Hello World

Short summary: the NY Times has implemented a new function where double-clicking on any word on the site (i.e., not links, just regular text) makes a new window pop up with a helpful definition of the word. This includes such words as "the," "green," and "Spanish." For those of us who semi-compulsively mess around with the text we read, this is a disruptive disaster. Thus the campaign to bring back free clicking. Please consider passing this along to your many friends and encouraging them to do the same, until we bring the paper of record to its east-coast liberal knees.

Cross-posted from my other blog.

No time for a full post, but there's a new development in the Mencia as joke-thief story. The following confrontation is filled, filled, with obscenities and bad editing. Happy Valentimes!

Joe Rogan's description here. [Defamer]

Cross-posted from my other blog.

Scissor Sisters - She's My Man

Some pretty impressive and deeply weird puppetry going on here.

[Table of Malcontents]

Cross-posted from my other blog.

Have you ever taken a horrible stereotype, applied it, and been shamed into realizing the error of your ways? Well let's just say that doesn't happen in this clip:

The saddest part is how for a brief moment it actually appears that the butt of the joke (the owner of the gas station) appreciates the irony--she describes it as a "hick town" and more or less nails the premise (that the guys are baiting the rednecks). But then she calls in the rock-throwing country bumpkins and sets back America's international reputation yet again. It's hard to like anyone in this video, though; if you're going to try to get each other killed, it's no fair wiping off the paint when it looks like you might actually succeed. And honestly, "rubbish"? Are you havin' a laugh? Maybe that kind of language flies in Wee Britain, but in the US of A we call it "trash."

In summary: America = dumb hicks. Britain = mincing pansies.

[Dethroner]

Cross-posted from my other blog.

Tom and Lauren both happened to mention recently how Carlos Mencia is an unfunny, hateful ignoramus (I may be paraphrasing). Tom helpfully pointed me toward links suggesting that his real name is "Ned Holness" and that he's not, in any technical sense of the word, even slightly Mexican. Also, the Fear Factor contingent believes that he steals his material, which is scary because if that's how it sounds when he steals other people's material, imagine how awful his own stuff must be. Anyway, I don't have anything else to say but it's been a while since I chimed in about how Carlos Mencia is just terrible and it's insane that people keep throwing money at him to inflict his unique combination of bigotry and ham-handed "social commentary" on the world.

On the other hand, his Super Bowl commercial (in which he hilariously taught immigrants to say things and their accents were SO FOREIGN!) was his best work in years.

Cross-posted from my other blog.

Anthony Bourdain is hilarious:

BOBBY FLAY: They seem to have noticed Bobby’s strong “negatives” among some viewer responses during focus groups--and decided to respond by subjecting poor Bobby to THROWDOWN; the object of which is to allow every web-fingered geek with a backyard grill--or half-mad muffin maker to proclaim, “I beat Bobby Flay at makin’ barbeque!” at the heart-warming end of show--before returning to tend their meth labs..

...

MARIO!
Oh, Mario! Oh great one! They shut down Molto Mario--only the smartest and best of the stand-up cooking shows. Is there any more egregiously under-used, criminally mishandled, dismissively treated chef on television? Relegated to the circus of Iron Chef America, where--like a great, toothless lion, fouling his cage, he hangs on--and on--a major draw (and often the only reason to watch the show). How I would like to see him unchained, free to make the television shows he’s capable of, the Real Mario--in all his Rabelasian brilliance. How I would love to hear the snapping bones of his cruel FN ringmasters, crunching between his mighty jaws! Let us see the cloven hooves beneath those cheery clogs! Let Mario be Mario!

His thoughts on Flay and many of Food TV's other personalities can be found in his guest post on Michael Ruhlman's blog--link here.

Cross-posted from my other blog.

Short summary:
Female astronaut, Lisa Nowak works with male astronaut, William. Lisa likes William but is too shy to tell him. Lisa finds out William has a girlfriend, Colleen Shipman, in Florida. Lisa decides to drive from Houston to Orlando to confront him about it. And then, well, short declarative sentences won't suffice for this part:

When she found out that Shipman was flying to Orlando from Houston, Nowak decided to confront her, according to the arrest affidavit. Nowak raced from Houston to Orlando wearing diapers so she wouldn't have to stop to urinate, authorities said.

Astronauts wear diapers during launch and re-entry.

Dressed in a wig and a trench coat, Nowak boarded an airport bus that Shipman took to her car in an airport parking lot. Shipman told police she noticed someone following her, hurried inside the car and locked the doors, according to the arrest affidavit.

Nowak rapped on the window, tried to open the car door and asked for a ride. Shipman refused but rolled down the car window a few inches when Nowak started crying. Nowak then sprayed a chemical into Shipman's car, the affidavit said.

Shipman drove to the parking lot booth, and the police were called.

During a check of the parking lot, an officer followed Nowak and watched her throw away a bag containing the wig and BB gun. They also found a steel mallet, a 4-inch folding knife, rubber tubing, $600 and garbage bags inside a bag Nowak was carrying when she was arrested, authorities said.

