I am getting DSL on Friday. Thank crap. I will be posting more when it doesn't take a week and a half to load any give webpage. For now, though, dig on these thoughts:

The Space Elevator is the greatest idea in the history of humanity. Read Red Mars if you don't believe me.

Steven Wright and Jerry Lewis worked together on an episode of "Mad About You" titled "The Billionaire." The are possibly the greatest comedy team of all time. Wright makes a perfect straight man. And a perfectly straight-straight man at that. And Jerry Lewis is, well, Jerry Lewis. Comedy gold.

While in Tucson, I saw "Serenity" and "The Aristocrats." Both excellent and both for very different reasons.
Serenity: Joss Whedon ("Buffy...," "Angel") has a knack for creating memorable, lovable, unique characters and giving them their own quirky, alternate-English dialouge. And he hit on all cylinders with this one.
The Aristocrats: Mindblowingly dirty. Which, if you know me, is exactly what I aspire to. If it's still playing where you are (I doubt it is) go see it. Drew Carey is priceless in it.

I bought "This Is Spinal Tap" because I saw it on sale for ten dollars, and for ten dollars, how could you not invest in the Tap? ("But this one goes to eleven...")
My most recent favorite "This Is Spinal Tap" bit has got to be the name and album cover for "Intravenus De Milo."

Also watched "Human Nature" by Charlie Kaufman while in Tucson. These just in:
1) Charlie Kaufman is a wierd and awesome guy and is possibly the best writer of fiction/science fiction of the twenty first century.
2) Patricia Arquette is hot. Really hot. She stars in "Medium." (Said in manner of Christina: Waaaaatch iit...)
3) Jonathan Rhys Ifans  ("Notting Hill") is one gangly, funny looking, Welsh motherfucker.
4) Tim Robbins will always be his chacter in "The Hudsucker Proxy" to me. That and Andy Dufresne. But mostly he's all about "You know, for kids!" (a phrase which awesomely always gets shouts-out on Gizmodo).
5) Yes, I used the more-formal, less colloquial "shouts-out" instead of the widely accepted "shout-outs." Reasoning: It's like attourneys-general and it feels wierd to say.

Why aren't more of you watching "How I Met Your Mother"? This week's featured a "Top Gun" related joke.

This week's "Gilmore Girls" was the funniest/most dramatic of any yet and has revived my faith in the show.

Seriously, though, watch "How I Met Your Mother" Mondays at 7,30 on CBS.

Alright, because I'm a little drunk (I mostly finished a story yesterday--or was it day before?--that's a reference to "The Stranger" and also a reference to that I don't know if it was yesterday of the day before--and am still in the process of celebrating--it needs one more round of editing before you all can see it, but I've only got three weeks to shape it up before I need to send it out, so you all are going to have to be quick with the criticism--I'm looking you, Christina--so I've had a little do drink. Side note: (this is all a side note, isn't it?) Absolute Mandarin + Sprite + Ice = delicious.) these are mostly going to be one sentence links. Enjoy!

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Think Progress and Talking Points Memo give helpful Katrina timelines.

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The U.S. has revised it's nuke-use manual (again).

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Seinfeld in advertising.

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Topher Grace to play ... Venom?

The thing you gotta understand, in the comics, Venom was a fucking hulking ex-Marine. To say that Topher will have to 'bulk up' to play the role as well all envision it is ein hilarious understatement.

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Kate Cruise? America's sweetheart really is gone forever, isn't she?

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Buy a fancy European Stoller... [Gizmodo, which is the wierdest part.]

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The story of the man who hit no whammies.

"Press Your Luck," a brilliant man and his ultimately tragic tale. Who could ask for more?

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Dirigible of War!

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A picture of the comic book Venom:

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Can we all agree that Anne Hathaway is a total babe?

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Toothpaste for Dinner effectively skwerers me and my ilk.

Also, the color beige.

Also, I would be one of these.

