Thanks to the miracle of technology, this pointless ephemera has been captured for posterity so it can be studied by archaeologists who will be very confused but hey they have flying cars so they can bite it:

• 07:17 "You can bet I took my turn at ridin' Teddy Bear..." You are one creepy dude, Red Sovine... #
• 17:55 Been up since four am. Self inducing turkey coma. Do not resuscitate. #

So my satellite dish's Cartoon Network HD has been screwing up the sound regularly on Venture Brothers, cutting things out for several seconds at a time. (The oddest was two weeks ago when 24 kept cutting out and all I got from the conversation was "OGO POGO......MOTHERF***ING PLEISIOSAUR!") Now Titan Maximum was a full fifteen minutes of non-stop static sound over crystal clear picture.

So I go to the web to see if the episodes online...and it cuts off about five minutes before the end. Arrgh.

Man, this weekend was pretty much a bust.

What had started out as a runny nose on Thursday became a full-blast head cold by Saturday. I managed to NyQuil the symptoms into submission, but I went into submission with them; I think I've been awake about eight hours out of the last 72.

The worst of it is that I'd finally ponied up the dough for a propane heater to make the garage useful, but still didn't make it out to do any woodworking/tinkering...

Sometime when I wasn't paying attention, Nintendo Wii started allowing free demo versions of stuff for download.

World of Goo amuses me, but I'm not sure if it $15 amuses me. Shawna doesn't seem to care for it.

Bit Trip Beat is like Pong meets Techno Geek Guitar Hero. I lack the hand-eye coordination to track that many moving objects at once. But the soundtrack amuses me.

Every once in a while you get a South Park episode with absolutely impeccable "retard logic". Last night's bit with the monkeys was just classic. And scientific!

I have been fascinating myself with a website that has animated instructions on how to tie knots.

My dad probably showed me how to do this one a few hundred times before I got it figured out. If only they had animated .gifs in 1989...

I have recently found myself far too amused by Titan Maximum. Today I decided to look up to see if the ending credit song was complete gibberish and found this:

http://www.rachael-leigh-cook.org/2009/10/03/titan-maximum-brings-laughter-to-space/

In which one of the writers admits that for the theme song he stitched together what he thought was elementary Japanese, but turned out to be confusing to the singer they hired. I believe that makes it Reverse Engrish, which amuses me greatly.

Other fun fact: Robot Chicken stuff is built on an eight inch scale, but Titan Maximum is 12 inch. What does that mean? Absolutely nothing, I suppose.

"I'd get a thousand hugs
From ten thousand lightning bugs
As they tried to teach me how to dance"?

This Owl City guy is in serious need of a wedgie.

Thanks to the miracle of technology, this pointless ephemera has been captured for posterity so it can be studied by archaeologists who will be very confused but hey they have flying cars so they can bite it:

• 11:15 Man, I had no idea Hoop hated Harleys that much. #

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/gordon/143951

It’s amazing how many people seem not to know where to look information up, or perhaps don’t care, as they have things other than accuracy on their agenda. Take Rocco Landesman, the new head of the National Endowment of the Arts. In a speech in Brooklyn last week, he said of Barack Obama, “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln.”

Oh, dear, where do I begin? Well, let’s start with grammar. It’s “the first president who,” not “the first president that.”

Second, he implicitly accuses Presidents Clinton, Bush 41, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Hoover, Coolidge, and Wilson of having had their memoirs, autobiographies, and other works ghosted. Many of them received research assistance (one could hardly write a modern presidential memoir without it), and many, no doubt, also received a good deal of editing. Presidents are not usually professional writers. But research and editorial assistance is by no means the same thing as resorting to a ghost writer. I can’t imagine Harry Truman using a ghost writer. Herbert Hoover wrote sixteen books in his life, including Fishing for Fun — and to Wash Your Soul, published three years after his death, and a translation (with his wife) from the Latin of De re Metallica. Just a guess, but I don’t think there are many ghosted 640-page translations around.

Woodrow Wilson was a college professor and president before entering politics. Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, his best known work and one that ran through many editions, was not ghost written.

Third, Landesman implicitly accuses Theodore Roosevelt of being, unlike Barack Obama, a second-rate writer. Roosevelt wrote a total of 38 books in his life (not to mention countless magazine articles and thousands of letters, all while holding a day job and living only sixty years). His first, The Naval War of 1812, written when he was 23, is considered a basic historical text on that subject and is still both highly readable and in print. Will The Audacity of Hope be in print a 125 years after it was published?

Fourth, Landesman seems ignorant of even the existence of The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. They were written in the last months of Grant’s life (he died in agony from throat cancer three days after he finished the manuscript). They are universally regarded as the greatest military memoirs since Caesar’s Commentaries, and among the genuine masterpieces of American literature. Perhaps Mr. Landesman should give them a try if he doesn’t object to reading memoirs written by someone who had actually done something (like — you know — save the Union) before writing them.

Fifth, Lincoln never wrote a book.