Jared's Jar:

Commercials

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 02:33:00 +0000

While watching the World Series, the absolute worst part about the whole thing is that they only air two commercials: the one with the very wealthy CEO of Sprint pretending to eat on a diner stool, surprised we still call phones, "phones", and a new (now very old) DirecTV commercial that takes a clip with Chevy Chase in Vacation and superimposes now-Christie Brinkley in her role from the 1983 movie. DirecTV had a great idea with their recent line of commercials, but airing them every single break is complete overkill. It's like eating 30 Oreos.

Heroes

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:53:00 +0000

I really wish I still liked "Heroes." It started out as an intriguing show, but it's turned into labored watching for me. People are always rushing around doing something that you are supposed to assume is extremely important, and then they end up fighting for some reason. Then there's a scene where someone explains a whole lot of nonsense as if it just occurred to them. Repeat. Formula is the grim reaper of tv shows for me, which is also why I'm less into Curb your Enthusiasm than I was in its first couple seasons.

Not to mention there are a few bad actors on the show: that Indian guy, the weird-mouth-was-in-Rocky-Balboa guy, and the South American girl. So I think I'm gonna hang Heroes up.

On a totally separate note, "Mr. McFeely" is a horrible name for a mailman on a kids show.

Sense (= none)

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:46:00 +0000

A woman just entered the room wearing a very heavy, thick, winter coat in 65 degree weather and commented, "Why does it feel like they have the oven turned on?"

There could be one day where I will wake up and just accept that some people cannot connect thought with reality, but I doubt that will be anytime soon. Some people are just simply oblivious to their Obviously Warm and Heavy Winter Coat.

Jeremy Davies

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 02:39:00 +0000

Jeremy Davies is my least favorite actor of all time. His performance in Saving Private Ryan was not bad, but in every other movie I've seen him in he plays the exact same character: The slightly deranged, confused, bumbling eccentric. And he's playing the same exact character on LOST right now. And it's not really acting. I've seen him in interviews and he is a slightly deranged, confused, bumbling eccentric. Like the guy in high school who tried so desperately hard to be weird but whose weird plan was way too transparent to be convincing.

I realize there are technically worse actors out there (Freddie Prinze, Jr., Lauren Ambrose, Keanu Reeves), but the fact that Jeremy Davies thinks his performances are compelling just completely bugs me.

Men Without Chests: Conviction Over Elegance

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 20:39:00 +0000

"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise."
- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

I don’t know if Americans are getting less intelligent academically, and I’m not sure how you would gauge that anyway. It’s easy to point to things like reality TV and Kevin Federline, but I think those examples are just reflecting the high amount of exposure the media gives to less intelligent people. We like seeing them do really dumb things because it makes us feel smarter, which is a justified feeling most of the time. And some of it is actually entertaining. As I was watching some of the political debates, I wondered if Americans are getting more intelligent politically in a very particular way, and my curiosity has to do with a cinematic analogy.

When anyone goes to a movie these days, they have extremely high standards for special effects, CGI and other tricks to make the images look as real as possible. Special effects from the 80’s and even ten years ago look dated now, and the average movie-goer sees them as quaint. When I watch some of these political debates, I notice right away that some of the candidates are attempting to use an outdated strategy that Bill Clinton mastered: appearing as if you said something without really saying anything of substance. People seem to be really tired of that political strategy. They don’t want the illusion of a leader, they want a real leader with conviction, and that might be easier to spot than it used to be.

This is one example that I think illustrates the point (go about 3:30 into it if you want to skip Chris Dodd and Obama):

Hillary started out as a somewhat strong candidate, probably because of her name alone. The more she talks, the less people like her (insert woman joke here). Another example is when Jon Stewart interviewed Chris Matthews from Hardball about his infuriatingly backwards book, Life's a Campaign. (He should leave out unnecessary title contractions in his campaign.) Here's a clip from the day after that addresses the interview:

Stewart lit into Matthews for constructing his whole life to be basically artificial, i.e. a campaign. It was one of the most popular videos on YouTube before they took it down and it's one of the most popular on the Daily Show site.

There are other examples of the public getting wise to "politalk" that include loud boos after canned responses from Romney, Giuliani and others. I'm not sure how this intolerance of scripted answers will translate in the voting booths next year, but I hope this is an actual trend and not merely my personal wishful thinking.