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I have been dreaming of something similar to this for five years. I almost built a computer into my coffee-table I want it so much. And now it is real. (Or will be soon...)

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Apple releases iTunes phone--from Motorola and carried by Cingular--as well as iTunes 5 and the iPod nano.

I want to have sex with an iPod nano it is so hot. Thinner than a goddamn pencil! Will wonders never cease?

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Oil companies intentionally limiting refining capacity to drive up prices? The hell you say!

Not that I fault them, business is business and until the market learns how to reduce/alter its gasoline consumption patterns, there's not a shitload shy of socialism we can do about it. Not that I'm terribly opposed to socialism, w/r/t economics, at least, but with the free market-ideal as strong as it is now--can you imagine somebody doing like Nixon did and capping wages today? They'd be stoned to death by the end of the business day--there's little chance of igniting real change.

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There's a lot of blame to go around, and frankly, I'm sick of talking about it. Not that I don't think it should be dealt with, but let me take a single deep breath before we launch into it, a'ight? But this was the first--and still best--article I've seen on it. It doesn't overreach like some, I don't think, and it's tremendously well titled. It's Slate's Department of Homeland Screw-Up.

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Anderson Cooper, sick of dealing with bullshit, breaks down on air. Good for him.

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Transcription of Kanye West's comments.

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One last, damning Katrina-item: FAA disputes that shots were fired at rescue choppers.

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Nova's been running an excellent four part series on how life got to / flourished on Earth. Recent science helps provides new evidence their liberal-elite propaganda is correct!

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Look, we need to have a talk about the fall season. Yeah, it's starting soon. And I'm going to watching most of it. For you, this is all for you. I'm going to watch things that are bound to be horrible like "Freddie" so you don't have to. Isn't that sweet of me? And I'll report back here about just how horrible or unhorrible they were. A list of the new show's I'll be reporting on, for at least their first week:

Monday:
Surface
How I Met Your Mother
Kitchen Confidential
Just Legal
Out of Practice

Tuesday:
Bones
My Name is Earl
Commander in Chief
Close to Home

Wednesday:
Freddie
E-Ring
Related
Invasion

Thursday:
Reunion
Night Stalker

Friday:
Ghost Whisperer (which WILL be oh-so-bad)
Twins
Hot Properties
Inconceivable

Sunday:
The War at Home

You are welcome. Check out epguides.com's terrific grid of the fall schedule and when everything on it premiers.

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Nothing can express the lust I feel for Paula Marshall like these grainy screencaps. And these, too, for good measure.

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Blogenlust shares: Condi Shops while Nah'lins Drowns

Also, in this post, Blogenlust links to an article in the Village Voice concerning the fact that 35% of Louisianna's and 45% of Missippi's National Guard units are ... wait for it ... IN IRAQ.

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A musical-shout-out to Jimmy Eat World. Futures was their best effort yet and it's sublime.

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Weep not for CBGB, weep for what it used to be.

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Rummy on Letterman next Tuesday. I'm sure this will be precisely as toothless as Santorum on The Daily Show, so don't get excited.

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An account of the situation in New Orleans, and, honestly, it sounds like hell on earth. I'd avoided it for the past day or two--reading full accounts, that is, but now that I am, this is so much worse than I imagined.

I am not the type of person who sends their "prayers out to" people or any muck like that, personally, I think that it's a kind of huberis to think that your individual ... anything non-tangible ... could actually do anything, but ... this New Orleans business is astounding. So, my thoughts, at least, are with them, for all the good it will do.

Perhaps some of my money--well, any money I can find--will soon be with them, too.

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How would you like to be act that follows that news item? So I'll quote Phoebe from "Friends": "It would be like those poor bicycle riding chimps that went on Ed Sullivan after the Beatles."

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Gizmodo makes elaborate joke about Apple's upcoming Sept. 7th anouncment and the related speculation.

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Daring Fireball on why the iPod wins. Mostly, it's the third of these three (long) items to which I refer. So, scroll down accordingly if you're one of those short-attentionspan types. For those of you with even shorter attentionspans, I'll thumbnail it here: it's simplicity, stupid.

