Author: admin

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Truck Stop Women and Phil Gramm

HEY! I just heard/watched this on Keith Olbermann, who mentioned IMDb! It turns out former senator Phil Gramm has an IMDb page and was an uncredited executive producer for a film called “Truck Stop Women”. Porn! Republicans! VHS! Anyway.

These scenes “really got Phil titillated,” Caton told journalist John Judis in 1995. Gramm enthusiastically cut Caton a check for $15,000. Because the film was oversold, however, Caton returned his brother-in-law’s money, offering him an investment opportunity in an upcoming feature.

Phil Gramm’s page and Truck Stop Women.

AND! Apple co-founder Stephen “The Woz” Wozniak may have been spotted on “The Price Is Right,” according to a post on macrumors.com.

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Nola’s 1st birthday party photos!

Photos from Nola’s first birthday party, held on July 18th, 2008.

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Bat to bra in three sentences

I love how Harper’s Weekly connects dots in their weekly emails. An unaltered paragraph from their latest digest:

“The British retailer Marks & Spencer defended a policy of charging extra for bras that are bigger than size DD, saying the charge represented “a small premium for [necessary] specialist work,” while the protest group Busts 4 Justice derided the price increase as an unfair tax. A British teenager who assumed that tremors in her bosom were caused by her vibrating mobile phone found a baby bat nestling in the padding of her 34FF bra. The World Health Organization warned people not to go into Ugandan bat caves after a Dutch tourist died from the Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola.”

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Edward Tufte on the iPhone

The New York Times weighs in on the iPhone’s success, and design usability hero Edward Tufte gets a prominent mention.

In a recent article and accompanying video posted on his Web site, Edward Tufte, the information and visualization designer at Yale, argues that the iPhone’s success is attributable in part to the decision by iPhone designers to dispense with clutter — all of the irritating buttons and menus that are part and parcel of a typical computer interface.

“The content is the interface, the information is the interface, not the computer administration debris,” he said in a video critique of the iPhone.

He also notes that the iPhone succeeds by “intensifying” information, made possible in part by its higher resolution display and in part by packing more useful information in each display.

Microsoft’s products could use this approach. Honestly, we might use about a tenth of those grouped icon bars. To be fair, they’ve improved the clutter somewhat on Office 2008 for the Mac, but it’s only a faint start. Hopefully, the next (last?) version of Office is truly a Mac application.

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Bruno is the new Borat! With Iranian missile “enhancement”.

They’re filming Sacha Baron Cohen’s next movie, it seems, when things like this appear in the news:

Crowds in Arkansas came for the lure of cage fighting and $1 beer, but police say what they got instead was men ripping each others’ clothes off and kissing _ a stunt suspected of being orchestrated by Sacha Baron Cohen of “Borat” fame.

…The two men would then wrestle, rip away some of their clothes and share a brief kiss reminiscent of one between Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell in the film “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.”

An elaborate array of mounted and handheld video cameras caught the crowd of 1,600’s reaction as the two men “went right up to the line” of the city’s morality laws, Holland said. The two men stripped down to their underwear, kissed and rubbed on each other, the sergeant said.

The audience, as well as local fighters drawn to take part in the show, became enraged. “It set the crowd off lobbing beers,” Holland said. “They had beers in plastic cups. Those things can get some distance on them actually.”

The article finishes with a bit of Mike Huckabee trivia!

If the cage match visits came from Baron Cohen, it wouldn’t be the first time Arkansas fell for a practical joke. In 2000, then-Gov. Mike Huckabee fell for a prank and congratulated Canada for preserving its icebound Parliament, calling it a “national igloo.”

National igloo! He ran for President! National IGLOO!!! Brüno releases May 15, 2009 in theaters.

Is having Photoshop overseas a recipe to enhance your missile testing? Iran thinks so, and got most major US dailies to run the photo untouched!

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Splashin’ with the butterflies.

Ellie in North Ballard, splashing around, pointing out the butterflies.

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A double-dose of The Stranger

I normally just skim our alt-weekly The Stranger, but this week provided two must-read articles: one person’s perspective on the economic slowdown, called United States of Anxiety, and a book review of Steven Seagal’s filmography and discography, relived in order of release.

Humanity is not dead in “Wall-E,” but it is in peril. The world’s population cruises the heavens ceaselessly on a mammoth luxury spaceship that it boarded in the early 22nd century after the planet became uninhabitable. For government, there is a global corporation called Buy N Large, which keeps the public wired to umpteenth-generation iPods and addicted to a diet of supersized liquefied fast food and instantly obsolete products. The people are too bloated to walk — they float around on motorized Barcaloungers — but they are happy shoppers. A billboard on the moon heralds a Buy N Large outlet mall “coming soon,” not far from that spot where back in the day of “Hello, Dolly!” idealistic Americans once placed a flag.
from the Frank Rich column, “Wall-E for President“

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Kennedy’s first birthday party

Photos of Kennedy’s first birthday party. Happy birthday, Miss K!