Inside Nowak's vehicle, which was parked at a nearby motel, authorities uncovered a pepper spray package, an unused BB-gun cartridge, latex gloves and e-mails between Shipman and Oefelein. They also found a letter "that indicated how much Mrs. Nowak loved Mr. Oefelein," an opened package for a buck knife, Shipman's home address and hand written directions to the address, the arrest affidavit said.

In the understatement of the century, a spokesperson for the police department said "If you were just going to talk to someone, I don't know that you would need a wig, a trench coat, an air cartridge BB gun and pepper spray."

In case you're wondering, my favorite part of the story is "Astronauts wear diapers during launch and re-entry."

[Washington Post]

Cross-posted from my other blog.

"No you will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation -- the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet -- for global warming," Hardiman wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board. The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is "one of the signs" of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day.

Was there anything in that last sentence that surprised you? Me neither.

[Washington Post]

Cross-posted from my other blog.

First, I scored some tickets to go see Robin Williams do standup on Thursday night (information here). For the sake of me having a good time, I really hope he's back off the wagon.

Second, I discovered my new desktop background. Perfect for widescreens! [kottke, who also linked to this insane video documenting how even the Food Network is evil]

So...

A highly superior being from another part of the galaxy presents you with two boxes, one open and one closed. In the open box there is a thousand-dollar bill. In the closed box there is either one million dollars or there is nothing. You are to choose between taking both boxes or taking the closed box only. But there's a catch.

The being claims that he is able to predict what any human being will decide to do. If he predicted you would take only the closed box, then he placed a million dollars in it. But if he predicted you would take both boxes, he left the closed box empty. Furthermore, he has run this experiment with 999 people before, and has been right every time.

What do you do?

On the one hand, the evidence is fairly obvious that if you choose to take only the closed box you will get one million dollars, whereas if you take both boxes you get only a measly thousand. You'd be stupid to take both boxes.

On the other hand, at the time you make your decision, the closed box already is empty or else contains a million dollars. Either way, if you take both boxes you get a thousand dollars more than if you take the closed box only.

Well, without reading the analysis, I'd go ahead and take the closed box. A thousand bucks is nice and all, but I'd rather just take the inexplicably-strong odds of getting the million the safe way.

Thanks, Boing Boing.

^* I mean thursday, obviously. It's been a long day!

My dear friend Molly posted this video today and, well, it's amazing.



Word on the street is a sequel, entitled Blazin Hazen. Or maybe this is the sequel. I don't know. It's all a mess. A beautiful mess.

Just go Ms. Dewey and search for "blockbuster video." Isn't that a charming rant? I'm not even sure what she means, but I don't think she's a big fan of P. Diddy. Another fun search is "how to hold hands," which, well, betrays a fundamental confusion about Texas Hold 'Em (i.e. that you have to deal all the cards before determining a winner). I also enjoyed "how to catch alligators." Anyway, this strange and choppy site has been brought to you by Microsoft.

Try your own searches and let me know if you come up with anything cool.

Well not trivia exactly, but another riddle found on the internet:

Kottke posted a riddle he found at 3 Quarks Daily:

You are given two ropes and a lighter. This is the only equipment you can use. You are told that each of the two ropes has the following property: if you light one end of the rope, it will take exactly one hour to burn all the way to the other end. But it doesn't have to burn at a uniform rate. In other words, half the rope may burn in the first five minutes, and then the other half would take 55 minutes. The rate at which the two ropes burn is not necessarily the same, so the second rope will also take an hour to burn from one end to the other, but may do it at some varying rate, which is not necessarily the same as the one for the first rope. Now you are asked to measure a period of 45 minutes. How will you do it?

Well guys, I've only spent a couple of minutes on this one but I certainly haven't managed to figure it out yet. I mean, I have no idea. 3 Quarks Daily is going to post the answer to this (and 13 other riddles that were posted with it, most of which I think I know the answer to) sometime next week, but I can't wait that long. What's the answer?

Obviously, somebody may put the answer in the comments below, so be judicious in looking if you want to try to figure it out on your own.

Edit: the answer (and a hilarious fight about the answer) can be found in the comments.

O.J. Simpson Book, TV Special Canceled
NEW YORK -- After a firestorm of criticism, News. Corp. said Monday that it has canceled the O.J. Simpson book and television special "If I Did It."

It's rare that, mere days after a daring (well, okay, not so daring--it seemed like a foregone conclusion before it happened) prediction, I get to say that I called it.

"I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project," said Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. chairman. "We are sorry for any pain that his has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson."

A dozen Fox affiliates had already said they would not air the two-part sweeps month special, planned for next week before the Nov. 30 publication of the book by ReganBooks. The publishing house is a HarperCollins imprint owned--like the Fox network--by News Corp.

Justice has been served. A little. I mean, he's still a free man and everything... but it's still nice to see that global megaoutrage is still powerful enough to get horrifying television off the airwaves. Next: Carlos Mencia.

