Their Super Bowl coverage sums it up:
As the once-invincible, still-insufferable Patriots attempt to come to grips with their 17-14 Super Bowl loss to the Giants, the death of their dream to go undefeated, and the possible end of their dynasty, almost every other person in America is reveling in what they consider the perfect ending to New England’s season.
“Got more than one checked bag? That’ll be $25 each.”
Isabella Rossellini is doing bug porn. And more. Via JWZ.
The choice between security and privacy is one our officials have been making quite a lot since 9/11, but they’re framing the discussion in a completely wrong way. The real question is liberty vs. control. Go, read, and share, and keep in mind that all governments eventually abuse the powers they’re given.
Mark Pilgrim has his version of the perennial “Incoming Freshmen’s Worldview” list up, but focussed mostly on computing. Some picks:
An “Apple computer” has always meant a “Macintosh computer.”
Apple computers have always had USB ports and never had floppy drives.
Windows has always supported long filenames and pre-emptive multitasking.
Oops.
LONDON (Reuters) – A chain of retail stores in Britain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active pre-teens.
BoingBoing Gadgets covers their picks; we just want to say that the first one they list was one of our favorites back in the day (497 Galactic Explorer FTW!).
Brits are stupid, too. Apparently a full quarter of them think Churchill was a myth.
How’s 18-1 taste?
Heathen Central would like to point out our favorite NFL name, Plaxico Burress, bagged the go-ahead TD for New York. We also, of course, enjoy the back-to-back Manning wins, as the Heathen Homeland is also the Manning Homeland.
BTW, how cheesy is it that Belichick left the field before the game was over? He’s a fucking class act, that one. Eat it, Bill.
It’s no surprise that the NFL, like any large corporation, seeks to abuse its copyrights willy-nilly to prevent anyone from doing anything that might have anything to do with their business. Hell, we’re talking about a group that sued churches last year for having Super Bowl parties with TVs larger than 55″. Seriously. The linked article details more of their absurd chicanery; we urge you to avoid their sponsors whenever possible on the grounds that apparently the whole organization is run by fuckwits.
However, there is a funny part to this, hinging on some serious New England hubris:
This year, the big news … is that the New England Patriots have applied for a trademark on “19-0” to represent the undefeated season the team will have if it wins this season. The NY Post, snarky as ever, filed for a trademark on 18-1 in response, supporting the home town NY Giants.
Awesome.
Some sad-sack ratings-seeking “consumer” reporter at the Jackson TV station (“Kandiss Crone,” who appears to be trying to live up to her surname) has done a hard-hitting expose on the fact that an adult bookstore was selling illegal sex toys. Madcap hilarity ensues, probably because it’s hard for anyone who’s not a TV news douchebag (or raving nutbird fundie) to supply even fake outrage over violations of such a ridiculous prohibition. Really, Kandiss? This is the best you can do?
Perhaps our favorite part is this quote from Jackson Vice, supplied when Crone went to JPD for comment: “The adult store is not a priority for our vice and narcotics officers. We will do the best we can. Citizens would rather see us using our resources to get drugs and prostitutes off our streets and work to decrease violent crime.”
Believe it or not, it’s therefore the State the comes off (marginally) better here. The “news” dorks, however, remain worthless wastes of oxygen.
(Via BB.)
(Sidenote: the anchor in the first part of the story, one Howard Ballou, was the m.c. a couple years back for the JDRF gala we attend. When introduced (“Heathen, this is Howard Ballou, he’s our MC tonight” was all I got), I had no idea who he was. I shook his hand and made with the cocktail chat, which — much to my brother’s amusement — included me asking about his line of work. If you ever want to have fun with these pseudocelebs, apparently one of the best ways to make them nearly spit-take is to be unaware of their identity.)
This longish discussion of retcons in comics is quite a read.
A retcon, for those of you too lazy to follow the link, is a device used in long-form narratives to RETroactively change the CONtinuity of the story. Because comics are among the longest narratives we have, it comes up a lot in that world.
For nongeeks, perhaps the most widely known retcon came at the end of Dallas‘s 1985-86 season, when Pam found Bobby in the shower — which rendered the entire season a terrible, terrible dream. A more drastic retcon just happened to James Bond, as Casino Royale is the story of an operative only just promoted to 00-status; for Daniel Craig’s Bond, there has been no SMERSH or SPECTRE, no Cold War, no undersea madmen, no Goldfinger, no marriage to Diana Rigg, and, sadly, no Octopussy. (Bond’s retcon is a drastic enough example to warrant being called a reboot, but that’s just a special type of retcon.) Comic retcons are typically (but not always) less ham-handed, but it’s this sort of shift.
