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Mad Men: “A Night to Remember”

Sorry for the delay in posting this!

Another great episode of Mad Men is in the can… so let’s get right to it, shall we?

The episode begins with Betty having a rigorous morning ride on a horse. She returns home, only to pester Don into fixing an errant wall outlet. To say that the tension between Don and Betty is palpable is an understatement; it almost seems as if those two can’t even be in the same room with each other these days. For those of you keeping score at home, Don calls Betty “Birdie” for the first time in what seems like forever.

While all this is going on, Peggy visits her mother’s house. Father Gill arrives and asks Peggy if she’d do some pro bono work for an upcoming church dance:

On Monday morning, Duck gives Harry hell for a humorous gaffe from the television department: the night before, a Sterling Cooper ad for a Maytag washing machine called “The Amazing Agitator” ran during a movie about communist agitators. Maytag’s switchboard “lit up like a Christmas tree” with complaints, and Sterling Cooper was forced to eat the cost of the ad time. Duck tells Harry that, regardless of politics, clients are always looking for a way to get out of paying the agency, and that he (Harry) needs to be on top of situations like these. Harry then begs Sal, Ken and Paul for help in reading the scripts of upcoming shows so that Sterling Cooper’s ads don’t conflict with them; when it becomes obvious that they’re not going to help him, Harry looks around the office in a panic.

Meanwhile, Duck and Don meet about Heineken. The problem with the Heineken account is this: the company wants to compete in bars, while Duck and Don feel that the brewer should focus on “home sales”. Imported beer was something of a novelty in 1962, and Don wants to push Heineken to housewives planning sophisticated parties at home. “For women entertaining in the home, Holland is Paris”, Don says, as he comes up with a plan to test market sales in grocery stores by putting Heineken on end caps, away from the other beers, with cheeses, crackers and “toothpicks with cellophane tips”. Pete even suggests “shorting” the displays, to make it look as if the beer is already selling well.

Continue reading “Mad Men: “A Night to Remember””

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Druckenmiller Withdraws

Billionaire businessman Stanley Druckenmiller “withdrew his offer to buy a majority stake of the Pittsburgh Steelers on Thursday, saying the Rooney family needs more time to consider its options about the future ownership of the team”. According to Yahoo!, Druckenmiller “issued a statement Thursday night saying he ‘removed himself from the process’ and that it is clear that the Rooney family, which owns the Steelers, needs more time to consider its options”. Read more here.

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette is reporting that “Art Jr. and three of his brothers, Tim, Pat and John, have a conference call scheduled late [Thursday] afternoon to discuss the two offers for their shares in the franchise, which combined total 64 percent. They have one offer from their brother Dan and his son Art II and another from billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller”.

So… if Druckenmiller has withdrawn his offer, does that mean that the Rooney brothers are going to sell out to Dan and Art II? Let’s hope so – although The PG is also reporting that the brothers might accept neither offer and seek other, higher bids at a later time… however, Art Jr. reportedly said that “I don’t see [a sale] immediately. I, Art Rooney Jr., don’t see that right now. We only have two people involved in this. We didn’t want to make a circus about it.”

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Cool Pic!

I found this cool picture online and thought I’d share. The filename is “ChileanVolcanoLarge.jpg”, and according to this article at the Daily Mail, the provenance is correct. The article says that “while scenes of molten lava are relatively commonplace, this otherworldly picture of Chaiten Volcano in southern Chile shows a truly spectacular, and devastating, volcanic phenomenon”.

(click to enlarge)
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COOL APP: iTunes Export

As I’ve said many times on this blog, iTunes is a great program for moving songs to your iPod, but it’s a crappy program for managing your music. That’s because it’s a “closed ecosystem”. As I noted in this post about iTunes Library Updater, after you install iTunes the program will scan your computer and look for music files to add to the iTunes library. Once this is done, however, there’s no way to add music to your library other than by ripping a CD with iTunes or buying music from the iTunes online store. If you want to use another program to rip your discs, or if you’d like to buy music from some other source, like Amazon’s MP3 store, you can’t add that music to your library without a third-party application like iTunes Library Updater.

I recently came across a need to export an iTunes playlist into the standard .M3U format. As you might guess, there’s no way to do this within iTunes itself, but I did find a nifty little app that can handle the task: iTunes Export.

The program is as simple as they come: just run the EXE, point it to your iTunes library, choose the iTunes playlist you want to export, then pick a destination for the new playlist. In a few seconds, you’ll get a M3U playlist (or a Windows Media (.wpl) or Zune (.zpl) playlist, if you prefer). You can then play the playlist in WinAMP or any other software player that supports M3U playlists, burn an audio CD with Nero, or copy the playlist to a portable player that supports M3U playlists.

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Monica Bellucci

Wikipedia sez:

Monica Anna Maria Bellucci (born September 30, 1964 or 1968) is an Italian actress and fashion model. Bellucci was born in Città di Castello, Umbria, Italy, the daughter of Maria Gustinelli, a painter, and Luigi Bellucci, who owned a trucking company. Bellucci started modeling at 16, when she was attending the Liceo Classico. Initially pursuing a career as a lawyer, Bellucci modeled to pay her tuition at the University of Perugia, but the lifestyle tempted her away from her law studies. She speaks Italian, French, and English fluently, Spanish semi-fluently, and she has had speaking roles in each of these languages as well as in Aramaic for her part as Mary Magdalene in The Passion of the Christ.

