Bill Callahan Fired

This morning Bill Callahan was fired from his job as the football coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. He joins athletic director Steve Pederson, who was fired last month. Even though they were fired, they both stand to make several million dollars over the next few years, as they're both under contract until 2012.

I personally believe that they shouldn't get millions of dollars for doing absolutely nothing, so I've come up with an alternative idea that would benefit both individuals and the university. I first got the idea after seeing this awesome cartoon by Neal Obermeyer after Pederson was fired:



That cartoon reminded me of the scene in Fun Run, the Season 4 premiere episode of The Office, where Eizabeth the stripper accepts the Big Check that cost $200 made out for $340 to Science. Which in turn reminded me of what happened to Elizabeth the stripper on her first appearance on the show, in the Season 3 episode Ben Franklin, where she's hired to dance at Bob Vance's bachelor party, but the party is cut short after Elizabeth dances on Michael and he has a sudden twinge of conscience, cutting the party short. Then Dwight, in his genius, takes Elizabeth up to the office and sits her down in Oscar's seat in accounting and this priceless exchange occurs:

Dwight: Elizabeth, I want you to sit here. When the phone rings, answer it.
Elizabeth: You want me to answer phones with my clothes on.
Dwight: We hired you for three hours work and we're going to get it.

Like Elizabeth the stripper, even though Steve Pederson and now Bill Callahan have been removed from the jobs they were originally hired for, that doesn't mean they should get the money from their contracts for doing nothing.

My modest proposal, then, which I guess is just Dwight's idea in a different situation, is that Steve Pederson and Bill Callahan should have to do some other job for the university until their contracts expire. While they both failed spectacularly at the high-profile jobs they were originally hired for, Pederson and Callahan would probably make acceptable janitors. Their job would be to clean up Memorial Stadium after each home game. I think that would be the least they could do to clean up the huge mess left in their wake.

FAIL

Well, yesterday I managed to go 22 hours without buying anything. And then, with less than 2 hours until midnight, I went to Joystiq to answer the day's question for their contest for a $5K gaming computer from Falcon Northwest. Before I could do so, however, I saw a post that Best Buy stores were selling the PC versions of BioShock and The Orange box for $25 each instead of the usual $50. While the nearest Best Buy is over 2 hours away, I checked bestbuy.com and found that the offer applied there, too, with free shipping no less, and I bought them both.

The sick thing is that I can't run either on my current PC, which is 6 1/2 years old, and if I can keep it running until Intel's Nehalem processor is released late next year, it'll be a year or so until I get to play either game.

A few weeks ago GoGamer.com had a sale on BioShock for $30, and I almost bought it then, but I figured that by the time I get a computer that could actually play it next year, the price would probably drop to less than $30 anyway, and maybe $20 or so during a sale.

Now that I've bought both games I'm in a little quandary: Do I root for my computer to fail so I can get a new computer and be able to play them, or do I keep hoping my computer continues working until Nehalem is released, knowing that I won't be able to play my new games until I get a new one?

Buy Nothing Day

New Maddox

Today Maddox finally posted a new essay:

Fashion tips for women from a guy who knows dick about fashion.

New Maddox essays have gotten more noteworthy over the years since they've become so infrequent. There used to be a couple new ones a month, but now there's only a new one every few months. In fact, this is only the 5th one of 2007, and I just noticed that there were only 4 updates in all of 2006. On the bright side, I think the quality of his essays has improved, as he used to be pretty hit and miss, but every single essay from the last 2 years has been great. This one continues the streak, as he makes a lot of hilarious comments and valid points, although I did disagree with 2 things.

Writing about how ugly and disgusting "Crocs" women's shoes are, Maddox writes:

"People who wear Crocs go on and on about how comfortable they are, and how it's supposedly odor resistant because it's made out of some kind of anti-bacterial foam. Great point, dipshits! You know what else it's resistant to? You getting laid."

I'm sure Maddox is like the Soup Nazi with impossibly high standards when it comes to deciding who to sleep with, but for 99% of men (and that's a conservative estimate) what shoes a woman wears does not figure into deciding on whether or not she's worth pursuing for sex.

Then a little bit later he's talking about the ridiciulousness of nearly identical lipstick colors. To prove this he has a picture showing 2 "different" shades of lipstick sold by Revlon, "Red Reinvented" and "Cherry Delicious." The two shades of red cropped from Maddox's comparison image:



While it is ridiculous that Revlon makes both colors, on my monitor the 2 shades are clearly different, even though they are very similar. "Red Reinvented" (left) is redder, while "Cherry Delicious" (right) is duller, and looks like it has a very slight pinkish hue. I looked at the samples one after the other a bunch of times and I correctly identified which is which every time. I wouldn't be able to identify them I could only look at 1 without reference to the other, and I doubt the actual lipsticks are as easy to tell apart, especially when someone's wearing them, but that doesn't change the fact that telling them apart from the sample colors on my monitor is easy.

Except for those two minor things I thought the essay was right on. I especially liked the part about the curtain dresses, which reminded me of a blog Mindy Kaling wrote a while back with some pictures of dresses like that that she said were really comfortable or something, which in turn reminded me that I still haven't tried the Kookaburra Liquorice that I've wanted to try ever since she wrote about it several months ago. Tonight I looked online a little bit for it and it's super expensive, about $5 for a 10-ounce bag. As if that isn't bad enough, with shipping it's usually more than twice that. You can get a much better deal buying it in bulk, but I don't want to be stuck with a case (12 10-ounce bags) if it turns out I don't like it. And even if I do like it, it would probably take me at least 6 months to eat that much licorice, and by the time I got to the last few bags the candy would probably be stale.

