Drinking whiskey clear!
It was announced today that the Super Bowl halftime show will be headlined by… Bruce Springsteen, who will bring his lame New Jersey-based rock to millions of people… people that will be taking bathroom or cigarette breaks, or hitting the buffet instead of watching yet another over-the-hill rock dinosaur.
Wake me up when that’s over!
So yesterday, the missus and I enjoyed a lazy Sunday on the sofa. At one point, one of Lisa’s friends (who has had some health issues recently and was just in the hospital for a small ‘procedure’) called the house line. Lisa went outside to talk to her, so I turned off whatever it was that we were watching to catch the last few minutes of last Thursday’s Burn Notice. As luck would have it, Lisa wasn’t on the phone for very long, so she came back inside and got back on the sofa. After watching about 30 seconds of Burn Notice she declared it “garbage” and asked how I could watch crap like that.
Well, I don’t think Burn Notice is garbage, and I’m apparently not alone: it’s one of the highest-rated shows on basic cable. It’s funny, though, that Lisa would call it garbage… because just a couple of hours later I watched a show that is indeed garbage:
Actually, the show is called Spooks: Code 9 and it’s a spin-off of the BBC’s popular show Spooks. Sadly, however, while Spooks was an excellent show in its heyday, Spooks: Code 9 is a steaming pile of poo.
Here’s the plot: terrorists detonate a small nuclear bomb in London during the 2012 Olympics. The British government has been moved from London to Manchester, and much of southeast England has been quarantined. MI-5 (the version you know for the original show) has been dismantled and broken up into small “field offices”. So instead of one giant spy agency, there are now 10 or 12 “mini-MI-5s” in the UK.
The main problem with the show is that the cast is made up of nothing but beautiful twentysomethings. If you will, imagine the overall look and feel of Spooks (albeit on a much tighter budget), but with British versions of the cast of The Hills or Gossip Girl playing spies (if you’re actually British, imagine Spooks recast with the kids from Skins). While the acting is barely passable, the plots are inane, and the fact that every character has a “specialty” is hackneyed and contrived. The show lacks the cohones of Spooks. For example, we have no idea who set off the nuclear blast. While Spooks would have immediately blamed Al Qaeda, an IRA splinter group, or some other (mostly plausible) terrorist group, Spooks: Code 90210 apparently doesn’t want to offend anyone by assigning blame.
And it’s not just me thinking the show sucks. The Telegraph wondered if the nuclear bomb had killed everyone over 40 in London. The Times said that the show is “to Spooks what Torchwood is to Doctor Who” (i.e., not as good). It further called the plots “daft and unconvincing” and “too ludicrous to work as well as similar spin-offs”.
Don’t get me wrong. I could look at Ruta Gedmintas (who plays former police officer Rachel Harris on the show) all day long. But not in this crap. This is awful!
The jimcofer.com Death Watch 2008 continues: Isaac Hayes had died. From CNN.com:
Soul singer and arranger Isaac Hayes, who won Grammy awards and an Oscar for the theme from the 1971 action film “Shaft,” has died, sheriff’s officials in Memphis, Tennessee, reported Sunday.
Relatives found Hayes, 65, unconscious in his home next to a still-running treadmill, said Steve Shular, a spokesman for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department.
Paramedics attempted to revive him and took him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly after 2 p.m., the sheriff’s department said.
No foul play is suspected, the agency said in a written statement.
One of my favorite features of Firefox is the built-in spellchecker. If you’re typing some text into a form (like posting on a message board or typing up an email on a web-based service), you’ll see a squiggly red line under any misspelled words. All you have to do is right-click the word and choose the correct spelling.
Unfortunately, the design of the context menu is such that it’s very easy to accidentally click “Add to Dictionary” when you try to correct a misspelled word. So you can accidentally add “teh” to your dictionary. What’s more, Firefox doesn’t have any way to edit the dictionary through the Firefox UI. So if you accidentally add “teh” to your dictionary, there’s no obvious way to remove it.
