heap).

After having spent a good while reading Tim Urban's stuff, I will undoubtedly start writing a bunch of Seinfeldian opinions about nothing. I will try and stay away from uttering timeless truths, like:

"If peeing in the shower is wrong, then I don't want to be right."

That being said, I can't help but be influenced. Already, you can see the self-referentiality seeping into my prose, the endless parentheses, the references to parentheses, and so on.

All things being equal, this is probably the easiest style to write in. You don't have to know anything beyond yourself and what you think, meaning that you don't have to sit around and look for a link to the informative tidbit that you think the world should see via your post. Since your post will be about nothing, there's no real reason to find a pithy image to fit with it. You're not trying to convince anyone about the validity of some point or other, so you don't have to cover your ass and think about an issue from a bunch of angles. And since the post is ultimately about you and what you're currently thinking, it's totally fine to just end at some arbitrary point, because that says just as much about the subject matter as anything else (i.e. I don't care enough to finish thinking this through).

Really, this is blogging at its laziest/most convenient. That other stuff, in one way or another, just feels like work. And to be perfectly honest, if I'm writing on this blog while I'm at work, it's because I'd rather not be working.

I've been trying to hit my stride with this blogging practice for a while. It's difficult - it takes time, thought, and in some cases, research. In my worldview, I have to do research-like functions for my job, and I'd rather not have them encroaching into my precious personal time. In general, that time is reserved for flipping through channels, mindlessly sifting through NBA fantasy stats for that one bargain player that nobody's yet picked up, and reading news articles that I'll promptly forget in the next day.

In any case, here's an example of a guy that seems to have found his blogging stride. He's currently on the Apprentice LA, which seems to be tracking with the other recent seasons in terms of its suckitude. On a more personal note, he lived right below me freshman year, and was the guy that we enlisted to play the keyboard when we started grilling burgers outside in the Yard. I'm pretty sure that he played Billy Joel's "Pianoman" about fifteen bazillion times, in a successful bid to get attention from passing females. From what I can recall, he was friendly, amusing, and frequently drunk. I also recall him getting belligerently upset when one of his roommates (who shall remain nameless) vomited all over his stuff one night, and then passing out without doing much about it. Said stuff included the interior of his shoes.

I never really talked to him following freshman year. For that matter, I don't think I even saw him after that. He's firmly in the category of "people that I definitely met at one point, to whom I am relatively indifferent." The amusing nature of his posts nudges him a couple ticks closer to being likable.

First: 30 Rock. Much like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, it's loosely based around the people that write and produce Saturday Night Live. Unlike Studio 60, it's actually funny, which is something that you would expect out of a show with the aforementioned content.

It reminds me of Arrested Development in some ways - reasonably strong ensemble cast, none of the characters are particularly likable as people, but they're all so clearly oblivious that you like them anyway. Unfortunately, it's not quite as funny as R-Dev... except for the moments when Alec Baldwin walks on-screen, at which point I promptly crap my pants with laughter.

I'd put up a clip, but this show is not popular enough to have any good YouTube clips.

Second: Violent Acres. I came across this blog while going through AKA's del.icio.us bookmarks and have been steadily growing more interested with each post. It's sort of what I would imagine Tucker Max to be like if he was a 30-something woman with a sense of responsibility, and a lack of alcohol-induced retardation. This person, who keeps enough to herself that she is speculated to be a dude, basically slams on assholes and self-indulgent women.

Here are some hilarious posts:

• On women gaining weight during pregnancy
• On Tucker Max
• On people being assholes to wait staff
• On fighting (the post from AKA)

The Chinese post office is giving a boon to all of its poor underpaid secretaries and mail-stuffers. This year's stamps will smell and taste like sweet-and-sour pork. A part of me vaguely wants to call, "Bullshit?" But hey, what do I know.

According to CNN (which seems to be full of generally crap stories, come to think of it), 2006 was the warmest year on record for the US. Citing the National Climatic Data Center, they stated:

I found this link to a Dallas Morning News article via David Winer's Scripting News.

Apparently, Barack Obama smokes cigarettes. Will this news tarnish his golden boy image with the taint of weakness, or burnish it with the luster of "he's one of us" normality? Will parents think of him as a bad influence on their children, or just shake their heads in amusement, much like they did with Bush's blatant stupidity?

It's hard to tell. Americans are fickle people. They seem to think that a person's consumptive habits somehow define their moral character more accurately than their actual history of decision-making. I would be pretty disappointed if this ever became an issue, though. There are so many more important criteria to think about (e.g. positions on the environment, Iraq, taxes, religion) that if this one actually gains traction, then my faith in democracy as a political system will drop by about five points.

**** Update ****
As I don't want to be yet another vector for anti-Obama sentiment, I removed the picture.

Happy New Year everybody. Hope everyone did something exciting. More importantly, I hope people are still setting out their resolutions.

I don't really take to resolutions. It's a pretty arbitrary thing to do - completely changing one habit or another because it just happens to hit a certain day of the year. But sometimes, the need is such that any catalyst will do.

I just watched Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Going into the movie, I wasn't exactly a skeptic. I've been listening to people talk about global warming since I was in grade school. I never doubted that the Earth was gradually getting warmer, or that mankind was the reason for this effect.

I was, however, not particularly motivated to do anything about it. It seemed like yet another issue that would probably percolate for many years before actually being dealt with.

Perhaps one of the most important reasons to see this movie is that it presents you with stark images of what global warming has already done. Gigantic ice shelfs falling off of Antarctica. Mountains losing their snow caps. Lakes and rivers withering away. It may not sound like much. But it's frightening when you look at it.

This year, I would like to think that I'm going to do something that will help change the way that this story goes. Being cognizant of my weaknesses, I'm aware of the relatively high probability that I will stop thinking about this tomorrow, or next week, or the week after that. But at the least, I'll urge everyone to go see this movie. In fact, I'll go one better, and point you to a place where you can see it for free. Unless you are an asshole, I promise that you won't consider it to be a waste of time.

