4 posts from 2006

Every Monday during football season (or at least for the first few weeks), I make the same mistake: I turn on Dennis and Callahan expecting them to talk about the Patriots' win the day before. Last week the game wasn't even on the menu because it was 9/11 and America desperately needed John Dennis' thoughts on the Mud People or whatever they were ranting about. Today it was the dreadlocks on Lawrence Maroney and Doug Gabriel. Callahan started off alright, pointing out the wildy inconsistent and questionable NFL clothing police have any number of stupid rules but no rules on hair. But his real "point" was they will be dragged down by said hair in the future. Call me oversensitive, but when two guys who went through the "METCO gorilla" incident talk like this, it seems like a friendlier way of saying, "This is a multibillion dollar industry. If you want some of this cash, cut your hair and look respectable like the white players."

Stunningly, someone out in the syncophantic audience called up to complain. Callahan beat him down with the usual logical fallacies. Asked why anyone would care, Gerry demanded the caller explain how he will feel when they get dragged down by their hair. Given both players are known as speedsters and players are taught to tackle by grabbing cloth, not hair, the caller just said, "I guess it'd be a tackle". Responding to D&C's homophobic mincing about how nice beads look in a player's hair, he asked if they were "the fashion police or something". This resulted in Gerry taking his one ok point, the illogic of the NFL clothing policy, and turning it on its head, asking the caller to explain why the hair wasn't against the rules. When the caller didn't know why the idiots that make up stupid rules didn't bother to add one for this, he was dismissed with "You're full of answers today."

And people listen to this all day. For the football talk, I guess.

Just fixed someone's new $1,800 Toshiba laptop for them. Now I get why people consider themselves computer illiterate. What the hell do you do with a new PC laptop nowadays? After you get the box from UPS, it's all pretty much downhill. Power it up and you're confronted with a desktop covered in promotional shit. It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to get the wireless network working. I already know how to make wireless networking work on an XP PC. It still took me 15 minutes. Tried all the normal stuff; all I managed to do was put the wireless card's client in charge of the card (XP's client gives me agita). No matter what I did it wouldn't let me enable the radio on the card.

There's a goddamn physical switch on the side. Whatever. If I hadn't been so pissed I couldn't figure it out, I would never have noticed it. I went through everything trying to find it. Thought maybe the battery management on an unplugged laptop would disable the laptop: good luck figuring that out, n00b. Hit the power management and it tells you to close the power management and open the Toshiba power management console. Why not hide the other one or repoint the link if you're going to provide your own? And what the hell added value are you throwing in for the trade-off of me having to learn your native client and not having as many results in Google? The whole thing is a nightmare with a shitty looking screen. I did my due diligence and downloaded Firefox. It took 5 minutes to start installing after it downloaded because Norton took over and decided it needed to scan it for me. Fuck off and die. And I only got that far because I subverted the OS and Norton firewalls. Which I subverted because I knew that:

1. I was behind a router and pretty damn safe
2. Software firewalls fuck up more than they help

What do you do if you don't know? Why should you have to know? I shut the poor, stillborn thing off as soon as I could. Except I didn't. When I hit Shut Down, I was presented with three options, Restart, Shut down, Log off. Shut down had an asterisk on it, letting me know it wouldn't actually be shutting down, it would be installing updates and then shutting off when it felt like it. Good thing I didn't have a plane to catch.

I don't remember what this Powerbook's desktop looked like when I got it, but it wasn't covered in AOL and AT&T offers. And the Fedora Core 5 install I just set up might be a little spartan, but it encourages you to explore rather than scaring you off with too many options. Maybe that's only attractive to the kind of personality that would want to explore anyway, but maybe not. Maybe Dell and Toshiba and the rest are scaring off potential repeat buyers. God knows they're pissing off anyone who knows how it should work.

Dolphins v. Steelers is the same matchup they used to have in Filene's Basement for Ugliest Starter Jacket. Rich Eisen just informed me Rascal Flats is America's new supergroup. Take that Asia and Europe. We don't need a foreign supergroup no more. At least NBC figured out HD. I suffered through 2 years of Notre Dame in 480p, but a handful of hicks lip-syncing you can get me in 1080i. Fabulous.

Coors Light, it is so awesome when people cut together an interview with fake questions that match up to the responses in a goofy way. It is, however, not awesome when the interview is fake too. Minus an additional point for the interactions not being amusing anyway.

ESPN, take Berman out back and shoot him. You're with me, tired catchphrases. No one likes him. No one likes you anymore either ESPN. The S is fine. The E sucks. And when I have to consume the S with a sidedish of Joe Morgan eyeballing pitch speeds, you can fuck off with both.

Rich Eisen: "Wow, this place is going wild!" A. It's Pittsburgh. B. They're making noise exactly when they're supposed to, like people laughing at an SNL show. Not wild. Wild is 4 guys raping someone in a park. This is more like bigtime country line dancing. We're not that far from the games being an excuse for Madden.

Long before the damn gubmint did a thing about it, Bo and Luke were a two man Homeland Security Department. Within county lines anyway.