Various and Sundry: Now Everything But Photography

I forced myself to watch the first five minutes of the debut of tonight’s “The Jay Leno Show,” before giving up without laughing. OK, that’s a lie. The “Cash for Clunkers” line made me laugh, though the dollar amount he made up for the gag oversold the joke a tad. See? Even when Leno has a good line, he steps over it.
Some quick thoughts:

• So, what, this “The Cheaters” thing is an actual reality show? Is that one of those daytime things they sell to stay at home moms that I’ll never see?
• Watching Jay shakes all those hands at the show open, I kept thinking, “Swine Flu Alert!” Seriously, would you want to shake all those random hands without have a quart of hand sanitizer in your pockets? (You know, those pockets Leno thrusts his hands into after every sentence…)
• Leno at least knows when the joke is bad and isn’t going to work. He always looks over to his sidekick for a cheap laugh. He gets it, but it’s the only one.
• I couldn’t even wait around for the inevitable Kanye apology.  Not that it matters, that guy is a punk who deserves to be derided and hated till the end of days.  I wonder if his apology will be auto tuned?

This is the savior of network television?  The networks are doomed.

* Apologies if you’re still blocked from the website.  The malware injection issue has been taken care of.  It infected two scripts that don’t even appear on the blog, and haven’t for years.  I guess the bad guys just picked random old script names and happened across one from the archives.
 
* I’d give up the copyright to my life’s work (past AND present) for $24 million dollars.  Are we supposed to feel sad for Annie Leibovitz?
 
* Dear Mac developers: I have a good screenshot capturing program already. Hell, I have three.  Go be more productive elsewhere.  Thanks!
 
* Dammit, people, if you’re going to use Facebook, at least learn to write consistently in either the first person OR the third person. Not BOTH in the same update!
 

I was always taught that, as a business, you shouldn’t leave bags of money sitting there onthe side of the road.

So why is it that my phone calls to an HVAC guy and a plumber went unreturned this week?  I guess I’m too small fry to deal with?  (The latter’s ad actually said “no job too small.”)

I want to give these people money, but they can’t be bothered to return a simple phone call? Crazy.

The plumber already lost his chance — I fixed the problem myself with $10 and a trip to Home Depot. So nyah!

I shipped a DVD this past week via the US Postal Service. It turned out to be cheaper to use their first class mail option than their media mail option. It was cheaper to use the option that took half the time. How messed up is the Post Office, exactly? I’m not complaining. It was a good deal for me. But shouldn’t they charge more for packages that they promise to deliver faster?

I can’t be sure if this is just South Carolina, or the entire South, but I did notice this:

Every commercial on TV is for Wal-Mart.  Sure, at first it seems like a random food commercial or eyeglass commercial or HDTV set commercial or pharmacy commercial or food store commercial — but it always ends at “At Wal-Mart!”

And, yes, there was one less than five minutes from where I stayed.  Handy.

Also, the local news is wildly different from the NYC news we get up here.  NYC News starts with political corruption before moving onto unsolved mysteries, brutal murders, and car crash theater.  South Carolina news begins with tips on supporting your roof in case of hurricane, moves on to a local fender bender, then talks about what’s going on to help tourists spend money locally.  It’s all rather laid back, by comparison, though the anchors don’t sport Southern accents.  I guess they’re all aiming at larger market jobs or something?

“Barney” isn’t such a bad thing.

But I don’t want to hear, “The more we get together, the happier we’ll be” one more time.  Damned dinosaur has no clue how much people really stink.

And, really, is Barney any worse than the wisemouth sidekick character employed by Disney in every one of their animated movies of the 90s?

I spent the last week with family on vacation in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  I took away a number of lessons from this, many of which I might share here in the days and weeks ahead.

But let me start with the biggest, coming from a guy in Northern New Jersey who ought to have really known this already: It is unfair to judge a state strictly by the interstate highway that traverses it.

North Carolina is NOT merely J.R.’s outlet on Exit 97 and Ava Gardner’s home town. South Carolina is not merely fireworks and pork products. And Virginia should not be picked on for having a town named Skippers.

Delaware, though, does deserve to be picked on for milking the most dollar per mile out of its interstate highway in tolls.
More to come. . .

