Of the many leisure activities I don’t have as much time for, watching desperately odd tv is one of them. Ahhhh…the Saturday mornings watching a former Spanish Playboy© model singing and dancing with Spanish pre-schoolers who were herded by Spanish teenage hotties in tight toy soldiers outfits, that always climaxed in Xuxa (the model/singer/dancer/children’s role model) applying thick red lipstick leaving big wet crimson kissis on the dazed cheeks of the little cherubs. Man, that was TV.

I’ve been going through this list of semi-mainstream but not-quite-right shows wishing I could have them in a big stack of tapes with a couple weeks just to kick back and go through them.

This guy could be a pre-cursor to a crazy billionaire’s particular scheme:

39. THE CHUCK MCCANN SHOW (WPIX, 1965-66). Manic kid show, in which McCann read the Sunday funnies while dressed as appropriate comic-strip characters. When he read Little Orphan Annie, for example, he wore a red dress, a curly fright wig, and white cardboard circles clenched into his eye-sockets like monocles, and spoke in a shrill falsetto. If these guys weren’t doing crank, nobody was.

They are building a new highway next to the office. It’s no Big Dig but it is fairly extensive and controversial since it’s deciding the traffic design for a major portion of the NAFTA flow and the number one computer company worldwide. I’m no expert in structures or concrete (since I dropped out of engineering school when I realized the doddering old jack-ass teaching statics would be teaching many of my advanced engineering classes — “I don’t want to see any of you boys drinking soda pop in my classroom because this isn’t the cafeteria, and don’t come in here wearing t-shirts and blue jeans because while I can’t grade you on if you dress appropriately it will certainly affect my ability to grade your work if you look unprofessional.” – 100% accurate paraphrase) but this pattern of decay/wear/loss appears in several places around the site.

Anyone know what it could be? Should I make a point of driving out of my way to avoid the over and under passes?

The Washington Post highlights a new “bipartisan” initiative that we can all applaud:

“Groups of conservative Republicans see an opportunity to step up a campaign to promote alternative-fuel vehicles and wean the nation from dependence on foreign oil. While skeptical about links between autos and global warming, the conservatives have concluded that cutting gasoline consumption is a matter of national security.

A who’s who of right-leaning military hawks — including former CIA director R. James Woolsey and Iraq war advocate Frank J. Gaffney Jr. — has joined with environmental advocates such as the Natural Resources Defense Council to lobby Congress to spend $12 billion to cut oil use in half by 2025. The alliance highlights how popular sentiment is turning against the no-worries gas-guzzling culture of the past decade and how alternative technologies such as gas-electric hybrids are finding increasingly widespread support.”

CNet’s got a bit on Sony’s efforts to digitally distribute movies. What has my interest piqued here (mostly as an emerging Apple fanboy) is Sony’s prominient place in January’s Macworld keynote, and the bit from the article on “I’m trying to create the new ‘anti-Napster,’” which looked at being a shot at iTunes’ chief competition.

The other interesting tidbit was Sony’s plans—and similar moves by other studios—are likely to avoid empowering any one technology company—such as Apple in the music equation—and allow studios to pocket more of the profits. Hmmm; Sony not a technology company? Interesting. (Aside: Cory Doctorow just did a bit comparing Sony’s approach with Betamax to current legal battles…)

Lastly, if anyone wants to send me a PSP, I’d love it.

Becky and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary with a trip to Belize. I’m going to post pictures and stories here, updating the post as I finish editing pictures and videos. You may choose to wait until I have updated completely or come back as I add pieces.

Content and date added.

• To Placencia pictures and description. 3/24/2005 1:00pm
• Kitty’s Place pictures, video and description. 3/27/2005 2:35pm
• Placencia pictures and description. 3/24/2005 4:00pm
• Ranguana Caye pictures, video and description. 3/29/2005 5:15pm
• Belize Zoo pictures, video and description. 3/27/2005 6:00pm
• San Ignacio / Horseback Riding pictures, video and description. 3/30/2005 3:30pm

Former Senator John Danforth has an editorial in the NY Times today, commenting on the transformation of the Republican Party into the political arm of conservative Christians. This is something that had occurred to most of us crazy liberals quite some time ago, but it seems that more “moderate” Republicans are realizing the same thing:

“BY a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube.