John Cusack conversation with Naomi Klein about The Shock Doctrine

Over the past few weeks several segments of a conversation John Cusack recently had with Naomi Klein about her new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism have been posted on The Huffington Post. The conversation has covered several different topics, and it's been fascinating and more than a little terrifying. Here are links to the 4 parts released so far:

Part 1: HuffPost Exclusive: My Interview with Naomi Klein (Video)

Part 2: Calling Things What They Are: More From My Conversation with Naomi Klein (Transcript)

Part 3: The Real Blackwater Scandal: Build a Frontier, You Get Cowboys (Transcript)

Part 4: The Real Blackwater Scandal: Build a Frontier, You Get Cowboys, Part II (Transcript)

I haven't yet got my hands on The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism or seen Cusack's new movie War, Inc., but I'm look forward to them both.

Chuck - S01E02

So despite my mixed thoughts on the first episode, I decided to give Chuck another chance and I was not disappointed. The second episode was funnier, the plot was more interesting (even though it seemed like just something they had to get out of the way, kind of like the episode of Futurama where Fry checks his old bank account and finds out that he's a billionaire), and the question of which, if either, agent could be trusted made things pretty interesting. One thing I didn't like was that the whole computer secrets stuck in his head thing is even more ridiculous than I thought it would be.

I liked that LOST was referenced when in the middle of reciting some of the secrets he knew he said, "Oceanic flight 815 was shot down...," but I have to wonder if the writers actually watch LOST each week since we learned in the Season 2 finale that Desmond not entering the code in time was apparently what brought the plane down. It would have been better if he had said "Oceanic flight 815 crashed on an island located..." or something like that that alludes to something we don't know.

Chuck x2

Good Luck Chuck

I have no interest in seeing Good Luck Chuck, but I was interested in seeing how it would do at the box office over the weekend compared to Shoot 'Em Up (which I have no interest in seeing other), which was released a few weeks ago, based on their very different advertising strategies. I had never heard of Shoot 'Em Up a week before it was released, and then the whole week prior to its release it seemed like every other commercial on TV was for it. The blitz didn't work too well, as during its opening weekend of September 7-9 it finished in 4th place and took in about $5.7 million. In contrast, it seems like there were a small but regular number of ads on TV for Good Luck Chuck over the last 2-3 months. Over its opening weekend September 21-23 Good Luck Chuck finished in 2nd place and took in $13.7 million. From the reviews, both of these are pretty bad movies, so I'm guessing that had something to do with the creative advertising techniques for them. I wonder how much, if any, of the difference in their opening weekend performance is because of the different advertising methods, and how this might affect future advertising. I guess I should be thankful that they haven't resorted to advertising crappy movies with the same despicable advertising technique used for that Head On thing, which I suppose is used because the stupid thing doesn't work at all (and even if in some parallel universe it did work, I think everyone there should boycott it on principle, to not reward the sleazy advertising used to sell it).

Chuck

I had seen some ads for this but I wasn't going to watch it until during a rerun of The Office last week there was a commercial for it and I heard what I thought was Adam Baldwin's voice. I was cleaning dishes at the time so I didn't see if it was him or not, but after I got done I looked it up on IMDb and sure enough it was him. Since the show had the guy who brought to life one of the funniest characters in the history of television, Jayne Cobb on Firefly, how could I not check this show out? So I set my VCR to record it, which ended up being a good thing since I forgot about it until 5 minutes or so after it started. So I watched the rest of the show, slightly confused. After it was over I watched the first 5 minutes and of course that helped everything make sense. Still, I thought the show was mediocre overall. The basic premise was pretty far-fetched (that's not how human memory works), and for a show about tech geeks (sorry, nerds) there seemed to be a lot of questionable computer things. For example, how does a virus destroy a computer? Even a really nasty rootkit wouldn't survive a hard drive wipe, would it? The best I could think of is if the virus somehow told the PSU that the mother board, CPU & hard drive(s) weren't getting enough power and when it put out more juice everything was fried. And how does a computer suffer complete destruction when it falls a few feet onto the ground, including a hard drive being in multiple pieces? I tried to put these quibbles aside and just enjoy the show, but it just wasn't that good. Adam Baldwin's character was not funny at all, and there were only a few laughs during the whole show even though from what little I knew about it, I thought it was supposed to be a comedy. It wasn't all bad though, as there were some funny parts in the beginning in the store. And then my favorite part was near the end show when Chuck diffused the bomb by searching for porn to kill the computer. I'm embarrassed I didn't see that coming, but I ended up laughing a lot harder than I would have if I had. Perhaps the overall lack of humor was because they had to setup all the plot stuff, so I think I'll give the show one more chance next week to see if they can bring the funny. Hopefully it turns out to be worth watching, but if not (and even if it does, for that matter), it completely sucks to see all the talented actors who were on Firefly, easily one of the best shows of all-time, appear in significantly lower quality shows (e.g., Nathan Fillion on Drive, Gina Torres on Standoff), so many of which fail, and they just keep coming up with new show ideas, most of which completely suck, all the while the Firefly 'verse is just waiting to be explored. I really hope Fox decides to give it another shot (or another network when Fox's TV rights expire at the end of the year), especially now that Kevin Reilly is there. He had a large part in saving The Office from cancellation after Season 1, and maybe if he'd been at Fox when they cancelled Firefly in 2002 and Futurama in 2003 (and then gone on to NBC to save The Office), maybe they'd both still be on the air.