Random Acts of Blogging
Flag Burning Controversy? Not this time…
Thursday, April 5th, 2007Headline : Three Yale Students Arrested for Burning an American Flag
Political scandal? Excuse for various presidential hopefuls to weigh in with the most opinion poll-tested response to such an incident? Front page news for several days? The subject of continuing coverage on MSCNNOX News?
Not this time. You see, the flag they burned happened to be attached to a house when they burned it:
[Police officers] saw that a flag hanging off of 512 Chapel St. was engulfed in flames, [a spokeswoman] said. While one officer removed the burning flag, the other officer stopped the students, who were further down the street.
According to court reports, the charges against the students initially included two counts of reckless burning, which were later changed to two counts of second degree arson at yesterday’s arraignment.
So this one is too much of a slam-dunk even for the story-starved mainstream media. It doesn’t even help that one of the students was born in Pakistan, the son of a former Afghan governor, and once worked as a translator for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
At least, I should say, it hasn’t helped yet. There’s always tomorrow’s paper…
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Sometimes plagiarism is the best vehicle…
Thursday, March 29th, 2007Would it be really bad if I just stole this idea outright to tell you about my morning commute?
No? Good.
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NY Times: Captain America Shot Dead
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
I know there’s an entire population of adults out there who still buy comic books, and follow the plots like they’re soap operas, but I didn’t realize how…well, pedestrian, these plots have become.
For instance, here’s what the New York Times Book section had to say about the recent murder of Captain America:
Captain America, a Marvel Entertainment superhero, is fatally shot by a sniper in the 25th issue of his eponymous comic, which arrived in stores yesterday. The assassination ends the sentinel of liberty’s fight for right, which began in 1941.
The last episode in Captain America’s life comes after the events of “Civil War,” a seven-issue mini-series that has affected nearly the entire line of Marvel’s library of titles. In “Civil War,” the government began requiring superheroes to register their services, and it outlawed vigilantism after supervillains and superheroes fought during a reality show, accidentally killing hundreds of civilians. The public likened the heroes to weapons of mass destruction that must be controlled.
OK, first of all, seriously? Marvel Comics has adopted the basic plot of The Incredibles? Isn’t this a job for Captain Copyright? Also, note the references to Reality TV and WMD’s, which give it that modern, political feel.
We press on:
The registration act polarized the superhero community. Captain America (whose true identity was Steve Rogers) considered the legislation an erosion of civil liberties; Iron Man, on the other side, believed that training heroes as the military, firefighters or the police are trained would only benefit society. When the factions came to blows and caused more destruction, Captain America chose to fight his battle . . .
With his secret ray gun? By using his Red, White and Blue super-shield like a Chinese Star and cutting his enemies to ribbons? By teaming up with his Super Friends to put the bad guys in a giant net and hurtling them towards the sun? Well, no:
When the factions came to blows and caused more destruction, Captain America chose to fight his battle in court.
But in the current issue of his title, Captain America takes bullets in the shoulder and stomach while on the courthouse steps. The assassin is alleged to be Sharon Carter, an intelligence agent romantically involved with Captain America.
[Emphasis mine]
So this is the state of the modern comic book? The superhero goes to court to defend his civil rights, and dies of a gunshot wound amid protest signs calling him a traitor, a victim of a domestic dispute gone bad?
Doesn’t this sound more like the final episode of Super ACLU-Lawyer? I realize I’ve missed 66 years of back issues, but I can’t believe this is how Captain America has always been portrayed…
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Springing Ahead Before Spring has Sprung
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007The major snowstorm we had this weekend, a week after we set the clocks ahead for Daylight Savings Time, made one of my colleagues realize that we’re no longer “Springing Ahead,” since the clocks now go forward in the middle of March, which is the last two weeks of winter, rather than the first week of spring. So, for those who have been waiting and wondering about a solution to this horribly unacceptable connundrum, I am pleased to announce the offical new Daylight Savings Time cliché:
| Old Cliché: | ||
| New Cliché: | March Ahead, Fall Behind |
That is all…
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Spring Today, Gone Tomorrow…
Thursday, March 15th, 2007Check out the weather forecast for New York City over the next couple of days:
62 degrees and rain today, low 30’s and 4-6 inches of snow tomorrow. I hope the tourists packed their entire wardrobe!
Also, I’m sure this indicates something profound about global warming, global cooling, or global climate change. Exactly what that is, though, I have no idea…
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Game Day EyeBlack
Monday, March 5th, 2007Remember when we were kids and they told us that one day, advertising would be everywhere? Well, they were right.
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Another Cliche Bites the Dust
Friday, January 26th, 2007Another classic quote from work today:
There is no “i” in “team.” But there is a “me.”
