Archive for December, 2007

In Other News

I will shortly be mak­ing my glo­ri­a­tial and spec­tac­u­lary return to reg­u­lar sub­stan­tive blog­ging. I have much in the way of Yule­tide dra­mat­ics to relate. Top­ics will include: The Bhutto Assas­si­na­tion My Sister’s Grad­u­a­tion My Sister’s Job Inter­view Fam­i­lies & The Hol­i­days Gift-​​​​Giving I will also be clean­ing up all these half-​​​​finished movie reviews.

The Take

This Christ­mas saw the addi­tion of 53 titles to my DVD col­lec­tion. Here they are: 9 to 5 A View to a Kill Bar­barella: Queen of the Galaxy Bat­man Bat­man Returns Blade Run­ner Dial M For Mur­der Dia­monds Are For­ever Die Another Day Dr. No Fam­ily Plot For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent For Your Eyes Only Frenzy From Rus­sia with Love Gold­en­eye Goldfin­ger Harry Pot­ter and the Order of the Phoenix I Con­fess License to Kill Live and Let Die Marnie Moon­raker Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941, d:Hitchcock) North by North­west Octo­pussy On Her Majesty’s Secret Ser­vice Psy­cho Rata­touille Rear Win­dow Rope Sabo­teur Shadow of a Doubt Stage Fright Strangers on a Train Sus­pi­cion [ . . . ]

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Things What Scare Me

It is dif­fi­cult for me to express exactly how much this man scares me. Not just from a polit­i­cal stand­point, but as a per­son. Even the look of him por­tends ter­ri­ble things. Per­haps he smells of doom. It isn’t even the pos­si­bil­ity, how­ever remote, that he might be elected that scares me. A theo­crat at 1600 Penn­syl­va­nia couldn’t do so much dam­age as, say, a theo­crat at One First Street. It would still be awful, but if putting up a theo­cratic gov­ern­ment is your goal, the Oval Office isn’t the most effec­tive route. What is really fright­en­ing about Mike Huck­abee is that so many peo­ple — peo­ple [ . . . ]

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It’s Like Sophie’s Choice!

Warn­ing: Project Run­way spoil­ers ensue! Augh! For some rea­son, I’ve been watch­ing Sea­son 4 of Project Run­way. I blame Flib­bert, but it’s not really his fault. Last week, Chris March left. I dis­agreed with that choice, purely on quality-​​​​of-​​​​product grounds. I think the judges booted him because of his poor per­for­mance as leader, rather than the qual­ity of his own work. Leader in a group chal­lenge. A group chal­lenge really early in the show. The sec­ond group chal­lenge in the show. On the fourth episode. In my une­d­u­cated and inex­pe­ri­enced opin­ion, group chal­lenges this early in the game are putting too much empha­sis on inter­per­sonal dynam­ics and not [ . . . ]

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The Amazon Dot Com

I can­not rec­om­mend the Ama­zon Dot Com highly enough. I love the Ama­zon Dot Com. The Ama­zon Dot Com always has great prices, fre­quently marks things down by huge per­cent­ages, has just about any­thing you could ever want, often has free ship­ping. And so on. The Ama­zon Dot Com is absolutely Amaz­ing! They have great cus­tomer ser­vice. Sev­eral years ago, I ordered some Christ­mas gifts for friends and fam­ily and had them shipped to me. The UPS deliv­ered them, but left them sit­ting on my apart­ment doorstep. My apart­ment at the time was in a build­ing where you keyed in the front door (or [ . . . ]

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Oh, Alex III

Mr Tre­bek had a minor heart attack at his home yes­ter­day. He is recov­er­ing in hos­pi­tal, and intends to con­tinue host­ing Jeop­ardy! when it resumes tap­ing in Jan­u­ary. I wish him well, and look for­ward to many more awk­ward con­tes­tant inter­views in the future.

Ham for Hanukkah

Via Eugene Volokh comes this lovely photo, snapped in a New York City Balducci’s by Nan­cyKay Shapiro: Appar­ently, some found it offen­sive and the signs have been changed. It’s a mar­ket­ing faux pas, though. Not a polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness or reli­gious tol­er­ance issue. Here we have a com­pany in the busi­ness of sell­ing stuff that failed to take into account the irra­tional eat­ing habits of a large sec­tion of its cus­tomer base, and it prob­a­bly lost a non-​​​​negligible amount of busi­ness because of it. If not cater­ing to your cus­tomers’ irra­tional whims will hurt your busi­ness, should you do it? Or should you instead be engaged in busi­ness [ . . . ]

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