Shifting topics without a clutch
First, a shout to a best friend I've never met, kdiddy, who done got hitched over the weekend. And without a hitch, too, so to speak. Huzzah! Told you it'd be fine! *kiss*
Mexico just blew a penalty kick! Arf! Call it schadenfreude, or the same word in Spanish, perhaps, but I love watching El Tri eff up. If Angola wins, Mexico's out. I think that match ended in a draw, but I just loved writing that last sentence.
There is a phishing attempt going through the Comcast user base right now. The email is a notice saying that your "Comcast Verification details records are expired", and it directs you to a URL based in Turkey. The word "immediately" in the text is misspelled "immidiatley", a sure sign of ironclad veracity. I shouldn't have to explain this to anyone on my flist, but if you should receive this, delete it unopened, or notify Comcast as soon as you get it; do not open the URL, and disable any automatic opening scripts in your email proggies and keep them disabled.
I popped two DayQuil earlier and they seem to be doing something, though I've gotten a bit dexy. That's in part due to the drugs, in part due to recovery from Geek Combat (fourth place last night, thanks to a very tricky final question once again*), and in part due to the fact that our facilities manager put decaf in the maker this morning**. I'm almost certain there's something against that in the Geneva Convention. I really need to start brewing my own, here, because even the leaded is Folger's, which sucketh muchly. There's a duo of engineer and ops tech who have their own 4-cup maker and get fine coffees, but they haven't invited me. Alright then, I did some shopping myself and found that Walgreen's, which is down the road and is becoming a common destination for me, as I find myself in need of various stuff while at work pretending I'm working, sells a 4-cup maker for ten bucks. This may become necessary.
Back in the stone knives and bearskins days when I was a kid, prior to the advent of 24-hour anything on TV, there were the weekend sports shows. They usually aired on Sundays, and were meant to fill the gap between sports seasons, or to put up as sacrificial lambs against the networks which owned broadcast rights to something worth watching. They were things like This Week in Baseball with Mel Allen, or one of the many NFL Films shows. ABC's Wide World of Sports started as one of these, and against all odds became popular enough such that a poor Slovenian ski jumper became an icon by wiping out week after week after week. (I wrote the Wikipedia article on that guy, btw.) I loved 'em. They were heaven for a sports geek - and by that I mean, a geek who also watched sports - because they couldn't get anything from any major sports league on there due to the fact that these shows were throwaways that they produced on a ridiculously shoestring budget...so they'd get bizarre, never-before-heard-of sports and televise a game or two. It's where I first saw a world-class soccer match, and where I learned about hurling, which has nothing to do with pub crawls despite the facts that a) it's played by Irishmen and b) you would almost certainly need to be chemically altered in some way to play a sport that fucked up.
Anyway, invariably, these shows would feature a segment called "You Make the Call!" In the segment, they'd play an off-the-wall boffo play that happened in a somewhat recent baseball or American football game and ask the viewer to play the ref and sort the whole thing out while going to a commercial. Then they'd give the answer afterwards. "The runningback for St. Louis takes the handoff at the 34-yard-line and sprints for an apparent touchdown...but in doing so, he inadvertantly crosses the International Date Line. Did he score for his team in the game they played yesterday? You make the call!"
So I'll leave that to dangle for a bit and briefly discuss Cher, the President of all homosexuals in America. A few years ago, Cher put out a single called "Believe". It featured an at-the-time unusual vocal effect, auto-tuning. The story, from Wikipedia, was that the producer had just bought one of these devices, and for testing purposes, or purely for a lark, he grabbed the vocal he'd recently recorded from Cher's session and ran it through. Cher heard it and immediately demanded that it be included on the single, much to the chagrin of her record company, and the rest is history. The record went to numbah one, and the result has been that everyone has used it ever since.
Of course, the story ignores the fact that Cher was in her fifties when she recorded the song, and maybe just, oh, might not have been able to hit the sustains in it. A year or two later, she conducted her (first) farewell tour. So...was it a gee-that-was-fun lark by the producer, or a clever way to cover the fact that Cher was losing it? You make the call!
While you're pondering that, let's advance things a bit further. Shakira is a singer dancer contemporary performer of some kind who invites the question, "Would you hit it?" (For further details about Shakira, contact jayel4192, who is pimping a "WWYD?" contest on another LJ; basically, that's asking the same question as above. I understand that Shakira has a high percentage of would-be doers. I also understand that whimmydiddle just posted on some of the other participants in the contest, for those whose tastes tend more towards outies than innies, so to speak - but I digress.)
Shakira currently has a single out, "Hips Don't Lie", which I believe has indeed hit number one, and is all over the airwaves as listened to by (and requested on iPod by) Kid-1...and wonder of wonders, uses precisely the same auto-tuning effect championed by Cher a few years back. Well..."precisely" is a bit of an overstatement, here. It's much, much, much more pronounced with Shakira. The song features a trumpet riff and a male rapper doing some yowsah-yowsahs to set things up (for reference, listen to anything that J.Lo has ever done)...then Shakira cuts in with the chorus. At least, we think that's Shakira. It sounds pretty much like Shakira might have dropped by the studio to order a pizza, and they caught it on tape and called in Kraftwerk to take it from there. How'd you like to be at lunch with Shakira, Ashlee Simpson, and Milli Vanilli? Can you imagine the awkward silences? You make the call!
So, let's review, shall we?
Poll You make the call on Shakira
...I did mention the drugs earlier, right? Okay.
* "Here are the three top grossing celebrities in 2005: George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Howard Stern. Put them in order in the amount of money they made last year, most to least."
