I kept waiting and waiting for DeGeneres to crack a few jokes, or at least any jokes. But none came out. Instead she stood in center stage and did her “I’m cute and lovable” impression. Criticizing her when she’s like that is like kicking a dear but retarded puppy.
There needs to be a word that expresses the degree of stupidity involved in a situation, similar to the way “speed” expresses the rapidity of movement. I ran across the word “dumbth” in a Steve Allen book years ago, and it seems to fit. It’s also pleasantly awkward, making the very act of saying it an expression of its essence.
Why do we need a word like “dumbth”? To describe cities like the District of Columbia. As described in this Washington Times story, the city (1) writes its own police officers tickets when the city’s automated camera system records them speeding and running red lights on emergency calls and (2) makes the process of dismissing these tickets cumbersome and time-consuming. Other jurisdictions with automated systems don’t make their officers go to court over on-duty camera records.
The District has installed 49 red-light cameras and 10 speed cameras that take photographs of offenders’ license plates and issue tickets that are sent through the mail. Twelve patrol cars are equipped with similar automated cameras. Mr. Baumann said officers are captured by the cameras as many as 10 to 15 times a day. His union represents the Metropolitan Police Department’s 3,400 officers, sergeants and detectives.
D.C. police Capt. Melvin Gresham said while officers sometimes get tickets while responding to a legitimate emergency, the cases are dismissed. He also said he hasn’t received any complaints from officers about the tickets. “We have had individual instances where officers on legitimate calls for emergency services were captured by photo red-light cameras, and as long as they can justify their actions, then more than likely the infraction will be dismissed,” he said.
Still, officers must spend a considerable amount of time dealing with them, and there have been instances where officers have paid their tickets to avoid the hassle, Mr. Baumann said. Officers must deal with the tickets either by mail or through court. When trying to get the ticket dismissed by mail, an officer must write a letter saying that he or she was on duty at the time and obtain a letter from a commander, as well as get radio logs and other data that would prove they were responding to a legitimate emergency. But some get called to court, where they must explain where they were and what they were doing at the time the cameras captured their vehicle.
“These are man hours that could be spent actually doing police work,” Mr. Baumann said.
In the CD Player: Duke - Genesis
Currently reading: Spoiled Rotten America - Larry Miller (paper) & Whiskey Sour - J.A. Konrath (audiobook)
In the Xbox 360: Crackdown
Just found: some nunchucks for the Wii so the boys & I can do some multiplayer
You can set WordPress to publish things at a future time. Say, Thursdays at 9am.
It appears I like buying Japanese RPG’s more than I like playing them.
Telephone solicitors have forefeited any right to polite treatment simply by showing up for work.
If there’s a woman too ugly to be impregnated, I haven’t seen her on TV yet.
Assuming you don’t want to deal with bums, when you are approached you should (1) never break stride, (2) never make eye contact, and (3) never say anything that encourages further interaction. It helps to be wearing headphones, that way you can just look at your watch and tell them what time it is as you cruise past them.
And yes, they’re bums. “Homeless” is a superset of “bums,” not all people without a fixed residence panhandle.
XM Radio is a lot like satellite TV, there’s a bit of what you like, and a lot of what you don’t. And it’s overcompressed.
There is no way that an HDMI cable is worth $100. Any retail outlet that tries to sell one to you at that price is insulting you on several levels.
Senator McCain is a lousy Republican. He is, however, an excellent McCainist. Too bad the primaries are held by Republicans.
There are 10 federal holidays a year. Two months have 2 holidays in them, four months don’t have any holidays. These four months appear in a span of six months.
I suppose one of the fundamental assumptions that I’m carrying around in my head is that everyone needs to have a home phone. I hear that other folks have gone over to cell-only lifestyles, but I can’t visualize not having a land line. My DirecTV box wants to phone home so it can report whether I’ve bought a pay-per-view, every once in a while I need to send or receive a fax, and what would I put on the no-call list without a home phone number?
I went with a cable-line phone from AT&T back when it was AT&T and not a hollowed-out shell worn by SBC like Buffalo Bill’s woman suit from Silence of the Lambs. It was reasonably priced, but after the cable system was sold to Comcast and then to Time Warner, the price has creeped up to over $50 a month for a service that didn’t seem to be worth that much. Especially since Time Warner promised a discout for carrying multiple services, but never could give me one for phone service and a cable modem that cost more than $60 a month. They hadn’t upgraded their billing software or something like that.
