doodledee

It's that time of year again. Buckle up for my 76th annual Best and Worst Awards.

• Movie of the Year - I saw like maybe 3 movies last year and I can't even remember what they were other than the one where the dude eats every meal at McDonald's for like a month and almost dies. And that would so obviously win my award even if I had seen a million other shows that it's not even worth discussing it any further. Kudos to that dude.
• Album of the Year - Yeah, I know that one song is on the radio and it's probably not cool to like them now that they've sold out, but Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Like Bad News has survived many a rotation in my changer and continues to kick more ass every time I listen to it. Honorable mention goes to Spaghetti Western's debut Do Right By People, an album that I'd like to pretend is the soundtrack of my life.
• Hat of the Year - The stocking cap. Honorable mention: the visor.
• Column of the Year [newspaper/magazine] - The new Consumed column in the New York Times Magazine was an awesome new arrival and quickly made my must-read list. Each week it selects an item that's risen to prominence in our consumption-obsessed culture and discusses what it means in a larger, socieital context. Stuff like why it's suddenly ok for everyone to go out and spend $600 on a household vacuum cleaner. I love that crap.
• Party Accessory of the Year - The 11.5 gram clay poker chip. True, I never win anything, but all those fancy chips made it fun to play cards again. Word is that the monthly tournament I semi-monthly play in is going no-limit right from the first deal in 2005. I should last a cool 10 minutes.
• Free Software of the Year - Google bought Picasa and started giving it away and that's just mint.
• Annoyance of the Year - Without question, that stupes song Hey Ya! Sure, everybody liked it the first time they heard it, but by the end of spring I'd been force fed it so often I felt like I'd been violated. How those two dudes kept singing it over and over again I'll never know. It's called dignity, and they lost it almost immediately. Ow, my freakin' ears.
• Personal Doof Moment of the Year - It was a close game deep into the softball playoffs and I was coaching 3rd base. The play unfolds like this: Kate is on second, and the next batter grounds one to left field. The other team has a female playing in left and the ball kind of took a little hop so I wave Kate home thinking there's no chance at a play. Well it turns out the chick in left is some sort of softball demigod and she ropes one to home that beats Kate by a good 2 strides. My doof coaching killed our rally and gave Kate an excuse to not speak to me for another 5 years. Kudos to me. (Good note: KC won the game for us in the next inning, 'natch. As if there was ever really any doubt.)
• Doofs of the Year [collective] - All the self-proclaimed geniuses blabbering on about the 'inevitable' October Surprise who later had to eat their hats when nothing happened. My personal shout-out goes to that Boondocks guy for his (mid-spring?) in-comic prediction of a bin-Laden capture right before the election. Holla! Honorable mention: all bloggers everywhere.
• More of the Same Award - Guess what? There are hurricanes in Florida. Thanks!
• Parking Nightmare of the Year - The parking for the second night Phish show at Alpine was insane. Literally dozens and dozens of rows of cars parked door-to-door and bumper-to-bumper. According to reports on the ineterweb, many people didn't get out until well after sunrise the next day. We got there early enough to be parked 'normally' and ran like antelopes to our car after the show. Total exit time: 4 minutes.
• Nickname of the Year - I still can't stop saying 'Thorpedo'. I think I may be the only one, though.

Thanks to all the presenters. You can pick up your gift baskets out back by the birdfeeders.

• Tuning into the 24-hour Yule Log burning on Channel 45 and being lucky enough to see the hand reach in with a poker to poke at the fire. Seriously, what are the odds of catching a hand cameo? Gotta be slim. And yes, the background music was unreasonably bad - Aaron Neville? come on, nobody likes that garbage - but the fire was still pretty neat.
• Two prime rib dinners. Bada bing.
• Reading that story about the dude who snuck across the Mexican border and somehow ended up in Mankato instead of El Paso. Minnesota Nice was on full display as the local community hooked him up with medical care, clothes, food and, oh yeah, a ticket to go somewhere else now that he's all taken care of. I suppose it's a heartwarming story on some levels, but I hope we all don't hurt our collective arms patting our own collective backs on this one.
• Gator Grip. Just like I seen on the teevee.
• An awesome Vikings/Packers game on Christmas Eve oh wait that totally sucked never mind.

Good times were had by all.

My laptop has been acting a little flaky lately. My copy of Word will occasionally hang while opening a document, the taskbar will suddenly lose all the little 'open program' tabs, etc, etc. I kinda half-believe that since it's been 18-months since it was last rebuilt that it's probably just overdue for a deep clean, but I also kinda half-believe that Windows XP is pretty solid and that I shouldn't really be having any problems.

