Procrastination Nation |
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Things that Robert is thinking about that keep him from accomplishing anything.
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Thursday, February 26, 2004
More Funnies Bush Selects San Jacinto C.C. For Presidential Library The White House announced that San Jacinto Community College will be home to the George W. Bush Presidential Library upon completion of his term in office. "The president is pleased to show his commitment to the nation's two-year community and technical colleges through this enterprise," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. "He could think of no better place than the greater Houston metroplex." The collection will house artifacts, film, photographs, and documents from Bush's tenure as president. Also included will be a collection of MP3 files of the president's daily audio briefings prepared by his staff of advisers and administration officials and some John Grisham books-on-tape. It is unclear whether the president will part with his dog-eared copies of Madonna's children's books and prized night-light collection. "We'll be in on-going negotiations with the president," said the library's curator Archibald T. Winslow. A team of administration officials will review material before sending it to Houston for the collection. "We will do our due dilligence to excise all material related to national security, particularly those where the president's actions or inactions jeopardized it," said McClellan. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz will supervise this effort. He has appointed conservative talk show host Lt. Col. (Ret.) Oliver North to handle day-to-day operations. Mr. Bush will be the third president to choose Texas to host his presidential library. Lyndon Johnson's papers are housed at the University of Texas in Austin, and George H.W. Bush's at Texas A&M in College Station. Houston and Harris County leaders are very excited to host the library, which will be housed at San Jacinto's central campus in Pasadena. "In these trying economic times, it is not often we can get somebody of the president's stature to rent 1000 square feet of space," said Houston Mayor Bill White. "This will really class-up the Fairmont Parkway Shopping Center." The shopping center is currently anchored by a 7-11 convenience store and a pawn shop. The library will take over the lease of DeShaun's Beauty Salon. "We haven't been able to keep a store in there for more than eight months," said Ramon Guttierrez, property manager for the shopping center. "Maybe this presidential thingy will stick around for a while. They just better not be expecting me to come out here every freaking day just because some mold is growing on the walls or the air conditioning is busted." "We look forward to having a library of any kind on campus again," said Dr. Dr. Monte Blue, president of San Jac-Central. "It's kind of ironical how the president cut the funding for our current library when he was governor. I guess he knew he would be giving back to the community down the road. We really appreciate it." Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Sports, Love It or Levitt The folks at Marginal Revolutions posted a link to a Financial Times article on the sports work of economist Steven Levitt. Here is a post I had recently on his work, which contains links to Levitt's original research. For you baseball fans, you will find a quotation from Levitt disparaging the Moneyball boys. I'd love to see Levitt get involved in some of the sabermetrics and sort some of that out. Also, in case you missed the link at Baseball Musings, the Baltimore Sun has an article on how the O's think they have found a relationship between players' entry draft psychological tests and future performance. Definitely worth a look, though it'd be nice to see a copy of the instrument and know something about its psychometrics. Excess Over the next couple days, I'll be posting some of my Slant material that didn't make this issue, but will be dated if it isn't used now. Here's the first item: Triumph Beaten At 'Passion' Premiere Saturday, February 21, 2004
When Cheating Fails This post goes into some of the details about Republican staffers stealing Democratic staffers' memos on the Senate Judiciary Committee and suggests criminal charges are potentially in the offing. This will add some interesting context to Bush's latest recess appointment, Alabama AG Pryor to the U.S. Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit. Of course, I wonder if why these memos didn't help them get anyone appointed. Maybe when the Dems realized the memos had been taken, they decided to dig in their heals on the noms. Anyhoo, I just did a little digging, and it turns out that Thurgood Marshall's appointment to the Supreme Court was a recess appointment. Ike did the same for Justices Warren, Brennan, and Stewart. Reagan and Bush Sr. used them quite a lot. This is the thing that interests me about recess appointments: it seems like an effective way to impose term limits on the federal judiciary. Now, instead of being lifetime appointees, we get some short-timers in for less than two years, and then they come up for confirmation again. But nothing says the president can't recess appoint someone else (I wonder if he could consecutively recess appoint someone), because you know Congress will recess at some point in the year. Heck, it often seems to be on recess every other week, kind of like Letterman's vacation schedule. I'm not saying that term limits for the federal bench are good, I'm just saying this is a rather