Jay Leno Losing His Audience to DVR Machines

Jay Leno Losing His Audience to DVR Machines

Evelyn Violet Ely

Evelyn Violet Ely
Originally uploaded by davextreme

Born at 3:04 PM on Sunday, November 29, 2009, 6 pounds, 13 ounces, 19 and a half inches long. Katherine and Evelyn are both doing great.

Peter and the Wolf

Recommended companion to Fantastic Mr. Fox: Suzie Templeton’s 2008 Academy Award-nominated, stop motion-animated Peter and the Wolf short. If you have Netflix, you can stream it.

Christmas Playlist 2009

I’ve been very carefully building a Christmas playlist for the past few years. I only add one song a year, and I only listen to the songs on the list between Thanksgiving and the Epiphany. There are now nine songs on the list.

1. “The Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues
2. “Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley
3. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by Judy Garland
4. “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by John Lennon
5. (New) “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby
6. “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” by Dean Martin
7. “Baby It’s Cold Outside” by Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Jordan
8. “Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy” by David Bowie & Bing Crosby
9. “Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade

My mom has Bing Crosby’s Christmas album on vinyl. As a kid I used to love playing records, and she has a great collection of Christmas albums. It’s hard to pick, and I already have a Bing Crosby tune on the list, but if anyone is allowed to appear twice on a Christmas playlist, it’s Bing Crosby.

Previously

The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings

I refer to this from time-to-time when people complain about Christmas starting earlier each year. In fact, it’s been going on for at least 80 years. Just as SNL has never been as funny as it used to be, Christmas shopping season has always started earlier than it used to.

From the FDR library, The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings.

After Six

Put This On links to a fashion-based 30 Rock joke. The setup and payoff of this gag make up one of my favorite understated jokes on the show. It highlights the mayhem of Liz’s life and the nature of Jack’s character perfectly.

Real Simpsons House

Real Simpsons House

"Exclusive" iTunes Extras

Ars Technica has a piece about iTunes Extras, a new scheme where you get bonus materials with movie downloads like you get with DVDs. A few thoughts:

1. A big pet peeve about DVDs for me is having to bother with animated menus. I really just want to put the disc in, hit play, and, you know, watch the movie. I haven’t bought a movie from iTunes, but I wonder if the extras add this annoying extra step to watching a movie. Surely there’s a way to still be able to get to them that still lets me get straight to the movie, since that’s what I want most of the time.
2. The main point of the above-linked article is that the extras from iTunes are not exclusive, but are also available on the DVDs. But why would I want exclusivity? Exclusive content means I’d have to buy it twice to get all the bonus materials (if I wanted them).

The Web in Danger

Anil Dash collects some doomsaying about the Web.

My take: someone smart needs to put together something that’s not the new Facebook or the new Twitter, but that connects all these things. The future of the Web is taking back the Web from the need for a site to entrench itself.

Facebook is convenient because everyone’s on it, but why can’t I have a site¹ or a program that puts all my friends’ stuff together even if they’re not on Facebook²? If I like Flickr or Picasa better than Facebook’s photos, and Twitter better than its status updates, why isn’t there a site that knows all those sites belong to me, and presents them to my friends in a handy place of their choosing?

What I see is an RSS reader³ where I give it one site, and it says, “hey, this looks like it belongs to a person. Do you want to subscribe to his other sites?” Then it would build a newsfeed like Facebook’s, but you’d be able to customize it, or use another reader, since we all know Facebook likes to change its feed every few months and we can’t do anything about it. We can’t jump ship because we’d lose our friends’ updates and nothing’s properly decentralized.

I’m not enough of a programmer to know the right approach. Perhaps we all put links to an OPML file in our site headers that the software could see to go find other sites we own. Maybe XFN and rel=”me”. Point is: there are lots of great services out there. We shouldn’t have to funnel them all into one social network to use them.

1. Friendfeed sort of does this, but then everyone needs to use Friendfeed. You can’t decentralize halfway.
2. And yeah, you can add other apps to Facebook, but it’s a step I shouldn’t need to do, and one that requires your friend to add his other feeds to Facebook, have a Facebook account, etc.
3. But it wouldn’t need to be an RSS reader by name. It could just say, “give me the Twitter/Facebook/etc.” username of a friend”, and go find the RSS feed on its own.

Lorenzo von Matterhorn

Lorenzo von Matterhorn has a very large web presence.

Verizon: How Much Do You Charge Now?

David Pogue, on how Verizon’s phones make it easy to accidentally connect to the internet so they can charge you $1.99, and how their representatives are trained to prevent you from blocking this.

Capitalization of Fantasy Race Names

On the capitalization of fantasy race names:

For the longest time I have capitalized my non-human race names such as Eldrien, Dworgh, Scaithi, Ogre, Goblin, and so forth. After all, the name of virtually every human race is capitalized, such as African-America, Latino, Caucasian, and so forth. Thus, capitalizing fantasy race names seemed fairly acceptable until I realized that it would force me to capitalize “human” as well.

