TEN JACK TEN

Anyone who uses the word “sheeple” without quote marks or irony has instantly and permanently lost any right to be taken seriously.

Guitar Hero II is fun right up to the point where I have to stop reacting and start memorizing.

Well-written movies and TV shows don’t have “extra characters,” i.e., chatacters that do not advance the story. This means that you can reasonably expect a character who appears to be “extra” to have something to reveal later.

If you get a gallon of shampoo, you’d better be damn sure you like it.

I find using coupons to be embarrassing.

I find redeeming rebates to be irritating.

If I needed a lawyer to handle something for me, I’d call a lawyer who practices in the county where the issue would be tried and doesn’t practice that area of law and ask them who they would hire.

Nothing teaches humility like applying for a job.

I’m in a better mood if I make a point of listening to music every day.

I should not trust car salesmen, building contractors, politicians, or door-to-door salesmen.

ABC News is handing out advice on “How to Show Off Breasts Best in the Office, on the Town and Everywhere Else”:

“We have to remember that while more women are showing more cleavage, you really have to use your breast power responsibly,” Squires said.

Wow, just like Spider-Man.

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From Comics Should Be Good!:  The top 5 comic book beards.  Linked mostly for Marvel’s evloution of Hercules’ beard.  Gotta love public-domain superhero origin stories.  While I’m at it, the top 5 lamest “forces” are good, too.

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Currently reading:  Black’s Law -  Roy Black

In the CD player:  Alright, Still - Lily Allen

In the DS: Final Fantasy III 

Trying to finish so I can buy a new cell phone without feeling like I wasted the money for buying it: Doom RPG

Follow the link for the trailer for the new CG animated Star Wars Clone Wars cartoon. Looks like they took the design of the Tartakovsky 2D animated show and transferred it to 3D. As you would expect, people do worse than things in the translation. That said, it looks cool and I’m sure the boys will give me an excuse to see it.

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Mean, but I laughed hard.

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Welcome to the summer movie season.  We’ve arranged for babysitting so My Lovely Wife and I can get out, and the only movie theater in the city is showing 13 movies on 24 screens.  And 5 of those movies have three or fewer showtimes per day.  So, if you don’t want to see a horror movie, Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3 or Pirates 3, to heck with you.

From Newsarama: Niche product for 40+ year old nerds gets controversial when people get worked up over a collector’s statue of Spider-Man’s girlfriend Mary Jane. But it’s not clear whether the angst is over the suggestive pose or the fact that she appears to be doing Spider-Man’s laundry. The designer, who’s been doing this sort of thing for years without anyone really giving a damn, seems a bit stunned.

Over at The Beat, Heidi MacDonald clubs the issue baby-seal-style here, here, here, and here. Although it all seems like a variation of “I don’t think this should be allowed to exist.” Hey, nobody listened to me when I objected to the existence of boy bands and the horrible teenage squealing they produced. Fulminating over the objectification or inferred servitude of a fictional character is just as silly.

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From NextGen: Big corporations and bawdy humor don’t mix well. Someone’s probably going to get canned for leaving in a picture of a guy showing the moon in an error screen for the PC version of Halo 2’s level editor. The real humor is the disappointment nerds will experience when they discover the nature of the “partial nudity” described on the new ratings stickers.

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From PS3fanboy:  The 1.8 firmware update for the PS3 includes upscaling for DVDs (HDMI cable required) and for PS1 & PS2 games.  Now, the system is where it should have been when it launched six months ago.  Follow the link for some before/after screens.

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Comedy and aggression are closely aligned.

Middle-class Americans live better than 99% of the human beings who currently exist or have ever been born.

Being famous appears to be an unrewarding experience.

Some of the most troublesome people you’ll ever meet are the ones who insist upon the purity of their vision, and refuse to consider compromising it.

Corporate mergers are done to (1) eliminate a competitor, (2) increase market share, and/or (3) achieve administrative economies by firing a lot of employees. None of these things particularly benefits the public.

The primary career path for ex-cheerleaders is apartment management.

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are going to have a tough time penetrating the market because marketing competing formats was stupid and because DVDs look just fine on an HD set.

ImgBurn is free and does what I want a CD/DVD burning program to do.

The broadcast TV networks aren’t doing themselves any favors by locking themselves into rigid “seasons.”

I will probably go my entire life without owning a German-made car.

Teenager from Long Island goes to Disney World and starts to spit on people. Teenager ends up on the business end of a Taser. Now that I think about it, not enough people in this world that need tasering get what’s coming to them.

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China: your one-stop shop for tainted goods! 

Authorities in the Dominican Republic said they seized 36,000 tubes of toothpaste suspected of containing diethylene glycol, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze. Included were tubes of toothpaste marketed for children with bubble gum and strawberry flavors sold under the name of “Mr. Cool Junior.” Toothpaste containing the toxic solvent was also found in Panama and Australia in the last week.