Alternately, you can go to www.climatecrisis.net and see all of the corporate plugging that's been legitimately set out for the movie.

Update: Apparently, boingboing logged the "liberation" of a gigantic ice shelf off the coast of Canada. The CNN source article states:

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic. The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometers (497 miles) south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada's remote north.

If you saw the movie, this will make you scared.

Happy Holidays, etc. Here are some recent happenings in my life.

Yesterday, I watched a spider murder an entangled bee. It was the closest thing that I had to a television at that point, since the power was down. In fact, it was so enthralling that I videotaped the bee's last three minutes. The spider, which is roughly 1/3rd of the bee's size, just goes right up and ninja kicks the bee all over the place. It's kind of crazy. I'll post a video when I can.

Lee called me last night. She was pseudo-freaking out because there was a spider on her ceiling. After ten minutes of instruction on how to use a rolled up newspaper to capture/squish the aforementioned spider, she promptly hung up and had her dad do it.

This morning, when I came back to my apartment, I looked out my sliding door and saw the bloated corpse of a mouse. It looks like it froze to death outside. This is the second mouse that's died in my back yard and it's starting to give me the heebie jeebies. I still haven't brought myself to the point where I want to go pick it up and throw it away. The worst part is my tacit understanding of the fact that the longer it stays out there, the more putrid it gets. Sigh.

Update: There's nothing worse than having to remove a fat, squishy, shiny corpse that's been sitting around so long that it's actually stuck to the ground.

Much like phonelesscord about two days ago, I've gotten bit with the urge to post about everything remotely interesting that comes my way. Unlike phonelesscord, I am incapable of writing reams of witty text in rapid-fire succession. Hence, links to videos about a dick in a box.

If you really want some text, here's some text. I read a fictional article about a crazy dictator in Kazakhstan that created a new name for himself that all of his people had to use, put statues of himself all over the country, and renamed the days of the week after himself and his family members. Well, it turns out that a) I've been watching too much Borat and not reading enough about Eastern Europe and b) that article was not fictional.

As was published in the Times, WSJ, and CNN today, that man was actually Saparmurat Niyazov, dictator of Turkmenistan. He ordered his country to refer to him as Turkmenbashi, or "Head/Father of all Turkmen," depending on which news source you check. His feats of craziness include:

* Putting his name on everything, including streets, buildings, the month of January, days of the week, a sea port, farms, military units and a meteorite
* Putting his face on all of the national currency
* Erecting statues of himself throughout the nation
* Authoring the "Rukhnama" (Book of the Soul), and making itrequired reading in schools.
* Children pledge allegiance to him every morning.
* Announcing that he would provide citizens with natural gas and power free of charge through 2030.
* Tapping the country's vast energy wealth for outlandish projects -- a huge, man-made lake in the Kara Kum desert, a vast cypress forest to change the desert climate, an ice palace outside the capital, a ski resort and a 130-foot pyramid.
* Banning video games, gold teeth, opera and ballet
* Encouraging his people to chew on bones — good, he said, for their teeth.

Oddly enough, most of these news articles seem to focus on regional instability caused by his death, the lack of a succession plan and threats to natural gas supplies.

Lee showed this to me. I know I'm in my mid-20's, but this is hilarious.

At some point in time, Sony had a marketing company put up a fake blog called alliwantforxmasisapsp.com. By the time I got wind of it, it had been yanked. However, thanks to the people at Consumerist, we can now see its contents.

There's a lot of attention being called to the moment where the guy in the springy Santa hat humps a ladder. I think that's pretty good. I think the comments are actually a lot better. Not only do you get to see market exec characterizations of the web community -

OMFG! IMHO that is teh LAWLZ funniez! I SMP! Srsly. 'O'RLY?', You may ask. Yes, RLY.

Out.

Comment By Young Squeezy At 12/5/2006 7:33 PM

but you can also see the comments of the dozens of pissed off people that caught on.

Sometimes, I can't help but feel sorry for Sony. As far as crappy years go, this one has got to be the most craptacular. The PS3 is late, too expensive, too short in supply, and has totally bombed review-wise. Their batteries start blowing up and require a massive recall. And now this. Too bad it's all their own fault.

Breaking news: There are congressmen out there that don't like Muslims.

As reported in the Times and CNN, Virginia congressman Virgil Goode (I'll let you guess his party affiliation - It's a real shocker) has suddenly realized that a Muslim has been elected into Congress. Not realizing that Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison is actually an African-American that can trace his American ancestry back to 1742, Goode is calling on all American citizens to "wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration."

The Goode position, as he puts it, is "to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy pushed hard by President Clinton and allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country."

Never mind that the vast majority of America's technological innovation is fueled by the foreign immigrants that actually have the fortitude to go through our higher level research programs. America's progress will certainly be unimpeded by this well-thought out policy, as God will continue to guide us through this rough patch of increasingly global competition. Never mind that his name is being invoked as the guiding light behind a bazillion other countries at the same time.

Goode's attack on immigration was provoked when he realized that Ellison wanted to swear in using the Quran, a book that is clearly less rooted in evidence-based reality than the Bible or the Book of Mormon. My guess is that he was worried that Ellison was planning on a suicide-bombing the House.
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For a differing viewpoint, check this out. Quote:

"The article above is an attack on an American public servant. He voices his opinions of the current state of immigration in the United States and got attacked for his beliefs. I do not know anything about this man personally, but I can tell you this. It appears that anyone who feels strongly about something and is man enough to say it gets labeled a bigot these days. It is sickening."

Holy cow, I'm not sure that someone can miss the point more completely.

After sniffing through her bookmarks, I found Katey's blog. It is the only blog on my list that is allowed to have posts like this:

Retinotopy

(from Hadjikhani et al, Nature Neuroscience, 1998)

And that's it!

