Garrett M. Vonk

I just found this spam comment in my moderation queue… Definitely more positive and uplifting than most.

Spam Comment left today

Wait, does that say “have gun”? Never mind.

So there’s this writer at The Times Online (British Times, not New York) who seems to be the latest graduate of The Kevin McCullough School of Irresponsible Pseudo-Journalism. The gist of her latest article is that many adult men are basically grown-up babies, unable to emerge from their youth because of their silly predilection for their most childish of habits: video games.

I know, it’s 2008 on the internet and I shouldn’t even deign to respond to attention whores like this writer. I understand that if we feed the troll, her goal is achieved. I just can’t let gems like these go unanswered…

At my college evening class last week, two intelligent, thirtysomething suited guys – solicitors or managers to judge from their e-mail addresses – were talking about their new Xbox 360s and what transcendent joy was to be had from them. I eavesdropped more attentively. Apparently, in Gears of War, the smallest details of the largest battles were crystal clear, in widescreen! Surely they were discussing their children’s computer games? Xboxes are toys, after all.

As are DVD players, computers, and board games, right? Surely, this woman has seen grown men playing chess in a park, and didn’t remark to herself that they were silly for playing with toys.

This reeks of the same naivete that puts the anachronistic notion in many people’s heads that fans of animated programming or comic books are stuck in their childhood because OhmyGodyoulikecartoonsandcartoonsareforkids! Um, no, there are whole realms of animation and comics that are specifically designed for adult consumption, not to mention graphic novels. Certainly, advertisers have been paying attention to this marketplace for quite some time, seeing as how they actually know how to do the research.

But wait–this writer did the research, too! She just ignored it.

Worried, I went unto Google and retrieved this trend for you: Nielsen Media Research surveyed American men aged 18 to 34 and found 48 per cent of them had used a games console recently, and on average, it was for 2 hours 43 minutes per day. Yes, half of not-so-young men spend nearly three hours a day gaming.

Kate, my dear, if that worries you, I beg you not to look up the statistics on hours spent watching TV.

Yes, there are plenty of adult gamers and no, we don’t appreciate being marginalized a la Fox News. Video games did $8 billion more in business than movies did in 2007 in the US. Note to journalists: If you don’t take gamers seriously, we’ll return the favor.

[The Dark Ages - Times Online]

photo credit: GodsMoon

Traffic politics are a major point of contention for me, encompassing a huge range of issues from red light cameras to random checkpoints. For this reason, I’ll probably check out Parking Wars on A&E as long as I can take it without changing the channel in frustration.

A blog I found last year, ambiguously named The Newspaper, does a fantastic job of rounding up the “politics of driving” stories. Here’s a sampling of the stories they covered this year:

In September, motorist Brett Darrow’s videotaped harassment during a traffic stop in a small Saint Louis city became international news. Our follow-up coverage showed area police continued to harass the young motorist, and even threaten him, over the publicity.

We also helped spread the word in June about the Virginia’s so-called abuser fees that turned what other states treat as an ordinary speeding ticket for driving as little as 15 MPH over the limit in a 65 zone (or 10 MPH over on sections of Interstate 85) into an offense carrying a maximum penalty of $3550. [...] Many motorists in the same state were surprised to learn in October that they faced a $2500 fine for not making a lane change away from a police officer stopped on the side of the road.

[...]

In April, we broke the news that a little known California agency intended to install speed cameras and the first-ever stop sign — not stoplight — camera, in violation of state law. We followed up with a report on the stop sign camera’s activation in July. But the news was not good for the ticketing industry in Minnesota. The state’s supreme court struck down of the legality of red light cameras with a strongly worded decision in April. In Kansas, ticketing picked up as police struck deals to hide video cameras in commercial big rig trucks to issue tickets to passing motorists.

Some UK motorists discovered ways to prove speed camera tickets inaccurate, including the use of a cell phone’s GPS readings as evidence.

Some of that stuff is pretty infuriating. (stop sign cameras?)

Somehow, the story of the Geico Cavemen getting a sitcom deal on ABC flew around the blogosphere under my radar last week. So, when Heather clued me in while we were on vacation in Florida over the weekend, I absolutely didn’t believe her. No way, I protested; despite the nagging feeling that we live in a time where originality is at an all-time low on television, I still couldn’t believe that a major network would seriously discuss airing a half-hour sitcom based on the cavemen from the Geico commercials.

Yet here I sit eating lunch, watching the teaser for Cavemen, actually set to air this fall, in which the Cro-Magnon lead characters will “struggle with prejudice on a daily basis [and] strive to live the lives of normal thirty-somethings in 2007 Atlanta.”

I suppose that the mixed reactions around the web indicate that I’m wrong to imagine that a show like this should be universally panned before it even makes it to air. For example, as far as I can tell, one film blogger seems to be totally serious when she calls the premise “can’t-miss-funny“. Still, Ain’t It Cool News called the yet-to-be-leaked pilot episode “astoundingly awful”, and there are those who even find the concept quasi-racist.

I know I’ll be on the edge of my seat this fall, if only to see how the caveman prosthetics hold up in high definition.

I just saw this quote in an article about the Virginia Tech shootings. Does this send chills down anyone else’s spine?

Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government’s files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.

It doesn’t really surprise me that they have a huge, privacy-invading database of our prescriptions, but what is unnerving to me is how definitive they consider it. I can just picture a Shadowy Government Official at his computer… “Why, he must not have been on antidepressants,” *clickety-clackety* “I don’t see it anywhere in our records.”

Edit: Someone at Boing Boing noticed the quote too and has a little more information on this database.