* * * 

Executives from both companies under investigation in China denied in interviews on Monday that they had exported any toothpaste containing diethylene glycol to Panama. “We didn’t do this; we didn’t make the bad stuff,” said Shi Lei, a manager at Danyang City Success. “It was probably someone else.” But Ms. Shi and other toothpaste makers in this region said that diethylene glycol had been used in toothpaste in China for years and that producers believed it was not very harmful.

Upon reflection, maybe it’s not that great an idea to buy huge quantities of goods from a culture that doesn’t have a lot of regard for the well-being of the individual.

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From Joystiq: Boxer Albert Liaw was in a wheelchair after an in-the-ring brain injury.  In less than 5 months, he was back on his feet after using Wii Sports as part of his therapy. 

Nintendo’s going to sell the heck out of the Wii, but in many cases, they’re not going to sell any games beyond the pack-in.  Until they make Wii Sports 2.

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A Canadian High School senior has been shown “An Inconvenient Truth” in class four times during the school year. Including Gym class. Apparently the shared brain of the education industry has concluded this is An Important Issue.

However, the oversell in the film (the cover of the DVD shows a hurricane coming from a smokestack) is starting to emerge:

About An Inconvenient Truth’s connection of rising hurricane activity to global warming — something refuted by storm experts — Mr. Hansen said, “We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is.”

Among other things, since the film’s release last year, scientists have rejected Mr. Gore’s claims that 2005 was the warmest year on record (temperatures have been receding since 1998), that polar bears are heading for extinction (their numbers are growing), that Antarctica is warming (interior temperature readings show cooling) and that sea levels will “rise 18 to 20 feet,” swamping coastal cities (the International Panel on Climate Change predicts a few inches).

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Which is ironic, because it’s set at work.

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By the way, NSFW means “not safe for work.” Probably not safe for grandmothers either.

From Powerline: The intriguing theory that Scooter Libby’s downfall was the result of score-settling by Washington insiders.

Comey, when asked for names of his adversaries in the OVP, mentioned his disagreements with VP Dick Cheney and Cheney’s Legal Counsel, David Addington. Curiously, Comey failed to mention Scooter Libby–Cheney’s Chief of Staff, a prominent attorney in his own right, and a leading architect of policy at the OVP–even though it is known that Libby was also involved in these matters. It is scarcely credible to suppose that Comey had no dealings with Libby, nor that they were in disagreement over the NSA program. Perhaps Comey avoided mention of Libby because he wished to avoid the appearance of personal animus. After all, it is well known that Libby had beaten Comey in a contentious case in the Southern District of New York a few years earlier, and one of Comey’s first acts as DAG–before the NSA program came up for recertification–was to talk Ashcroft into recusing himself from the Plame affair. Comey then proceeded to appoint his former SDNY pal Patrick Fitzgerald to go after Libby, even expanding Fitzgerald’s purview to “process violations,” even though Comey knew that Armitage was the “leaker” and that the supposed “leak” violated no known law.

Thought one: What a poisonous environment. Thought two:  GW Bush will likely go down in history for his embarassingly poor personnel decisions.

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There’s a special kind of stupid that only the very highly educated can produce.

Wireless DVD-player headphones from a Nissan will work in a Honda and vice-versa.

For no particular reason, I consider “geek” to be a more insulting term than “nerd.”

If you download a game onto your cell phone, it can’t be transferred to your next cell phone.

The words “global warming” and “hoax” are going to appear together in a lot of future sentences. There’s no way reality can live up to the predictions.

I don’t care for Scotch whiskey.

It’s amazing how much of television news programming is nothing more than the merchandization of human suffering.

The first half of a non-fiction book is often better than the second half.

Chili is good with mustard. Chili is good with sour cream. Chili is not good with both.

The easiest way to shut a child up is to put him on the phone and ask him to talk to a relative.

Noting the 50th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the most scathing critique of socialism I’ve ever read.

But for many readers, Atlas is even more: it’s life-changing. Fifty years after its publication, how can a novel still exert this powerful an effect? Because in its pages Ayn Rand forces you to look at the world anew.

To give a taste of its radicalness, consider that today it’s bromidic that the person of virtue is akin to Mother Teresa; he selflessly lives to serve others and demands that you do the same. Likewise, the person of vice is selfish; he pursues his own interests and demands that his actions bring him a profit. Whenever a television show or movie needs a stock villain, one whose evil motivation will require no setup, you can be sure a businessman erecting an office building on a patch of green land or a corporation testing an experimental drug will be penciled in. Simply to point out that they are pursuing profit is sufficient to damn them. More murders on television are committed by businessmen than by mobsters and gang members.

It’s important to note that even if the book’s praiseworthy, everyone’s allowed to skim the astoundingly overwritten “A is A” speech.

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File under obvious: Ricky Williams would rather smoke pot than play pro football. 

Former NFL [and UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS] rushing champion Ricky Williams tested positive again for marijuana last month, which will delay his return to the league until at least September, a person familiar with the case said Friday.

Williams sought to end a one-year drug suspension last month when he asked to rejoin the Miami Dolphins. But following the positive drug test, clinicians in the NFL’s substance abuse program advised commissioner Roger Goodell to delay reinstatement, the person close to the case said.

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