It does, however, have some awesome things in it, such as this description of the safety video that she saw when she started working at her lab:

"At least the question "What's the worst thing that can happen?" was answered repeatedly in slightly different scenarios.....they were: fire extinguisher torpedoes into fMRI, fireman rushes into scanner room and gets stuck to MRI with the O2 tank on his back, recent grad drains all liquid helium out of MRI by pressing wrong button during first week of work, nurse wheels entire surgical cart into magnet room and entire contents of cart becomes projectiles...etc. There's a lot that can go wrong."[2]

Worth checking out.

I confess that a lot of my time these days is now being absorbed by Google Reader. I know - Bloglines has been out for about three years and performs essentially the same function. Yet, somehow I never got around to really using the Bloglines account that I set up. At some point, I'll check it out and see if they're package is more capably put together, but for now, I'm really happy with Google's product.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, Google Reader is an RSS reader that lets you track all the web pages that you find yourself constantly checking throughout the day (newspapers and blogs, primarily). It solves the problem of having to go to each individual website to find out if they've posted something new. It does this by essentially treating each site as a sender and their posts as e-mails. In keeping with this paradigm, the site looks a lot like Gmail.

The one thing that I will say about this is that trying to keep up with the volume of content being posted is impossible. Granted, that should be obvious, given the number of sources that are constantly producing information. But now that it's so much easier to quantify just how far behind I am on my reading, I keep finding myself overwhelmed by the amount of content that I have yet to look at. Rachel, stop writing so many damn posts.

So, Miss USA has been caught drinking. Donald Trump was this close to firing her but, gracious man that he is, decided to stay his hand, allowing her to stay as the symbol of... something or other.

I've got to say, I've never properly understood the purpose of the Miss USA and Miss America pageants, which are apparently both owned (and poorly brand-differentiated) by the Miss Universe organization. Cynic that I am, I thought they were nothing more than a (great) excuse to get a bunch of pretty/hot girls into a room and make them walk around in bathing suits. I never believed that the "values" portion of the competitions were the actual centerpiece driving the competitions; rather, they were an adjunct put in place so that older, red state-ish Americans that watched the shows could feel like good Christians while they compared Ms. Kansas and Ms. North Dakota's rack size. Either that, or they were put in place to make sure that the girls had enough poise and diction to string together sentences that weren't blitheringly stupid.

Lest you think that I'm just being a cynical prick, let me quote some relevant Wikipedia articles.

Re: Miss USA

Unlike the Miss America pageant, there is no talent section at Miss USA. Delegates are required to compete in Evening Gown, Swimsuit and Interview.

In more recent years, the importance of the interview portion of the competition has been greatly diluted. From 1975-2000, all delegates who made the initial cut were tested in an Interview competition in some format. As of 2001, the interview portion was taken away and only the "final question" left. The finals judges thus only hear the final candidates speak.

In other news that I'm dumping in from my daily WSJ reading, parents are apparently sneaking away from their children to spend time with their Blackberries. Quoth the WSJ:

"The children of one New Jersey executive mandate that their mom ignore her mobile email from dinnertime until their bedtime. To get around their dictates, the mother hides the gadget in the bathroom, where she makes frequent trips before, during and after dinner. The kids "think I have a small bladder," she says. She declined to be named because she's afraid her 12- and 13-year-old children might discover her secret."

For many of us, this may sound a bit reminiscent of what we had to do to catch a cigarette. If you had particularly restrictive parents, you may have had to go to a friend's place to watch TV or play video games. This list could clearly be added to, but the point is that these are all things that are mainly associated with "fun," whereas a lot of Blackberry activity, at least among the people I know, is associated with "work." And much as I like my job, I really couldn't imagine sneaking out of bed to play around with Excel.

Here's the best part of the article:

"Elsa has hidden the BlackBerry on occasion -- Hohlt says she tried to flush it down the toilet last year... But Elsa also seems to recognize that it brings her mom comfort, not unlike a pacifier or security blanket. Recently, seeing her mom slumped on the couch after work, Elsa fished the BlackBerry from her mother's purse and brought it to her. "Mommy," she asked, "will this make you feel better?""

That's just messed up.

Just found this blog courtesy of the WSJ, which seems to be extremely interested in all of the pain that the Wii is causing the American consumer. It's a little bit sparse and perhaps destined to be short-lived, but I thought this picture was great. The other picture of the kid with a mark across his face is also pretty priceless.

Oddly enough, I have two posts on science and religion sitting in my draft list. They're both boring and not particularly original. I'll post them eventually, but at a time when they won't really be noticed by anyone that bothers to look at this stuff.

I've been playing around with del.icio.us. I know, I know, it's really old. I've probably had my account for over a year, but never did anything with it. I'm playing with it now.

It's neat and oddly compelling. If you've been swept up by the Web 2.0 desire to have every part of your life aggregated and tagged on the Internet, then the appeal will be obvious. For everyone else, I'd say that the neatness comes from having a quick/easy way to bookmark anything and everything that comes across your path. There are so many awesome websites that we come across on a daily basis - now you can save them for perpetuity and not have to worry about clogging up your bookmark bar.

If my bookmarks are any indication, I seem to think that the coolest things on the web are do-it-yourself posts, blogs about various web 2.0 crap, and cooking sites. I seriously thought I would be more interesting than that, but apparently not.

The other thing about del.icio.us is that it allows you to peruse other people's bookmarks. For instance, I've been checking out some of the ones posted by AKA. He has many interesting things.

My one comment is that it would be great if you could figure out which sites are one-offs and which ones are truly, incredibly interesting. You can do this to some extent by checking the link-count. But it would be good if, for each person, I could tell which of these sites they visited frequently and which sites they spent a lot of time at. Unfortunately, that would probably take a level of data-collection and privacy-infringement that wouldn't be possible.

In keeping with my "follow-the-herd" mentality, here's a link to the WSJ's most blogged article, from Jamin Warren. The main point, as paraphrased by me, is that Americans are so horribly out of shape that they are managing to hurt themselves while playing Nintendo's new video game console, the homosexually named Wii (note that this system is about two phalluses hanging out together). As Jamin puts it, "They're reporting aching backs, sore shoulders -- even something some have dubbed 'Wii elbow.'"

