This morning on The Price is Right, the bidders on Contestants' Row were given the opportunity to bid on a "computer" with keyboard and mouse. The Price is Right has been on the air for a continuous 35 years, and I think it's really showing its age when it is a "computer" up for bid. If it were a dishwasher or chest of drawers, the manufacturer of the product would be displayed in big letters and would be announced at the top of Rich Fields' voice when the product is revealed. But when the product up for bid is a high-tech device such as a "computer," the make and model are information that is useless to the common TPiR viewer and is therefore conveniently ignored. To no one's surprise, a young man in a rock band from California won with a bid of $1650. Everyone else went over. Actual retail price? $1699.

The computer happened to be an Apple Mac Mini with JBL Creature II red speakers, a 20" flat-panel monitor, and wireless mouse and keyboard. I'd tell you what the available memory and hard drive size were, but it's hard to tell when the only information that you get is a picture of the case.

$1699? On apple.com, the build that gets me closest to the TPiR "computer" includes a 1.66 MHz processor, only 512MB of RAM, and an 80GB hard drive. From scratch, I can build a much faster PC for the same price. Dell can provide a better PC for even cheaper than I can from parts. Of course, my PC wouldn't come in a cute little white plastic shoe box and my mouse will have more buttons and will therefore be useful, but I think I'm willing to sacrifice aesthetics for actual functionability. Then again, I'm actually interested in doing good work with my computer, not just having a pretty, expensive paperweight on my desk.

Oh, yeah: Macs suck.

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I've watched entirely too much television this week. I'm ostensibly supposed to be painting the exterior of my mother's house, but what with uncommonly cold temperatures and sporadic rain, I've spent more time polishing heavily tarnished brass fixtures in front of the idiot box than I have with a paintbrush in my hand. A brief sampling of what I've seen:

• Oprah. I hate her: she panders and preaches to the lowest common denominator, the same strata of American society that needs to be led but doesn't much care who does the leading.
  
• Fox News. I swear that they said that the U.S. Forestry Service was dropping retards on the California forest fire. What a great idea, I thought; that takes care of two problems at once! Unfortunately, they corrected themselves quickly to say that they were dropping retard-ant. I think they're missing an opportunity.
• Leave it to Beaver. Why is it that Wally always seems to know more than the Beaver? How did the older brother grow up to know everything and pass none of it down to his slightly younger brother? And how is Ward right about everything? It's like the man is omniscient.
• Without a Trace. There is a trend among televised cop/law shows in which the culprit is only caught at the last minute when he gives himself up under interrogation. I suppose I should blame Perry Mason for this. It makes for some very boring drama when you know that the cops aren't smart enough to get evidence (despite their fictional high-tech forensics), and they have to rely on the crooks' egos or consciences to break the case.

It sure makes me wish that there had been a Kolchak: The Night Stalker marathon this week. Or even Galactica 1980. Or even >ick< The Six Million Dollar Man.

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Gooooold!

I may have mentioned the TV show Gold Fever on my blog before. If not, shame on me. It's broadcast on the Outdoor Channel, the same channel as the sublime Ted Nugent's Spirit of the Wild, and features prospecting enthusiast Tom Massie crawling through caves and tundra in search of that most alluring of elements: goooooold! (Which is, I swear, how Tom pronounces the word every time he says it.)

The show is unintentionally one of the funniest on TV. Tom's earnest, endless pursuit of gold is just about as amusing as watching Yosemite Sam chasing Bugs Bunny. I've seen Tom get lost in a cave, slip and split his pants, and fall into a creek, all the while talking 100 words per minute about gold and pitching $80 annual memberships in the Gold Prospectors Association of America (GPAA). In short, I've always pegged this guy as the good-natured, hyperactive fellow in high school who was a lot of fun to hang out with for a few hours, but a few ounces short of a pound, so to speak.

Turns out, Tom Massie is the Executive Vice President of the Outdoor Channel itself, a $40 million company. Tom and his comparatively surprisingly suave brother Perry - think of redneck versions of Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger from Twins - have owned and managed the company since the death of their father, Buzzard (no joke), in 1993, developing it into a minor media titan on the back of such shows as Shooting Gallery, Inside Paintball, and Turkey Country. So not only is Tom Massie a cornball, gold hunting machine, he's also a successful television executive in the dog-eat-dog world of cable television.

What is the moral to this story? Don't judge a GPAA book by it's cover? Scratch the surface of a ridiculous goofball and you may find gooooold? Do what you love and the gooooold will follow? I'll let you decide.

