Robot Monkeys

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CNN’s Rick Sanchez is still playing the Jeremiah Wright soundbite on a continuous loop. My god. This has been going on for weeks now. Can we please move past this? No, of course not. This is the easy story. The story that even most simpleton can write – and by “write” I mean “repeatedly play the same pixelated clip from YouTube.”

Of course CNN Newsroom is the crappiest of all the CNN programs. The stories right now on the web page are “Is Your Computer Slower Than When You Bought It?” and a featured article on tattoos.

I’m not surprised. It’s an easy narrative. I guess what makes the whole thing that much sadder is that when Obama said:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

part of me wishes that just for once, the media wouldn’t have interpreted that as a call to arms as Stephen Colbert mocked on his show.

How come I don’t remember this? And why would anyone think listen to Pee-Wee Herman, especially since his whole show looks like something out of an LSD trip.

I also like how Pee-Wee calls crack, “the most addictive form of cocaine;” but that’s a while other story.

With the exception of Gears of War, Andrew only has sports games. Madden N, NBA 2kN, NHL N, and MLB 2kN. When we played MLB 2k7 we complained that the outfielders robbed home runs way way way too often. “Don’t Call Him Barry Bonds” steals not one, but TWO home runs in a game? Not a chance. Barry won’t even even move over to catch a pop fly. He won’t run down a ball, let alone climb a wall.

Honestly. I had four home runs robbed in a row in that game. After that day, I turned downed the outfielders’ speeds from 60 to 40. (Ever so “helpfully,” there was an option in 2k7 to increase the frequency of home runs being stolen, but not decrease them.)

MLB 2k8 arrived a few weeks ago, and while they fixed the outfielders’ problem, they introduced a whole slew of new ones. Everything now uses the right stick. Batting is completely done with timing, which makes it much harder to hit home runs. Which arguably may be better since in 2k7 I had a virtual Murders’ Row in Seattle with Vidro, Sexson, Guillen, and Johjima.

Base running is so much more awkward now. In 2k7 you had icons over the runners that indicated which button to press to select the runner, and then you would use the triggers to advance the runners. In 2k8 you use a stick (I have no idea which one, which is one problem I have with it.) to point at the runner, and as far as Andrew and I can tell, you have to point at the runner, not the base came from to select the runner. You can still use the triggers to advance the runners, but now you can use the buttons to send the runner directly to a base – which is where all the problem comes in. A sends a runner home, and it skips the cut scene. So what happens at least once a game, is that your batter/runner advances to a base. They throw the ball to that base. You’re safe. The fielder starts looking the ball over. You press A because you don’t want to watch the fielders toss the ball around and listen to Joe and Jon talk about the heads up base running; but instead your runner takes off for home and is tagged out by the fielder standing right next to him.

Jesus.

The most annoying problem in 2k8 is the fielding. You now use the right stick instead of the buttons to throw the ball. You don’t just flip the stick in the direction of the base you want to throw, but you have to basically charge the throw. If you undercharge the throw, your ball bounces. Overcharge and it goes wide or even bounces to the base. You can also somehow point the throw, but that’s basically to just another way to make the throw go wild.

This stick is the same way you are supposed to pick off runners. But again you have to charge the throw and so by the time the throw is charged, the runner has already dove back to base.

This game is so much more frustrating than the 2k7. 2k7 was too easy. After turning down the outfielders, I lost only three games out of 30, but 2k8 is just annoying. It’s more than annoying, it’s frustrating. The last few times I’ve turned the game on, I couldn’t finish it. I couldn’t even see straight I was so pissed off.

Verdict: MLB 2k8 sucks (and so does it soundtrack)

Dear Madison Avenue,

Stop using the word “literally” to introduce a metaphor.

The Geico gecko says, “They literally hand you an english muffin with butter and jam. – That’s a complete a dramatization…” Some annoying woman in a vehix.com ad says, “You can go on the website and literally take a test drive. – You’re practically sitting in the car.”

“Literal” means

actual: being or reflecting the essential or genuine character of something; “her actual motive”; “a literal solitude like a desert”- G.K. …

without interpretation or embellishment; “a literal depiction of the scene before him”

limited to the explicit meaning of a word or text; “a literal translation”

avoiding embellishment or exaggeration (used for emphasis); “it’s the literal truth”

None of these definitions allows you to use “literal” to embellish the story. In fact, it’s literally forbidden.

Please stop. Please please please stop.

Honestly. Who taught you how to do this stuff? Alanis Morissette?

Purim isn’t Jewish Halloween. It’s Jewish Mardi Gras.

““Human extinction” is the as-yet hypothetical extinction of the human species, Homo sapiens.

[Citation Needed]

Dear Interweb,

AVI files, MP3 files, in fact, pretty much every media file you care about, have this thing called a “codec.” This thing tells how the audio/video is encoded. These things are made by some pretty smart people. People that know math. Now if all a codec did was encode the audio/video, they wouldn’t be very interesting. Essentially, there’d be just one. The reason why there are so many codecs, is that these things compress the data.

So if the data is compressed, then why are you trying to compress it more? Do you think it will compress it more? No. Quite the opposite. Compressing and already compressed file, makes it bigger.

Seriously. It makes it bigger.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself!

Let’s look at this file:

Wow. Raring that that AVI certainly made it so much smaller. Imagine if we would rar that rar! Wow!

The NY Yankees paid more for A-Rod than JPM paid for Bear Stearns

Alex Rodriguez: $275 million
Bear Stearns: $236 million

So Bush has finally come around to admitting that the economy sucks. The economy has been stagnant at best for his entire tenure, and now we’re in the midst of a recession, with all signs that the Bush’s lassie-faire policies, especially with regard to regulation, have come home. The amount of debt in this country is serious. Contrary to Bush and his supporters, we do not have a “fundamentally strong” economy.

Bush said that he wasn’t going help out homeowners who are going to lose their homes because they can no longer afford their mortgage. Now these people shouldn’t have ever been loaned that money, and I reluctantly agree with that position. Freezing foreclosures is a dumb idea, because all it does is delay the inevitable.

But just today, the Fed protects out JP Morgan’s buyout of Bear Stearns. That is stupid. The government shouldn’t be bailing out these banks. They took leave of their senses, and made very very very bad decisions. They screwed up, and now they’re failing. The Invisible Hand™ works its magic. Of course, those promoting lassie-faire economic policies, aren’t really lassie-faire proponents at all. They just want all regulation help them. “Don’t get in my way to screw over everyone for a but, when I screw up, bail me out.”

This is stupid, and bad economic policy, and completely expected from the Bush and the modern Republican party. Afterall, government bailouts for bad business decisions run in the family.

We are so fucked.