Category: words mean things (Page 116 of 223)

I got back from dinner tonight and there were 12 new e-mails in my inbox.

They were all spam.

The Wall Street Journal attempts to explain the appeal of Ann Coulter in a recent article. (I guess we’re on an Ann Coulter kick today at words mean things.) Along the way, they call her outrageous and hateful statements “flights of fancy” and “raillery.” Yeah, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would have a problem with her statement that she wished Timothy McVeigh would have stopped by the New York Times building.

As one MetaFilter commenter wrote, much more succinctly than I could have:

I can’t help but wonder if the WSJ would have been so accomodating if someone like Michael Moore had said something like, “My only regret is that W wasn’t breakfasting at Windows on the World that day.”

Words. mean. things.

I’m a proofreader – I can’t help it.

“Already this year, Ann Coulter’s ‘Slander’ and Michael Moore’s ‘Stupid White Men’ have been runaway No. 1 bestsellers, proving that ink on paper is one full-proof way to break out as a partisan pundit.”

-from a Salon article on conservative pundit Sean Hannity

My TV made me insane

I was looking forward to the RFK movie on FX tonight, with Linus Roache as RFK. But for some unknown reason, they replaced it with a M*A*S*H marathon, while still running the RFK promos throughout. I’m quite curious to know what would make FX pull such a heavily-hyped project from the airwaves at the last minute – and no crawl notice on the screen or anything.

Also tonight, they were showing “Mrs. Doubtfire” on PBS. I began to wonder if I was having some sort of breakdown, like, what night is it? Are these the right channels?

Then, I switched on the TV schedule crawl channel. They now show ads in the top half of the screen, and lately the audio hasn’t been synching properly with the video. So I go looking for answers about RFK, and I see little kids playing with some sort of Fisher-Price train set. But on the audio track is a promo for John Carpenter’s “Ghosts of Mars,” so as I watch the children playing, I hear explosions and the announcer intoning, “ALL THAT MATTERED WAS STAYING ALIVE!”

I need to go lie down now.

Reason I wish I still had a Mac: Watson.

Bringing together all kinds of “look it up on the web” information – movies, TV, weather, phone numbers, word definitions, flights, etc. – in a non-browser interface is a great idea. (It’s so great that Apple copied it for Sherlock 3.) It’s faster than going to lots of different web sites for the same information, and you use a consistent, fast interface for everything. If anyone knows anything like this on Windows, let me know.

I miss my Mac.

First it was the double release of “Lord of the Rings,” with the two-disk set (which I bought) to be followed by a four-disk set at the end of the year. I wouldn’t mind the two-disk one, except it has no audio commentary whatsoever. They’re saving that for the next one. Greedy bastards. 🙂

Now it’s “Pulp Fiction,” my friend Mike VS‘s favorite movie. I bought the bare-bones DVD some time ago, and now they’ve up and got me buying the ultra mega edition at Best Buy (it was $15.99 or some such, so I didn’t have to take out a second mortgage). It too has no audio commentary (boo!) except when played on a computer DVD player. But what it does have is what they call a “trivia track,” where they use the subtitle text area to tell a stream of trivia about the movie. Very cool. And your eyes aren’t wandering around the screen like they are with the “pop up video” stuff, which this is clearly patterned after.

So these three tomatoes are walking down the street: Papa Tomato, Momma Tomato, and Baby Tomato. But Baby Tomato is lagging behind. So Papa Tomato gets mad, goes over to Baby Tomato and squishes him, and says, “Catch up.”

Looks like I touched off a design debate over at Radio Free Blogistan. Now if I could just get all those sites (especially journal sites) with tiny red text on blue backgrounds, pink text on white, etc. to change to something readable…

I hate doing laundry, but I enjoy doing the dishes. Go figure.

Have you ever stopped reading or cut down on your reading of a weblog because they changed the design? Radio Free Blogistan, one of the first Salon blogs, used to have a spare, plain design. I used to read it quite often – lots of good stuff about the world of weblogs. But now that they’ve switched to one of those busy, choppy, non-scrolling backgrounds, it’s hard for me to look at.

Let’s face it, the web is all about text. People who fight that are waging a losing (and reader-losing) battle. My Web Common Sense newsletter this week is about the very same topic (and if you’d like to subscribe, I’d be honored).

Tamyra, Tamyra, Tamyra

Up until now, I always told myself that there was no reason to watch the Wednesday night voting show of “American Idol.” After all, it’s just 30 minutes of filler and ads and fake suspense. Until this week, until tonight, the vote-off was pretty anticlimactic. But I would always end up watching it anyway.

So in the cosmic joke way my life has been playing out lately, the shocker came on the night I decided that the show wasn’t worth watching.

I was so, so wrong.

I have to admit that I thought Tamyra gave the worst performance of the night last night, a bizarre rendering of Patti LaBelle’s “New Attitude.” So her ouster isn’t totally without merit, at least based only on last night (which it shouldn’t be). But Nikki’s singing has been groan-inducing from the start, and I think she did just OK last night. And don’t even get me started about Mr. Floppy Legs Guarini trying to do something I was told was a Michael Jackson impression. I thought he was having a seizure.

I’ve heard some hackers have been using autodialers to flood the phone lines with votes for Nikki. I believe this is one of the preeminent occupations in Hell. The girl knows she’s not going to win, and she wants to go home, people. Let Nikki go home. In the name of all that is holy.