Comics, unlike soaps, are faced with an undeniable need for retcons, precisely because they’re long-running but also, at least to a point, at least somewhat frozen in amber [1]. If they didn’t keep shifting or handwaving about some aspects of Superman’s backstory, for example, we’d be dealing with a decidedly geriatric Man of Steel; at his introduction in 1938, he was supposedly in his late 20s, which puts his birth at about 1910[2]. I’m pretty sure the current comic incarnation isn’t supposed to be 98 years old. Even Spiderman would be at least middle aged if his story moved in real time; he was a student in 1962.
To add to the complexity, comic publishers are forever having crossover events where Batman and Superman team up to fight Evil Dude X, which means their continuities are blended; a retcon for one will necessarily affect the other. In the persistent world of the DC (or Marvel) universe, this gets very complicated very quickly.
Anyway, that’s a retcon. Check out the first link for discussions of them done well (Frank Miller’s work on Daredevil; they actually skip my favorite) and badly (pretty much the last 20 years of the Legion of Super Heros), all through the lens of the gawdawful bullshit they’re pulling with Spiderman these days. (There’s a literal deal with the Devil that undoes pretty much the last 2 or 3 decades. I shit you not.).
(Via Wil.)
Notes:
1. An amusing example of retconning is ongoing with the Simpsons, who have taken being frozen in time very seriously. The show’s nearly twenty, so flashbacks to teen/early 20s time periods for Marge and Homer have ratcheted from the 70s through the 80s and into the 90s.
2. The cinematic Supes has also been retconned, and recently: Superman Returns is itself a bit of a retcon in that it branches off the film continuity after Superman II, and renders moot all subsequent Reeve films.)
The following is a list of the electrical items which can be used without incident simultaneously in my office:
The following is a list of the electrical items which, when used simultaneously, will cause a breaker to flip:
That is all.
In this live video of Dave Brubek’s band, it is undeniable that Joe Morello is a god. Watch the whole thing. The drum solo is astounding.
Because the iPhone uses the same charging system as my iPod, my capitulation means I have to carry one fewer charger when traveling — and that, in the event of a loss, replacing it will be significantly easier, since it’s easier to find an iPod dealer than a cell phone shop with the ProprietaryCharger du Jour in stock.
“Hey, let’s make Stephen Hawking out of LEGO!”
The Navy now has railguns.
Actually, it’s not just Kansas. We can see this cartoon applying pretty much anywhere there are raving nutbird fundies.
In which I discuss and comment upon the new toy.
We finally have a counterpoint for the dramatic chipmunk. Enjoy.
So I didn’t buy an iPhone last summer. Instead, I worked up a head of steam over “no 3rd party dev” and “walled garden” and “no 3G” and “no physical keyboard” and got something else that met my steam-headed criteria, and which I immediately found wanting. I’m sure the good folks at HTC aren’t completely to blame here, since the hardware is pretty much fine, but holy shit is Windows Mobile ever made of FAIL. As an example, here’s how you close a program in WinMo:
No word of it a lie. Seriously. How in the big blue FUCK did Windows Mobile get to version 5 with this kind of shit in it? Is there NO QA or usability testing up there?
Also, the whole 3G thing? Wholly overblown, and — crucially — way ahead of the battery curve. Usable life on the WinMo phone was less than a full business day, and woe unto you if you hit a web page and then forget to kill the browser, as you may well look down at the phone at 2:30 in the afternoon and discover it begging for juice because the browser is too stupid to stop refreshing web pages when the display is off.
Sure, the phone did have some features an iPhone lacks, but ended up being so frustrating to use, and so unreliable, that I never did any of those things. In fact, some modern phone features — sending snapshots to Flickr, sending quickie SMS — were so much harder to do on it compared to my last two phones (a RAZR and a Treo 650) that I actually stopped doing them, more or less. Again: EPIC FAIL.
Today, about 8 months into my contract (with ATT, fortunately), I gave up and bought an iPhone. You know what? It just fucking works. It synced with my Mac out of the box (admittedly, only of interest to other Mac people, but being able to kick these losers to the curb is a fringe benefit), but I suspect the out of the box experience on Windows isn’t that much different. It synced down my mail config, so I didn’t have to key in IMAP servers and ports and whatnot, even.
Oh, apparently, it also plays music and videos, but frankly I couldn’t care less about that. I’ve got an 80 gig iPod; another 8 isn’t even interesting. And the iPhone is good enough at being a PDA that having the music and movie options is just gravy.
Nationwide, the 2007 foreclosure rate was 79% over the 2006 rate.
In Texas, though, the 2007 rate was 4.6% LOWER than the 2006 rate. Less speculative real estate price runups –> fewer folks overstretching to buy a modest home –> fewer folks in fuck-you ARMs –> fewer folks getting screwed now –> fewer folks in foreclosure. Score.
Problogger Heather Armstrong and her husband Jon are good reads, but the real gravy is when they post pictures like this.
It occurs to us that, at a certain point, the growing commodification of culture coupled with the gradual yet inexorable physical decline of their aging fanbase will cause someone closely related to the band to notice that there is a natural advertising licensing opportunity for a particular song from Radiohead’s early catalog, and that soon thereafter — we’ll bet 2020 or so — we’ll see adult diaper ads on television to the tune of “Baby’s Got Depends.” Possibly even with Thom Yorke as a spokesman.
How about a canned cheeseburger?
That being the case, someone please get us this $300, 4100 lumen flashlight that is capable of setting things on fire.
Whoever is doing the Skittles campaign is deeply weird.
Obama entered the South Proper, and routed Clinton tonight, 55% to 27%. Native son Edwards pulled in third. Iowa was not a fluke. According to CNN, Sen. Obama pulled more than 290,000 votes — nearly as much as all votes cast in the 2004 primary. He’s now got 63 delegates, vs. Sen. Clinton’s 48 and Sen. Edwards’ 26.
One defense a small party has against a huge corporate SLAPP suit (or any bogus suit, particularly in this age of over-reaching copyright claims) is the publicize the legal bullying, and the first step has traditionally been to share the ill-considered and legally bogus cease-and-desist letters with the Internet at large, so that everyone can see what fucktards Big Company X is being.
Large corporate interests would prefer their bullying not be so widely known, so they’ve been working to try to find a way to keep it all quiet, inspired no doubt by the whole national security letter bullshit promulgated by the Bush administration. One particularly absurd argument is that the letters are copyrighted material, and that unauthorized distribution is an infringement on that copyright. This ought not even pass the risibility test, but, sadly, some judge has actually bought the argument.
If this ruling stands, the implications for free speech in America are dire indeed.
Of the many fine restaurants with the Heathen Seal of Approval, one of our personal favorites is the DC-area tapas (no, not topless) joint Jaleo, named for the striking Sargent painting hanging in (but thankfully not stolen from) the Isabella Gardner museum in Boston (small pic at right; the real deal is more than 7 feet tall and 11 feet long; go see it). Their food is fantastic, but their sangria is out of this world.
They’ve had enough success, even, that Jaleo has locations outside the District, in Bethesda and — and this is where the trouble comes in — in Virginia. As it turns out, Virginia still has post-prohibition-era laws that make it illegal to mix hard liquor and beer or wine, which means the sangria in the Virginia locations is, well, a crappy approximation of the real thing. People have noticed this bullshit law, and there’s an effort to change it, but the real shocker is that there apparently some goatfuckers in the Virginia legislature who think the law’s fine the way it is.
At least it’s not Mississippi.
Via a review in the New Yorker, we discover that up-and-coming actor Chiwetel Ejiofor (American Gangster, Inside Man, Children of Men, and, most notably at our house, Serenity) is in a production of Othello in London. Ewan McGregor is Iago. The run has been sold out for a while; tickets now go for $1500.
The same article notes something we find astounding: Laurence Fishburne‘s 1995 adaptation was the first film version in which the title role was played by a black man.
Photo documentation of the JDRF gala is now on HeathenFlickr.
Look. I’ve been at this a long time. Heathen’s more than seven years old already, and we were looking at weird shit on the Internet a long time before that, or even before most of you knew it was there.
All that said, this is the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever seen on the web.
Here’s a handy list of dos and don’ts you should probably keep on your person. Enjoy.
A Nebraska deputy pulled seized $69,000 during a routine traffic stop during which the driver was neither arrested nor ticketed.
Investigators don’t know if they will be able to connect the money to a drug operation, [Sheriff Tim] Hanson said, but the important work already has been done.