(Completely off-topic - I wonder how many reindeer jokes Giuliani gets this time of year.)

How to Get on Reddit

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 15:06:00 +0000

Ron Paul is amazing.

Mike Huckabee is not.

A government official and/or media network is doing something horrific.

Genius? A Very Wrong Website (but also nice to post)

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 04:01:00 +0000

Apparently, according to this...

Get a Cash Advance

My Friend Screener - Thanks, Martin!

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:22:00 +0000

I was recently in a movie theater and the movie trailer below was one of the previews before the Feature Presentation (American Gangster - good). It let the viewer know the general plot and characters of Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins. But it also served another function: a personality test.

Let me say from the outset that I was in a crowded theater with a typical demographic. It wasn't slanted toward any particular age, gender or race. It was a mixed bag; a random sample. Let me also say that I believe good comedy is good comedy regardless of the source. I like Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Cosby, Brian Regan and Chris Rock. You get my point.

This trailer functioned as a personality test by letting me know who I would not be very close friends with. Those people who were laughing at the preview were people I probably would have very little in common with. The weird part is that 70-75% of the people in the theater were actually laughing at the very contrived, very predictable and very transparent jokes. It was like my own personal twilight zone where things that are not funny at ALL suddenly became ass-over-tea-kettle hysterical to everyone else.

I thought from now on I might show this trailer to people who have the potential to be a friend. Their reaction will be a good litmus test to see whether they will be a mild acquaintance (they smile), a close friend (they become very ill) or an enemy (they laugh at any part). I consider this trailer a Friend Screener.

Google Image Labeler - Origins

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:43:00 +0000

After seeing this post and watching this insanely interesting video (also below) it's especially interesting to see a post like this praising the Google Image Labeler "game." It reminds me of seeing Jeff Han's presentation on his multi-touch interface in August of 2006 and watching the technology come to life less than a year later via the iPhone and Microsoft Table (complete with hilarious spoof). ALSO reminds me of reading this article and then seeing Amazon incorporate its suggestions into its customer ratings system. Technology. Crazy.

Definately MTV

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 13:10:00 +0000

MTV isn't exactly helping out the MTV generation...

Hats Off to Google. (Part Two)

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:22:00 +0000

(Cont'd) Having access to that amount of information requires strategy. It means scrolling quickly through feeds that don’t produce a high volume of interesting or usable items and knowing when a feed needs to be cut off. When I don’t have time to read something in detail, I put it in my starred items, which is getting increasingly longer every week.

The search capability makes Google Reader essentially a massive Bookmarks program (although I also use Google Bookmarks for links I can't subscribe to). When I see an item that other people might find interesting, I put it in my shared items that other people can subscribe to. I don’t always agree with the author or subject and I don’t always endorse whatever I share, it’s shared only when I think it might be interesting to others who subscribe to my shared items. It also helps me when I want to email or send a link to an interesting story. If I want to revisit the story about the world-renown violinist Joshua Bell who played to strangers in a subway, I can find it in five seconds. Google Reader has reduced the time it takes to search for interesting things by about 95%. It’s amazing.

The biggest problem is information overload, but I’m sure everyone’s seen articles highlighting those pitfalls in titles that go something like, “Is the Web Killing Our Attention Span?” or “Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Information?” To answer the latter question, I don’t think there is, I think it just depends on how you handle it. Like any tool, I think Google Products can be used more productively and successively than almost anything out there in the Web world. They just added another feature in Google Labs called Google Pages that is a web page creator. I'll definitely be using that when I get some time.

For those who know how to use all the products, they can really keep you informed of important issues, funny articles and random-yet-interesting facts and events at lightning-fast speed. Or it can let you know what complete morons are doing these days. Either way.

Hats Off to Google. (Part One)

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:24:00 +0000

The best Google products in order of best to almost-best are The Google Toolbar, Google Reader, Gmail, Google Docs, and Blogger. I am a huge fan of the Google philosophy, and their products have completely changed the way I use the web. And I use it. If I want to know anything at all, I just enter a few key words in the toolbar, hit enter, and I have the results in a new page in my browser. Gmail’s threaded conversations and archival feature lets me search my entire email history in a click. I have all of my grad school notes saved in Google Docs, never having to worry about losing them on a hard drive. They recently added Power Point capability to Google Docs, so I’ll be importing a few slides from a Middle Eastern class I taught in 2004, preserving them forever. Here's an awesome video that explains everything you can do with the Docs feature.

