Month: August 2003

The Buffalo Bills won their preseason opener last night. They beat the Ravens 20-19. I didn’t watch any of the game except for an excerpt of a couple of minutes while we stopped Mission: Impossible! for a bathroom break. Generally, I pay very little attention at all to the preseason. Why? Well, in 1990 the Bills went 0-4 in the preseason, while the New York Giants went 4-0. The two teams later met in the Super Bowl.

Preseason tells you nothing about how a team will perform. It also doesn’t tell you much about the rookies who are trying to make the team. The only relevance preseason has is if your team’s starting running back breaks his ankle or something. Then it’s relevant. Outside of that, nope.

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I always liked this guy:

Sad, very sad.

But now, at least Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Gregory Hines are in the same place. I wonder what kind of number they’ll cook up.

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Here’s something that I haven’t seen before, so I don’t even know if there’s a term for it. I’ll call it “Comments Spam”.

It works like this: a person leaves a one-word entry in a blog’s Comments section, something like “Cool!” or “Neat!”, but the URL they enter for their homepage is not their own blog but instead where you’d go if you click any of the links in the e-mail Spam messages that clog your inbox. It’s a pretty sneaky way to guarantee I’ll look, since I wager most bloggers — except the really big ones — tend to check out those URLs when a unknown person leaves a comment.

I got two of these the other day. One of them linked to some credit-card offering site, and the other actually did lead to a BlogSpot blog. But the blog in question only had one post on the front page, and it only had two permalinks in its sidebar, one of which led to the exact same ad site as before. My first thought — “Hey, a new reader!” — was immediately replaced by irritation. (Which makes me wonder just when “Irritate your potential customer as early on as possible” became good sales advice.)

On the off chance that I’m wrong, and this wasn’t some new wrinkle in foisting advertising on those who don’t want it, I merely deleted the comments in question. If this continues, though, I will ban any users who try to leave such links in my comments.

I don’t get too worked up about spam in my e-mail; mostly I just delete it en masse. Ditto pop-ups; I don’t get offended by them as long as I can close them easily. Mostly I just let them sit there on my screen until I’m done doing Web-stuff entirely, and then I close all current IE windows. But this new thing, if it is a new thing and not just a one-time anomaly, will annoy me greatly.

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Someone’s got the house to himself for two weeks. He’s already planning a celebration of All Foods Canned and All Pizza Frozen.

He’ll deny it, of course, but I rather expect that after about nine days or so a scene much like this will be observable in his living room:

Pray for Mojo….

(Pic from here.)

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I don’t know if there’s a more incongruous-feeling thing in the world than getting a cold in August. Ugh. I find myself wandering through the cough&cold section at the grocery store or Target, and I’m saying, “This is wrong…I shouldn’t be here…it’s still summer, I shouldn’t get sick until November….”

Ach, it makes me mad.

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Stuff you didn’t care to know: In the last ten days I have personally consumed three gallons of sun-brewed iced tea.

(This content-free post is merely an excuse to republish everything, in hopes that permalinks will work when I am done.)

ADDENDUM: It appears to be working now. May the Force be with us.

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Writing update: Almost done with Chapter Two. (I’m figuring on around 22 chapters or so, give or take.) I’ve made my thousand word goal each day except yesterday, when I as 200 short. But, on Wednesday I did almost 2000 words, so it’s all good. I also figured my way through a small plot problem. Hooray.

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I finally got around to watching the first couple episodes of The Restaurant, which I’ve been taping. Pretty good show, although it would be nice if they’d show some of the good stuff that’s certainly going on at the same time as all the bad crap that they keep showing — stuff like fires in the kitchen, a server accepting a customer’s credit card with the order to go across the street and buy some red wine and actually doing it, et cetera. Random thoughts, just in case anybody’s watching the show:

:: Unless I missed it, the New York City Health Department is never mentioned in the first few episodes. Wouldn’t they be a slight bit concerned about a restaurant that’s actually still a construction site on the day it begins serving food to people?

:: When the fire erupted in the kitchen, I was dying to see the place’s “Ansel” system get set off. This is a fire-retarding device that spews out a gargantuan amount of powdery white crap, pretty much everywhere all over the kitchen. I thankfully never had to see our system triggered in the restaurants where I worked, because when the thing discharges, the mess is such that (a) you have to shut down the restaurant immediately and (b) cleanup takes more than a day.

:: This restaurant seems to be striving for a classy Italian look, and yet serves appetizers in those red-and-white paper baskets that you get French fries in at theme parks. Weird. (This may have been because they ran out of normal servingware, or some other explanation that I missed.)

:: Servers standing around after the shift which was apparently many hours long, comparing their tips, and no one seems to have made more than $70. Ouch. In the small-town family restaurant where I once worked, on a bad day my best server would take home more than $100 in tips. For a server to do worse than that, in an expensive, fine-dining restaurant that serves alcohol, in New York City no less, is disastrous. The show implies that table-turns were nonexistent on the night in question, which definitely explains it.

:: I was hoping they’d show more of the kitchen stuff and the inevitable tension between cooks and servers.

:: I know space is at a premium in NYC buildings, but putting the kitchen downstairs so food has to be carried up and down what looks like a fairly narrow flight of stairs? Lordy!

:: I’m sure it’s an amazing coincidence that the restaurant manager that everyone hates is a Frenchman.

:: It wasn’t mentioned, but I’m sure that the kid who got demoted from server to food runner, and then broke his arm in a fall, was treated at the hospital under workman’s comp. The show didn’t mention this, probably to heighten the “poor restaurant schlub with no insurance” angle (although I haven’t watched the episode after that one yet, so I may be wrong entirely).

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I don’t do a lot of “Here’s the latest cute stuff the kid did” posting, but I like to think I’m doing right: The other night, the daughter and I watched Return of the Jedi. (We had watched The Empire Strikes Back a few weeks before.) A couple of her comments:

“How come the big ship isn’t finished?” (referring to the incomplete Death Star)

“Oh, he’s still in metal!” (referring to the first shot of the still-frozen Han Solo)

“What happened to Yoda?” (much sadness when Yoda passes)

“There are bears in this movie!” (much happiness with the Ewoks)

“Did the bear die?” (referring to the one shot during the battle when one Ewok dies, and his friend tries to awaken him)

“Where’s the part with the girl sleeping and the big bugs crawling on her blankets?” (confusing ROTJ with AOTC)

“Why did Darth Vader kill the bad guy? I thought Darth Vader was the bad guy.” (hmmmm….we’ll explain this later on)

“Hey, Yoda’s not dead!” (referring to astral-Yoda at the end)

Doin’ my duty to shape the next generation….

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Gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger says, “I’m a uniter, not a divider.” Well, I’m not Californian so my opinion matters not in the slightest, but I can’t help but recall the last prominent Republican to make that claim whilst seeking higher office….

Also, Atrios makes a funny point about something else Schwarzenegger said. (BTW, I for one am really glad Atrios has apparently re-taken the reins over at Eschaton. His collaborators were game, but they just didn’t have his style.) (Oh, Atrios’s permalinks are as buggered as mine. Scroll down to the post entitled “Arnold on Gray Davis”.)

Finally, here is Jim Rome’s take on the whole California business, which is quite similar to what he actually said on the show. (The audio version was funnier, really, but apparently to listen to the Rome Show online you have to be a paid subscriber.)

(UPDATE: The Jim Rome article is here, actually — apparently the previous link is to his current column, with each column being moved to an archived location after a new one is posted. Thanks to Sean for the update.)

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