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Pat Robertson wants a lot of people dead, it turns out.

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Student suspended for posession of a cigarette, hangs herself.

I link to it not because it's sensational but because the article is more about the lawsuit the parents filed against the school district and the grounds on which it was dismissed. I'd always been curious abou this particular cranny of our legal system and the back half of the article discusses the principles nicely and how they play into the particulars of this case.

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Opinion: There's too goddamn much football on TV these days.

I've been pissed about how every time I turn around there's another goddamn preseason game on. That's the thing about football: every game matters. Every game matters so much that every down of every game matters. And that's awesome. Preseason football guts this. There's no consequences to any of it. So: whoopity doo. Thank fuck the regular season starts on Thursday.

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I sat down today with Excel and the fall schedules for the 6 networks that I get and made out a schedule of when everything I want to tivo is and to see if there were going to be any conflicts. There were a few, but nothing major. I am excited about this fall. It will be a good time for television (I hope). I also hope that "How I Met Your Mother" doesn't suck. Please, please let it not suck. "Out of Practice," however, starring Rizzo and the Fonz? Oh, man, there's no way it'll be good. Though I do think that Paula Marshall is a total babe.

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I am sick with some sort of sinus thing, so these links will have to do without much explanation:

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Something about Bush's ability to communicate and how he and his communications office eat but, get this, from someone on the right.

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Albert Ellis is anti-Freud. Whatever. I like how he's one mean psychologist.

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"Towards a unified theory of wingnuttia"

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Has anyone ever watched an episode of Tru Calling or Felicity? I'm looking for a cheap (i.e. not something from HBO) TV Drama on DVD now that I've exhausted Buffy, Angel, Alias, CSI, West Wing and Gilmore Girls. And Veronica Mars doesn't come out until October. Don't make me watch Dawson's Creek, people--I'll do it.

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Nobody has anything to say about snakes on a motherfucking plane?

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"The Ballad of the Thin Man" is quite good.

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Read Charles Simic's book "Walking the Black Cat." You will like it.

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A long but ultimately pointless review of the day's news and interesting crap

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As you've probably heard, Google introduced "Google Talk" today. Some are naysaying, some are speculating that this is only one part of Google's endgame, some are waiting for a Mac client that has all the fancy features of the Windows only client availible now, though you can connect with iChat, which comes standard on the Mac. And that's why I've been on it almost all day: it's no extra investment of effort (after I figured out that I had to open port 5222 in my firewall) and iChat--which I run anyway--will open it automatically. The only problem: there's no one to talk to on it.

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Mary Loise Parker to play Brad Pitt's Wife. Now those are two foxy people.

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Samuel L. Jackson to star in the title-says-it-all thriller, Snakes on a Plane.

Related: "Snakes on a Plane" as zen koan.

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No, the economy is not doing all that well, thank you very much...

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Armstrong faces fresh drug accusations. That's Lance, not Neil, by the way.

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Jacob Weisberg on why we should quit pretending that evolution and God are compatible:

But the acceptance of evolution diminishes religious belief in aggregate for a simple reason: It provides a better answer to the question of how we got here than religion does. Not a different answer, a better answer: more plausible, more logical, and supported by an enormous body of evidence. Post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, which can explain the emergence of the first bacteria, doesn't even leave much room for a deist God whose minimal role might have been to flick the first switch.

And he's right.

Bonus: Only 13% of people believe in straight up evolution. That's a depressing, depressing figure.

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I've been bummed lately because of my computers performance. Not that I'm not happy with it and don't love every Mac minute--how beautiful the typefaces in Word documents look cannot be expressed in words, it's like looking at a laser-printed piece of paper, it's increadible--so, anyway, I've been bugged by lags and spinning-beachballs-of-death, particularly in Firefox, which spurred my transition to Mozilla, which has the same problems, only less. So I took a long hard look at the Activity Monitor and learned something interesting: even though these programs only take up about 40 megs of resident memory, they were using on the order of TEN TIMES that in virtual memory.

