Posts from — September 2006

Radar has a good interview with John Hodgman

I like the word sesquipedalian because simply using it makes you one. I can’t think of many other words that have that property.

Keith Olbermann’s tirades are a lot of fun to watch, even if you don’t agree with everything he says (the latest).

Clinton’s interview on Fox News is getting a lot play, though only the “angry” snippets, it seems. I’d recommend watching the whole thing, it’s fairly interesting. If you haven’t seen the documentary “OutFoxed”, I’d recommend it. It’s about bias in fox news, and has a lot of good examples of subtle (and not subtle uses of language). One device that they use is to make it sound like “the people” are asking questions or hold certain opinions. To be fair, they aren’t the only ones to do it, but I’ve noticed it more in their coverage than others.

Anyway, check out how interviewer Chris Wallace asks the 9/11 question:
“When we announced that you were going to be on “Fox News Sunday,” I got a lot of e-mail from viewers. And I’ve got to say, I was surprised. Most of them wanted me to ask you this question: Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when you were president?

There’s a new book out, I suspect you’ve already read, called “The Looming Tower.” And it talks about how the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, bin Laden said, “I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of U.S. troops.” Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the Cole.”

He later goes on to push the responsibility for the question back onto “the viewers” as well. That was the only question he asked in such a roundabout way.
transcript

“80% of Pennsylvanians now want a wall on the border.”
- Pat Buchanan on Real Time with Bill Maher

I wonder if he was talking about the PA/NJ border…

I realized tonight that the three things I’ve been watching over the last few days are thematically similar: The Wire (HBO crime drama, season 1.. it’s really good), The Office (british version) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (but Mr. Potter!). They’re all about individuals being crushed in some way by the organizations to which they belong.

OK, maybe that’s not so interesting, but I thought it was an odd collection of shows to share something so central.

TANGENT
I’m trying to expand my collection of standup comedy recordings, if you have any recommendations, please let me know. I’ve got a bunch already (almost 4GB), I’ll write about it later.

TANGENT
I saw the first episode Dane Cook’s HBO special over the summer, and it was just terrible. I’m not going to go on a rant about the quality of his material in general, but the show was really bad. Since they performed about the same act at each stop on the tour, the material on each episode was pretty light, so most of the 30 minutes was showing the comedians interacting with each other while on tour but not onstage. It turns out my friends are generally funnier than them. Then again, my friends don’t have as many obviously-staged hijinks. More hijinks are needed.

This new statue of Nikola Tesla is pretty awesome:

He’s standing atop an AC motor! More info here

Having seen a season of the British version and all of the American one, I really agree with this analysis from an article in Slate:

“To the outrage of many of my British friends, I find the American version superior to its British relative. It’s not that I don’t like the U.K. Office, I just don’t like it as much. It doesn’t reflect the reality of any U.S. workplace I know. The sexism is too blatant and the inside jokes are often too, well, inside. (The DVD of the British series decodes many of these allusions: “Charlie Dimmock,” in case you didn’t know, is the hostess of a BBC garden show; the chant “Oggie, Oggie, Oggie, Oi, Oi, Oi!” has to do with Cornish tin miners or West Country rugby teams, depending on whom you ask.)

But, more subtly, the base-line mood of David Brent’s workplace—resignation mingled with self-loathing—is unrecognizably alien to our (well, my) sensibility. In the American office, passivity mingles with rueful hopefulness: An American always believes there’s something to look forward to. A Brit does not, and finds humor in that hopelessness.”

From here:

These two images look fairly reasonable, similar but not identical:

But when you rotate them 180 degrees, the differences become quite clear.

A creepy illustration of human facial recognition.

I need to decide upon an email address @google.com. I used ‘mrcasey’ over the summer (just like my gmail), but it bothers me that it looks like mister casey, and people interpret it as such. I know matt@google is taken, as is casey@google. Here are some ideas, please reply if you have some:
m@google.com
I like this because it can be read “matt google dot com”, which will doubtlessly confuse people. Sorta seems like Rob Pike‘s email, which is r@google.com, which again might make my address seem a bit presumptuous. Having a short username will be easy to type when logging in and stuff, though.
mrc@google.com
I guess people could interpret this as “Mr. C”, but I think that seems less likely.
mkc@google.com
Seems difficult to differentiate from “mcasey” when giving someone the address verbally.
mcasey@google.com
Converse problem.
mattcasey@google.com
Easy to express and remember. Sorta a long username, so it takes longer to type in, though.

Any ideas? Suggestions?