Sorry Jak, Rutger’s #10 ranking will likely change next week after the knights were beat at home by the unranked Terrapins.  In fact, I’ll bet Rutgers will fall behind the Warriors in the AP poll.  At least you picked up Brian Leanord.

From Digg.  This is a great clip of Paris, post jail, on Letterman.  Dave gives her a pretty hard time…really funny.  You gotta kind of feel for the girl, but she handles herself well.

It’s surprising that despite her time in jail she still has a movie coming out, as well as a fragrance and a clothing line.  The girl is pretty smart.  I mean, she played the ditzy white girl thing for a while but now she seems to be taking a more mature approach.

With all her money I’d think she’d want to take a break from the spotlight for a while.  But it seems like she wants to go out on her own and run her own biznass.

Here’s a bit more info on the bizarre story of a boy who survived a flight on the wing of an airplane.  The russian paper Pravada is now claiming that the boy was inside the wing of the 737, not outside of the wing as reported by a variety of other sources.

Now, lots of people called BS on the idea of a boy clinging to the wing of the 737…and I agree as well.  For one thing, it would be difficult to survive 500+ MPH winds for 2 hours.  Secondly, it would be waaaay cold up there with no protection at all.  And also, where would the kid hang on to?

According to Pravada, the boy snuck onto the airport tarmac through a hole in a fence.  Then the boy climbed into the plane’s wing through the landing gear opening.  This southwest 737 (pictured) shows that the landing gear does extend from the wings - so I suppose this would be possible.  Also, without the protection from the airplane’s fuselage, it would be very very cold at cruising altitude, resulting in frostbite.

This makes way more sense than the clinging to the wing story.  At the end of the day, the error in reporting was the use of “on” rather than “in” when describing where the boy hid.

 Spolier Alert.

This was a big week for TV with premiers of Heroes, House and The Office.

On Heroes, you have the story picking up four months after the season 1 finale.  Hiro is in the past, Claire is in a new school, and there are some new mexican characters.

All in all, the premier was moderately disappointing.  It felt like there were too many storylines with no connection.  But this is, of course, a Heroes trademark - it’ll probably just take a couple episodes to bring everything together.  One big question for the show will be how well ratings hold up without an impending nuclear disaster to sustain viewer interest.

I thought House was really good, especially since House’s team wasn’t there.  The story itself had a good twist at the end, and it was kind of amusing to see House work without his team.  I think this will be a good ongoing plot line over the year, but I am betting that the old team will be back before long.

The thing that bugs me about House, is that the writers make him all non-PC, give him sarcastic lines, make him somewhat racist and sexist, etc.  But they will never have him hook up with cameron or a med student 20 years his junior, even though this is the first thing someone with House’s personality would be doing.  My guess is he’ll eventually end up with Cuddy - I mean, that seems pretty obvious.

The Office premier was also pretty good.  At first, you get the idea that Jim and Pam are still just skirting around the whole dating thing.  And that was infuriating.  But then you find out that they are dating on the down low - and so that made me happy.

Also, Ryan is Michael’s boss, as indicated in last season’s finale.  There were some theories that Ryan wouldn’t actually make it to corporate - but at the end of the day it wasn’t that complex.  Other notes, Jan is living with Michael, but not working, Karen no longer works in Scranton, and Kelly is still in Scranton, but bummed because Ryan is no longer there.

It was a big week for TV…I’ve been waiting all summer for it.  Anyone else see any other good premiers?

Heard this on Howard today.  Apparently a 15 year old boy survived a two hour flight on…yes, on…the wing of a Boeing 737.  The boy suffered frostbite since temperatures drop to -58 Fahrenheit up where planes fly.  Not to mention the 737 was flying at 560 miles per hour.

The boy decided to take the flight after his parents got into a fight.  The flight was between Perm and Moscow.