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This weekend I was thinking about how pleased I am that baseball season is over because it means that after several months of self-imposed exile, I can listen to Atlanta's 96 Rock radio station again. During the season, 96 Rock - Atlanta's oldest FM station, number 96.1 on your analog radio dial - forgoes classic rock 'n roll for Atlanta Braves coverage. It sucks to tune the radio in hoping for AC/DC or Tom Petty and hearing Skip Caray lamenting weak batting instead.

I suppose it's a trade-off for the Clear Voice >shudder< owned radio station: losing the listening audience like me that tunes out because we're not hearing music versus the increase in listeners due to the broadcast of a baseball game. But who even pays attention to baseball anymore?

Television ratings for baseball games have been gradually declining for decades. Major League Baseball frequently points out that revenue is up and allowing for inflation, ticket prices have remained relatively consistent over the past half-century. This really means that revenues aren't so much up, they're just much larger numbers thanks to that same inflation. So baseball revenue has been largely stagnant for years, indicating an overall decrease in interest among a growing American population. America's Pastime? More like America's Past Time.

I'm pretty sure that radio ratings are falling across the board as people are given more options in the home, office, and car. (I looked at the internet in an attempt to verify this, but all I could find were sites maintained by radio advertisers such as the Radio Advertising Bureau, and they are the last group of people who would willingly confirm this.) I'm not surprised that broadcasting baseball games may provide a shot in the arm for declining ratings in an industry besieged by the variety of popular entertainment. However, I would think that weakening your listening base by bisecting your listenership into summer sports fans and winter rockers would only damage your all-too-important brand loyalty.

So give it up, 96 Rock, and give me America's other dying amusement: rock and roll.

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I don't think I've ever been in a stadium of 80,000 people who expected their team to lose before. After the last two weeks, the so-called UGA faithful Bulldog Nation held their breath on every play. The stadium was so quiet, I could hear the electronic buzz from the stadium PA system.

And we were almost not disappointed. Down only 3 points with no timeouts remaining, Mississippi State had the ball near our 20 yard line with 18 seconds left to play. Their quarterback didn't seem to understand the necessity of not taking a sack under any circumstances. When we hit him, he lost the ball. Though we recovered, it wouldn't have mattered, since no time remained on the clock and no other plays were run in the game.

So we won the game, no thanks to our own players. I heard "fans" in the crowd compare Matthew Stafford (3 picks) with Quincy Carter and Mohamed Massaquoi (3 drops and a fumble) with Terrence Edwards. One guy was verbally flaying OT Daniel Inman alive for his 3 false starts. After time expired, most of the crowd left with their head down as though we had lost. It's been a long season already.

Next week: Florida. Ick.

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In the movie Robocop, when post-resurrection Alex Murphy is having a flashback to his previous life in the now-abandoned house, his son is sitting in front of the tv (watching the show T.J. Lazer - thank you, Shatner!) with a bunch of comic books in front of him. Those are Marvel ROM, Spaceknight comic books. Clearly the design for ROM, a toy turned into a comic, was one of many that influenced the Robocop costume. But I think it's odd that a movie that takes place in the future would depict a boy reading comic books that were canceled before the movie was ever released.

It's perhaps a little more odd that the director of Robocop, Paul Verhoeven (also director of Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Starship Troopers, and Hollow Man) believed that Robocop was the story of Jesus Christ in the future. Like Jesus, Murphy rose from the dead and saved his people - police, not Christians - from persecution. It should be pointed out that Verhoeven was the director, NOT the writer of Robocop, who got the idea from Blade Runner. I think the fact that Robocop was driven largely by vengeance sort of puts the whole thing outside the realm of comparison. If Paul wanted to make a point, I think he should have made a film where Jesus crawls out of his cave and goes all biblical on the Romans' ass.

As I read back on what I just wrote, I realize that I'm talking about a movie that was released in 1987. That was 19 years ago. It's those sorts of realizations that start to make you feel old. My parents wouldn't let me see Robocop because it was rated R. Yet I was allowed to see Good Morning, Vietnam, even though it was rated R. It's those sorts of realizations that start to make you understand why you're fucked up.

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I have a friend who is absolutely in love with Oscar Goldman, the eternally inappropriately sunglassed chief of the U.S. government's Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) and boss of United States Air Force Colonel Steve Austin, the world's only Six Million Dollar Man. Because of this man-crush, I'm frequently subjected to long marathons of Six Million Dollar Man episodes, one of the most boring shows known to mankind. As an unwilling participant in the misadventures of Steve Austin, I've learned quite a few things about how poorly the United States handles its scientific secrets and how world-famous NASA moon astronauts spend their free time.

