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  1. Hurricane Preparedness Checklist

    August 26, 2011 by Earnest Pettie

    hurricane

    There are those who say you can never be truly prepared for a hurricane. They say this not because it’s true, but because they’d like to interest you in insurance. All you really need to have to be prepared for a hurricane is a checklist. Preferably, it would be a hurricane preparedness checklist. Fortunately, I have constructed a hurricane preparedness checklist that you can print out and laminate so that you can read it when the hurricane starts.

    • Have you told your mother that you love her? Don’t. That will make her think the end is near, when the reality is the end is just nearby. It’s best to just send her a text reading, “Everything is fine. I have always wanted my own seahorse.” That will let her know that you’re fine and are willing to make the most of a bad and/or underwater situation.
    • Have you suspended your newspaper home delivery? You’ll want to resume it to ensure you’re able to keep abreast of news during the hurricane. If the newspaper arrives and is wet, the effects of the hurricane are still being felt, and it’s best to stay indoors. If the newspaper stops arriving, you may take this as a possible indicator that news, democracy, and freedom of speech have all been suspended and replaced with martial law by jet ski-riding warlords. If you have a jet ski, you can probably assume a role in the new government.
    • Have you stocked up on canned goods and water? If so, you are already doing far too much. There’s going to be plenty of water so why are you devoting valuable storage space to it? Aquariums would be a much better use of that space. You will be able to use them to contain much of the water and marine life that will soon be sharing your living quarters with you.
    • Have you placed your dishes, laundry, or old relatives outside? The hurricane represents an opportunity to clean these items in an ecologically sound manner. You will need to secure your dishes, laundry, and old people firmly to the ground and be sure to retrieve them quickly after the storm before they’re stolen. Police are notoriously loathe to track down these things because of their generally low resale value.
    • Have you built an ark? If you haven’t built one yet, there’s no use trying now. The best you can hope for is having a neighbor willing to give you a lift. Be prepared to endure several days of snide mumbling about grasshoppers and ants (you’re the ant).

     

    Please be safe during the hurricane. A lot of myths about hurricanes have been spread by the hurricane industry, a group of professionals devoted to promoting hurricanes and rain coats. Here are some of the most common myths regarding hurricanes.

    • MYTH! You can stop a hurricane by gathering a group of friends together and blowing opposite the direction of the hurricane’s winds. FACT: It’s too difficult to get enough of your friends on the same page about anything no matter how many Facebook Invites you send out.
    • MYTH! Everything is calm in the eye of the hurricane. FACT: I am not calm in the eye of the hurricane.
    • MYTH! You can catch raindrops on your tongue during a hurricane. FACT: It’s far too difficult to catch anything on your tongue when you’re flying backwards.
    • MYTH! Hurricanes spin the other way in the other hemisphere. FACT: The other hemisphere doesn’t have hurricanes. It pretends to to keep us from feeling bad about ourselves. If it did have hurricanes, they’d spin the same way: quickly.

     

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  2. The Supreme Court Is Ruining Our Justice System

    April 2, 2011 by Earnest Pettie

    Dahlia Lithwick’s recent piece on Connick v. Thompson is one of the most troubling things I’ve read in a long time. In Connick v. Thompson, a man who’d been on death row and was later found to have been the victim of evidence having been withheld by the prosecution, was denied compensation awarded him by a jury and upheld by every court on the way to the Supreme Court. Once there, not only did the Supreme Court deny him the jury award, but Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia found that the District Attorney in New Orleans couldn’t be held liable for the misdeeds of prosecutors and specialists. Here’s why I found the article troubling.

    Last year a trio of court rulings began peeling back Miranda rights. Thanks to Maryland v Shatzer, a request to not answer questions without a lawyer present is now moot. Thanks to that ruling, all that is required is a break in custody before cops can begin questioning you again. It is now possible that police can release a suspect who has refused to talk without a lawyer, pick him up again and resume questioning him. Berghius v. Thompson found that you must explicitly invoke your right to remain silent in order to be recognized. Yes, that “right” is now opt-in instead of opt-out. Finally, in Florida v Powell, the court found that suspects needn’t be given the Miranda warning that we are all familiar with as long as they are informed of their rights, creating a scenario where cops no longer have a concrete definition of the warnings they need to give suspects.

