popplers

Not on a bet, Part II.

You couldn't pay me enough to go out shopping on the day after Thanksgiving. I'm not a shopper. I don't like crowds. I don't like to get up early. And I especially don't like being trampled and knocked unconscious by rabid consumers. The quote from the Wal-Mart spokesdroid is particularly egregious: "We are very disappointed this happened," Burk said. "We want her to come back as a shopper." Sheesh.

Update (2003-12-09): the plot thickens. The woman who was trampled was a former Wal-Mart employee and has filed over a dozen lawsuits in the past. Is this a scam? Was she really injured? Will anyone who isn't a lawyer get any money out of this?

You go, girlfriend!

80-year-old woman defends her home from burglars, states: "I have still got my sword and I am ready to use it if anyone else should have a go." (Via Warren Ellis.)

Whistlin' Dixie…

Insert punchline here.

A bullet fired in the air during a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony came down and struck a participant in the head, critically injuring him, authorities said. […]

Addiction.

So, Jenn is addicted to Astraware's Text Twist. I downloaded it and installed it, and I like it a lot. But it bugs me that there are many real words that the dictionary doesn't recognize.

I'm addicted to JumbleTime.com: word games for Scrabble players. I had tried it out a while ago, but hadn't been playing it much lately. ESPN recently re-aired the 2003 Scrabble All-Star Competition, and one of the competitors said that she uses JumbleTime.com to study the word lists. So, I logged in again, and now I'm hooked. I'm trying to learn some new 4s and 5s before I head back to the Lexington Scrabble Club…

I say.

This sort of thing is precisely why I never invite George Bush over to my house.

Penguin Lust.

Opus is back! Go buy a newspaper! Don't delay! Also, Salon interviews Berke Breathed (free, but you have to sit through a commercial):

>What are the advantages of a Sunday-only strip?

In my case, having a life. Ever see a seven-day-a-week cartoonist?

They all look like Keith Richards at 5 a.m. I've said that cartooning, like education and sex, is wasted on the young ... but I understand why it's that way. It's wearing, corrosive, killing work. Consider Charles Schulz. Look where he is today.

Simpsons did it! Simpsons did it!

Alert channel-surfer chrism pointed out (weeks ago) that Ian McKellen is going to be on The Simpsons, along with J.K. Rowling. The episode, titled "The Regina Monologues" airs this Sunday at 8 p.m. Woo-hoo!

Don't Panic!

The Toque answers that all-consuming question: What Should I Do If The Internet Goes Down?

No one knows when the Internet will fail. It could happen at any time, leaving you bereft of your e-mail, your sports scores, and your Blogs. Therefore, it's important that you and your family have a contingency plan for just such an emergency. If your connection to Cyberspace were to ever get severed, you should at least be prepared. We have included a few key points that should assist you if that were to happen. […]

We hold these truths to be self-evident…

Three cheers for the eloquent and sensible Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall (excerpts here). The State Supreme Court finally rules that same-sex couples have the legal right to marry!

[…] We are mindful that our decision marks a change in the history of our marriage law. Many people hold deep-seated religious, moral, and ethical convictions that marriage should be limited to the union of one man and one woman, and that homosexual conduct is immoral. Many hold equally strong religious, moral, and ethical convictions that same-sex couples are entitled to be married, and that homosexual persons should be treated no differently than their heterosexual neighbors. Neither view answers the question before us. Our concern is with the Massachusetts Constitution as a charter of governance for every person properly within its reach.

The individual liberty and equality safeguards of the Massachusetts Constitution protect both ''freedom from'' unwarranted government intrusion into protected spheres of life and ''freedom to'' partake in benefits created by the State for the common good. . . . Both freedoms are involved here. Whether and whom to marry, how to express sexual intimacy, and whether and how to establish a family -- these are among the most basic of every individual's liberty and due process rights. . . . And central to personal freedom and security is the assurance that the laws will apply equally to persons in similar situations. […]

Get Fuzzy

Pittsburgh: Gateway to Cleveland.

