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Pelosi Blinks
Check out how often Nancy Pelosi blinks - about once per second. The president blinks at a more relaxed pace of once every 3-5 seconds and then there’s Cheney, who’s robot eyes never need to be refreshed. [youtube]YzhJXQLxxZs[/youtube] If you watched the speech in high-def (wider and more detailed coverage!) then this was pretty obvious throughout the entire speech.
On a somewhat unrelated note, an NPR analyst described the war in Iraq as a morass, which I think is a very appropriate way to characterize the situation.
Corn Runs the World
This week and last, news outlets have mentioned the rising price of tortillas in Mexico. It seems humorous on the surface but tortillas are the staple food of Mexico’s poor and the 14% increase in prices for the commodity in the past year, as compared to the country’s 4% inflation, is significant for many. Tortillas have increased in price because the white corn from which they are made has similarly increased in value due in part to the increased demand for yellow corn that is used to make ethanol.
One of the authors of Freaknomics, Stephen Dubner, recently mentioned in his blog that these increase in corn prices stem from the high price of oil, which bolsters demand for ethanol. Anyone who has read The Omnivore’s Dillema knows that corn is the basis for nearly all industrially produced food in the United States. Could Dubner be right that this oil prices could lead to less obese Americans through a convoluted chain of corn?
GQ Style Guy archives
I found the archives of the GQ Style Guy today, which has answered numerous style questions I had. It’s also peppered with some serious wit:
The only people doomed to pulling off pills [from a sweater] one by one are those in hell who, while they were alive, washed my cashmere socks in hot water and then put them in the dryer.
UFC Advertisement on FoodTV
Generally the commercials shown on TV are targeted at the viewers of the channel or show in question. Can anyone explain why I see UFC ads on FoodTV? Is there really much overlap in their viewing demographics?
Formula 1 car playing God Save the Queen
They have to test and warm up F1 engines somehow:
mythbackend startup error
My MythTV installation hasn’t been working for a couple of weeks and I hadn’t gotten around to fixing it until today; shows you how much TV matters to me when I’m busy. It was a really easy error to fix - simply a crashed table which was quick to diagnose and fix even though I hadn’t ever encountered anything of the sort before. For Google-searchers, the error from mythbackend was as follows:
<snip>
2006-11-28 17:38:35.805 DB Error (UpdateMatches):
Query was:
DELETE FROM program WHERE manualid = -1 OR (manualid <> 0 AND -1 = -1)
Driver error was [2/145]:
QMYSQL3: Unable to execute query
Database error was:
Table './mythconverg/program' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
</snip>
To fix it, I simply had to login to the database, ‘use mythconverg;’, and issue the command 'repair table program;’. As noted below, make sure you see those semicolons. Simple.
French movie with freerunning
I don’t know what this movie is, but it has a really good freerunning scene in it:
Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
A friend made me a CD a few weeks ago and included a sublime rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and What a Wonderful World, but he didn’t know who the artist was. I heard the same song on a commercial for Rice Krispies today while watching CNN. I quickly went to my computer and used Google to dispatch a query through the tubes of The Internet which led me to this Yahoo! Answers page that solved the mystery. Apparently the song was also featured in 50 First Dates.
The song is by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, who is certainly not who you’d expect if you hear the very ethereal nature of his rendition. Iz, made numerous albums in the style of his native Hawaii often advocating Hawaiian independence. His music features a lot of ukulele, much like Jake Shimabukuro, who has also grabbed my interest recently.
Piracy is good?
Though about a year and a half old, this is a very good article (and presentation; scroll down) about the positive effect that piracy can have. Written by Mark Pesce, this is a case study of how Battlestar Galactica’s distribution via BitTorrent changed the viewership of that show; bringing it to Americans before the scheduled release and to Australia where it wasn’t set to be available at all. Further, he goes on to explore the ways that advertisers can still profit from this model that cuts out television networks who normally marry shows with advertisements.
We now live in a time where many people (myself included) don’t know or care when the shows they want to watch are broadcast or what channel they are one. If you simply get your TV from the internet, the channel and time simply don’t matter. Nor do the advertisements, which are normally snipped from interweb-released shows. Are we soon to see TV funded by product placement, layover placards and bugs?
Borat
I saw Borat this weekend and though I would say it was good, it feels like a stretch to make the character’s exploits into a full-length film. I think I’ll see Sacha Baron Cohen’s next movie when it comes out on DVD. Also, see this interesting piece on how Borat’s portrayal of Kazakhstan compares to the real nation.