effective way of imposing them. Poor Hollywood I keep meaning to mention this...If you've been to the movies recently, you've no doubt seen the ad from the MPAA about how movie piracy costs Hollywood folks jobs and money. Not actors and producers, but the good, honest, hard-working, decent tradespeople who work on the films. I'm sure the irony is lost on them that outsourcing movie jobs to Canada and Eastern Europe do the same thing. I'm sure that set designer for "The Big Chill" actually gets to travel out of the country if his production goes overseas, but I'd bet the people he actually works with are natives of the foreign countries. It'd be interesting to see the SGA and other film-related unions to try a similar campaign. I See... I thought this was pretty slick. An MIT grad student came up with a cheap way to make eyeglasses. You can check out his website here. Friday, February 20, 2004
Because I've Been Absent Couldn't think of a title because, well, I don't have anything in particular to say. I think I forgot to remind you about the new issue of The Slant. The only thing I have in there is the note on Reagan's birthday in Other News. A new issue is coming this Wednesday, too. I was flipping through other blogs, and I came across this interesting item at Marginal Revolution about fighting parking tickets online. I may have to put a link to them on the left-hand side soon. Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Random Thoughts ...will Triumph make an appearance at a The Passion of the Christ screening? I guess after his visit to Quebec NBC may be a little gun shy about incitement to riot. ...did anybody else think that Mel Gibson, during last night's interview with Diane Sawyer, was about to say "spic" and then catch himself and say "Spanish conquistadors"? ...why is LeAnn Rimes singing that you should "be an original" in a Dr. Pepper ad when she made her entire career out of being a Patsy Cline clone? Thursday, February 12, 2004
Off the Market As the only man in America who will publicly admit to enjoying the Cathy comic strip, it is my duty to inform the rest of an indifferent America that Cathy is getting engaged. Hurry Up and Wait Here's an article from USAToday about bringing broadband to D.C.'s emergency medical system. I guess now the people who die on the streets will be that much more outraged at how slow their service is. On a related issue, I'm wondering about another idea. I've developed yet another pet peeve over the years: annoyingly loud sirens. It's driven by eating outdoors on patios on the last main street before a major hospital. I suppose the theory is that these sirens need to be so loud because they have catch the attention of drivers in cars some distance away, and people in those cars may already be distracted by phones or the radio or their own conversations and thoughts. The problem, of course, is that the sirens are painfully loud to pedestrians, and they are a nuisance to people who live nearby, as I once did on Cold Spring Ln. in Baltimore with tons of police and ambulance sirens. There has been lots of talk about applications for wireless technology, and I submit to you that a substitute for the siren is a natural use. Right now, things like EZ-Pass treat your car like a grocery item, with the wireless reader scanning your sticker as you pass an entry/exit point and deducting money from your account. And there's plenty of other wireless stuff like satellite radio, not to mention good ole regular radio. However, there's nothing to say we couldn't outfit cars with a WiFi receiver and give EMS vehicles the capacity to transmit WiFi messages to cars. Then, instead of broadcasting an ear-splitting siren that annoys people in local proximity to the source and is only faintly heard at a distance, EMS could transmit a single uniform signal to all cars with the device in an unobtrusive way (e.g., flashing and sound like a seat belt warning indicator). We wouldn't have to do away with sound completely on a siren (pedestrians would still need to hear it), but it doesn't take much in the way of decibels to alert a pedestrian. Wednesday, February 11, 2004
I Feel So Cheap Well, the TN primary is over, and justice prevailed in the case of Gen. Clark. Still, I don't see any evidence of huge support for Kerry. I confess there's a huge sampling problem as I don't come into contact with too many folks during the day outside of my normal corridor from home to office and back again. But, there's definitely more anti-war paraphernalia about Nashville than for any particular candidate; and what little candidate support there was, it was Clark by a lot. Perhaps there is this huge correlation between people's voting preferences and their willingness to decorate their cars/advertise their voting preferences. Certainly the Bush folks have no qualms sporting Bush-Cheney stickers, even on their Escalades and Hummers; the Clark folks didn't have too much problem either. This would be an interesting study: predicting voting patterns by type and model of car. Perhaps someone's already done it. I'll get back to you on this. Still, why do I feel cheap? Because I went ahead and voted for Edwards instead of Dean on a purely strategic basis. I rationalized this because Dean made a strategic decision not to contest Tennessee, so I figured he would not mind if I opted not to vote for him. Since it looks like Edwards has the best chance to be #2, I figured I'd keep him in the game a little longer. Still, I would like myself better if I had voted my true preference (i.e., for myself). Monday, February 09, 2004