Memories of Spang

Years ago, I saw a great prank on Jay Leno. They made up a case or so of a product called Spang-- a beverage that combined the great taste of SPAM with the astronaut-sanctioned goodness of Tang. It looked like cloudy Snapple. Okay, like cloudy, scary Snapple. Then, they took the show on the road and had man-in-the-street taste tests. They told some people that if they liked it, they'd get a chance to be in a commercial. They asked other people for honest feedback. The contrast between these two groups was readily apparent (and totally hysterical).

Then, today, I read this: JONES SODA CO. TO LAUNCH NEW JONES SODA FLAVOR

November 12, 2003

Seattle, WA, U.S.A. – Jones Soda Co. (the "Company" or "Jones Soda"), announces today that it will introduce a new seasonal flavor in its popular Jones Soda line – Turkey & Gravy flavored beverage.

In time for the Thanksgiving holiday, Jones Soda will launch a limited production of the sugar-free and no carbohydrate Turkey & Gravy flavored beverage in the Washington and Michigan markets. […]

I love a company with a sense of humor.

Look For the Union Label

Some time ago, I read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Ehrenreich sets out to support herself with income earned from minimum wage, non-skilled jobs. She tries several different experiments, including working as a waitress in Florida, working at Wal-Mart in the midwest, and working for a maid service in Maine. The conditions for Wal-Mart employees are appalling, but there's more to the story. Does spending money at Wal-Mart contribute to unemployment here in the U.S.?

This month's Fast Company has a fascinating article on The Wal-Mart You Don't Know, and how Wal-Mart's pressure on suppliers is forcing many of them to send jobs overseas.

A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of abundance and excess; it is entrancing, and also vaguely unsettling. This is the product that Wal-Mart fell in love with: Vlasic's gallon jar of pickles.

Wal-Mart priced it at $2.97--a year's supply of pickles for less than $3! "They were using it as a 'statement' item," says Pat Hunn, who calls himself the "mad scientist" of Vlasic's gallon jar. "Wal-Mart was putting it before consumers, saying, This represents what Wal-Mart's about. You can buy a stinkin' gallon of pickles for $2.97. And it's the nation's number-one brand."

Therein lies the basic conundrum of doing business with the world's largest retailer. By selling a gallon of kosher dills for less than most grocers sell a quart, Wal-Mart may have provided a service for its customers. But what did it do for Vlasic? The pickle maker had spent decades convincing customers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Wal-Mart was practically giving them away. And the fevered buying spree that resulted distorted every aspect of Vlasic's operations, from farm field to factory to financial statement.

Indeed, as Vlasic discovered, the real story of Wal-Mart, the story that never gets told, is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of bringing us "every day low prices." It's the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to U.S. manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole. That story can be found floating in a gallon jar of pickles at Wal-Mart. […]

Woo-hoo!

Guinness is Good for You!

A pint of the black stuff a day may work as well as an aspirin to prevent heart clots that raise the risk of heart attacks.

Drinking lager does not yield the same benefits, experts from Wisconsin University told a conference in the US. Guinness [was] told to stop using the slogan decades ago - and the firm still makes no health claims for the drink.

The Wisconsin team tested the health-giving properties of stout against lager by giving it to dogs who had narrowed arteries similar to those in heart disease. […]

Best. Contest. Ever.

Via Daypop, FARK.com's Mate-a-movie Photoshop contest. I wish I was better with Photoshop (or GIMP) so that I could do Chris's suggestion: Master and Commander: Far Side of the World According to Garp.

Made for each other.

I'm not usually a big books-on-tape kind of person. I read pretty fast, and I've never had a long enough commute that books-on-tape particularly appealed. However, I think I have to make an exception for these. Salon reviewed Tim Curry's audio recordings of the Lemony Snicket books, and I'm sold. You can even listen to an MP3 snippet of A Series of Unfortunate Events #10: The Slippery Slope.

