Humor!

Jon: Did you have a chance to interview Frank for the job?
Tom: Yeah.
Jon: What - you didn't like him?
Tom: Meh. In his cover letter, he spelled résumé without the accents.
Jon: Dude. Don't be so diacritical.

Still moody

About 4 years ago I wrote a post saying that I thought "Nights in White Satin" kinda sucked.

At the time I caught flack from both friends and my moms for my sacrilege. I guess I didn't fully appreciate how prominently this song features in the personal sexual histories (I'm just guessing) of people I knew.

But then today, I get this anonymous comment on that post: "You don't understand it because you are an idiot. Fucking Clones."

So are there Moody Blues fanboys just trolling the web, looking to set the record straight about "Nights in White Satin"? Jumping into long-stale threads from years ago to defend the use of the gong that celebrates the end of the 8 minute version of the song?

And what to make of the clones comment. Is the commenter a clone-hunter? Part of a legion of Moody Blues-inspired blade runners who use "Nights in White Satin" as their empathy test.

The internet perplexes me.

Baseball's Back

Go Cardinals!

Sell it

Jason Sutter had some good advice for me inspired by this clip of Michael Jackson and Prince getting called up to the stage during a James Brown show.

While the getting's good

Slate on the recent spate of former Bush insiders who are going public with their dissatisfaction:

The only downside to deserting Bush at this late hour is that sooner or later all the best media outlets will be used up. Please note, however, that Slate's dance card is still free. If you are a reasonably visible Bush loyalist who would like to declare the current administration a complete disaster, please e-mail chatterbox@slate.com. You'd better make it good, though. This story's starting to get old.

Nookie

You're a single dude. The NYT wants to do an interview with you about dating. They've brought a photographer.

You may think, "Cool! I'm gonna be in the paper. I'm finally gonna make good time with the ladies."

Sadly, however, the correct response is to resign yourself to a life of celibacy. The Old Gray Lady has decided that your humiliation is needed to sell papers, so you may as well use yesterday's Style section to wrap up your penis and ship it off to midtown Manhattan.

Better yet, use the Circuits section you wonky, unfuckable geek.

Exhibit A: Tom Ryan of Denver interviews with the NYT for an article about modern-day marriage. The article appears under the headline "Facing Middle Age With No Degree, and No Wife." It features a picture of him strumming away on his lonesome guitar followed by the caption:

"Tom Ryan used to share a home outside Denver with a girlfriend but now lives alone, enjoying the ability to keep the house as he pleases. That includes a hat rack covered with dozens of commemorative baseball caps.

Can I get you a box of tissues and some hand lotion, Mr. Ryan?

Exhibit B: Bob Strauss writes dating advice for match.com. He agrees to appear in a story about how women respond to the apartments of potential mates. His picture appears in today's Home & Garden section with a red REJECTED stamp emblazoned across his belly.

What's more he's holding a stuffed baby seal that's sporting a studded leather collar. The caption explains: "Bob Strauss refuses to 'blandify' his apartment by getting rid of his stuffed baby seal, even though it puts some women off." D'you think, Bob? Do you have to be a professional advice columnist to know that some women aren't into "baby animal taxidermy"/"fetish gear" mashups?

As if the photo weren't enough, the article goes on to state that the baby seal "is displayed along with Mr. Strauss’s South Park and Sonic the Hedgehog figurines and Lego collection."

Well played, New York Times. I think you've succeeded in making sure that even internet porn will turn down sex with Bob Strauss.

Music Supervision

Spoilers: this post talks about the Season 3 finale of BSG and Jason Sutter's wrinkly bits.

So, yeah. They need to finish this whole series up. Not that it's completely unenjoyable - in fact, there were a number of solid moments last night. But at this point it wouldn't be surprising to find out the whole thing is some Matrix-like simulated reality.

And, increasingly, they're making some questionable artistic choices.