Now, since virtual memory is stored on disk, it gets hung up on the well documented bottle-neck of Mac Mini performance: the 4200 RPM notebook harddisk, so I implemented a hack I'd read about back when the Mini was still relatively new: I did a fresh install of Tiger ... on a FireWire drive.

And because the Mac is genius at transferring settings and documents and applications, though it took an hour to move the 75 gigabytes of data I've got on my hard-disk (I've not been able to archive porn, NewsRadio or other video lately) the performance gains were awesome. Solved my Mozilla/FF problem and actually increased system performance across the board considerably. It is beautiful.

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And now, a picture of an office chair being sucked into an MRI machine. Good luck in medicine, Lars!

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Has any pop-up ever--I mean, in the history of time--has any pop-up ever actually worked? By accident alone and only I would guess.

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"Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog"--Roman Graffiti, courtesy of .:Data-What?:.

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I wrote a widget for the OS X dashboard. Here is a picture of said widget:

It strips the fresh Tooth Paste for Dinner comic off of ... wait for it ... toothpastefordinner.com.
I would make it availible here for testing, but typepad's upload feature seems to have gone a little wonky. If you're running Tiger (Lars), email or IM me if you want to test run this bad boy for me before I submit it to somewhere for, I dunno, general widgetry.

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I had forgotten how ... all consuming it could be to spend five consecutive hours staring at a computer screen learning how to do something that's not even really all that imortant. Sure, widgets are just HTML, graphics, JavaScript, CSS and a .plist file, but for someone like me whose entire knowledge of HTML stems from a time when the "blink" tag was the hottest thing going? It took me a while. And it was fun. I hadn't learned how to do anything completely useless since PreCalculus and this was more fun than that.

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New Death Cab for Cutie record August 30th. Transatlanticism was their best to date--Chris Walla's prodcution alone was worth the price of admission--but Lindsayism rips Ben Gibbard a new one about one of the new songs a few weeks ago.

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France gets book vending machines. [Gizmodo]

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I have now watched both "The Bourne Identity" and "The Bourne Supremecy." Verdict: Doug Liman (... Identity) directs things good. Paul Greengrass (...Supremecy) is not good by comparison. Also: Franka Potente, once freed from the red mane of "Run Lola Run" is quite the fox.

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Occasionally an actor or actress will become so at one with their part that it transcends acting. here is an uncomprehensive list: Peter O'Toole in "Lawrence of Arabia," Alexis Bledel in the Gilmore Girls episode where Jess wrecks her car, Jeremy Piven as Paul Spericki in "Grosse Pointe Blank." There are good actors that are still ... acting when you watch them. These people in those roles embody their subjects--or, more, even than that--they make the subject them, if that makes any sense. Also: Mila Kunis is the "That 70's Show" episode "Cat Fight Club."

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While the rest of the album is hit and miss, "Mystery Juice," the opener on Sean Lennon's solo disc "Into the Sun" is still excellent, trippy and rockalicious.

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Sometimes I feel like this:

And I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I've written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones
My bones
My bones

--Lyrics from The Decemberists "The Engine Driver," it's like "Wichita Lineman" for a whiny generation.

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Jay Pinkerton rewrote the Superman origin story to be hilarious. And dirty, absurdist and more than a little mean. It's terriffic.

Also via .:Data-What?:.

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And now, a picture of a "Bewitched" cell phone:

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The wierdness that is number stations... [referenced in this Gizmodo post]

Now I almost want to have a short wave radio, but I'm not quite THAT nerdy.

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Guy: My whole family hates me. I hope they all fucking die, even the babies.

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Also at Gizmodo, Low End Theory: Why Discmen Won't Die.

The last crappy CD player I bought cost me 29.99$. That was only eight months ago, so either prices have shifted massively since then or in AZ you really get screwed.

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Partisan bickering can be funny, too.