The feature I use the most, though, is Google Reader, and I’ve used it even more since they recently included the search capability (a long time coming). It’s a love/hate relationship, because I subscribe to 59 RSS feeds (including CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, Freakonomics, kottke.org, ESPN, Snopes, Dave Barry, The Onion, other people's shared items, tons of blogs, etc.), which averages to about 600-700 posts/stories a day. If I went somewhere remote for a few days, I would come back to thousands of items and would probably have to declare feed bankruptcy. (Cont'd on next post...)

Umbrella Cover

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 19:38:00 +0000

Artists who have covered Rihanna's "Umbrella":

- Travis Barker (Plus 44)

- Dashboard Confessional

- Originally meant for Britney Spears (ironically)

- My Chemical Romance (also ironically)

- Vanilla Sky

- Plain White T's

- Tegan and Sara

insane.

Kid Nation Plantation

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 02:04:00 +0000

I watched Kid Nation and it is off-the-charts interesting. And this is coming from a single guy with no kids of his own, so I don't have that automatic personal connection with kids of my own. It's a reality show, but I've always viewed reality TV as televised social experiments that sociologists would eventually do anyway. Or maybe that's just how I justify it.
The perception of the show before tonight (probably semi-perpetuated by CBS - controversy brings ratings) is that 40 kids are plunked down in the middle of nowhere with no adults and they're told to make due. It's actually kind of like Survivor in a way, but the kids are given social tasks and duties, there are competitions for town money (it's set in a Western town; they get Buffalo nickels), and every few days every kid has the opportunity to leave and go home.
I haven't been around a group of kids since I was one myself, so I forget a lot of what makes kids kids. It was like watching development unfold. The age range was 8-15, which turns out to be a VERY significant factor in their social relationships. The most interesting parts were how the kids cooperated or fought, how some tried to lead, and how many of them were clearly emulating someone they knew back home, personality mimicking. There are so many subtle elements to the show, including how humane it is to leave a community of kids alone while a good amount of them cry for their parents. In public. The hierarchical political element to the show adds some anticipation to later episodes; the structure itself is a conflict bubble waiting to pop.
For sheer entertainment and fascination, it's definitely worth catching an episode.

Song in Cadillac Commercial

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:53:00 +0000

If you want to know the name of the song that is playing in the background of the new Cadillac commercials, it's a segment from "Stars" off of the early 1995 album You'd Prefer an Astronaut by Hum. I liked this song so much when it came out that I bought the album just from hearing this song on the radio. It turned out to be a good purchase, although I didn't ever hear of anyone else who owned the album at that time. It's a pretty unique sound and there are some songs on there that I still listen to today.
It reminded me of how big a risk buying an album was back then. There was no iTunes where you could hear samples, and if no one else had the album then you were buying blind. I guess it made buying music slightly more exciting in the way gambling is exciting, but I think I prefer the modern advantages that keeps me informed. I also bought Foma by The Nixons off of their single, "Sister" (also in 1995), and that was a huge mistake. That album sounds nothing like their radio single and is a tribute to horrible, awful-sounding songs.

If you misspell "Intelligence"...

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 03:17:00 +0000

From Urban Dictionary...

Wall Street Journal Causes Unnecessary Concern About MP3s

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:15:00 +0000

This WSJ article on MP3-quality sound really bugged me. The WSJ wants to give us something else to worry about in the music industry, but it's a completely unnecessary concern. The gist of the article is that artists, engineers and producers are recognizing that many or most people who listen to music listen to it as an MP3 file on an iPod. An MP3's quality is not as good as on a CD and the problem is exacerbated if the music is listened through standard iPod headphones.
If artists, engineers and producers engineer their musical finished product for the low MP3-quality standard, they deserve any backlash they get from consumers. Good engineers have the foresight to set the quality mark as high as possible and let the medium decide how to meet that standard. Joe Consumer has chosen the MP3 knowing that there is a slight loss in quality but a gain in convenience. I doubt the average listener's ears are so attuned that they will start complaining that their music is not engineered for MP3-level acoustics; so why not be prepared for the future and shoot for a better quality sound? The engineer's smart play is to be prepared for whatever medium replaces the MP3 down the road. When The Starting Line's 2002 Say It Like You Mean It album is heard in 2022 through whatever medium is popular at that time, the high-quality engineering that went into recording will be able to come through the high-quality medium. Good engineering will always outlast consumer trends. No worries.