 
Random Thoughts:
 
* It had to happen: The most interesting songs on the “Guitar  Hero: Van Halen” set list are the Not By Van Halen Songs:  “Stacey’s Mom” by Fountains of Wayne, “Dope Nose” by Weezer, and  Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life.”  The latter has some great  guitar bits that would be fun to play.
 
 
* Amusing: Rolling Stone has a Shepard Fairey cover of Obama this  month, because the magazine world clings to Obama for every last copy  they can sell while they can before their entire industry sinks into  its own quicksand.  It seems that despite Fairey’s protestations that  he’s an artist and not a copyright infringer, Rolling Stone is very  careful to credit the photographer for the cover: “Illustration by  Shepard Fairey Based on a photograph by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP  Images”  That can’t help his “Hope” poster case, can it?
 
 
* Twitter is still suffering from Denial of Service Attacks.  I’d like,  once again, to declare my innocence.  They can Fail Whale all they  like while they keep my account suspended for no good reason. Feh.
 

Forget the iPhone –

– let’s bring back the Handspring Visor!

I had the modem at the time, too.

I just ran across these while cleaning out an old box from the back of the closet tonight.  Ah, good times.

You know what the Handspring Visor had that the iPhone still doesn’t? A wonderful keyboard that the Visor plugged into.  Very compact, very nice to use.

* Overlapr.com tells you Twitter which friends of yours overlap with another friend.

* Here’s the story of the girl who grew up with two hearts.  Eventually, the back-up heart failed and was removed, but it gave the primary heart enough time to strengthen itself.

* First review of “Wii Sports Resort” I’ve seen so far. Mind you, I wasn’t looking very hard, but this is hopeful.  I haven’t played too many video games lately, but I’d love to give this one a spin.

* Why “Wipeout” wins. Answer: a dearth of slapstick television.

* Remember when the Harry Potter movie series began, and everyone said the same actors couldn’t make all the movies?  It would take too much out of their childhoods, or they’d age faster than the movies could keep up with them, etc?  Ah, we were so naive then.  (No link.  I just felt like pointing that out.)

* It’s just so crazy it might work.  No, not really.  It’s complete and utter madness, but it is hilarious: Convert Central Park into an airport!

Belgian authorities are checking out public profiles of their citizenry to determine who might not be reporting their entire income.  It’s enough to launch an investigation, and perfectly legal.

Think twice before opening our mouth on-line again. You know the IRS will be all over this soon enough.  (”You reviewed that ‘Harry Potter’ book, but I don’t see you paying taxes from Amazon purchases anywhere on your tax return?  AUDIT!”)

Hi all,

I’m over at FriendFeed, scratching the same old itches. . .

Find me here.

I have thoughts I NEED to express, but nobody who cares.

Heck, I likely have that with Twitter, too. So nevermind.

But I do need to say this: Apologies for there being no photo on AugieShoots.com yesterday. That’s the first time it’s happened this year, and it’s a complete Stupid Stupid User mistake on my part. I loaded up yesterday’s image — and today’s — with next month’s date. So the photos are up there now.

Also, I had a roast beef sandwich for lunch.

What, isn’t that what Twitter is for?

For unknown reasons, Twitter has suspended my account for “strange activity.”

I haven’t done anything wrong, I’ve dropped them a line, we’ll see how this turns out.

I imagine I’ll be back eventually.

Sorry things have slowed up here so much again lately.  Here are some links to keep you busy for a while as an apologia:

* Weezer covering Lady Gaga, because it’s what all the cool kids do today.

* Speaking of whom, check out Lady Gaga’s Muppets dress.  Cool!

* How to make a triptych in Lightroom. (OK, I put this one up here as a reminder to myself of something I want to do someday soon.)

* Dance to the Mii Channel theme music. Bonus: he’s a one time MTV reality show contestant.

* So, they cut the original Star Wars movie up into 472 fifteen second clips, and invited the world to take one and make their own version.  The goal is to make a new and complete movie from those bits.  Hilarious?  Insane waste of time?  Bound for failure?  You make the call.

* How to get banned from Sesame Street’s forum.  Funniest geek thing I’ve seen in a long time.

* eBay?  Still dying.