LBY3
The continuing adventures of Beau Yarbrough

D.C. has second-ugliest people in the nation

Tuesday, October 23, 2007, 16:10
Section: Miscellany

This is no surprise to anyone who watched Wag the Dog with an eye toward the (totally accurate, in my experience) casting, hair and costuming: Washington, D.C. has the second-ugliest people in the nation, according to Travel & Leisure.

1 4.53 Miami
2 4.50 San Diego
3 4.43 Charleston
4 4.40 Austin
5 4.34 Honolulu
6 4.31 Los Angeles
7 4.28 San Francisco
8 4.26 Minneapolis/St. Paul
9 4.25 New York
10 4.23 Denver
11 4.18 Chicago
12 4.14 Seattle
13 4.13 Phoenix/Scottsdale
14 4.10 Las Vegas
15 4.09 Nashville
16 4.09 Boston
17 4.08 Santa Fe
18 4.07 Portland, Oregon
19 4.04 Atlanta
20 4.00 New Orleans
21 3.99 Orlando
22 3.99 San Antonio
23 3.98 Dallas/Fort Worth
24 3.95 Washington, D.C.
25 3.75 Philadelphia

The nation’s capital ranks #4 in intelligence, though, and #1 in “nice personality.”

I don’t know about Miami, but whenever I go there, San Diego is always laughably full of beautiful people, of all ages, as though some casting agent had just populated the street moments before outsiders arrived.



Grindhouse: Planet Terror

Monday, October 22, 2007, 13:22
Section: Arts & Entertainment

I didn’t like this as much as I did Death-Proof, which I thought was really, really good, despite me liking Robert Rodriguez’s films more than Quentin Tarantino’s films generally.

Part of it was the genre: zombie flicks have never really appealed to me, other than intellectually. Part of it was that Rodriguez was much more true to the grindhouse inspiration, and made a film much more over the top than Death-Proof and less in keeping with modern sensibilities. (The trailer for Machete, shown before Planet Terror, does the same things, but since it’s a 90 second or so short, it’s just flat-out hilarious.)

As a film geek, it was interesting to note that Planet Terror seems to be “officially” part of the Tarantino universe, with a reference to the death of Jungle Julia (from Death-Proof), Red Apple cigarettes and, of course, Texas Ranger Earl McGraw (also seen in From Dusk Till Dawn and Kill Bill).



The Invisible

Friday, October 19, 2007, 18:35
Section: Arts & Entertainment

This movie is a 30 minute Twilight Zone episode stretched to more than three times that length. Somehow, we still don’t learn almost anything about the protagonist despite that, other than he’s a terrible poet.

A rental at absolute most.



Treo to iPod, part three

Thursday, October 18, 2007, 17:45
Section: Geek

OK, Yahoo! can read Palm contacts and calendar files, and iPods can synch with the Yahoo! contacts system. So one new Yahoo! account later, my contacts are now copied onto my iPod, although, wow, what a step backwards.

I’ve got hundreds of contacts, and having no way of putting them in sub-folders so that I can just look through my personal or work contacts is pretty bad. Hopefully Apple will patch in some improvements, since this would be especially galling if I were using an iPhone.

In the meantime, I still can’t input entries into the iPod touch calendar via the iPod itself, and iTunes won’t synch with Yahoo!. Instead, it’s looking for some other calendar application (when the natural thing to do with both the calendar and contacts would be to pull it directly from the Palm directory for my Treo). Hopefully this will be addressed in a patch, because as it stands, the calendar function is worse than useless on my iPod.



Treo to iPod, part two

Thursday, October 18, 2007, 10:52
Section: Geek

After looking around at various Mac support sites, I tried this. But it doesn’t seem that the iPod touch has the basic “use this iPod as a disk drive” as a choice under iTunes, and it doesn’t show up as an additional hard drive when connected to my computer, so the plug-in never got a chance to work.


 








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Veritas odit moras.