Here's another select anecdote: Ryan Mercer, a customs broker in Indianapolis, lifts weights several times a week. But that hasn't helped much with the Wii. After playing the boxing game for an hour and a half, his arms, shoulders and torso were aching. "I was soaking wet with sweat, head to toe -- I had to go take a shower," he says. And the next morning? "I had trouble putting my shirt on," says the 21-year-old avid gamer.

There's a part of me that wants to laugh at all of these poorly-conditioned masses that can't handle waving a stick in the air for an hour without hurting themselves. Then I remember that I have a desk job, I get no regular exercise, and my favorite recreational activity, when possible, is aggressive spooning ("Spoon or be spooned!"). I had a runny nose and watery eyes for most of Thanksgiving because my fleece got covered in dog-hair, to which I'm mildly allergic. And I like video games (sigh).

So, instead of casting stones, I think I'll start shoring up the walls of my glass house.
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Additional note: People at work have also commented on being hurt by their Wii's.

I recently stumbled upon David Sifry, founder of Technorati's post on the State of the Blogosphere. The short of it is that the number of blogs are growing briskly, with the number of blogs doubling every 236 days, although the rate of growth is cooling down a bit. There are now around 57+mm blogs out there, with ~55% of them being active.

The post is pretty interesting, although it's not clear to me if Technorati is getting this data from the major services or just from people that subscribe to Technorati's service. If it's the latter, then I would say that this data is only reflective of a specific subsegment of the blogosphere. Moving on.

One thing that caught my eye was that the average # of posts/day is growing a lot more slowly than the # of blogs (roughly 3x since late '04 vs. 10x since late '04). My guess is that blogging - like the SAT's - is increasingly being done by the mainstream, with a higher number of people writing on a semi-frequent basis. So if you think my blog is mediocre and poorly updated, just wait until the rest of the world really gets on the bandwagon.

Couple other quick points:

1. The NYTimes is getting about 3.5x more trackbacks (I think that's what inbound sources is referring to) than Fox News. Much like the Dems winning the elections, that makes me happy.

2. The Japanese are almost as blog-crazy as the English (33% vs. 39% of posts). I am really, really curious about what they write about.

Anyway, that's all for now.

In case no one noticed, I've added single-click commenting capabilities and also made it so the sidebar on the left collapses. Hurray for minute changes!

On a more serious note, there's been a lot of excitement about the Democrats taking back Congress after some 12-odd years. I think it's great that they won, but I think their victory is causing a bit of oversight on a critical issue that has totally vanished since election day, i.e. the significant issues that were cropping up with electronic voting platforms.

Given the slim margins and the intense polarization of recent elections, you would think that any hint of a miscount would be blasted out to the public. Maybe it has, and I just haven't noticed it because I've been working until midnight for the past two weeks. But my sense is that the discussion has been more about the Dems coming to power, Rumsfeld resigning, and Pelosi becoming the first female speaker of the house. Given the overwhelming feeling that this election went the right way, it seems a little bit inappropriate to talk about how things in the election went wrong.

I'm not saying that the election was stolen or that there was massive vote-theft. But there are some things that are worrying. This catalog of voting-issues news stories includes several troubling items, such as:

* Williamson County. iVotronic touch screen machines count every vote three times.
* Marion County. Doris Anne Sadler, Marion County Clerk, is unable to retrieve the votes from 520 ES&S iVotronic machines
* Waterville. Diebold scanners malfunction. Results show 27,000 votes in a town with 16,000 registered voters.
* Lancaster County. A third of the county's 232 polling stations experienced malfunctions on the Hart InterCivic eScan ballot scanners. In many cases, the memory cards were test cards, not set up for election results.
* Knox County. Circuitry in a Hart InterCivic eSlate fails, calling into question over 2600 e-ballots. Knox County Election Commission Chair Pamela Reeves explains what happened to the machine. "Apparently, what it did was it smoked. I don't know what caused it to smoke, but it was literally smoking. So they unhooked it at the time. Of course, we don't read the votes and we didn't know there was a problem until we went to read the votes Tuesday night."

And so on. According to an article in the Miami Herald, 18,382 votes either weren't cast or were miscounted in Sarasota county. Unfortunately, the voting was electronic and has no paper trail, closing out the possibility of a recount. Given that the 2000 election came down to some 500 votes in Florida, I think this should be a fairly serious concern for anyone that cares about who gets elected.

So, hurray for the Democrats and all of them getting elected. Let's just hope that they're secure enough in their victory to demand an investigation into voting practices in preparation for 2008.
******
If this is something that concerns you too, you can sign an on-line petition, or maybe it's send an e-mail to your senator, for paper trails and accountability at Get It Straight by 2008.

It's a bit embarrassing to be posting something this commercial, but this clip of a fat, dancing penguin should hopefully make someone happy.

Coincidentally, didn't Jamiroquai steal the tune behind this Stevie Wonder song?

Holy cheez-doodles, it's been two whole weeks since I've posted anything!

Honestly, I don't know how these other bloggers do it. Phonelesscord is pumping out around two-three humorous yet insightful posts a day. ifyougiveacowamoo, who recently nagged at me for not writing anything, has put out two whole posts in about a month. The last time I wrote anything was at the very beginning of the month, when I plip-plopped out a whole three posts in a day's time.

I think the secret is not giving a damn if anyone sees you writing your posts. The last two weeks have been super-busy for me - i.e. staying at work until 11-12 at night - but I'm sure I could've cranked out a paragraph or two if I hadn't been so nervous about people looking over my shoulder and seeing me be unproductive.

I think the big problem is that once you start not writing, the list of things to write about starts building up. To date, I have yet to make any comment on the Democrats taking over Congress, Borat being sued by drunken frat-boys and Romanian villagers alike (isn't eating a hairy scrotum enough punishment?), or my own recent conversion to Southern Baptist-inspired social conservatism. My theory is that the size of my list is directly correlated with my feelings of resignation, especially since each of these posts ends up being 4x longer than originally intended.

