Wednesday, January 02, 2008

News of the Day

+ Sure, we may never get to see new episodes again, but we can relive the best of Battlestar Galactica Season 3 when the DVDs are finally released on March 25. Start saving your pennies now. [Buddy TV.com]

+ Lake Superior State University took its annual seven minutes in the sun (and trust us, that's a good thing because there is zero sun in Michigan in winter) this past week with their list of 19 words and phrases that were so overused, they made cliches turn away in shame. Topping the list? The phrase "a perfect storm," which they said "was numbingly applied to virtually any notable coincidence." When pressed, however, scholars were forced to admit it was still a pretty good movie. [Reuters]

+ Finally, a contest I could win! Yesterday morning, the ESPN Zone Ultimate Couch Potato Competition kicked into high gear. And by high gear, I mean four guys climbed into a La-Z-Boy and started watching TV. No, really. Here's how Yahoo describes it: "The participants, sitting in recliners in front of a dozen 42-inch high-definition plasma televisions and a couple of 14-foot HD projection TVs, will try to watch the most continuous hours of televised sports. They can order unlimited food and drinks, but can't sleep or leave their recliners except for restroom breaks once every eight hours." No word yet on whether or not any of the participants have been Medivaced out for couch sores. [Yahoo News]

+ The Washington Post ran a fascinating review on a new book called, Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them by David Anderegg. I'll be running out to get this book at my lunch hour today and delving into it as soon as possible. Why? Because of excerpts like this:

"Indeed, nerds are just about the last group of people it's safe to mock in polite company, which infuriates Anderegg, a professor of psychology at Bennington College in Vermont and a practicing psychotherapist: 'We act like it's all in good fun to communicate to our kids that people who are smart and do well in school and like science fiction and computers are also people who smell bad and look ugly and are so repulsive that they are not allowed to have girlfriends. And then we wonder why it's so hard to motivate kids to do well in school.'"
[Washington Post]

Hell yes...and hell yes again. Sing it, nerd brother!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm a bad boy. I read the book in Borders and didn't pay any money for it.

Essentially he argues for more sensitivity for and tolerance of nerds (using more or less the standard definition of 'socially inept person with technical interests'), for the reason that America needs engineers and scientists, and that American anti-intellectualism has negative side effects (among other things the disastrous presidency of W). All very well, but unfortunately the way outsourcing is shaping up salesmanship is going to be a lot more important in doing well in the 21st century than knowledge, and being different is going to be worse than ever. (And no, I don't like this either.)