Great parody, something I think we can all relate to on some level.

So a friend at work sent along this link, in reference to a specific skit from the UK children’s television show “Rainbow”.

Pretty disturbing, to say the least. But I also kinda recognize it (well, not too much of a surprise, since 70’s-80’s were pretty formulaic and this show in particular was considered to be the UK’s version of our “Sesame Street”). That said, I don’t remember seeing anything like this ever happening on “Sesame Street”.

Absolutely necessary for those folks whose Powerbooks are out of warranty (and don’t really want to pay exorbitant prices on repair work that they’re comfortable doing themselves). Courtesy of Macintouch.

Voting activists yesterday enlisted computer experts, a trained monkey and a man on a hunger strike in a last-minute pitch to convince officials to improve the security of electronic vote-counting systems.

Yeah, I thought it was a joke too, but it’s a Reuters piece. And, ultimately, it’s just not funny.

Garrison Keillor is pissed. Pretty great piece, even if you’re a little allergic to paragraph-long sentences.

So Dave just sent me his recent post on the possible reinstatement of the military draft, which is certainly scary enough. I was a little surprised that I didn’t send him along this article when I tripped over it in May - one might think that little revelation might have a more extended reach…

OK, maybe it’s just me, but do you really think that having a celebrity who just got out of widely-reported treatment for an eating disorder promote a fast-food company’s wares to children is the best idea? Check it out - for those who are a little rusty on their French, choose “Entrez” to enter the site, then click on “En Familie”, which will allow you to select “Happy Meal Kid Paddle MaryKate and Ashley” from a drop-down menu. “Voir la pub” lets you view the commercial promoting the Happy Meal (but the Olsen twins are not in it), whereas “Découvrir les jouets” shows you what comes with the ‘Meal.

You folks know that I’m the LAST person to follow professional sports of any kind - notably the popular ones, like baseball (at least, until the Red Sox are about to choke going into - or during - the World Series). That said, I do occasionally watch TV - broadcast news, even. Well, color me surprised when I saw the severely-arrogantly-named opinion segment, “The World According to Gary”, by Gary Radnich on KRON (you know, those locals out there, the rechristened “Bay Area News Station”-because-we-lost-our-NBC-affiliation?). This guy went off on the recent Oakland A’s-Texas Rangers brawl in which a fan got “Geraldo-ed” and said while the fan should sue for as much money as she could get (my eyes began to roll there), that all of this is really the fault of the fans. Sure, he admitted, the behavior exhibited by Frank Francisco was inexcusable. But fans shouldn’t heckle! He’d been around his fair share of pro athletes and these guys make ridiculous amounts of money and they’ve led sheltered lives since their teens. So fans shouldn’t heckle.

I’m sorry, but the few games I’ve gone to and everything I’ve grown to know about baseball is that heckling is part of the deal. It always was. His opinion piece struck me as if nobody had heckled at a baseball game until that woman’s husband opened his mouth that night. Heck, the classic baseball movies always have scenes of heckling. I know you can’t presume that if you see it in a movie that it’s real, but all those filmmakers must have gotten inspiration for those scenes somewhere…

From what I’ve been seeing around the web and such, for some odd reason, everybody agrees with this “blame the fan” theory. I just don’t get it. Fortunately it doesn’t seem as though I’m alone here, as someone who gets a lot more eyeballs than me (nevermind the fact is way more informed on sports), has written a more eloquent response to this theory. Personally, I find this partial-defense of Francisco appalling. I’ve never been comfortable with pro baseball players since the strike way back when, and for someone to excuse Francisco’s behavior because he’s rich and “special” in some way is just sickening. Like Kaufman wrote, if you can’t handle the heckling - get another job. Lord knows you shouldn’t be priviledged enough to earn your living playing a game.

A month or so ago, I was talking with a guy in my pace group during a run about politics in general and at one point I made a flippant remark about how the Electoral College system for our general election is an outdated & rotten one that should be trashed - a position he disagreed with. While neither he, nor I, had any particular specifics to convince the other at the time (I’m kinda amazed that we were able to discuss the topic given the fact that I think we were running 16 miles at the time), it’s something that’s kind of hung in the back of my mind. For those friends that follow politics in a way that informs them as to the general workings of the Electoral College and its weaknesses, this was the first time in recent memory that I could recall speaking with someone who didn’t have a problem with the EC.

I was just skimming through some old posts (as previously mentioned) and tripped over the “Quote of the Day” discussion Erik Barzeski of NS(Log); was having about the EC. I only sporadically visit his blog primarily because a lot of his interests (hunting, golf, etc) are not mine and I don’t really agree with his views on politics (Why do I go there? Well, he does have some interesting posts & I’m always interested in seeing what percolates in the minds of other Mac folks), but the discussion reminded me of this earlier discussion. While Erik suggests that the EC is pretty screwed up in its proportionality (which I agree with), he initially suggests a “fix” that just blew my mind due to the fact that it would fix nothing. In the comments, he eventually comes around to my own personal viewpoint - why shouldn’t we abolish the EC and move to a popular vote? With the crisis in abysmal voter turn-out, why keep in place that which pretty much reinforces the unlikely-voter’s impression: that ultimately, no, that individual’s vote doesn’t really count?