So, that was my feeble stab at writing something. I'll make another go of it soon, I promise. I am also willing to bet about $50 that I will be writing another "OhmygodIhaven'twritteninweeks" post sometime within the next few months, after which I will wash my hands of self-inflicted guilt and say "Screw it, it's not like anyone's reading this anyway."

This is one of the things that seems so odd to me about strategy. Sometimes, there are advances that don't make it to the market until years down the line. I just found this today. It's a link describing the automatic parallel parking feature of new 2007 Lexus LS460 sedan. This is insanely amazing to me. And yet, according to CBS News, this feature has been around in Japan since 2003.

Here's a video of the whole thing in action. Keep an eye on the guys hands and watch how close the car gets in the back:

Why is this something that took 4 years to migrate to the US? If I really had to guess, it would probably be something along the lines of "lack of a market" and high production costs. Under this scenario, the manufacturing costs must have dropped by now to a more manageable level. Either that, or there are some terribly inadequate lines of communication between Toyota and the Lexus US operations.

I'm curious about the average life of a blog. My guess is that there are probably a few categories.

One-timers

These are mostly jackasses that take up all the good names and then never do anything with them. I remember them quite distinctly. It took me forever to find a name for my blog, primarily because all the good names were taken. Of all the blogs in this category, I've only found one to be of any interest at all. Got to love a guy that faces down his critics. Even if he is a lying poo face.

One-years

I've ran across a few of these. My friend Thomas falls into this category. Lee Tyler, a guy that I sort of knew on the periphery in high school also gets a nod. I'm sure that research would turn up some more. somethingwitty.blogspot.com, one of the sites that I was gunning for, also had a run of about a year. I'd include the ever-interesting Reasoner here, but atari keeps on posting and fucking up the categories.

On-going

We're all aware of these ones. The boingboing's and the drudge report's and the dailykos that everyone is always reading and citing. Bah, fooey to all of these people that seem to have caught the imagination of the public.

It's kind of interesting. For Al Gore, there's been a lot of wistfulness about what could have happened had he been elected president. I don't have the time or resourcefulness to go and look up a supporting article, but especially after the release of "An Inconvenient Truth," I think there were a lot of people who remembered that:

a) The election was more or less stolen from him
b) Had people overlooked his "wooden-ness," they might not have elected someone that thought it was acceptable to lie to the American people and then drag them into a war that's more or less Vietnam 2.0

Gore's post-movie success, I think, has a lot to do with him making a decision to essentially drop out of the limelight. He became a lecturer at Columbia for a bit, made a movie, and has repeatedly disavowed any intention of running for office. This apolitical stance has allowed him to work on what he thinks is important and say what he thinks is right, which has helped him immensely. Prior to Obamania, I'm fairly sure that a bunch of Dems were hoping that the guy would give up his guns and run for office.

Sadly, I don't think the same can be said for John Kerry. The guy just can't seem to get a break. Whereas people say that Gore had the election stolen from him, most people generally concede that Kerry ran a dumb campaign that essentially amounted to, "At least I'm not that idiot in office." Whereas Gore was stiff and wooden, Kerry just seemed to be kind of a loser (What the hell was up with that duck-hunting photo-op?). These days, anytime Kerry sticks his head out into public, it's basically just to have the door slammed in his face.

As evidence, witness his latest debacle with a botched joke. This is what he was supposed to say:

“Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.”

This is what he ended up saying:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”(1)

And there are others too. Sigh. Poor John Kerry.

****
It makes me extremely happy to hear that people have taken all of the Republican sniping at John Kerry's expense more as a sign of the hypocrisy of the sniping party than as a sign of John Kerry being a bad person/bad joke giver/what have you. In particular, I liked what I read here and here.

I have to admit, I'm a little timid when it comes to letting people know that I have a blog, especially people that I know. I'm still at that stage where I'm not sure if I want to let all my friends know what's going on with me, or if I just want a private diary where I can blow off steam about my girl, my work, etc.

I just let a bunch of my friends know what's up, and in return I got the address for another friend's blog. Now, I have another reason to be timid. Her blog is really smart sounding and awesomely formatted. It cites studies, has cute pictures of brains and caterpillars, and quotes lots of smart people.

Anyway, whoever reads this blog (or who went to college with me) should go read it. It's great!

I know, I know. You receive about five e-mails a month telling you how urgent it is that you read this or that article full of unbacked theories that will eventually be debunked on www.snopes.com. This, however, is not one of those issues. The following video is a little bit long and the narrator really needs to think more highly of his audience, but still, it's worth a watch. (Note: the issues I'm talking about in this post are pretty old, and will probably be boring for a lot of people. Still, it strikes me as being relevant, given the impending election season.)

You may try and nitpick pieces of the methodology ("Removing a few screws" = removing 20 of them). But I think the overall point is scary - it's very easy to break into these machines and - given some level of technological savvy - steal an election.

There are, of course, a lot of questions about how representative that video was. If it was the only thing that I'd seen, I might not be persuaded about it. For a full, convincing discussion of the potential theft of an election, see this article from arstechnica. Aside from answering a lot of the logistical questions, it breaks the problem down as follows:

a) The use of electronic voting machines presents a vastly larger number of vulnerabilities for "bad apples" to attack.
b) Many of these attacks only require one bad apple, as opposed to a coordinated army of them

This all goes to show that electronic voting machines in their current form are a suboptimal voting solution. That's the part that I think we should be worried about. What I think we should be angry about is that it seems like the companies that are putting these machines together are almost (note: 'are almost' != 'are') actively courting a voting disaster.

For instance, leaked internal memos that were published by Swarthmore students suggest that Diebold was actively skirting state certification procedures by patching the software after the machines were certified. Moreover, when the state of Maryland tried to protect itself by requesting paper printouts, Diebold apparently circulated a memo saying, "As a business, I hope we're smart enough to charge them up the wazoo [for this feature]".

