Comments: 0 Posted by david on 27 February 2009 at 8:52 PM

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Comments: 0 Posted by david on 24 February 2009 at 8:39 AM

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Comments: 0 Posted by david on 21 February 2009 at 3:30 PM

Oktapodi Is an Oscar-nominated animated short. Having now watched it has increased the number of Oscar nominated movies that I've seen by about 50%.

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Comments: 0 Posted by david on 21 February 2009 at 5:23 AM

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Comments: 0 Posted by david on 20 February 2009 at 8:52 PM

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Comments: 0 Posted by david on 20 February 2009 at 2:49 PM

I totally stole this from Craig Ferguson.

Paul McCartney was nominated and performed at the Grammys this year. And he was looking pretty good for an old guy. Good enough, in fact, that I thought I'd share a picture of him with you.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 12 February 2009 at 9:16 AM

A publishing industry chestnut is that the three fields readers are most interested in are (1) Lincolniana (2) medical books and (3) books about the care of pets; therefore, one surefire best seller would be "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog." Joking aside, we have a mountain of bicentennial works, many slicing and dicing influences on all the phases of his life and death: relationships with his wife, his admirals, his great and terrible generals, his law partners and secretaries, and supporters and contemporaries, from Frederick Douglass to Stephen A. Douglas -- and an account of his escape from assassination in Baltimore on the way to inauguration.

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Comments: 0 Posted by david on 10 February 2009 at 2:49 PM

Time has a great article on auto-tune, the little piece of software that renders the ability to sing somewhat less valuable to pop musicians than it probably ought to be.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 9 February 2009 at 9:18 AM

I saw a Paul McCartney concert from earlier this decade on TV earlier today and now I'm seeing him on the Grammy broadcast. He really has had a face-lift, hasn't he?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 February 2009 at 8:58 PM

The New York Times has an official policy that bans the use of anonymous sources in most cases. In cases where anonymous sources are allowed, the reason for maintaining the source's anonymity has to be given. Which leaves us with a paragraph like the one below, take from an article about A-Rod's alleged steroid use:

The two people who cited the positive test did so on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their access to sensitive information.

Or, to paraphrase, they were anonymous so they'd be able to leak sensitive information in the future. The Times's policy seems to be a bit of a joke.

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Comments: 0 Posted by david on 7 February 2009 at 6:40 PM

I'm having AT&T U-verse installed today (more on why in a future post) and we're now about three hours into the installation. About 45 minutes ago, the installer said he needed to run up to "the box" and run some tests that he'd forgotten to run earlier and would be back in ten minutes. I haven't seen him since then. I hope he's planning on coming back.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 7 February 2009 at 2:34 PM

One of the truly great things about Congress pushing back the digital conversion date is the fact that some stations, because of increased costs associated with broadcasting on both the analog and digital spectrums, have decided to just go ahead and stick with the original date. The Congressional date is just a drop-dead date -- there's nothing that keeps stations from switching sooner. So now no one will really know what date their stations are switching on. It's really great of Congress to step in and save us from the national nightmare of digital conversion. It's convenient that there weren't other things that they could have been working on instead.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 6 February 2009 at 9:10 AM

And the "Dumbest Quote of the Recession So Far" award goes to James F. Reda, who was quoted as follows in The New York Times today:

"That is pretty draconian -- $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus," said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. "And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend."

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Comments: 0 Posted by david on 4 February 2009 at 5:34 PM

Fifty years ago today was the "day the music died." While it seems clear that rock didn't die with Buddy Holly in 1959, this is as good an excuse as any to celebrate his music. Clearly a precursor to what we'd hear from The Beatles and other bands in the '60s, The Crickets' music paved the way for the rock revolution. They invented the rock band in the classic form that we know it today: guitar, guitar, bass, drums. Holly also popularized the Fender Stratocaster and used multitrack overdubbing like no one before him. He wrote his own music at a time when singer and songwriter were often considered separate jobs. When he died, he was only 22 and his career was all of eighteen months old. The music didn't die on February 3, 1959, but who knows where Buddy Holly would have taken it if he hadn't.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 3 February 2009 at 10:21 PM

I'm beginning to think that the St. Louis Beacon should be replacing STLtoday as my go-to spot for local news, if only because the Beacon's website is navigable (something that can't be said of STLtoday).

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 February 2009 at 6:23 PM

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 February 2009 at 9:22 AM