A group of friends and I had such a horrible time at a local restaurant this past Friday that I wrote about it on Yelp. Here is my review. Seriously, don’t ever go to this place.
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The tv saga endeth
As you may or may not have heard, the 46″ Samsung DLP that I bought a little over two years ago from the online arm of a “big box” retail electronics concern died a couple weeks ago. For simplicity’s sake, lets call them “BB”. I had a service plan, so eventually a BB tech came out and had a look at it. He said a couple circuit boards were toast, and he’d order replacements and fix it. The process was expected to take a couple weeks, so that sucked. He called a couple days later and said that it turned out to be cost prohibitive for them to fix it, so we’d be getting a replacement TV. He gave me a claim number which was good for a new TV. Yay.
Last Monday, Miyuki and I went to the BB in Evanston. After looking me up in their system, they said they’d be willing to give us a 50″ DLP in exchange (no one makes 46″ DLP’s anymore). I pointed out that I spent quite a bit of money a couple years ago on a 46″ DLP, so I’d rather they give us a 46″ LCD, which was much closer to what I paid back then, but was still cheaper by a few hundred dollars. They said they couldn’t do that, as they have to match TVs on a feature-to-feature basis and not cost or size, and the value of the old TV had depreciated over the past couple years anyways. They would also be willing to give a credit equal to the cost of a DLP towards an LCD. (The latter of which was presented as a very magnanimous solution.) I called the service plan hotline and they confirmed those policies1, so I went with a 50″ Samsung DLP because the credit would have only covered about 2/3 of the cost of the LCD.
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Call me photojournalist
The Consumerist used this picture that I took on St. Patrick’s Day last year in a story about how The Gap is contracting. Pretty cool.
Land of scrunched-up text
I don’t know if this is what inevitably happens when you try to cram a state name, two dates, a graphic and two mottos (one of which contains an eleven-letter word) on the back of a quarter, but wow.
Stay tuned
This may look a little screwy over the next week or so. I’m testing out a new theme behind the scenes, but it may affect how things look regardless.
UPDATE (06-04-08): Ok, that didn’t go quite as planned. Back to your regularly scheduled theme.
Pork and Beans
This Weezer video makes me irrationally happy.
Dear Mark Calvert:
Your email address is not mcalvert [at] gmail dot com either, but thank you for signing me up for something called the American Family Association Action Alert. The most recent one—and the only one I’ll ever receive if they honor unsubscribe requests—goes a little something like this. Wow.
The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) has passed the U.S. House and Senator Edward Kennedy is now leading the push for a vote in the U.S. Senate. ENDA is aimed at providing heightened protections for a particular sexual behavior – homosexuality. It would grant special consideration on the basis of “sexual orientation” that would not be extended to other employees in the workplace.
ENDA violates employers’ and employees’ Constitutional freedoms of religion, speech and association. The proposed legislation would prohibit employers from taking their deeply held beliefs into account when making personnel decisions. This would pose an unprecedented intrusion by the federal government into people’s lives.
ENDA would approvingly bring private behavior considered immoral by many into the public square. By declaring that all sexual preferences are equally valid, ENDA would change national policy supporting marriage and family.
It’s obvious that the real agenda behind the innocuously named Employment Non-Discrimination Act is a push to enshrine homosexuality in national policy. This dangerous legislation would dramatically expand the government’s reach into your work place and create unnecessary work-place conflicts and lawsuits. ENDA is a sweeping employer mandate to create special new legal protections based on “sexual orientation” (or “perceptions”).
Dear Miranda Calvert:
Your email address is not mcalvert [at] gmail dot com, but thank you for all the spam coming my way anyhow. Sigh.
Malcolm Reynolds, the great17-grandson of George Michael Bluth
Someone in Australia points out that the entire run of St. Elsewhere was imagined by an autistic kid and then lists 281 other shows that can be linked to St. Elsewhere via character cross-overs and various references, which means that all of these shows were also imagined by the kid. The full PDF is amazing and sort of scary.
The 6th Annual TNMC Awards
My movie nerd friends and I just finished our own version of the Oscars again this year. (Here is last year’s results.)
Again, we start with Brian’s commentary:
As suspected by most of us the minute we saw it, No Country For Old Men was clearly the film of 2007, winning a stunning seven awards this year, including Best Picture, Supporting Actor, Director, Screenplay, and Scene of the Year. Interestingly, the film was shut out of the technical awards, which saw us spread the wealth to Zodiac, The Assassination of Jesse James, and The Bourne Ultimatum, an undeniably accomplished threesome. After No Country, the next highest winner only took home three and that was Michael Clayton with its wins for Supporting Actress, First Feature, and a surprising win for Original Screenplay over Juno (something that many have been thinking lately could actually happen Sunday night too…not saying it will, but if you want a dark horse, it’s one to consider). Five of 2007’s best films – Jesse James, Bourne, Grindhouse, Zodiac, and Once – all took home a pair of TNMC Awards with seven other films winning only one. We hit several of the critically acclaimed films of the year, giving Atonement, Juno, There Will Be Blood, and Ratatouille one award a piece. I really like the way we spread it around this year. I hope you had fun. Maybe we can do it again next year or maybe I’ll fire up those long-rumored 1st Annual TNMC Television Awards – but we know Lost and 30 Rock would win everything.