In regards to the leaked memos that were published, Diebold sued the students that posted them. To me, this seems like a clearcut case in which corporate interests are in direct conflict with the public good. Diebold's primary source of profit is entirely dependent on the public believing that it is providing a quality solution. In lieu of actually providing a secure voting solution, it has decided that the cheaper and more efficient strategy is to simply dupe us, regardless of the effect that this could have on the entire political ecosystem. In some cases, I'm for the privatization of government functions, but this is just preposterous.

Anyway. This all makes me very upset. If you're worried about trails, go with an absentee ballot.

This video scares the hell out of me. I don't want to get Parkinson's disease, I don't want to weave uncontrollably without medication.

I'd talk about Rush Limbaugh, but I'm sure that would just be beating a dead horse.

On a happy note, my cousin got engaged in Hawaii earlier this month. After dating his girl for like, five years or something, he finally sacked up and gave her a really, hugely, obscenely expensive diamond with a hoop of metal attached to it.

After listening to his story about how he proposed to her, I have to say this. Guys like him give guys like me a bad name. I really don't know how you can compete with a huge, Hawaiian sunrise and a hotel room full of champagne, rose petals and bubble baths. Actually, I do know how. To rephrase: I don't know how you can compete with all that stuff that I just mentioned when you don't have a ridiculous amount of cash constantly piling up in your bank account. I'm sure that she told somebody about it, who told somebody else, who will tell somebody else, until the story becomes part of the collective consciousness that says, "Hey, it's more or less expected that you blow a fat stack of Benjamins on a special occasion." So thanks a lot, rich boy.

I would put a comment in here about the returns that one gets for laying out cash on events like these, but I think it would only land me in hot water. So instead, I'm just going to allude to the fact that I could have made a comment and let the reader infer what he/she will about what I have to say.

But seriously, I'm really happy for the guy. He couldn't have picked a sweeter girl - they're really perfect for each other. They're seriously two of my favorite people in the world and I can only wish them the best. And I'm going to be the best man! Which means I have to give a speech!

...

Holy Crap! I have to give a speech! Sigh.

This is going to be a terrible, terrible admission to my adoring public. I have been wearing the same undergarments - socks and boxers - for roughly three days. I would like to say that this is not my fault. I've been staying somewhere that does not give me access to clean items of clothing. While I could technically just stay close to my clothes, I have a nagging suspicion that I would get flack about it.

In any case, I don't think anyone's discovered me yet. The current count puts me at zero disgusted sniffings. I haven't seen anyone quietly backing away from my stinkily-clad person. No one's asked, "Does anyone smell that?"

Of course, this isn't to say that I don't smell. The albino that sits across from me definitely has B.O. issues, but I am too polite to mention them. Instead, I simply control the distance between the two of us, politely ignoring his persistent requests that I come near to him so that I can help him with his Excel work.

Still, tonight I will go home and get socks. And wash my feet. And it will be amazing.

It's been a while since I've written a sad/depressing post - just about two weeks. I'm going to put a hold on the sad/depressing for a bit longer and switch to irritable/cantankerous.

There's a certain class of people that I work with that are persistently making small talk. These people seriously irritate the hell out of me. I really couldn't care less about how serendipitous it is that fifty percent of the room went to Harvard (eech). Now, I don't want to be that guy that makes the workplace less fun or what not. But there's a difference between having fun and making small talk. Small talk is made in order to avoid being rude. It's a societal obligation that really should be kept to a minimum, unless it's going to lead to fun. I'd describe what having fun is like, but I've sort of forgotten what it consists of. I vaguely recall that it has something to do with midgets, booze, and large bears in party hats riding tiny tricycles.

Unfortunately, I think that most of those things are frowned upon in the workplace.

Another irritable note: they're banning tag at schools. This follows the banning of games like dodgeball or soccer. I swear, over-protective/litigious parents are freaking retarded. My prediction: kids will just start having sex earlier.

Lee's gone for the weekend. It's really hitting me how much I've lost touch with all the friends I used to have in the city. I don't even know who to call right now.

I am trapped inside of my office. Not by bars, not by any sort of working obligation. I'm trapped by torrential rain and a $900 dollar suit. Such is life.

Last night marked the end of my first year together with Lee. We went out, ate a nice meal, and went home. I was worried that things wouldn't come together, but everything worked out. It was a nice night.

On the ride home, I began to think about fairy tales - Cinderella in particular. It struck me that the tale of Cinderella may have the most resonance among all the fairy tales that I remember. Red Riding Hood speaks to our fears about the beasts that may be hiding in the dark and in plain sight. Sleeping Beauty has the "One day, my prince will come" aspect, which really only appeals to women, which is probably why it's a second-rate fairy tale. Snow White has weird stepmother/stepchild relations and freakiness with dwarves.

But Cinderella speaks to everyone's desire to be suddenly discovered, seen for our special qualities and pulled away from our daily drudgery. Again, the telling of the story is highly chick-oriented and the part of me that wants to be masculine is yelling at me to abort the writing of this post. But still, I think the Cinderella story is out there in full force, especially with the advent of reality TV. Now everyone has a chance to be discovered (except for that Daniel Lue guy from Survivor, who sucks).

All that being said, the one part of the story that I kept thinking about was the stroke of midnight, when the magic wore off, and Cinderella realized that her dress was really just a bunch of old rags, her horses were just a pack of field mice, and her carriage was a giant pumpkin. The part that saddened me was that for those of us not living in a fairy tale, no matter how much magic you cast over a night, there will always be the stroke of midnight to bring us back to the reality of daily life.

I think it says a lot that the most damaging thing to happen to the Republican party's chances for re-taking the House are not:

a) Initiating the war on Iraq
b) Lying to the American public about the reasons for going into Iraq
c) Totally bungling the rebuilding of Iraq at the cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars
d) Huge mismanagement of fiscal policy, leading to a huge ramp-up in federal debt
e) Utter mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina

Instead, the thing that is probably going to get them is the fact that one of their representatives sent dirty text messages to a Congressional page.

