Give Me an E!

The Texas House has approved legislation to ban sexually suggestive routines by school cheerleaders:

"Girls can get out and do all of these overly sexually performances and we applaud them and that's not right," said Democratic Rep. Al Edwards of Houston, who filed the legislation.

Edwards argued that lascivious exhibitions are a distraction for high school students that result in pregnancies, high school dropouts, contraction of AIDS and herpes and "cutting off their youthful life at an early age."

If Edwards hopes to turn the thoughts of teens away from sex, he'll have to restrict a lot more than an NC-17 rendition of "Rock Steady." He seems to have forgotten what it was like after the adolescent change of life known as Peter Brady, which turns the entire world into a lascivious exhibition.

When I was a teen, a legislator trying to protect me from knocking up a dropout would have banned all of the following:

• The time Laura Dumais fell into my arms and my left wrist inadvertently reached second base
• Drawing the She-Hulk naked
• A breeze of at least three knots
• Role-playing a female NPC with a charisma score of 15 or better in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
• The scene in The Sword and the Sorceror where Kathleen Beller had to be lathered in oil to prepare for her wedding
• Phoebe Cates

Good times.

Politics · 2005/05/05 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

R.S.V.P. at Any Time

This Saturday at MIT, a Time Traveler Convention will be held for anyone who hears about the event in the future and can find a way to attend:

We need you to help publicize the event so that future time travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web page is insufficient; in less than a year it will be taken down when I graduate, and futhermore, the World Wide Web is unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in major outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.

If MIT no longer exists at the time the invitation is received, time travelers are given the latitude and longitude of the event: 42:21:36.025 degrees N, 71:05:16.332 degrees W.

2005/05/04 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Giveaway: Radio UserLand Kick Start

We adopted a kitten from the humane society nine months ago who thinks he's a dog, and there's nothing he likes more than the taste of a computer book. A stack of them make an excellent scratching post, as I learned when he shredded a dozen copies of How to Use the Internet Eighth Edition.

This situation adds urgency to my need to give away more of my books, before they become either out-of-date or drenched with saliva.

I'm giving away four author's copies of Radio UserLand Kick Start, each in new condition and completely untouched by my catdog.

If you'd like to win one, post a comment on this Workbench entry or write about it on your weblog, linking to its permalink so I don't overlook it. I'll pay the postage to anywhere that I can send it for under $10.

Kick Start covers everything you need to get started with Radio UserLand, an Internet content management and programming tool that makes it simple to publish your own weblog, develop web services, and collect information from thousands of Internet sites. Several sample chapters can be read online.

During my last book giveaway, I awarded an extra copy to the person with the most inventive reason for wanting one. If I can scare up a fifth copy, I'll do that again here.

Publishing · Radio Userland · 2005/05/03 · 26 COMMENTS · Link

Symphony in Eight Bits

A funny video is making the rounds of a school choir performing Nintendo themes:

This next song needs a little bit of introduction. Keeping with the experimental nature of Redefined we decided that we would now do what some might consider an art piece. It's a little older than some of the music we've already sung today, and it's all original work from Japan. So I hope that you can all listen with open minds, and if you'll give me one second I need to boot it up.

The choir does a really nice Tetris, complete with falling blocks in L, S, and T shapes, and the Legend of Zelda swordfight scene is practically Shakespearean.

Some digging reveals that Redefined is an 18-member ensemble at the University of Wisconsin that kicks major a cappella ass.

They're auctioning off the last few copies of the CD that includes the "Redefined Nintendo" video on EBay.

Music · 2005/05/03 · Comment · Link

I'd Buy That for a Dollar

A stamp machine at the post office gave me dollar coins back as change -- five Sacagaweas and two Susan B. Anthonys. I gave some to my kids, who had to be convinced they were legal tender, and freaked out a clerk at an Arby's by using one.

"Are you sure you really want to spend this?" he asked, marveling at the golden coin honoring a woman so obscure there's no record of her appearance. A coin can't be doing very well when people think you spent one by accident.

Last week the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill to crowd out Sacagawea with new dollar coins for each president, beginning in 2007 with the first four: Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and Madison. I'm setting a task in Microsoft Outlook to corner the market in 2010 on Millard Fillmore, widely recognized as our least accomplished leader.

The earliest a Hillary Clinton dollar will be available is 2017.

Politics · 2005/05/02 · 12 COMMENTS · Link

I took Buzzword.Com offline for several hours this morning to compact the databases and perform some other server maintenance. I'm tempting fate by saying this, but so far, so good.

We're nearing the one-year anniversary of the server, which became the home for 3,000 longtime Weblogs.Com bloggers last June. I have some ambitious plans to mark the occasion, but for now my priority is to keep the active bloggers running smoothly and bring all of UserLand's upgrades online.

UserLand has a new version of Manila, the software hosting these weblogs, in beta release. There are a bunch of new features, among them a better way for bloggers to manage visitor comments and trackback.

Manila · 2005/05/01 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

That's Quite a Spectacle

Whenever a character in a movie is a by-the-book square who never got over the end of the 1950s, he wears plastic-top, metal-rim eyeglasses. Tom Hanks donned them in Catch Me If You Can, and you can't make a film about Malcolm X, NASA, or the JFK assassination without ordering them in bulk.

The glasses are especially effective if the buttoned-up wearer is one bad day from a total nervous breakdown, like the downsized defense contractor D-FENS, who rampages across Los Angeles to protest incivility in Falling Down.

I wrote about these glasses last year when I heard the only manufacturer, ArtCraft NewYork, was discontinuing the style. This was crushing news -- I step on my pair of Clubman Art-Rim frames at least twice a year and can barely see through a SuperGlue smudge in one lens.

Since then, I've heard from an executive at Shuron, the company that invented the style in 1941 and sold more than 17 million of them by 1970:

The Ronsir was in many movies and worn by many actors/celebrities -- Kevin Costner, Denzel Washington, Vince Lombardi, Nicholas Cage, and many others. The Ronsir is not going away.

Because I keep directing people to Shuron when they ask about the glasses, the company is sending me a free pair, which I believe makes me the world's first blogger/spokesmodel. I'm spending this weekend trying to come up with my own Blue Steel.

2005/04/30 · 14 COMMENTS · Link

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