“The big thing is he grabbed 69 (thousand dollars) and took it away from them,” Hanson said of the money seized. “That’s going right straight to the heart of the matter.”
No, Tim, the heart of the matter is that you just stole money without any judicial oversight, finding of guilt, or other evidence. The heart of the matter is that you presumed a large amount of cash was illicit with no other indicators that was the case. The heart of the matter is that you’re making it de facto illegal to have a bunch of cash, unless the owner can prove the money is legit. That’s a long-ass way from “innocent until proven guilty,” don’t you think?
The heart of the matter is that asset forfeiture rules allow so-called law enforcement agencies to profit by confiscating what they want from suspects without trial or recourse. The heart of the matter, Timmy boy, is that people like you and your jackbooted deputy are causing far more harm to our nation than the drugs you claim you’re so zealously fighting.
(Via Radley.)
Cracked.com gives us the Internet Party, a quick little video about a cocktail gathering amongst anthropomorphized Web 2.0 properties. I promise you’ll giggle at least a little.
You should go here and search for “martians” and “telephone.”
…and hello to waaay more police misconduct. At least, that’s the way Radley Balko reads the upcoming Supreme Court ruling. The case, involving a Virginia man stopped for speeding who was found to be driving on a suspended license:
Virginia law bars police from making arrests for misdemeanor traffic offenses. In this case, the cops illegally arrested the guy, then forced him to take them back to his hotel room. There they searched him, and found some crack in his pocket, for which he was arrested and convicted.
The Virginia Supreme court threw out the conviction, explaining that evidence obtained from a search following an illegal arrest can’t be used at trial. The state of Virginia appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. From the tone of the questioning this week, it looks as if the Roberts court is prepared to rule for the state–that evidence seized in searches resulting from illegal arrests should be admissible at trial. Which means the court is well on its way to either overturning the Exclusionary Rule, or limiting it to the point where it’s basically useless. Virginia’s attorney general was asked if, consistent with this case, someone could be (illegally arrested) for jaywalking, then have his home searched pursuant to that illegal arrest, then have the evidence found in the search used against him at trial. He said yes.
Previous court rulings have held that evidence gleaned from illegal searches must be excluded at trial, on the grounds that no other set of rules is likely to produce sufficient motivation for police to act properly. Segments of the Court, particularly Scalia, have disagreed, and seem poised to do so again. Balko continues:
I’ve argued that while the Exclusionary Rule isn’t perfect, it’s necessary, because it’s really the only effective deterrent to Fourth Amendment abuses. History has shown us that bad cops in fact aren’t properly disciplined by their departments or by prosecutors. The doctrine of qualified immunity and the tendency of judges, jurors, and police administrators to show deference to police, victims of illegal searches and excessive police tactics rarely if ever recover any damages–if their case is fortunate enough to even get by summary judgement.
Which brings me back to the Virginia case argued before the Court this week. The state of Virginia and the U.S. government (siding with Virginia against the Fourth Amendment) once again brought up the argument that disciplining and firing police officers who perform unlawful searches is a better remedy than the Exclusionary Rule.
That raised the question: What happened to the police who performed the illegal search in this particular case? NPR found the answer (listen to the tail-end of the audio). Not only were they not disciplined, one of the officers was named his city’s “Cop of the Year”–the same year he took part in the illegal search.
THIS is the kind of court we get when you fuckers vote GOP. Stop it.
Check out this big from the Jon Stewart show. Belly performs.
No, not The Daily Show; Stewart’s original talk show on MTV, back in the early 90s.
(Color’s awful, but still. Hat tip to MAD.)
Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the Fucking Fucker, made completely of NOS tubes.
Last summer we pointed out the storage-stairs, but now we find that these angular space-saving stairs may be even cooler.
An artist has created a shitting machine into which food is placed, and which thereby converts said food into something very like shit.
Mrs Heathen hates it, but Conan does it on TV, so we see no reason to stop now:
Remember that Federal case about California attempting to demand higher emissions standards from cars and trucks, and the EPA trying to stop them? Yeah, well, in the resulting lawsuit, the EPA is asserting Executive Privilege to avoid turning over unredacted materials, which basically makes the discovery process useless. Bush-Cheney’s 7 year Imperial Presidency is a cancer on our republic, and it’s clearly still metastasizing. It’s going to be a long year.
Three new sets over at HeathenFlickr:
Enjoy.
