As long as the judges keep rewarding ugly failure, you’ll never see a beautiful skate program, at the Olympics or otherwise.
Michael Botsko looks at six years of ticket stubs and discovers some interesting, if not entirely unexpected, trends. (via Kottke)
Bruce Schneier tells us that “identity theft” is a misnomer, and that for real change to happen, the burden must be shifted from the individual, who has little recourse, to the financial institutions taht have the means to stop the fraud.
Slate on the nonsense of Olympic doping rules. On a related note, I haven’t found myself watching a single second of Olympic coverage, even by accident, thus far.
_Grey’s Anatomy_ creator Shonda Rhimes writes about the Super Bowl two-parter on the show blog. In case you were wondering, the bomb squad dude is *dead*. He isn’t coming back after having been blown up, even if it did take place in a hospital.
Ray Bradbury tells us that the answer to LA’s escalating transportation woes is an overhead monorail system. I completely agree. In fact, I was advocating a Monorail for Brandeis! (Instead of “you went where?” it would be, “oh, man, you went to that school with the monorail!”). Public transportation, and not massive new freeways, is the answer. Subways have not proven to be viable. Busses are useful, but not a complete solution. Monorails, as silly as it may sound, could prove to be an excellent answer. (via Aaron)
I’m happy to hear that _Coast to Coast AM_, a show I used to listen to regularily during summer vacation from high school, continues to be the highest rated radio show in its timeslot even three years of the departure of legendary host Art Bell.
Review
High School Musical
!>/files/2006/02/hsmusical.jpg(High School Musical)! This gem of a Disney Channel Original Movie (or DCOM, for short) is called _High School Musical_ but is targeted — as you might suspect — at middle schoolers. The plot is minimal and contrived, the characters are stereotypical and completely flat, the ending preordained, and the movie, on the whole, absolutely wonderful.
Troy the basketball star and Gabrielle the mathlete are paired off against their will at a New Years karaoke party and discover their hitherto unknown shared passion for singing. They think it is a chance meeting on vacation, but (shock!) soon find that they are attending the same high school, which just happens to be casting its winter musical. Troy is afraid of what his basketball buddies might think of his thing for singing, Gabrielle is reluctant to take on such a public activity before she has gotten her bearings at her new school. The two, a bit perturbed by how the school’s resident diva is treating the student composer, decide to try out after all, and just like that we’re off to the races.
The tertiary characters — jocks, “brainiacs,” band geeks, and the like, are stereotyped to the point of absurdity, which is probably the idea, and the school is thrown into chaos when Troy’s brash action causes others to start revealing their secret obsessions and crossing boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed. The ball player who bakes is my favorite. His crème brûlée obsession makes me hungry. 🙂
Between unintentionally funny dialogue and the occasional hilariously cheesy joke we have catchy if simplistic tunes that will stick in your head. While the various factional leaders attempt to break up Troy and Gabrielle, they soon discover the error of their ways and everything turns out okay in the end, as you might suspect. The only obvious thing that this movie lacks is the main character’s kiss, tactfully broken up by a basketball. Guess Disney wanted to keep that G rating.
Me, my sister, and my roommate agree — High School Musical is a blast. It’s also Disney’s most popular DCOM to date, with over 7 million viewers on its first night. If you get a chance, check it out. You (probably) won’t regret it!
I had a simple question, which characters are allowed in MySQL database passwords (i.e. can I use #^% and other special characters to make the password more secure). I asked Google, and the page I ended up with (which is actually for Oracle databases) shows that some people have put *far* too much effort into figuring this sort of thing out, and that the answer is completely bonkers.
Says Jim Wier of lawn equipment maker Snapper, “I could go to my grave, and my tombstone could say, ‘Here lies the dumbest CEO ever to live. He chose not to sell to Wal-Mart.’“
On CAGs
This post contains spoilers for Battlestar Galactica episode 2×15.
For my Battlestar Galactica watching friends, I just want to remind you that Television Without Pity publishes weekly recaps, and the recent BSG recaps by Jacob have been bordering on amazing. If I was him in college I would have been able to skip as many American Studies classes as I did will also getting all the “A”s that I didn’t. One specific character relationship that he has a lot to say about is the dynamic between Apollo and Starbuck, and its fascinating to watch them converse and then read his analysis and realize that everything they do, everything they say, every single guesture between them is *always* misinterpreted by the other, that as much as they care about and perhaps love each other, they just can’t communicate. The recap for Scar, which is a fabulous read on its own, contains this gem of analysis:
Kara pushes Lee off and starts dressing. “Hey,” he whines, “what about us?” She laughs. “There is no us, all right? I just wanted a good lay. There is nothing here. Do you get that? Nothing.” She dares him to say otherwise, but he gives in so easily that she just screams, “My gods!,” exasperated. He comes in again, this time like a friend, over her shoulder, on a bunk: “Hey.” She stands up and seems ready to shoot him. “Well, that’s just great. Frack or fight, huh?” He steps right up in her business: “Okay, maybe I am just a quick lay. But, Kara, I’m also your friend.” True. She takes advantage: “I am hung up on a dead guy, okay? And it is pissing me off. And I don’t know what I’m doing.” Nice to know that, even now, she can tell him parts of the truth. Lee turns and thinks about this, the crush part and the best friend part engaging in a brief war: “Anders, right? On Caprica, the resistance fighter.” Kara pushes this off, because “Samuel” is dead, and Lee starts to give her a speech starting with “For once in your life…” but Kara translates this as pity. Lee: “You haven’t got my pity! Listen, you are fine. You’re fine with the dead guys. It’s the living guys you can’t deal with.” Which is ironic on all cylinders but still true. She slaps him, and they look at each other, and she grabs his face, kissing him roughly. Lee’s hands don’t know what to do. She pushes off, and he’s a little angry and intense by now, even though the last kiss was basically an apology for being a freak, and Kara grabs the bottle and swings out of the room.
