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In Lancaster, California, Honda decided it would be fun to carve grooves in a road such that when you drive over them, the vibration of your suspension plays a song. They decided, for unknown reasons, to use the William Tell Overture, by Giaochino “Joey Chinos” Rossini. In case you haven’t watched the Lone Ranger recently, listen to this.
Then, go watch and listen to this.
Notice anything? Am I the only one? They spent heaven knows how many man-hours gouging grooves into that road and did it to produce the wrong fricking notes. This commercial gets played at least once every time I watch a Daily Show online and it makes me insane.
Just so you know.
One of the side effects of the amoxicillin that’s clearing up Charles’s ear infections is that it tends to give him diahrrea, which if he doesn’t tell us about, sits in his diaper until we do a regularly scheduled change. This gives him devastating diaper rash, and is unfortunately a vicious cycle: because it hurts when we wipe him clean, he is resistant to diaper changes, which means he sits in feces that blister his taint until we finally have to hold him down and get it cleaned up.
As you can imagine, nothing about this is pleasant for anyone. It is how our week has been. Welcome to Friday!
I feel guilty for laughing at these things, but cannot help myself:
- Andrew Sullivan shows us how the Catholic Church feels about its youth.
- This young lady loves her some John Mayer. (For which I do not fault her; he’s like a tattoo’d god.)
- A new iPhone app that everybody would want, if Apple hadn’t immediately taken it out of the App Store.
- Penny Arcade brings us a special new Rock Band.
Andrew Sullivan, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow all took Karl Rove to task for this stupidity. I might as well join in! Let’s break it down like En Vogue:
What the Obama administration’s done in the last several days is very dangerous.
What they’ve essentially said is, if we have policy disagreements with our predecessors,
what we’re going to do is, we’re going to turn ourselves into the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses . . .
Hey Karl, you know what else is popular among South American dictators? Torture. They LOVE the stuff.
. . . and what we’re gonna do, is prosecute, systematically, the previous administration, or threaten prosecutions against the previous administration, based on policy differences.
Policy differences? Really? Not, you know, criminal acts?
Is that what we’ve come to in this country? That if we have a change of administration from one party to another, that we then use the tools of the government to go systematically after the policy disagreements with-that we have with the previous administration? Now that may be fine in some little Latin American country that’s run by, you know, the latest junta. It may be the way that they do things in Chicago. But that’s not the way we do things here in America.
You know what, Karl? Your mom’s a junta. (I should probably look that word up.)
Ignoring for the moment that I think Chicago is technically located within the borders of the United States, Mr. Rove apparently thinks that the matter of torture, which is against federal law and various international treaties, is merely a “policy disagreement,” like arguments over tax rates or deficit spending.
Hey Karl: shut the hell up. You’re a buffoon. What we’re talking about are crimes. Crimes that hopefully will be prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Shepard Smith put it best (warning: uncensored F-bomb, if that bothers you).
It’s all Gerald Ford’s fault, I think. When he infamously pardoned Richard Nixon, he set a dangerous precedent that a Presidential administration should not pass judgment on the crimes of a previous one. Which is fine, if we were some kind of banana republic in which every new dictator spends the first week slaughtering everyone associated with the last one. I can’t remember any incoming President immediately telling the Department of Justice to go after the last guy because he didn’t like him. What would the benefit be? It’s not as if last guy is going to come back. The time of Grover Cleveland is gone, people.
By “closing the book” on the Watergate scandal, President Ford gave credence to President Nixon’s idea that when the President does something, it’s not illegal. Since we didn’t punish Nixon, now we can’t punish anyone, seems to be the feeling.
My ass. Mr. Holder, the only way to prevent these kind of crimes from happening again are to ensure that everyone knows they’ll be punished for it. As much as I hate the idea of “setting an example,” anyone who authorized or ordered torture tactics needs to be prosecuted and jailed. Go get ’em.
I do have to admit, however, that my judgment may be clouded by the fact that I’m giddy over the possibility that Dick Cheney might end up with a prison tattoo saying “If u reed dis, bubba kill u.”
Here’s a snap from Tuesday’s ball game, described here.
