TEN JACK TEN

Never rule out the possibility that you’re entirely full of crap.

Whether a movie has won an Academy Award has no correlation to the question of whether I’d want to watch it.

Kids refuse to believe that being a grownup sucks most of the time.

There are no authors right now whose books I will automatically buy in hardback.

No good has ever come from the “deconstruction” of anything. The word is essentially a synonym for “bullshit.”

Children are mimics. They learn by observing and imitating others, especially parents. That’s why good examples are important.

Nobody successful has ever said “I owe it all to smoking pot.”

Spammers are a lot more concerned about the size of my penis than I am.

Even if you aren’t a true believer, it’s hard to argue that the Ten Commandments are bad ideas.

The government’s inability to handle passport applications in a timely manner has severely diminished its credibility.

After being emphatically informed by an Ikea employee last Friday that the parts I wanted were not in stock and would not be in stock for at least two weeks, I went to the store on Wednesday to return some parts. While I was there, I asked the clerk to look up the shelf extensions.

There were 17 in stock.

But they were out of the extra shelf I wanted to get while I was there, guaranteeing yet another return trip.

Screw Ikea. And phooey on their cheap meatballs.

You can have your way or you can have me like it, but you’re not getting both.

When a performer commits suicide, it diminishes my future enjoyment of their work.

Jack Black’s acting range is limited to one character: Jack Black.

Sony hasn’t learned a damn thing from its failed proprietary formats Betamax, MiniDisc, UMD, Memory Stick, DAT, Atrac, and SA-CD.

One of the reasons I procrastinate doing creative things is because I think that I need to do them perfectly or not at all. I know it’s stupid, yet I keep doing it.

If governments didn’t have the ability to make a few people wealthy at the expense of everyone else, they’d be less corrupt.

One of the defining characteristics of modern liberalism is a desire to remake the world to suit their vision of what it should be. If people need to be forcibly compelled to conform to this vision, so be it.

Complete elimination of passive voice from writing is silly. Sometimes the object of the action is more important than the actor, and sometimes you don’t want to come right out and call someone stupid.

The worst part of call-in talk radio shows is the callers.

Save receipts.

I walked out to get the paper, turned around, and saw a squirrel on my roof. Our eyes met. I knew he was the one who was messing around in my attic. He knew there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to him while he was up on the roof. Oh, the insolence.

The staredown ended with a bluejay chasing him off the roof. For a brief moment, justice was served.

Slate discusses what makes an effective anti-drug campaign:

Of all the legitimate fears that gnaw at the average marijuana user, two of the more troubling are 1) the fear that nonsmoker friends, or lovers, might find them tiresome and pathetic, and 2) the fear that they might be growing dependent on the drug. This campaign effectively picks at both of these insecurities. Just as important (when it comes to reaching too-cool teens), it does so in a low-key, unembellished manner.

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Also in Slate, why Nifong’s disbarment is an isolated incident rather than a trend:

Prosecutors almost never face public censure or disbarment for their actions. In fact, it took a perfect storm of powerful defendants, a rapt public, and demonstrable factual innocence to produce the outcome that ended Mr. Nifong’s career. And because only a handful of prosecutors will ever face the sort of adversaries Nifong did or come close to the sort of scrutiny the former DA endured, the Duke fiasco will make little difference in how criminal law is practiced in courthouses around the country. Regardless of Nifong’s sanction, the drama leaves prosecutorial misconduct commonplace, unseen, uncorrected, and unpunished.

Sadly, I tend to agree with this perspective.  It’s satisfying to see someone who clearly abused his authority made to answer for his excess, but in the rest of the nation it’s still only technically possible to oppose a prosecutor’s dirty tactics and win.

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This is too good not to swipe in its entirety.  This is comment 19 following MS Xbox Products VP Todd Holmdahl’s completely useless interview with Dean Takahashi on the Mercury News website:

Jeremy Anderson Says:
June 16th, 2007 at 11:41 pm

I bought the 360 at launch. That one died in May of ‘06 and was promptly replaced. The replacement died 10/15/06. Microsoft sent me a refurb that arrived on Halloween and was instantly killed by the Fall update’s faulty installation code (as admitted to on Gamerscoreblog.com - a site run by Microsoft employees). Two weeks later, another refurb arrived - this time dead out of the box. At this point, I bought a Core system from Circuit City because I had gone over a month with no system and wanted to play Gears Of War.

Microsoft lost the DOA unit I returned. After countless hours on the phone, they still refused to act so I contacted Larry Hyrb (aka Major Nelson) and explained my story, asking for his assistance. This resulted in an e-mail from Microsoft asking me to send in my dead system, which I explained that I had already done a month before. I did not receive a replacement until January 15, 2007 - almost three months to the day after my first refurb died. During that time, the Core system I had purchased red-ringed on me and was promptly replaced by Circuit City on 12/23/06. When I complained about 8 weeks of my Live account going to waste from them sending me broken units, they offered me a free year of Xbox Live.

