Useless Factoidia

A bunch o' stuff!

:: Several people have indicated that they were highly amused by the bunny with the pancake on its head. That's great! But there turns out to be a backstory here: the bunny (now sadly deceased) was named Oolong, and had the ability to balance stuff on its head, an ability which was "exploited" by Oolong's owner for Internet photos. The stuff you learn!

:: Reader Charlie (who hails from Iowa City!) directs my attention to this set of 2007 NFL predictions, which equates each team with a Star Wars character. This is pretty funny stuff...although Norwood's miss was almost 17 years ago! Can't we move past that as the defining moment for this franchise?

:: I don't know about this possible approach to Star Trek that may be in the offing in the movie JJ Abrams is making. Basically the idea is that old Trek standby, the "bad guys go back in time to alter history so our heroes never existed" plot or something like that -- but the plot succeeds in some fashion, meaning that instead of telling a story set within established Trek canon but in the days of James T. Kirk's years at Starfleet Academy, Abrams is literally re-setting the timeline to zero. It's an interesting approach, but I like established Trek canon, and I've never much enjoyed JJ Abrams's work, so we'll see.

:: I've had some search hits the last day or two for JP Losman on the Jim Rome Show; I assume they're looking for this interview Rome did. We'll see how he does on the field, but as far as talking to media goes, Losman's come a long way. I really hope he succeeds as the quarterback here, because Losman's just one of the most likable guys to come to Buffalo in a long time. He just seems like a good guy, and I hope his career reflects that.

:: For some reason I'm also getting lots of search engine hits for "What was the Millennium Falcon in when it lost its topside radar dish", or some variant wording thereof. The answer is, of course, the superstructure of the Death Star II.

:: I sympathize with a guy who got sick, certainly, but I'm flummoxed as to how anyone could consume multiple bags of microwave popcorn on a daily basis for over a decade. I adore popcorn, and I don't even eat it every week, much less every day. Wow.

:: Matthew Yglesias has a good, and brief, post about Sen. Larry Craig. I agree with pretty much every word.

:: A couple of weeks ago, Jayme e-mailed me about For Better or For Worse, when the strip was in the middle of a week-long thing where all that happened was Liz going on in very long-winded fashion to her friend Candice about how Anthony's life has been a disaster and how he ended up in a terribly unhappy marriage and how now he's free and he's the love of her life and all that jazz. As Jayme wrote:

Seems to me that Lynn Johnson is going out of her way to justify the storyline's direction, and writing almost a point-by-point rebuttal of bloggers' gripes in the process.

Well, Comics Curmudgeon is on the case, finding an interesting parallel between recent "present day" events in FOOB and the past events that the strip is now depicting in some kind of weird flashback mode.

Personally, I find that reading Michael's narration makes me hear the voice of Bob Saget in my head, and that's never a good thing.

:: Here's a fine essay on how we've lost "silence":

Just give me five minutes without it; that's all I ask, perhaps all I'll need to bring it back into being for myself. Imprisoned by it as I am now, assaulted in every store, elevator, voice-mail system, passing car, neighbor's home, by it and its consequent immolation in the noise of the quotidian, it is lost to me as anything other than a kind of psychic rape, a forced intimacy with sonic partners not of my choosing. When music is everywhere, it is nowhere; when everything is music, nothing is. Silence is as crucial to the musical experience as any of its sounding parameters, and not merely as a kind of acoustical "negative space." Silence births, nurtures, and eventually takes back the musical utterance; it shapes both the formation of its textures and the arc of its progress through time.

(via)

:: I think that now I know where Linus will be hanging out this Halloween. He's looking, after all, for the most sincere of all pumpkin patches!