Honestly. What the f***.

I know, there's a lot there. Incredible hypocrisy on their part, abuse of power for pedophilic purposes, gross gross gross, etc. But in terms of the actual costs to the nation, how does this even remotely compare to any of the other things I just mentioned?

The voting public is craaaazy.

When I was a kid, we used to have storytime at the school library. It was awesome, it was more or less like watching TV, except the only picture you get is of an old, shrivel-some lady hunched over an excessively colorful book. If you closed your eyes, you could sometimes get her to look like Levar Burton.

There was one story that I'm remembering in particularly vivid detail at the moment. It was called Alex and the rotten, stinky, terrible, no good, completely awful day. Or something along those lines. And the story started off with Alex, or whatever his name was, waking up on the wrong side of the bed, with gum in his hair, his mom yelling at him, his homework undone, late for the bus, and all sorts of terrible things. The way the book went, he'd have probably dropped a fudge-covered twinkie in his sheets too if the book was written for adults.

The reason I'm remembering this book (which doesn't exist as far as Amazon is concerned) is because as far as mornings go, this one was pretty much shit. For all of you voyeurs out there, I'm going to give my apologies for not letting out any personal details. No, I did not crap my pants. Whatever it was that happened, it was stressful and made me unhappy.

In The curious incident of the dog in the night-time, or whatever that Mark Haddon book was called, the narrator needs to see how many red cars vs. yellow cars there are on the way to school in order to make a judgement about whether the rest of the day is going to be good or bad. I would have thought the character was an idiot, but he was autistic, so I guess the proper thing to do is cut him some slack. Still, having signs tell you that a day is going to be bad is really just a half step away from having tea leaves tell you that you should kill your parents for insurance money. Days aren't made bad because of random morning occurences. Days are made bad by bad things happening constantly throughout the day.

Hell, even if you have a bad morning, that should have very little bearing on the rest of your day. At least I hope, because my morning sucked and I want it to go away. Hurray for work.

This posting stuff is a lot easier if you commit yourself to writing no more than a paragraph or two. It gets even easier if the alternative is working.

Lately, I've had a problem committing myself to a book. I'm reading no less than three books at the moment. And by reading, I mean that I've gotten through the first chapter and not much else. The books include:

1) That book by Ignatieff that I wrote on about, Oh, two months ago.
2) The Life of Pi, which had a really captivating introduction and a really boring first chapter.
3) Blindness, which actually seems like it might win this particular horse race.

I blame all of my reading difficulties on my girlfriend, who always makes it difficult to be near the book that I want to read.

So, what I didn't get was that if I started writing something a week ago, but posted it today, it's published as if I posted it a week ago. This will probably make my last post confusing for anyone that hasn't look at this site in a while. All one of you (for some reason, this phrase sounds really awkward if the number is < 3).

I'm sneezing a lot today.

I have a big problem with finishing my posts. They're all really long and end up being kind of boring. In fact, they're so boring that by the time I've reached the 80%-completion point, I'm too bored to finish writing them. They start becoming like a phone call that's taking up too long, but you're too polite to tell the other person to stop yapping about how their pear tastes and let you go.

The problem with not finishing your posts is that some of them are time sensitive. The post that I just posted says something like, "I haven't posted anything in a while, I feel bad, blah blah blah." Of course, I posted a bunch of Colbert clips within the last week or so. But when I started writing the last post, that was clearly not the case.

Anyway, I think that trying to write down my serious thoughts might be too time-consuming. Maybe I'll switch over to fluffier topics like, "I've eaten at the same Japanese restaurant at the same time (10:45pm) for the past three days and they all think that I'm Japanese." This would be a bonus, because then I could start going at all of those thoughts that are only one line long, yet still equally pressing in my mind, e.g. I have to stop drinking alcohol - beer in particular - because it makes me really gassy on the following day and will probably end up getting me fired.

I wonder if Kant ever had this problem while he was writing his critiques. Oh well.

The following is a set of clips that I found interesting. The first is an interview that Stephen Colbert had with Rep. Wexler from Florida.

It's been awhile since I posted. I've seen this happen to other blogs before. After a run of furious posting, the posts start trickling out a bit more slowly, then they just stop. Without becoming part of a larger dialogue, these things are just on-line diaries. And at the end of the day, when you're done with work and you've finally just gotten home, what do you really want to do? Spend a half hour writing a post that no one will read, or make yourself a nice dinner, watch some television, and then try and get your girlfriend to take off her clothes?

Anyway, I had a thought this morning. Incredible, I know.

I'm not entirely sure why I was thinking about this, but it struck me how people are always trying to find someone/something to blame for the problems that they see. I think the reason for this is pretty intuitive. When a specific problem can be attributed to a particular source, it's much easier to deal with. You can isolate the problem and work towards a solution, or at least dismiss it in some way.

When you don't know what the problem is, it suddenly becomes far more insurmountable. Without having a clear target to attack, it's harder to control whatever it is that's bothering you. You have less predictive power over when the anxiety will strike and this only makes things worse. 'Sourceless' problems like these seem to be what cause people to become deeply depressed and/or generally unhappy.

Some time ago, I read about a distinction between fear and anxiety. It categorized problems with identifiable sources as fears and the others as anxiety. I wish I could remember what article it was, because it was kind of neat if you're into keen word-mincing.

In any case, what I was thinking about this morning is how there's probably a very strong inclination to blame one's problems on the first plausible source, especially if you're possessed of a Type A personality and have a borderline compulsive need to do something about it. By blaming something else, it's a quick and virtually costless way of regaining a bit of control and composure.

Obviously, you can't just blame anything. Blaming your insurmountable feelings of inertia on a cheeseburger you ate in 9th grade won't ring true enough to pass even the weakest of internal dialogues.