But there is, of course, a way… and here it is:
1) Close Firefox (you’ll probably want to open Task Manager and make sure that FIREFOX.EXE is no longer running, as it can take a few minutes to completely exit on your system).
2) Windows XP and Vista users should then click on Start > Run and type (or cut and paste) the following text into the “Run:” box:
%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
3) In the Windows Explorer window that opens, you should see at least one folder with a name like “43y0xpxd.default” (the exact name will vary). Double-click this folder to open it.
If you have more than one folder with such a name, then you have more than one Firefox profile on your system. Open each folder and look at the “Date Modified” attribute for the BOOKMARKS.HTML file, as this might help you figure out which profile is the “correct” one.
4) Look for a file called PERSDICT.DAT and open it with your favorite text editor (Notepad is installed by default in all flavors of Windows, but I prefer Notepad++).
5) Remove the word you accidentally added to the dictionary, making sure that each word is on its own line.
6) Save the file and exit the editor.
7) Restart Firefox.
8) Rejoice that “teh” is now marked as a misspelled word again!
1915 was a great year for tiny Cumberland College of Lebanon, Tennessee. In that year, Cumberland’s baseball team defeated the mighty Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets by a lopsided score of 22-0. To say that Tech’s pride was wounded would be an understatement. And the fact that Cumberland hired ringers for the game absolutely infuriated Georgia Tech football coach John Heisman, the man for whom the Heisman Trophy is named.
Cumberland was such a small school that it often couldn’t field a football team. In fact, football was dropped at Cumberland in 1906, resumed in 1912 and dropped again in 1915. Cumberland wasn’t even going to field a team at all in 1916, but Heisman absolutely refused to release the school from its contact to play Georgia Tech. If Cumberland didn’t play Tech that year, they’d have to pay a $3,000 penalty to Tech (which is almost $61,000 in today’s dollars). Heisman knew that Cumberland couldn’t afford to pay the penalty, and thus had to play Tech.
And so… on October 7, 1916 Cumberland College came to Atlanta… and John Heisman had revenge on his mind. And the result was the biggest ass-kicking in the history of American football:
Yes, you read the score correctly. Tech defeated Cumberland by a score of 222-0. Tech’s 222 points are the highest ever recorded in an American football game; the score also represents the largest margin of victory in any football game.
Here are some fun facts about the game:
– Tech had exactly zero passing yards in the game. In fact, Tech didn’t even attempt to pass the ball. On November 6, 1976, Tech would defeat Notre Dame by a score of 23-14… also without attempting a pass.
– On the other hand, maybe Tech didn’t need to throw the ball, as they ran up 978 rushing yards against Cumberland.
– Tech also had 440 yards on kick and punt returns.
– For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a mindboggling 1,418 yards of total offense for Georgia Tech. In a single game.
– In the 2007 NFL season, offenses averaged 325.24 yards per game. Thus, Tech’s offense in the Cumberland game equaled the average offensive output of 4.36 modern NFL games.
– Tech’s defense and special teams scored 12 of team’s 32 touchdowns in that game.
– Tech wasn’t perfect, however: they missed 2 extra point attempts. Still, going 30 for 32 in PATs in a single game is pretty good in my book!
– Neither team made a first down in the game: Cumberland either punted, committed a turnover or turned the ball over on downs on every possession, while Tech scored every time they got the ball.
– Cumberland ended the day with -28 yards on offense. Contrary to popular belief, Cumberland’s biggest gain was not a 2-yard loss… it was a 10 yard pass. Unfortunately for Cumberland, it was 4th and 22 at the time. Cumberland also turned the ball over 15 times, committing 6 interceptions and 9 fumbles.
– As if all this weren’t humiliating enough for poor Cumberland, both head coaches agreed to cut the second half short by 15 minutes (instead of not playing the fourth quarter, the coaches agreed to make the third and fourth quarters seven and a half minutes each). This is why Tech’s offensive output seemed to dip in the second half. Had a full game been played, the score might have ended up being 252-0!
