Practicalmadness

There was no Two Minutes Snark yesterday because nothing important happened yesterday. (Note: there is a “to me” implicit whenever I say that, i.e., “nothing important happened to me yesterday.”)

• You may have heard something about the comedy duo of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton teaming up for a “unity” event today in — wait for it! — Unity, New Hampshire! HA HA!

• There’s a guy running for President who knows who Jay-Z is. So what is on Obama’s iPod?

• Zimbabwe update: Mugabe’s youth militias are stocked with young men who are as scared of the regime as the people they’re beating to death.

• And let’s all take a moment and reflect on a world where the following graf makes sense: “One of Mr. Tsvangirai’s most senior aides, Tendai Biti, was freed Thursday on bail of a trillion Zimbabwean dollars, or about $90. He was arrested two weeks ago on treason charges, which carry a potential death penalty.”

• There are some interestingly similar shots in the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men and Raising Arizona. And interesting to note: No Country was released last year but is set in the late 1980s. Raising Arizona was made in the late 1980s.

• Pixar’s Wall-E in a nutshell: lazy, self-absorbed human race saved from the evil clutches of Wal-Mart when a lonely robot walks up to it, waves, and says “[Hello, my name is ]WAAALLL-EEEEEEE[!]” a few times. Whether you think Wall-E is better than Ratatouille is likely correlated with how much you love Kubrick and robots. (I love Kubrick and robots, but I also love Paris, food and Ratatouille. I am on the fence.) Also: Wall-E made me cry. Verdict: Four out of four spare robot eyeballs.

• Today was Bill Gates’s last (regular) day at Microsoft. He’s staying on as chairman, but will no longer be involved in the day-to-day business of the company. Gates stepped down as Microsoft’s CEO years ago and was replaced by this man.

• Web designers are, first and foremost, professional communicators and crafters of interactions. Andy Rutledge on the skill set required by any employable web designer. There’s a degree of ‘job description creep’ here; the job Rutledge calls “web designer” I would call “art director” or “web design lead,” and I think he sets the bar for ‘employability’ a bit high unless you’re talking solely about senior folks and not junior- or entry-level designers. But I absolutely agree that good web design has absolutely nothing to do with yr mad Photoshop skillz.

• Related from Rutledge (and far more useful to people on the lower rungs): Pre-Bid Discussions and Calculating Hours: The Client Factors, both about how to deal with reconciling your youthful Pollyannaism with the harsh reality that People Is Suck Sometimes. Note that Rutledge is also the dude who, when Veerle Pieters posted about how deadlines kill inspiration, spent a few hundred words telling you to suck it up and quit whining.

• In case you weren’t aware, Adult Swim has been posting each weekend’s new episode of The Venture Bros. — TV’s third best comedy series — as a free web stream on Friday mornings. This week, Dr. Venture opens a day camp for boy adventurers.

Tonight’s edition of Two Minutes Snark is brought to you by Half Acre Lager, the best local microbrew I could find at the 7-Eleven on the corner.

• The best case of It Just Works you’re likely to find anywhere outside of Apple: I just bought a Polar heart rate monitor to use during cardio. On a typical cardio day I use three different machines from three different manufacturers, all of which have built-in HR monitors, all of which suck. (They all require you to hold onto something, which may or may not have been cleaned or calibrated right.) Today, though, I walk up to each one of them wearing my new wireless monitor and all three machines immediately pick up its signal. Probably helps that Polar is to sports HR monitors as Apple iPods are to portable music players these days, but still — nice.

• Verdict: despite 40+ minutes of unsimulated sex by the leads, Michael Winterbottom’s 2004 film 9 Songs — about a so-brief-as-to-defy-meaning love affair between a dull Englishman and a crazy American girl who’d be a cipher if she were interesting — is really fucking boring. I feel like it could have at least had some soul if the acting had been better, but of course, to attract better actors Winterbottom would have had to forego the ultra-explicit sex. Which was almost the whole point of the enterprise.

  Having been shamed by my über-cool stylist into giving Winterbottom another chance, next up will be 24 Hour Party People.

• Speaking of England: At the urging of the UK’s Foreign Minister (not to mention pretty much every member of Parliament), Queen Elizabeth has annulled Robert Mugabe’s honorary knighthood. The Queen has customarily given knighthoods to visiting heads of state; Mugabe’s was granted during a state visit in 1994.

• While we’re across the pond: the CEO of Irish low-cost airline Ryanair has promised that their new business-class service would feature “beds and blowjobs.” And yes, that’s exactly what he said.

• Hugh Laurie told the London Times one of the biggest perks of celebrity was the “Burger King gold card”, which entitles a select group of 11 very famous people (including Jennifer Hudson!!!) to free BK hamburgers for life. Laurie’s endorsement tends to prove what we’ve always feared: that English food really must be terrible if it makes Burger King sound appealing.

• Photo of the day: Eddie Murphy’s head traveling down the interstate.

  

So, let’s try something new — this is an overview of things that were on my radar screen today. I am going to try to do one of these every weekday, though we’ll see how well I hew to that.

• GWOD update: 240.6 lbs this morning (-59.4 from start on 8/8/07), about to enter ominous “Phase 2” involving a diet and a third weekly resistance session.

  Also: just went out to Danny’s for beers and OMG yes I did dancing, alone on a Tuesday night. Realizing such things can be fun if I can just quit worrying about a couple of things. Yes, all straight white men look like idiots when they dance (so may as well enjoy it), and no, it is not important that I Meet Someone, Take Someone Home, or etc. tonight (so may as well enjoy the view).

