Mad Men: “The Arrangements”

Gene and Sally continue getting closer and closer. We see Gene and the Draper kids walk out the front door, and Gene has a stack of phone books in his hand: he’s taken it upon himself to teach Sally how to drive.

In Brooklyn, Peggy’s mother complains about the lack of coverage of the death of the pope. The TV seems to be on the fritz, so she repeatedly hits it. Peggy complains to Anita that the shower in her apartment is broken. Anita offers to have “Jerry” come over and take a look at it; Peggy thinks her landlord purposely breaks things in her apartment. Anita says that she’d offer Peggy a room, but doesn’t have teh space now that their mother moved in. Peggy says that she wants to move to Manhattan. “It’s so far away”, Anita says.

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At Sterling Cooper, Pete is holding a meeting with his friend “Ho-Ho” and the rest of the Sterling Cooper team. Ho-Ho (real name: Horace Cook) is a trust fund baby who thinks he’s found the next big thing: the Basque sport of jai alai. Ho-Ho says that he’ll leave them a notebook with more information about the sport, and that in seven years it will eclipse baseball as America’s most popular sport. He then asks the Sterling Cooper boys how he’d sell the sport to America. Harry says that most of the money would end up on television. Ho-Ho agrees, and says that he wants a jai alai show. Lane assures him that Harry has excellent relations with all the networks, but Harry says that any show would probably have to be on ABC. Ho-Ho says that he wants the show on all networks at once, like a presidential address. The Sterling Cooper crew sit at the table, stunned. Harry says that it’s never been done before… but can’t think of a good reason why it can’t be done. Paul suggests a big musical show with Desi Arnaz, with a jai alai match as the centerpiece. Ho-Ho asks what other ideas that might have. Paul suggests advertising in woman’s magazines, selling the idea as a glamorous night in (the still exotic) Miami.

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Mad Men: “My Old Kentucky Home”

This episode begins with Paul, Peggy and the rest of the Creative team auditioning Ann-Margret lookalikes for the Patio commercial. Harry annoys Peggy by asking the actress, Hillary, to “do the twist” one more time. Peggy tells him that he is not part of Creative and his input is not needed. Hillary leaves, and Pete and Ken walk in to announce that Bacardi is coming in on Tuesday, and that Don wants copy by Monday morning and art by Monday night. So it seems that Creative will have to work over the weekend. Ken points out the “good news”: that he and Pete will be attending a party hosted by Roger and Jane on Long Island and thus will be “out of your hair”. Harry asks if Ken and Pete will be wearing seersucker, because he “doesn’t want to look like a barbershop quartet”. The rest of the Creative team seems surprised that Harry was invited, and after Ken, Pete and Harry leave, Paul whines that they were all hired at the same time. Sal points out that he worked there six years before Paul was hired. Peggy says that management hates Creative.

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Meanwhile, we see Jane walking through the office. She spies Joan and a couple of the other “office girls” and stops to talk. She says that it’s great to see them… but then she cattily says that she’s at the office because Roger was getting her rings re-sized because she “keeps losing weight”. She then dismissively asks Joan where she and Greg are living now (when Joan says that they’re looking at places in The Bronx, Jane snootily says that she “gets a nose bleed above 86th street!). Jane then asks Joan for a favor – there is construction in front of Sterling Cooper’s building, and Jane had her driver circle the block. As if to show her complete dominance over Joan, Jane asks if she can “send one of the girls down” at 1:15 to flag him down.

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Sad News

Sad (but not unexpected) news from Baltimore:

BALTIMORE, Maryland, AUG. 31, 2009 (Zenit.org).- On Thursday, a community of Episcopal nuns and their chaplain will be received into the Catholic Church by the archbishop of Baltimore.

Ten sisters from the Society of All Saints’ Sisters of the Poor will be received into the Church by Archbishop Edwin O’Brien, along with Episcopal Father Warren Tange, the Baltimore archdiocesan newspaper reported last Thursday.

Fr. Tanghe was the rector of The Church of Our Saviour in Atlanta, the church I was confirmed in on April 15, 1995. I’m sad to see him leave the Anglican Church, but, given how orthodox the good father is, it’s not very surprising.

Read more about it here or here, or read one of the many articles Fr. Tanghe has written here.

Alton Brown on Kitchen Gadgets

Gizmodo has a neat article with Alton Brown where he gives you the skinny on several kitchen gadgets. As anyone who’s watched Good Eats knows, Brown is no fan of  “unitaskers”, kitchen gadgets that can only do a single task. Here’s Alton’s take on the garlic press, for example:

There is absolutely no reason for a garlic press to exist. It is utterly completely magnificently useless.

Check out the rest of the article for some… good reads?

via Alton Brown: Kitchen Gadget Judgment Calls – Yea or Nay?.

God, I’m old!

“I used to be with it, then they changed what it was. Now what I’m with, isn’t it and what’s it seems weird and scary.”

– Grandpa Simpson

So I was skimming over an article in the Daily Mail about Pixie Lott, Britain’s latest pop tart and the heir apparent to the “Brit Soul” crown once Amy Winehouse dies (tick tock, tick tock!), But then I came across this line in the story:

“I was inspired by Christina Aguilera, who started out really young.”

Great. So now we’re two generations away from “my music”? Ya know, it made me feel a bit old, but mostly proud, to hear people like Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, and Christina Aguilera say that they were influenced by Madonna. But now those singers have influenced another round of newer singers? So it’s now Madonna > Christina Aguilera > Pixie Lott?

Intellectually, I knew this was going to happen… but it doesn’t make me feel any better about it. I at least wish my friend Richard were here… that way I wouldn’t feel alone:

Statler and Waldorf

Randomness

– A hilarious Twitter feed from a 28 year-old guy who lives with his 73 year-old father: ShitMyDadSays

– MSNBC commentator Helen A.S. Popkin wonders what’s up with Flickr.

– British customers of Lloyd’s TSB are being charged up to £200/month in overdraft fees… unless they’re Muslim, then it’s only £15.

– America is now exporting hate: Greyhound bus service is coming to the UK.

– For four years, there was a US state called Franklin. Made up of several counties in western North Carolina, it eventually became part of Tennessee.

A molecule, photographed

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, pictured for the first time ever, the “detailed chemical structure of a single molecule”:

pentacene_anatomy

Apparently, some IBM researchers in Zurich used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to create the image shown above. Their version is like a tuning fork: the fork is vibrated, and one of the tines is placed near a molecule. The amount of vibration recorded on the other tine is then recorded, and by carefully repeating the process, an image of the molecule is formed. While carbon nanotubes have been photographed before, this is the first time that the actual chemical bonds have been photographed.

Learn more here.