Parity Violation

So, photos from my last days in Houston and my first few weeks here in Florida are up. View the entire album here

My house is untidy, but there is still much unpacking to do. This weekend hopefully.

The Golden Globe nominees were announced today. The nominees for best TV drama are:

• 24 (FOX)
• Big Love (HBO)
• Grey’s Anatomy (ABC)
• Heroes (NBC)
• Lost (ABC)

This is a sad joke. I mean, these are all fine shows (ok, I’ve never seen Big Love) but the thought that any of these are better dramas than Battlestar Galactica is a sign only that the nominators have never seen Battlestar Galactica. Yes, it has a funny name – but it has more pathos and more drama than 24, GA, Heroes, or Lost combined. (Especially considering that season 2 and 3 of Lost haven’t quite been as good as Season 1.) Heroes is an ok show, but it’s highly derivative of … well, everything – the X Files, The 4400, the X-Men.

And the Golden Globes has gotten sci-fi shows before – the X-Files won best drama many times. I guess non-network shows on the sci-fi channel just can’t lure in a wide audience. Oh well. Those of us who watch the show know better.

Poll: Clinton, Giuliani Early 2008 White House Favorites – washingtonpost.com. You’ve heard me say it 100 times. These polls are about one thing – name recognition. Neither Clinton nor Giuliani will win their party’s nominations – though Clinton has a slightly better chance. The day the GOP primary voters will never pick a pro-gay-rights, pro-gun-control, pro-choice candidate like Giuliani.

The Astros acquired pitcher Jason Jennings today from the Rockies for Willy Taveras, Jason Hirsch and Taylor Bulchholz. I don’t know how I feel about this. Hirsch could be really good some day. Taveras is pretty much all the team’s speed and is good defensively.

Man it sucks Drayton wouldn’t pay the piper for Pettitte… this helps the rotation somewhat, I guess. We’ll see how it goes.

VerizonMath: Summary for those who haven’t pieced all the details together. – A breathtaking and somewhat hilarious story. Verizon’s customer service reps don’t seem to understand that $0.002 is not the same as 0.002 cents. They quoted the latter, but charged the former. Amazing.

You can heard the audio of his call to Verizon here.

It’s A Wonderful Machine is a great column by David Pogue from 1998 when Apple was near-death. Pogue imagines Steve Jobs is Capra-like story where he sees what it would be like if he had never invented the Mac.

This post is my first to use the Wordpress Press It Bookmarklet tool. It’s not quite as cool as the Facebook “Share” bookmarklet tool, but it offers somewhat similar functionality.

I’m all moved into my new place, and the mover arrived with my furniture today. I still have lots of boxes to unpack. I’ll try to get some photos up this week of a) my new place, b) my various farewell events in Houston.

A good article is Salon about Giuliani’s shortcomings Now, of course, he’s way to liberal to ever get the GOP nomination – but he still shows up on polls for 2008 – and why? Repeat after me – polls this far out are about what? Name Recognition – nothing more.

Repeat after me – polls for 2008 2 years out are about name recognition, polls about 2008 are about name recognition. Yet, this dumb story about front runners of course talks about Hillary Clinton and John McCain – two people who will not get the nomination of their respective parties.

Yes, they lead in these national preference polls – but those are meaningless. They only indicate name recognition. Hillary Clinton suffers from two problems – pragmatic democrats don’t think she can win, liberal democrats think she’s too timid. I’m not convinced she even runs.

McCain will run, but he won’t win – at least it’s not likely he’ll win the nomination because the GOP conservative establishment doesn’t understand that the american people don’t embrace their philosophy… so they will want a “true conservative” and despite all his efforts, McCain won’t meet that requirement. He didn’t in 2000 and the GOP primary voters picked an unqualified and dim-witted George W. Bush instead of John McCain – why does anyone think they’ll pick him this time around? Maybe only if they decide they want to win…

The thing about renting a house rather than an apartment… there’s a lot more space to lose things. And this is before the movers have arrived with my furniture! (They’ll be here Monday morning.) I’m going to have to either make a point to always put my keys / phone in the same spot… or I’ll need to get some sort of pageable keychain thing so I can find my keys. I foresee some problems there.

In other news, it’s raining alot here. I’d just as soon it be clear. And I think it’s going to be cold Sunday night … though most of my cold weather gear is with the movers. But, I did get a used washer/dryer so at long last my days of coin operated laundry are over. :)