For those of you who may not know, Col. Austin was chosen for bionic implants after he crashed a NASA test plane. Sure, we may have the technology, and technically we can rebuild him, but why would we want to? It's an expensive procedure to waste on a fellow who can't even properly land a plane. (By the way, $6,000,000 - six million with an "M" - in 1973 translates into nearly $30,000,000,000 - thirty billion with a "B" - in 2006 when adjusted for inflation using NASA's own inflation calculator. That's approximately how much money the world's second richest man, Warren Buffet, recently gave the world's richest man, Bill Gates, to spend on eradicating pandemic diseases. I suppose that no one told him that he could have purchased bionic limbs for the same cost.)

Presumably, Austin's particular disfigurement was perfectly compatible with the potential bionic replacement surgery that the OSI had already planned for a future accident victim, but I'm really not sure why they chose Steve Austin. Austin is demonstrated, even in the pilot episode, to be a laid-back, sunrise-watching, skirt-chasing, self-indulgent pacifist. Hardly a prime candidate for the job of "patriotic super-spy." In fact, Austin will even lament the implementation of his bionics, calling himself "less than human." Steve, last time I checked, being faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive does not lower you to "less-than-human" status; laying in bed and complaining about how good you now have it does.

The good Col. Austin had both of his legs replaced with bionic limbs that could propel him at speeds up to 60 miles per hour. His new bionic right arm could lift several hundred pounds effortlessly. His destroyed left eye was replaced with a camera that could provide a 20x magnification. And all of these modifications were made without reinforcing his hips for the jostling of the extreme vibrations while running, his spine from the torque created while lifting cars, or his skull from the frequent "karate chop" knockout blows to the head that every thug, hitman, and Soviet spy would employ to incapacitate him. That's good medicine.

Most disturbing (and far-fetched) is the premise that these bionic enhancements are powered by self-contained atomic generators in the arm and legs. That alone should be a far more spectacular accomplishment than the bionics these generators power, but it is frequently played down during the shows. In a typical nuclear reactor, radioactive decay is harnessed to heat water for energy generating steam-powered turbines. This makes Steve either radioactive or full of hot air, maybe both. It's possible that since you never saw Steve water his legs, his generators were a new kind of atomic power unfit for anything other than making metal legs move really fast. In fact, I don't recall anything else during the run of the show using the power of these generators in any other way. Nuclear power was instead frequently shown to be a dangerous tool demonstrated by way of several near reactor meltdowns, missing atomic devices, and the destruction of the Bahamas via a nuclear warhead (detonated by Steve himself). Were we supposed to be subtly fooled into believing that Col. Austin was extra-dangerous because of his nuclear powered limbs?

Once fully healed, Steve Austin was put to work as a super spy in order to pay the government back for his new Top Secret "Security Clearance Level 5" super powers. (On a USAF Colonel's O-6 salary, which I estimate was probably slightly less than $20,000 in 1973, including his NASA and super spy bonuses, paying back those $6,000,000 would probably have taken a mere 600 years.) He refused the job at first and has to be tricked into dueling with the Russians for the location of a stolen American warhead. (I know it doesn't sound like something that someone can be tricked into, but Col. Austin does not list "Mensa Membership" anywhere on his bizarre resume.) Reluctantly, Steve agrees to be OSI's poodle, and soon found himself battling Russians, foreign terrorists, mobsters, assassins, robots, moonshiners, rogue archeologists, other bionic men, crooked cops, rockstar groupies, imposter Steve Austins, telepaths, mountain lions, earthquakes, aliens, sharks, and John Saxon.

As a secret agent, Steve reflected James Bond's frequent misunderstanding of stealth and low profiles. Col. Steve Austin, astronaut and college football star quarterback, was widely recognized throughout the world, destroying most chances for subtlety. I suppose that super speed and strength don't naturally lend themselves to guileful subterfuge, but then neither did Steve's fashion sense. (Button up that shirt, Steve!)

What little camouflage Steve did possess was often lost when Steve would capriciously reveal his enhancements to anyone within earshot. He simply couldn't resist the opportunity to jump over a 10-feet tall fence or race an automobile. Steve, here's a super-spy tip: using the line "I eat a lot of carrots," to explain away how you were able to read a car's licence plate several hundred yards away in the dark isn't going to stand up to any real scrutiny. Steve's indiscretion became so widespread, even Monday Night Football host Frank Gifford who supposedly played college ball against Steve Austin in the early 1950s was therefore naturally entrusted with knowledge of Steve's top secret enhancements. (Guest stars always found out about Steve's abilities. William Shatner, Farah Fawcett, and Gary Collins among others all were entrusted with some of the nation's most classified information. They were a trustworthy bunch, I'm sure.)

