I’m sitting in my bed, watching CSI: NY and enjoying the delights and mysteries of wireless. To that end, I offer what little I can before my battery gives out entirely:

  • It’s episode 2, and CSI: NY hasn’t quite come together yet. Dark, Gothic, deep, painful, angsty — and this week, featuring a punchline like, “Hey man, tell me something! Who ratted me out!”

    But you see, it was the rats who produced the evidence! Ironically, rats did.

    On the other hand, Gary Sinise? Honestly, he could be reading the TV Guide and I’d probably tune in every Wednesday night.

    “Tuesday, 7PM Reba: Reba deals with being a single mom… while her family makes life… difficult for her.”

  • Seeing the Sarah Jessica Parker Gap commercial reminds me of when I was at the Gap on the weekend:

    Customer: Um, excuse me, do you know where I could find the jeans? The ones from the commercial with Sarah Jessica Parker?
    Clerk: Yep, they’re over there, right under her picture.
    Customer: Oh, no, I mean the ones with the black stripe, right down the–
    Clerk: (robotically) Yes see about that well you know she actually did those herself yes herself and then she wore them in the commercial.
    Customer: (struggling feebly) So…
    Clerk: …so we don’t have them.
    (Customer leaves)
    Clerk: …frigging commercials.

  • My eye won’t stop twitching. My left eye. Twitching and fluttering and flickering across my head.

    It is driving me mad.

  • Checking my referrers this morning, I noticed that Stacy had the courage to post some pictures of herself in underwear or a bathing suit or whatever.

    I don’t think I’ve ever posted a picture of more than my face, or possibly my upper body, on the internet. And it has always been clothed in at least one or two layers of tee shirt, protecting the world at large from the pale, mole-dotted surface below. I’m not far off in thinking that the internet, when it considers this, is breathing a huge sigh of relief.

    I do wonder though, how successful a guy would be if he got into the CamGirl business. Are there really women out there who’d pop in on a guy with a webcam, and left occasional random pictures of himself, say, doing 20 lb curls or reading homework in a muscle tee?

    And if so, does anyone know where I could hire a guy like that? Because I seriously doubt I’m going to find an audience to watch a guy eat chips, download episodes of MST3K, and throw empty water bottles at the recycling bin across the room.

  • Lisa notes that the coverage of weblogging and its influence on the election is intensifying, and closes by observing two key objections: first, that while webloggers have all the power of instant publishing at their fingertips, the tool of self-publishing does not instantly make them journalists; second, that by the end of the national conventions, most of the webloggers were resorting to recylcing each other’s material.

    I personally love that these kinds of analyses are being published now in the mainstream media, years after more or less the same criticisms were levelled at web journals by other internet writers. It’s like the hosts of CNN’s Crossfire are just noticing the shortcomings of web-based punditry now, several dozen months after the rest of us.

    Like Seanbaby said,

    Are recounts of people’s dull lives better or worse now that they have an audience? No matter how obscure your geocities piece of shit is, at least 2 or 3 strangers are going to end up seeing it every day. Are you ready to entertain them, or are you just going to tell them how tired you are and how noisy the guy was next to you at a movie that sooo sucked? Self-publishers have a responsibility to self-edit. Take the extra second to ask yourself if anyone but you and your grandma want to read it. We’re a vouyeristic public, but that only means we want to watch people take showers. We don’t care how crowded the mall was today.

    Every time I sit down to try to be like all the other weblogs, two questions cross my mind. The first is, “Where the hell am I going to find the time to get all of these links and read the newspaper from start to finish?” And the second is, “What the hell content am I providing, aside from links that other people have listed?” or worse, “What am I doing aside from linking to other people who are linking to things?”

    Salon discusses Instapundit’s assertion that the technology gap is closing, to the point where the tools available provide the “insider tricks” that would otherwise distinguish the rank amateur from the professional. It happened with music, Reynolds says, and now it’s happening with digital imaging in the film and photography field, and with weblogging in the journalism world.

    Except that someone can hand a three thousand dollar camera, with a fifteen hundred dollar lens and a thousand dollar flash, to me, and I’m still going to take some pretty shitty pictures with it. I can have all the tools in the world, and it’s still not going to change the fact that I’m not a professional.

    Similarly, I can have a website — and have had, for about five years — and it’s not going to make me a more successful writer than, say, someone writing for the Times. This seems to be pretty much common sense, so I suspect that what many weblog pundits are actually implying with all of this is that, if given the proper access to an audience, any old person with word processing skills and an interest in research can be a better reporter than the ones on television.

    And if that really is the case, well damn, then I need to get myself a newspaper subscription.

1% remaining now. And that’s just my mental capacity — you should see my laptop battery!

Bwah! I crack me up.