(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)
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“The Chick List”

Two Fridays ago, Lisa and I were at Sir Ed’s, celebrating Calvin’s birthday. At one point, Lisa brought up the subject of male celebrities that she’d sleep with. She went through her list, then the conversation moved over to Calvin, who has Shirley Manson of Garbage in slots 1-4 of his “Top 5” list.

Eventually, of course, they came around to me. Unfortunately, I was having a complete brain fart and couldn’t think of any celebrity I wanted to sleep with at the time. For one horrifying moment, I had a list… and it was empty.

So this past week I’ve kept a Notepad window open on my computer, and I’d add a name to the list as I thought of it. After a while, the list got ridiculously large. Just for fun I divided it up like a football roster: Varsity and JV squads, with first and second strings for each team and a practice squad for each, as well as “Future Draftees” and “Retired Jerseys” sections). It’s silly, but I hope you enjoy the list:

JIM’S LIST OF HAWT CELEBRITIES, FALL 2008

THE VARSITY SQUAD

The First Team

1) Angelina Jolie
2) Kelly Brook
3) Emma Pierson
4) Kate Winslet
5) Jenna Fischer
6) Scarlett Johanssen
7) Kristen Bell
8) Jill Wagner
9) Sarah Wayne Calles
10) January Jones
11) Dana Delaney
Continue reading ““The Chick List””

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American Brewers

Back in 2002, South African Breweries bought Miller Brewing, forming SABMiller. And then, in 2005, Coors merged with Canada’s Molson to form Molson Coors. And of course, earlier this year Belgian brewing giant InBev bought Anheuser-Busch. Are there any AMERICAN brewers left any more?

Look, I’m not normally one of those “BUY AMERICAN!” people. There are several reasons for this. First of all, American companies own huge chunks of foreign companies around the world, so it would be hypocritical of me to scream “BUY AMERICAN!” then complain when British people bought Sainsbury’s baked beans instead of Heinz. Secondly, global business is such that it’s hard to tell what’s “American” and what’s not these days. My maternal grandfather would never even have considered buying a “foreign” car, even if Ford owned 25% of that “foreign” company, or even if 45% of the car’s parts were made in the US and the whole thing was assembled in Tennessee. I just don’t have the time and energy to track down who owns what or where it’s made, so I just try to buy the best thing I can afford. Lastly, although I generally don’t have a problem with patriotism, there’s just something… ugly about “BUY AMERICAN!”. There’s an implicit xenophobia there, as if the Belgians are going to buy Anheuser-Busch… then take our women! As my econ professor pointed out, foreigners buy American companies because they’re a good investment, not to run them into the ground or take them home with them. Back in the 90s, there was a huge brouhaha in Atlanta over a Japanese company buying the IBM Tower… which my econ professor put into perspective by joking “What, are they gonna put it on a flatbed and take it home with them?”

Whew! With that rant done, let me get to the point of this article, which is this: now that America’s top 3 brewers are all either completely or partially foreign-owned, can you guess which are the three largest American-owned brewers?

1) The Boston Beer Company (Sam Adams)
2) Yuengling
3) Sierra Nevada

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Popeye’s Redux

PopeyesPopeye’s Chicken and Biscuits, a popular fried chicken chain here in the South, is getting a makeover. The restaurant will now be known as “Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen”, in order to better reflect its Crescent City roots.

Man… I’d kill for some of their spicy chicken, red beans and rice, green beans, and mac and cheese right now! Sadly, we don’t have any Popeye’s in Charlotte (we do have Price’s, the home of the world’s best fried chicken, but it’s too damn far away… and they don’t make a spicy version… and it’s take out only). Charlotte does have a single Church’s Chicken, but I stopped eating there once the Muslims bought it and took all the pork off the menu. Fuckers. Sigh. Bojangles it is, I guess.

For the record, Popeye’s was named after Popeye Doyle, Gene Hackman’s character in The French Connection, and not the spinach-lovin’ cartoon character.

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Tonight’s the night!

The Pittsburgh Steelers travel to Cleveland to take on the Browns at 8:15pm Eastern Time tonight.

Just for the record, “Pittsburgh leads the all-time series 57-55 (including postseason) after sweeping the Browns for the fourth consecutive year in 2007… the Steelers are 48-24 against the Browns since 1970… the Steelers are looking for their 10th straight victory over the Browns…the Steelers are 8-1 against the Browns at Cleveland Browns Stadium, which opened in 1999… the Steelers defeated the Browns, 43-0, in the first game at Cleveland’s new stadium on Sept. 12, 1999… the 112 games played between the Steelers and the Browns are the most between any two AFC teams… the Steelers have won 15 of their last 16 games against the Browns, and 22 of the last 25 contests… the Steelers have not been swept by the Browns since 1988 but have swept Cleveland five of the past six years.”

Bwahahahahahaha!! SUCK IT, BROWNIES!

(Thanks to steelers.com for the statistics)

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Kelly Brook

Wikipedia sez:

Kelly Brook (born Kelly Ann Parsons on 23 November 1979) is an English model, actress, and occasional swimwear designer and television presenter. After leaving school in Rochester, Brook studied at the Italia Conti stage school in London for three years before becoming a professional model. Kelly attended The Thomas Aveling School in Warren Wood, Rochester, Kent. Her mother is cousin to well known Lady Margeret.

(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)