I’m increasingly dismayed at ESPN’s bashing of Oklahoma in favor of Texas regarding the BCS.

I find it disturbing that they almost universally ignore that a three way tie existed, that it was not just a case of Texas beating Oklahoma and Texas having a loss, and never seem to consider the idea that maybe beating the team that beat Texas by a huge margin should count for something.

I find it disturbing that there has been open bias and campaigning by a media organization in favor of Texas. How in the hell do you justify letting Mack Brown campaign during an OU game? How in the hell do you justify every damned writer sitting there and parroting “Texas should be in the National Title game.”

I think if someone seriously wanted to discuss the question, they should consider that a) if Oklahoma had lost those last couple games, Texas Tech would have gone to the Big 12 game, and possibly been rendered a more fitting BCS Bowl team, b) no one talks about what must run thru the minds of voters, in asking the question: “Do you really think Texas would beat Oklahoma if they played again? Especially considering how badly Oklahoma beat the teams Texas just scraped by against…”, and c) did none of the writers actually watch the Red River game? Yes, Oklahoma lost, but they lost a game that until they lost Ryan Reynolds, they led. They lost a game with multiple blown calls. They didn’t get blown out which is how it sounds every time ESPN mentions the game.

I’m infuriated by the fact that ESPN as a company and an organization has seemingly swung behind and supported this bias. I could understand and accept individual writers promulgating the view that Texas is more deserving, and there are good arguments for that. But one of the cornerstones of good journalism, and of good writing, is honesty and the duty to tell the truth and the whole truth. To not even mention any of the counterarguments except in passing, to just utterly dismiss them out of hand, to never have an actual countervailing opinion…

I realize that ESPN’s writers generally write a mix of journalism and editorializing, but if not one of them or the editors reviewing the articles actually considered the question of bias and fairness and complete honesty when covering this issue, how can we trust their integrity, their willingness to do their full duty?

I wrote this because of today’s Forde Yard Dash. I’d been meaning to do so for a while, but that finally pushed me over the line. As someone whose parents are both journalists, this has weakened my respect for ESPN as a whole, and for the individual writers. I realize the question of who has greater merit is valid, but there is a question, and that ESPN does not ask it or discuss it or even consider why there is a question, strikes me as biased and pretty damned stupid.

Far as the iTunes movie and TV selections go, I’m not really that impressed. At least the movies section lets you search for all 90+ movies that have captions. If universal captions appear, or if they merely caption the shows/movies I’m interested in, I may purchase/rent, but otherwise, no sale.

I have not considered hacking the AppleTV all that seriously so far. I can see the virtue of doing so, but, so long as I am hearing impaired and require subtitles/captions, I don’t see the need to mess with it unless I decide I must have real closed caption support.

Gets a vote of support from me overall.

Short review: good, not great. Needed more time for the bad guy to flesh the role out and really just needed more time for Iron Man being Iron Man. Otherwise, no glaring flaws. The movie is well made and comes off well. Just feels a little flat with the ultimate conflict being left to just a clichéd, stereotypical sort of “evil uncle decides to take over the company/fortune/etc” gimmick. Needed a bit more meat to that part of the story.

Look at the list and:

1) Bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you own.

3) Underline the books you have seen a movie or TV production of. (I didn’t actually do this part. Assume I probably saw some movie version of most of them that are older.)

4) Reprint this list in your own blog

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible 

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Bank

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

With regard to the insurance process, I have to say, Progressive was stellar. They were fast, responsive, and flexible to my needs.

So, shopped around for a couple days. Did a lot of comparisons and stuff. Cars.com was pretty handy. I’d narrowed it down to wanting to take a look at a couple VW models and the Hyundai Sonata and Tiburon. Went to the Hyundai dealership, sat in a dark red Tiburon GS and decided, “This is the car I want.”

So I bought a Hyundai Tiburon. Loving it immensely. Vroom Vroom.

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Short review is: they’re all good and worth a look.

Long versions:

• Skitch is a fairly effective tool. It is a screenshot utility offering editing and automated uploading to a variety of services. I think the user interface is a bit busy, but it provides basic image editing right then and there. For the basic task of taking a screenshot, uploading to a remote server, and providing an URL to link to, it is excellent. I’ll probably buy it when it goes non-beta.
• Evernote is an interesting take on an information manager (think Yojimbo or DevonThink). The major feature is an online interface to store information in, with a desktop client to interface and sync with. The online tools are well done. The desktop client is a bit raw, but more than serviceable. Its utility is directly tied to how you deal with information. If, like me, you generally do not archive large amounts of data, the value of Evernote is limited. If you save lots of data and need methods to organize it, Evernote might be a good option. Probably not something I’m interested in paying for, but worth keeping an eye on.
• Delicious Library 2 is a dvd/book/game database manager. I’ve long been a user of DVDpedia, but Delicious Library 2 represents a big leap forward from the first version of Delicious Library. As such, I’m mightily tempted by it. In addition to the database features and the technical improvements in Delicious Library 2, new features such as the ability to export the database and others finally bring it to a rough parity with DVDpedia. I’m unlikely to change my tool of choice at this time, but Delicious Library 2 teases and tantalizes with the attractive interfaces. Worth a good hard look, and is definitely a compelling product. Only my prior investment in another tool prevents me from buying Delicious Library 2 at this time.

I feel about Sweeney Todd much the same as I do about Chicago. I think there is much to like in the critical appraisal of the visual style and all of those details. But as an enjoyable movie for me to watch, neither measure up.

Lest I be accused of hating musicals, I do like musicals in general. I love many of the classic ones, like the Wizard of Oz, Singing in the Rain, and Mary Poppins. I also love Moulin Rouge immensely, and would argue that its use of popular songs is part of its greatness because the songs are perfectly selected for the moments. The feature each of those share is a witty plot, catchy songs, physical gags, and above all, good voices singing the songs.

So, final appraisal of Sweeney Todd is… meh. Could be a lot worse, but I have no real interest in seeing it again.