Snoopy Dance
A crazy productive week “in real life”, culminating in checking a major item off my to-do list but very little weblogging. Still, I think we should all celebrate by stopping by the Snoopydance page. Doo do do doo do do dooo dooo….
Month: April 2003
TNN Goes Macho
I was sent this today under the cover “I’m ashamed to be a guy”, and I’m still not 100% convinced that it’s real, even though it is at CNN.com: TNN changing its name to Spike. They want to appeal to male viewers more, drawing off their lineup of WWE, Star Trek: TNG and “Slamball” and their 66% male audience. When did Spike become “a guy’s name” anyway? My association is with the Buffy villain, and while I love that character, I’m not sure he’s the image of manhood for the WWE and Slamball. What makes me find this particularly sad, … Continue reading TNN Goes Macho
16 Fun Links
I amused a friend of mine today with periodic e-mails of weird and wonderfulness on the web. Now y’all can enjoy too! Here’s some happy silliness to start your day off right: Cats in Hats Whee – very cool scrap metal sculptures of science fiction robot and alien favorites. [via Boing Boing] If you’ve got Flash installed, go check out this Honda ad of an amazing “Rube Goldberg” machine.[via Dave Barry’s Blog] I was pleased that I could place all but a handful of the countries on this map of the Middle East within off-by-one or two of their true … Continue reading 16 Fun Links
Why We Didn’t Unionize Revisited
A couple of months ago Vicky from U.S. News and World Report called me up, and I nearly hung up on her, having no interest in subscribing and a general loathing of telemarkers. Good thing I was sleepy and slow on the receiver – with their annual Graduate School Rankings issue came a renewed interest in Cornell grad students’ choice not to form a union last year. The first two paragraphs of the article are online, or you can stop by your local newsstand, flip to p. 66 of America’s Best Graduate Schools 2004 and check out their presentation of … Continue reading Why We Didn’t Unionize Revisited
Cannibalism Gene
Because the news just hasn’t been disturbing enough in the past month, the New York Times lets us know Gene Study Finds Cannibal Pattern in humans. If you read the article, it seems that the study actually finds that people have genes which protect them from diseases spread through cannibalism, and the end of the article concedes that this could be explained by eating habits other than cannibalism in pre-historic humans. But it’s always good to get that Friday-morning skin-crawl in….
Highbrow Weblogs
Well, it’s good to see that someone’s working to give weblogs stature and intellectual respectability. Clearly, what the weblog community was missing was bloggers from Ivy League schools. Yup.
Noooooo! J-Lo!
A discussion of what good movies were supposed to be coming out this year led to short-term excitement that a new Kevin Smith movie should be released until an IMDB search revealed that the new Kevin Smith movie is a J-Lo movie, promptly negating all enthusiasm for it. It’s just wrong.
Spring
I took some pictures for Photo Friday of “spring” yesterday, but I hadn’t gotten around to uploading them yet when I got a chance to take a whole different set of spring photos today, visiting the same locations. Here’s a before-and-after shot of one of my runner-up photos.
Local Pranks Only, Please
Drunken prank call tip: restrict calls to your local area, as your inebriated state will probably prevent you from correctly converting west-coast time to east-coast, and particularly avoid the Daylight Saving switch as you’ll surely miscalculate that 11:30 your time is 3:30 at the house of your friend. Who, by the way, isn’t necessarily the person who will answer the phone. You’ll probably end up speaking to somebody who neither knows or nor cares whether your friend borrowed your vibrator.
Pittsburgh Branding
My hometown’s at it again. Pittsburgh has spent the past couple of years in a serious self-promotion drive, and their latest effort involved training taxi drivers as ambassadors for the city, encouraging quality service through a reward system.[via JRE] I’d be seriously disturbed if my taxi driver started playing the clarinet when the traffic got bad. At least it’s better than their $200,000 effort to develop a “Pittsburgh brand” – a major flop, generating a 45 word statement whose only use is fuel for mocking, such as in the Pittsburgh Branding Phrase Generator Tool, provided by the Pittsburgh-centric weblog YinzerMullet. … Continue reading Pittsburgh Branding