Wow…all these years, and I never noticed the “me?” Damn…
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Blogito, Ergo Sum (I Blog, Therefore I Am)
Friday, January 26th, 2007Wil Wheaton: T-Shirt designer.
I gotta admit, this one strikes close to home. Not close enough to buy the shirt or anything, but still, close to home…
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DST2K7 Just Doesn’t Have the Same Ring To It…
Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007Back in August of 2005, President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which sent us off to fight in an unfair war based on dubious evidence. Oh, wait – wrong policy. What the EPA actually did was extend Daylight Savings Time by four weeks, beginning in 2007.
So, this year, for the first time, our clocks will “Spring Ahead” on the second Sunday in March (March 11th), as opposed to the first Sunday in April (April 1st) as has been the case since 1966. Similarly, we will “Fall Back” on the first Sunday in November (November 4th), rather than the old standby – the last Sunday in October (October 28th). If you’re curious (as I’m sure that you’re not), this site tells you everything you’d ever want to know about Daylight Savings Time, including a discussion about spelling and grammar. See, it’s actually Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time, but (and I swear this is a direct quote):
Nevertheless, many people feel the word savings (with an ‘s’) flows more mellifluously off the tongue. Daylight Savings Time is also in common usage, and can be found in dictionaries.
Just about the only thing that site doesn’t talk about is the effect this has on the world’s computer systems. The whole “first Sunday in April through last Sunday in October” rule is baked into most computers, so a small change needs to be made to each one, and then all the programs that run on them need to be tested to make sure this “small change” doesn’t break anything. Kind of like a mass recall for every computer ever made.
Astute observers (read: geeks) will note that this is similar to the infamous Y2K thing, in that any problems that aren’t caught are going to come to light on March 11, 2007 – no extensions, no exceptions. Luckily, though, the implications of the world’s computers being one hour off are relatively minor, whereas having them be 1,000 years off requires the building of underground bunkers, the purchasing of copious amounts of duct tape, and a deep introspection about our society’s dependency on technology. But, I digress…
I bring all of this up because my boss at work is holding a two-day offsite meeting this week, and wants to talk about our plans for Daylight Savings Time testing at the end of the meeting. All of which led to this rather ammusing e-mail in my inbox:
John had requested that we add Daylight Savings Time to our agenda which means that our meeting’s end time on Friday will be extended one hour, from 12:00pm to 1:00pm. Please adjust your schedule accordingly. Thanks.
OK, that was a long way to go for a bit of irony, but it gave me a chuckle…
UPDATE: The meeting ended at 11:00AM. Don’t you hate it when you mess up the time change like that? SO embarrassing… ;-)
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Go Wil, Go!
Monday, January 8th, 2007I’ve been slowly catching up on blogs this past week, since I was away on vacation at the end of December (how dare the blogosphere not stop updating while I’m away? Now I have all this stuff to read…). Anyway, Wil Wheaton’s blog is always entertaining, but over the last couple of weeks, he’s pointed out some pretty cool stuff:
First, we have Gregory Wester, who scaled a security fence at Raleigh-Durham International Airport at 3:30AM one night, and calmly boarded a Delta 737 jet, which was scheduled to take off at 6:35AM. Authorities arrested him on various charges, and after thinking about it for a while, cancelled the flight & booked all the passengers on other planes. Here’s the money quote:
“It blows my mind that you can’t get 3.5 ounces of toothpaste on a plane,” [said Steve Shaw, 27, a passenger on the plane], “yet somebody can sneak on a plane and take a nap.”
Next, we have the Magic Eye website. This kind of thing was hot for a while when I was a kid, and I remember getting quite good at it, although I wasn’t able to see any of the 3-D images on the computer screen. That could be that I’m so out of practice (it must be 25 years since I last tried), or something to do with looking at the image on a screen and not on paper. Probably the former.
On a somewhat related note, Wil linked to a site called The Image Mosaic, which will let you update dozens of your personal photos, and then use them to re-create another photo. I might try this with various pictures of my kids one day, but the site claims it’s down until February. Check it out, though, the samples give you a good idea of what it (claims it) can do.
And then finally, we have Wil’s review of the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’m not sure if I blogged about this before or not, but rather than shunning his iconic early role as Wesley Crusher on ST:TNG, Wil has taken a paying gig at tvsquad.com to occasionally review one of the episodes. They make great reading because a) he’s often brutally honest about what he did and didn’t like about the episode, and b) he reviews it both from the perspective of a Star Trek fan, and also as an actor who was there during shooting. So you get to hear both sides of the story, so to speak. Tvsquad.com has a categorization feature that will let you look at all the ST:TNG reviews if you’re so inclined. I recommend you do…
Anyway, that’s the list of cool stuff I found on Wil’s blog lately. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogosphere…
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