Cuz We Said So

Dick Cavett Remembers Bobby Fischer

Via Pejman Yousefzadeh, Dick Cavett remembers a very different Bobby Fischer than the man Fischer became later in life.  There’s video of an interview from 1971.

The Next Texas License Plate

According to KPRC 2 in Houston, Texans have weighted in on their choice for a new license plate design, and I’m pleased to say the one I liked was also apparently the popular favorite.  It is a beautiful design, though clearly, word of my preferences must have leaked, somehow…

More than 1 million votes were cast in the weeklong online poll by the Texas Department of Transportation to pick a new state license plate.

Texans had five plates to choose from, including the current design.

But the overwhelming winner was the Lone Star plate, which received more than 450,000 votes. It featured a white Lone Star in the top, left-hand corner, wide brushes of red and blue punctuating the Texas sky on the top half of the plate along with a low-lying mountain range on the bottom.

The vote isn’t binding; it’s the Texas Transportation Commission has the authority to change the plates.  But I feel confident they will make the right choice once they hear I’m in favor of it.

Cassette Tape Flashback 1992

Remember the casette tape?  It was a technology used by those zany residents of the 20th-century for audio recording.  I have dozens of them gathering dust, and over the weekend ran across one Russell recorded with his brother EB back in 1992.  It’s an amusing little slice of history; one segment features a quick survey of late night cable television, including news reports from Somalia (Clinton lied, people died!) and commercials for telephone psychics (“for entertainment purposes only!”).   Perhaps the best bit was a segment from what turned out to be Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, written by soon-to-be Pretty Woman scribe J.F. Lawton, and starring Shannon Tweed, Adrienne Barbeau, and a very pre-Real Time Bill Maher.  Ah, the classics.  The little snippet I heard proved unexpectedly amusing, the way it revelled in its own awfulness.

Can We Promote this from Conspiracy Theory to Conspiracy?

Stacey Higginbotham: Choose Your Own Conspiracy: Undersea Cable Edition:

After three undersea cables in the Middle East were taken out last week, those who fear black helicopters started to worry. But now, with the number of broken undersea telecommunications cables in the Middle East rising to five, even sane people (and pundits) are donning their tinfoil hats to discuss what might be behind it.

Various theories are fielded; I’d be open to any but blaming the fisherman—five incidents looks like deliberate sabotage.  The whole affair does highlight the challenges inherent to protecting this sort of infrastructure.  How do you protect thousands of miles of high bandwidth cable from determined individuals that want to harm it?  Remote monitoring?  Switch to satelite? Armed robots?  Trained dolphins?

How Many Countries Can You Name...

…in 5 minutes?  I thought I was doing okay as I was going through it,  but once I saw the list of countries I missed, I felt less cocky.  Also, I was surprised how quickly five minute breezes past when you’re trying to do this.  Memory counts, but the time it takes to type in each country name is a significant factor as well.  I suggest you try to think of countries with short names first.  (Via Nik Fletcher at Download Squad).

52

"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles"

It occurs to me that I haven't yet reviewed this series.

It sucks.

Okay, so if you want more detail, here's why it sucks:

The casting is greatly distracting, since the actress playing Sarah is only fourteen years older than the kid playing her son John. And while the choice of Summer Glau as their protective terminator is kind of cool... her performance in the pilot indicated that her character is capable of a completely humanistic performance... which performance she hasn't replicated since.

They have almost (but not quite) completely ditched the events of the third film from the arc of the mythology. I know people who (wrongly) believe that the third film sucked. But even if it did, a few minor tweaks to the timeline of the series could have dealt with that deftly. And even then, there are enough details from the second film that they got wrong that it just bugged me.

I guess it's not really possible to create a series out of the character that Linda Hamilton portrayed in T2, since she was, essentially, insane. But the whole thing is so tonally distinct, I feel like I'm watching a reboot rather than a sequel... and it's not one I can get behind.

Here's hoping the new movie is a better follow-up.

So is the Writer's Strike REALLY Nearly Over?

Rumors, including the latest from Nikki Finke, say it might be—but of course, we’ve heard such rumors before, and those didn’t exactly pan out.  Cross your fingers, media fans…

From the What Could Possibily Go Wrong Dept.

Instapundit.com:

A GALLERY OF armed robots. Plus, this reassurance:

"We're not building Skynet" says Bart Everett, the technical director for robotics at SPAWAR.

Terrific, except that in the story, the people who built Skynet didn’t think they were building Skynet, either.