'Bred Crumbs

03:27 PM A press release I just saw -- dateline, Des Moines:

Surprisingly, no exclamation point.

If for some reason you want to read more, or see the stylin' World Pork Expo logo, here you go.

Send e-mail

11:56 AM As savvy, open-minded, and self-deprecating as Ben-'n'-Matt seem to be, I'm a little surprised they haven't made a short film consisting entirely of them making out with each other, thus reaping the huzzahs and dollars of many, many gay men.

Send e-mail

11:54 AM Attack of the Secondhand Links ...

Tonight, the opening ceremonies for another big round of Missing the Point. As the world's athletes gather in oppressive Utah for what is supposed to be celebration of sport and global harmony, the Winter Olympics are being pushed hard here as America's Games -- that is, America's chance to be self-centered and arrogant and think winning medals proves anything. Of course, what this nation and its people should be doing is listening to the rest of the world. Here's one powerful voice from The Times of London (link via Salon):

By identifying America primarily as a military power, by asserting that it will pursue its perceived national interests regardless of international laws, coalitions or treaties, by emphasising its unchallengeable superiority over every other nation and global institution, by claiming an unconditional moral hegemony over any adversary he cares to identify, and by acting so blatantly in the interests of the US business establishment, Mr Bush is weakening America and playing into the hands of its opponents.

·  ·  ·

On a lighter and more aerodynamic note, a visual highlight of the Salt Lake Games is bound to be the Canadian speed-sport costumes. (Link via Outsports)

·  ·  ·

This link requires registration and will be free for only another week, but this New York Times article is thought-provoking reading: "The Trouble with Self-Esteem." (Link via Using Bees)

Self-esteem is something I've never been long on, and I've found that my conscious efforts to improve it have made me a happier and more productive person -- but they haven't necessarily made me a better or more successful person, which is the key to the flaws in the concept of self-esteem as cure-all:

"There is absolutely no evidence that low self-esteem is particularly harmful," [researcher Nicholas] Emler says. "It's not at all a cause of poor academic performance; people with low self-esteem seem to do just as well in life as people with high self-esteem. In fact, they may do better, because they often try harder."

Send e-mail

11:57 AM Compared to most Webbers, I've historically lent little support to the various global networks that have let people download entertainment that the producers and sellers of said entertainment didn't intend to be downloaded. (Napster, we hardly knew ye.) Seemed fairly clear that, no matter how evil the conglomerate purveyors of the merchandise, finding it for free was likely to cut into the purchasing of it, and thus hurt the actual artists. But I'm beginning to see how the media companies' beancounting behavior and lack of interest in actually satisfying fans/customers can make digital bootlegging not merely appealing but, well, justified.

For example, say that no new installments of one's favorite TV series had been broadcast since last August, four episodes short of the season's conclusion, even though the show is its network's biggest hit and has already been renewed for two more years. Let's say the climactic final episodes of the season are not only in the can but have just been broadcast in other parts of the world. But the U.S. broadcaster of the series, for no better reason than to micromanage its resource-poor prime-time schedule, is sitting on the new eps until April, and has shut off even a supply of reruns* of the series since December, filling its programming with dreck in the meantime. In such a case, it might begin to make sense to say "frell the damn network" and turn to the Internet to find the completed programs, even though locating and acquiring them is a time-consuming hassle, and even though the resulting gratification of seeing an embargoed episode two months early is dimmed a little by having to watch it with distracting Hebrew subtitles.

I mean, I can see how such a thing could happen. I'm just sayin'.

* Compounding the shortsighted, piracy-encouraging corporate villainy, the distribution of the North American DVDs of the series is lagging more than a full season behind the pace of the European DVD release.

Send e-mail

03:33 PM A scene from a livingroom on a certain February Sunday in America:

[Tim, Robbie, and a female guest of Robbie's roommate are looking at the TV, which is showing a team of Clydesdales, representing a beer company, plodding across a field. Then the horses stop and bow their heads toward the Statue of Liberty.]

Tim: Oh boy.
Female Friend: Wow, do you think they actually trained all those horses to do that?
Robbie: Nah, it's all CGI.
Female Friend (laughing): Look at how cynical we are -- here's this touching tribute to the Statue of Liberty, and we're wondering if it's all CGI.
Tim: They probably trained one horse and cloned the rest in CGI.

And so on. Yes, the cynicism is back. The cumulative effect of seeing too many giant decals of American flags on the cars of people driving like assholes and the increasingly inflammatory rhetoric of an adminstration determined to set our country apart from the rest of the world and thus completely fail to learn one of the big lessons of last fall's horrors left me not at all in the mood to watch this year's Super Bowl. That, and not wanting to see the United States wallow in its biggest display of one of its worst traits* -- excess. And not wanting to hear Mariah mangle our awkward anthem. And realizing that the commercials should never be a reason to watch anything. And dreading hearing that damned tired Fox football fanfare (dadaDUM dadaDUM dadaDUM DUM-DUM) every two minutes. And being unable to pretend to care about the outcome of the game when I've never cared about the teams involved and have barely paid attention to football all season. Yeah, it sounds like the ending was cool, but I'm not going to watch a whole game just in case the ending is interesting. If I did that, I'd be a basketball fan, wouldn't I?

Still, we checked in just for a few minutes in the second quarter, long enough to see the calculated schmaltz of the Budweiser ad, and occasional blips of players moving the football up and down the field. Then we resumed surfing channels, found little else worth watching on TV, and shut it off. I'm sure that while we weren't watching, many people on the TV proclaimed in various dramatic ways What America Is All About and told us how the Super Bowl somehow has something to do with that. And if it all helped some shaken people feel better, OK. But it makes me uneasy, like that billboard on 101 that shows a little girl waving a flag and says that what makes America strong is UNITY. Which, presented this way, smacks of conformity. Which strikes me as the opposite of the freedom the Super Bowl supposedly celebrated.

But hey, that Kevin Bacon commercial was funny.

·  ·  ·

If you have to put pest-control links on your website, maybe you shouldn't have named your snowboarding-eyewear brand Silverfish. Eww.

* The nation's very worst trait, of course, is that its people buy Creed albums.

Send e-mail