** Which is why I wasn't all that bloody upset to discover that the said facilities manager actually fell for the above phishing scam, and I'm sure his personal info is floating around amongst a collection of smirking Turks even as we speak.
Mexico just blew a penalty kick! Arf! Call it schadenfreude, or the same word in Spanish, perhaps, but I love watching El Tri eff up. If Angola wins, Mexico's out. I think that match ended in a draw, but I just loved writing that last sentence.
There is a phishing attempt going through the Comcast user base right now. The email is a notice saying that your "Comcast Verification details records are expired", and it directs you to a URL based in Turkey. The word "immediately" in the text is misspelled "immidiatley", a sure sign of ironclad veracity. I shouldn't have to explain this to anyone on my flist, but if you should receive this, delete it unopened, or notify Comcast as soon as you get it; do not open the URL, and disable any automatic opening scripts in your email proggies and keep them disabled.
I popped two DayQuil earlier and they seem to be doing something, though I've gotten a bit dexy. That's in part due to the drugs, in part due to recovery from Geek Combat (fourth place last night, thanks to a very tricky final question once again*), and in part due to the fact that our facilities manager put decaf in the maker this morning**. I'm almost certain there's something against that in the Geneva Convention. I really need to start brewing my own, here, because even the leaded is Folger's, which sucketh muchly. There's a duo of engineer and ops tech who have their own 4-cup maker and get fine coffees, but they haven't invited me. Alright then, I did some shopping myself and found that Walgreen's, which is down the road and is becoming a common destination for me, as I find myself in need of various stuff while at work pretending I'm working, sells a 4-cup maker for ten bucks. This may become necessary.
Back in the stone knives and bearskins days when I was a kid, prior to the advent of 24-hour anything on TV, there were the weekend sports shows. They usually aired on Sundays, and were meant to fill the gap between sports seasons, or to put up as sacrificial lambs against the networks which owned broadcast rights to something worth watching. They were things like This Week in Baseball with Mel Allen, or one of the many NFL Films shows. ABC's Wide World of Sports started as one of these, and against all odds became popular enough such that a poor Slovenian ski jumper became an icon by wiping out week after week after week. (I wrote the Wikipedia article on that guy, btw.) I loved 'em. They were heaven for a sports geek - and by that I mean, a geek who also watched sports - because they couldn't get anything from any major sports league on there due to the fact that these shows were throwaways that they produced on a ridiculously shoestring budget...so they'd get bizarre, never-before-heard-of sports and televise a game or two. It's where I first saw a world-class soccer match, and where I learned about hurling, which has nothing to do with pub crawls despite the facts that a) it's played by Irishmen and b) you would almost certainly need to be chemically altered in some way to play a sport that fucked up.
Anyway, invariably, these shows would feature a segment called "You Make the Call!" In the segment, they'd play an off-the-wall boffo play that happened in a somewhat recent baseball or American football game and ask the viewer to play the ref and sort the whole thing out while going to a commercial. Then they'd give the answer afterwards. "The runningback for St. Louis takes the handoff at the 34-yard-line and sprints for an apparent touchdown...but in doing so, he inadvertantly crosses the International Date Line. Did he score for his team in the game they played yesterday? You make the call!"
So I'll leave that to dangle for a bit and briefly discuss Cher, the President of all homosexuals in America. A few years ago, Cher put out a single called "Believe". It featured an at-the-time unusual vocal effect, auto-tuning. The story, from Wikipedia, was that the producer had just bought one of these devices, and for testing purposes, or purely for a lark, he grabbed the vocal he'd recently recorded from Cher's session and ran it through. Cher heard it and immediately demanded that it be included on the single, much to the chagrin of her record company, and the rest is history. The record went to numbah one, and the result has been that everyone has used it ever since.
Of course, the story ignores the fact that Cher was in her fifties when she recorded the song, and maybe just, oh, might not have been able to hit the sustains in it. A year or two later, she conducted her (first) farewell tour. So...was it a gee-that-was-fun lark by the producer, or a clever way to cover the fact that Cher was losing it? You make the call!
While you're pondering that, let's advance things a bit further. Shakira is a singer dancer contemporary performer of some kind who invites the question, "Would you hit it?" (For further details about Shakira, contact jayel4192, who is pimping a "WWYD?" contest on another LJ; basically, that's asking the same question as above. I understand that Shakira has a high percentage of would-be doers. I also understand that whimmydiddle just posted on some of the other participants in the contest, for those whose tastes tend more towards outies than innies, so to speak - but I digress.)
Shakira currently has a single out, "Hips Don't Lie", which I believe has indeed hit number one, and is all over the airwaves as listened to by (and requested on iPod by) Kid-1...and wonder of wonders, uses precisely the same auto-tuning effect championed by Cher a few years back. Well..."precisely" is a bit of an overstatement, here. It's much, much, much more pronounced with Shakira. The song features a trumpet riff and a male rapper doing some yowsah-yowsahs to set things up (for reference, listen to anything that J.Lo has ever done)...then Shakira cuts in with the chorus. At least, we think that's Shakira. It sounds pretty much like Shakira might have dropped by the studio to order a pizza, and they caught it on tape and called in Kraftwerk to take it from there. How'd you like to be at lunch with Shakira, Ashlee Simpson, and Milli Vanilli? Can you imagine the awkward silences? You make the call!
So, let's review, shall we?
Poll You make the call on Shakira
...I did mention the drugs earlier, right? Okay.
* "Here are the three top grossing celebrities in 2005: George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Howard Stern. Put them in order in the amount of money they made last year, most to least."
** Which is why I wasn't all that bloody upset to discover that the said facilities manager actually fell for the above phishing scam, and I'm sure his personal info is floating around amongst a collection of smirking Turks even as we speak.