Disks in Rotation:
DVD • Gladiator
CD-ROM • D2X
CD Carousel
• Soundgarden - Bad Motor Finger
• Fat Boy Slim - From the Gutter to the Stars
• System of a Down
• Skinny Puppy - Rabies
• The Prodigy - Fat of the Land

Books Lying Open
• Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (selected by) Joyce Carol Oates
• Annotated Lovecraft, S. T. Joshi
• Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Brothers Grim
• Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
• Dreams of Terror and Death, H. P. Lovecraft
• Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre H. P. Lovecraft

What's For Lunch?
• Something warm, I hope *shivers* C+

Soul-Devouring Worry
• My career is based on a sport I could care less about.

When I Grow Up:
• The heights will be higher. 

Daily Blog
Work, boring, nothing of note.

Starving now, tired from work and little sleep yesterday, and so many major projects that need to be worked on, here and on the d2 site and on other things, it's depressing me.  I didn't even find any interesting news items to post about today.  I think it's more about me being tired and cold and feeling lazy now, and my mind isn't spitting up various comments about news items at the rate it usually does.  Lucky thing I wrote the essay portion yesterday, since I wouldn't have that much typing in me tonight.

A few news thingies.

Article about and interview with the head programming director of Turner Networks.  Not Ted Turner, some other guy named Jamie Kellner.

A big piece of the future of television is in the hands of Jamie Kellner. Kellner, a launcher of broadcast networks, sits atop the empire built by Ted Turner, who acquired programming libraries and turned them into cable leaders. Now Kellner must steer Turner's networks through a media recession and find the best way to exploit the company's vast resources in a new era of television, filled with digital promises and opportunities.

I don't really care one way or the other what he does, since I don't watch TV very often, and never watch network type programming, just PBS or sports.

Anyway, he talks at length about issues in entertainment today, especially the digital recording and commercial-skipping made so easy by things like TiVO, and how's a problem for the revenue model of television.

The audio marketplace--Napster and other companies had a great game going. They figured out how to use the Internet to give music away that they didn't own and make it into a business. Everyone was planning on getting rich there at one point. The companies that are financing and own copyrights stepped in and challenged it, and it's not a very rosy picture for them right now. I think the idea of copyright is very important--and it's respected by the courts and our government--and as people realize the potential of what the Internet with digital can do in terms of distribution, I think there's a good decision to be made that will protect the copyright.... Someone's going to have to recognize that once we've entered the digital world people can send out perfect copies without any costs to large numbers of people in many different territories of the world [and] can dramatically disrupt the system that we've built that allows us to produce and distribute content and pay for it and make...a profit in the investment, and that has to be addressed.

This is in issue of concern, since the reason the good stuff on TV is free to watch, is because of commercials.  As many websites have found out over the last few years, it's very expensive to run a popular website, and internet ads don't pay enough to cover your hosting.  So god help you if you're working hours a day or even full time on your website, and would like to you know, pay your rent and eat and such.

I've often wondered about TV commercials, which make running a TV station very profitable, compared to internet ads.  On the internet the clicks on ads are easily-measured and tracked.  This leads to advertisers seeing a direct return (or lack thereof) on their investment, and often deciding that running the ads isn't financially wise.

My thoughts are that this is probably much more true on TV ads, but since there's no way to measure clicks on TV, advertisers don't know it.  The only TV ads that ever make me do anything are ones for Dr. Pepper.  And I hate their commercials, I just like the soda, and usually have some cans in stock, but am able to avoid drinking them 99% of the time.  However when I see an ad for it I tend to find myself unable to resist.  Virtually every other ad I hate, mute instantly, decide to never buy the product based on how stupid their commercials are (see Chevy Trucks), though it's likely I'd never have done so anyway (see all trucks), etc.  I assume most other people are the same, and that commercials do give consumers some pushes towards wasting their money on a particular brand of an un-needed product, but generally are ignored and would have click rates as low or lower than Internet ads, if there were ways to check clicks on TV commercials.  (Admittedly I have had virtually zero disposable income for my entire adult life, so I'm far from their ideal consumer, and if I were making $50k a year I'd probably be much more interested in ads for new cars and DVDs and such.)

I'm sure that every company does studies and information on how their sales do depending on how much they're spending on promotion, what their ads are, where their ads are playing, etc. But my impression is that internet ads are held to a vastly higher standard than TV commercials.

What this has to do with the above-mentioned article is not entirely clear, but this is where my fingers have lead us.  Good thing I'm freezing and starving and feeling generally miserable, or I might have gone on and on about things.  *cough*

Now for a cute animal feature.

Very funny pics in this article about remote control rats.  Really.  The story is interesting also, with a sort of cyborg rodent with electrodes stimulating the pleasure center of the brain, and training to make the rat go straight, left, up, down, climb, etc. The concept is to send remote-control rats into disaster areas, collapsed buildings, etc.  Places humans can't fit, and no robot can possibly go (at least not for another 20 or 30 years of miniature robot design improvements) to scout for trapped people.