So, I was willing to listen when some guy tries to sell me a return to the “new” AT&T. The promised halving of the phone bill turns out to be something less than that with fees & taxes, but what the hell, Time Warner doesn’t deserve my business, might as well save what money I can. But then, the guy can’t get his customer service rep to sign me up for DSL. The houses on either side of me have it, but their computer says no. And really, that’s all the answer a customer service drone needs. Requests for either action or thinking were rejected. The salesman gives up after wasting 45 minutes of my time.
Then he comes back the next day, saying he talked to some supervisor who said they could deliver the service. But the new customer service drone didn’t believe him because the computer said no. And they wouldn’t budge because I was a former customer classified as a “winback.” Apparently, that doesn’t rate their highest level of cooperation or service. After another hour is wasted, they say they can sign me up for the phone and then do the DSL. I’ll believe it when I see it.
I think I’m just exchanging one set of screwups for another.
Interview with a guy doing time for selling modded Xboxes. (via Kotaku)
Thomas Sowell is one of my heroes. All of his stuff is brilliant, but here he discusses the fallacy of price controls. Hint: only controlling one variable can’t fix the equation.
The Wii (which you can’t find on the shelf) easily outsells the Xbox 360 and the PS3 (which you can). Better release more games for it before we get bored.
Right after I’d thought of it, here’s a news story speculating that Tony Blair’s announcement of troop withdrawal from Iraq is so he doesn’t have to send the Prince’s regiment there. Makes sense to me, you can’t give them the opportunity to score that kind of hit. UPDATE: Looks like he’s going.
As linked on the Drudge Report, the University of Minnesota is considering giving Al Gore an honorary doctorate in climatology:
University spokesperson Daniel Wolter said since Gore is an expert in the subject, several colleges at the University have expressed interest in inviting Gore to speak on campus. “He’s in the news and is a legitimate expert on a pressing issue of global concern, climate change, so this level of interest is understandable,” Wolter said.
An “expert,” eh? If this is an expert, we’re going to need a new word that indicates someone has extensive personal knowledge of a subject area. Heaven forbid he starts running around demanding his “credentials” be cited everywhere like Bill Cosby did for a while.
This is a guy who either flunked out or dropped out of law school and seminary school. This is a guy claiming that the oceans might rise 20 feet when even the most alarmist of actual scientists use a figure of about 18 inches. This is the ultimate product of a culture that holds Congressional hearings on agriculture and takes testimony from actors who appeared in movies about farms.
This is a guy working an angle — the moral equivalent of the people selling TrimSpa. And if we as a nation encourage him, we’ll only get more hucksters marketing the next doomsday.
EDIT: An article by former Delaware governor Pete DuPont addresses the available data.
Local news is usually about bad things happening to a handful of the millions living in the metroplex. Which is why I usually don’t bother with it. But I managed to catch Channel 5 blowing the lid off this amazing story:
A tanning salon in Arlington went out of business and closed.
They had the reporter standing in front of the closed salon. They had people complaining that they had paid in advance and couldn’t get tan for their cruise. They had people, without irony, saying “this is no way to run a business.” Guess what, folks. If you were paying someone to irradiate you, you were getting ripped off before they went out of business. Enron this ain’t.
Jonah Goldberg on changing priorities of conservatives. Unsurprisingly, security takes the lead over social issues.
The war on terror hasn’t just changed Giuliani’s profile as a crisis-leader, it’s changed the attitudes of many Americans, particularly conservatives, about the central crisis facing the country. It’s not that pro-lifers are less pro-life or that social conservatives are suddenly OK with homosexuality, gun control and other issues where Giuliani’s dissent from mainstream conservative opinion would normally disqualify him. It’s that they really, really believe the war on terror is for real.
Via Joystiq, the BBC show “Watchdog” has a feature on unreliable Xbox 360’s.
A soda collector discusses his rarest items. I’d forgotten about Coke II, Orbitz, and Surge.
15 geek-classic movies. I’ve seen 12.
I’m man enough to admit I thought Anna Nicole Smith was attractive, at least when she started out in the public eye. I’m also man enough to admit that bothers me a little bit, to the extent I helped enable her lifestyle.
Externally, she was voluptuous and had a way of connecting with the camera. Internally, she was a complete mess. She had one thing to sell to the world, and she sold the heck out of it. There always seemed to be plenty of buyers, but there also seemed to be a lot of buyer’s remorse. Litigation abounded. If she wasn’t suing to get a chunk of her horny old dead husband’s estate, she was being sued to get back the house in the Bahamas that wasn’t really a gift after all. I cannot visualize being on either end of the transactions in Ms. Smith’s life.
