dsandler.org

Have you been keeping up with the posts on erinmak? It’s an excellent substitute for the gripping bloggery lately absent from this very page. (I’ve been busy. Um, super busy.)

• No secretary left behind. “I’m sorry, but I got a huge kick out of watching Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings get trounced up, down, backwards and forwards on Celebrity Jeopardy! yesterday by the actor Michael McKean.”
• Rebecca Traister gets it wrong…again. “Salon’s Rebecca Traister is quickly becoming someone I actively despise. That’s a short list that you really don’t want to be on.”
• You need to be watching: Studio 60. “This week’s episode was classic Sorkin, although ironically, Mark McKinney, the Kids in the Hall and SNL alum Sorkin hired as a consultant, was credited with the story, which is rare, because Sorkin doesn’t often share credit.”
• Ever get that “not-so-feminist” feeling? “And here’s the thing, you ‘good’ feminists out there: this is the kind of crap that turns women against feminism permanently. If the tent is not big enough, people just walk out.”

Amanda got the idea to capture every hour photographically. Naturally I want to follow suit, because, you know, my initial response to anything essentially ephemeral is, “oh, quick, capture it.” I see this take-a-photo-on-the-hour idea “becoming a thing”, as Barney might say.

Diedrich Coffee, the OC-based retailer and wholesaler (known in Houston for its beautiful—now defunct—Westheimer location, which was actually owned by a local Houston franchisee since all Diedrich company-owned stores were sold to Starbucks a couple of months ago), has been selected to provide coffee for the new Fondren Library Pavilion. The Thresher editors are cautiously optimistic and hope the new caffeine stand differentiates itself from the ever-improving Coffeehouse with longer hours (possible) or food (unlikely).

In other news, Shipley’s coffee is still terrible—even worse than the (not dead, just) badly-burned coffee they make here in the departmental kitchen. Bleah.

Fig. 1. Taken from Yahoo!’s documentation. (Recommended, my ass.)

OK, I have to take a break from writing my paper to complain about the new “Fully Featured” Yahoo! Groups email style, which was just turned on by default for everyone. Oh, but it’s got features, you say. Bah! My nice little plain-text emails have all been replaced by ugly, web-bugged, bulky HTML.

I had originally feared that you needed a Yahoo! ID to opt out of this monstrosity, but apparently you can switch back to “traditional” (read: plain text) emails by firing off a message to groupname-traditional@yahoogroups.com.

Over on erinmak: Why E and I are watching Studio 60, and you should, too. “The show has some problems…but I was sticking with it, mostly out of residual West Wing loyalty to Aaron Sorkin. After this past Monday’s episode, though — which is a two-parter, so you can catch the next part this coming Monday — I’m prepared to exhort you to watch it.”

We have MSNBC on in the background; it’s Matthews + Olbermann, already a pretty solid pair, backed up by Williams, Russert, and Brokaw. Predictably, we’re making snarky comments in-between interesting developments. (Will be updated.)

Just a reminder (to the US citizens^* out there) to find your polling place and go vote today. If you don’t like any of the candidates, isn’t there still one that you dislike least? If you feel like the government has gotten off track but don’t particularly like the opposition candidate in your area, well, it’s OK to vote the party and not the person. Most importantly: It is your responsibility, like paying taxes or dry-cleaning your dress shirts or eating a balanced diet, to periodically nudge the government in a way it is powerless to ignore. So be a grown-up and vote.

Or, “Reason #173 why How I Met Your Mother makes me laugh harder than any other show currently on TV.” Stills from the last scene in tonight’s ep, “Swarley,” as soon as I can find ‘em.