A guy in *.co.uk does some amazing things with sheets of paper. The remarkable thing is not merely the precision and ingenuity of the cuts but the fact that, as far as I can tell, it's all still attached. It's hard to explain, so you're better off just checking it all out here.

Bo Jackson dominated Tecmo Bowl (a classic 1998 1988 Nintendo Entertainment System football game). Everyone who knows too much about video games knows that. But there's knowing something and then there's knowing something:

This clip is from Tecmo Super Bowl, the 1991 successor to Tecmo Bowl.

[Kissing Suzy Kolber]

• A fascinating and in-depth look at how to design a book interior.


• A wrong-minded column that purports to describe the problems with Wikipedia. Column summary: in the minutes after Ken Lay's death, some people wrote inaccurate/biased things in his Wikipedia entry. Over the next several hours those inaccurate/biased things were filtered out and by the afternoon of the day he died the entry was accurate. The column says that the fact that people can write things that are wrong in the posts is an enormous weakness. It doesn't mention the fact that the thousands of contributors to Wikipedia ensured that less than a day after Lay's death, his entry was up-to-the-minute accurate; that the very fault the writer finds in Wikipedia--the faceless masses with the ability to make corrections to every entry--is the reason Wikipedia is reliable. And of course the columnist neglects to mention that anyone concerned about the accuracy of an entry can easily browse every single change made to it and the citations to justify them. Just a generally bizarre column, overall, which in my opinion is a better polemic for Wikipedia than against it.

  Some examples of how misguided this column is: Mathew Ingram's perspective, Open Culture, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post.

  It's true, though, that Wikipedia's value as a source of news information is limited. It's neat that this year's World Cup entry already lists Italy as the winner, but the presence of entries for contemporaneous people and events does make more glaring the short-lived but irritating "corrections" that are rightfully maligned in the column.


• I saw Pirates of the Caribbean over the weekend. I enjoyed it but it wasn't particularly good. Certainly not $132,000,000 good. Depp's Captain Jack was just a tired retread of the role in the first one, in my opinion--a caricature of a caricature going through the expected motions--and aside from the truly excellent bad guy and his minions I didn't really have any interest in the other characters. The effects and action stuff were generally fun, though, and if you can manage to see it at a drive-in theater I can assure you of an entertaining evening (if you aren't unlucky enough to park next to a van stuffed to the gills with pre-teens on cellphones).

In other news, if you want to talk to me you should add me to your google talk list--calamityjake at gmail.com.

Another side of the Consider the Lobster colloquy:

Beyond the fact that our current hand-wringing foreshadows an America that increasingly regulates how we live our lives (with a government attempting, via warfare, to regulate how other countries run their lives), which is scary enough, the more insidious danger to me is that we think clams and ducks and lobsters are people too. They’re not. But the flip side to this is that, in a way, we’re not all that far off when we believe such things. This is the height of human arrogance, to think that we’re somehow above the animal kingdom. We have one trait beyond our handy opposable thumb: we know we're conscious. Ducks are conscious, yes but do they know it? No. Perhaps some very advanced French duck is right now fitting a Gauloise into its cork-tipped filter and adjusting its existentialist beret, but not in America. They’re animals.

To read the rest of this delicious post (harvested humanely), click here.

Here's a Washington Post profile of Johnny Monis, the chef/owner/etc. of Komi. Someone clued me into this place a couple of years ago and soon thereafter I had an amazing, decadent, exorbitantly expensive evening there. The food was great, the wine was great, and everything else was great, too. The restaurant is comfortable but cozy (seating fewer than 30 people), and the service was excellent--Monis came over to tell the table about the selections we'd made for the cheese plate that capped our meal. The cheese plate, by the way, was incredible. Anyway, I think I've made my point here. The restaurant is my favorite in DC, because every aspect of a night there is predicated on non-pretentious substance.

Monis has no illusions about what he does. "Food isn't about art; it's about taking care of people," he says, even though he stays pretty much out of the dining room. He shows his caring by overseeing every plate, but in order to do so, he does not serve tables of more than four diners. "There are only three of us in the kitchen, and there is no heat lamp," he states. "By the time a fifth plate would be ready, the others would be ruined." He does not participate in events that take him away from Komi. The one day he was sick, he closed the restaurant.

Monis may be a little crazy in his devotion to the restaurant, but it's to the lucky customers' benefit. I've eaten there only a couple of times (it may be the best restaurant in DC, but it's not exactly the cheapest), sadly. Next time I'm back in town I'll have to sucker somebody into taking me out for a prix fixe dinner.

I'm sure at least a few of you will have already seen this, but for the sake of those who haven't I will refrain from describing this at all and simply encourage you to click on this ASAP, because this is hilarious. Although I should point out that this is not in particularly good taste and could offend some people. But, personally, I thought this was the funniest thing I've read in quite a while.

My eternal thanks to Catherine for this link!