From CNN: Keyboards taking over cursive in 3rd grade.

Hmm, interesting.

I’m sitting through the end of Live and Let Die on TNN. There’s a scene towards the end where 007 and Solitaire enter a secret underground hideout, and as they entered I felt a sense of deja vu. That underground set looks just like the underground lab in Enter the Dragon! My suspicions grew stronger as they went through the metal sliding door. That door looked EXACTLY like the elevator door that Bruce Lee exited, with a small legion of willing-but-incompetent foot soldiers waiting for him.

This is really starting to gnaw at me. Both movies were released in 1973, which makes me even more sure that there was some set sharing going on. Does anyone know the truth?

I’ve played this Honda commercial several times over the past few weeks, and I still can’t get over it. It’s so brilliant it hurts.

From today’s Washington Post: Middle schoolers increasingly using IMs instead of the telephone.

I remember when I first discovered the telephone as a way to keep in touch with my friends. I was in a Magnet-style school of some kind from fourth grade through high school, so I never really had the advantage of living near my friends. Social interaction prior to becoming mobile (hello driver’s license!) was limited to time at school and time on the phone. Sure, we’d all go over to each others’ homes, but it was never as simple as just walking down the street and being back before dinner. To this day, I wonder if the social costs were justified by the higher-quality education. I always wanted to be more social, but I wonder if my introverted personality was the cause or the effect — nature or nurture?

Anyway, back to IMs. I was somewhat atypical of the normal kid in school…okay, I was a nerd. I got my first modem in 9th grade and it didn’t take very long for me to discover BBSs. Back then, realtime online conversations were difficult to find; there was no realtime connection between any of these silo bulletin boards. Hell, email was typically limited in scope to users of the BBS, unless your sysop was a subscriber to FIDOnet. Once you found a BBS with multiple modem lines, starting a conversation was relatively easy because the medium was relatively novel and people were very willing just to start up a conversation. Ah, the good old days…

In 10th grade I received my first “real” computer account on our high school’s MicroVAX. It had eight incoming 2400 bps lines, and it had an honest-to-goodness connection to the internet. At a blazing 9600 bps, it was pretty pokey if more than one person was trying to telnet out, but it worked. That’s when we all discovered the VMS PHONE utility, and it very quickly tied of all of the modem lines at night to the extent that our admins (teachers) had to limit or altogether eliminate PHONE access. One particularly driven friend of mine then created a mini-utility to mimic online conversations by sending emails with the text of the message in the subject; the VAX (running some archaic version of VMS) would alert any online user who received an email during his or her session with the sender’s username and the subject line of the email. I don’t know if that particular activity was ever discovered, and it was clunky at best, but it kept us online and communicating anyway. How interesting; when it was just as easy (and often simpler) just to pick up the phone and call someone, why were we all competing for space on eight slow phone lines to type to each other online and risk getting caught in the process?

Well, for one, it was much easier to communicate that way for me. I’ve never been able to communicate as well in person as I have through written means, and PHONE allowed me to show people more than just my “quiet antisocial” side. Being online also maintained a sort of permanent presence; it was a lot like living next door to someone who was actually miles away. There was no phone set to pick up and no number to dial; if we were both online, PHONEing was as natural as walking up and talking to someone. And one very important feature of online communication was the privacy. I assume that parents today are well versed with Instant Messenger and email, but mine certainly weren’t. I was the only use to use the home computer. I was able to type things that I couldn’t dream of saying out loud on the phone, and by just being on the computer my parents usually thought that I was working.

Then I discovered MUDs/MUSHes/MUSEs/MOOs/etc. That dinky internet connection allowed me to connect realtime to other servers, where hundreds of people were gathered…at the same time, in realtime! Think of Ultima Online, Everquest, or The Sims Online, only text-based, free, and not always fantasy-based. It didn’t take long for me to get sucked into those worlds. I spent very little time on the “D&D” servers, although those seemed to be pervasive at the time. I was more interested in social interaction, and less in going on conquests to kill dragons. I was suddenly and finally able to talk to anyone there without trying to figure out the social cues and body language that were required to start a relationship in the real world. It was rather addictive, I must admit, but I somehow managed not to lose myself. And I think they played a pivotal role in my emotional growth. In fact, I believe internet/BBS access had a very significant and important role in my social development through high school.