Of course I’m skeptical about this story, but it has been widely reported by various news organizations, including the AP.  But at the same time, this story is kinda cool.  I’ve always wondered if it would be possible to hang on the wing of a plane during flight, and I guess it’s possible.

I mentioned last week that I got HD.  Well, I finally put my money down and subscribed to Howard Stern TV on Demand, as well.  It’s actually pretty easy to add services to your comcast account…which is a bad thing because they always try and sell you all these additional packages.  But I figure since I steal Howard’s show four days a week off of bittorrent I should at least pony up for the TV show.

And at $11 a month, it’s totally worth it.

It’s hard to describe, but Howard TV fills that ‘I wish I could have seen that’ urge that you get constantly when listening to the show.  There are weekly recaps of the show which are absolutely indispensable.  You see stars, games, and all sorts of ridiculous shit going on.

They also have specials on certain shows…like the queefing contest.  I have to say, I have NEVER seen anything like this before…and the great thing is if I had gone out and looked for a queefer online I would have felt bad about myself…but on Howard TV it’s just part of the show.

Another awesome episode was the replay of the September 11, 2001 show.  Seeing the cast’s reaction to the first plane hitting the WTC, then the second, then the pentagon, then the towers falling down…it was really engaging.  it was interesting too, because Howard’s reaction was of the ‘just nuke ‘em’ variety, and especially now with the war in Iraq and whatnot, it’s illuminating to kind of go back in time and re-experience 9/11.

You also get a lot of gay shit.  And on one hand, it’s super funny.  But on the other, I’m basically there watching dicks and balls.  Like one bit was where sal had to kiss Richard’s taint to get Artie on the scale.  Howard TV shows everything…really too much.  But it was hilarious.  You also see Sal painting Richard’s face indian style with his penis.  Gay right?  Especially when Sal actually stuck his penis, for a second, into Richard’s mouth.

It was hard to watch.  But it has that Jackass factor that makes it impossible to turn away.  Especially after hearing all this shit on the radio.

At least the gayness is contrasted with a lot of great T&A.  I am in love with Valentina Vaughn.  Her voice on the radio was jaw dropping…and that was just her voice!  On the sybian…my god.

Anyway, I know there are a few Howard fans out there, and I’ve been getting into the show lately and I think this is show is really worth while.

Do you have DSL?  If you’re an AT&T customer you were forced to buy a landline as well - whether or not you need it. 

I just use my cell phone around the house - I have no need really for a landline.  Technically I have a landline connection in my house but I don’t even have a phone hooked up to it.  But I still pay for it - with taxes it comes to an additional $10-15 a month.  And this is for a basic line with no minutes.

But as part of Cingular’s merger with AT&T, the company agreed to provide Dry Loop DSL service - that is, DSL service by itself, without a landline.  Consumerist posted the details of this new service yesterday - $28.99 for the Pro DSL package - a nice discount over landline + DSL service.

Not only that, but the principle of the thing counts for me.  Phone companies should really not use their monopolistic power to force you into buying something you have no need for.

So today I called to change my service.  After an hour and a half on the phone and at least a dozen AT&T reps, my order was in.

It’s a new service, so you get a lot of reps passing you on to their superiors.  When I finally got to the ‘Dry Loop’ department I had to wait for 15 minutes off an on while the rep talked with his manager, figuring out how to complete my order.

The result?  I’ll have dry loop in a week, but it will require the creation of a new AT&T account and 3 days of downtime.  In a nutshell, they make it hard for you to switch…but in a few months this service will be more widely advertised and the process should be a lot quicker.  hopefully.

Seeing as we have so many loyal readers with law school backgrounds, I’d like to hear some comments regarding a Wall Street Journal article that appeared today titled The Dark Side of the Legal Job Market.  I’ve always thought those median post graduation statistics seemed high.  We get a similar type of skewness in the financial industry when the media reports “average” salaries or median incomes.