Update: Apparently, this guy agrees (in a much more cogent and thorough way). AbsolutePunk picked up on the same story, but didn't comment.

This Had To Be Intentional

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 13:45:00 +0000

Pennsylvania Is Run By Monkeys

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 02:16:00 +0000

This article in the Philadelphia Inquirer is proof positive that the people who are in charge in Pennsylvania are idiots in the strongest sense of the word, and so are the people who report on them. The article's discussion is based around the Supreme Court's upcoming decision on whether Pennsylvania convenience stores, grocery stores, etc. will be allowed to sell beer. The article had an opportunity to inform the reader of where Pennsylvania fits into this discussion on a national level, i.e. what other states' beer distribution laws are. It could have compared PA to other states that have more relaxed beer distribution laws and how that has impacted those other states. Instead the writer chose to focus attention on how beer distributors would be affected by such a law, implying that these distributors would be victims.
I'm sure there is some broader economic point that I am missing in this, possibly involving "The Man vs. Mom and Pop" debate. But the issue is whether PA should allow convenience stores to sell beer. Period. In making that decision the lawmakers (and journalists covering the debate) should look at how other states have been affected by passing laws that allow convenience stores to sell beer. The economic impact on beer distributors should carry no weight in the debate. If beer distributors' service is no longer needed in the same way, that's fine. Why should public policy and law ever be forced to sustain unnecessary businesses at the expense of principle and public convenience?

Blockbuster: Man's Best Friend

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 19:06:00 +0000

After I received an email from Blockbuster saying that they have completely cut out their free in-store exchange service they were so giddy about a year ago (AND their in-store coupons for free rentals) I noticed that they were making it up to us in other ways. Because I am a loyal subscriber, I get amazing deals on movie prices. Instead of paying $14.99 for a movie, I pay the low low price of $14.24, a savings of three quarters of a dollar!! They truly are passing the savings on to me. Thanks, Blockbuster!!

Nicetown

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 13:22:00 +0000

When moving to Philadelphia, consider a move to Nicetown. I hear great things.

Non-Baby Girl Names

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 18:51:00 +0000

Below is a list of girl names you won’t really see much of anymore, mostly because no one in their right mind would name their little baby girl any of these:

Mavis

Joan

Barbara

Gladys

Linda

Mildred

Paula

Mabel

Alice

Edith

Deborah

Down on "Pal"

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 16:31:00 +0000

Is "Pal" really the right word to use here? For some reason it seems very irreverent given the circumstance. I don't think I've ever used the word "pal." I don't know why, but it just sounds really stupid. This was acknowledged in the Seinfeld episode, "The Deal" when Elaine got upset when Jerry referred to her as his pal. "What's wrong with 'pal'? Why is everyone so down on 'pal'?"

Poop Terms

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 14:37:00 +0000

Culled from yesterday's Preston and Steve show. Immature, yes. Funny, yes.

Dropping a cobra in the basket.

Making room for dessert.

Brewing butt coffee.

Stocking the pond.

Crunching a grumpy.

Backing the car out of the garage.

Heave a Havana.

Getting rid of some butt ninjas.

Dropping anchor.

Launching a corn rocket.

Don't Worry, It's Ok to Call

noreply@blogger.com (Jared) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:06:00 +0000

I take full responsibility for my cell phone, and I think others should too. There have been great developments in cell phone technology including the “vibrate” function, the “silent” feature and the “off” button. I will never get annoyed at someone who calls at any time, even at night, because it’s always my responsibility to adjust my settings according to my environment. Even if I tell you I’ll be at a movie, at work, at church or at a funeral I cannot blame the caller for calling. It’s on me. That is my cell phone policy. (This also gives me an excuse to post one of my favorite movie theater ads.)