I was right!

Check out this lotto result which was the winning lottery on Nov. 5, 2008 (the day after the election) in Illinois–Obama’s home state.

Check it out yourself here. (Evening pick 3)

Barack (6)  Hussein (7)  Obama (5)

6 + 7 + 5 = 18

(18/3 = 6) = (6 * 3 = 18)

Barack Hussein Obama = 666

Case closed.

The first person to identify this house wins…uh…something.  Maybe an e-card.

A little history: My wife grew up in Long Beach, California.  We were down there over the weekend for the funeral of her maternal grandfather–a remarkable man, I must add, but that’s for another post–and we spent a little time revisiting her old neighborhood.  This house is just a few blocks away from the home where she grew up and belonged to a family that my wife used to babysit for frequently.  That said, the house has a much more historic and important place in American pop culture.

So submit your guesses.  Your e-card awaits!

For those of you who have designs on raising the next crop of nerds, here’s a great little Christmas gift to get your kids off on the right formative track.

Though this little fable is relatively obvious and unimaginative, it does at least have an entertaining and all-too-true moral pay-off.  The geeks in the room will appreciate it more than others, but the moral is generally applicable.

Enjoy.

When a video leaves me speechless, I guess the only thing I can do is post it and let it…uh…scream for itself.

I guess I could mourn the absence of witty commentary in this post with deeply-rooted primal screams.  Or at least Motley Crue’s totally awesome rock anthem Primal Scream.

If you can’t trust SitComs and commercials to provide the much needed sense of stability and consistency that is an innate human need, who can you trust?

Granted, these commercials are pretty funny, and show that a sense of humor can go a long way toward building a better image for yourself.  And this is a pretty good “fight fire with fire” approach to facing your competition.

However, the credibility of this new campaign by Microsoft begins to break down when you consider one very important fact: Have you ever noticed what kind of computer is a subtle but consistent fixture in Jerry’s apartment on Seinfeld?  Have a look (about :45, look close in the background).

“It’s Harry Potter meets Lord of the Rings!”

“It’s Friends with an edge!”

What do these two phrases have in common?  The same thing as this season’s latest addition to “comparison condemnation”:

“If you like Lost and X-Files, you’ll love Fringe!”

In a few poorly-chosen words, these descriptions each spell the most heinous four-letter f-word in all of entertainment: Flop.

As a rule, any time the producers have to try to buy their audience by such overt comparisons to fan favorites of days gone by, it’s an indication that the show has no merit of its own and, despite their best efforts, will not appeal to the discerning viewer.

Such is definitely the case with the new Fox offering, Fringe.  True to title, Fringe will not be joining the mainstream of television hits this season.  My wife and I decided to give it a chance to pick up some of the TV entertainment void that has been left for several years by the exit of X-Files.  Sadly, the two programs can’t even be mentioned in the same sentence.

X-Files was tremendously entertaining because it was smart.  The dialogue was natural and believable.  The actors were charismatic.  You wanted to believe that they were real.

Fringe offers no such benefits. While the plot of the pilot episode was ok, the dialog was clunky, obviously over-laden with exposition of back stories and sub-plots that would be better left to viewer discovery.  The characters are vanilla at best.  The female lead, played in the pilot by Anna Torv, was bland and brought an annoying air of “seen it” to the role.  There was nothing new or interesting about her; just another girl playing out of her depth as an FBI agent, like so many before her.

Maybe the biggest surprise (for some) that Fringe has to offer is that J.J. Abrams really is a one-trick pony, and apparently that trick is good old fashioned summer action movies.  He really seemed to find his stride with Mission Impossible III, which I found very entertaining (considering it’s a Mission Impossible movie). Lost had its moments in the early seasons, but since then the story has gone in circles so many times, I have to agree with those who think the writers have no idea where they are going.  Several times during the 30 minute experiment with Fringe (yes, 30 minutes…that’s as far as we made it) I honestly couldn’t tell if I was watching the new show or just a bad back-story episode of Lost.  So many of the elements were lifted straight from the Lost template, right down to the weird horn crescendo that precedes every commercial break in both shows, you get the strong impression that Abrams just kind of mailed this one in.

Topping off the list of complaints is the experimental gimmicks that I can only assume were Abrams’ attempt to freshen the Lost model just enough to trick people into thinking it’s not the Lost model.  There’s something very off-putting about having scene locations established by having to fly through the words “Logan Airport Boston” or having the words “Baghdad Iraq” laid out in large block letters across the tops of the buildings in a panoramic of the city.  We watch TV to be taken away, to be drawn into the make-believe world that is being created on screen.  Such lame gimmicks immediately smack you back to reality.

So, all in all, I found nothing of value in Fringe, not even a mild curiosity.  The entire abbreviated experiment was nothing more than a waste of time.  I can only be grateful I didn’t stick around for the full hour.

Am I the only one who finds this a little creepy?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww

First, obviously, it’s kind of a sad day when anyone dies (except Saddam and his ilk, of course).

Second, who’s going to introduce us to all the “worlds” from now on?