I mentioned Kitchen Nightmares last week, and it premiered this Wednesday.  This show is an import from the UK, and I watched several episodes of the European version and it was pretty good.

Kitchen Nightmares stars chef Gordon Ramsey, who also stars in Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen.  Ramsey is a Michelin star-winning chef that has restaurants worldwide.

In KN, Ramsey goes to failing restaurants and tries to improve them.  He will try to improve just about everything - the food, obviously, but service, decor and marketing as well.

The first episode takes place in Peter’s Restaurant, a family-owned Italian restaurant.  The co-owner of the restaurant, Peter, is a character.  He’s a stereotypical italian wanna-be mafia character with a bad temper.  I’ve been watching the sopranos and thought this personality was more hollywood than anything, but this guy really plays the part.  He dresses like a gangster, drives a black Benz, and constantly fights with people who ask him for money.  I don’t know if this is a typical italian personality, but if it is, it’s a horrible thing to deal with.  Plus this guy is huge, so no one really is able to calm him down.

And the thing I hate about Fox is that they really focus the show on this guy’s personality.  The only thing they show Ramsey doing with the actual food is changing the serving portions to ‘family style.’  They don’t show how he changes the existing recipes or anything, which is a major focus of the european version of KN.  Really fox just turns the show into a mix of Jerry Springer and a restaurant reality show…and it’s kind of a shame, but probably more appropriate for the Fox prime time audience.

Ramsey does make some changes with the kitchen, like cleaning up the walk-in and bringing in new equipment.  He also gets peter to work in the kitchen for a while to make him understand what it’s like to be a cook.

But really the biggest problem with the restaurant is Peter and his horrible personality.  And they try to make it seem like Ramsey fixes this, but I doubt it.  And that’s another thing, Fox really glossed over the results of Ramsey’s work.  They leave the final five minutes of the show to showing results, and most of it is this asshole Peter holding a party in a park.  Really kind of ridiculous.

So, the show was a disappointment…but it’s not really surprising.  Fox is not going to show a true cooking show.  They kind of reduce Ramsey into a drill sergeant character, and that’s that.  And it’s a waste.

Any one else catch it?  Let me know.

So you might recall japadamus posting about Morton’s 2 for $99 September promotion. It sounded too good to be true, so El Jeffe and I went to our local Morton’s last night to check it out. One interesting thing — all the Southern California Morton’s are called “Arnie Morton’s of Chicago.” According to the website, it looks like this is strictly a Southern California nomenclature. I don’t know why except that maybe SoCal people need to know beforehand that their steak has Midwest origins. That wouldn’t surprise me about L.A. people.
Anyhow, on to the food. My friends had gone the prior night, so they warned me that the Morton’s salad tasted “fishy” because of the anchovies on top fo the salad. Sounds logical. El Jeffe and I opted for the Caesar salads, which were a good sized portion and were falling off the plate there was so much salad. I got the crabcake, which is probably the best crabcake I’ve had with respect to crab meat: filler ratio. It was essentially 1:0. It came with a side of mayonnaise/mustard sauce on the side, which I prefer to having it dressed by the sous chefs. The boyfriend got the “Colossel Shrimp Alexander,” which was basically six pieces of shrimp thrown under a broiler. It was a good serving (6 pieces) and tasted good yet perhaps unremarkable. The only thing you didn’t have a choice of was the steak itself — each person go the single cut filet mignon, which was still a great cut done just right. No complaints at all. We got the baked potato and grilled asparagus topped with a balsalmic vinegar glaze. The potato was what you’d expect and the asparagus was amazingly good. We both got the key lime pie, which was easily at least 1/6th of a pie. Talk about good value. Anyhow, the food was great and the portions were very generous for $50/head. It’s awsaome.

