April 2002

I just about never watch television in the morning. I catch about five minutes worth of the Today Show each month. Katie is just as cute as a button, and Matt is the least-threatening male in all of media. This I know not from watching the show, but because these two happy-morning-people are pop culture icons. (They were also the first two people I saw on tv on September 11.) I know there’s a show called Good Morning, America on CBS or ABC, but I wouldn’t know its anchors if you wrapped them in a fish and slapped me in the face with them. That’s not the point.

There’s also a weatherman. For some reason all television news programs must have a ridiculously annoying self-possessed hyperactive ham reporting the weather. I don’t know why this is, but I do know it is a universal truth. The local guys are even more full of nincompoopery than the national ones. (It should be noted that The Weather Channel is the sole, curious exemption from this truth.) Are Americans too scared of weather predictions to take them without a shot of comedy that only a septuagenarian could enjoy?

For as long as I could remember, there was a chubby guy named Willard Scott who told us the weather. When I was a kid my mom always watched the Today Show while we got ready for school. Willard was balding, but he sometimes wore a toupee. Willard looked to be incredibly unhealthy, ready to keel over at any second. He always told us about people who were 100 years old (or more!) who wanted us to know that they got that way by smoking a cigar a day or drinking whiskey every night or having bacon every morning or something else that was completely contradictory to what medical science seemed to think was good for you. Willard frightened me. I didn’t think he was funny; I thought he was scary.

The new Today Show weatherman is Al Roker. Al doesn’t frighten me. I like Al. Al is hip. Al is so hip that he has Al’s Journal, a blog! What could be hipper?

I’ve been to N’Awlins several times in the last decade or so. It’s one of my favorite cities. Part of its charm, I think, is that you can feel the Mississippi River’s omnipotence no matter where you are. Even as you walk along the streets, with the water far from view, you know it’s there. I just read a fascinating - and scary - article in the NYTimes about the problems the city is having trying to prepare for a possible storm surge. Good reading if you’re interested.

Nothing’s Easy for New Orleans Flood Control
A flood wall built by the Army Corps of Engineers to hold back a cresting river - which on normal days moves more than 300,000 cubic feet of water a second past the city at an average depth of 90 feet - raised the levee to a uniform height of 25 feet above sea level, or 10 feet above the average annual high water surface level of the river, when water can rush by at the rate of one million cubic feet of water, or more, a second.
…
The city would be trapped inside the levees, steeped in a worsening “witches’ brew” of pollutants like sewage, landfill waste, chemicals and the bodies of drowned humans and animals.
Bourbon Street could remain under 10 feet of water, with water swirling above two-story houses in neighborhoods closer to the lake.
…
The American Red Cross … has declared it no longer will provide hurricane shelters … saying that placing staff there in a killer storm will represent too much risk for its employees …

<rant>
I could write a book about all the things done horribly, terribly poorly at CNNSI.com. Try to manage your magazine subscription there. Try to edit any of the thirty-eight separate mailing lists to which you can unwittingly find yourself subscribed. Try to find an article! The pages on the site load slightly slower than tectonic plates collide. There are dozens of useless and usability-impinging graphics on every single page. (I can’t even imagine what it would be like to read on a sub-4 browser.) The search functions are next-to-useless. And - can I stress this enough? - the archives are craptacular. You can’t link to an article more than an issue or two in the past, and all that’s archived beyond that are the “teasers” (which is only a bit more annoying than it is pointless).
</rant>

One of my friends is in a movie called Pranksters. My girlfriend and I went to the premiere Thursday night down at the Laemmle on Beverly. (It’s an independent film with quite a few sponsors; Krispy Kreme provided free donuts for all.)

Another friend keeps popping up on a late-night comedy show. He’s done some pretty funny Candid Camera-type sketches that are hysterical. Both he and his roommate had birthdays last week so Friday night we went to Cat & Fiddle on Sunset to celebrate.

The patio bar was packed all night, but somehow- even with fourteen million people wandering around LA - I bumped into a guy I hadn’t seen in almost two years. (Crazy!) It was good to learn he’s doing well and hasn’t squandered the hundred thou he won on Hollywood Squares last year. (He was back in town for a tournament of champions week.)

nf0 has written an article that describes How to Add the current Temperature to a Movable Type Blog Entry. (I cannot imagine why you would want to post the temperature which corresponds to a blog entry. But I’ve worked with databases and users long enough to know that no niche should ever go unfilled. Someone, somewhere is just dying to have this feature. I think that it is really much more interesting as a tutorial on how to add your own custom tags to MT.)

NEEDED Semi-nude Housekeepers (LA area)

Happy Housekeepers, Inc., is expanding from the New York City market into Los Angeles.