Superficially, I believe I was very much the nerd’s nerd until abouth 10th grade. No sense of pop culture, little initiative to go out and meet people, not easy to speak to…the list goes on and on. Even in the Magnet program’s culture of nerdiness, I was one of the quiet ones in the corner. Anyone in that situation understands the difficulty in breaking out. And while I did end up on the phone for hours through the rest of high school, I don’t think I would have gotten to where I was by my senior year if I hadn’t been able to go online and chat with my school friends “under the radar.” I had no peers who lived near me, I had no siblings, and my parents were so out of touch with American culture that it hurt. Had I used the telephone for every online conversation, I would probably have gone deaf in my left ear a long time ago. And had I not been able to go online and “talk” to my friends, I would probably be as withdrawn from society as ever. Considering my current social situation, that is a truly sobering thought. I would have never screwed up the courage to talk to my future wife, I would have slogged through college without friends (a truly sad prospect…and I know it happens), and life would probably mean a lot less to me than it does now. I can’t say that going online had EVERYTHING to do with my relative success, but it was certainly a keystone in my social development. Ironically, doing all of these things — which were considered nerdy and not mainstream at the time — helped me to become a less withdrawn, less “nerdy” person.

When I read that middle schoolers are increasingly going online rather than using the phone, then, I can’t say that I’m surprised. It makes a lot of sense to me.

Dieters who look for shortcuts in this modern era have their choice of weight loss methods. You’ve got ephedra (if you don’t want to live very long), Slim-Fast (if you don’t mind drinking non-nutritious chalk/cake batter), Myoplex (if you don’t mind drinking nutritious chalk/cake batter), and the list goes on and on. Old stalwart dieting companies like Weight Watchers are happy to take your money in exchange for exercise advice, recipe suggestions, and whatever else it takes to make you think you’re not being fleeced. Maybe this doesn’t sound so cool after all. Maybe you think that the best way is to eat *REAL* food carefully and engage in exercise. And maybe, especially if you’ve tried at least one of these so-called miracle diets, you’ve wondered how people dieted years ago.

Lemme tell you — miracle dieting wasn’t any better thirty years ago. It was MUCH worse.

Take a look at these Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974. Do you see anything appetizing there? Perhaps the Fish Balls? Can you believe that someone actually thought THIS would be a better way to lose weight than, say, eating lots of salad and going out for a jog twice a week?

Call this a daring guess, but I would say that all people who consider themselves fans of computer/video gaming history have played at least three different variants of Pong. There are probably thousands of Pong-like games on the web, and at some point I’m sure it became fashionable to write Java/Javascript/Flash Ponglets.

…Well, how about a Pong that is arguably older than old school? Check this out. I guarantee you will come away unimpressed, yet impressed; annoyed, yet amazed; and bored, yet very humored.

I came across a blog entry in PetrifiedTruth today that purported to report a first-hand account of the relief efforts underway in Iraq:

UMM QASR/BASRA, 30 March 2003

When we finally made it to Safwan, Iraq, what we saw was utter chaos. Iraqi men, women and children were playing it up for the TV cameras, chanting: “With our blood, with our souls, we will die for you Saddam.”

Different versions of that very quote, but with a common theme, I would come to hear several times over the next three days I spent in Iraq. The people of Iraq are terrified of Saddam Hussein.

Now, the name of the blog and the nature of the other articles in it suggest that the author is biased. But it’s hard to interpret the Iraqi man’s quote in more than one way.

Reports from Iraq regarding Iraqi military tactics are rather interesting. Troops and supplies are being found in “hospitals” and “schools,” and Iraqi soldiers are dressing as civilians over their uniforms. There are also reports of civilians being used as “human shields” around key military targets.

…and Iraq is very loudly complaining that U.S. forces are killing Iraqi civilians. How compassionate of them.

I’m watching a live video feed from nbc4.com of the “shock and awe” campaign that started within the past half hour. The footage is scary…simply astounding in magnitude.

News anchors are claiming that the primary targets are presidential palaces and other military installations, which are typically forbidden to civilians. The hope, of course, is that civilian lives are spared while the government and military capacities are severely affected. I am truly sorry to know that some civilians will undoubtedly be killed in this action. This is the terrible consequence of war, a war we were forced to engage.

Shock and awe, indeed. And this time we’re all watching it live. I don’t really understand how Saddam thought he could WIN this war. Was he calling Bush’s bluff, observing the worldwide opposition and the U.N.’s stance and figuring that the U.S. would not act alone?

Some news updates from CNN. Among them is this little tidbit:

“U.S. military officials confirm oil wells are burning in southern Iraq near the Kuwaiti border. Rumsfeld said the Pentagon had reports that Iraqi forces had set ‘as many as three or four’ wells ablaze in the southern part of the country.”

This, the work of a man who swore that he would not set fire to Iraq’s oil fields. Who also swore that he had no weapons of mass destruction.