For Christmas, the Horne Heathen Collective gifted me with a fascinating book about football called The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis. Lewis we knew; he’d written, among other things, Liar’s Poker, about the culture of bond salesmen on Wall Street in the 1980s. Lewis’ work reads like long-form magazine articles, in depth and highly interesting, so I tore into it immediately.
I finished it about 48 hours later. It’s a strong and compelling book comprised of two main narratives: first, the development of modern NFL tactics and strategy, with an emphasis on the so-called West Coast Offense (precision, timed short passes to precise routes, basically, which turned passing into something drastically more important than it was previously) pioneered by Bill Walsh, and second (and most importantly) the story of Michael Oher, a nearly feral African-American kid growing up in Memphis. Oher has no real parents, and basically lived by his wits and attended school only occasionally until a family friend, fulfilling a wish from his own child’s dying grandmother, ended up taking them to a suburban Christian school in the hopes they’d actually get an education there. Oher has essentially no educational background to build on, but when the small school’s football coach saw him — six and a half feet tall, nearly 350 pounds, hugely powerful, but with running-back speed — they figured out a way to admit him.
Somewhere along the way, the parents of another Briarcrest child took notice of Michael. Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy first clothed and fed, then housed, and finally adopted Michael more or less because it needed doing, and they had the means. They took it upon themselves to help Michael catch up academically — and athletically. Playing organized football for the first time as a junior, Oher was immediately a standout; by his senior year, he was being actively courted by virtually every big-name collegiate program in the country because his size, speed, and skills made him a perfect fit for the “blind side” of the offensive line in the new post-Walsh world of the NFL. The new world order needed big, fast, smart men on the quarterback’s non-dominant side, which typically means the left. Defensive players like Lawrence Taylor (don’t remember him? Joe Theismann’s leg does) had made a game of sacking quarterbacks, and the offense had to have an answer for them. In the years since, the Left Tackle position has become the second highest paid job in football, behind only the quarterback. Oher couldn’t fit this role any better if he’d been engineered in a lab.
Oher is now in his junior year at Ole Miss, and has been contemplating his future these last few weeks. With three years behind him, he’s eligable for the draft, and is widely considered to be a first or second round prospect. His coach is gone, replaced by Arkansas’ Houston Nutt. Many folks thought he’d go pro, and in fact he initially indicated his intent to do so — but then took advantage of the 72-hour regret period. As it happens, Oher will play SEC football next year after all. I can think of lots of reasons why he might prefer this, among them the prospect of a better season (Ole Miss was helpless this year even with Oher’s All-American, All-SEC heroics). However, after growing up without a family, and then suddenly getting one as supportive and devoted as the Tuohys, I also wonder if the prospect of the NFL isn’t a bit much for Oher just yet. Oxford is close to Memphis, and in fact the Tuohys own a house there as well. Why not be a kid one more year? It’s worth noting that Oher’s prospects aren’t as stark as they would have been had he come to Ole Miss from poverty; he doesn’t need NFL money to buy his parents a home, or a car, or take care of any relatives. He has no real kin other than the Tuohys, and Sean’s bankroll is sufficient for all of them. That gives Oher options.
It also means Ole Miss will be more fun to watch in 2008, and that can’t be bad.
Anyway, read the book. Many smart people, including Malcom Gladwell, are fond of this book; you won’t be sorry. However, we are very concerned about the movie buzz surrounding Lewis’ work. For one thing, there are few plausibly teenaged 6′ 6″ 300+ pound actors in Hollywood.
Security Guru Bruce Schneier has a couple winners this week:
What do Chicago-fire era public fire alarm boxes and modern-day geiger counter regulations in NYC have in common? At the time of the Chicago fire, the public boxes were kept locked to prevent false alarms; as a consequence, the first alarm wasn’t pulled until the fire was already raging out of control. Today, in NYC, it’s against the law for private citizens to own or use chemical, biological, or radiological hazard for precisely the same reason. If there was a lesson learned in Chicago, it’s clearly been forgotten by the NYC authorities.
Bruce runs his network naked: “Whenever I talk or write about my own security setup, the one thing that surprises people — and attracts the most criticism — is the fact that I run an open wireless network at home. There’s no password. There’s no encryption. Anyone with wireless capability who can see my network can use it to access the internet.” Read more.
“When Governments Put Together Big Databases On People, They Get Abused.” Word. It’s really just a corollary to the fact that any power given to government will get abused. Behave accordingly.