The most the average audiobook has to offer is convenience. You can absorb a book on tape or CD while driving, exercising, cleaning the house or doing anything else that requires your eyes to be occupied elsewhere. And the most the average audiobook consumer can hope for is that the recording won't mess with the book too much. A reader who's stilted or stagey, or -- and this is my own pet peeve -- a male reader who adopts a breathy, high-pitched voice for the dialogue of female characters can make the audio version of a good novel unendurable. If you read quickly, even an acceptably performed audiobook can feel like a frustrating slog. Plus, you can't easily flip forward or back in the text, or skim through long passages of landscape description, the way you can with print.

But an audiobook that actually adds to an author's work? That ideal once seemed as remote and fabulous a creature as the unicorn. Or so I thought, until a friend gave me Tim Curry's performance of Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events #6: The Ersatz Elevator." […]

For those who are already Snicket fans, don't miss Quidditch.com's Incomplete Guide to Lemony Snicket Allusions. Some of them are awfully danged obvious, but others are interesting.

<snrk>

I love defective yeti. Yesterday's entry on McNPR cracked me up.

Also, don't miss this week's issue of The Onion: Mom Finds Out About Blog.

Dang!

November 11th was Pocky Day, and I missed it! For those of you who haven't tried it, Pocky is a yummy snack consisting of biscuit sticks that are dipped in chocolate, or milk chocolate, or strawberry, or chocolate and nuts, or what-have-you. I am told that it is actually pronounced "pokey", although I always read it as "pokky". The best flavor of Pocky, by far, is the goofily named Men's Pocky: Crispy pretzel dipped in dark chocolate for the type of person who enjoys the finer points in life. The Glico Company (makers of Pocky and Pretz) declared 11/11 Pocky Day, because the 11s look like Pocky. While I realize that I'm a day late (2 days late if you're on Japan time), I plan to celebrate today with a package of Pocky Chocolate. Happy Pocky Day, everyone!

p.s. Tangential Pretz-related comment: doesn't this image from the Pretz website make it look like she's going to drive a Pretz into her eye?

Anime Action

We've been getting our anime fix lately. Between Cartoon Network and Encore Action, we've been able to catch a bunch of cool stuff. Encore Action recently aired Hellsing (very cool) and Vampire Hunter D (meh). Cartoon Network's Adult Swim just started showing InuYasha and FLCL (only watched one episode of each). Chris swapped the old hard drive into the TiVo, so we're back to having only 30 hours of space. But on the bright side, this may mean that we can pull some of the info off of the other drive before it gives up the ghost.

Night Watch

Finished Terry Pratchett's Night Watch earlier today. I've read many of the Discworld series, but certainly not all of them. Plus, it's been long enough since I've read anything by Pratchett that this one seemed even more enjoyable than usual. Forthwith, the worst pun in the entire novel:

He hated the official uniform, but he represented a bit more than just himself these days. Sam Vimes had been able to turn up for meetings with grubby armor, and even Sir Samuel Vimes could generally contrive to find a way to stay in street uniform at all times, but a duke… well, a duke needed a bit of polish. A duke couldn't have the arse hanging out of his trousers when meeting foreign diplomats. Actually, even plain old Sam Vimes never had the arse hanging out of his trousers, either, but no one would have actually started a war if he had.

The plain old Sam Vimes had fought back. He got rid of most of the plumes and the stupid tights, and ended up with a dress uniform that at least looked as though its owner was male. But the helmet had gold decoration, and the bespoke armorers had made a new, gleaming breastplate with useless gold ornamentation on it. Sam Vimes felt like a class traitor every time he wore it. He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armor. It was gilt by association.

There. Now it only gets better. Go read it. Hurry along.

Also, I'm quite looking forward to Monstrous Regiment (not yet out in paperback, alas). Haven't tried inter-library loan yet.

A shout-out to Miss Manners

Today's Boston Globe has an interesting article on manners and etiquette. It's focused primarily on the decline of civility, and the notion that 9/11 introduced a sort of "grace period" wherein people did (briefly) treat each other with kindness and care.

