flights

Perusing the online blogopolis today, I saw that Xeni over at boingboing has proposed a new greeting card that would thank the recipient for “not douching out.”

“Douchebag” was a fairly common insult back when I was in high school - in the ’80s, but it seems to have made a comeback. Jon Stewart uses it fairly regularly, and I even used it in a blog post a while back to describe how I feel about Chad from those Alltel commercials.

I don’t remember hearing the word much or at all between, say, 1988 and 2005, so out of curiosity I did a Google Trend search for it:

Apparently I’m right. As you can see, the word is virtually nonexistent in searches before around the fall of 2005, and then it suddenly leaps back into the vernacular. I wonder what happened in 2005. What kind of douchebaggery was it that made people reach back in the collective consciousness and pull ‘douchebag’ out of the mothballs.

I don’t know, but if I were to put on my CSI hat, I’d probably start my investigation in Austin TX, where there seems to be a concentration of doucheness:

UPDATE: In September 2005, during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, George Bush congratulated then FEMA director, Michael Brown with the now infamous line, “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” If that’s not douche-worthy, then I don’t know what is.

As a final thought, I’ll share my own opinion on ‘douchebag’ and its return. I like it. It just seems to be the perfect term to describe a certain collection of human qualities. Just what those qualities are is something we were talking about at work a few months ago, and we didn’t come up with an answer beyond ‘you know doucheness when you see it.’

We did agree that ‘douchebag’ describes a collection of qualities as opposed to a type of behavior. As an example of a behavior-describing word, we thought of ‘asshole.’

So, if you make a reckless move and cut someone off in traffic, you’re definitely an asshole. If you’re driving a Hummer and talking on your cell phone, then there’s a good chance you’re also a douchebag.

Make sense?

Lots and lots of people have passed this video around, but it puts a giant, ridiculous grin on my face everytime I watch it. This guy is my new hero.

Matt is a 31-year-old guy from Connecticut who was inspired one day during his travels to do his signature silly dance for the camera and upload it to the website he was using to keep his family up-to-date on his wherabouts.

Anyway, what started on a whim in one country, he decided to repeat around the world…

Well, you could say it caught a wave (over 10 million views as of today), and a year or so later, Stride Gum approached him about sponsoring a sequel, on their dime - which was a no-brainer for Matt…

Don’t ask me why, but I was looking at Sean Hannity’s website today. OK, I was looking for a video clip of his recent interview with Shelby Steele that I learned about via Digg or reddit or something. Anyway, once I was there, I found myself clicking around out of sheer amazement.

Right away, I was assaulted by an orgy of red, white and blue that makes Stephen Colbert’s set look sedate. This is the obligatory patriotic pose. When you stand in front of the American flag, you must look proudly into the distance and display the underside of your chin. It also helps to have a second shot of yourself behind you, representing that “over-reaching” quality we want from our government.

Anyway, after I absorbed the full weight of Hannity’s patriotism, I tried searching for “Shelby Steele” and came up with nothing…

I was delighted to see, however, that I can share this page of zero search results with a friend. And I can search for Shelby Steele in the Yellow Pages. Do people still use the Yellow Pages?

Undeterred, I tried searching for Obama…

Nothing. Hmm… An example of “fair and balanced” reporting? How about a search for Clinton…

OK, could be the same thing. How about a couple of searches more in line with Hannity’s views…

Wow! How about another…

So, clearly pure incompetence. Maybe it has something to do with the way every word you search for is transformed into a “Sean Hannity Keyword.”

I want to keep clicking! By far the best thing I found on Sean Hannity’s website was this…

This has to be a joke. It needs to be a joke. But there’s no way Hannity is that funny, so I can only conclude that it’s real. I’m completely hooked at this point, especially when I see…

I love this. Watch out ladies, he’s “ready for it.” He’s actually armed and ready for it, if you look at the picture. Don’t take your eyes off your drink if you’re around this guy, because he’s bound to slip you a rohypnol.  I can’t stop myself from clicking into his profile…

Who would have guessed motor racing and wrestling? I mean, the guy has a high school education. But wait, there’s more…

Wait, twenty-seven? Didn’t your personal information say you were 31?

This dude can’t be real. I’m almost sure he’s fake… but he is the “featured” profile, which either says something about Hannity’s audience (if he’s real) or his ability to run a website (if he’s fake).

I wish I had time to see more, and say more, but it’s midnight, and I’m procrastinating. I have a couple more hours of work left before I can go to bed, so I’ll just leave it here.

