Great Movie Ad
I just saw a great ad on the side of a bus. No images, just white text on a black background, saying:
YIPPIE KAI YI YAY MO
John 6:27
I love the way it assumes you know stuff: to understand the ad, you have to remember the famous line from the original “Die Hard”, and that the character who delivered it was named John. It helps to know that “Live Free or Die Hard” is coming out soon, and that gets you to interpret the 6:27 (I may be misremembering the exact numbers) as a date.
Great stuff. It obviously won’t win over anybody new, but it’s not trying to–it’s trying to whip up excitement among die-hard “Die Hard” fans, and it sure does that.
Movies, Work | Comment (1)Bees, Cell Phones and Bad Activists
When I was up in Ithaca last weekend, I went to the Farmer’s Market, which is excellent. On a bulletin board there, someone had pinned up a sign saying that people shouldn’t use cell phones, because they’re the reason for the massive bee dieoffs that have been in the news lately.
Only, it turns out that isn’t true, or at least there isn’t any particular reason to believe that it is true. There’s exactly one study on the subject, and what it actually found is that the electromagnetic frequencies emitted by cordless phones (those are the kind that you plug into a landline connection) may (note that word, “may”) interfere with bees’ ability to find their way back to their hive. Cordless phones use a completely different set of frequencies from cell phones, and there’s no reason to assume that this result would transfer. Also, this is only one study with a rather tentative result anyway.
Now, I don’t particularly fault this Ithacan activist for initially misinterpreting the study–if what he saw was a mainstream media report about it, well, a lot of mainstream media reports got it wrong. What I do fault him for is taking the results of a single, small study, not doing the research to figure out what that study really found in the first place, and immediately going off into a half-cocked “OMG WE MUST GET RID OF ALL OUR CELL PHONES RIGHT NOW!1!! TEHY’RE KILLING ALL TEH BEES!1!!11!!oneone!!”. I have to kind of suspect that the activist had a pre-existing hatred of cell phones, and took the opportunity to bash them.
Hysteria like that makes more thoughtful environmentalists look bad–it makes us all look like Chicken Littles, and means that people won’t take the real threats seriously.
Rant | Comment (0)Blogiversary
Hey, I wasn’t paying attention and missed my six-year blogiversary! Happy blogiversary to me.
Meta | Comments (3)Palm Foleo
I’m a big Palm fan, as anyone who has been reading this blog since my Ann Arbor days may remember. But I gotta say, they haven’t done much for me lately. The PalmOS is really getting old, and instead of coming out with updated smartphones, they just announced this Foleo thing.
I don’t know who they think is going to buy this. They can’t possibly think it’ll replace laptops, since it can’t do everything even a low-end laptop can do. But it also can’t replace the Treo, both because it’s too big and bulky and because it relies on the Treo for its Internet connection. So what’s the point? What can I do with the Foleo that I can’t do better with a laptop? Why should I pay $500 for what amounts to a bigger screen and keyboard for my Treo, especially since I’d still have to carry the Treo around too? They’re trying to talk up the fact that it syncs with your Treo, but my iBook does that too, and it does a lot of other things this Foleo can’t.
I don’t get it. They must have done market research on this thing–did they really find a group who wants it? Perhaps once it hits the market it’ll reveal some untapped audience for “sub-notebook” computers that none of the other failed sub-notebooks have managed to reach, but I doubt it.
Geek | Comment (0)Idea File: New Game Show
I was half-watching an episode of Jeopardy the other night while I was writing some e-mails, and a couple of times I missed the name of the category and found myself trying to guess what it was based on the questions and answers. So I thought, hey, that would make kind of a cool game show.
Here’s how it would work. It would be more or less like Jeopardy, with maybe 5 different categories of question/answer pairs for players to choose from, only the categories wouldn’t be named–just category 1, 2 and so on. Players would have to answer the questions, but they’d also have to guess what the unifying theme of the category was, based on the questions and answers. Maybe they’d have a chance to guess the category after each correct answer, or maybe they’d have to buzz in separately for that, I don’t know.
The categories, like in Jeopardy, could be anything from subject matter-based (like “The 1700s” or “Tony Award Winners”) to wordplay (like “Homonyms for weather terms” or “One-letter answers”). Obviously it would be a challenge coming up with categories that were neither too easy nor too hard, but it’s certainly possible.
Wouldn’t that be fun? Pity that the only new game shows that have been coming out lately are built on the Millionaire model (only one contestant, one question every 5 minutes), which wouldn’t work at all for this game.
Idea File, TV | Comment (0)Vermont
So yeah, Vermont. Christmas and I drove up Friday night and spent two days in beautiful Vermont. Saturday we spent touring part of the Vermont Cheese Trail, going around to four different “cheeseries”, if you will. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t get to see any cheese actually being made–apparently they usually don’t do it on weekends–but we got to see the animals the milk came from, in two cases (one goat farm and one cow farm), and drove through lots of beautiful places. We tasted a lot of very good cheese, too, and came back with some great ones, including some amazing 6-year-old cheddar. I also got a lot of good pictures.
We stayed in a little town, West Dover, at a B&B. That weekend, the town was holding their own version of “The Amazing Race”, where teams would go through various Detours and Roadblocks and so on as they raced all around the valley. The grand prize, no pun intended, was $1,000. I wish Christmas and I had known about this ahead of time, because I totally would have done it–it sounds like it was an absolute blast. Ah, next year; they’re planning to do it every Memorial Day Weekend.
Travel | Comment (0)Veronica Mars
Christmas and I are back from a weekend in Vermont, and I’ll be telling stories about that (and posting pictures over on the photoblog) soon. But now I want to talk about Veronica Mars.
Veronica Mars was just canceled; I probably have the final episodes sitting on my Myth box right now. Normally, when a cult TV show is canceled, the fans have the same litany of complaints: the network didn’t understand the show, they didn’t appreciate it, they didn’t support it enough. Well, we Veronica Mars fans can’t even say any of that. Well, okay, some Veronica Mars fans are probably saying that, but if they are, they’re wrong.
“The network” (first UPN, and then the merged CW) really did support Veronica Mars. They gave it three seasons, even in the face of terrible ratings. They put it on right after their #1 top-rated show (which, sadly enough, was “America’s Next Top Model”, but still). They promoted it–they especially gave it a big push when the merger between UPN and the WB happened. Clearly the network realized that they had a great show on their hands, and they wanted it to succeed.
It’s just that the audience never materialized. There’s only so long they’re going to run a show if there’s no audience. Sad, but there you have it.
TV | Comment (0)