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Archive for the 'trends' Category Page 3 of 4



Chuck Norris Approved

A new (and quite funny) ad for GOP primary candidate Mike Huckabee features none other than Chuck Norris. (Huckabee: “When Chuck Norris does a push up, he’s not lifting himself up—he’s pushing the earth down.”)

The spot leads me to wonder: Is this the start of a new era of action-figure endorsements? If so, I predict the following declarations of support:

Keanu Reeves avows that John Edwards is “The One.”
Tom Cruise jumps around violently for Mitt Romney.
Toby Maguire (Spiderman) senses Dennis Kucinich’s potential.
Steven Seagal says Rudy Giuliani will issue a series of quick jabs and chops, leaving the competition in a heap.
Linda Hamilton (Terminator I) says Hillary is made of liquid metal and cannot be defeated.
Clint Eastwood sees a little Dirty Harry in John McCain.
Mel Gibson says he’s casting Tom Tancredo for his next movie, “The Passion of the Xenophobe.”

Say it with me: Jean-Claude-Van-Damme

Dilbert creator Scott Adams likes saying the words “monkey god” over and over, because “for some wonderful reason, that combination of words – monkey god – releases a little snort of serotonin directly into the part of my brain that likes it the most.”

For me (and at least one or two other people) the words Jean-Claude Van Damme produce a similar effect. It’s hard to say why this is so. If you have any clues as to why the name of a short Belgian martial artist/actor would be so intrinsically funny, let me know.

As it happens, there is a new movie on the way that will star Jean-Claude as Jean-Claude. It’s called JCVD in JCVD. It sounds like a documentary but it isn’t. It’s a biopic that will star the actual subject.

Leave it to Jean-Claude to break with convention and create an entirely new film genre—the auto-biopic. I’m sure that my blogging comrade Visionary Larry saw this coming.

Suggested reading:

Happy Belated Birthday, Jean-Claude Van Damme!


Here’s something novel

I am an occasional user of Jott.com, a free service that allows you to phone a message (which is then magically transcribed) to an e-mail address. It’s a handy way to send reminders to yourself. You call up a number and a recording asks “Who do you want to Jott?” You give it a name or say “myself” and then there is a beep and you state your message, which is then transcribed and sent to the recipient’s e-mail address. Pretty neat.

Today, I got an e-mail from Jott about a new program called Jott the Vote, wherein you can phone-email a message to any presidential candidate.

You could send a message to, say, Rudy Giuliani: “Hey, Uncle Rudy, why don’t you tell us about 9/11 one more time.”

Much has been written about how the internet is changing our politics, perhaps even making it more democratic. Where does Jott the Vote fit into this concept?

Is a Jott to a presidential candidate worth anything? I’d like to explore this further, but I gotta go. Maybe later.

The necktie returneth

I don’t know about other bloggers, but whenever I have an itch to write a post, I throw on a button-down shirt and necktie.

Well, not really, but what if doing so made me a more productive blogger? What if it made me a more productive AND hipper blogger?

According to the NY Times, the necktie is back. But these days, instead of signaling a desire to get ahead, the half-Windsor knot reveals the desire to be seen as a cool and groovy guy. Someone cool and groovy like, say, Justin Timberlake or Frodo Baggins.

“Wearing a tie is a kind of style. It’s a thing you’re doing. It’s seen as ‘creative,’” a 31-year-old film executive told the Times.

Continue reading ‘The necktie returneth’

Funny juxtaposition

Radiohead frontman Thom YorkeHere are the two biggest news stories to come from the recording industry in the past week:

1. The indie band Radiohead decided to let fans choose how much to they’re willing to pay for their new album. The lowest acceptable price? $0.00.

2. A group of record labels successfully sued a Minnesota woman (a single mom earning $36,000 a year) for illegally downloading music from a popular file-sharing site called Kazaa. The woman must pay $222,000 in damages, which amounts to $9,250 per illegally downloaded song.

Photo (of Radiohead singer Thom Yorke) from Michell Zappa

On hand dryers

hand dryer

Here’s a great post on why restroom hand dryers are both unsanitary and, at best, environmentally equal to paper towels.

They are alleged to be more hygienic than hand towels. I don’t buy that for a second, because they “dry” your hands by blasting them with recirculated air from the restroom itself. You didn’t think there was a canister of fresh air hidden behind the wall, did you? And guess what’s probably floating around in the restroom air. That’s right, tiny particles of you-know-what. (I will concede that the hand dryer is nonetheless hygienically preferable to the continuous-roll-of-cloth machine.)

“Tiny particles of you-know-what.” Ew.

As much as I share this guy’s dislike of hand dryers, I understand why they’re popular. If it were my job to clean a bathroom—or if it were my job to pay a guy to clean a one—I’d surely oppose paper towel use, mostly because only half of population (by my estimate) manages to land their wet towels in the waste basket.

And any person of sound mind opposes the roll-of-cloth machine. Regardless of its minimal ecological footprint and/or low maintenance costs, these things ought to be outlawed. It’s one thing to use a cotton towel in a friend’s bathroom. It’s quite another to use one in a public restroom.

Back to hand dryers: I also credit a hand dryer for staving off hypothermia two summers ago. After riding our bikes to the top of Mt. Evans, in Colorado, my girlfriend and I rode down the 14,000-foot mountain in a torrential downpour. We used the dryers in the welcome center bathrooms to dry our clothes. (Side note: It’s funny what near-hypothermia can do to an otherwise quite modest person: I had no problems standing half-naked in a busy public bathroom while holding my wet bike clothes under the dryer.)

Photo from A Nameless Yeast


Happiness gap between men and women grows

Are you a woman who feels slightly guilty for not wanting to spend more time with your parents? Apparently, it’s normal for women to not want to spend time with mom and dad. At least, that’s what new study out of Princeton says. According to the study, which recorded women’s feelings while doing certain activities, “women find time with their mom and dad to be slightly less pleasant than doing laundry.”

The reason: women’s time with parents resembles work, whereas men’s time with family resembles fun, like sitting on the couch and watching football.

According to a Times article, the study fits into to a larger pattern in which the gap between men’s and women’s happiness is growing.

This is probably a study that social conservatives will cling to. “See, looky what feminism did—it made women miserable. They ought to go back to the kitchen where they belong, where they’re happiest.”

But the real story is that women never left the home—even when they entered the workforce. The duties of homemaker have remained in tact. At the same time, since the 1960s, men have cut back even further on activities they don’t enjoy. So if women are less happy now, it’s because they’re juggling careers and the housework, while their lazy husbands chill in the family room and watch the game.