    We now live in a world where cops need only imply our rights to us when we are taken into custody. Then those rights that are implied must be specifically invoked in order to be considered binding. That protection you get from invoking your rights, however, is temporary and disappears after a brief period of time. That undermines your right to avoid self-incrimination, and the problem is compounded by Connick v Thompson, because it creates a world where your newly-undermined rights might land you in jail, whether you are guilty or not, and once you’re there, the prosecution may engage in wrongdoing, withholding evidence that would prove your innocence, without fear of reprisal. I’m not a person who leaps to alarm, quickly, but with more and more people on death row being proven innocent, each year, it occurs to me that we should be reinforcing our legal system against the cracks and flaws that have allowed so many innocent people to be arrested, convicted, and in some cases executed. Instead, we’re increasing the structural damages that have created those flaws. Well, we aren’t. The Supreme Court is.

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  3. Spongebob Penishands

    April 1, 2011 by Earnest Pettie

    spongebob-penishands

    From time to time, my eagle-eyed wife will pick out something on television that I never would have noticed. She’s much more observant than I am. She treated me to one of her finds this evening while we were going through recordings on our Tivo. She told me she’d recorded a Spongebob Squarepants for me, which immediately made me groan. I love Nickelodeon and cartoons, but I hate Spongebob. She’d saved it, she told me, because she’d been disgusted by what she’d felt was a hidden penis. I’m sure you’re familiar with the hidden penis phenomenon. Artists working on children’s movies, often for Disney, are rumored to draw penises into the backgrounds of the movies they’re working on. My wife felt like the hidden penis she’d seen in Spongebob Squarepants had gone just a little too far. It took me half a second to register the hidden penis she’d found. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.


    murphyy – Watch more Funny Videos

    She pointed out that Spongebob’s hands formed a penis during a dance sequence in the “I Heart Dancing” episode. I ran to the internet to see if this was something others had picked up on. I didn’t immediately see anything other than someone pointing out that Squidward’s head looked like a penis in the frames immediately preceding the sequence we’d been discussing. TWO PENISES? Yes, there are two hidden penises in fifteen seconds in this one episode of Spongebob Squarepants! You’re welcome, Internet.

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  4. Delicious Deserves To Die

    December 21, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    I began using Del.icio.us back in 2005. Del.icio.us had been around two years and carried the promise of offering a better method of bookmarking websites than using the browser’s unwieldy dropdown and encouraging the discovery of new websites through link sharing. It made good on the first promise, but I don’t think it ever fully delivered on the second. According to Techcrunch, Delicious (as it was renamed after being purchased by Yahoo!) is due to be sunsetted in 2011.

    For me, the main strength of Delicious was that it liberated my bookmarks from the browser and allowed me to access them from any computer anytime. It also was one of the first websites I ever used that allowed me to “tag” anything. In addition to having my bookmarks searchable by name, I could categorize sites using whatever tags I found helpful. Your tags were also discoverable by other users of the service. Despite having millions of users, the social aspect of the site never really did anything for me. Largely, this was because almost no one I knew used the site. It was social before social was big.

    Ideally, one could use Delicious to discover new sites to peruse. You might search through tags, but because you didn’t know the people who’d bookmarked the sites, the tags were either untrustworthy or obvious. That is to say, you might search for comedy and come across either some lame collection of jokes or Comedycentral.com. I did eventually come across the blog We Make Money Not Art, which updated its Delicious bookmarks on a regular basis, constantly adding interesting new articles and photo galleries, but Delicious never really caught on for that kind of use.

    Meanwhile, “social” began its march toward being the buzzword we know and love today. Slashdot became a popular destination for discovering the latest tech news. It was replaced by Digg, which had a wider scope than tech news and became a destination for finding out news and content that was hot. Twitter and Facebook soon supplanted Digg as destinations for sharing cool links. As those link sharing sites proliferated, Delicious’s other strength, being a browser-free bookmarking service, was all that remained to set it apart. But soon, even that would disappear. First Opera, then Chrome, and finally Firefox all developed technologies that would allow you to access your bookmarks from whatever computer you were using, provided you were using their browsers.

    I still use Delicious. When I began working in internet video, I began accumulating hundreds of video sites I’d check for content. I had it all categorized on Delicious. In fact, I found that useful for sharing my links with my co-workers. I could simply send them URLs for my tagged bookmarks so that they would have access to my bookmarks. The problem for me is that that isn’t really reason enough to continue using Delicious. I can’t imagine why anyone would continue to use the service other than intertia.

    I will always have a fondness for Delicious. It is the same fondness that I have for Friendster and the old Northern Lights search engine. They were all innovative in their days, but we have little real use for them now. Instead of forcing it to amble on in its old age, Yahoo should put Delicious to sleep.