I’ve been trying to find fun stuff to do with Charles before The Baby comes and takes us out of the power play and into man-to-man coverage. Earlier in the month we went to the zoo (always a favorite for me; I love a good capybara). Yesterday, I discovered that as a result of Monday evening’s rainout, the Wilmington Blue Rocks were going to play a twi-night doubleheader, with the first game starting at 5:05. I figured we’d get there late, stay to the end of the first game, and then sneak out before the rains started.
I picked up Charles at the usual time and asked him if he wanted to go to a baseball game, and he was SUPER-excited. (One great thing about children is that they cannot hide enthusiasm: they actually say things like “Yay!” and “Wow!” completely unironically.) So we got in the car and headed down to Frawley Stadium. Charles, being under the age of 4, required no ticket, so I bought a general admission ticket for $6. We went inside and were each given a free Rocky Bluewinkle hat, after which Charles got to meet the moose himself and shake hands. Then we went and found a little bench just outside the reserved seating area to watch a few at-bats.
Next to us, a stadium usher was chatting with an EMT (of which there were several around; I wasn’t sure if the Blue Rocks’ fans had a particular problem with coronary thromboses, or what; I can report that most of the fans, myself included, are well into the “obese” area of BMI measurement), discussing what idiots the fans were for thinking that they could move out of the General Admission seating into the almost utterly empty “Reserved” area. Anyone that tried was summarily dismissed to the bleacher seats. By the end of the game, there were hundreds of people crowded into “GA,” and literally tens of fans in reserved seating. Supposedly they would be permitted to upgrade their seating for the second game, but c’mon, Blue Rocks management. That’s kind of a silly policy on a Tuesday evening with threatening skies.
We watched a few at-bats, and I tried to explain to Charles what the fielding positions were; he grasped “pitcher” and “catcher” because, well, they pitch and catch, respectively. We got to see one Salem player knock one out of the yard, and I thought of Harry Kalas. Charles’s attention span being what it is, we had to find something to do after a bit, and got some chicken fingers and fries. Again, his attention span failed us as I got him to eat approximately 6 fries and no chicken before he spotted what he called a “trampoline,” but was in fact a small moon bounce. I insisted we eat some dinner, but he was too amp’d up. I finished off the chicken and threw most of the fries away (in our defense, the fries appeared to have been cooked during the last Democratic presidential administration) and wandered over to the moon bounce, where I was charged $2 for the privilege of watching my son bound around with wild abandon.
Once I finally convinced him to take a break, we headed up into the General Admission area, to the top row, where he watched baseball for about 30 seconds and then spent 10 minutes watching trucks go by on I-95. After a time, he decided he needed some popcorn, so we went off to retrieve that, and then returned to the bleachers to watch some more. By then it was close to 7pm, and Charles was entering a loopy state wherein he would say deliberately unintelligible things and then giggle uncontrollably, so I realized it was getting to be time to go. We shuffled out of there back to the car and were home and watching Thomas do his Tank Engine Thang by 7:30.
The Blue Rocks won, 8-3.
Good times: Jon Stewart meets the President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and gets a fun surprise at the end. Also in the episode: Wyatt Cenac goes to Sweden to meet hot blondes; succeeds.
This puts a grin on the face of any old-school tech dweeb, which I only barely qualify as, due to my beautiful youth. Enjoy: Bohemian Rhapsody on Atari 800XL, TI-99, 8-inch floppy, 3.5-inch hard drive, and HP ScanJet 3C.
Saw this on Andrew Sullivan’s blog this morning, and found my curiosity piqued. In all the arguments about healthcare in America, all I ever hear comparisons to are the Canadian and UK versions of free public healthcare, which by many accounts are kinda sucky. Apparently what we need to model our healthcare system on is the French one.
According to Wikipedia, FrogHealthTM was
named by the World Health Organization as the best performing system in the world in terms of availability and organization of health care providers.
Sounds like “Win” to me. As I understand it, and admittedly my grasp of the situation is tenuous at best, the French healthcare system pays something akin to 80% of basic medical costs. The rest is born by the patients or the private medical insurance that a majority of French citizens have. Who’s covered? Any legal resident of France. Still, having to pay 20% of medical costs can get pricey, right? What about serious illnesses like cancer? The public healthcare system covers that 100%.