We provide semi-nude housekeepers to “lightly” clean apartments, condos and homes in the Los Angeles area.

We are hiring 3 to 5 attractive, voluptuous, or sexy young women between the ages of 18 and 30.

This is a 100 % professional job and does entail some light cleaning. However, our customers do understand Happy Housekeepers do not do more than “light” housework.

This is a very lucrative business for our housekeepers in New York City.

If you are attractive, do not mind housework, please send an e-mail to happyhousekeepers@yahoo.com.

Be sure to include your experience, whether you are looking for full or part time work and 2-3 pictures of your appearance!

written and directed by Andrew Bergman, 1992
I watched this last week on DVD. I’m pretty certain that I saw it in the theater when it was released, but it was so long ago that I can’t be sure. The flying Elvises (Elvii?) seemed to be in my memory.

This is a pretty funny flick. I love Nicolas Cage when he’s being a comedian. He does a great job as the regular guy in a strange situation. In Honeymoon in Vegas he’s basically trying to get his not-yet-quite wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, to marry him instead of evil millionaire James Caan. During the vacation in which he was about to propose, he somehow loses her to Caan for several days when he inadvertantly uses her as credit in a game of poker.

Hilarity ensues as he frets over whether she will fall for Caan’s charms. Cage travels to Caan’s luxurious Hawaiian hideaway trying to find her. (Pat Morita plays one of Caan’s henchmen tasked with keeping Cage away long enough for Parker to fall under the millionaire’s spell.) Most of the funniest parts of the movie occur here. I’m trying to not spoil any part of the film for you if you haven’t seen it, so I won’t go into too much detail.

I think the film is about five minutes too long to really be considered a great comedy. (A few of the bits between Caan and Parker could have been cut without detracting from the plot.) Cage and Morita really have some deliciously funny exchanges, though, and those alone are worth watching the movie to see.

I can half-heartedly recommend this movie.

Just when you thought beer-drinking couldn’t get any better, along comes the Autonomous Beer-Opening Robot, or ABOR.
It was built by Jean-Phillipe Clerc, a mechanical engineering master’s student at the University of Florida, as part of the school’s Intelligent Machine Design Laboratory class.

Fossil recently introduced a wrist PDA that runs Palm OS and looks really nifty. Right now it’s probably too bulky to be a comfortable watch, but I’m guessing that it will get smaller as the technology progresses. I think this is a cool idea; It would be cool to be able to have all the information in my Visor available right on my watch, but Backgammon, Solitaire, and Minesweeper are the Palm OS “tools” I use most often and I can’t imagine playing them on a tiny screen like that.
Aside: At the Barry Manilow concert Wednesday night my friend was incensed that he forgot to set the VCR to tape Greg the Bunny. (I haven’t seen this show yet, but he seems to think it’s excellent.) He complained that there should be some way to call his VCR from his cell phone (or wireless PDA) and tell it to start recording. I have to agree that that’s a pretty good idea. That sounds like a money project to me. Is anyone working on this?

I drove over the hill and down into West Hollywood yesterday for an interview. At some point during my trip I topped 10,000 miles on my truck. After the interview I met my girlfriend at the Olive Garden and then we booked to the Kodak Theater. Our friends, Michael and Deanna, got us tickets to the taping of Barry Manilow’s concert. (He’s on tour promoting his new CD and his most recent greatest hits CD.) I had a great time. I’d never seen Barry live so it was quite a treat. He played a bunch of classics and it was cool because, since they were taping it, he kept stopping between takes to tell stories about the songs and ad lib. Our ticketed seats were up in the mezzanine but there weren’t enough people on the floor so we got to be seat fillers closer to the stage.
I highly doubt we got on camera, but you can catch the show on CBS next month.

The LPGA certainly created an interesting trophy for the Longs Drugs Challenge! You really have to see the photo to appreciate it. And *what* could the winner have been thinking when she decided to kiss it?!

Great Caesar’s Ghost! This is possibly the worst news ever: Cancer Risk Found in French Fries!

I am a bit late (surprise!) but here are my answers to another round of Blogger Insider interview questions. This session had me paired with Kristina Pardue of pardueduran.com. Her answers to my questions are here.

[click to continue...]

From Son of Web Pages That Suck:

If you’ve got a “real” Web site, and by real I mean a site that gets real traffic, then you don’t need a counter on each page. Counters are not only unimpressive, they make you look like an amateur. Do you see a counter on any page at Microsoft, IBM, or General Motors? Counters appear on sites like Larry The Locksmith (apologies in advance to all locksmiths named Larry). If you can’t afford log file software, then you’re not a real site. Sorry. Most hosting services will provide you with log software. Some of the programs are probably good and some are probably bad.