That being said, I think the problem with this approach to regaining control is that it focuses too much on identifying the problem and not enough on solving it. In some cases, identifying the reason that the problem arose won't lead to a solution. For instance, if you're driving on a highway and your direction-giver doesn't tell you about your exit until it's too late, identifying that person as the problem isn't going to fix the fact that you now have to find a way to turn around and get back to that exit.

Ok, that's all.

In She's All That, we're taught that ordinary-looking girls (with nice eyes and flawless bone structures) can be made super-hot by switching their glasses for contacts, letting their hair down, and the application of makeup. While I think that most people know that there's a little more to it than that (I've never heard of makeup that covers up multiple chins), I think that there's a feeling out there that by giving a person a proper makeover, all sorts of hidden hotness can come out.

Here's my question. Are there any movies that say the same thing about guys, i.e. nerdy guys can suddenly become awesome, ripped and popular? Do I sound incredibly homosexual because I'm asking that question? Oh well. Just curious.

So I got caught in a lie this weekend. The details aren't important, but the fallout was pretty bad. There was a lot of discussion about this and that, being truthful and trustworthy, etc.

A lot of that got me thinking about lies as a whole. Is it ever ok to lie? To this, there are several responses.

I think the most conventional one is "No." From the day that we're born, people tell us that lying is bad. On occasion, we're given a thwacking if we're caught lying. We're told the parable of the boy that cried wolf to reinforce the theory that lying undermines people's trust in what you say.

Kant had a much more sophisticated response, which might be of interest to some people. Bypassing a lot of his discussion of rationality and ends, it boiled down to the fact that when we lie, we are making a decision for someone else and effectively place our decision-making faculties above the same faculties of the people that we lie to. For Kant, this is a big no-no, especially since an equal weighting of all such faculties underpins his entire moral philosophy.

Of course, absolute moral prohibitions run into problems when we start talking about either-or situations. Kant had a problem figuring out what to do when faced with the question, "What if a murderer came to my master's house and asked me where he was?" Relatively speaking, abetting the murder of your master seems like a greater evil than lying to a murderer.

Going with a bastardized version of Ignatieff's "lesser evils" theory, we could say that lying is permissible so long as we continue to recognize it as an evil, and only use it if abstaining would necessarily result in an even greater evil.

If that's the case, then we have to put together a pretty robust framework for figuring out what constitutes a "greater evil." Suppose I'm trying to sell a weak product so that my start-up and all of its employees can scrape through another meager year. Would that qualify as a reason to overstate the strengths of my product to customers?

Realistically speaking, I think this is the theory that's guiding most people, if they're being guided by anything at all. Most of us tend to figure out the pros and cons of a lie, and if the pros outweigh the cons, we'll go with it. The only problem is that this is a really loose way of dealing with ethical issues. If this was a widely accepted framework, GW Bush could easily say that all of his lies about WMDs in Iraq and all of the spinjobs he's done on torture and imprisonment without due process were done "for the greater good" of national security. Strong odds say that he would even believe what he was saying. But for a lot of us, I don't think that would make it right. Morally relativistic double-speak eventually leaves me with the feeling that you don't have morals at all.

Another response that I've heard is the "victimless crime" theory. Here, the lie is justified by the fact that it a) introduces a benefit into the world, and b) provides no downside. It's the moral equivalent of finding a $20-bill on the street. Sure it came from someone else's pocket, but they'll never even know they lost it.

A better example might be as follows. Suppose that someone you love and care about is having some sort of crisis of confidence. They just don't think that they're up to the task of doing whatever it is that they're supposed to be doing. To a certain extent, you think that they're probably right. But you know that these confidence issues will only compound their problems and make matters worse. And who knows, maybe if they got their confidence back, they'd do fine. So. Would it be ok to lie to them? Could you make something up that would make them feel a bit better about themselves and be right about it?

This is a tough one. I think a lot of people would probably say sure, go ahead. Their reasons might be as follows: a) you're not hurting anyone, so long as the person doesn't find out, b) this isn't even for your own benefit, it's for theirs; it's a selfless lie. But I think that a lot is hinging on the qualification in reason A. Supposing that the person does find out that you've been lying, then a lot of the self-esteem that you've been trying to build up might go poof! and vanish. Even some of the honestly good things that you've said might be considered to be garbage. Boy who cried wolf, etc.

Interesting note: Frankfurt's On Bullshit distinguishes between a liar and a bullshitter by pointing out that liars are actively trying to steer people away from the truth, whereas bullshitters don't particularly care about what the truth is or is not. Well, I thought it was interesting.

It is with great sadness that I note the passing of Steve Irwin. Aside from the fact that his last name has a passing resemblance to my first, the man was absolutely fearless. Many of my friends considered him to be certifiably insane. Still, his unrelenting enthusiasm for his job made many of us, including me, think that he may have been on the right side of that very fine line.

His means to fame - wrestling around with lethal, deadly animals - has been copied many times over by people like Jeff Corwin and other random zoologists that don't really know that much (I saw this guy on Shark Week that was a certifiable idiot). Hopefully, his freakish, excruciatingly painful-sounding death (stabbed in the heart by a stingray) will not have them all running for the hills.

"I think the reason that Sprint and Nextel are failing is because of the yellow."

This is a real quote, coming from the mouth of a person that is influencing a major corporation's acquisition strategy.

At first blush, I'm inclined to dismiss this as utter sillyness. When people are trying to choose between various phones and service plans, do they really care about the corporate color? Is Cingular's orange really so much cooler?

Well, maybe. Branding works in strange and mysterious ways, which are mostly incomprehensible to me. I will say this though. T-mobile turns me off with its pinkness. I defend this sentiment by thinking about how any T-mobile phone that I purchase will have a pink little logo on it, adding a feminine touch to even the most masculine of phones. Being the insecure person that I am, this means something to me.

So something is probably wrong with yellow too. Cingular is playing it safe with a tasty looking orange. I have no idea what Verizon's chosen color is - maybe the red that's in their little check mark thing?

Anyway, this can't be very interesting for anyone to read. I'll come back with something more intelligent later.