Geoff Swift, late of CBT, joins the Blogosphere:
May 31, 2009
DTV
I just installed my digital TV converter box. I get half as many channels as before, but they come in very nicely. One of the channels lost was PBS. Expect an avalanche of phone calls to the FCC when old folks begin missing Antiques Road Show.
Imagine you’ve just been laid off from your job selling Pontiac cars. They’ve cut your cable, but at least you could look forward to a summer of watching broadcast TV undisturbed… until now. Nothing to do about it but sit in the dark until the repo man comes for your house. Hell of a country we’re running, eh?
May 29, 2009
Yet More Silver Lining
Harvard is in trouble. Not really news, but The Atlantic’s blogsite gives a good treatment.
May 28, 2009
Where No Man Has Gone Before?
I refuse to believe that pulsars are a natural result of stellar evolution. An interstellar navigation beacon network implies an interstellar navigator, does it not?
Spell This, Sucka!
There are few things I hate more than the National Spelling Bee. Have they ever used a word that wouldn’t appear in publication italicized as foreign or capitalized as proper (e.g. Homeric, not homeric)? I swear one day I’ll find a deaf kid and a lawyer and get an injunction placed to limit their word list to those extant in American sign language. That’ll fix ‘em.
May 27, 2009
More Silver Lining, cont.
Wall Street Journal reports the demise of bling.
The recession is cramping the style of hip-hop artists and wannabes — many of whom are finding it difficult to afford the diamond-encrusted pendants and heavy gold chains they have long used to project an aura of outsized wealth.
In an attempt to keep up appearances, celebrity jewelers say rappers are asking them to make medallions with less-precious stones and metals. Some even whisper that the artists have begun requesting cubic zirconia, the synthetic diamond stand-in and QVC staple.[emphasis added]
Bring it, recession.
May 25, 2009
Eelam no more
Hitchens on the fall of the Tamil Tigers; only the last paragraph is important. The take-away lesson of the whole affair seems to be: send your diaspora to New York, not Toronto.
May 21, 2009
Shhh! Secret.
Operation Re-Cappie-tulation III has gone into action. Those in the know, hush. Those of you left wondering may continue to do so.
May 20, 2009
Goa Trance
Gabe wasn’t wrong about Sita Sings the Blues. It’s very charming. It made me think, not for the first time, that we’re sorely lacking a Zelda-type video game treatment of the Indian pantheon–the animation even reminded me a bit of Windwaker’s. Of all the incarnations of Sita, I liked the singing-Sita least. Too Betty Boop. But the mural-painting Sita in the introduction, floating on water and then through outer space, Chakras glowing, was as mesmerising as a snake-charmer.
I knew the story already, but I had forgotten and was surprised by the most interesting detail, Sita’s walk through fire. The story, or that detail at least, must date no earlier than the Iron Age, unless purity through the crucible is a metaphor written in the fleshy tables of the heart and not learned at the forge.
Addendum: although Rama’s story is similar to Odysseus’, Sita’s is more like Chunhyang’s. Hmm… -nb
May 19, 2009
Getting Nostalgic
Oh good, the old New York is back.
Assaults in Greenwich Village lead the frightening upturn, with a whopping 43 percent increase so far this year compared with the same period in 2008.
