Umph. Long week. Lots of meetings. Lots of recovering data from a server that was down all last week. A 24-hour bout of Can't-Get-Out-Of-Bed-itis. Time to think about things that I enjoy that don't involve score gaps or standard deviations:
(1) Walter Olson's Overlawyered.com. I cover only the ludicrous lawsuits that involves the educational system; Walter covers 'em all. Some are almost too hard to take - a cop wins over 87K pounds in damages because he was traumatized by watching someone die when his car hit theirs? - but some are funny enough to balance out the maddening ones. Like the story about Riverside, CA, whose citizens want to sue Fox Broadcast Co. for labeling them as "white trash" in a (fictional) TV series. Besides the ludicrousness of wanting to sue over a comment about an entire town by a fictional character in a fictional series, it should be pointed out to Riverside that, at least where I come from, one of the definitions of "white trash" is "people who sue at the drop of a hat, and hope to enrich themselves through lawsuits, rather than working for a living."
(2) Snopes.com. An utterly invaluable research tool for getting the real story behind hoaxes, frauds, scams, urban legends, rumors, real viruses, and any other goofy story making the rounds. Go to "What's New" to get the latest on Sobig.F, the relationship between a man's hand size and the size of some of his other bits, and whether Fox News used an outdated photo of NYC to illustrate a story about the recent blackout.
(3) Movie review sites like the Movie Review Query Engine, Rotten Tomatoes, and The Greatest Films. I'm addicted to film reviews and enjoy reading them even for movies I have no intention of seeing. For movies I do see, I read on average between 10 and 20 reviews for each. I just love knowing what someone else thought of the film experience, and what someone else caught that I did not.
The MRQE allows you to type in any movie name, and it retrieves every online review. Rotten Tomatoes ranks movies by the number of tomatoes thrown at them, so it's fun to root through the movies with the most appalling ratings (Gigli, anyone?). And The Greatest Films site rehashes all the classics, with lengthy reviews and good background information.
Of course, when it comes to review of bad movies, there's always the site for which I proofread, Jabootu.com.
(4) Bill Holbrook's comic strips - Safe Havens, On the FastTrack, and Kevin & Kell. The last one is particularly inventive; a group of anthropomorphic animals recreate a very human environment and address topics like parenting, mixed marriages (herbivores and carnivores - just think of the in-law issues!), adolescence, a real dog-eat-dog corporate world, racism (or, rather, speciesism), and dealing with spam on the internet. The Bradys' job was easy, compared to the effort required to blend a family composed of two wolves, a rabbit, and a porcupine (she was adopted). If you've got serious time to waste, start at the beginning (1995!) and read straight on through.
Posted by kswygert at August 29, 2003 11:28 AM