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, is that for a while TNN was my example of a network that knew it had a male audience but used advertising which built off that without being offensive to women. Consider those appalling chick-fight beer ads which supposedly poke fun at stereotypical beer advertisements by framing the objectional content inside a fantasy ad. Contrast them with TNN's ad for Star Trek: TNG in which two TNN employees are talking about the surprising success of their latest ad campaign, while a poster from said supposed campaign featuring a breast-exposing Klingon woman is in the background. The subtext is made explicit as one of the employees asks his friend if he'd "you know...." said Klingon, and the incredulous look on his friend's face, and the more-nerdy-than-not appearances of the two men sells the ad's ironic humor. And without turning off female viewers!
[4.16.03]

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 location on the map, particularly considering the number of name changes since I officially learned geography in school. And it actually was a relatively entertaining way to get a refresher on exactly where everything falls in that part of the world. [via YTBN]
• Geek Origami: Make a Starship Enterprise out of a floppy disk [via YTBN]
• Distributed computing, like the SETI@Home search for extraterrestrial life screensavers, are pretty cool. I just found another cool one under the suprising name "Seventeen or Bust". Yes, that's a "work safe" link, it's a distributed client for solving the Sierpinski Problem.
• How can you resist the cuteness that is a crocheted pegasus or unicorn?
• The Lord of the Peeps: The Fellowship of the Peep
  "Bilbo Baggins! You don't look a day nearer your sell-by date!"
• If this picto-history is accurate, the first video arcade game ever was awfully cute. I'd like one in sparkly hot pink for my living room!
• The collective consciousness tries to draw pictures. Given a grid of black and white squares, select the color of a single pink square to move the image towards the goal description. View the animations of how the grids evolve from initial random states to final "pictures".
• "Secret of UFO Propulsion: Ghosts!" [via Bifurcated Rivets]
  ""The only connection I can find between ghosts and UFOs is that occasionally a UFO case suggests that the craft, although physically present, turned itself invisible." And so, presumably, individual UFO crew members can also turn invisible. "Such invisible ufonauts may occasionally enter a human dwelling and explore it. Naturally, if they accidentally interact with the homeowners then the latter may be convinced that their house is haunted."
• The world's largest natural crystals, over 20 feet long, were found in a cave in Mexico that looks like a real life Fortress of Solitude. [via memepool]
• Take the Simpsons Personality Test; find out you're Marge.
• Rate My Kitten: I dare you not to go "awwwwww" at the screen
• Move the lights, create funky music: "It's SPOOKY!" Maybe someone with a better ear than I can figure out what the relationship between the locations and the sounds are....
• This is possibly the best collection of math and logic puzzles I've ever found, most with accompanying applets to help show or solve the puzzle. This is a "lose days playing with it" type of site.

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 my thoughts (wheee - my name's in the second sentence of the article!). If you are an extremely petty person, you can also notice that this time around the Cornell union organizers were not invited to put their spin on the loss, instead giving space to organizers on other campuses.
[4.11.03]

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....
[4.11.03]

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.
[4.8.03]

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.
[4.8.03]

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.
[4.8.03]

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.
[4.6.03]

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. The existence of a weblog with that name is the best summation of modern Pittsburgh I've seen in a while...
[4.4.03]

I'm not a big poster person, but over the past few days I've come across a couple of items I'm wishing I had for my walls. I'm tempted to find a poster printer for The Computer Tree family tree of computers of the 50's and 60's. [via Larkfarm] And I saw several One Page Book posters in a local bookstore and while I have no need for a poster of the entirety of Macbeth, I still think it's really cool.
[4.3.03]

Kick off your shoes and revel in the pure geeky goodness that is Starship Dimensions. Marvel at how much smaller Cloud City is than the Whale Probe. Find out which buildings are taller than the Mothership in "Close Encounters" and notice that the space shuttle is about the same size and shape as a Romulan science ship. You're encouraged to view the page using IE so that you can enjoy dragging the ships around the page for comparison and cross-genre battle fantasies. [via Anita's LOL]
[4.2.03]

The much-referenced 1996 book Shock & Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance by Ullman and Wade out of the National Defense University is available on-line. I've only had a chance to skim it, but it seems worth a closer look. I find it particularly interesting (beyond the obvious reasons) because it's written as a proposal which remains to be tested and lays out what evaluations remained to be done, and what fundamental changes in military organization and training they believed needed to be made for their strategy to be effective.
[4.1.03]

"Shadows" for Photo Friday [full size]

"Water" for Photo Friday [full size]

"Skin" for Photo Friday [full size]

"Spring" for Photo Friday [full size]

"Just as the steel from which it draws its roots, Pittsburgh has an authenticity and durability that provides a strong foundation, yielding new opportunities to grow and succeed. The amalgamation of our resources draws people together to a place where ideas are invented and transformed." - defining the Pittsburgh Brand

"Glass" for Photo Friday [full size]