I'm not sure how well the trapped people would take things, as they're lying there dying, legs crushed, wondering what else can go wrong, and here comes a beeping rat with a back pack and wires poking out of its head.

Now what they need to do are put little airline shot bottles on their backpacks, like miniature St. Bernards.  Slowly dying of shock and asphyxiation under a collapsed slum tenement is more fun if you're snockered.

At least this answers the question, "Which looks stupider in clothing, dogs, cats, or rats?"  Previously cats were on the hook vs. dogs, but they've been far surpassed now.

he look these days (one of them anyway) is for girls (not women, at least not very often) to wear g-strings with low-rider pants, or sagging baggy pants, so their underwear pokes out on top, like every fat male plumber.  A few examples of this can be seen here and here.

I'm relatively ambivalent about this look. I love g-strings on women with the asses to make them viable, but seeing them poking out of their pants seems so tacky.  Obviously it's intentionally tacky, but tacky is tacky.  It's somewhat reminiscent of the trendy (but fading, blessedly) look where guys wore huge pants with their underwear poking on on top.  I have always found that to be perhaps the stupidest look imaginable, not to mention that it's "prison bitch".  Yes, I want to look like hardened inmates are trading cigarettes for the right to slap me around and throw me over a bunk for a few hours of fun!

I remember when that was first a look, in like 1987, I'd see wanna-be ghetto black guys (there was nothing approaching a ghetto in Tierrasanta) in my high school wearing that, and we'd (me and my friends) just laugh and giggle at how gay and stupid it was.  Fast forward 5 years and by the mid-90's it was becoming sort of popular, and then 5 years later every pudgy white 16 y/o was wearing that, with their dog chain wallet in their baggy pants.  Black guys had by then moved on to baggy parachute pants with one leg rolled up to the knee, with way too expensive basketball shoes on.

It's so nice to not be a teenager, so you can look back at the stupid stuff you wore, and what kids wear these days and just laugh and be glad you're not still so insecure and caught up in whatever the current fashion victim trend is.  I can remember just begging my parents to waste money on whatever type of t-shirt the cool kids were wearing when I was in junior high, obsessed with the thought that I wouldn't be cool, and others would pick me out.  Of course I never had any idea what my friends were wearing, and paid it zero attention, and no one would have cared if I'd come to school in anything more than a burlap sack, but try getting a 13 y/o to understand reality to that extent.  Hah.

Anyway, so is the g-string poking out look sexy?  Obviously someone must think so, and girls are even more obsessed with appearance and trend chasing than boys are, so if Britney wears it, and they see it on the news, then they figure they have to wear it.  Plus it pisses off their parents (since it looks idiotic and slutty) which is of course a huge motivation to wear it.  As the highwater underwear boys can attest.

Oddly, I wrote the rest of this last night, and then today checking the most popular stories on Yahoo, and saw this one.

Angry parents have demanded the resignation of a California high school vice principal after she lifted the skirts of teenage girls at a dance to make sure they were wearing "appropriate" underwear.

Parents at Rancho Bernardo High School in suburban San Diego say the vice principal, Rita Wilson, made the girls prove that they were not wearing skimpy thong panties before they were allowed into the dance on Friday.

Probably some ex-nun with hips the width of a barn door, angry about sexy little tarts flipping their skirts and showing some skin. There's more detail about it in an article here.

As most every guy over 25 says, "Where the hell were g-strings when I was in high school?"

I still clearly remember a young woman in a Philosophy class I had in college. Long long before anyone thought of g-strings and low pants.  She used to wear a leotard every day, with a g-string back.  Over that she wore usually jeans and a denim jacked, or a t-shirt.  But the legs of her spandex were cut so high that there was usually a slice of skin visible above her jeans and below the leotard.  I found that just indescribably sexy, and a glance at it would set my brain to bubbling to where nothing the instructor said about Kant or Hegel made even a dent.  Which might explain my dropping that class eventually, despite the incentive of her barely-visible hips.  Tragically I had a semi-GF at the time, and felt like since I was dating, I shouldn't talk to another woman.  So I didn't.

Fortunately I've moved well beyond that point now, and no longer consider talking to any women, for any reason.  Too much trouble; easier to just be alone.  Don't have to shave or clean up the apt either.

There was a picture in a Newsweek article about teen sex or dating (or whatever), probably 2 or 3 years ago, and I still clearly remember one shot, which was a close up from the side, with a guy and girl embracing, and the guy had his fingers gripping under the girls' high side string of her panties, above the side of her pants.  I found that really sexy and appealing.  So I like visible panty strings on the sides, but not in back?  I dunno, I can't explain it.  This is all just an excuse to talk about girl's underwear anyway.  Same as the rest of the internet.

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