Obama's BlackBerry


From today's New York Times:

"Of all the fights facing Mr. Obama as he prepares for the White House, one of the most maddening for him is the prospect of losing the BlackBerry that has been attached to his belt for years.

"It is, he has vigorously argued, an essential link to keeping him apprised of events outside his ever-tightening cocoon."

I love my BlackBerry too, and would miss it. But I'm guessing that many people interpret this as missing the ability to read emails, or to text friends on-demand.

But those are not the primary reasons.

I would hate to lose access to my personal calendar and contacts, and to all of the instant connections I have to media, sports, and other things I'm interested in, through the various BB apps I've installed.

That's the stuff I'd really miss. And I think he will miss them, too.

Maybe, You Know, She Wouldn't Be Too Bad After All...


There is something compelling about Maureen Dowd's advocacy of Caroline Kennedy in today's NYT:

"Ask not, you know, what your country can, like, do for you. Ask what you, um, can, you know, do for your country.

"After a lifetime of shying away from the public spotlight, Caroline Kennedy asked herself what she could do for her country.

"Her soft-spoken answer — to follow her father and two uncles and serve in the Senate — got her ripped to shreds in the, you know, press.

"I know about 'you knows.' I use that verbal crutch myself, a bad habit that develops from shyness and reticence about public speaking."

"People complain that the 51-year-old Harvard and Columbia Law School grad and author is not a glib, professional pol who knows how to artfully market herself, and is someone who hasn’t spent her life glad-handing, backstabbing and logrolling.

"I say, thank God."

The Green Wonderbra

Recycling news from the Wall Street Journal:

"Ingrid Goldbloom Bloch, an artist in Massachusetts, looks for Coke cans and washing-machine-hose clamps, weaving pieces into garters. The red and silver garter is one of 13 items in her line of trashy lingerie, which also employs old dryer vents and, in her homage to the Wonderbra, welded steel."

"The recycling bin at the Springdale Tavern across the street from Chris Tymoshuk's studio in Oregon's Multnomah County is a treasure chest she is mining with particular diligence. Thanks to holiday revelers at the bar -- and fewer profit-minded scavengers looking for cans to redeem -- she has a lot more inventory to choose from.

"I like a long, slender can," she said, preferring #10 orange- and cranberry-juice cans she burns with an oxyacetylene torch and renders into garden sculpture, candle holders and lanterns.

"The availability of so much excess trash has the 47-year-old Minnesota native dreaming of new media to work with. A charter member of Oregon's "Cracked Pots" art-show group -- a loose community of artists who work almost entirely in recycled trash -- Ms. Tymoshuk has been inspired to try her hand with milk jugs and Styrofoam.

I wonder if Ingrid lives in Cambridge?

It's All HGTV's Fault!!

"That's right. The cable network HGTV is the real villain of the economic meltdown."

Finally! The root cause of the economic crisis has been exposed!

All this time, I thought it was just me shouting at the television as I watched whining Yuppies blather on about granite countertops.

"'How much money can these people possibly make?'" I shout at my wife before wrestling the remote from her hand and switching it to the nearest sports program. 'The guy can barely string together two sentences!'"

"And yet on episode after episode for this entire irrational decade, HGTV pumped up the housing bubble by parading the most mediocre, unworthy-looking homeowners into our living rooms to watch while they put their tacky, run-of-the-mill tract homes on the market for twice what they paid and then went out and bought houses with price tags too obscene to repeat."

"You couldn't watch these shows without concluding that you must be an idiot and a loser if you lived in a house you could actually afford."

(Photo: Kendra Todd, host of "My House is Worth What?")

Chains


The sideline chains used in all NFL games are a little more tricked-out with color and plastic coverings, but they are essentially identical to the ones used when I played high school football fifty years ago.

In the extreme high tech world of the NFL, this analog anomaly is still around because nothing has been found to improve on it.

“There must be a better way,” said Pat Summerall, the longtime N.F.L. player and broadcaster. “Because games are decided, careers are decided, on those measurements.”

Ideas have come and gone, but "inventors like Alan Amron, a 60-year-old from Long Island, plan their extinction."

"In 2003, with the help of Summerall, Amron presented a sophisticated laser system to the competition committee."

"Using lasers permanently mounted into stadium lights, a green line — visible to players, coaches and fans in the stadium, and to television viewers — would be projected onto the field to mark the line for a first down."

"Amron said it would be accurate to within a sixteenth of an inch."

I'm sure we will soon see a digital alternative to chains, but the game will lose one of its most dramatic rituals:

"[An] official protectively holds the ball against the ground, because precision is suddenly important. The chains arrive from the sideline. An official slowly pulls the chain taut. Breaths are held."

“When we measure, we make sure the players are clear so that TV can get a good shot of the actual measurement,” [Mike] Pereira [Director of NFL Officials] said."

"Suspense would be lost if every first down were determined instantly."

