Dialogue I would have liked to hear

In last night's episode of Heroes, the interminable Mohinder snaps at a man (Stephen Tobolowsky, AKA Ned Ryerson, AKA a !@#$er from Yankton) who, Mohinder says, has been following him -- because Mohinder has seen this man at three presentations he's given! Of course, Ned Ryerson explains something that has to do with one of the show's lurking uber-conspiracies. Which is fine, for dramatic purposes, but I wish he'd said, "Yes, I have! When I attend academic conferences I go to presentations by researchers whose work interests me and overlaps with my own research! I was going to suggest we collaborate on a paper together, but since you've just pushed me down a flight of stairs, never mind."

The $30 Million Dollar Newt

Newt Gingrich is saying he'll join the absurdly crowded GOP field if supporters raise $30 million. Which raises the question: What happens if he can only raise, say, $20 million? Does he just get to keep it? There's the makings of a Max Bialystock-caliber scam there...

Synchronicity

Isn't it funny how when you have a night that consists of you thinking, "If I fall asleep now, I'll get six hours in, which is pretty good...if I fall asleep now, I'll get five and a half hours in, which isn't bad..." the next day pretty much consists of you thinking, "If I concentrate and buckle down now, I can still get six hours of solid work in...if I concentrate and buckle down now, I can still get five and a half hours of solid worl in..."?

I'm just sayin', is all.

Did that boy just say "What's a hooplehead"?

Everything you always wanted to know about the term "hooplehead" but were afraid to ask.

Had a dream last night...

...in which I was a wedding guest forced to make conversation with fellow wedding guest Peter Jackson, whom I kept confusing with Guillermo Del Toro, causing the horribly embarrassed Jackson to have to gently correct me each time I made the mistake.

Sandie Shaw had a dream last night, too:

ehPods

Since my trusty, three-year-old 20G iPod has started acting shirty (it's been skipping songs randomly, refuses to synch more than two or three songs at a time, that sort of thing) of late, I took notice of the recent announcements of new iPod models. But after seeing the new ones up close at an Apple store last night, I'm less than impressed with all of them.

Let's start with the iPod Touch -- basically, it's an iPhone without the phone. It looks cool and I thought it might make a decent replacement for my aged Palm Pilot. But the interface on it is maddening -- my attempt to get it to go to www.washingtonpost.com wound up looking like waaasgo, and then I gave up. I'm sure I could get used to the touch keyboard in time, but for many hundreds of dollars I don't want a steep learning curve, I want something that WORKS.

Then there's the iPod Classic, most notable for the insane amount of memory it has -- either 4 or 8 times as much as my current iPod. Basically, one of these could hold all of the music I own and lots and lots of videos, too, although watching a video on an iPod is the most ridiculous thing I've heard of since Oz suggested attacking the mayor with hummus. But the clickwheel is really, really slow, at least compared to my current model. If I were tech-savvier I'd be inclined to wonder whether the enormous memory makes the whole thing slower, but all I know about computers I've learned from reading Neal Stepehenson and Cory Doctorow and Wired. Again, though, for lots of money, I want something that works smoothly right out of the box.

And that brings us to the new iPod Nanos, which work fine and look great but have relatively small amounts of memory - 4G or 8G. The only problem here, really, is the price -- I'm not sure how much I'm willing to pay for such a small amount of memory, relative both to what I have now and to what's available for $50 more in the larger iPod Classics that don't appear to work very smoothly.

So the long and short of it is that I went from excited to underwhelmed about the new iPod options in about 20 minutes. Disappointing, to say the least.

My God. It's full of peanut butter and banana-creme filling.

I saw these at the campus store this morning as I was buying a bagel to replace the one I left sitting on the kitchen counter:



And, well, after that, I got nuthin'.

And you thought George Allen was bad...

Pat Buchanan is contemplating a run for the Senate in Virginia next year. That could make the 2008 Senate race there the single most insane spectacle in the country. So I can only say: Run, Pat, run!

Six years later

D is for Deadwood

I watched 8 episodes of Deadwood in 30 hours this weekend. I hope I can stop cursing before I'm supposed to teach on Thursday.

This is not the financial and diet plan you are looking for.

From Michelle Singletary's financial advice column in Sunday's Washington Post:

Deborah McNaughton and Melinda Weinstein want us to face a simple truth: Many people consume too many calories and their unhealthful eating is costing them a piece of prosperity.

"Life would be a whole lot easier if our bank accounts grew and our waistlines stayed in the lower-digit range," McNaughton and Weinstein write in their new book, "Rich and Thin: Slim Down, Shrink Debt & Turn Calories Into Cash."

From a 1987 episode of Moonlighting:



I'm just sayin', is all, here.