Thursday, 10/16/03

I'm looking over baseball's teams, and I honestly can't come up with a World Series matchup more asinine than the Yankees and the Marlins -- a team I actively dislike vs a team I'd almost never heard of two weeks ago. Cubs/Red Sox would have been one for the ages, but this isn't worth watching.

The ironic thing is that NBC last night panicked and shut down their Wednesday and Thursday night lineups because the baseball playoffs had been doing so well on Fox. Tonight CBS followed suit, yanking CSI off the air for a rerun. Well, after tonight, the World Series is going to play like calculated tedium everywhere outside of the island of Manhattan and the Everglades, and I've got a dollar that says the ratings will tank. The only folks sadder right now than Bostonians and Chicagoans are Fox executives. 09:44PM «

Tuesday, 10/14/03

According to Professor Pollkatz, it's about time for another war. 12:06PM «

Over the last year or so, I think I may have devoted at least four minutes to wondering how it is that the Segway can allegedly travel up and down stairs without subjecting its parent company to a jolly barrage of litigation.

Phillip Torrone, a fellow Seattleite, has been documenting his Segway experience at bookofseg.com, and if you scroll way down that page, you can find a four-minute Windows Media video snippet demonstrating his use of the "Power Assist" mode, which is what makes this marvel possible.

Like most uses of Windows Media, it is powerfully anticlimatic. Rather than gracefully escorting the rider up or down the impediment, I learned that Power Assist is apparently designed to make it easy to tug the unit along behind you. It mitigates the thing's 70-pound weight, but still looks considerably slower and more difficult that, say, putting an aluminum-frame bike on your shoulder and walking. 10:52AM «

Monday, 10/13/03

I don't watch much sports aside from baseball and the occasional World Cup, so maybe this is old news, but Jeannie Zelasko's facial musculature seem to have an unusually consistent relationship with the name of her network. Every time the implacable bombshell says the word "Fox," I think her right eyebrow arches. 05:27PM «

Monday, 10/06/03

I'm irrationally pleased with myself that two of my three fall-season dead pool picks are shared by the verbose, irascible Philip Michaels. The dead pool is, of course, an educated guess at the first three shows to be canceled in any given fall TV season, which is already upon us.

My trifecta consisted of, in order, "One Tree Hill", a beneath-the-radar WB show about a mopey high-school basketball player, "Luis", a horrible sitcom starring the brilliant Luis Guzman whom I sincerely hope was paid in advance, and "Threat Matrix", an hourlong drama about stopping terrorism, which aside from occupying the most competitive timeslot imaginable, sounds about as palatable as an endless loop of colonoscopy videos. 01:57PM «

The new O'Reilly catalogue showed up a couple of days ago. I had no idea Matt Neuburg was writing an AppleScript Definitive Guide, but that's one good reason to look forward to November. 10:05AM «

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