I mentioned my troubles to a guy at work today and he casually tossed out that it was probably spyware causing the instabilities. "Gufuh?!" I said. "Yep," he said, "I bet that's it."

But wait. I'm no idiot. I don't click banner ads, I don't download random software, I keep my privacy settings tweaked to only allow the bare minimum of data to squeak into/out of my system. How could I have spyware? He's gotta be wrong.

But paranoia and fear got the best of me so tonight I downloaded AdAware SE and cranked up the full disk scan. And WHAM! like 2 minutes in it had already identified 52 'critical' files on my machine. WTF?! How could that be? What are they? Tell me tell me tell me!

But it doesn't tell me, it has to finish the scan first. Which, when you have a computer burdened with a palette of hefty development programs and a lifetime worth of code, takes like 3 effing hours to complete. I had half a million files. Gross. I actually got so bored I stopped worrying about whatever critical crap it found and came to be at peace with the world. It was very cathartic.

In the end it turned out that I just had a bunch of pseudo-spyware cookies in my IE cache. I don't use IE for my daily browser, so I never bothered to set-up any type of security on it. I must have inadvertently fired it up and picked up some trashware cookie data while browsing yahoo or something. (Pre XPSP1 IE security: totes stupes.) Either way, some lamer cookies hardly constitute a 'critical' spyware invasion. They gotta get some new levels or something. Like maybe 'warning' or 'info' maybe.

So conclusions: AdAware - cries wolf, but still pretty neat; laptop - needs a rebuild, but it can probably wait a while.

AdAware [lavasoft] - free as in beer
Firefox [mozilla] - free as in beer
Firefox AdBlocking [mozilla] mint as in beer

• A dude selling bulldog puppies out of the back of his truck over in Linden Hills. He was holding up a "For Sale" sign in one hand and an actual live puppy in the other. The sign had a phone number on it. Go figure, the number was area code 715 - Eau Claire, WI.
• A guy buying no fewer than 200 bottles of spices at Penzey's. Seriously, like 200 bottles. Yeah, ok, I get it, you're "spicy", that's clever. Now please get out of my way, I just need some chili powder and a vanilla bean and my kid is starting to get whiny.
• One of the houses in the neighborhood is under *massive* construction. One of those "jack it up and pour a new foundation and then add a story and maybe connect it to the garage or something" type of deals. Well they jacked it up yesterday and today when I drove by half the house had fallen off. Whoops.
• Some doof sitting in his car in the Target paring lot stuffing Krispy Kreme donuts in his face after playing soccer. Oh wait, that was me.

I had planned to write more about the video game thing below but I got too fed-up to continue when I went to the Star Tribune's website to find the article about the lady who bought the game for her kid and I discovered that they no longer maintain links to articles older than 3 weeks. Instead, they 'archive' the article to a section called - get this - the "pay archives" where they make you - get this - "pay" to "read the story".

That is so lame. Here are some reasons:

(AM@Strib = Attention Morons @ The Star Tribune)

1. Last time I checked, the web sometimes involves linking to things. When the Strib decides it's time to archive content to the pay area, they change the story's URL, breaking any inbound links in the process. AM@Strinb: That is stupid. If you want to put your crappy video game violence story behind the checkout counter, that's fine, but at least keep the link the same. Hey, maybe it's just me, but it seems like you'd want to keep the click momentum going instead of making somebody re-search to find the article.
2. Oh yeah, then there's search. The Strib's searching function is probably the worst of any major news site on the internet. It's horrifically bad. Like would-have-been-bad-in-1996 bad. Here's an example. I remembered that the lady in the video game story I was looking for was a vice principal so I went to google news and searched "halo 2 vice principal" and OMG only one result and it's exactly the article I was looking for it's like effing magic oh no wait it's not it's like effing duh that's that way it's supposed to be. When the link turned out to be bad, I tried to find it using the Strib's search service, using the same search parameters and shocker!, no results. So I dumb it down and just try "halo 2" whereupon it brings back a list of results including Gordon Miklethun's obituary at number 5 (run-over by Warthog). Oh, and the story I was looking for wasn't even listed. AM@Strib: No one is going to pay for something they can't find. And I went to your site and all I found was a bullshit "pay archive" and a broken search engine.
3. As much as they keep pretending to be, the Strib is not the NYTimes (the original pay-for-archives newspaper site). Free registration requirements, totally unreasonable commie editorial writers, and now a pay archive? AM@Strib: stop pretending.
4. $2.75 for an article?! Ha! That is awesome! AM@Strib: Ha!