The day after this statement was made, they charged my credit card for a year anyway. When I called to ask for a refund, they cancelled my Live account altogether. After two hour long calls asking where my free year went, they told me I would have to pay for a year again while the refunds were being processed. I did eventually receive two credits to my card, so eventually they did give me that free year. They then charged my credit card for Microsoft Points without actually giving them to me, requiring two more hours of phone calls, plus faxing my driver’s license and credit card to them on the letterhead of the law firm where I work. To their credit, after the 01/15/07 console arrived, I did receive a call from Microsoft HQ asking if I was satisfied, and when I explained everything that had happened, they sent me a free copy of Viva Pinata.

The system they sent me on 01/15/07 died on 05/23/07. I waited for the box, sent it in and received a refurb on 06/08/07. That refurb had a disc tray that wouldn’t open and the system would randomly reboot itself for no reason. I received yet another box from MS and just sent the refurb back to them on 06/14/07.

If you’re doing the math, the next refurb I receive from Microsoft will be system number 9 since launch (if you count the second Core system, which I kept as a backup). Seriously. NINE. I wish I was kidding about that number, but I have a closet full of Microsoft boxes and 5 white faceplates to prove it (because they tell you to remove them before you send the dead system in).

Since launch, I have made over 50 phone calls to Microsoft support, each averaging about an hour. During these calls:
- I was lied to about getting a free year of Live and had to talk to two supervisors to get what they had promised me.
- I was lied to multiple times about a return box being sent to my house when none was scheduled to.
- I had to pay for my own shipping and packaging twice.
- I was told that I had to ship it myself, and then received an empty box from Microsoft the day after my Halloween ‘06 refurb arrived.
- I had a supervisor tell me my case was being escalated to Microsoft HQ so I would receive a NEW console instead of a refurb - only to be told weeks later by another supervisor that this was not true.
- I had another supervisor tell me that a new-in-box console had already been shipped to my house and to call back 24 hours later for a tracking number, only to be told the following day by a supervisor named Shaun that “that supervisor lied to you, probably just to get off the phone with you.”

The point of my story is this: I love the 360. I like the games, I like the integration and ease of Xbox Live, and the 360 controller is probably the most comfortable game controller I’ve used in my 33 years. But if someone like me, who works in IT and treats their electronic equipment exceedingly well, can’t keep a 360 running, there is a serious issue with the system’s reliability. And after my 8th system since launch was dead on arrival, you would think that Microsoft would just send me a new one already… or at the very least, a refurb that they had adequately tested.

Let’s hope that system number 9 arrives soon. Personally, I’m hoping that they send me one that has the new heatpipe they’ve added to the GPU heatsink that has been reported by countless gaming news outlets (and was responded to with the same amount of stonewalling and doublespeak that Dean experienced here). If not, I’ll no doubt be on number 10 before too long… and that’s simply inexcusable.

LINK

The New York Post compares the comic-book movies from Marvel and DC:

This battle’s got everything that make comics worth reading: slugfests, superpowers (if you count making the Z-list “Ghost Rider” into a hit a superpower) and above all, high stakes. While the top-selling comic book only moves around 100,000 copies, a blockbuster movie can pull in a billion bucks.

And currently in this epic throwdown, Marvel is winning. Mightily. It’s like Hulk beating up on Krypto the Wonder Dog.

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From Powerline:  William Katz writes about his time working for Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

“Tonight” had a reputation as an unpleasant, cold place to work. That was accurate. The staff was competitive, and some of its members had personalities even their mothers would reject. Johnny Carson wasn’t particularly cold, but was distant. Staff morale was not his priority.

When people left the show, they found they’d made no friends. And yet, you could find wonderful moments with some of the guests, and in discovering new talent. It was important, however, to watch your back.

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Triumph the Insult Comic Dog at the Tony Awards.  A cornicoupia of gay jokes.

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If you’ve never been to an Ikea store, you’ve missed out on a massive celebration of merchandizing stylish cheap furniture and housewares. As they like to say on their in-store ads, they start with a price point in mind, and design backwards from there.

You can’t shop there without traveling the entire winding path of the store, which runs you upstairs, around the various showroom areas, downstairs through even more sales floor, and finally through the get-it-yourself warehouse shelves. There’s a few shortcuts, but no way around having to go upstairs when all you wanted was to get to the area right before the checkout. The first time through, it’s amazing. The second time through, less so. By the sixth or seventh time around, you start to resent the whole arrangement.

Since we don’t want to move anytime soon, one of our priorities has been to make the most of the space we have in the house. So over the Memorial Day weekend, we got out the tape measure and decided on a shelving project for the living room. Even though Ikea’s stuff is affordable, we were still looking at spending over $800.

So I go to the store, wind my way through the show areas, and start to load the cart. And they have one shelf extension where I needed three. I asked an employee when more were coming, and he told me about a week and a half later.

