Whose Faulty Vision

“The Mole” Returning

“The Mole” is coming back in June! Longtime readers of this blog will remember that I used to love that show; I used to blog about my suspicions as to who the Mole was. Unfortunately, it went “Celebrity Edition”, as so many declining reality shows do (see also “The Apprentice”, “Fear Factor”) and I stopped watching, and I believe it was canceled pretty quickly after that.

But now it’s coming back with a non-celebrity edition, and I’m excited. Have my TiVo set already.

RSS Importance

I get pretty much all of my news via RSS these days. It’s a gmish of real news sources (most notably the New York Times–I follow several of their feeds), some of it is “near-news” sources (like Gothamist, a blog about New York City) and some of it just blogs that comment on the news a lot (like my economics blogs). Which is nice, because that way I get more of the news I’m interested in (international, business) and less of the news I’m not interested in (human interest, sports).

The one downside, though, of getting my news this way is that I don’t get any sense of relative importance. In a newspaper, more important stories get placed on the front page, get headlines in bigger type, stuff like that. In RSS, all stories are equally weighted. This means that sometimes I miss the importance of big stories for a little while. For instance, I completely overlooked the cyclones in Myanmar when the first story hit, because little natural disasters in other parts of the world are in my “international news” feed on a near-daily basis, and the headline didn’t make it clear that this was an order of magnitude more serious than the others.

I eventually get a sense of how important other people consider a story to be by the number of stories about it that show up in my feed, but that takes time and isn’t completely reliable.

So here’s what I propose: Whatever standards body is behind RSS (I assume it’s the ISO folks, but I don’t know for sure) should add an extension to RSS that shows how important the feed-writer considers this story to be, relative to other stories in that same feed. Then each feed reader could implement importance in whatever way it wanted–some could put the more important stories in bigger type, some could change their color, some could ignore the importance indicator completely. It would be up to you and whatever software you use.

I love RSS–I think it’s the best thing to happen to the Web since the Web itself–but I think that a little thing like this would make it even more useful.

(And yes, I’m aware that this is actually the second extension to RSS that I’ve proposed on this blog. I’m a geek, I admit it. And I love RSS.)

Single again

Boy, no sooner has my announcement that I’m dating Wilder scrolled off of my front page than it’s obsoleted. Wilder thought some more about the whole thing, and decided that she couldn’t handle being in a relationship that she knows is going to end after all. She says that she likes me more and more with every time we see each other, and doesn’t want a breakup over the child issue to be later and harder than doing it now is.

So there it is. I’m single again. I knew this relationship was going to end, but I wasn’t expecting it to happen so soon.

So far, I’m coping okay. The fact that I knew the end was coming, and the fact that it didn’t last very long, are both factors making it easier for me.

But I did like her.

Poland Spring ads

And speaking of advertising, the new ads for Poland Spring bottled water are laughable. They talk about how the Poland Spring “Eco-shape” (or some such nonsense) bottle uses 30% less plastic than other bottled waters, so by buying it, you’re doing something good for the environment.

Want to actually do something good for the environment? Refill a water bottle you already have, and use 100% less plastic.

I hope nobody falls for that crap.

Link: Commercial Breaks

Someone has taken some tapes of Saturday Morning Cartoons from the mid-80s and put just the commercial breaks online. (See the “related” section on the right for a bunch more.)

I’m not sure whether it’s sad that someone bothered to do that, or whether it’s sad that I really enjoy watching them, but I’m certain that there’s something sad in there.

Quote of the Whenever

Quote of the Whenever:

“I guess irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.”

-”Airplane II: The Sequel”

Indiana Blu

I saw an ad on TV last night for a new “Special Edition” release of the three Indiana Jones movies. New transfer, cleaned up, special features blah blah blah the usual drill. But it was only on DVD, not also available on Blu-Ray. What’s up with that? You can get lots of recent crap on Blu-Ray; you’d think they’d start re-releasing older movies like Indy that would really benefit from the better picture and sound, especially if they’re doing a new transfer anyway.