That's all. I'm not sure what drove the decision. It's bad for their site. It's bad for the web community. It's just plain ol' bad and I hope the change it.

Is it just me or has the eterna-issue of video game violence been getting even more coverage than usual this holiday season? It can't be just me, because it's everywhere. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising when you consider that the two big games on every pre-teen's wishlist are Halo2 and Grand Theft Auto 14, but still, it seems as though the Moral Values Revolution has cranked up their outrage machine a notch or two higher than in years past.

My favorite story so far was the one the Strib ran a few weeks ago that blew the lid off the "kids don't like violent video games" myth. Brace yourself... apparently they do. Who knew? The best part was when the reporter tracked down some mom who purchased Halo2 for her 11 YEAR OLD DAUGHTER.

The mother justified her purchase thusly:

She said she doesn't "necessarily approve of these games." So she allows [her kids] to play video games only on weekends, rarely for more than a half-hour at a time, and monitors her kids while they play - enough to know that son Rafael, 14, is "really good."

"As long as I know I'm teaching my kids appropriate values, they're good students, make good decisions, I'm OK with it," she said. "They see more violence on the evening news."

HALT.

Ok lady, we get that you feel a little guilty about buying your 11-year old daughter a game based on blowing up basically everything that moves, but come on, the "evening news" excuse is so, so lame. Because while I may not have known that 11-year old girls now prefer Xbox over My Little Pony, I do know that NO KID watches the evening news. In fact, according to a slightly more recent story in the Strib, basically no adults are watching the evening news, either:

Viewing numbers for Twin Cities broadcast television stations are down dramatically, and the only bright news seems to be on cable.

And just to be clear, I'm hardly pro-violent-video-games-for-kids, but how about instead of pointing the finger at Tom Brokaw Dan Rather Don Shelby, we instead look at ourselves and the choices we make © Jesse Ventura.

Oh wait, then we can't all be victims anymore.

Well screw that, then.

Violent Video Games: Myths, Facts, and Unanswered Questions [apa]
KARE still leads TV news pack, but fewer tuning in [strib]

I've had fun watching how the media (and by extension, our entire culture) has reacted to the various problems that the NBA, NHL and now MLB are having. Per tradition, I'll leave the real sports talk to JoePa, but here's how I see it.

• NBA - Ron Artest and his insane posse of clowns put a beat down on some fans in Detroit. Media instantly swells with "overpaid thugs" commentary. ESPN takes major heat for pointing at least a partial-finger at the fans. NBA-haters single out the brawl as exactly the type of reason they don't like the game. Too bad they didn't stay up late to watch the Wolves/Suns the other night, because that's what NBA basketball should look like.
• NHL - Players and league can't work out a collective bargaining agreement and a strike ends the season before it starts. The major media pretty much ignores it. Local Minnesota media runs nostalgic sweeps pieces about how great St. Paul used to be when the Wild were playing. North Carolina media tries in vain to find anyone who even knew they had a team. Bertuzzi-induced "stop the cheap violence" talk seems to have vanished. It's all about getting the game back now.
• MLB - Steroid scandal rocks the sport. Front page news across the country, much focusing on the 'integrity of the game'. (Reminder: baseball is old or something.) Heat ratcheted-up on the league to at least pretend to address the problem instead of just *winking* it away yet again. A nation of diehard fans forced to look inward. Casual fans bewildered how anyone didn't just assume those guys were juicing all along. Seriously - duh.
• NFL - Vikings lose horribly to the Bears. Daunte does post-game locker room interviews wearing some kind of crazy-huge fur coat. Nobody says anything. Uhh, there's your story, people.

So there's that, then.

Last Wednesday I got to take a break from my all-day-every-day work schedule and spend some quality time at home barfing. Go figure, the stomach flu that savaged the rest of the family on Sunday - and that I had exhibited minor symptoms of having - caught up with me in a capital-M major way. Fun. Well, no, not really that fun. Well except maybe for the part where I got to puke in the Augsburg parking lot after soccer, that was kind of neat.

It was an unusually vicious bug. Overall I'd probably it in the top 5 sickest days of my life. (Full disclosure: I've been lucky.) And here's the funny part: both this time and arguably my #1 overall sickest day occurred within 18 hours of eating at Arby's. And I basically *never* eat at Arby's. Like maybe once every couple of years or something. And now cosmically this happens. I'm not saying there's a connection, I'm just saying I think I'm done eating at Arby's for a while.