Last night’s episode of AMC’s Mad Men, the best episode ever, was “brought to you by DirecTV.”
DirecTV, which claims to offer “more of your favorite channels in HD than anyone,” does not carry AMC in HD.
Ironic, eh?
In his latest Comedy Central special, Patton Oswalt ponders going back 10 years in time to tell his past self about the wonders of 2009. I’m paraphrasing here:
“What’s that you’re listening to? Oh yeah, our old Walkman. What’s in it?”
“Oh you know, a mix tape with our 25 favorite songs.”
“That was a great tape. I’ll tell you what. Pull out that tape. Break it in half. That’s how big your Walkman is going to be in 2009.”
“Wow. How many songs can that hold?”
“Every song you’ve ever heard, or ever will hear, or will ever be written.”
“What’s that cost? Like a million dollars?”
“No, no, no. They’ll be everywhere. You’ll get them in gift bags and try to re-gift them to your nephew, and even he will be like, ‘Thanks a lot, [expletive].’”
This is more or less how I feel about EA’s TeamBuilder application for NCAA Football 10. I don’t know if I could even describe it to my past-version without him having a full mental breakdown.
When I was a kid, I was a huge football nerd. (OK, I’ve steadfastly failed to mature on this front.) My nerdy pastime was creating fake teams, complete with rosters, stats, uniforms, histories, and mascots. You may ask, “For what purpose, Eric?” And then I would pity you for not have a childhood passion of your own.
Anyway, fast forward 20 years. EA Sports has released NCAA Football 10, which is the first version of the game I’ve bought in years. You’ve always been able to create teams in the game (as well as in the Madden NFL series), but with the TeamBuilder web app, you can now create whole teams from scratch, including uploading custom logos for the helmets.
And I’m majorly geeking out.
San Francisco University Fogcutters. Sutro Tower on the helmet. How awesome is this?
NCAA 10 is also loaded with other shiny things, including deep integration with ESPN and a mode that ties the game to the real-world NCAA football season. This integration isn’t a gimmick; it’s a key value of the game. And my inner 12-year-old couldn’t be more excited about it.
Last night, I had the honor of attending a San Francisco organizing meeting for Repair California, the movement to call for a constitutional convention. It was marvelous to attend an on-topic town hall-type session where nobody demanded to see anyone’s birth certificate.
The utter brokenness of our state government is as obvious a 7.0 earthquake right now. Our state education system ranks near the bottom in student achievement and performance, even when controlling for poverty and demographic factors. Our university system, once the world’s best, is being hollowed out by budget cuts. Our water system is built for a state with half its population, and catastrophe awaits. Our transportation systems have been neglected for 30 years, leaving LA and the Bay Area with America’s #1 and #2 most congested freeways.
And nothing can be done about any of it, because since 1870 our Constitution has been amended 500+ times. Its 75,000 words contain layer upon layer of special interest protection, rendering our elected leaders essentially powerless to change anything. Not that they want to change anything — mercilessly gerrymandered districts and the two-thirds “yes” requirement to pass a budget has led to electoral non-competitiveness, ideological extremism, and utter gridlock.
The problem isn’t the bums in office. The problem is systemic. And the system needs to get blown up. Ergo, a new constitution.
And so it is that concerned Californians from across the ideological spectrum have come together to get the constitutional convention ball rolling. It will require getting two initiatives on the ballot, and working out a lot of details about choosing delegates and limiting the the new document’s scope. (I used my microphone time to suggest that delegates should be chosen randomly by assembly district, and then they would caucus to elect delegates to the state constitutional convention, similar to the way a jury selects a foreperson. One of the movement’s leaders, Jim Wunderman of the Bay Area Council, said this proposal is already under consideration.)
Everyone who lives in California should get on board right now. A new constitution is going to happen — almost everyone accepts that it has to. And it will be up to citizens to make sure that California’s new constitution is of, by, and for the people, and not hijacked by the special interests that dominate the initiative process every election.
Back when I worked on My Yahoo!, one of my projects was to create ad quality standards. Users were generally displeased with seeing an LREC (the standard “large rectangle” ad you see on so many sites) where they used to see their own content, so we had to be sensitive to what users were experiencing in that spot on the screen.
We certainly would not have approved this:
(Click on it to see its gory detail.)
This is the Old Spice campaign currently running on Yahoo! sports. The LREC (which is animated) shows what is supposed to be a very hairy armpit crusted with chunks of antiperspirant residue. (One of the chunks falls and crushes a car, for some reason.) This campaign fails for two very obvious reasons:
I have a pretty strong stomach, but I am repulsed. Is it just me? Or is this an ad standards FAIL?