Some Words

Hockey Pre-Season has started. Today the Wild beat the Wings 2-3. My consolation is that the Wings only dressed something like two members of their team last year. The wild had Demetria and Gaborik on the ice, plus Fernandez in goal. It was frustrating driving to work today, as I had to go past the Xcel Energy Center, where the game was played. There were no broadcasts of the game that I could get either.

Boing Boing seems to have started in on a project using what amounts to micropayments. I was never quite sure I bought into the guys at Goats debunking the idea. Still, I don’t know of anyone making it work very well so far. Good luck to Boing Boing’s Emporium. I would love to think it will be a huge success. It’s a great sounding model when you belive it works.

Back in the day I had an incredibly crappy web page, where from time to time I would post thoughts and things I had written. It was like this blog, but without php making things easy, nasty graphics that I had done myself in photo shop, and even less frequently updated. I can tell you’re all wondering why I’m not an internet phenomenon already.

Anyhow one of the things I wrote about back then, was how I wished there was a service, either a little program (the sort of thing that would now go in the OS X dashboard) or an email service, that would aggregate all the bands I wanted to track so I would know when they were coming through town. A lot of bands had sign up lists, but it was not consistent, and usually they would just send out a big tour schedule. I’m lazy and I wanted it to feel personal.

Well, yesterday the good folks of Fabulist let me know that such a thing now exists. Tourfilter, and here I link the Twin Cities portion, but it’s there for a bunch of other cities. Lets you track who’s coming to town. They send you email notices and if you want to, you can post it to your blog. And oh, what’s this I see? It can integrate with iCal and thus end up in your dashboard. Now I have even less excuse for why I don’t go to all those shows I miss.

So David Brooks pumps out the crazy and gets smacked the fuck down. Balance is restored to the world. But does anyone but me remember the speech he made to a Young Republican group last year that was broadcast on C-Span? I mean, I feel really dorky admiting that I was watching C-Span for more than the two seconds it takes to get past it while channel surfing. But one day, I don’t remember why, I stopped there. David was there, playing the usual role of Republican apologist in chief. He was going into the usual stuff about the ‘burbs growing and feeding the Republican machine.

That’s when things got sureal for me. He stood on the podium and basically said that the Republicans had screwed a bunch of stuff up. Then he said something that amazed me, and I’m paraphrasing here, I would give anything for the actual text, it was the gold standard of ‘what are you thining.’ He said that Republicans had shown themselves to be bad at governing, but it was ok, because the demographics were set for them to continue getting elected. Now, I’m probably crazy, because I’ve been taking hippy drugs here at work all day, but if you say that you’re bad at governing, maybe the solution is not to govern? Play to your strenghts man! He said Dems were good at governing (ish, again, I’m paraphrasing here, he probably weaseled around on it more) but the Republicans were better at getting elected. There is an obvious solution here.

Republicans should be campaign managers and let the Dems to the governing. Hey, I didn’t say it. I just twisted a half remembered speech by David Brooks into saying it.

Via Boing Boing comes a list of 20 great Japanese adds.

Ah, but it does not have the ad that an old friend who went to Japan told me about. It’s about a toilet bowl that has a tab of cleaner dropped into it. It’s so happy that it breaks free and rolls through the streets of Tokyo proclaiming its joy. Sadly you tube does not seem to have it. Searching for ‘happy toilet’ gets mostly people puking on their birthday. Happy toilet to you all.

Aislinn gets it right on the subjecto of Snakes on a Plane. Half the people I know, if asked how much illicitly acquired data they go through in a day would have to give the answer in gigs. I think Tycho once used the phrase “bathing in a sea of illegal data,” but I’m too lazy to look it up. Indeed, I would say that illegal data downloads were the porn of our day, (cheap, easy, often of dubious quality) if not for the fact that 80% of it is probably actually porn. Indeed, the net seems to only support two enterprises right now, porn and T-Shirt companies.