Hey, Fletcher and Lauren–why haven’t you already written about Kinky Friedman’s campaign for Texas Governor? This (very long) article is filled with great stuff:

Kinky promises big changes. He’ll legalize casino gambling and use the proceeds to fund public schools — “slots for tots.” He’s the only candidate in the race — or maybe anywhere — who supports both school prayer and gay marriage. (“They have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us,” he explains.) He’ll clamp down on illegal immigration. And he’ll run the state’s school buses on the biodiesel fuel that Willie Nelson uses to propel his tour bus.

“We can make Texas number one in renewable fuels — which is a helluva lot better than being number one in executions, toll roads, property taxes and dropouts!”

But here’s the real question: Does Kinky have a chance of winning?

Kinky’s campaign has raised more than $3.4 million — more than Bell but far less than Perry or Strayhorn — while enlisting an army of volunteers who gathered the signatures that put him on the ballot. Now all Kinky has to do is get one more vote than anybody else: The election is winner-take-all, with no runoff.

“Kinky’s gonna win,” says John McCall, a hair-care products mogul who has donated $1 million to his old friend Kinky’s campaign. “I have a business that deals with hairdressers. People talk to their hairdressers. And what I’m hearing is: Kinky’s gonna win in a landslide.”

So there you have it, folks–hair-care products moguls agree: Kinky Friedman is going to run away with the election and turn the rest of Texas into Austin–a den of liberal weirdos and hippies with a penchant for beer and big hats.

 

Another funny video that tails off at the end.

 

Bo Jackson dominated Tecmo Bowl (a classic 1988 Nintendo Entertainment System football game). Everyone who knows too much about video games knows that. But there’s knowing something and then there’s knowing something:

This clip is from Tecmo Super Bowl, the 1991 successor to Tecmo Bowl.

[Kissing Suzy Kolber]

 


Owens says he was misquoted in autobiography

This really sums up Terrell Owens–the guy claims unfair treatment in his AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

 

New color scheme, not to mention my effort to put overline in play with my ridiculous viewed link design scheme.

I also changed the font to Calvert and made it a bit larger, all in an effort to improve your reading experience (those few of you who aren’t reading via an RSS feed).

For the record, the main background is Burnt Sienna (#8A360F), the post background is Dark Wood (#855E42), and the post text is Light Wood (#E9C2A6). Links are, I dunno, variants of orange.

Does anyone who knows how to use Photoshop feel like contributing a header that isn’t horribly ugly like the current one? You’ll be rewarded with Hostess Baseball Cupcakes, or something you might actually want.

Jul 132006
 

under construction
I’m making some changes and the site may look awful for a while.

 

To honor the cowardly but successful Azurri, I declare this to be Italy week.

I celebrated by finishing Heat : An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. The book is written by a New Yorker editor who writes a profile of “Molto” Mario Batali and decides to quit his job to work in Batali’s kitchen. And then he moves to Italy to learn how to make pasta and butcher cows and pigs.

Short review: It’s an easy, entertaining read (his description of conversations with Marco Pierre White is hilarious) that will appeal anybody who cooks or, like me, prefers to cook vicariously through professionals. If you’re not interested already, don’t bother, but if you are interested already I can pretty much assure you of a good read.

And, unrelatedly, I’ve got to take a moment to tell you guys how great T-Mobile is. My phone has been acting up recently, so yesterday I went to the T-Mobile store to ask them about it. I decribed the problem to the guy, and he said “that’s a known issue and it’s covered under the warranty–we can’t replace it here but we’ll mail you a new phone right away.” He didn’t demand to see the problem in action or make me get a notarized affidavit, and I didn’t have to sign anything in triplicate. They just fixed my problem. That experience, plus the fact that T-Mobile is still the cheapest cell provider, with the coolest phones, is why I’m going to stick with them in perpetuity. Unless anybody else offers me a slightly better deal, of course, in which case I’ll drop them in an instant.

 
  • A fascinating and in-depth look at how to design a book interior.
  • A wrong-minded column that purports to describe the problems with Wikipedia. Column summary: in the minutes after Ken Lay’s death, some people wrote inaccurate/biased things in his Wikipedia entry. Over the next several hours those inaccurate/biased things were filtered out and by the afternoon of the day he died the entry was accurate. The column says that the fact that people can write things that are wrong in the posts is an enormous weakness. It doesn’t mention the fact that the thousands of contributors to Wikipedia ensured that less than a day after Lay’s death, his entry was up-to-the-minute accurate; that the very fault the writer finds in Wikipedia–the faceless masses with the ability to make corrections to every entry–is the reason Wikipedia is reliable. And of course the columnist neglects to mention that anyone concerned about the accuracy of an entry can easily browse every single change made to it and the citations to justify them. Just a generally bizarre column, overall, which in my opinion is a better polemic for Wikipedia than against it.

    Some examples of how misguided this column is: Mathew Ingram’s perspective, Open Culture, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post.

    It’s true, though, that Wikipedia’s value as a source of news information is limited. It’s neat that this year’s World Cup entry already lists Italy as the winner, but the presence of entries for contemporaneous people and events does make more glaring the short-lived but irritating “corrections” that are rightfully maligned in the column.

  • I saw Pirates of the Caribbean over the weekend. I enjoyed it but it wasn’t particularly good. Certainly not $132,000,000 good. Depp’s Captain Jack was just a tired retread of the role in the first one, in my opinion–a caricature of a caricature going through the expected motions–and aside from the truly excellent bad guy and his minions I didn’t really have any interest in the other characters. The effects and action stuff were generally fun, though, and if you can manage to see it at a drive-in theater I can assure you of an entertaining evening (if you aren’t unlucky enough to park next to a van stuffed to the gills with pre-teens on cellphones).

In other news, if you want to talk to me you should add me to your google talk list–calamityjake at gmail.com.

© 2011 Hello World Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha