The Smarmy Carny

The NBA announced their Player Dress Code, which requires all players to wear business casual attire whenever they are engaged in team or league business.

No more sunglasses indoors! No more medallions over clothing! As expected, several players are outraged and have been vocal on this issue already, even though the league (voluntarily) passed it by the players' union first.

When in attendance at a game (but not playing and in a jersey), players are required to wear a sport jacket. This certainly puts the "sport" back in "sport jacket."

Of all the quotes from players, most of them are understandable. You can actually see where they are coming from. The most outlandish quote comes from Camby:

"I don't see it happening unless every NBA player is given a stipend to buy clothes." -Marcus Camby, Denver Nuggets (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 10/19/05)

How's this for a stipend? How about your team overpays you by a bajillion dollars??? Marcus Camby . . . 2005 . . . $8,500,000. That's all I need to say . . .

. . . but I'll say more. As I mentioned in my "Pro Sports Unions Are Worthless" post, the NBA minimum salary is $385,277. For comparison, the salary for a WNBA's salary was capped at $174,000, and many of the WNBA players earned less than I do annually! Even when you're a huge freak, I think you can afford a couple suits and business casual attire without demanding a clothing stipend. Camby, get over it! You win the "Weakest Excuse Award." No one is going to feel sorry for you and your new dress code because of the cost to the players. I earn well under 1/8 of the league minimum, and I can manage to buy some business casual clothing.

The "Take It Like a Pro" Award goes to Mo Williams:

"You know when you put the rules in, Allen Iverson is not going to abide by it. But he's one player, and that's the way they look at it. I have dress clothes at home, so I get to break them out. That's cool. I can see what they're trying to do." -Mo Williams, Milwaukee Bucks (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 10/19/05)

If you're a fan of Lost, you just might think this video is absolutely hilarious.

This is another one of those flash videos with lip syncing. In it, the characters of Lost lip sync to "Bohemian Polka," Weird Al's version of "Bohemian Rhapsody." According to Newgrounds, it was created by CapnBob. Take a look at "Lost Rhapsody." (Click the link, then click "Play Movie.")

The genius of this video is all the Lost puns that he found in the Bohemian Rhapsody. I was impressed.

The important thing is to give the video at least a minute of your time, since the lack of video editing quality is quickly apparent, but the jokes take a little bit to start up. But then, that's how Bohemian Rhapsody is, too.

If you like the song, you can find it on Weird Al Yankovic's Alapalooza album.

Crash! Burn!

Ouch!

The hard drive holding the server's operating system suffered a horrendous crash and burn yesterday.

I had the system up within a few hours, as I thankfully had a usable spare hard drive available, and it was even the exact same size as the defective drive.

Unfortunately, I had other things to set up long before I could take the time to get the web server back up and functioning properly. The fact that the web server data ended up with a different label didn't help the process much, either.

It's a good thing that the drive didn't go a couple weeks ago when I was bedridden (or futonridden, as was my situation) without any possible attack on the problems.

Now I'll just have to learn how well Western Digital's tech support and return policy work.

Shoe
by [unprintable].

Here is the Foto Friday for this week. I think I have finally figured out where all those missing socks have gone!

I recently joined up on Flickr.

As of right now, there's not much on my account (that is public, anyway), but bookmark it. You never know what will pop up there.

Happy Birthday, Microsoft

In October 1985, Windows first shipped.

What would we be doing now if Windows had never shipped? Would the 95% of computer users that currently use Windows be using an Apple OS instead? If so, would Apple still be charging an arm and a leg for their Macs? And with only Apple on the scene, would Linux have been developed as much as it has? The answers to these questions, just like the number of licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.

Back then, it didn't even include Internet Explorer.

A Lost gnome?

Back in February, I posted a bit about the garden gnome theft adventures that occur around the world. Tonight, I was pleased to see yet another instance of garden gnome theft.

For those who are obsessed with the television series Lost, you are well aware of what I am about to discuss. For those who do not watch Lost, I certainly feel for you. For goodness' sake, go out and buy/rent/borrow the Season One DVDs and catch up to the rest of us. You will thank me later.

So, in a flashback, Hugo/Hurley and his buddy Johnny quit their jobs at a fast-food chicken restaurant. As retaliation, they steal quite a few garden gnomes from around town and spell out "CLUCK YOU" on their ex-manager's lawn.

I'll bet that once ABC gets their picture gallery up from the "Everybody Hates Hugo" episode, I'll link to it if possible, or at least let you know.

As a secondary note, Johnny is played excellently by DJ Qualls, the lanky geek from The New Guy, Road Trip, and Comic Book Villains.

Enhanced Orange?

Apparently, scientists are working overtime to enhance common colors that you and I are already familiar with.

That's how it seems, anyway, because The Homeland Security Advisory System has had some interesting twists to it due to the threats against the New York City subway system this weekend.

Now, in general, I don't have any problem with the Homeland Security Advisory System, despite many people's complaints. Let's face it — many people just don't read, listen to, or watch the news regularly, and I like the idea of a simple system for telling everyone if something is or might be going on. (In fact, this site perpetually displays the HSAS threat level in Muppet form. Just take a look at the sidebar.) More importantly, it lets the appropriate agencies know when to really buckle down and make sure they don't miss anything crucial.

Now that's not to say I don't have any problems with the system. Why in the world do we have a green level on there? We all know that no one with half a mind will use that threat level! Who's going to lower the advisory to the "Low" setting of Green? You just know that if we get attacked and the setting is Green, whoever is responsible for that is utterly screwed. So, we are currently on Yellow alert, right? Right . . . unless you're in New York City, where the status has been Orange all along. And unless you were using mass transit three months ago, when there was a raised status for mass transit only.

These, as odd as they are, are perfectly understandable. I have no issue swallowing these discrepancies, but let me mention the latest color change. Suppose a threat is made on New York's subway system, and you are riding San Francisco's BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). What would you suppose the threat level would be? Yellow? Nope. Orange? Nope. Try this on for size:

"Enhanced Orange" That's right . . . it's certainly not Red, but it's more than Orange. It must be Enhanced Orange. BART spokesman Lynton Johnson was quoted as saying that this was not taken because of any specific threat to BART or even to San Francisco! I don't know about you, but in my book, that makes for Enhanced Yellow, at best. I guess that wasn't an option, because BART has been on Orange since the London subway bombings. Perhaps they should have gone with Enhanced Yellow back then, and then they could have bumped up to Orange now.

Bumping up your threat level because of a specific threat to a city 3,000 miles away? Maybe San Francisco just feels like they have been left out of the spotlight for a bit too long. Who knows?

I know there are only five levels because they didn't want to be changing it all the time, but when you take into account that no one is going to use the lowest one, and we seem to have been avoiding Blue as well, that leaves us with only three. Of course, Red is also observed for the "something is actually happening right now or has just happened, so start panicing" situations, which leaves us with two functional threat levels. With two functional threat levels, it's no wonder we have already started splitting these two colors up. Nonetheless, I would prefer the use of "Red-Orange" to "Enhanced Orange," since that's technically the correct term for the method. Honestly, I don't like Red-Orange, either because then you hear Red and start panicing before you even get to the "-Orange" part. I'm sure artistic folks could come up with a color that fits, though. Maybe "Tomato Soup."

Of course, I just want to hear Stone Phillips say "The terror alert level for San Francisco's BART has been raised to Tomato Soup today."