But I ended up annoyed at her (I have a title to live up to, after all) not because she was all of the above, but because she was a parent who refused to grow up. Her behavior set a fatal example for her son, and orphaned her daughter. Self-indulgence is not the highest calling this world has to offer.
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. In that spirit, there’s a list of every discrete ad shown during the Super Bowl broadcast in the DFW area, kickoff to the end of the fourth quarter, after the jump.
Now, the overanalysis.
Most spots: Anheuser-Busch, 9; Coca-Cola, 6; General Motors, 3; Frito-Lay, 3; CareerBuilder.com, 3
Internet companies with ads: CareerBuilder.com, SalesGenie.com, E-trade, GoDaddy.com
Major advertisers who cheaped out and had a standard-def ad: Revlon, Doritos, Blockbuster, Schick, Motorola, Taco Bell, Prudential
Retail food ads: Snickers, 1; Emerald Nuts, 1
Retail beverage ads: Bud Light, 5; Coke, 4; Budweiser, 2; Sierra Mist, 2; Snapple 1; Budweiser Select, 1
Only national restaurant ad: Taco Bell
Automotive parity: Chevrolet, Honda, and Toyota each had 2 national ads. No other nameplate had a national spot, with the possible exception pf GM’s “Fired Robot,” but they weren’t selling any particular make.
Only ad shown twice: GoDaddy.com
Local to network ads ratio: 13:102
Goods to services ratio for national ads: 41:14
Ads to promos ratio: 65:47
Specials to series ratio for TV show promos: 12:27
Most promoted CBS shows: The CSI’s, 6; Survivor, 4; CBS Evening News, 3
Currently broadcast prime-time CBS shows that did not get a Super Bowl promo: The Class, Close To Home, Cold Case, Ghost Whisperer, Numb3rs, Without a Trace. Don’t spend that money from the next season just yet.
Sorry, Katie!: The CBS Evening News is sinking further down despite the expensive new host. So what does CBS News do? They promote the show withw exactly the kind of “soft news” features that Little Miss Serious Journalist was trying to get away from on the Today show.
Lamest: Honda’s “Burnin’ Love” and “Fuel Economy” are what we always get from Honda, the smug belief that all they need to do is show you a car and you’ll buy it. Amusing us is beneath them. Revlon thinks we give a damn about Cheryl Crow’s hair, what Cheryl Crow’s prissy hair stylist thinks, and whether Cheryl Crow has any integrity with regard to sponsorship deals. That’s a hat trick of wrong guesses. And then they give us an ad about hair COLOR and shoot a lot of it in black & white. Also, why the hell would you pick the theme “never fade away” and then admit in the ad that you have to re-do it every week?
“But he already cashed the check”: Budweiser Select - “Virual Football” with homely rapper Jay-Z cheating at a football game with Don Shula (who should have been wearing a nametag, the world doesn’t know him by sight) by having some chick interfere with the winning field goal. I think we were supposed to think Jay-Z was smarter than Shula because he’s all hip and whatnot, but they failed to convey that in the ad. However, the fact that they’re paying this guy a boatload of money to make overproduced urban lifestyle ads for an allegedly upscale mass-produced beer says something about the relative intelligence levels involved. Yes, look serious and nod your head again, Jay-Z, you won that one fair and square.
Recycling: Coke - “Grand Theft Niceness” and “Inside the Machine” had already been made for movie theater ads. “Black History Milestones” could have been made with PowerPoint. That leaves “What Else Haven’t I Done?” as the only ad with a significant budget. I guess they figured they spent enough on the airtime. Meanwhile, Schick reuses an ad that was not that funny to begin with and was played out six months ago. T-Mobile’s “Barcley & Wade” ad would have been funny if it had been the first time I’d seen it, but it wasn’t even the dozenth time I’d seen it.
More creepy than funny: GM’s “Fired Robot” had a few laughs before the suicide attempt, but ultimately didn’t make any damn sense. Bud Light’s “Rock, Paper, Scissors” was just mean-spirited. King Pharmaceuticals “Heart Attacked” was unpleasant to watch. FedEx’s “Moon Office” ended with death by meteorite for what reason? Chevrolet’s “Topless Man Car Wash” stretched a potentially amusing sight gag over way too much of the ad’s time. E-Trade’s “Bank Robbery” never lightened the mood once it made its point.