It sounds like the best of all possible worlds: serious sickness is covered completely, and treatments that are prone to being overused by demanding patients have a co-pay to deter them from doing so. Meanwhile France, as a nation, spends about $3,500 per person on healthcare, as opposed to the $6,100 spent by Americans.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to tell me why this couldn’t work for the US. Cut costs, get everybody covered? What’s the roadblock?
Correction: in this post, the French Healthcare system was referred to as “FrogHealth TM.” This is inaccurate; the true title of the program is “CheeseEatingSurrenderMonkeysHealth TM.” We regret the error.
Since more and more people are going out and purchasing iPhones, and since I also have an iPhone, I thought I’d make everybody’s life a little better and talk about what applications I have and love. Here’s an abbreviated list:
- TwitterFon – Free – my preferred Twitter reader. Shows your whole timeline, but scrolls down to the first message you haven’t seen, so you can pick up wherever you may have left off. Can also track your conversations, so if someone replies to you days later, you can see what post they were talking about. Kinda nice feature.
- Facebook – Free – Meh. You can see people’s updates, post pictures, poke through a few things, but it’s kind of annoying, frankly. You can’t view other people’s friend lists to browse for people you might know. You can’t search for folks. The way it links to things is ridiculous; if someone makes a comment on something, and you click it, you don’t get linked to whatever was commented on, you get linked to the commenter. Little annoyances. I rarely use it, actually, unless I can’t get to my lappy for a day or two and want to see if I’ve missed anything important.
- iMafia – Free – Mildly entertaining game in which you steal money, rob banks, buy real estate. You log in every four or five hours, do a few minutes of stuff, and then log back out so your resources build back up. Not time-consuming, but still fun.
- WordPress – Free – Oh yeah man, WordPress has an app. I’m just starting to play around with it, but I can use it to post without having to open Safari and do it through a webpage, which is kludgey even on the iPhone.
- MLB.com At Bat – $9.99 – One of the few applications I’ve paid for, but I can use it not only to follow live games in a VERY detailed manner, but listen to the radio feeds for any game. Yesterday I listened to the Red Sox/Yanks game at work. Also has detailed player information, so if you hear that Jason Varitek just hit a home run, you can quickly bring up his stats. Useful for fantasy, particularly if you were dumb enough to draft Jason Varitek.
- Evernote – Free – If you’re not familiar with the Evernote application, you should. You use it to store notes, pictures, sounds, all kinds of stuff, for later follow up. See something in a store, and want to see if you can order it online? Snap a pic with your phone and store it at Evernote, then when you get home you bring it up on your lappy and search Amazon. I don’t use it as often as I should (mostly I just email myself).
- Dictionary – Free – The application version of Dictionary.com. Good search tools, reads the words to you if you’re unsure about pronunciation.
- Cleartune – $3.99 – The first app I ever decided to purchase. It is a chromatic tuner, accurate to fractions of a cent (1/100 of a semi-tone). An electronic device that does ONLY this costs 10 times as much. It is so awesome.
- Metronome – Free – Uh…it’s a metronome.
- Midomi – Free – Cute gimmick. If you hear a song you like, but don’t know the name or artist, open up Midomi, hold your phone to the speaker, and it’ll tell you what the tune is. Pretty accurate, although it’s not of much use outside of pop/rock/country. No knowledge of classical, for example.
- Slacker Radio – Free – Music program along the lines of Pandora, in addition to telling it a song you like and then having it guess at other possibilities, Slacker has prebuilt stations along normal lines (top 40, indie rock, buncha classical channels, etc.) There is a paid version that has no ads and allows you to “skip” as often as you want. Normally you can only “skip” songs 6 times an hour, although if you run out of skips and something by “Lady Gaga” comes on you can always switch stations. I also have Pandora installed, but rarely use it.
- Public Radio – Free – Finds and tunes into your local public radio stations. Wanna listen to NPR but no AM radio is handy? This is your app.
- Baseball – Free – The compiled statistics for teams and players dating back to the 19th century. Nice.
I have a lot of other stuff, but don’t necessarily use it much, or find cause to recommend it. I also have a lot of games, but c’mon, the iPhone is a business tool.
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