I called a week and a half later, and the employee tells me they still don’t have any. And they don’t have any on order. And they couldn’t order any for me if they wanted to — it’s an automated process, you see. And even if Ikea’s automated ordering system decided tomorrow that it would be a good idea to have shelf extensions to sell, it would take at least two weeks for them to show up. But, he assures me, at least they’re not discontinued. There’s just no current plans to sell these particular items in the metroplex.

So, I can’t finish these shelves until they say so, after lulling me into spending the better part of a grand with promises of restocking an item they should never have let go out of stock in the first place. And they seem to think this is acceptable.

Ikea doesn’t put more than one store in any given metro area, and they don’t prioritize having parts of their modular systems in stock. I have one a few miles from my house, but what if I’m driving in from 30-40 miles away? They could give a damn. It’s the height of European arrogance to take responsibility for maintaining stock levels away from the store level and then impose a centralized system that doesn’t maintain stock levels. Screw Ikea.

And just in case this can increase this post’s Google ranking: screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea, screw Ikea.

UPDATE:  On 6/19/07, this post was the fourth hit for googling the phrase “screw Ikea.”  I’m petty enough to admit that makes me smile.

When real life demands your time, your internet life must give way.

Reading a bad book makes me want to write a good one.

The last thing I need is to start playing some time-sink of an online RPG game.

People disappointed with the last episode of the Sopranos must have watched the show for all these years without realizing the show was never about a payoff or a dramatic crescendo, it was always a character study.

Reality-show producers are never going to run out of people who are kidding themselves.

Sometimes I buy DVDs for the pleasure of owning them rather than to actually watch them. But I’ll probably get around to that later.

People often confuse tolerance with approval.

People often demand approval when all they’re reasonably entitled to is tolerance.

Every once in a while, there’s a moment where the preoccupations of life fall away and I feel completely at peace with myself and the world. These moments don’t last long, and I treasure them.

Boy 3 was unwavering in his desire to get a “dinosaur movie” for his fourth birthday.

Since one of our (lazy) family birthday traditions is to let the kids spend up to a certain amount of money at the store, we let him pick a movie out. He picked whatever the latest movie is in the “Land Before Time” series (which, if you’re not familiar with them, features a bunch of whiny animated young dinosaurs engaged in low-impact “dino vs. environment” plotlines).

He eagerly sat down to watch his new movie, and I went about my business. Next time I passed through the room, he looked up at me with obvious disappointment.

“It’s not scary.”

Every once in a while, I like to have lunch at an actual restaurant, as opposed to heating something frozen out of a box or getting drive-through food (which I keep promising myself I’ll stop doing).  This time around, it was Applebee’s.

Right as I sit down, the waiter puts a survey and pen down on the table and promises a free appetizer next time if I fill it out.  OK.  Then, after lunch, I get the check and notice the receipt has one of those call-in survey numbers on it, offering $3 off the next meal.  He takes my Amex and only returns the credit card receipt, the original receipt is gone.

I figured as long as I was being surveyed, I might as well do this one, too.  So, I asked the guy for my orignal receipt.  I thought he’d have to dig it out of the trash, but it was right on the counter next to the ordering screen. 

It took me a few beats to figure it out.  This guy was saving receipts and completing the surveys himself. I kind of respected the corporate-BS workaround.

Next Gen takes a shot at predicting current-gen price cuts with an analysis of last-gen price points:

For all the talk of Sony dropping its price, it is Microsoft that appears to have the impending date with destiny. In fact, if Microsoft doesn’t drop its price by the end of July 2007, it will have held the line on its pricing longer than the PlayStation 2 did last generation.

The average price for a console last generation, weighted by volume of sales, was under $200. So the important price appears to be $200, not $300 as some have speculated. The best selling console of the new generation, Nintendo’s Wii, also happens to be the one closest to this price.

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Animated pardoy of NBC Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” as they catch the Predator.

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Hitler gets his Xbox Live account banned.

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Deadbeat Ferrell gets the business from his 2-year-old landlord. The Today show clucking about it is icing on the cake.

It’s funny enough on its own, but if you’re a parent, you know how much time it must have taken to make. Be sure to watch the outtakes video lower on the page.

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In an extremely long post, the editors of The Digital Bits pick a side in the high-definition disc war:

Our readers trust us to give it to them straight, and to help guide them through the confusing home video landscape in such a way that they don’t end up wasting their money. HD-DVD is a great format technically, but its business model is an utter and complete disaster from which it will not recover.

Meanwhile, Blu-ray is just as good technically and quality-wise, it has the support of EVERY HOLLYWOOD STUDIO BUT UNIVERSAL, it has the support of the MAJORITY OF HARDWARE MANUFACTURERS, and nearly the ENTIRE computer industry. There are lots of great titles coming out, many more titles are on the way, there are more models of stand-alone players available and they’re getting cheaper all the time. Blu-ray Disc is by FAR the smarter choice. If you want spend the safe money, there’s your best bet.

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