Back Door Man

New York politicians have a little bit of a history of going after video games over content--most notably Sen. Chuck Schumer with 25 to Life and former Senator Hilary Clinton with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Fortunately for people who enjoy a little bit of violent content in their fictional entertainment, there's very little they can do thanks to ye olde First Amendment.

But fortunately for nanny-state government officials, there's a way to force your will through the back door, as discovered by an obscure New York State Assemblyman: rule it a "health risk", slap a sin tax on it, and add one more burden to the ever-growing list of "wealth redistributions". "It's bad for you" is the new "Think of the children"--the battle cry of the banal and the bland.

Carrie

OK, I'm mainly posting about this so I can put up the picture at the left--can you blame me?

Good for The Donald, though. Who'd ever have thought that he'd be a champion for free speech and the right to express a different opinion? All Carrie Prejean did was give an honest answer to a question. And just whose idea was it to make that little weasel Perez Hilton a pageant judge--a female beauty pageant, at that? As far as I can tell, his only qualifications for any sort of notoriety are being a flaming homosexual and drawing cock'n'ball pictures all over his site, like a junior high kid doodling in his textbooks. By that criteria, I'm halfway there myself. The guy's just an asshole--proving once again the old adage, "You are what you eat."

Swine And Dandy

Swine flu is this year's bird flu, with the mainstream media doing their damnedest to scare the bejeebus out of us all, so that we keep their station tuned in for all our Swine Flu Updates. I wonder how many infected from Mexico and South America will try to make their way across our borders in search of our superior health care, infecting every town they come in contact with. And I wonder what our government (now with Senate Filibuster-Proof Majority) will do to lower our risk. The next couple of days will be a golden opportunity to shore up our porous southern border. By this time next week, we'll know whether or not we've got a government that will give us "change we can believe in" on border security.

...And New Photos

I've finally resolved to get my Flickr site up to date with the photos I've taken over the last, oh, 8 months or so. This first batch is photos I took at Camden Yards and Citizens Bank Park during a "two-games-two-days-two-parks" weekend, culminating with the eventual World Series champion Phillies clinching the division over the Nationals.

New Look

No, you're not at the wrong site.  I just proofread the post I just made and realized that my layout was giving me a headache.  So in the interest of easing eyestrain everywhere, I've changed my template to one that I think is a bit easier to read.  I'll be making some changes to some of my sidebar items (my Flickr link in particular takes up way more than its share of room), but I hope everyone likes the new look. (I welcome feedback if you love it or hate it; just use the comment form.)

You May Pick Your Seat

Anyone who knows me or who's ever read this blog (and I think all of you are one and the same) knows that I love the Yankees more than I love breathing. So it's out of love that I say this. Just like Chris Brown.

It's no secret that I hated the Yankees tearing down and replacing the classic, historical Yankee Stadium. In fact, over on my Twitter page, I likened it to seeing the Temple of Solomon torn down and having a McDonald's built on top of the rubble. Well, it looks like some of those proverbial McChickens have come home to roost. Seems that even during the inaugural series of...well, Yankee Stadium (I do give them credit for not naming it Macy's Stadium), there were an awful lot of Yankee fans who were disguised as empty seats and sitting very quietly. This was especially true in the most TV-visible lower seats, where face-value tickets ran over $2,000. And it's making one of (if not the single) most-followed, best-marketed-and-merchandised franchises in the world, let alone sports or baseball, look bad. There are lessons to be learned here--about tearing down the single biggest piece of the history that's made the franchise as beloved as it is, about spending billions of public and private dollars during one of the biggest recessions in recent memory, and about doing it all in the name of eliminating the bleachers and putting in more luxury boxes and "Legends Suites". Yankee Stadium isn't the only place turning what used to be entertainment for the working masses into a diversion for bluebloods and titans of industry only. But it's the worst and most visible offender. And a perception of inaccessibility is the first step down a very bad road for any franchise, sports or otherwise.

Sext and Sensibility

I never thought I'd be praising the ultimate blue-state government of Vermont, but this time they're working on a plan that actually makes sense. And that plan is to decriminalize sexting between teenagers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, religious conservatives, it'll probably lead to more of that kind of thing. But we're not talking about school shootings or fight clubs here. We're talking about stupid and horny kids doing what stupid and horny kids do whenever a new technology is invented: use it to get their rocks off. In a post-Megan's law world, is that worth being branded for life with the modern-day scarlet "A"? That's in the same category of stupid as stigmatizing someone for taking a leak in the alley behind the bar.