So Steve Austin was a lousy pilot and an incompetent spy. Based on the fact that the only female interest that he could keep was a fellow American bionic slave/spy, I'm guessing he was probably a poor lover, as well. In one episode, Steve even admits to a crippled boy that he fumbled a lot as a football player. It should be no surprise that Oscar sends Steve to the ends of the earth (which generally looked suspiciously like southern California) on pointless suicide missions; he has to be hoping that one day, Steve won't come back. I sure do.

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On October 2, Emerson Electronics sued GE because NBC showed a person's hand being chopped up from being thrust inside a running InSinkErator brand garbage disposal on the show Heroes. Emerson manufactures the InSinkErator and claims that NBC's parent GE, also a manufacturer of garbage disposals, was trying to sully the InSinkErator brand name by showing the damage it could cause to a human. Money.CNN reports the lawsuit, including the plaintiff's argument that "according to data from the government's Consumer Products Safety Commission, you are actually ten times more likely to get injured by your dishwasher than your garbage disposal."

First of all, I should think that InSinkErator would be pleased to demonstrate what it can do to a human hand. If it can destroy bone, it damn well should be able to take care of a few apple cores and potato rinds. Secondly, why does the government track and study how likely you are to get injured by a dishwasher? Are we in imminent danger of invasion from insurgent dishwashers? (Well, I guess possibly so if you count Mexicans.)

So the lesson here, NBC, is that next time you should show a person's hand being chopped up from being thrust inside a running GE brand dishwasher. You'll save yourself money in the long run.

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I said before today's game that the worst part of a potential loss to Vanderbilt would be being exposed to the world as a bad football team. And then we lost to the Commodores.

The picture above was taken just after the Dores kicked the game winning field goal (leaving 2 seconds on the clock: don't get me started on how poorly refs in the NCAA have handled clock management this season). That's Vandy celebrating on the right. They hadn't beaten us in 11 years.

The worst part? After the game, I realized that we have very little chance of beating Florida, Auburn, or Georgia Tech this year. That will give us, at best, a 7-5 record. Ouch.

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Hell, it's my blog I can bitch if I want to. And it's Friday the 13th, so I'll kill someone with a machete while wearing a hockey mask if I want to, too.

PayPal really knows how to get my goat. One month ago tomorrow, I shipped a 24 pound package via USPS Economy Parcel Post to Argentina. (The contents were some Masters of the Universe figures I sold for a friend on eBay.) The buyer has grown impatient after a mere 3 weeks of waiting for an international Economy Parcel Post (read as "slow boat") package and has earlier this week opened a dispute with PayPal for the cost of the item. Of course, this means that PayPal has put a "temporary hold" on my account in the amount of the payment. If this were a $29.50 item, that's be no big deal. But it's not. It's a $295.00 item.

So now, my Paypal account is essentially useless to me until PayPal realizes that I did ship the item, the buyer is just being incredibly impatient, and I'm in the clear. My past experience with Paypal tells me that this will take about 90 days. Meanwhile, PayPal will be hassling me to pay them what I "owe" them (HA!) and I will be unable to take eBay payments through PayPal. As anyone who sells on eBay knows, this means that it is pointless to try to sell anything on eBay. Therefore, no income for me for 3 months.

Once again, let me say to you people out there: PayPal sucks. If you use it, learn to enjoy the sensation of someone grabbing you by the balls and squeezing while ramming a Louisville Slugger up your ass. Fuck you, PayPal.

(Granted, I am well aware that the problem in this case is not actually PayPal, but the dipshit who decided that economy international postage should arrive on his doorstep within 3 weeks of shipping. But since I'm not currently in the mood to travel to Argentina to avenge this disruption in my life, I'm attacking the messenger. PayPal doesn't care.)

On a completely unrelated note, why do MLB and the NFL have Breast Cancer Awareness Months? Exactly how many players in either of those leagues are female? In 2002, only 3,000 more women in the U.S. were killed by accidents than died from killer breasts. (That's less than 10 a day in a country with 300 million people.) When was the last time you heard of an Accident Awareness Campaign? Breast cancer isn't even the largest killer of women in America. It doesn't even make the top 5. Alzheimer's Disease is credited with killing more women than breast cancer. (However, a Alzheimer's Awareness Month wouldn't make much of an impression, as everyone who cared to promote it would forget about it by the time it arrived.) I suggest that breast cancer is so widely championed these days simply because it is the only one of the top ten killers of women that doesn't also kill large numbers of men.

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