And One More Thing You need to start watching Arrested Development on FOX. Not necessarily because I think you will enjoy it. You should, but I don't know a damned thing about you. No, you should watch it because I like it; and, if other people (i.e., you) are not watching it, then they will stop making episodes. And then I'll be sad. So, do your part to help my procrastination. Don't Mind Me Hey, I'm just in here cleaning up links. Only Baseball Matters has been redesigned, and it looks like John is back in the blogging business, if spending free time writing about stuff for no pay can be called much of a business. I missed him down the stretch last year. We love snarky commentary on the Giants, enough that we can forgive his sad defenses of Pete Rose. I'd like to write about the Democratic primary coming to Tennessee, seeing as how I'm expected to vote tomorrow. At this point, I'm still kind of undecided. I'm tempted to vote against Kerry just out of spite for all the bandwagon people. But, that doesn't say who to vote for. I guess Dean could get a sympathy vote, and heck, the guy is still second in delegates, even if he has zero chance of getting beyond fourth here. Not that he has no support, it's just that he has no support outside of the "creative class" folks who work at Vanderbilt and related creative industries. It's funny, Kerry could win in Tennessee and I have not seen a single Kerry sticker or sign anywhere. He does have a few t.v. ads, as do Clark and Edwards. Clark has earned my enmity by push-polling against Dean last month. Edwards...I still don't understand the appeal. His commercials aren't too bad, even if he misses the obvious rhetorical opportunity to capitalize on his "2 Americas" idea: obviously, it should follow that he will help make us "one nation" and let people fill in the allusions to the pledge of allegiance. Instead he has some wordy nonsense that detracts from the message. I don't know, I guess I'll just have to wait until 2008 so I can finally put an end to my indecision and start writing myself in as a candidate. Sunday, February 08, 2004
Scoop! Well, my article on Burger King Betty made it to print and beat out folks at the Nashville Scene and Nashville City Paper for the "where is she now?" story. Here is the link to my article in the Tennessean. Also, if you caught the president on Meet the Press this morning. Yikes, what a disaster! I thought it would be terrible after Russert let him off the hook with the very first question, but he rallied to put the president on the spot several times. Of course, it's not clear how his performance matters. People who like him will see it as reinforcing his strength, and people who hate him will see it as reinforcing his stupidity. I guess there's some play at the margins. I'd say on balance it had to hurt him, but he avoided a complete meltdown when hit with the stray unanticipated question. Not by much (e.g., "Was it worth the 567 American lives?"), but by enough. It would seem there's plenty of fresh fodder for the Democrats now. Friday, February 06, 2004
Honest, I Was Searching Her Body Cavity for Hidden Weapons It's bad enough that the US military must play the world's police officer (whether it or the world want to), now the military has to police itself for sexual assault charges. It's obvious that these women stationed overseas dressed all scantily in their Kevlar vests are just asking for it. It's the usual story. You see them out with their M-16s, winking and fingering their weapon, the sweat soaking their t-shirts, clinging so suggestively to their hard bodies. It would be a crime not to sexually assault them. Also, expect a feature article in this Sunday's Tennessean by yours truly on the legendary Burger King Betty. I'll post the link then. Thursday, February 05, 2004
Coordination, Shmoordination Maybe all those anti-gummint Republican types are right. Maybe the Homeland Security department is a colossal waste. Here, the Secret Service admits it delayed 5 days before telling the FBI and CDC that it found ricin at the White House last year. Good work, folks! Tuesday, February 03, 2004
Procrastinators in Mourning For people who have trouble getting out of bed in the morning or mid-day due to a crippling addiction to the Tony Kornheiser Show will be sad to hear that Satchmo is leaving the radio show at the end of March, according to this article on WUSA Channel 9 in Washington, crediting USAToday's Rudy Martzke. Here's the Martzke link. Perhaps this means Chris Moore will finally take over the job (God knows he's substituted enough for him), but I wonder if he's gone from ESPN entirely after being replaced by Doug Gottlieb on ESPN GameNight. I still hear him on TK promos. Any info is much appreciated. Yawn! The only thing more annoying than a Super Bowl with a stultefyingly boring first half, too many commercials, too much lead-in, and a ridiculous halftime show is suffering through punditry on Janet Jackson's tittie. So, I'll spare you an obsessive entry with my thoughts on the subject. Sufficit to say, my opinion can be summed up by this exchange from Scrooged: Censor: Specifically, you can see her nipple. Instead, I point you to this interesting tidbit from USAToday on shopping carts. I've previously referred you to IDEO, the engineering firm that helped design a better grocery cart for Nightline. I'm soliciting better, cheaper ideas from you, the Internet community for how to deal with stolen shopping carts. My three ideas are:
Any of these seems like they would cost less than $60 per cart for all carts in a supermarket's inventory. Email your solutions. |
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