This is really just cute more than anything else. Poorly implemented, but worth it for the kicker at the end.



Hats off to Google Docs for putting together something less shitty than PowerPoint in one-gazillionth of the development time that Microsoft has wasted on their soulless presentation software.

On a similar fanboy note, enjoy this article, also from Slate, about the fawning praise for Leopard.


Thanks to Slate.

According to several news reports, Peter Hume, the actor/Canadian professional wrestler who played "The Stomach" in the prtotypical teen camp movie Meatballs died last week in his sleep. In case you don't remember him, he was that actor that you probably frequently confused with Stephen Furst or Josh Mostel. I'm not sure why, but this news made me profoundly sad when I read it. I don't know if I was expecting a sequel to be made or what, although merely the thought of Bill Murray, made up as Raleigh St.Clair and shaking his booty to "Makin' It" by David Naughton and reciting the "Wudy the Wabbit" speech, makes me smile. So who knows.

On behalf of all the big funny guys in the world, I salute you.

Huzzah.

What would you do?

What would you do if you had an opportunity to pick up a toy you've been lusting after for ages at a savings of $100?

Let's say, in this hypothetical, that you had a chance to buy this toy for $300. You'll have the money on payday a week away. However, the cost of the flight you need to book to visit your parents also costs about $300 and you've also planned on booking that flight on your next payday. You've already promised that you're making this trip and you would have to scrounge to find the money elsewhere to make it happen, although there's a chance you'd be stuck waiting another two weeks for your next payday and possibly paying more. Up to $100 more... thus negating the savings on the toy.

This is not a picture of said toy, merely an example of a toy. One that would best be used in a story. A story about toys. They should call it: "Space and Wooden Man Imaginary Adventure Movie"

I know what I'm going to do, but I'm curious, what would YOU do?

UPDATE (11/2/07): I didn't buy it. It's a battle of will, and I shall prevail over my gluttonous desires.

Huzzah

Man, what's the deal? Everyone seems to be having a shitty Tuesday. Is it the weather? It was a bit frosty this morning and it's been wet and overcast in Omaha. But the weather is notoriously poopy in the autumn. Surprisingly, I haven't succumbed to this October funk as of yet. And you'd think I would have considering that while searching for some nifty 1440x900 desktop pics on Google Images I found this:

It's a promotional desktop for the Billy McGuigan album Billy as Billy from his site. Yes, international recognized actor and blah blah blah. Wow. It boggles the mind. Those of you who know me know the backstory. Those who don't will just have to ask. Since I'm in the minority of people not having a crappy Tuesday, I'm not about to ruin it by digging up that old chestnut.

Let's find some good things to focus on so the good people of Omaha can shed the funk:

Apple had record profits this quarter. Like net $904 million. They somehow managed to struggle to a huge jump from their last big quarter despite me, tastemaker and trendspotter that I am, not buying an iPhone. For a while there I was pretty glad since the 1.1.1 firmware update seemed to f'up a number of phones. And as illogical as it may seem, apparently a complete wipe of the phone by your resident Apple Genius Bar attendant manages to put right what went wrong. Or so it would seem for the moment. Ah! New technology!
Unless you're a complete fanboy (like me) or have apple stock (unlike me) this news probably doesn't brighten your day all that much, I suppose.

It's not often that we get Nobel Peace Prize winners in Omaha. Particularly not of the caliber of Bishop Desmond Tutu. But he was in town, nonetheless. He was spreading the word of peace, which is always nice. And he was spitting more girl power than a Spice Girls album. A direct quote:

"Women ought to say to men, 'Hey guys, we've given you all of this time. Look at the mess you've made of the world. Get out of the way. Let us women take over."

Groovy. I'm totally fine with the women taking over. Although please don't take that as a part and parcel endorsement of Hillary just yet. I'm going to hold my breath until the last minute to see if Gore pulls an 11th hour surprise.