Amazing, huh? Something I’ve always wanted to know about this game: what, exactly, do you as a head coach tell your team in the locker room at halftime when you’re down 126-0?
I just wanted to let you good people know that I updated the British English Glossary page.
In fact, I added a couple of dozen new words to it, and cleaned up some of my clunky diction in existing entries.
I’ll be adding a printer-friendly PDF version of the page in the next couple of days, too.
Enjoy!
Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news from the world of TV Land today.
First, the good news: according to Robert Seidman over at tvbythenumbers.com, Mad Men will definitely be renewed by AMC, barring some unforeseen ratings disaster. And why would AMC renew an incredibly expensive show that can’t even crack the Basic Cable Top 20 Ratings?
Well, two reasons: first, Mad Men is a darling of the critics. If the show wins even a handful of the 16 Emmy Awards it was nominated for, it will be a triumph for AMC, which would then inherit prestige it could never otherwise have had… especially since Mad Men (along with FX’s Damages) are the first two basic cable shows to ever be nominated for the Best Drama award.
But more than that, Mad Men gets what I like to call “30 Rock Ratings”. You may have noticed that there is little (if any) talk about canceling Tina Fey’s comedy, even though the show pulls down mediocre overall numbers. Part of this is because NBC management loves the show. Another part of it is that “industry insiders” also love the show. But the main reason 30 Rock stays on the air is that the show attracts an insanely wealthy demographic. In fact, among households earning $100,000 or more per year, 30 Rock actually ranks as the #2 show in America. As you might guess, advertisers cream over numbers like these, and upscale brands like BMW and Sub-Zero will line up around the block to advertise on 30 Rock. Mad Men is in almost the same boat: although less than 2 million people watch Mad Men every week, around 40% of those people are in households that earn $100,000 or more per year. So trust me: my favorite show isn’t going away any time soon.
But it appears as though another of my favorite (new) shows is going away, and that’s where the bad news comes in: it looks like Swingtown will not be renewed. Although CBS has not made any announcements about the show’s future, actor Grant Show has already shaved off his “porno mustache” and taken a role on Private Practice. This frankly isn’t much of a surprise, given the show’s ever-dwindling numbers. But at least we’ll have closure: according to Swingtown executive producer Alan Poul “[t]he season ends with a cliffhanger, but it’s also a completely satisfying ending. So, if we go forward, there are many new things that are set up to explore. And if we don’t go forward, there’s no feeling that we’ve been left with something incomplete.”
Sure, I’ll be sad that Swingtown is gone. Although I initially watched the show for its titillating premise, I’ve grown to care about the characters in what amounts to a conventional drama with a few peccadilloes thrown in for fun. Perhaps the show was a bad fit for CBS. It’s not perverted enough for HBO these days, and doesn’t seem to fit in with what Showtime’s doing these days. Maybe it would have worked better on FX or USA?
In any case, I’ve watched a lot of British TV in the past couple of years. Most British shows have 6-8 episodes per season, with a maximum of 3-4 seasons. Unlike American shows, which tend to go on and on and on over the years (Prison Break, I’m looking at you), most British shows have 32 episodes or less to tell a story, complete with a beginning, middle and end. And that’s that. And it’s kind of refreshing in a way. Instead of “I used to like that show, but gave up on it after season 13”, most British shows just end, and viewers move on to something else. So as long as Swingtown has a nice ending, I’ll be happy.
Somewhere deep in my heart, I actually have sympathy for the folks at the Department of Homeland Security. I mean… imagine if the president of the United States came to you and said “Hey [you]… you’re now in charge of preventing terrorist attacks in the United States”. Jesus! Where would you even begin to do that job? And once you start looking for terrorist scenarios, you can find them almost anywhere. A terrorist could get a job at an airport and plant a bomb on a plane. He could rent a tanker truck and blow it up on the Golden Gate Bridge. He could fire an RPG at the New York Stock Exchange. He could blow up an electric substation here in Charlotte and bring Bank of America to its knees. He could even do something as simple as dump a bucket of LSD into a reservoir. Lord knows that chemistry students in college have been whipping up batches for years… a dedicated team of terrorists could easily cook up enough acid to plunge Los Angeles or Boston into chaos.