Standing alone, each of these initiatives has its advocates, within the Republican Party and beyond. But the distinct elements do not stand alone. Rather they are parts of a larger package, an agenda of positions common to conservative Christians and the dominant wing of the Republican Party.”

more below:

Dark M&Ms, that is. Witness the birth of the chocolate m-pire April 1. Watch the trailer in quicktime or wmv. The best part is the blatant reference to the “death” of Anakin and the rebirth of Darth Vader.

I can’t wait until Friday. I wonder if I can find a place to line up for a midnight early release party…

It hides when you press snooze

This is a huge problem for me – if I’m tired, I’ll hit snooze without realizing it, until the alarm goes off again and Missy starts kicking me. I’ve started using my cell phone so that the alarm is in a different place every morning.

Ha! That’s it, my right-ist brethren, no more ditching us progressives to go to your VRWC meetings. Now we’ve got a club of our own — “The Syndicate”!

Christian Science Monitor

Mr. DeLay recently told a Christian conservative group that he had met the enemy and it was “a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in.” This “syndicate,” DeLay said, was attacking the conservative movement by launching vicious personal attacks against its leaders.

And I’ll bet they have beer at their meetings too!

Chirac wants to work more closely with Microsoft.

Let me just go ahead and queue up next week’s culture war front …

Capitol bill aims to control ‘leftist’ profs

So those crazy Floridians are working on a bill to keep college students from having to hear things that they don’t agree with.

If you don’t believe in evolution, you don’t believe in science, which is fine, but don’t complain about it when your kid is sitting in a science class.

And if you don’t believe in challenging your worldview with disparate viewpoints, in my opinion you don’t believe in humanities-based higher education. Again that’s fine, but cut to the chase — you’re looking for the abolishment of public education.

Scientists in Montana found soft tissue inside a T. Rex leg bone. (slashdot )

Having spent about every other night I’ve been home in the last two years reading about dinosaurs, and having made up a dinosaur version of the Hokey Pokey to perform at a certian five-year birthday party last weekend, I’m kind of obsessed with this.

And completely willing to withstand all sorts of bad Jurassic Park jokes if we can actually get some 35’ tall predators stalking out there.

Interesting column on the state of Social Security and one of the most fundamental word games that we play with this program -

Excerpt:

Naturally, the elderly don’t see themselves as freeloaders. They think they’ve “earned” their Social Security benefits by paying payroll taxes. As Schieber and Shoven note, the term “social insurance” dates to Bismarck in 19th-century Germany. But applying it to Social Security involved much political license. In normal usage, insurance suggests protection against something you don’t expect to happen — a house fire, a car accident. By contrast, most people expect to grow old. Using the “terminology of insurance … [was intended] to mask the huge welfare payments being made,” they write. People falsely believe they’re “only getting what they have paid for.” That is even less true of Medicare. In 2006 the Congressional Budget Office expects Medicare to cost $383 billion. Medicare premiums (paid by recipients) pay 12 percent; payroll taxes, 49 percent; general taxes and borrowing provide the rest.

This mass deception may seem harmless. After all, most Social Security recipients have been responsible citizens and productive workers. Why accuse them of living on government handouts? The answer is that today’s myths perpetuate unrealistic expectations and prevent honest debate. Americans regard “earned benefits” and “welfare” differently. The first is a right, the second a privilege. In theory, welfare should serve some public purpose and not just enrich the recipients. By admitting that Social Security and Medicare are welfare, we allow relevant questions to be raised. Do all beneficiaries “need” or “deserve” their welfare? Is the cost “unfair” to taxpayers or burdensome to the economy? Have the social and economic conditions that originally justified the welfare changed?

Last night during American Idol a voting toll-free number was mis-printed and pointed to a back-end TFN for a Manilla-based outsourcer support center of a certain major computer company, prompting them to post this message at their website.

IMPORTANT PROGRAM NOTE CHANGE
Due to an error with the graphics shown on-screen (incorrect voting numbers were displayed) during the performance recap at the end of last night’s AMERICAN IDOL, a live, one-hour show will air tonight, Wednesday, March 23 9/8c on FOX, to enable a re-vote. This new show will combine new live elements with encores of Tuesday’s performances from the remaining 11 contestants.

Now I might be compelled to get a PowerBook just for a new hack.

Enterprising hackers have discovered that because the new motion sensor returns reasonably accurate measurements to Mac OS X, it can be used to do some cool tricks, from realigning an image in a window so it always points up, no matter what angle you hold the laptop at, to controlling what’s playing in iTunes — rock the machine backward to go to the next track, forward to play the previous one.