''We can almost pinpoint the decline of manners and etiquette to the 1960s,'' says Thomas. ''Prior to that, families ate together at the dinner table. Manners were reinforced all the time -- conversation, listening skills, dining skills, basic considerations, and even electronic manners in that you didn't take telephone calls during the meal. But then people began not to eat together as much, and that's when the basics were no longer taught.

''One problem these days,'' she says, ''is that, unfortunately, there's a lapse in etiquette when people make too great a deal over things that are inadvertent, offenses that they perceive as being intentional but really are inadvertent oversights. In etiquette, we want to overlook as much as we can. Not everything, of course, but we try to give other people the benefit of the doubt.''

Jeopardy, Part 2

My second episode aired tonight. For those of you who couldn't watch, I'll just let you know that you don't need to bother setting the VCR for Monday.

Sean, Chris, and I went up to Tyngsborough and caught a matinee (Alien: The Director's Cut). Went out for sushi afterward. Came home to 8 more messages on the answering machine from well-wishers who were watching tonight's episode. I think 4 of them were from K., who called at every commercial break to update me with her thoughts on how the game was going—too funny.

I loved Elke's comment (via email) about last night's show:
Although after his zipping through all that presidential information, your opponent had me a little nervous (and no wonder, since he was apparently old enough to remember all of them personally). But as soon as Alex announced the Science History category, I was certain you were going to emerge victorious.

Lost in Translation

Went to The Strand last night to see Lost in Translation. Bill Murray is superb, as is Scarlett Johansson. This Onion A.V. Club review describes it well, but contains a few spoilers. I've stolen an excerpt (which doesn't reveal too much):

In a role that draws equally on Murray's remarkable turn as a depressed millionaire in Rushmore and his iconic career as one of America's most beloved comic actors, Murray stars as a Bill Murray-like superstar who travels to Japan to make a quick two million bucks endorsing a brand of whiskey. Alone in a luxury hotel, he finds a kindred spirit in Scarlett Johansson, a winsome, fiercely intelligent newlywed whose husband (Giovanni Ribisi) leaves for a business trip. United in their ennui, Murray and Johansson find solace in a relationship that defies easy categorization, hovering giddily and uneasily between friendship and romance. The disorienting culture of Tokyo plays a major role in Lost In Translation: It doesn't cause the leads' alienation, but its foreignness heightens it, giving those feelings a surreal quality as it tightens Murray and Johansson's ephemeral but strong connection to each other.

Jeopardy!

The TiVo is set to record. (We're crossing our fingers & hoping that it doesn't crash between now & then.) We're cooking up a storm: chili, hummus, marinara sauce, manicotti. Really looking forward to tonight's shindig, and finally being able to answer the questions that people have been asking me since the end of August…

Are we having fun yet?

Played a new game this evening called Xactika. It's another bidding/ trick-taking game, similar to Oh Hell!, from the same people who brought you SET®, Quiddler, and Five Crowns. Xactika is ostensibly for 2-10 players (we were playing a 3-handed game), but our guess is that it would be more interesting (or less random) with 5+ players. The deck consists of 81 cards. Each card has a number value between 4 and 12, and each card has 4 "suits" on it (spheres, cubes, cones, and stars). Everyone is dealt 8 cards and must then bid the number of tricks that s/he expects to take. You must hit your bid exactly—if you go under or over you lose points (the difference between your bid and the number of tricks that you actually took). Repeat until you've played 8 hands, and whoever is in the lead after 8 hands, wins. None of us could seem to get the hang of it. At one point, Chris was winning with -1 points. I thought the game was fun but certainly don't feel like I have any clue of what strategy to use next time. But I'd play again.

Woot!

Hope springs eternal! We're keeping our fingers crossed— the TiVo seems to have gripped itself. I was able to watch The Daily Show earlier today with no ill effects. It hasn't rebooted itself since last night. Current theory is that there was a bad sector on the disk drive and that after doing its disk check/ software reload dance it got better. But what do we know?

