Question of the Week
Have you had any interesting moments of cognitive dissonance lately?
Two. One was yesterday while at the gym as various news outlets covered the Austin plane attack into an IRS building. As I was flipping through the channels while ESPN was at commercial, I caught Glenn Beck addressing it and stating that the news does not cause people to go insane. Glenn Beck. Saying the news doesn’t make people go insane. It hurt my head in a very real way.
The other was this weekend when my wife and I went out to see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in Harvard Square. At the end of the film, the reel started jittering. Not two seconds after the credits started to roll, the screen burned out and froze. The audience sat there for probably a full minute just waiting to see what would happen next. “You’re not going to fool us that easily, Terry Gilliam!” we thought.
As time went on it became obvious that the burned film was not part of the movie; not some sort of nihilistic sendoff to the late Heath Ledger like one might have expected. Instead it was very much real and almost certainly by mistake. A few of us walked up to the window into the projection booth and saw an ancient, Cold War-era projector slowly emitting a bit of smoke.
We’re glad we saw it when we did.
Graph of the Week
These are my raw weekly site stats for the first 7 weeks. The numbers are sort of relative in that they’re probably greatly inflated over the number of “real” hits this site gets given that every time someone hits the front page it will make a request for several PHP pages. That’s partly why I like RSS subscribers: one hit, one page. Keeps the stats honest. It also doesn’t account for spam traffic, of course.
Still, taken with those grains of salt it shows that the traffic is steadily improving. I’m expecting this week won’t match last week’s high due to the fact that I had a spike in traffic one day last week and this week I’ve had some server down-time. It should still be decent, though.
Links of the Week
Have you heard of the CARD Act of 2009? If you’re an American, you should have. When it goes into effect this coming Monday it will mean important new regulations for credit card corporations aimed at protecting consumers – that’d be you – from fraud. However, it only works if you know about it. So educate yourself. Unless you, y’know, trust credit card companies to self-regulate. Heh heh.
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