What the hell?: Snickers’ “Man Kiss” isn’t going to sell me a candy bar anytime soon. I’ve never run across an instance where men did not regard food ACTUALLY BEING IN SOMEONE’S MOUTH as an adequate indicator of ownership. The gag doesn’t get a setup that makes sense. Sprint Mobile Broadband’s “Connectile Dysfunction” assumes we find boner pill jokes amusing. We don’t.
Funniest: Bud Light’s “Axe.” Unlike every other ad, this one elevated the joke. Emerald Nuts’ “Robert Goulet” is absurd humor at its finest.
I guess it’s funnier if you’re old: Blockbuster’s “Clicking the Mouse.” Get it? The guinea pig thinks that a real mouse is . . . oh heck with it.
Coolest: Garmin’s “Maposaurus” used campy Ultraman and Godzilla cliches to grab attention. Letterman finally gets Oprah to spend some time with him. CareerBuilder.com got rid of the monkeys and went with a Survivor/Lost theme that goes well with how people feel about work. Good use of office supplies.
Wasted cash: Chevrolet’s “Car Music” was overdone and (I think) full of celebrities I couln’t quite recognize. Budweiser’s “Artificial Dalmation” goes to the well once too many times with the “dog wishes he was on the wagon” theme. Coke’s “What Else Haven’t I Done?” asks me to believe someone can reach a very old age and never try a soda. And then resorts to the worst old-folks-doing-crazy-stuff cliches available. Snapple looked like it went over budget with its one-old-joke “ECGC” ad.
Generics: Van Heusen and IZOD settle for image ads. Taco Bell’s third or fourth helping of talking animals can’t be saved by Ricardo Montalban. Prudential phones it in with deep thoughts about stone objects. Don’t expect Budweiser’s cooler-worshiping crabs to have much staying power. Mencia’s racial humor doesn’t play well without context in Bud Light’s “Language Teacher,” while “Wedding Auctioneer” stays well inside the established beer-obsession rut. Speaking of ruts, GoDaddy.com is comfortable in the one it’s dug. Toyota Tundra does stunts that prove nothing about the truck, but were nicely executed. HP trots out another marginal celebrity to talk about what can be done with a PC.
Spoiled: Nationwide gave away the ending to “Federline Fries” in a press release a week before the game, taking away all of its impact.
Amusing: The Doritos ads relied on imagination rather than budget. Bud Light’s slapfest in “The Fist Pump Is Out” was good — wait for it — slapstick.
In the CD player: Resigned - Michael Penn & Recovering the Satellites - Counting Crows
Currently reading: Those Dirty Rotten Taxes - Charles Adams
In the Xbox 360: Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland
Just passed: the 15,000 mark on my Gamerscore. NERD!
Feeling superior to others appears to be a fundamental human need. That’s why it’s so easy to convince people they are better than other people who do X or think Y.
Dignity is not compatible with parenthood. Or at least the version of parenthood where you actually take care of the children.
Radio ads should not be allowed to have the sound of either screeching tires or sirens.
Toting around a cell phone isn’t enough to set you apart anymore, so those that want to feel distinguished now have to constantly wear a Bluetooth earpiece. Well played, important cyborg!
Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done. Just ask an ER doctor about the things they remove from various human orifices.
Prostitution isn’t going anywhere, so it should probably be legal so it can be regulated and taxed.
Microsoft almost never gets anything right the first time.
Someone will buy a unique consumer item no matter how much it costs just to prove they can pay for it. This serves both an economic and a moral purpose.
There’s only one guy running the trash truck, the driver. He uses the mechanical arm to lift the trash bin over the truck to dump stuff out. He won’t get out of the cab of the truck if some of the trash misses the truck. This also means he won’t get out of the cab if you pile a bunch of trash bags over the top of the bin and use packing tape to hold the stack together.
Gaming Nexus gives us the Ten Commendments of a Console Launch. They should all be heeded, but here’s my favorites:
2. Thou shall have enough accessories to go with the system
5. You shall not steal extra money from us by not including key components in the box
10. Future launches will launch with one and only one SKU
Air America is bankrupt and for sale. But I’m sure they’re still right on all the issues while maintaining moral superiority.
The RIAA sues a guy for allegedly downloading five songs. In related news, please buy used CDs whenever possible. It’s legal, and the RIAA members don’t make any money.
New York wants to make crossing the street while listening to an iPod or talking on a cell phone a criminal offense. It’s not clear how this will impact the deaf or the merely stupid. I think they’ll still be allowed to legally cross streets.
Ann Coulter discusses exactly where the Duke lacrosse player case stands based on the known evidence. Hint: it’s not on very solid ground. Those who pre-judged the story don’t come out too good, either.
