Archive for January, 2009

Schenley caused hallucinations in readers

Never heard of this whiskey before today, and given the ad that sur­faced at Retro Press I think I can see why. Follow along with me as I reveal the night­mare to you, but only in pieces at a time, lest your mind be over­whelmed by too much ghast­li­ness at once and you be dri­ven into the nether­est regions […]

Let’s at least wait for the first 100 days to end…

Image by Patrick Chappatte at Daryl Cagle’s pad. Over the last eight years I’ve been increas­ingly annoyed by the way Ronald Reagan has been lion­ized. Airports, air­craft car­ri­ers, schools named after the man, and he wasn’t a par­tic­u­larly good or ade­quate pres­i­dent. Listen. The man ignored AIDS. He had an arms-​​​​for-​​​​hostages deal going with Iran. (Yes, […]

God and U.S. Airways flight 1549

From CNN: The pilot aboard U.S. Airways Flight 1549 came over the speaker sys­tem and told pas­sen­gers “brace for impact.” One pas­sen­ger turned on his cell phone so his body could be found with its GPS track­ing. Others reflected on their lives. Everyone sur­vived. Said pas­sen­ger Andrew Jamison, “God was cer­tainly look­ing out for all of us.”

Sexting = child porn?

Setting aside con­cerns such as, what if it was your daugh­ter that did this, on the face of it the actions taken against six Pennsylvania teenagers are just plain damn stu­pid. [S]ix Pennsylvania high school stu­dents are fac­ing child pornog­ra­phy charges after three teenage girls allegedly took nude or semi-​​​​nude phở­tos of them­selves and shared […]

RIP, Number Six

Patrick McGoohan has died. The goods: The show:

Do not read while eating

It’ll put you right off your feed. “The most urgent threat [Obama] will have to deal with, and other pres­i­dents after him have got to deal with, is an attack on our home­land,” Mr Bush said. Gee, if only Bush had received the same kind of warn­ing when he took over in 2001. Oh. Wait.

iTunes pricing: not the news

While the new three-​​​​level pric­ing on iTunes is mar­gin­ally inter­est­ing, of much greater impor­tance is that iTunes is ter­mi­nat­ing DRM. You can upgrade all the songs in your library pur­chased from them to DRM-​​​​free ver­sions à la iTunes Plus.1 About time, too. DRM is for teh shite­heads. ==== 1. At 94 items to upgrade (singles […]

We’re not in a recession.

This is a full-​​​​on depres­sion, folks, and it’s only just begun. MSNBC et. al. are still in total denial, using words like reces­sion while doc­u­ment­ing the implo­sion of brands such as Mervyn’s (clothes), Best Buy, Starbucks and so on — but the real­ity is that this is not a reces­sion any more than the October 1929 crash […]