Alternatively, why not move to instant runoff elections (a.k.a ranked choice)? I remember first hearing about such a proposal when Peter Camejo was running for governor with the whole California recall mess - it’s a system that the Green Party backs (surprise, surprise). Basically, you rank the candidates in order of preference whom you think should get the job. Once the polls close, they count each candidate’s #1 votes and if there is no majority winner, they toss the candidate with least number of #1’s. The #2’s from those ballots then get redistributed to the other candidates. Ballots are recounted and the process begins anew until there is a clear majority winner. This way everyone’s vote is counted and there aren’t any spoiler candidates (read: Nader). In fact, I had just found out in researching this that San Francisco has implemented this system for their local elections.

In kinda-related news, Colorado is considering moving from a winner-take-all to a proportional approach for their EC votes.

Catching up on some reading and came across this post at Daily Kos: Bush goes negative on Jesus

Who the heck douses themselves in cologne right before they run a few laps on the track? I’m talking about leaving a stench-trail of at least 30′.

A service Sean pointed out back in August that never really particularly impressed me (I have more than my fair share of coniption fits whenever they hike the rates for regular postage), Stamps.com’s PhotoStamps customized stamps service just got poked and prodded by The Smoking Gun.

I honestly can’t say what my reaction would be if I got a letter from someone with a stamp depicting Monica Lewinski’s infamous blue dress…

So I’ve been thinking about picking up a couple of books lately and remembered having bookmarked Bear Pond Books several months ago for this very reason. Of course, with the savings and universality of Amazon.com, one begs the question: Why?

Well, it all comes down to a little thing called Section 215 of the US Patriot Act. This is a particularly nasty aspect to the Patriot Act (you know, that legislation that Michael Moore managed to get a Congressman to confess that no one he knew read it before approving it as law?), which allows the FBI to not only circumvent the Fourth Amendment and collect information on you from organizations like bookstores and libraries, but makes it illegal for the people from whom they collect the data to notify you.

I can’t remember where I found out about Bear Pond Books, but they (along with numerous librarians) recognized the severity of this invasion of privacy and rewrote their software to collect all the information about the transaction except for the book titles. Not doing anything illegal, just choosing not to collect the data. Now I have to admit that I’m pretty swayed by the savings to be found on Amazon, along with the free shipping offers and their extensive product offerings. Heck, who isn’t (I know Basil is a fan)? So, even though I knew the chance was pretty slim (tracking purchase histories is a specialty of Amazon), I figured I’d give them the benefit of the doubt and ask their customer service people of the likelihood of being able to make a purchase without the book title being retained in their records…

So Sean brought up an interesting question: Do you use a newsreader? Personally, I’ve tried both NetNewsWire and PulpFiction, and I just can’t get behind them for the exact same reason as Sean - as the blog is meant to be a web media, it strikes me as somewhat unnatural (and I also find that it’s kinda disrespectful of the time that a lot of bloggers put into the design of their site). The exception I would have for that is Craig’s List postings… quick ‘n’ dirty information (apartment, job listings, etc.) lends itself well to something like a newsreader.

At his recommendation, I tried out blo.gs - an interesting service to say the least. I was stunned, however, that this blog is on their watchlist. Talk about thorough - this blog hasn’t been up very long nor been advertised very widely (just links from friends’ blogs, from what I can tell). Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that its updating mechanism is kind of inconsistent. Some blogs it cites as being updated are spot-on, others are off by a few days at least. I’ll play with it for a while. See if it can comfortably service the weird requirements I have between personally going to each blog in Safari and having a newsreader that I don’t like to launch very often (but will proactively feed me the updates)…

A very amusing read. I’ve found that I agree with a lot of their reasoning, although at the same time, if “professional musicians” are supposed to earn a living from their music and we already know that the members of the RIAA are the real pirates in stealing from these talented people (although there are plenty untalented folks in that group too), shouldn’t they cash in on their success when they have it?

I mean, don’t get me wrong - I to am pretty disappointed with the current schlock that comes out of people who we know from previous experience to be exceptionally talented. Heck, I used to go see Dave Matthews every chance I got - until I got the feeling the band was just “going through the motions”. Sometimes the musician evolves along with the times - Peter Gabriel would be a perfect example of that. I can’t say “Up” would be my favorite album, but it’s still got some good tunes and, in all, still exhibits Gabriel’s genius and willingness to do new & different things. Aside from the commercial success of “So” (furthered by the movie Say Anything…), I’m not quite sure of why he deserves to be included in the “Honorable Mentions”.