I am totally bummed out that Squeeze would not get reunited for my amusement. In fact, I went to VH1 to sign the petition.

This brings me to the rant about how I find this show to be both sad and compelling.

A testament to true "we've been using data mining tools on our demographics information" brilliance, the show has managed to pick bands that all were important to me (if only for a few moments) during my childhood and youth. In this sense, I am saddened at the knowledge that I am getting older and that my music is less relevant, even to the artists who created it.

There is something nevertheless compelling about the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts" aspect of these reunions. There are times where I still suffer from the delusion that former rock stars take their riches and retire to live as millionaires in Fiji. Partly this impression comes from the fact that the no-talent Bob Van Winkle managed to hold on to his money. Part of this is also my own self-deception, that part of me that still wants to believe that when I was four and we moved to a nicer suburb, my parents gave my dog, Husky, to Eskimos. In any case, "Bands Reunited" completely demolishes any fanciful notions that the audience may harbor about the care-free life of a musician.

That said, Squeeze was by far the most talented of the bands that the show has tried to reunite. Maybe not enough time has past since their last greatest hits album.

Thanks to Ben for pointing out another case of them just not making stuff like they used to

In this case the "stuff" is the Apple iPod, which has a rechargeable battery. Because of the Apple "closed architecture" philosophy you need to shell out a significant portion of the original purchase price to replace the battery if it no longer recharges very well. This issue seems to have caused a media backlash fueled by a home movie (made on a Mac) created by one very irate customer.

On the one hand, the anger isn't entirely fair. If you busted the LCD on a portable electronic device, or the hard drive, or any part of the motherboard then you'd be okay with having to shell out $60-$100 to fix it. Somehow because its a battery, this is not acceptable. What if they had called it the "DiLithium Power Core"? I bet people wouldn't get so grouchy then.

On the other hand, quality and longevity issues are an inevitable result of the relentless pursuit of "cheaper, cheaper, cheaper." Am I saying that you get what you pay for? Yes and no. The market will fix low quality in one of two ways (not exclusive) either a market will develop for a premium-priced higher-quality, longer-lasting product or a producer will price the low-quality product such that the item is not longer considered a consumable. Would you pay $75 for a new PDA every year? Probably.

Of course, human inventiveness and human unreasonable expectations leave open the possibly that some clever design and engineering team will create an MP3 player that is nigh indestructible, holds terrabytes of storage, costs only a nickel, and steals the songs and movies right out of the studios without any possibility of detection. Then the music and film industry folds. In the ensuing dark age, mankind is replaced by generous, kind, and peace-loving hyper-intelligent roaches.

I can't believe that I had never heard about honku until Chelse mentioned it on the Hollerer. The 17 syllables of serenity seem especially appropriate during these Super Bowl days whereby the construction zone in front of our building is currently bereft of traffic cops because they have been pulled off to Reliant Stadium.

My own frustration at Houston Traffic being what it is, and necessity being the mother of invention, my own recipe for relief from overwhelming rage while driving is to sing "Comfortably Numb" like Pavarotti.

That's just corny, Will Li!

Maybe. But I saw an interview on Letterman where Pavarotti explained that he began his training in opera by being told to yell as loud as he could. From there the teacher had Pavarotti back it off until screaming became deep soul bellowing. This is how Pavarotti learned the limits of his control. I don't know if I've learned quite the same lesson, but I do make a terrible racket and then I laugh.

So do I sound like Roger Waters as a tenor?

That's exactly what I sound like.

In reading about the resignation of Gavyn Davies, chairman of the BBC, I marvel that:

a) journalist could be called to task for being irresponsible.
b) journalists would take this responsibility seriously enough to accept blame, apologize, and then resign.
c) somewhere in the world, there is an English-speaking population that doesn't mix up Andrew Gilligan and Bob Denver.

Hi Trav. If you decide to follow my advice, you can learn some of these telephone songs.

We took Dave to eat at The Swinging Door Bar-B-Q restaurant tonight. The food there is outrageously delicious. So much so that when I dared bite a pickeled Jalapeno, I let the juices run over the meats and the seeds spread fiery hotness everywhere.

My mouth was burning. I took a quick bite of white bread, a sip of diet coke. There was no quenching this fire. A crisis loomed: the only way to put this fire out would be lots and lots of diet coke, but then I would have no room for barbeque. A true dilema. I made my decision to ride it out: slowly I ate more chicken and ribs. Not too fast, not to slow.