To Amazon: You Stink, No Link

I like keeping the Recent Experiences section over on the right hand side of this site up to date. It's a way for me to let my visitors know what entertainment I've been enjoying lately. To do that, I use the thumbnails from Amazon.com, just because they're there and easy to grab hold of. As a way of thanking them for not blocking me from leeching their images, I link back to the product's purchase page so that they can perhaps grab an extra sale or two out of the deal.

Well, not anymore. After I read this story on Slashdot today, I refuse to send them any more business until they back off this policy fix the "bug". Oh, sure, they're free to to sell or not sell whatever they want. But I'm also free to encourage others to send a message by taking their business elsewhere.

Sin Tax Error

I'm sure everyone's read the stories and the opinions, pro and con, about the biggest ever tax hike on tobacco in history. (And it is tobacco, not just cigarettes. In fact, the taxes on cigars are going up at an even higher rate in some cases.) Problem is, most of the money goes to increase funding to S-CHIP, the childrens' health insurance program. That's not something that's suddenly going to need less money if smokers quit en masse. This tax has two goals that are at odds with each other: to get more people to quit smoking (and buying cigarettes), and to fund government programs. If and when the first goal is accomplished, the revenue stream dries up for the second. And what does the government do then? Well, if the fiscal conservatives are in charge, they cut spending commensurately. But if the government acts in character for recent times, that's not going to happen. And in the end, when everyone's taxes go up to keep the money flowing in, even the saints will be paying the sin taxes.

Bailing Out The S.S. Georgie*

I don't necessarily agree with Barry Hussein's Bailout Bonanza, but I can at least get the arguments.

Bank bailouts--I get it. We can't let our banking system collapse.
Automaker bailouts--I get it a little less than the banks, but they do provide a buttload of American jobs.

But newspaper bailouts? I don't get it at all. At least the banks and automakers still have a type of product that people want and need. Do we really need to spend still more taxpayer money to preserve paper copies in the era of 24/7 news channels and the interweb? Why don't we just bail out Tower Records and the vinyl record industry while we're at it?

*If you don't get the title, watch the TV movie version of IT.

March Madness 2009

It's that time again--the only time of year that I watch basketball, the NCAA tournament. (I refuse to call it the "men's tournament" because the only women's sport I watch is beach volleyball.) For the record, I'm predicting Pitt to win it all over Louisville, with Memphis and UNC rounding out the Final 4. My big first-round upset predictions are Maryland over California (UMD is up 3 at the half as I write this), Mississippi State over Washington, VCU over UCLA, and the Hilltoppers of Western Kentucky taking out the Fightin' Illini.

It's just too bad the NCAA's new and "improved" video player sucks so bad. Just a few of the new "features" include:

• Gigantic advertising banners that take up approximately 1/3 of the available viewing room in fullscreen mode. That's not fullscreen, you greedy scumbags. That's 2/3 screen. And just to add insult to injury...

• The inability to switch games during commercial breaks. Why would I want to check out the near-upset of #2 Memphis during the commercial break of the also-close LSU vs. Butler game?

• Underestimation of bandwidth. Apparently they've failed to realize that 90% of the audience will be watching the daytime games on our superfast work connections and therefore we'll all want the high-quality feed. I actually want to see the shots go in, not hang in midair while the word "Buffering" and the Wheel of Waiting sit on my screen.
  

• Microsoft Silverlight. If your computer had balls, Silverlight would be the steel-toed boot slamming into them. I'm not a Microsoft-basher (in fact, I'm a Microsoft-basher-basher), but in this case, I've got to call a spade a spade.

I suspect 99% of these problems would be solved if the NCAA would follow baseball's lead and ditch Silverlight in favor of Adobe Flash (or just stick with good old Windows Media Player. Really, was that so bad?) Better luck next year, hoops fans.

Autoneurotica

I don't read the news and stress about the economy. No, I just find more and more other things to worry about. Just a few:

• I've already posted my fears about Europe's Large Hadron Collider, or as I call it, the Doomsday Device. Now I find out that there's a similar gizmo right here in the U.S. The race is on...to see who can cause the Apocalypse first.

• I can't go out to eat anymore. At least not to a lot of the places I used to go. Not since my local paper introduced me to a searchable database of health code violations. I'm reasonable with it--it's not going to steer me away from my favorite cheesesteak place just because they caught one of the cooks smoking too close to the kitchen door. But I'm sure as hell never going back to the Chinese place that got written up because the staff was handling the food with piss-hands!

• This is my ultimate fear. This is the reason that I've never had the organ donor label on my drivers license. I saw an episode of Law & Order similar to this when I was younger, and had it removed the very next time my license was renewed. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for organ donation, and my family will donate my organs, but they know to keep it to themselves until they're satisfied that I'm completely dead. In my worst moments, I imagine my organs being harvested while I'm conscious (similar to locked-in syndrome).