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Midlife Assesment : Cataloging my Ruination @ Slate.

I'm sure glad I don't have that non-closing-torso-hole problem...

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Musical shout out of the day: The Buzzcocks. With songs like "Orgasm Addict, "Fallen in Love," and the recently-covered "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" how could you go wrong?

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Lars gets whitecoated today. Way to go, Lars! You're living the dream. Of being a doctor. Not my dream, particularly. But a dream. Your dream. So way to go!

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Jenna Jameson vs. Scottsdale. Now everyone all together: Fucking Scottsdale.

Who the fuck spells out Circle K on a sign? (Fucking Scottsdale, that's who.)

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Slate on Lions, Cheetahs and Elephants on the Great Plains.

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And now, a picture of Bebe Neuwirth and Mr. T.:

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"Special Edna," episode 14.7 of "The Simpsons" was on the other night. I'd like to take a moment and relive one of my all-time favorite Simpsons moments.

And we're not stopping there, because at Eastern Airlines, world conquest
is part of our master plan. Now enjoy the soothing music of the Turtles!

The whole Epcot sequence is magic--"It's what people in 1965 imagined 1987 would be like!" the electric car bit, Enron's Ride of Broken Dreams, et cetera--and Cletus' press conference questions are great, but really, can you beat plane-head robots?

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As a follow up: "The Simpsons, Hyper-Irony and the Meaning of Life."

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If you haven't read "THIS IS MY COMPUTER BLOG ON THE INTERNET" you ought to. It's not updated terribly often but, man, is it funny:

THIS IS THE OWLS THAT HEARD THE HARMONICAS!! THE RABBIT IS PLAYING HIS HARMONICAS!!
HEY OWLS, GET YOUR HORNS!!! THEN YOU CAN PLAY THE SONGS WITH THE RABBIT!!! I AM CALLING SUPER MOP-TOP!! HE WILL PLAY HIS DRUM SETS!!

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Text of Steve Jobs commencement speech this year @ Stanford. I didn't read it or nothin', but I might want to sometime and I didn't want to lose the link. That, any maybe you will read it and summarize it for me.

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I started writing a story last night so probably no poems for a while. I know, you're all real sad. You don't have to be dicks about it.

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An interview with the editor of Defamer. It digresses for a while in the middle, but it comes back, don't worry.

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And now to wrap up, a pair of Slate articles.

The first is on how network news and so called "Old Media" will continue to be profitable--extremely profitable--for a long, long time to come. So get over yourself, bloggers and new-media-revolution types.

The second is about meth-mouth and how, while somewhat accurate, sometimes, it's attributed causes are usually horse-shit.

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Lindsay Lohan will apparently be getting her boobs back. Thank crap. Now, will this all so de-whore her and/or give me a shot?

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If you're going to post this crap on Slashdot, you might as well just start the post with "Just so you know, this will be  troll. Possibly the trolliest-troll you've ever seen." And not that there's not nothing to his point. Just don't be trolly about it.

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LJ Post [via Defamer] about Scott Stapp getting his ass handed to him as he tries to hit that shit @ Denny's in Gainsville. True or not, the idea that it could happen? Hilarious.

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Apparently China's Mystery Disease(TM) could be Ebola. [sarcasm] Fucking great. [/sarcasm]

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Lars, buy two.

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Bonnie McFarlane is funny. She was funny on Letterman the other night. And she apparently has a (regular in any way?) column. The excerpts on the index are funny enough for me.

Apparently she also was in a UPN series called "Social Studies" in 1997. Which must've been like, their first year or so, eh?

Here are some of her upcoming showdates. None of us are near any of them.

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Because everyone that had actually seen it liked it and the only people that didn't like it were the people who hadn't seen it (myself most surely included) and because it got picked up by CBS for the fall, I tivoed and watched the first episode of Veronica Mars. You know what? It was pretty darn good. That Veronica Mars, she's a pistol. And she goes to Neptune High. The first season hits DVD 10 Oct 2005.

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