Considering this is basically a rally on behalf of irony, and Jon Stewart isn't even there yet, there's a hell of a lot of people on the mall. So it figures to succeed at least as entertainment, regardless of how it works as politics.

Thanks to the "Help America Vote Act", New York has discarded it's mechanical pull-lever voting machines, which have been used (without issue)) my entire voting life, and replaced them with optical scanners. Predictably, the machine was jammed when I tried to vote, a call was in to the Board of Elections, and I had to go home. I was eventually able ( Read more... )

So, the bad news is that my IPhone chose to become an ex-Iphone 21 days after the warranty expired. The good news is the Apple store people gave me a new one anyway. So they've got that going for them from a customer service perspective.

IPhone (3GS, not the new one) has retreated into a catatonic state of only showing me the black screen with the white Apple logo. Microsoft products do crash, but they are also somewhat designed to recover from crashing. Apple's, with their celebrated simplicity, have one button, and if pushing it doesn't solve the problem, there's a distinct lack ( Read more... )

The Deepwater Horizon incident is, in addition to a catastrophic environmental disaster, which I'm not making light of, also a fascinating engineering problem. There is plenty of politcal blaming to go around in terms of whose fault it is that safeguards were not in place to ensure that if the rig blew up, it would not leave a permanent, open ( Read more... )

No other show will ever go into and out of breaks with a device like the ticking clock. It makes it so extraordinarily easy to fast forward through commercials.

Otherwise, ( Read more... )

Approximately Tuesday (I think Glee has another episode) the TV season will be over. In theory, I should miss it, but in May, watching TV starts to feel like work, since I watch a lot of baseball. So it will be a while before I miss it. This is my more-or-less annual mostly-post-mortem ( Read more... )

I think Fringe has given up the last vestige of not being exactly like the X-Files. Not that that's a particularly bad thing.

I've never read much of Elmore Leonard's work (I think I read one of his novels at some point, but I'd be hard put to say which one), but I have a strong sense nonetheless of what an "Elmore Leonard vibe" to a story is. I enjoyed "Out of Site", "Get Shorty", and the short-lived "Karen Sisco", with me-fave Carla Gugino. So thus far, I've been pretty ( Read more... )

I think the government is hording tax refund money .In past years, I've generally gotten it in a week or so. This year, I was told 8-15 business days. This is not progress.

Of course, I explicitly know that New York state is doing this. But I owe them, so it doesn't make much difference.