Let's just put this one under "May I please be in the room the next time Maureen Dowd does an across-the-room spit take?"

Asked about an accusation on the Drudge Report that Clinton staffers had circulated a photo of Barack Obama wearing Somali tribal dress, Singer let 'er rip.

"I find it interesting that in a room of such esteemed journalists that Mr. Drudge has become your respected assignment editor," he lectured. "I find it to be a reflection of one of the problems that's gone on with the overall coverage of this campaign." He went on to chide the journalists for their "woefully inadequate" coverage of Obama, "a point that has been certainly backed up by the 'Saturday Night Live' skit that opened the show this past Saturday evening, which I would refer you all to."

-- Phil Singer, Clinton campaign PowerPointer, somehow managing to give a presentation to elite Washington opinion makers with his head entirely ensconced in his Klein-bottle-shaped GI tract.

There's Always a Turd in Every Box of Chocolates

It's perfectly legitimate for a genetic scientist to say things like "blahblahblah [something specific] because genes"....

But it's truly dismaying (although since the '04 election decreasingly surprising) when somebody as indisputably intelligent (despite his race) as James Watson says something like:

[although he hoped everyone was equal in terms of intellect] "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

Link goes to a truly flabbergasting news story.

Still a pathological liar alcoholic with delusions of grandeur, after all these years...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — When President Bush is asked what he plans to do when he leaves office, he often replies curtly: “I don’t have that much time to think beyond my presidency” or “I’m going to sprint to the finish.”

[...]

“I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers.” With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, “I don’t know what my dad gets — it’s more than 50-75” thousand dollars a speech, and “Clinton’s making a lot of money.”

(link goes to rest of article)

Is it just me who has these daydreams that, for the rest of his days after he leaves the trappings of the presidency, this man will be shunned by all good, right people? That he will be turned away at restaurants, receive response letters from the American Enterprise Institute (!) saying "we appreciate all you did during your terms, Mr. President, but our speaking calendar is booked for this season.." ? That no-one will return his calls? Who, to verbize a name, will Frost him? (And what a horrible, pointless, thankless, go-through-the-motions-for-nothing task that would be; I'll pass.)

Like watching a slo-mo video of a runaway train crashing into a school bus full of children...

A Feature You Shouldn't Need

From the "You have got to be kidding me" file.... (link goes to HP's page explaining this)

		To use the slimming feature, first take a photo. Then, while in playback mode, use the arrows to select an image and press OK. Highlight the Design Gallery menu tab using the arrows.
		Use arrows to highlight Apply Artistic Effects and press OK. Then highlight Slimming and press OK.
		Adjust the slimming level using the arrows. Then press OK, and you're finished.

I think I could get rich selling a box for smokers to hang around their necks which, when they enter into a fit of hacking cough, covers it up with the sound of childrens' laughter or perhaps the 1812 Overture.

A Letter to Glenn Britt

(5/24/07 update below)

Time Warner Cable CEO
Glenn Britt

CC: his Technical Service Staff

Dear Glenn,

I have decided that the only way to balance the equation of my getting what I pay Time Warner Cable for and what I actually receive is to reduce the dollar amount paid to $0.

You're fired.

Why? Oh, let's just talk about the last few months (going back 3 years and over 30 on-site service calls would be somewhat tedious.)

Since last fall, I have had a dual-cablecard-and-tivo3 setup. Every time something goes wrong (say, the cablecards suddenly stop receiving premium channels, while the broadcast channels are perfectly OK) I am forced to make an appointment for an on-site service call, usually over a week into the future, during which I have no TV service. During said service call, all the technician does is dial in to the tech service center (the same one I dialed into a week prior to make the appointment), give them the serial number of the cable cards and we hope for the best. I could have done that myself.

My point, and the source of my frustration, is that whatever may or may not be wrong with the technology is moot as far as customers receiving the service they need if you hire uneducated, untrained, unmotivated, unempowered drones to do the job of a voice-response system and call it customer service ("I'm sorry sir, but we can't do that over the phone; you'll have to schedule a service call", etc etc).

Well, I can't hold my full-time job of tending to the animals at Neverland or whatever it is I do for a living and jump through hoops for the amusement of the cost-effectiveness analysts you hired that told you that paying tech support technicians $15/hr and just throw quantity-over-quality brute force at the problem is the way to serve your customers (yes, that's what I was told you pay them, you bastard; meanwhile your compensation for the year leading to April '07 was enough to pay for 304 field technicians for one year).

I'm looking forward to FiOS becoming available in my neighborhood (soon enough; they have it barely a mile away). To quote one of your tech people letting me know about the setup he himself had at his house as we were killing time in my living room on hold with a service center operator: "FiOS is the shit". I'm sure he knows.



In the meantime, maybe I'll get some reading done... (my in-shelf is quite full, and I've got a small stack of New Yorkers to get through...)



(for folks of the same mind as me, especially if you live in Brooklyn, please do drop your comments -- or, if you prefer, my personal address is j u a n m at p a n i x . c 0 m ).

05/27/07 Update: When the technician came to collect the cablecards -- something I was categorically forbidden to do myself because "it requires expertise to remove them and if they become damaged as a result [I] would have to pay for them" he first (1) tried to unscrew the coax from the back of my Tivo thinking that it was a cable box and he was supposed to take it with him, and (2) had to be told which/what the cablecards were, and (3) I had to remove them for him because he didn't know how. This is the fun one has with Time Warner Cable.