And the final reason to be happy: Hardee's recently unveiled a 920 calorie breakfast burrito-monstrosity. The Country Breakfast Burrito contains two omelet's worth of eggs plus hash browns, gravy, sausage, cheese (naturally) and probably just a big squirt of rendered cow lard because who gives a fuck at this point?

AP Photo

Fans of Hardee's Monster Thickburger (1,400 calories, FYI) now have a breakfast option as they try to cram 6,000 calories into three daily meals. So if you're a sedentary ham-beast looking for a new way to let your manboobs melt into your couch cushions then you've finally got an "on the go" breakfast option. But who are you kidding? When was the last time you were "on the go" anywhere but the bathroom?

I did a little research on this and found that the average "The Bomb" QuikTrip convenience store-brand beef & bean burrito actually has 940 calories if you eat the whole thing. It's listed as two servings per burrito at roughly 470 calories per serving, most of which are from fat. Because people so frequently split gas station burritos with a friend. So Hardee's didn't really re-invent the wheel here. They just said "hey, what if we put two whole country breakfasts and wrapped them up in a tortilla?" Above you see the answer to that question.

Aren't you glad they asked?

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go barf now.

Cheer up, everybody.
Huzzah

The whole "mash-up" thing is totally three years ago in hipster time, so that means it's hitting its stride with mainstream middle 'merica. A good way to tell? When Madison Avenue tries to reach you with some viral video advertising. Usually mash-ups, do not improve any of the songs involved. Once in a great while, however, both songs benefit. As seen in the following clip. Britney's pedestrian dance tune mixed with Kelly's funny but weak on the production end battle cry for the teenage shoe-shopping youth. Check it:



Other times a crappy song can be made better thanks to a mash-up. Take for example the classic funk of the Tom Tom Club elevating the danceable shitstorm that is Fergie's London Bridge. I think it'd look a little something like this:



Once in a while someone will come up with a clever title for a mash-up and start from there. 9.5 times out of 10 this renders total crap. But sometimes if the stars align just right you can get something that's passably listenable, even if it's comprised from two real "vagina-festivals" of pop songs. Case in point, Every Car You Chase by The Police vs. Snow Patrol:



And sometimes mash-ups are a foregone conclusion, particularly when all the tunes involved are the same fucking song. Why Toni Basil isn't suing I have no idea.



And yes, sometimes you can mash up video as well, although the results are only going to be about as funny as this:



And if you don't watch the Office AND Lost, it probably wasn't funny at all. If you're like me and those are your two favorite shows on broadcast TV then... well, it still isn't really funny at all.

Okay... so ends the lesson for today.

Huzzah, kiddies.

Hey kids, it's update time.

More stupid questions (and stupider answers) posted to the MegaMeme. Scroll down to the bright red bold Update to read the latest.

Also, I neglected to mention it last time, but I updated the Comedy Stuff page to help promote tonight's Weisenheimers performance at the Big Ha!.

And a quick poll question, feel free to answer by email or in the Comments, who out there would be interested in getting together for a regular dine-out night? Just wondering. Had the idea rolling around in my head for a while. I'm expecting to get somewhere between 0 and 1 responses to this, so no pressure.

Hugs and Huzzah.

This morning on Pat & JT after doing my stupid little ranty DC Blitz, which you can hear an excerpt from here (it's about halfway through), a caller asked why I "hate" so much. The caller "Eric" asked this question after perusing my myspace and then this blog. Why, dear caller, do I hate so much? Ask my therapist or decode my DNA. I have no idea. It's just who I am.

In case you missed today's DC Blitz, here are my notes. Unexpurgated and with my own notes and timing, typos and all, so please forgive that. Also no links, but as usual you can find most of these stories like I did on Wonkette, Politico, Raw Story, etc. etc.