Up until now, I’ve been pretty quiet about us losing our liberties to the jackboots at DHS. After all, most of the hassles ordinary Americans have to deal with come at the airport, and if recent reports are any indication, people are becoming so fed up with air travel that something will have to change in the next couple of years, or else the airline industry will collapse. And I’m confident that that “something” will, in fact, happen.
But I have now officially “had it” with DHS and the whole “War on Terror”. What caused this change of heart? The recent news that agents from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement may now seize laptop computers and other electronic devices from travelers entering the United States. It’s important to understand that the people that own these devices need not be suspected of anything, much less actually charged with a crime. Not only that, they can hold the items for any amount of time that they wish, and they can share the private data on those laptops with other government agencies, and even non-government agencies contracted to do government work. And no, this doesn’t apply to just foreign nationals entering the United States… it applies to anyone entering the country – even American citizens! And although the government swears that any copies made of your personal data will be destroyed, the agencies are actually empowered to keep any notes they make whilst examining your laptop, pager, cellphone, iPod, or any other device.
Fuck that… and fuck you, Michael Chertoff. Do you honestly think that anything productive could ever come of this policy? Please, Mr. Jerkoff, show me one example of where this policy has stopped a terrorist attack. Just one.
In an op-ed piece in the USA Today last month, Herr Himmler Mr. Chertoff assured us that “”the most dangerous contraband is often contained in laptop computers or other electronic devices” and that DHS searches have uncovered “violent jihadist materials as well as images of child pornography”.
Kiddie porn? Really? Really? Look, I hate child pornographers as much as the next person. Hell, if I were Emperor of the United States, I’d order every person convicted of child pornography to be hanged by their balls until they fall off, then lock the bastards in a sewer until they die of gangrene from their infected wounds. But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna trample all over the Constitution of the United States just to lock up the occasional idealistic Muslim college kid with a “Fuck America” essay on his laptop or some damn pervert with kiddie porn.
I mean, does Mr Jerkoff really think that the next Mohamed Atta is going to try and enter the United States with his complete “Plans of Destruction” on his laptop? And why the hell would he? In case Mr Jerkoff hasn’t heard, there’s this newfangled thing out there called the Internet, and terabytes worth of data moves through it every day. And there are so many techniques for hiding data (not to mention billions of places to hide it) that it makes the very idea of the need for this policy laughable.
Dude… what the hell is up with all the beheadings lately? I’m sure you’ve heard about the beheading on a Greyhound bus in Canada… but did you heard about the Greek guy that beheaded his girlfriend on the island of Santorini, then walked around the island showing off the head to tourists? And it’s not just the crazy men out there… a Malaysian woman living in London became jealous of another woman and beheaded her, dumping her body in the Thames. Oh, and seven London men were recently convicted of attempting to behead a man using samurai swords… At least here in the US we can just shoot people and get it over with quickly!
You might think that all this is bizarre… but how about this: remember the 2002 Bali bombings? Three of the men convicted for that terrorist attack… are demanding (yes, demanding) to be beheaded (instead of facing the firing squad).
The older I get, the less I understand. Really.
The website Consumerist.com is usually a sad place, chock full of horror stories about people trapped in customer service nightmares with Comcast, Sprint, or WaMu. In fact, it’s downright depressing, and reading the site every day might lead you to think that customer service not only doesn’t exist in America any more, it’s actually morphed into some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare.
Occasionally, however, they’ll run a funny story… like this one about a guy named David Ng that bought a “Banzai Wild Waves Water Park” for his kids. It sure looks like fun on the box… but the reality is quite different. On the box three kids are enjoying the inflatable pool, but the final product looks as though it could barely fit the little boy in the picture:
