Emotionr
Emotionr purports to measure the subjective happiness of the world by aggregating every user’s 1 to 10 rating (with a nifty Web 2.0 slider, no less).
I found this rather interesting (and confirmation of what I expected):
A particularly striking quote from Axel Boldt, in his “A subjective comparison of Germany and the United States”:
If I had to boil it down to a word or two, I’d say naive optimism characterizes the American mentality and deliberate, hesitant pessimism the German one.
And a quote from Slartibartfast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
I’d far rather be happy that right any day.
Some food for thought.
El Guapo
I must say, I’ve been underwhelmed by the aquisition of Bray and Majewski, thought Royce Clayton has put up pretty good numbers.
My favorite trade so far this year, has been Travis Chick for Eddie Guardado. He may be the best Reds-Mariners trade since, well, you-know-who.
He just closed out his 6th save out of 6 opportunities as a Red in spectacular style. He does not have overpowering speed, but he has a killer intensity and attitude that I love.
He has picked up the nickname of “El Guapo”, and I think it fits nicely.
New RSS reader
Opera has an RSS reader built-in to it that I’ve used a lot to date.
However, I’m not sure it’s quite adequate anymore for what I use RSS for. I’m auditioning a standalone RSS reader called FeedReader. It allows me to categorize my feeds and to edit the information of each feed. It has an “intelligent” polling period, which actually divines the optimal polling period for each feed based on how often the feed is updated.
So far, so good. I haven’t gotten completely used to it yet, but I’m optimistic about it.
Pop-up politician
Check out this pop-up politician thing. You can highlight politician’s names in a web page and information about them will pop up on clicking. Instead of having to Wikipedia a name, you can get their party, picture, term, voting, etc. at your fingertips.
This type of content could really take off. If it does, I predict that the contextual ads (text link ads) that do a similar thing already will take off as well.
Howard Dean
This is just unbelieveable. I don’t think I even need to comment on this (but I will). Here are some quotes from Howard Dean:
Dean called President Bush “the most divisive president probably in our history.”
“He’s always talking about those people. It’s always somebody else’s fault…” Dean said. “Americans are sick of that. Even if you win elections doing that, you drag down our country.”
So, diviseness is bad, I think is the gist of this.
Democrat leader Howard Dean called the Iraqi prime minister an “anti-Semite”
“Thank God for Bill Nelson, because we’d have another crook in the United States Senate if it weren’t for him…She doesn’t understand that it’s improper to be chairman of a campaign and count the votes at the same time. This is not Russia and she is not Stalin.”
So, let’s not be divisive, but I guess it’s okay to call a prime minister an “anti-Semite” (because he condemned Israel, by the way, so Howard Dean is calling the leaders of that whole list of countries anti-semitic by proxy) and let’s compare Harris to freaking Stalin. Did I miss the great Florida purges somehow? How many pounds of make-up did Stalin wear?
N*Sync
Oh boy, is this good.
Lance Bass is gay. Yes, CNN, so you know it must be true.
Bass says he wondered if his coming out could prompt “the end of ‘N Sync.” He explains, “So I had that weight on me of like, ‘Wow, if I ever let anyone know, it’s bad.’ So I just never did.”
Strap-in folks, and get ready for those Leno jokes! Oh boy, I can’t wait for the yuks! Maybe he should remove the “B” from his last name EL OH EL! But wait, it gets better:
Bass and Fatone, 29, are developing a sitcom pilot inspired by the screwball comedy “The Odd Couple,” in which his character will be gay.
Wait, so it’ll be “The Odd Couple” with a gay character? Hmm, yeah sounds familiar. Oh wait, yes, it’s EXACTLY THE SAME AS “THE ODD COUPLE”.
Mac
I found this Mac commercial a little more accurate, and certainly funnier, though maybe that’s because I’m not a Mac user. Just for the record, I’m certainly not anti-Mac. Mac makes fantastic software that’s pretty, usable, and less error prone. What I take issue with is the dishonest PC-bashing that the real version of these commercials takes part in, though anyone who knows they are dishonest is probably not the target market.
In summary: good, but very dishonest, marketing.
To summarize the summary:
Unexpected
A Hezbollah boss recently quoted:
“The truth is _ let me say this clearly _ we didn’t even expect (this) response…. that (Israel) would exploit this operation for this big war against us,” said Komati.
He said Hezbollah had expected “the usual, limited response” from Israel to the July 12 cross-border raid, in which three Israelis were killed.
I think that shows that this is hardly a disproportionate response.
Insanity, it is said, is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. The best way to stop Hezbollah from kidnapping again clearly isn’t negotiation, so why not try obliteration instead?
Also, it should be pointed out that while the 2 kidnappings are certaintly being touted, this is the first time I’ve seen that there were 3 Israelis killed in the same raid. Does that mean I’m not paying good enough attention, or is this fact just being underreported to make Israel’s response look more disproportionate? I’m not a big “liberal media bias” guy (anymore), but all the reports I’ve seen haven’t really mentioned that Hezbollah was first to draw blood in this particular conflict.
Via: Queer Conservative
Lost
These Lost action figures are pretty cool. Very good detail, very well done.
Buy my book!