From Sylar to Spock


Zachary Quinto discusses inhabiting the character of Spock in the new Star Trek Movie:

What kind of things did Leonard Nimoy tell you about Spock to help you understand him?

It's been such an indelible mark on his life and he's metabolized it so gracefully.
We spent some time watching episodes but it was an all encompassing experience. We'd go to his house. We'd meet sometimes at Paramount. I'm seeing him before the holidays. He's an advanced mind and heart and I want to hang out with him as much as possible.

Jennifer Aniston On Mad Men


Jennifer Aniston's comment that she'd love to be on Mad Men has sent the Mad Men bulletin board into overdrive with script ideas on how to cast her in Season Three.

For example:

"I could see Jennifer Aniston coming in as the phone operator that replaces - Flo, the Progressive Girl (can't remember her real name).

Jennifer manages to squeeze her way through the metal bars in the phone dungeon and becomes Don Draper's new secretary.

Lois is furious, but then again, she can't go back to being Don's secretary right? Lois is still convinced that Sal is in love with her and decides to take lessons from Joan.

Joan brushes off the red dress and gives it to Lois. Joan proceeds to show Lois how to shake her hips so hard it causes earthquakes at Sterling Cooper. Joan advises Lois to throw her chest out so far that her breasts knock down anything in her path.

Joan has decided to learn a lesson from Jane and tell Lois to leave at least one or two buttons undone whenever possible. This should reel in any men who missed the hip shaking or cleavage plow.

Lois starts getting noticed by more men than Sal. Jennifer Aniston will get a little threatened and we will see a showdown at high noon between the two."

Sounds like there are a lot of closeted screenwriters out there!

So A Lady And A Horse Walk Into A Bar...

On vacation recently, it seemed like we ran into an awful lot of people in airports, hotel elevators and restaurants accompanied by small animals.

"ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT IN A SUBURB of Albany, a group of children dressed as vampires and witches ran past a middle-aged woman in plain clothes.

"She gripped a leather harness — like the kind used for Seeing Eye dogs — which was attached to a small, fuzzy black-and-white horse barely tall enough to reach the woman’s hip.

“Cool costume,” one of the kids said, nodding toward her.

"But she wasn’t dressed up. The woman, Ann Edie, was simply blind and out for an evening walk with Panda, her guide miniature horse."

OK, but "a growing number of people believe the world of service animals has gotten out of control: first it was guide dogs for the blind; now it’s monkeys for quadriplegia and agoraphobia, guide miniature horses, a goat for muscular dystrophy, a parrot for psychosis and any number of animals for anxiety, including cats, ferrets, pigs, at least one iguana and a duck.

"They’re all showing up in stores and in restaurants, which is perfectly legal because the Americans With Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) requires that service animals be allowed wherever their owners want to go."

And while "some people enjoy running into an occasional primate or farm animal while shopping, many others don’t.

"This has resulted in a growing debate over how to handle these animals, as well as widespread suspicion that people are abusing the law to get special privileges for their pets.

"Increasingly, business owners, landlords and city officials are challenging the legitimacy of noncanine service animals and refusing to accommodate them. Animal owners are responding with lawsuits and complaints to the Department of Justice.

"This August, the Arizona Game and Fish Department ordered a woman to get rid of her chimpanzee, claiming that she brought it into the state illegally — she disputed this and sued for discrimination, arguing that it was a diabetes-assistance chimp trained to fetch sugar during hypoglycemic episodes."

I don't know; I guess I understand.

But whenever I see that lady out walking her llama along Massachusetts Avenue in Lexington, I just can't help but ask:

"WTF?"

Back Before The Sixties


Some interesting observations today from Judith Warner about the current fascination with late 1950s/early 1960s America, on television (Mad Men) and in the movies (Revolutionary Road):

"Unlike the baby boomers before us, we “baby busters” of the ’60s never rebelled against the trappings of domesticity represented by our images of the 1950s. Many of us, deep down, yearn for it, having experienced divorce or other sorts of family dislocation in the 1970s. We keep alive a secret dream of “a model of routine and order and organization and competence,” a life “where women kept house, raised kids and kept their eyebrows looking really good,” as the writer Lonnae O’Neal Parker once described it in The Washington Post Magazine."

"The fact is: as an unrebellious, cautious, anxious generation, many of us are living lives not all that different from those of the parents of the early 1960s, yet without the seeming ease, privileges and benefits. Husbands have been stripped of the power perks of their gender, wives of the anticipation that they’ll be taken care of for life."

As with all of Judith Warner's columns, the Comments about them are always worth reading too:

"My life as a 50s and 60s housewife was quite pleasant, although we managed on far, far less than the two-income homes of today. Married women today have a mountain of debt to worry about, now that their husbands are unemployed.It couldn't last--the grandiose culture that so many women expected to enjoy. Self-indulgence has led so many ordinary couples to financial ruin, despite the wife's second income. Expectations of self-fulfillment have been far too high."