Never Clever

I’ll admit to Googling around when doing NYT crosswords when something tickles my head. Today I was trying to remember the spelling of the sequel to Shogun (I was way off; only had the T right). The top Google hit for “shogun sequel” is currently this blog post, which has the text of a bunch of today’s crossword clues in it. Clicking on the video got me an ActiveX error on a Mac, but the page tried to force a .dmg download. Class.

Man I love Steve Wozniak. Kathy Griffin lost me somewhere around her millionth plastic surgery when it became hard to look at her.

I have a theory. A rather dangerous theory. I believe Numbers Stations (the whole Yankee Hotel Foxtrot thing) are a blind to hide how governments really do secret communication. Archie & Jughead Double Digests in the grocery store. Have you ever seen anyone buy those things? Anything else that doesn’t sell by the truckload gets yanked from the impulse buy section in seconds.

I’m the only person I know who’s picked them up; once to see if they had somehow improved so much over the inanity even my ten year-old self couldn’t stand and the second time because the first time annoyed Michelle so well. The clerk didn’t say anything either time, but those bitches are well-trained to maintain their mask of utter disinterest. A couple of flash mobs to clean out the stock at Shaws, and the world would be plunged into chaos.

who wanted to know, while watching Lost, why fickleness is always presented as a “female” quality.

First she wants to get rid of it, then halfway down the page she’s amazed by it.

has replaced deadspin as the one place where I read the comments. The first 100 or so in the earth-shatteringly important Square Pegs review are terrific. I’m guessing it’s as much a function of being close in age to the majority of the posters as it is any great coming together of Internet humorists. I’m basing that assumption on scant evidence: the number of people who remember an 80s show and the fact one of the posters has a nick based on a MC Paul Barman line. Speaking of MPB, he has new tracks out but they didn’t do it for me on first listen. Don’t take my word for it though; I tend to immediately stop listening whenever someone on the ‘net starts a foreskin debate.

There are a zillion stupid things I’m going to run into that make me realize how much I’ll miss my mom (yesterday’s twin headlines blared at me from the Foster’s paper box: “Super Mom” and “Secrets for a Long Life”), but the thing that’s got me right now is I’ve lost someone who enjoyed bitching about For Better or For Worse as much as I do. If she’d been more computer-literate, I’d have loved to send her this. I can’t decide if it’s horrifying or reassuring there are people willing to argue about the lives of a bunch of fictional Canadians.

In the interest of patching up, E from the eels has invited the President to a concert (or three). No word from W’s lady-in-waiting yet.

Literally. Somehow in the course of a year, the online music sampler from SXSW went from 60 songs to 48 hours of songs, so I’d given up hope of finding anything new from this year’s SXSW. Fortunately for me, Paul Ford was willing to step in and act as a filter. All via his 6-word limit Twitter feed.

Remember that movie where Clint Eastwood plays a fighter pilot? Yeah, me neither:

It even inspired a decent comment on YouTube:

. . . it’s fun to pretend he’s playing the same character as in Firefox. Why wouldn’t they give the job of stealing a Soviet superplane to the man who won an air war against a giant spider?