My friend Caitlin Skinner, who is helping me with marketing my web design services, gave me the best advice the other day. I’ve been a little down that business has been incredibly slow, and I don’t see a lot of jobs on the horizon. She said whenever I talk to anyone about my business, I should say how incredibly busy and happy I am – no matter how much of a lie that is. And it makes sense: people want to hire someone who is busy, not someone who can’t find work. So I’m going to try it out on you guys. Ready?

You: So Adam, how’s business?

Me: I’m really busy. Things are fantastic. I’m always looking for new opportunities, though.

…so did you buy it?

Random Yet Fascinating Fact

Brussels has more than 2,000 chocolate shops.

Obscure Sci-Fi Reference of the Week

I think George W. Bush may be the Leto II of 21st Century America. Anyone agree with me?

This season of “The West Wing” has been scattershot at best. They seemed to be all over the place, too cutesy at times (like the whole inauguration Bible episode) or too complex and elliptical at other times.

Well, as of last night, they’re back, baby. In a big way. So much so that I actually enjoyed seeing Sam Seaborn again – and that’s saying something. Funny, sharp, topical, focused. I hope they can keep it up.

Daredevil

“Daredevil” suffers mostly from failure to commit. If you’re going to make a superhero movie, you need to decide whether you’re making “Batman” or “Unbreakable.” If you want to be campy and wild and unrealistic, run with it. If you want to show a hero who hurts and doubts and lives in the same world we all live in, so be it. But you can’t have it both ways.

“Daredevil” also suffers from poor casting. Ben Affleck is one of the most impassive stars working today, so it’s probably best not to cast him as a blind man whose face is mostly covered in a mask. And Jennifer Garner is sweet and charming and charismatic in her own way, but she just can’t pull off the vengeful assassin her character becomes (if any actress could, given that the transformation takes all of five minutes of screen time).

For all its problems, I can’t say I was bored watching this movie. Colin Farrell, for his part, definitely commits to the craziness of Bullseye. (I agree with John and Matt that Farrell would have been quite good in Affleck’s role.) Jon Favreau gets off some great lines as the requisite sidekick. And there are quite a few nice touches, including some cool “radar sense” footage to show you what Matt Murdock’s world looks like. But it’s just not enough to hang a movie on, much less a franchise.

I promise I’ll stop with all the quotes – after this one

“Nobody likes burned nuts.”

-Martha Stewart

Blog stuff

1. Congratulations to Evan Williams on sale of Blogger to Google. Blogger, while maddening, is the magical application that got me into this weblog mess in the first place, and for that I will be eternally grateful. Can’t wait to see how things shake out with this.

2. I have similar respect for Ben and Mena Trott and Movable Type. MT is flexible and great for multiple-author, multiple-weblog setups. But now that I’ve been spending some real time with the application (I’m building a site for a friend), I find the interface to be almost perversely complex at times.

An example: to add an author to a weblog, you have to exit out of editing that specific weblog, go to “Add/Edit Blog Authors,” choose the existing author from a dropdown, submit, scroll down to the bottom of the page, select the weblog from a dropdown, and submit.

Ben and Mena: How about just having a list of authors and an author dropdown on the main weblog editing page? Just a thought.

First nominee: Quote of the Year

“[Michael Jackson] is like Saddam Hussein. He hasn’t done anything in 10 years, and suddenly we’re attacking him again.”

-Bill Maher, on The Tonight Show

As much as I hate to say “I told you so,” I predicted the so-called “shocking twist” at the end of Joe Millionaire a while ago. (Regrettably I didn’t write it in a post for take-it-to-court proof. But you trust me, right?) I did mention Evan and now-we-know-it’s Zora getting $1 million to my friend Wendy, to which she responded, “A million dollars doesn’t go all that far these days.”

A much better twist would have been to reveal that all the women were actually millionaires, and knew Evan’s “secret” from the beginning. This would have thrown funny new light on the “what’s your middle name?” and “I had a dream you were two people” episodes. Or, knowing Fox, they could have offered Evan $1 million, but only if he never saw Zora again. Talk about good television.

One thing I did write about is that I liked Zora from the beginning, and I stand by my feeling that she’s too good for him. But she’s such a sweetheart, if she gets $500K out of the deal, that’s OK. She can use part of it to iron out her hair from the finale – she looked like she had a deranged poodle on her head.

One reality show down, 237 to go.

Orange Alert Quote of the Week

I was talking with my friend Michele, who lives out in the boonies around Verona, about how Wisconsin is a great place to live right now, since it’s an unlikely target for terrorist attack.

“Terrorist attack?” she said. “I can’t even get cable.”