—M.C. Williams

Minding One's Qs

William & Mary recently elected Jessee Vasold, a transgender student, homecoming queen. The Flat Hat reports that “Jessee Vasold ’11 made history at the College of William and Mary Wednesday when ze [sic] was announced as the school’s first transgender homecoming queen, representing the Class of 2011.”

As a student at William & Mary, my fraternity, Psi Upsilon, co-sponsored the Gay Student Union’s annual Drag Ball. At home somewhere I have a photo of me in a white dress shirt and plaid skirt (and a mohawk) at the drag ball from that year. The GSU hired professional drag queens to dance at the event which, in my junior year, would prove a bit too raucous for The College’s taste and get the event banned. I fondly remember two of our members, Mason and Russell, dressing in black suits with phone cords stuffed in their collars to look like secret service agents, acting as “security” for the performers and escorting them around the University Center. After the show the girls came back to Unit A to party. This may not have been the first time drag queens partied at a W&M fraternity, but I like to think we broke the mold.

All of this to say, I have some amount of gay cred, but I can’t get on board with The Flat Hat’s use of “ze” as a gender-neutral pronoun. Some languages, like German, have gender-neutral pronouns. English does not. Perhaps in time people will start to adopt new words like “ze” and “zir”, but I think at present they just make for awkward reading. A pronoun’s job is to stay out of the reader’s way, allowing the sentence to flow without needing to constantly repeat a person’s name. Having to stop and define a pronoun undermines the purpose of pronouns.

Yet language is an important battleground that does affect how people think. For example, The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s Media Reference Guide states:

Because of the clinical history of the word “homosexual,” it has been adopted by anti-gay extremists to suggest that lesbians and gay men are somehow diseased or psycho­logically/emotion­ally dis­ordered - no­tions dis­credited by both the American Psycho­logical Association and the American Psychiatric Association in the 1970s. Please avoid using “homosexual” except in direct quotes.

We should try to avoid using offensive terms inadvertently, but it’s easy to go too far in altering language to avoid offense, as the Politically Correct English movement in the ’90s evinced. In his essay “Tense Present”, David Foster Wallace notes:

As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully refers to him as “economically disadvantaged” rather than “poor.” Were I he, in fact, I’d probably find the PCE term insulting — not just because it’s patronizing but because it’s hypocritical and self-serving. Like many forms of Vogue Usage, PCE functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the speaker — scrupulous egalitarianism, concern for the dignity of all people, sophistication about the political implications of language — and so serves the selfish interests of the PC far more than it serves any of the persons or groups renamed.

But what if the problem isn’t knowing which of a few terms to apply (“poor” versus “economically disadvantaged”), but that no good term applies?

GLAAD’s style guide states:

We also encourage you to ask transgender people which pronoun they would like you to use.

A person who identifies as a certain gender, whether or not they [sic] have taken hormones or had surgery, should be referred to using the pronouns appropriate for that gender.

If it is not possible to ask a transgender person which pronoun he or she prefers, use the pronoun that is consistent with the person’s appearance and gender expression. For example, if a person wears a dress and uses the name “Susan,” feminine pronouns are appropriate.

Fine if the person has decided on a gender, but not useful for an individual with no, or changing, preference. I’ve seen some publications starting to use the abbreviation “LGBTQ”, adding a “Q” for “questioning”, when referring to the collective group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people (including my employer’s Georgetown Law Weekly).

GLAAD’s recommendation makes common sense: use whatever the individual in question prefers. The Flat Hat article, however, states that Vasold prefers to be referred to neutrally. If I were a newspaper¹, I wouldn’t use “ze” as a gender-neutral pronoun, I’d use “he” or “she”, because of the stylistic reasons mentioned above. The job of a pronoun is to stay out of the way. If the individual declined a preference, I’d pick. In the context of the homecoming queen article, I’d use feminine words, since the story is about a male acting in a female role. If there were no gender context, I’d use whatever the person’s biological gender were. Yes, this would go against the wishes of the article’s subject, but if anyone can appreciate needing to do something because of style, it’s the homosexuals.

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See also: “All-Purpose Pronoun”.

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1. I do have an internal style guide for what I write on this site, as do all newspapers. For example, I use serial commas, I put quotation marks inside other punctuation “British style”, and I don’t put spaces around dashes. But I leave quoted passages intact, so if they use different rules, I let them be.

Robot Playing Rock Band

“Rock Band has been released on the iPhone, and even though its a lot of fun, I would rather have something play it for me. Preferably a robot!”—Joe Bowers

Watch the video. I love how the sounds of the robot operating are like an accompaniment to the song.