One thing I really like about the show King of the Hill is the clever use of names. For example, the massive, oppressive Walmart equivalent on the show is the Mega Lo Mart. This works both at the character level - you can imagine the owners talking about how their prices are not just low, but mega-low - and also at the audience level, by evoking ( Read more... )

Today I was poking around in Google’s archives of rec.arts.sf.fandom, the Usenet group where I spent most of my online time back before blogging took off. I was looking for a thread from October 2000 in which one poster had asked anti-Bush people to make some predictions of what sort of negative consequences would follow a Bush victory. (Yeah, lots ( Read more... )

Google Video: Search recent TV programs online. (Set your ZIP code in the preferences.)

Jon Stewart being interview by Ken Auletta on C-SPAN, and then answering questions from a bunch of media people. RealMedia stream, about an hour.

I’m missing the Obama-Keyes debate on CSpan2!

Whuf. There’s a whole bunch of stuff I want to write now, but I’m too tired. My father had bypass surgery today, and I was up at 4:30 AM to accompany my parents to the hospital. The surgery went well, and he’s doing about as well as you’d expect some to be doing who’s had that kind of surgery ( Read more... )

I watched the first half of Zell Miller’s speech at the GOP convention before I couldn’t take anymore, and not just because the compression of the video stream made it seem like the turncoat was being applauded by an army of giant alien insects. Then, minutes ago at the pizza parlor, I heard a bit of an old speech by some al Qaeda bigwig, and I ( Read more... )

So there was this TV show, right? A pretty blonde California girl has special powers. Her father has departed before the series starts, but her mother’s still around. And a sister who unexpectedly turns up later. Mostly she gets by with the help of her goofy male friend, who’s too brother-like to be a romantic interest, and an older mentor ( Read more... )

BoingBoing linked to this great article examining the economic underpinnings of Gilligan’s Island, “The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell III”. Along the way, the author passes along this bizarre observation:
After the invasion of Iraq, there was no more central bank printing dinars and no more Iraqi government to put the fiat behind its fiat ( Read more... )

Trying to calibrate my laptop’s battery by running it all the way down. The indicator’s been showing a tiny sliver of red for like half an hour now, and I got the shutting down in a few minutes if you don’t plug me in message like ten minutes ago, but it’s still going.

And here’s a link to the Videos page for the Democratic Convention, if you ( Read more... )