News Corp., the company that brought you Sean Hannity’s impermeable hairdo and popularized the concept of the embedded news-bimbo, has announced the launch of their very own all business news channel: the creatively named Fox Business. So now the company that takes jingoism and being a mouthpiece for the uninformed right to a whole new level can now spend 24 hours a day telling you how the crappy economy is somehow Bill Clinton’s fault. Among the dubious collection of contributors Fox Business has hired, the most insane is former HP Co-Chief Executive Carly Fiorina. Carly is no stranger to business. In fact from 1999 to 2005 Carly lead the buyout/merger of Compaq and took the once revered name of Hewlett Packard as a company known for innovation and milked it like a cash cow. Shares of HP lost 63% of their value while she was at the helm, and stock has more than doubled since she was fired in 2005, to give you an idea of how much she was loved as a corporate leader. Now she’ll be offering business news on Fox! Good Job, Rupert. You picked another winner.

Speaking of Sean Hannity’s helmet-hair and the frighteningly melting man Alan Colmes, being forced to watch FNC at the gym this week I caught another classic Hannity straw man argument where he had someone on to scream about Al Gore being considered for a Nobel Prize because of his work raising awareness about global warming. The closed captioning wasn’t on, so I just had to watch the Fox news bobbing heads mouth the words “how ridiculous” and “Nobel Prize is a sham” etc. This was made even more poignant by an AP story that was brought to my attention. From yesterday’s AP: An upcoming report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will contain new data showing that the level of climate-changing gases in the atmosphere has already reached critical levels, levels scientists weren’t expecting for another decade. Why so many greenhouse gasses? I don’t know. It must be Clinton’s fault.

In case you missed it, this last week President Commander-Guy vetoed SCHIP, the program that offers free health care to eligible children. This is all part of “W”’s aggressive new “No Child Left Standing” initiative that intends to offer a little tough love to America’s Kids by suggesting that they just tough it out through any illness like chicken pox, broken bones or meningitis. Remember the battle cry of the modern neo-conservative Tax Cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations = good, health care for children = bad. Win another one for family values.

Blitz & Pieces

Today, October 11, is national coming out day, and in just two days Idaho Senator and Minnesota Airport Bathroom sex-goblin Larry Craig will be inducted into the Idaho hall of fame. Coincidence? Or does the Idaho Hall of Fame Association just not follow the news? That’s like George Michael winning some type of award from the California Parks and Recreation service. Craig, as you will remember, promised to resign on September 30th if a judge would overturn his guilty plea. The judge didn’t, but Larry changed his mind. But I guess this wouldn’t be the first time he went both ways on a decision ... Never let it be said that the Bush administration isn’t really proactive. Prior to the announcement noted earlier in the Blitz about the Greenhouse Gas emissions report, Sec. of State Condoleeza Rice challenged the world’s biggest polluters a couple weeks ago to "cut the Gordian knot of fossil fuels" and [shift] toward energy sources that will reduce global warming. Most of the people she was addressing had trouble hearing her, however, of the sound of her motorcade of Hummers that were revving up just to hear that sweet sound of internal combustion engines roar ... last night Hillary Clinton got the music industry endorsement that is bound to put her over the top. The Goo Goo Dolls played a fundraiser for her. So, yeah... Goo Goo Dolls...

Yer Blitzed!

Hope you enjoy, or enjoyed, or whatever.

See you tomorrow night at the Weisenheimers exhibition at the Big Ha! If you want to come. If not... whatever, dude. It's your life.

I'm not going to bother to go over any more of the trip to Atlanta. Know why? It's boring to blog about. At least noticeably more boring than the request I got to blog about the accidental teabagging I got from a 70 year old guy at the gym over a lunchtime workout. However I'll spare you that one as well.

But yesterday marked a momentous occasion. Ten years ago Michael Dell, purveyor of boring Windows boxes, said that in some magical world where he were head of Apple Computers Inc. he would close the doors and give the shareholders back their money along with a heartfelt apology for being such a gigantic doucheball.

Well, Dell, how's that decade treating you?