Regarding the finale, I actually started shouting 'No' at the screen when Tigh muttered "Said the joker to the thief." The idea that the Final Five Cylons are picking up on transmissions from modern-day Earth is a perfectly serviceable sci-fi concept. I just can't believe they went with such a hokey, overused song.

Heather Havrilesky's reaction in Salon is pretty accurate:

"Oh my God! My stoner boyfriend from high school wrote the season finale of 'Battlestar Galactica'! Why did Ronald D. Moore take a break and hand over responsibility for the finale to a guy who spent most of his time doing shots of Bacardi 151 Rum and noodling Hendrix on his guitar? Was that wise, really?"

No, it wasn't wise. By using this hackneyed tune, it makes the underlying concept seem weak ... which is a shame. Just as a for instance, what if that scene had been written like this:

Chief: I can’t seem to face up to the facts.
Tigh: I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax.
Anders: I can’t sleep because my bed’s on fire.
Tory: Don’t touch me I’m a real live wire.

It works better on basically every level.

Obviously, I'm picking on one detail. But this was the sort of thing that used to just work in BSG. Starbuck returns to her apartment, turns on the radio and Philip Glass pours out. Or, you know, the first time Apollo defied his father and renounced his military obligations.

At this point, I think we're either revisiting old territory (cancer!) or paying off new story arcs in a hacky way (Starbuck lives!). Time to wrap it up.

(Regarding Sutter's balls: Like BSG this season, I hinted at a compelling story arc but failed to deliver. Unsatisfying, isn't it.)

Making it Up

Salon has an interview with BSG creator, Ron Moore. There are a couple questions they ask him that I find interesting.

First, they ask about the difficulty in keeping an audience for a serialized drama. How can you pick up new viewers when it's essentially impossible for someone to start watching from the middle.

When asked how they deal with this challenge on BSG, Moore says "I don't. It's a genuine problem I have no solution for ... It's certainly not something [the network is] in love with." And he goes on to say "We've done a few stand-alone episodes here and there, and they're almost never very successful."

True that.

Second, they ask about how planned out the season arcs are and how much is changed on the fly. While the major story arcs are planned "as you do it you find that there's this other more interesting path." When asked for an example of something that resulted from this organic approach, he says "In this season's finale, I decided on the fly to give Laura her cancer back."

Boo! Just slapping someone with the cancer stick at the last minute is some weak-ass soap opera bullshit.

But more importantly, HBO's The Wire has shown there's a better way to deal with serialized drama. You treat the whole season as a single piece and tell one, 12-hour story. No one gets cancer at the last minute and you don't have stand alone episodes.

Yes, this is probably only sustainable for the shorter seasons that premium TV allows. But I'd be so much more happy with BSG if they'd kept to the momentum they had back at the end of season 1/beginning of season 2.

In short, the way in which to make serialized drama work is to not treat it as a serial. Consider the whole thing long-form fiction and make a complete (if slightly shorter) story out of a single season.

Dumb spam

Top story on Digg states "75 per cent of Google's blogspot blogs are spam."

The dugg story is a post from infoniac.com reporting on a post on WebMasterWorld reporting on a wire story on Yahoo! News reporting on joint project from Microsoft Research/UC-Davis to study web spam.

Unsurprisingly, some details got lost in translation ... literally, I think, as I'm gonna give the infoniac poster the benefit of the doubt and assume that no native English speaker would write "what would happen if certain World Wide Web structures, among which Google, Yahoo and other search engines, didn't fight spam?"

In any case, it turns out that the study didn't look at all URLs and count the spam. They took a bunch of commercial keywords like "prescription drugs" or "cheap tickets" and looked at the percentage of sites that were spam for specific domains. It's not terribly surprising that a high percentage of spammy sites would be found.

But that's far different than saying 75% of all sites are spam.

Update: As Kevin points out in a comment, what the study actually found was that 75% of blogs likely to be spam actually were spam.

Outrage

In which I finally disgust Jason Sutter so much that he refuses to talk to me (took 12 years):