My eyes teared and sweat beaded up on my forehead. The delicious smoky flavors from the meats swirled and whirled on my tounge - alternatively on fire or numb; hypertasting the meat. This was an intense eating experience par excellance; the culinary equivalent of the green room.

Dave exclaimed, "Will- you're sweating!"

"and crying", my wife added.

"Don't cry, Daddy."

To: National Geographic Society Forum
Fr: William Li
Re: Regarding the pagination of National Geographic

Dear Editors (especially the ones responsible for layout)

What is the deal with page numbering? I mean, why do you even bother to put the page numbers in the table of contents?

In the most recent issue that I received, the so-called “page 1” started on about the 50th page of the magazine; seriously. This wouldn’t be so bad if the pagination was at least consistent from page 1 onward. No way. Sometimes fold-out pages count as two pages, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes pages with articles have page numbers, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes advertisement pages count as magazine pages, sometimes they don’t. Most aggravating of all is that there is no rhyme or reason for it.

Actually there is a rhyme for it; as follows:

The National Geographic staff paginates capriciously.
So if you want an article about the deep blue sea,
Open to the middle and then flip around
If you are lucky, the article will be found.

The whole issue makes reading your magazine very discommodious, if you know what I mean.

Sincerely,

William Li
Sugar Land, TX

Of course we have all made tin-foil hats to stop brain scans by the orbital mind control lasers. However, protecting my cat from BRAIN SCANS is just silly. Everyone knows that if you have a really good idea, you need to be keeping the pets outside , else your pet sell it to the competion (like the Bush Bean's dog.)

Will- Since when do you have a cat? I don't.

Happy New Year. This is now the year of the Monkees. Louren's school had a good celebration, I ate an appropriately themed buffet, and the day was capped off with an edifying episode of Stanley in which we, the audience, learn a valuable lesson about work-life balance: it's okay to disappoint your cute daughter, Jane, by canceling a family trip for something stupid and work-related so long as your daughter's friends can get advice from a talking Goldfish on how to cheer her up.

Spoiler Alert: If you don't want me to give away the ending of a 15-minute children's cartoon on the Disney Channel, stop reading now.

I like the way Stanley and Co. go back to Ancient China and don't interact with any Chinese people or even the locale. It is like they all read The Sound of Thunder.

That wasn't much of a spoiler, was it? To be honest, I just think that spoiler alerts are funny. Its a bit like shouting, "Don't look at this!"

So... I was reading in the Wall Street Journal (weeks ago) an article describing how "environmental credits for greenhouse emissions" might work. The gist was that if your industrial facility generated a lot of CO2, you could offset it elsewhere. One of the easiest ways to do this, says the Journal, is planting trees in the Mississippi Delta region. This is my round-about way of getting to an article that Noah sent to me:

'Mr. Bill' to save Louisiana coast

I had something snarky to say, but I'm tired so if you would be so kind as to imagine the wittiest thing possible and then imagine that I said it.

Thanks.

I am outraged by the latest turn of events for Dean. This venerated public figure deserves better than to have Sara Lee drop Dean as Sausage Spokesman.

Ha! What a classic joke! This is funny because I have used the time honored comic device of "SURPRISE AND INCONGRUITY. You were expecting me to talk about the surprising upset of Howard Dean but no, I was talking about country musician Jimmy Dean you were surprised, weren't you? Then you found your surprise amusing, didn't you? HO HO Ho ho ho!

Boy howdy, nothing is funnier than explaining a joke. Its just like in High School English when you analyze poetry to better understand how emotional and spontaneous it is.

For the sake of completeness, I have referenced this blog on friendster. I was pretty much using the "about me" space for the same purpose as this blog anyway. Here is what had been in that space:

My wife pointed out that Dora the Explorer and her "so-called friend" the Map seem to have a strained relationship. When Dora is lost, she says, "Who do we ask, when we don't know which way to go?" But then, her Monkey Pal, Boots, not Dora, is the one who answers this rhetorical question (it's the map).

The most telling remark indicative of a strained relationship comes from the Map himself: "Where is Dora trying to go?" he asks. He acts as if he wasn't right there on Dora's back, listening to every word she says.

"Well I know how to get there... Tell Dora to get there she needs to go here then here then finally to here." Actually, that might be the problem... he's always on her back, telling her where to go, but he himself would have no purpose without her. That sort of co-dependence is unhealthy.

Anyhow... Map, you gotta listen to me, Dude. You need to tell Dora yourself, don't take it out on the kids because you are mad at your spouse.