  Also: if the girl in the strapless dress with the hair and the eyes and the moves is a Practicalmadness reader: um, hey, baby, whassup?

• Guitar Hero came out for the DS this week; I picked it up today. Instead of a guitar controller, the game comes with a “guitar grip” you attach to the bottom of your DS, and a pick-shaped stylus you use to strum the touch screen. It sounds insane, but it works — GH: On Tour isn’t really a “play on the bus” sort of game, but it might be a “play in a waiting room” sort. I say: three out of four pick-shaped styli. Game Rankings gives the game a 75% fresh rating. Speaking of music games on Nintendo consoles: as previously noted, Rock Band is out for the Wii on Thursday.

• “The reality of the regime’s brutishness nearly hit me over the head as I was being expelled from the country.” Peter Maass on the U.S.-backed Obiang regime in Equatorial Guinea in Slate.

• Speaking of African dictatorships: the current exchange rate of U.S. dollars for Zimbabwean dollars is 35,000,000,000:1. That’s nearly doubled since Friday.

• Mayor Daley, having given up on Chicago being America’s London by getting Harrod’s to open a store here, now has his heart set on us starting up a Paris-inspired bike rental program. Unfortunately, the lawyers don’t share his romantic bike-sharing vision and are holding up the project.

• This blogger’s favorite Muppet — Cookie Monster — visited The Colbert Report on Thursday.

• Newsweek covers the book I’m reading right now, Sam Gosling’s Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You: “‘It’s dangerous to look for the things that stick out,’ Gosling says. ‘You want to look for themes. The meaning of one thing modifies the meaning of another.’” (Buy the book at Amazon)

If you get links forwarded to you by co-workers or friends or keep up with the news, you may have heard a story about some high school girls in Gloucester, MA who decided as a group to start having babies and raise them together, one going so far as to find a 24-year-old homeless dude to knock her up. You may also know that there’s now some doubt about certain details of that story. The school’s principal had said there was a “pregnancy pact” (and he’s also the source for the homeless dude thing), but inquiries by school and city authorities have found no evidence of such a pact. So the tenor of the coverage has shifted, from “OMG there are girls getting pregnant!” to “OMG a white guy lied about girls getting pregnant!”

So, questions of veracity aside, why were these girls allegedly knocking themselves up? Apparently, it’s because globalization has sucked all love and meaning out of their quietly failing fishing town, and this is a rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light kind of thing.

That’s fine, I guess, but one can’t help but wonder whether this graph speaks to the real reason why these young women couldn’t wait a few years to fill the gaping, baby-shaped void in their lives:

The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. “We’re proud to help the mothers stay in school,” says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.

It’s interesting that this should show up on my radar the same day as this funny funny blog post describing a really terrible job offer with no salary, demanding hours and a generally unpleasant working environment. (Let me ruin the joke for you: the author is describing his daughter’s elementary school.) The post was linked from the Twitter streams of three different software developers, either in the context of ‘that’s totally why I’m homeschooling my kid’ or ‘that’s totally why I dropped out of college.’

To attempt a full explanation for why American public schools are so profoundly fucked up is, alas, beyond the scope of this writing. So instead, please allow me to raise the following questions:

• What kind of insane world have we created for our children where high schools have day care centers?

• Did it not occur to anyone that that was a symptom of some deep, terrifying social malaise, if not such a nuclear explosion of meta-ness as to threaten the very fabric of the space-time continuum?

• What kind of death-defying mental acrobatics are required to look at that situation and think, ‘wow, we have finally solved the problem of unwed single mothers with unstable home lives dropping out of school’?

Free day care is what those of us in the armchair economics game call a “strong incentive,” especially when paired with free room and board from one’s parents. Toss in some media-blaming — do we really need round-the-clock coverage of Brad & Angelina’s babies? Of Jessica Alba’s baby bump? — and it seems obvious why these girls got pregnant: because society made it look glamorous, and the school made it seem cheap.

• Is there a new iPhone? — IT IS DECIDEDLY SO.

• Will it have 3G? — SIGNS POINT TO YES.

• Will it come in colors, such as PRODUCT(RED)? — REPLY HAZY, ASK AGAIN LATER.

• Will it go on sale today? — OUTLOOK GOOD.

• Will it be $200 after subsidy/rebate from AT&T ($400 at Apple retail stores)? — MY SOURCES SAY YES.

• Will the “OS X iPhone” 2.0 software update be available for download today? — MOST LIKELY.

• Does that mean the App Store and the first round of third-party apps will be out today too? — SIGNS POINT TO YES.

• Will .Mac be rebranded “Mobile Me?” — YOU MAY RELY ON IT.

• Will the new “Mobile Me” service feature over-the-air “push” e-mail and calendar syncing, essentially like an Exchange server for consumers? — AS I SEE IT, YES.

• Will anything else change about the former .Mac, like its spotty reliability or ridiculously high price? — DON’T COUNT ON IT.

• Will Steve Jobs announce the next major release of Mac OS X? — MOST LIKELY.

• Will that be the rumored “10.6 Snow Leopard” release, which drops PowerPC support and foregoes new features for a bunch of welcome performance boosts and framework improvements? — OUTLOOK GOOD.

• Will “OS X Snow Leopard” be a free upgrade? — VERY DOUBTFUL. (Sarbanes-Oxley, dudes.)

• Will new Apple Cinema Displays be announced, possibly slimmer ones with built-in iSight cameras? — OH, IF WISHING MADE IT SO.

• Will Jobs announce Mac OS X licensing, or some other official way of loading Mac OS X onto non-Apple hardware? — NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS.

• Will he announce a Mac tablet, or an xMac? — BITCH, PLEASE.