No joy in Mudville, redux

Sad news for our TiVo, again. It froze up and, after restarting, came up with the dreaded Green Screen of Death. It tried to fix itself, rebooted, green screened again, and finally seemed to regain its sanity. Started watching The Daily Show and it lost its mind again. Chris thinks that we have a hard drive that's flaking out (just past its 1-year warranty, of course). What is it about our TiVo and game show appearances? The last drive flaked out right after I was on Win Ben Stein's Money; this one craps out just prior to my Jeopardy appearance. Grrr…

404 Not Found

Well, after 3 years, I have finally grown tired of assembling popplers from 1s and 0s. I've stepped up. I'm no longer kickin' it old school, but I will still be keepin' it real. Or something. Point is, if you've bookmarked http://popplers.org/weblog/ or http://demonchow.org/weblog/ or even (God forbid) http://users.rcn.com/rv.ma.ultranet/weblog/, you need to update your bookmarks so that they point over here. For the record, the new URL is:
http://www.foamtotem.org/~rv/popplers/

Same popplers goodness in a wholesome new package: foamy popplers for the 21st century.

One of us. One of us.

What I've Been Doing While I'm "Unemployed" (Part 188 of an eleventy-seven part series): watching horror movies. Without question, October is my favorite month for movies. TCM and AMC dig through the vaults and air "classics" like Scream, Blacula, Scream and Piñata: Survival Island. (Yes, someone green-lighted a movie about a haunted piñata—the evil spirits are released when drunken co-eds smash open the piñata.) So, last night we watched Tod Browning's 1932 classic Freaks. Based on Tod Robbins's story, Spurs, (which I've never read), Freaks is a morality play. The scheming trapeze artist, Cleopatra, uses her beauty to manipulate the circus midget, Hans, who has fallen hopelessly in love with her. Cleopatra and her lover, the strongman Hercules, aim to steal Hans's fortune. She marries Hans and tries to poison him on their wedding night. Neither Cleopatra nor Hercules are particularly bright, or else they would have known better than to cross Hans and incur the wrath of his extended circus family. 70 years later, it's still a creepy, unsettling film.

Pocket full of kryptonite.

I just read Mike Daisey's amusing pseudo-memoir 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com (which has been released in paperback with the more generic title 21 Dog Years : A Cube Dweller's Tale). It's a very funny book, and I found myself reading passages aloud for Chris to laugh at. Some reviewers have taken him to task for giving an inaccurate portrayal of what really happened at Amazon, but I think they're missing the point. I don't think Daisey is casting himself as a dot-com historian-- he's a humorist. And yes, I am sure that some things that take place in the novel are exaggerated or completely made up, but you can get away with that if you're writing fiction. Amusingly, right now the paperback edition is priced at $9.60 on Amazon.com, while the hardcover is available as a "bargain book" for only $4.99. FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25.

I couldn't believe what I had become, how much I had changed, but it's an old story—one of the oldest. It's the delusion of immortality. When you're young, you think that you'll live forever. Hey, check me out, I'm sixteen and I'm bulletproof. This misconception generally fades around twenty-three, when you wake up in a Dumpster naked, covered in garbage, and you realize: Oh, I'm not immortal; Jaegermeister is my kryptonite.

Not on a bet.

Man gets arm stuck in train toilet, causes commuting delays

NEW YORK -- NEW YORK (AP) -- A man riding a Metro-North train dropped his cell phone in a toilet and got his arm stuck trying to retrieve it Thursday, forcing the train to stop and delaying the evening commute for thousands of people.

Edwin Gallart, 41, of the Bronx, was stuck with his arm in the toilet for 90 minutes, The Advocate of Stamford reported in Friday's editions.

The incident happened on the 6:19 p.m. train from Grand Central Terminal. Crew members were alerted to the problem at about 59th Street, a few blocks north of Grand Central.

"When this moron's arm went down the crapper, so did our evening commute," Metro-North spokesman Dan Brucker said. […]