ALSO:

I had a rave about Thomas Dolby there that I've since lost.

Packy is on page 222 of Reflections by Barbara Bush. This is more or less the story that got him the shout-out at his graduation by the keynote speaker (GHWB). What I like about the graduation story is how I get to convolute the details each time I have the situation where both are true:

1) There is at least one person in the conversation who has heard me relate this story.
2) There is at least one person in the conversation who hasn't

If I think of it (or even if I don't) I will probably do the same thing on this blog. Probably I'll get to it when I rant about the trite nature of graduation speeches and how Rice has a habit of getting speakers who phone it in.

Sigh... Even this rant is a bit worn out. Everyone complains that graduation speeches are trite but no one ever gives the complaint any thought.

Why do we complain about the trite graduation speech?

If its because you didn't want to hear a speech, then you're dumb. Skip your graduation and have the school mail you the diploma.

The reason you should complain is this: a bad speaker is a covenant broken. Graduation is the last chance for your school to impart wisdom to you as a student. Great lengths are taken to find a special person to deliver this message. The message should be engaging, inspirational, sincere, and provide a sense of closure.

I believe that this is an impossible task for a commencement speaker unless that speaker is somehow invested in the graduating students; there needs to be some connection. Towards this end, getting a random celebrity is a set-up for failure. The plain truth is that a celebrity speaker could not care less about the graduating class, their endeavors, or their future. As such, their speech is almost always filler stuff like:

In the future, the world will be different. For example, we will be older. The world is getting more dangerous, look both ways before crossing the street. When I was a young flowerpot, I ate a long string of watermelon seeds. Today you see the fruits of my loom. If you remember nothing from today then you are drunk right now.

Regardless of how one might feel about Bush senior, he was genuine in expressing how proud he was of his beloved grandson and his grandson's friend.

What I am trying to say is that when I exaggerate Packy's role in George Bush's commencement address, its because I really wish that the whole speach had been about Packy.

John Ritter never got any respect when he was alive. Here is a prime example of that.

As it so happens, Hooperman was cancelled because the excellent cop show had great cinematography and John Ritter singing to a cranky dog named Bijou. Then the weasels at ABC said, "Your numbers aren't high enough to renew you nor are they low enough for us to step up and cancel you, so we are going to sabotage your show by making it video instead of film." (This is not actually how that conversation went. I am paraphrasing.)

John Ritter had the self-respect and integrity to decline being set-up for failure. That can be hard when you are the star of the show.

I don't like it when TV show synopsis sites don't have the plot synopsis but list the title of the show anyway. Case in point: HoloGuides's synopsis for "Frank Leaves For the Orient" doesn't even have an episode title list. It only had six episodes! C'mon, make an effort!

This was a great show, in a stupid way. I found Frank's desire to do something interesting with his life in the face of his own blandness to be very compelling. The myriad banalities that prevent him from just leaving his old life behind are obstacles that he sets for himself but blames on everyone else. It reminds me of that scene in The Hobbit where Gandalf is shooing Biblo Baggins out of his house without a hankerchief. What happens to us when Gandalf isn't there to shoo us out of our comfortable lives? How many of us hear the call and desire to respond but can't because we are stuck in our Hobbit holes fretting the laundry?

The dearth of information about the show and the fact that I only watched episodes 1, 2, and 4 leave me with nothing but questions. Does Frank ever leave? Does he get to Japan? Is he surprised to find that the Orient is exactly like the West?

Which brings me to my point: If I cared enough, I would have a TV show episode synopsis site that was in this format:

*Title of show
*Premise of show
*Summary of all the major plotlines for all the seasons
*detailed synopsis (~1000 words) of the LAST EPISODE ONLY
*Musing: "So what does that all mean?"

I wouldn't list a show if I didn't have all that information.

At Rice I had this fantastic-hilarious .plan file. To be fair, it was neither fantastic nor hilarious but when I was 19, I thought that a massive inside joke appearing on the screen for all the world to view when they would "finger william@rice.edu" was epic. This was way back in the ancient year 1993; before there were too many web pages. When I finally got around to busting out some HTML, I had this bold vision of turning my .plan into a homepage hyperlink bonaza. It didn't happen, but I still like to think about some of the truly awesome link ideas that I had, even if they were essentially a rehash of a running gag that Trav's started.

(Fnord's Theatre)

Happy New Year. This is the first post in the blog. I am William Li