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  5. My Sincerest Apologies On This My Thirty-third Birthday

    November 8, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    My sincerest apologies on this my thirty-third birthday, but due to an agreement between myself and the sovereign nations of Denmark, Argentina, and Freedonia, my birthday has been cancelled this year. What this means for you is that the week-long celebration that had been planned in each of the world’s major capitols will not take place, and parking will resume as normal. Also, the special goggles you had been mailed should be returned since you will no longer be needing them. The team we had working on that special solar eclipse has been disbanded but remain available for bar mitzvahs and weddings (they’re contractually prohibited from working other birthdays). Those of you in municipalities that had been chosen by lottery to receive a statue in my honor, please admire it quickly because we have repo men coming early tomorrow morning.

    The tragedies that occurred at last year’s birthday celebrations– I’m very sorry, Oprah– will not be forgotten anytime soon by anyone present. There are some things that you just can not unsee. Again, I’m very sorry, Oprah. Of course, my feeling is that we should let bygones be bygones and that all the damages should be paid for through Paypal but not by me.

    It has come to my attention that many of you were looking forward to celebrating my birthday with me. The feeling was mutual. I was looking forward to celebrating my birthday with me, too.

    In place of birthday greetings and presents, I ask that you make a small donation to the foundation I’ve started to help people in third-world countries celebrate birthdays. It’s called the “Make A Wish* Foundation.” Were you aware that there are parts of the world with people too poor to have birthdays? It’s because they don’t have the necessary ingredients for cake. They light small bushes on fire and ask the birthday boys or girls to blow them out. If they blow them out, they receive a wish (usually to live elsewhere), and if they don’t, there’s fire. Everywhere. Be sure you give to the foundation with an asterisk in the name. If you don’t, your donation will go toward fulfilling some dying kid’s last wish, which is a real waste of your money, because it isn’t likely you’ll ever receive a Thank You note.

    The hardest part of all this is that I may never get to have a thirty-third birthday. All the other parties involved in these high-level discussions have seen fit that I should remain thirty-two at least through these tumultuous times. I’m eager to see thirty-three, but my people at the UN don’t think it’s feasible for at least another four years without military intervention.

    Reprinted from the Legal sections of the Tulsa World, New York Sun, and TV Guide.

    Category Old Blog | Tags: | 2 Comments

  6. 5 Awesome Acapella Videos

    August 28, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    acapellalogo

    Why do glee clubs and college acapella groups exist? Because there’s strength in numbers. You can diss one scrawny lover of vocal music, but the time and effort required to diss an entire group requires a bit more effort than the payoff is usually worth. I have always had a soft spot for these groups, but I’ve fallen hardcore for a certain substrain of these a capella groups. I love groups that cover current hip hop and pop songs, taking something that was already cool, making it geeky, but pushing the geekiness to an extreme that is wonderful. The most recent of these videos to become popular is this Columbia/Barnard cover of a Dr. Dre classic.

    This is a cover of Ben Fold’s cover, and what pushes this video into the realm of geeky cool is the costuming choices the girls have made. Tennis racquets? That’s the whole nine!

    Of course, I’ve amassed a number of other favorites over the years. Here a few I consider classic.

    The Final Countdown

    I borrowed a friend’s time machine and went back to 1996 just so that I could feel ok suggesting that this choreography is the bomb. After using that slang I returned to the present because in 1996, watching video on the internet meant using Quicktime and waiting half an hour to download ten seconds of postage stamp-sized video over Compuserve.

    Gangsta’s Paradise

    This is by one of my favorite acapella groups, UCLA’s Scattertones. Their b-girl stances and posturing are enough to make this video killer, but it’s the when you get to the bridge, where they kick the choreo into high gear with a step routine, that this video begins to soar. Even Coolio responded to this video on Youtube because it was so awesome. Coolio doesn’t just respond to anyone– unless you start by saying “I’m an agent, and I’m pretty sure I can sell your brand of feel-good party rap with gangsta feel to nostalgic  30-somethings in the Midwest.”

    Harder Better Faster Stronger

    This Daft Punk song was unavoidable on the Internet for a while. It’s popularity coincided with the birth of Youtube, and there were at least two other wildly popular viral videos based on the song. For me, this was more about the strength of the performance than the charisma of the performers or any other wow factor. I also like that the group is called the Carleton Knights because the group may not have been named for him, but who doesn’t think of Carlton from the Fresh Prince when thinking about glee clubs?