OK, not that big a deal I guess, but I saw Ric Ocasek near Dam Square today and snapped a couple pictures with my iPhone…

I can’t believe I’m writing about Britney Spears, but bear with me.

One would hope that Britney bottomed out somewhere around the head-shaving or the crotch-flashing. Now it seems the gossip mill’s coverage of Britney has finally bottomed out as well.

Yesterday I was in the checkout line at the Safeway - where I get most of my celebrity gossip - and I noticed the usual array of Britney shots on the covers of the usual magazines. But something was amiss.

The normally snarky Us Weekly had Britney’s face dominating the cover, but instead of the obligatory jab about her latest booze binge or child-endangerment episode, the headline simply read, “Living With Mental Illness.”

Adjacent to this on the shelf was Star magazine, whose cover story was something about how Britney and K-Fed are working to come up with a parenting agreement that will be good for their kids.

All of this on the heels of the recent South Park episode (”Britney’s New Look“) lampooning our insatiable appetite for tabloid news. Key quote, “I know watching celebrities go down can be fun. Me and my friends were just as guilty as all of you, but maybe, just maybe it’s time to let this one go.”

Amazingly, the tabloid press is listening, and it seems they’ve agreed to a ceasefire.

Of course, Craig Fergusson called for it a long time ago.

I didn’t see Obama’s landmark speech today, but I read the transcript. I admit I was moved by it, and although there was certainly a practical or tactical element to it - in the context of his presidential chances - I think it’s important to look past that and consider his actual words.

I wish CNN agreed. Unfortunately, the whole focus of their coverage was to discuss whether the speech would work, and by “work” they meant only whether it would put to rest questions around Obama’s association with pastor Jeremiah Wright. They used Rush Limbaugh’s response of all things, to raise doubts, as if Limbaugh’s response wasn’t determined before the speech was even made, as if Limbaugh at this point is anything more than a washed up, irrelevant joke on the outer fringes of the media, preaching to an ever-smaller choir.

They didn’t talk about whether the speech would “work” in the sense of whether it will remind us that individuals are complex, that the issue of race is complex, that none of this is black and white - in any sense of the phrase. They didn’t talk about whether the speech would “work” in the sense of whether it will help us shift our attention to more concrete and ultimately solvable issues like the economy, healthcare and the environment - where people of all races share the same concerns.

It’s bullshit cynical coverage CNN, and you will lose more and more of your young audience as long as you pollute the airwaves with this kind of crap. No amount of fancy touchscreen infographics and talk of “liveblogging” will change that fact.

March Madness is here, and my productivity is already suffering (case in point: here I am blogging about March Madness in the middle of my workday). I’ve started working on my bracket and looking around the Internetz for a little help. I don’t know whether to trust the wisdom of crowds, the experts or my own careful analysis. There are resources on the web to support each of these strategies, and I thought I’d write up a quick survey…

Crowdsourcing your picks

Yahoo Sports has a new application called the “Team Ranker” that’s sort of like a Hot-or-Not for the various matchups. One risk in this strategy is that the rankings might be dominated by people who know nothing about college basketball and make their picks more or less at random. Fanboys might be a problem too. Duke, for example, has a lot of haters, so no matter how viable a contender they might be, I would worry about people expressing their desires (e.g. for Duke to lose) instead of their predictions in some cases. Finally, the tournament seeds and rankings are driven - in a way - by the collective opinions of a crowd, so even if Yahoo’s Team Ranker is dominated by true college basketball aficionados, I would expect the results to follow the seeds.

Turning to the Experts

I’ve done well with this strategy in past tournaments, but taken as a whole, the experts tend to follow the seedings, so you still have to use your gut to a certain extent. The other challenge is that the expert commentary you can find is pretty disjointed. There are a lot of bits and pieces out there - separate breakdowns by region and conference, lots of hypothetical head-to-head matchups, etc., and it’s difficult to synthesize it into any kind of cohesive set of picks. That said, the free resources I tend to look at are the obvious ones:

• CBS Sportsline
• ESPN
• Sports Illustrated
• The Sporting News
• College Hoops Net

DIY Analysis

Today I found a pretty nifty online tool called Bracket Brains for analyzing all the tournament matchups. If you pay them $15, you can save any analysis you do, and you get a bunch of other features, but you can also get a lot of utility out of it for free. It incorporates a Hot-or-Not style picker like the Yahoo Team Ranker, but it provides a whole range of parameters you can tinker with to help you make your picks.

You can adjust how you think various slices of things like recent performance, strength of schedule and Vegas spread will factor in to the matchup. You can look at similar matchups from past tournaments (based on the parameters you set). You can even view a map showing the distance traveled by each team to the game venue. As you tinker with all these parameters, you can watch the projected outcome of the matchup in question change in real time.

Superbad might have been my favorite movie from last year, and I believe it’s destined to become part of the canon of high-school coming-of-age comedies that includes iconic films like American Graffiti, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the great works of John Hughes.

I know I’m late to the party with this post, but I just watched the movie again and was inspired to mention some of my favorite quotes…

Evan: The guy’s either going think ‘here’s another guy with a fake ID’, or ‘here’s McLovin, 25 year old Hawaiian organ donor.’ Okay? So what’s it gonna be?

Evan: Fogell… shut the fuck up. And take off that vest. You look like Aladdin.

Seth: I just wanna go to the rooftops and scream, “I love my best friend, Evan.”
Evan: Let’s… go on my roof.

Seth: You know when you hear girls say ‘Ah man, I was so shit-faced last night, I shouldn’t have fucked that guy?’ We could be that mistake!

Becca: I’m so wet right now.
Evan: Yeah… they said that would happen in Health Class.

Evan: I heard she got breast reduction surgery.
Seth: What? That’s like slapping God across the face for giving you a beautiful gift.
Evan: She had back problems, man.

Seth: [imitating Becca] Oh Evan, thank you for bringing that lube for my pussy. I never would’ve been able to handle your four inch dick inside my pussy without that gigantic bottle of lube.

Seth: I’ll be like the Iron Chef of pounding Vag.

Seth: I’m over here in my unit, isolated and alone, eating my terrible tasting food, and I have to look over at that. That looks like the most fun I’ve ever seen in my entire life, and it’s B.S. - excuse my language. I’m just saying that I wash and dry; I’m like a single mother. Look, we all know home-ec is a joke - no offense - it’s just that everyone takes this class to get an A, and it’s bullshit - and I’m sorry. I’m not putting down your profession, but it’s just the way I feel. I don’t want to sit here, all by myself, cooking this shitty food - no offense - and I just think that I don’t need to cook tiramisu. Am I going to be a chef? No. There’s three weeks left of school, give me a fuckin’ break! I’m sorry for cursing.

Jules: You scratch our backs, we’ll scratch yours.
Seth: Well Jules, the funny thing about my back is that it’s located on my cock.

Fogell: What’s it like to have a gun?
Officer Michaels: It’s like having two cocks. If one of your cocks could kill someone.

Seth: You know how many foods are shaped like dicks? The best kinds.

Seth: Nobody has gotten a hand job in cargo shorts since ‘nam!

Becca: [drunkenly making out with Evan] I *so* flirt with you in math.
Evan: Tell me about it. I - same-sies.

Finally, as a bonus, this clip of outtakes is pretty awesome…

When I was a kid, my parents controlled my TV diet, and while I was hardly deprived, I was never at risk of becoming a glutton. After school each day, I was allowed to 30 minutes of TV time - enough for one show. Our TV set was a 17″ black and white with the obligatory rabbit ears. It was old and sad, even for its day. It sat in the corner of my parents’ bedroom, probably because that was the only place where it could get decent reception, and I remember sitting on the corner of my parents’ bed, joyfully, for my daily dose.

There were, if I remember correctly, six channels: NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS and two UHF channels. I would rush home from school to watch Ultraman, Spider-Man, The Little Rascals or The Three Stooges (although my mom ultimately banned this last one, after I started reenacting the stooges’ antics on my younger sister).

Sometime in college I stopped watching TV. I think I just didn’t have time. I also didn’t have a TV. This abstinence phase continued after I moved to New York, then Arizona and well into my life here in the Bay Area. I won’t say I missed it, but this was probably due to not really knowing what I was missing. I will say that through those years, whenever I encountered “ambient” television - in many bars, for example - I was powerless to look away.

All this ended a few years ago when I signed up for DirecTV, with TiVo (before they switched to their own DVR). It was like going from a tricycle to a Ferrari. I had never been one to proselytize about the evils of the idiot box but still, for the first few months, I kept my conversion secret. I considered TV to be junk food for the mind, and while I never begrudged anyone their right to a tasty - if unhealthy - snack, it was also not something to be proud of.

Gradually though, I began to make exceptions for certain shows. Then more and more. Until finally I had to acknowledge that there are a whole lot of good things on TV. It’s not 57 channels and nothing on. It’s 500 channels, and trying to optimize my TV viewing to see as much of the good stuff as possible.