Category: Commentary

It might seem hard to believe today, but back in 1982 the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was huge. It didn’t have the “teen appeal” of Titanic or Twilight, but it was the kind of movie grandparents, parents and church groups could feel good about taking their little ones to see. And so take them they did… and the movie became a phenomenon.

It only made sense, then, that there would be a video game tie-in based on the movie. Although newer systems like Intellivision offered better graphics than the stodgy Atari 2600, Atari’s gigantic user base ensured that the company would win the rights to make the game. When kids found out that E.T. the video game was coming out, they gleefully added it to their Christmas lists by the millions. E.T. was perhaps the hottest gift of the 1982 Christmas season.

There was just one problem… the game sucked. The graphics were so horrible and the gameplay so boring that even today, 27 years later, the game still makes it onto “Worst Video Games of All-Time lists”. In fact, given the game’s high-profile at the time, it often ranks near the top of those lists, too.

Continue reading “The Game That Killed Atari”

For some reason, lately I’ve been thinking of some of the weird neuroses I have:

1) For some reason, I have this bizarre problem with wasting food. None of my family (that I’m aware of) dealt with starvation in the past, and none of my parents or grandparents ever gave me the whole “starving kids in China” routine as a kid. If I didn’t like something, they never made me eat it, and they didn’t make me feel guilty for it. Yet, whenever I see food being wasted, it drives me nuts. Specifically, it really bothers me when food is wasted purely for entertainment. Remember the scene in the movie PCU when the pranksters stole a huge vat of ground beef and dropped it onto the animal rights activists? Or when Late Night with Jimmy Fallon does the “hot dog toss” game, where audience members try tossing the most hot dogs through the mouth of a celebrity cut out? It drives me crazy. I don’t know why. And lest you think it’s some claptrap about precious animals dying to make food, I used to have no problem tossing the tomato slice that comes with most hamburgers to the side… until one day around 5 years ago, when I thought about that poor tomato growing in a field, hoping to one day be the most delicious tomato in the world… only to wind up, uneaten, in a Dumpster behind a Wendy’s in Belmont. It made me sad and guilty, so now I eat the tomato. Intellectually, I know that there’s plenty of food to eat in this country, but wasting it just bothers me. Badly. Amusingly, however, this specific neurosis doesn’t apply to leftovers. I guess if I’ve already eaten some of it, then I have less guilt about throwing it away… or something.

Continue reading “My Neuroses”

Quick – name the most “progressive” cities in America. Portland? Seattle? Austin? Denver? Minneapolis?

These cities are known for their fine public school and public transportation systems and healthy art scenes as well as their liberal values, like actively encouraging cycling to work and anti-sprawl policies.

Aside from that, what else to these cities have in common? They are the whitest cities of their size in America, that’s what. Black folks make up 12.8% of the US population, but only constitute 10.6% of the population of Minneapolis, 10.0% in Denver, 8.8% in Austin, 6.2% in Seattle, and a mere 6.0% in Portland. And although foreign-born people make up a lot of the difference in these cities, they still lag behind other cities in their “diversity”.

It’s amusing, then, that so-called “progressives” flock to these cities. After all, why move away from downtown Atlanta to be called a racist when you can move to Portland and be a liberal hero?

Read more about it here.

I don’t know how, where, or when it came about, but there’s the idea out there that embassies are somehow “foreign soil”. According to some folks, the American embassy in Japan sits on what amounts to American soil; likewise, the Japanese embassy in Washington sits on Japanese soil.

Allow me to clear this up for you: embassies are not, nor have they ever been, considered “foreign soil”.

I suppose the idea began because ambassadors and other high-ranking diplomats do enjoy something called “diplomatic immunity”. Basically, this means that ambassadors are, in most cases, free from prosecution in host countries. The reason for this is obvious: to allow free communication between government representatives during times of crisis. Diplomacy wouldn’t get very far if ambassadors could be arrested by unfriendly host countries, and if, say, Iran arrested a British ambassador, they might find their own ambassadors arrested in other countries as a form of retaliation. Thus, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations basically says “don’t arrest my guy, and we won’t arrest your guy”.

Continue reading “RIGHTING THE WRONGS: Embassies”

– Corporations might sometimes seem like heartless, impersonal monoliths. But the fact is, even the largest corporations get their inspiration from little guys every now and then. You might know that the Big Mac and Egg McMuffin were invented by individual McDonalds franchisees. Well, you can now add Subway’s $5 footlongs to that list. The idea behind them was hatched by a struggling franchisee in Miami. Read the (surprisingly interesting) story of how $5 footlongs went from one guy’s crazy idea to save his business into a national sales model and annoying jingle at businessweek.com here.

– Speaking of business, Pabst Brewing Company – a “virtual brewer” who contracts all their actual brewing out to Molson – is up for sale. Although Pabst doesn’t brew their own beer any more, they do own a line of iconic beer brands, such as Pabst Blue Ribbon, Old Style, Ballantine, Lone Star, Olympia, Schaefer, Schmidt, and Stroh’s. PBR’s resurgence in the marketplace has led folks to tag the company’s worth at over $300 million!

– A big THANK YOU goes out to the Belmont Fire Department, whose swift action saved the lives of 8 puppies yesterday morning.

– Tibet is a mountainous country where the ground freezes too hard to bury people and the scarcity of firewood prevents cremation. So how do they get rid of the bodies of the deceased there? By paying monks to smash up the bodies and leaving them for the vultures! It’s called an “sky burial”, and you can read more about it here (warning: gruesome pictures included!).

– And lastly, if you like your humor with a side of intellectualism, you’ll probably enjoy the Nietzsche Family Circus, which pairs a random Family Circus cartoon with a quote from one of Germany’s most famous philosophers. The results are usually pretty funny (refresh the page to see a new one).

Here’s another great interview from David Lynch’s Interview Project:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC2PqmE9XNg&feature=player_profilepage