    Just Dance

    Normally, I disqualify songs that include musical accompaniment, but PS22 can not be bound by anything, least of all my arbitrary rules. These kids are amazing, and have several stellar covers under their belts, including Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger. My fear is that these kids will attempt to enroll at High School Musical’s East High in a few years, only to discover that it exists only in film, and then layers of their reality will fly away Inception-style. “People don’t like acapella?” “The people on Glee are autotuned?” “Our teacher isn’t cool outside of school?”

    I love Fox’s Glee. Glee has made this kind of music acceptable in the mainstream, but Glee actually does this kind of music a disservice. The vocals on the show are sometimes painfully post-produced, and only Lea Michele has a voice strong enough to make you forget about the instrumental accompaniment. That’s why I’m thankful for all the groups who have come up with their own quirky performances and uploaded them to the net over the years. Here is one bonus video for those of you who have made it this far.

    Videogame Medley:

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  7. What’s New With The Crew? 8/28

    August 28, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    Take a quick trip around the bend with a few of my friends’ blogs, won’t you?

    Arnold Benedict had two problems: A bum for a roommate, and, after evicting said roommate, an empty room full of potential. Instead of exploiting said room for profit, he built a camera obscura!

    …if you’re like me, you have a lot of time on your hands, and not a whole lot of money [re: broke as shit from three paragraphs above], and no immediate desire to move someone into that empty space. So I did some research and decided to look into building a camera obscura [after getting denied access previously on account of I'm 'not an old person' (statement made by a security guard at the senior recreation center in Santa Monica in response to 'can we go in there?')].

    -Read more at Down in the Well

    Over at Notzombies.com, between recaps of True Blood and Bachelor Pad (yes, Bachelor Pad), NotZombies discusses the day, this week, when his lunch hour went action movie.

    At that exact moment, less than a block away, an armed officer of the Beverly Hills Police Department was screaming into his shoulder mic for reinforcements. “I NEED BACK UP! GOD DAMN IT, I AM IN THE SHIT HERE! CALL SWAT! FUCK, CALL THE GOD DAMN ARMY! JUST GET ME SOME FIREPOWER AND GET IT HERE 10 MINUTES AGO!”

    -Read More at NotZombies

    Inkoo at Thinkovision recaps Mad Men

    The Don v. Ted feud had a brilliant dénouement, but the upstart rival storyline was a fly I kept swatting away.  We didn’t know enough about the Pete-ish Ted to gauge whether he posed a real challenge to Don, making the feud hard to care about — though to get the attention of the New York Times, Ted must be a pretty gifted self-promoter, if not a great ad man.

    -Read More at Thinkovision

    Amy weighs in on Piranha 3D with her review for Boxoffice.com

    Are you a breast man? An ass man? Or a fish man? Either way, there’s plenty of all three in this bloody spree by French director Alexandre Aja. The script is ridiculous, the bodies are great and the film skates so long on the line between knowingly bad and bad that by the time the body count hits 100 and the booby count hits 1000, we’ve lost track of the difference.

    -Read more at Amyweekly

    And Ross Lincoln has been up to… update your blog, Ross! 

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  8. New Invention: Brainstorming App

    August 21, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    I have a lot of reasons to brainstorm when away from the computer: blog posts, script ideas, jokes, etc…. I have never been one of the kinds of guys who has been able to use more traditional means of keeping track of ideas. I can’t handle the embarrassment of talking into any device to record ideas for later. I get embarrassed doing that even in the privacy of my own home. On the other hand, I almost never have a pen and pad handy. If I have one, then the other is inevitably missing. The one way I have been able to keep notes is digitally. When I bought my first palm pilot, I finally had something that I could keep track of and use all the time for jotting down ideas. Then I lost it. That is the problem with using non-networked digital devices to keep track of anything. When the device is gone– so are your books, movies, music, and ideas. An ideal solution for me and, I assume, many others, would be to use one of the devices we keep on ourselves and store the information remotely.

    When you think about it, those little bits of ideas that come to you and must be jotted down or else be forgotten are ideal for microblogging. Think Twitter. Unlike the ideas released into the Twitter ecosphere, these ideas are not meant to be seen by the public. After all, they are the seeds that must grow into full blown ideas. They have to be private.  They should be hidden away and stored in your Integrated Digital Journal Idea Tracker, your IDJIT.

    The Core:

    The core of the service is the IDJIT site, to which all of the IDJIT clients send your updates. Like other microblogging services, your updates are listed chronologically from the most recent entry through the oldest. That is the primary microblog view with which we are all familiar. You may, however, opt for a journal view, which reorders your thoughts from the oldest through the newest and removes timestamps. Instead of the standard microblog display, this view takes place in a text editor screen. Additionally, you may tag your entries with different subjects and interact with those subjects as their own idea threads.

