Friday, October 30, 2009

Rewriting History

We all tend to be skeptical, I think, of "sizzling revelations" that come out years after the fact. I'm especially suspicious of ones that relate to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. So I'm not sure what to make of this new claim about the behavior of Surprise President Lyndon B. Johnson on that day. It sounds credible to me but we'll probably never know for sure...

• Posted at 11:38 AM · LINK

By the Way...

Speaking of TiVos: If you have one and it breaks, this page may be of some value to you. There's this company called WeaKnees (I have no idea why) that does great work upgrading and repairing TiVos. They stuck a new hard disk in one of mine, boosting it up so it'll hold a couple hundred hours of Jay Leno Shows I haven't gotten around to watching, and it runs great. But even if you don't buy from them, their site is a tremendous online resource for TiVo users.

• Posted at 11:28 AM · LINK

Lasagna Watch

I'm still laboring under the impression that The Garfield Show debuts on Cartoon Network on Monday. It was supposed to debut there last Monday and it was on their website schedule and also on the schedule on my TiVo. Then it disappeared from the website schedule (though not from my TiVo listings) and, sure enough, it did not air, apparently because they decided to go with Halloween-themed programming instead.

It's now on the Cartoon Network website schedule for next week...though they list the contents of Shows #6-10, as if they ran the first five this week, which they didn't. It is not yet on my TiVo's schedule. And you now know as much about this as I do.

• Posted at 11:14 AM · LINK

Why Banks Fail

A number of blogs are quoting this but I can't resist. The Seattle Times did an article on the collapse of Washington Mutual and it includes the following...

"Someone in Florida had made a second-mortgage loan to O.J. Simpson, and I just about blew my top, because there was this huge judgment against him from his wife's parents," she recalled. Simpson had been acquitted of killing his wife Nicole and her friend but was later found liable for their deaths in a civil lawsuit; that judgment took precedence over other debts, such as if Simpson defaulted on his WaMu loan.

"When I asked how we could possibly foreclose on it, they said there was a letter in the file from O.J. Simpson saying "the judgment is no good, because I didn't do it.'"

Hey, it's not as if he'd lie about such a thing.

• Posted at 1:08 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

A number of my friends say they were disgusted by this new DirecTV commercial...the one that takes a scene from Tommy Boy and turns it into a pitch for the satellite company. David Spade has been criticized for whoring himself out and exploiting his dead pal — and I really don't think he deserves that. It's not like Chris Farley had some solemn dignity that is being diminished. If they did this with Laurence Olivier, okay, maybe. But Farley was a guy who would do anything — a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g — to get attention. Do we really think he would have been outraged at the idea of being kept "alive" this way and having his best movie promoted as some sort of semi-classic?

No one would think anything was wrong if they just did this commercial by running a clip of Farley and then cutting to Spade telling everyone to watch DirecTV because they occasionally run Tommy Boy. I don't see why this is all that different except that it's cleverer this way...

• Posted at 12:56 AM · LINK