One of the most fascinating relationships in a series full of fascinating relationships, as long as we just ignore that completely terrible episode two weeks ago where Lee did all that stuff that didn’t make sense. I’m really rooting for BSG to redeem itself, becase when its good its just so good, and in the meantime while I wallow in its surprisingly out of place suckiness, at least I have Jacob over at TWOP to keep me hopeful.
In a small patriotic American town, the high school production of _Grease_ created a controversy because of the drinking, smoking, and wearing of nightgowns. Now they’ve cancelled _The Crucible_ (not for any specific reason) and are also nixing plans for _Little Shop of Horrors_ (woman gets beaten, plant eats people). Also off the table: _Bye Bye Birdie_ (smoking and drinking), _Oklahoma_ (scene of near-rape), and _Diary of Anne Frank_ (not appropriate for young children). The irony of banning _The Crucible_ — a play about the Salem witch trials — is of course completely lost on the community leaders. To add insult to injury, the drama teacher has been told that her contract might not be renewed. Oh, and they’re not too hot to the idea of putting on _Romeo & Juliet_, either. You think I’m joking, but I’m not.
Rocketboom’s eBay ad auction brought in $40,000!!! Wow, big congrats to them. I expect to see great new things, or at least a less sucky new backdrop! (RB is a daily 3 minute web video broadcast).
How world leaders make phone calls — Oh explainer, you’ve always been my favorite!
Learn how to build your very own Web 2.0 ™ layout in just 5 minutes! Be cool with big text, a gradient, a tag cloud, and highlighting!
And she asks, “what did I do?”
Sunday night’s _Grey’s Anatomy_ was an excellent episode but I think the last few seconds caused some confusion among careful watchers, and that confusion has more to do with problemtic editing (or direction) than acting. The ratings-boosting episode showed a World War II weapons enthusiast coming to the hospital with unexploded home-made ammunition in his chest. An inexperienced paramedic stuck her hand into the chest to stop the bleeding and, in the final moments of the episode, upset and panicked, removed her hand and ran from the room, while everyone else dropped to the ground, afraid of an explosion. Meredith, standing by the paramedic’s side, instinctively put her hand into the chest cavity as Hannah removed hers, stabilizing (theoretically) the round and continuing to plug the wound, saving the man’s life, at least temporarily.
The problem, and the reason why I think many people are debating Meredith’s action, comes down to about eight frames (a quarter of a second) in that final scene. As Hannah removes her hand, at the bottom left of the frame we see Meredith’s gloved hand slipping in simultaneously to take its place. This leads one to believe that she took the action instincitvely and just might have saved everyone’s lives. This is borne through by the last few cuts, showing Meredith, calmly but almost unbelievingly staring down at the body and whispering over and over, “what did I do?” However, the scene immediately following the hand placement shows Meredith’s arm being thrown out of the way as Hannah removes her hand and retreats, and then arcing back down towards the body, thus leading to the belief that Meredith stuck her hand into the chest cavity after the shell had been jostled, thus stupidly putting herself further into harms way or, perhaps, having a death wish. Now, either way, the action took place in less than half a second, so I’m not sure that in general this would drastically change someone’s thought process, but the ambiguity of how it was shot and edited does lead to some deserved confusion about what precisely was taking place, how Meredith reacted, and the degree of foolishness of her action.
Ars offers a primer on the CableCARD standard that is set to replace set top cable boxes. Or not. Luckily, I expect IPTV, iTunes, and the like, will make much of this a moot point, which is good, since the new content control systems are, in a word, sucky.
Rocketboom asks, “why is George W. Bush so awesome?” Potentially ironic aside: at least two of the interviews were filmed inside Berkman — directly in front of a bathroom. That people were trying to use. Hehe.
This short article is very light on details but the gist gets across just fine: anyone with a few minutes access to your cell phone can start tracking your every movement by paying nine bucks to a shady web site. One might wonder how they do this without the phone companies being involed. Or one might be cynical, like me, and not even have that thought.
Blogs and the internet in general are making reporting a more open and transparent process — sometimes in constructive ways, sometimes in a blatantly partisan ways — but, as we apparently have to reiterate every time one of these stories appears, this doesn’t mean traditional journalism is dying or becoming irrelevent, its just becoming better. RMacK gets a few quotes. Maybe she’ll post the email transcript. 😉 (via Aaron)