    Interacting:

    There are many ways you may send your brainstorms to yourself. You may send text messages from your cell phone, instant messages from your IM client, or E-mail. These provide you with standard text functionality. Mobile App interaction would extend your functionality by allowing you to add images or voice (which would be transcribed).

    Incentive:

    I have not thought this through entirely, but maybe the standard interaction would be free, but you would have to pay to interact by mobile App. The fee per update would be minimal. Maybe 2 cents. 1 cent would be the fee, and 1 cent would go into the user’s account. Thus the more the user interacts with the service through the mobile app, the greater his or her personal account grows, and at the end of each month, the total savings is transferred to the user through Paypal. That way it feels as if the user is getting a bonus just for being creative and brainstorming with IDJIT.

    These are just my initial ideas on the service. I’ve been juggling these ideas in my mind over the past couple days, probably because I don’t have an IDJIT yet.

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  9. Creepy Chrysler Town and Country Ad

    August 14, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    townandcountry

    I have a superpower. When a commercial break interrupts a television program I’m watching, I can disappear completely into my head for the duration of the commercial break. I don’t need the commercial skip on my Tivo because I’ve trained myself to skip them. That’s one of the reasons I was surprised when my wife pointed out to me something very interesting about an ad for the Chrysler Town and Country minivan that I’m sure must’ve passed before my eyes hundreds of times without any notice. The ad depicts a young boy being challenged to a race home from school by some of his classmates. Once he makes it to his mom’s minivan, he taunts his friends as his mom pulls away. Check it out.

    All fun and games, right?

    Well, if you watch the ad without audio, it become another ad, entirely. It then becomes an ad about a poor kid being picked on by bullies at school. They wait for him after school’s out and chase him all the way to his house, where the mama’s boy leaps into the safety of his mom’s minivan and rolls away, taunting his tormentors. I’ve added a little different music to the commercial to better underscore the point.

    Poor kid!

    The best part is once you’ve had the benefit of watching it this way, it becomes obvious how tacked on the kid’s voice-over is in the official commercial. That leads me to wonder what the commercial was originally like. I imagine the tagline was “Chrysler Town and Country. The next best thing to returning to the womb.”

    Category Old Blog, Uncategorized | Tags: ,,, | 26 Comments

  10. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

    August 14, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    scott-pilgrim-vs-world-review-meta

    I haven’t yet seen Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, so I don’t have any thoughts of my own to share about the movie yet. I’ve noticed, however, that many of my friends have published their thoughts on the movie, so I thought I’d do a little metareview of the movie.

    Amy Nicholson for IE Weekly says:

    Edgar Wright has made a 112-minute entertainment contraption, celluloid that shapeshifts its frames into video games, comic books and sitcoms…. It could give a seizure to anyone in the Twitterverse unused to dividing their brain among twelve browser windows. But for the already addled—myself, millions more and metastasizing—it’s a blast: fun, fresh and unbounded with an ensemble that delivers every joke and elbow jab.  Read the rest here.

    Inkoo Kang at Thinkovision offers:

    Scott Pilgrim is an adorable indie action-romance told in video game language that is far better than the sum of its genre parts…. if the plot isn’t super-original, the winsomely nerdy way it’s told more than makes up for the narrative’s by-the-bookiness.  Read the rest here.

    Benji Briggs for Screenjunkies writes:

    Wright, like a painter with vintage nintendo system, builds the 8-bit video game action of Scott Pilgrim to come at us with such freshness and detail that you’ll keep asking for more, more, more.  Read the rest here.

    Tasha Carter gushes:

    Dude-man-girlfriend you will NOT be disappointed! It’s tons of fun! The only thing that bummed me out was the thought of eventually not being able to see it on the big screen anymore with a kickass sound system. It just won’t be the same on dvd. :-( (Yes I realize that I am thinking very far ahead)   Via Facebook.

    Brian Huntington for Not Zombies dissents:

    Scott Pilgrim- really disappointing. Great visuals. Even better sound. Couldn’t care less about the characters. Via Twitter

    That’s once around the horn with people I know and trust, and the bulk of the sentiment seems to land solidly in the movie’s camp. I look forward to the movie, and maybe I’ll relate my own thoughts after watching Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Just after I finish my rebuttal to Roger Ebert’s review of Kick-Ass… so sometime in 2012, just before the world ends. Allegedly.

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