The Onion has it summed up perfectly:

You Know What’s Stupid? Everything I Don’t Understand

Looks like the handy red envelopes are not Post-Office-friendly. ZDNet has the story.

Pandora is very, very cool. I got a surprise today, though, while listening to a radio station I had seeded with the Crash Test Dummies and other rather mellow bands. Pandora decided that I like music with “basic rock song structures, a subtle use of paired vocal harmony, extensive vamping, paired vocal harmony and minor key tonality.” The song it played was “Strip 4 Me” by Gravy Train!!!!. The lyrics to this song are available here. WARNING: Definitely TV-MA stuff, and again, not exactly what I was expecting to hear after a steady stream of Tom Petty, The Police, Counting Crows, etc.

On the other hand, I suppose Pandora did its job by exposing me to a band I wouldn’t have known about otherwise, and it did give me the option not to hear it again.

Sox-Yanks is about as close to nirvana as you can get in sports. But watching last night’s game was something akin to having your yoga class led by Richard Simmons. The role of “Guy you want to hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat” was played by Joe Morgan. Here is a transcript of Morgan’s 63-second description of a collision the previous day between Eric Hinske and Jorge Posada. It was accompanied by some slo-mo replays and telustrations which I can’t reproduce here, but believe me, they did not make Morgan’s analysis any less excruciating.

I want to show you something about that collision, Jon, because Posada got caught in an awkward position. There was no place for Hinske to go. There’s no place for Hinske to go, so he had to hit him. There was no – there was no plate. You know, catchers usually give you some part of the plate to slide towards. There’s no plate. The plate’s back here. So what is Hinske gonna do other than try to bowl him over, you see what I mean? You know, he had no choice but to run into Posada. I don’t think it was a — it wasn’t a bad play, you know, there was no place for him to go. See where the plate is? Now how’s he gonna get to this plate? You can’t slide. There’s no place to slide. Posada’s got it blocked. The only place you can go is try to run over him. And that’s what he did, so I don’t want, you know,  the Yankee fans to think that was a dirty play because there was no place for him to slide, there was no place to go. Posada usually will give you — the catcher will give you someplace to slide, but he got caught in a bad position, and there was no place for Posada to go and no place for Hinske to go.

I’m sending this one off to the “Fire Joe Morgan” blogsters. It’s a classic.

It’s far too easy to spend way too much time editing your own Facebook profile and looking at what your friends are up to. Now there are third-party applications available on the site, promising to suck up even more time. See this blog entry from ZDNet for more info.

So far I’ve added file sharing and a “political compass” application to my own profile. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of others available.

My brother got me an iPod nano for my birthday. (I think it’s the first Apple-manufactured device I’ve owned in 10 years.) Now I have to decide what to put on it besides music.

So far I’ve subscribed to four NPR podcasts:

1. Car Talk
2. Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me
3. Fresh Air
4. Krulwich on Science

I need to broaden my horizons. I’m looking for podcasts that are educational but not soporific, humorous but not banal, meaningful but not pedantic, intelligent but not impenetrable. Any suggestions? Please comment and include URL if possible. Thanks.

Yeah, my wife and I are Survivor fans. And we were both aghast when Dreamz broke his promise to Yau-Man. I would really like to know what it is like inside Dreamz’s head. He’s got some serious cognitive dissonance processing skills. I think he is actually able to convince himself that he had certain motives and used certain logic before acting, when in fact he makes up those motives and rationales afterwards.

“Hmm, I just walked in dogshit. A smart person like me wouldn’t walk in dogshit by accident. I must have had a good reason. What could it be? Now here I am, sitting on a bench scraping off the bottom of my shoe. Hmm, there’s a pretty woman sitting next to me. Well, guess what? I’ve been watching this pretty woman sitting on this bench for the last 15 minutes, and I couldn’t think of anyway to introduce myself without seeming to come on too strong, so I stepped in dogshit first. That was my plan all along!”

I think I’ll have to base a character on Dreamz in a play someday. But maybe no one would find him believable.