Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Recommended Reading

Someone wrote me recently to ask how come I keep linking to Fred Kaplan's articles about Iraq. I wrote back that I link to them because they strike me as extremely accurate, informative and — most of all — realistic. In this latest piece, Kaplan deals with a simple fact that a lot of the arguments about Iraq overlook; that the U.S. will be lessening its presence in Iraq because we are running out of troops to send. An amazing percentage of articles I've read seem to treat that as one of those little details that we can just ignore if we really need to have more soldiers there.

• Posted at 5:07 PM · LINK

TiVo Talk

If you've been toying with buying a TiVo, I'll suggest a deal you might consider...and I don't make a nickel on this. The best company I've found that handles TiVos, especially for repair and upgrades, is a firm called (for some reason) WeaKnees. They've come up with a stash of refurbished Humax TiVos with built-in DVD burners. This is the only TiVo system out there for which one can still purchase TiVo Lifetime Service, which at $299 is a bargain if you're going to keep the machine more than two years.

WeaKnees is offering the Humax TiVo for $199 with free shipping. There's a $150 rebate available so the machine costs you $49. Actually, if you go for this deal, spend a hundred bucks more and get the version in which WeaKnees installs a larger harddisk, thereby boosting your recording capacity from 40 hours to 350.

It won't handle hi-def but if that doesn't matter to you, you can get a TiVo with lifetime service and a DVD burner for a grand total of $348-$448. And yes, it's refurbished but you'd be buying it from a pretty reliable company. Here are the details.

A couple times a month, I get an e-mail asking me if I think TiVo will be around long enough to make it safe to invest in one. Yeah, I do. A few years ago, there was a period when that seemed iffy...but even there, if you'd bought a machine then and it all blew up today, you'd have gotten your bucks' worth out of it. At the moment, TiVo looks somewhat stable. The big threat is probably not that the company would go under but just that someone else will come out with a machine you'd rather have. (The odds are it would be the TiVo company and given their past behavior, there's a good chance — though no guarantee — that they'd allow you to transfer that lifetime service contract to the upgraded machine.)

A newer, better model is pretty much the risk when you buy any piece of technology today. A week or so ago, I purchased the new Blackberry Curve cellphone and on my way out of the store (italics, mine) I heard another salesguy talking about a new phone that'll be out in a few weeks that sounds even better. And if I waited for that and bought it instead, on my way out of the store, I'd hear of yet another coming out in a few weeks. Still, I've been a TiVo customer since the first few months they were on the market. That was mid-1999 and I haven't seen another brand of digital video recorder I thought was preferable. It'll happen but it hasn't happened yet.

• Posted at 10:33 AM · LINK

Today's Snide Remark

In her will, hotel magnate (and Cruella DeVille look-alike) Leona Helmsley left twelve million dollars to her dog. Gosh, I hope the "death tax" doesn't kick in on this. Raise payroll taxes on people who make minimum wage if you have to but it would be such a crime if the bitch didn't get the full twelve million.

• Posted at 9:50 AM · LINK

Early Wednesday Morning

By now, you've probably seen the video of Miss Teen South Carolina giving a pretty clumsy answer to a question in a beauty contest. Matter of fact, I don't know how you could have avoided it. We have a guy in the White House sending men and women off to war who gives equally incoherent answers to questions...but somehow, this eighteen year old woman who has no responsibility for anything (and no real job except to just look cute) gives a lunkheaded reply and it's Front Page News.

A dumb answer in the Miss Teen USA pageant? Wow, what are the odds of that? I'll bet all the other contestants were up there discoursing on the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre in between the swimsuit competition and the parade of evening gowns. Come on, people. It's a beauty pageant, not a MENSA meeting. Give the lady a break. She got the important part of the pageant down. She looked great in the bikini.

While we're at it: For some reason, much of the press coverage (do a search if you don't believe me) described what we saw in that clip as a "meltdown." How is what she experienced a "meltdown?" Here's the definition of that word in the Free Online Dictionary...

1. Severe overheating of a nuclear reactor core, resulting in melting of the core and escape of radiation.
2. Informal. A disastrous or rapidly developing situation likened to the melting of a nuclear reactor core: "After several corporate meltdowns, only two reporters remain in [the] bureau" David Fitzpatrick."
3. Informal. An emotional breakdown.

Okay, there was no nuclear reactor involved in the incident, and I think it's a bit of a stretch to compare one dumb answer that harmed no one to a nuclear accident. She also didn't have any sort of breakdown in the clip. Maybe she had one afterward when she realized she'd become a national laughingstock but we didn't see one. Is the word "meltdown" becoming an all-purpose descriptor for any time something doesn't go right in public? Given its nuclear connection, maybe we oughta save it for something a bit more destructive than this.

• Posted at 1:24 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

This one runs nine minutes. It's one of my favorite burlesque sketches as adapted for the Abbott and Costello TV show. The man running the employment office is Sidney Fields, one of the great burlesque straight men. So was Bud Abbott. Lou Costello was the kind of comedian who sometimes needed two straight men.

The other thing that's interesting about this sketch is how many lines seem to be bobbled or ad-libbed. They were filming on a soundstage with no audience but still, they often didn't stop and refilm when someone stumbled on dialogue. Part of this was because these shows were shot fast and cheap, and they figured that since audiences were used to mistakes of that sort on live TV shows, you could get away with them on a filmed show. But there was also the fact that Costello hated doing multiple takes of scenes. He liked to get it in one and head for the track, and since he controlled this particular series, that's how it was done. It still turned out funny.

• Posted at 12:58 AM · LINK