Oh wait, I think I know:

Yeah. Not so good for Dell. 10 years of stock price statistics don't lie. Maybe it's iPod "halo effect", maybe it's perceived "elite" status that comes from owning an Apple machine, maybe... whatever. Doesn't matter. Dell had their chance. They made an mp3 player (remember the Dell DJ? No? Neither does anyone else), yet they suffered no halo effect. Maybe they just got wrong what so many others continue to fumble. People want a pleasant computing experience. Back in '98 Steve Jobs was still sorting out the master plan for Apple. Things were still in pretty dire straits. He had his magic man Jonathan Ive in place and the cute gumdrop iMacs, but he was still sorting out the tasty treats to come. And he did, with a vengeance.

When I held my first iPod, one of the first ones in Nebraska I venture to guess, I remember thinking to myself that this gizmo is going to change the way things happen.

Fuck yeah it did.

So, Michael Dell, suck it.
And Ted Waitt can help you suck it. And he didn't do shit to Steve Jobs. It shows you what a spiteful a-hole I really am.

Enjoy, kiddies.
Huzzah

(Thanks to Gizmodo for the heads up)

As I type this I'm sitting in a tiny seat on a tiny airplane heading back to my comfortably-sized hometown. I've just spent the last three days talking shop with professional business people about the business of doing business. If bullshit was sand I would have created a new desert. There are so many anecdotes that it would take longer than this flight to type it all out. Three days in Atlanta and the only time I got outside the hotel was to walk to the adjacent mall to eat the generic Chili's/Applebees/TGI McPickleshitters clones that can be found at any mall in the U.S. Three days in a suit, looking damned fine if I do say so myself, but for what?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Here's the hotel:

Reasonably swanky. The photo doesn't convey the humidity, the lack of adequate air conditioning or the Wednesday morning complete lack of hot water throughout the entire hotel. You know what's better than wearing a suit and uncomfortable dress shoes from 5:30am until 11:00pm? Preceding it with an ice-cold "penis inverter" shower at 5am. I promised myself that I would try to be positive about it, so instead of complaining I'll just say it was a bracing way to greet the dawn. (I'm happy to report that my ween has since returned to its previous state as an "outie".)

Here's me as a smooth operator in a suit:

Dashing? You know it, dawg.

I've never understood the whole "looking sexy in a suit" thing that some people find so appealing. Frankly I think it makes me look boxy, but to each his own. All I know is those Kenneth Cole shoes, while perhaps not very comfortable for all-day wear, are fierce.

I hate that disconnected feeling of being alone at a hotel on business. That feeling of being adrift, missing some essential component. But if there's a silver lining in it all, it makes you appreciate the life you left. And right now at 35,000 feet over the central U.S. the only thing I can think about is getting home.

So sorry for the quiet week here on el blog-a-rino.

If I can muster the strength and change the names to protect the innocent, or in this case protect me from the guilty, I'll tell the story of the crazy woman at dinner and the "almost had a 3-way with Bruce Willis" story that will frighten you. I have pictures, but I don't want to be sued and/or fired. So just ask me to see them sometime in person and then you, like me, can say "there's no way Bruce Willis invited you to take any part in a three way, save for maybe having you hold the camera."

I specifically put this post under the category of Schadenfreude not because of the joy I normally take in other's misery (with the single exception of the odd-gal-out in the misfired Willis 3-way), but so you could take a little joy in mine.

More this weekend, kiddies.
Hugs a-plenty.
Huzzah.

Not a proper post really, but I wanted to get some new goodies up on the docmarvy before I left town.

There's a new Band of the Month, so go check out Christine Fellows, why dontcha?

I added 70 new lines to the MegaMeme, just scroll down to the red "Update 10/1/2007" and read more inane garbage.

I finally did a little tweaking to the Links page, although it's all pretty shoe-gazingly boring. I'm wrestling with a Rapidweaver plug in that supposed to simplify it, but actually makes it a little more complicated. Check it out anyway.

And there are a few updates to yesterday's Sunday Retro Post.

That's it. I'll try to find the funky ephemera of my hotel in the ATL and put it here.

Hugs, kids.
Huzzah.