The only down side to this deal might just be in my head and location specific. First off, the Beverly Hills location is kinda small and packed with diners, so it’s pretty loud. El Jeffe and I sat side by side in a booth for 4, so we didn’t have a problem hearing each other (my friends who had gone the night before were at a 2 top table and sat facing each other), but it was a little tough to hear the server. Also, this is the only thing that made me feel all ghetto, but the server brings out this fancy cart of meats and various fishes to show you and goes through this whole spial about their cuts, and then I had to whip out this coupon and tell her that I wanted the 2 for $99 special. That’s also partially why I didn’t take any photos of the food to post here. I already felt kinda ghetto, which normally I don’t mind, but it’s a piece of steak and a caesar salad,w hich you’ve all seen before.

Overall, if you can make it to Morton’s by the end of this month, definitelyt ake advantage of this promotion. It’s very good. Otherwise, I’d say that there are other steakhouse chains taht I’d prefer (Ruth’s Chris) or local joints that have more history and personality (Taylor’s in L.A.). But, this is a really great deal, and Morton’s is a good steakhouse. Anyhow, two thumbs up from us.

I hate to admit it, but Beauty and the Geek is becoming one of my favorite shows.  I’m really happy that the show made it on for another year, and right now I’m in the middle of the two-hour first episode.

For the uninitiated, BATG takes geeky guys and matches them up with ditzy pretty girls.  Generally it goes like this:  a geek and a beauty form a team, and they compete in tasks that test the social abilities of the geeks and the intellectual abilities of the beauties.  Teams that lose get eliminated and the winning team gets a quarter million $.

This is one reality show in which casting means everything.  The show works best when the geeks progress socially and superficially, and the beauties are able to learn and overcome their egos.

It’s hard for the geeks, because they look and dress pretty badly, and really don’t know too much about social graces.  And the beauties are usually very very stupid, sometimes pretty arrogant and without a foundation of book knowledge, it’s hard for them to learn pretty simple things.

It’s also important to ensure that the contestants are real…it’s pretty easy for a girl to act really ditzy, but really be decently smart, and that girl will have a huge advantage over genuinely dumb girls.  There’s also a difference between girls that are actually not very smart, and girls that are smart, but just don’t know about ‘geeky’ topics like science and politics and math.

BATG is so great because you really get to like some of the characters…and hate others.  And although it’s kind of cheesy, you actually do get to see these people grow.

What’s interesting is that for the most part, the geeks are pretty civil to each other, even though they’re really competing.  A lot of the geeks approach the game as a learning experience rather than a money winning opportunity, and that makes the show more genuine, I think.

The story with the beauties is a bit different.  Girls are usually pretty competitive with each other and there is a lot of backstabbing going on.  Last season, the deal with the girls was blondes versus the rest, and the blondes quickly eliminated all the non-blondes.

The show is pretty funny…and true, a lot of it is ‘watch the dumb girl and geeky guy.’  But the show remains relatively fresh with different tasks that force the geeks to learn social skills and the beauties to learn intellectual activities.

And of course, the beauties are all pretty hot.  Like, hooters waitress and playboy model type hot.  That makes the show fun to watch as well.

The guy’s this year?  One guy is a LARPER, which stands for Live Action Role Player, i.e. dungeons and dragons live with fake swords and stuff.  Another guy runs a rubber band club, and shot a cup off a girl’s head, which was actually pretty impressive.  The geeks are also very very smart - like, the guy who won last year was MIT smart.

Anyway, this year looks pretty good.  The show is on CW on tuesdays.  Check it out!

On Wednesday the first episode of CBS’ Kid Nation premiered.  There has been a lot  of controversy over the show, including lawsuits from some of the kid’s parents and charges of child labor abuse.

The show puts 40 kids in a old west-style ghost town.  The kids are divided into four teams, which are split into classes.  The classes get paid different amounts of money per day for performing their duties, and the money can be used to purchase things from the town’s general store.

Each team is led by a member of the town council.  Every episode, the town council picks a kid who deserves a gold star, which is worth $20k.

The kids also have some daily duties that they need to perform, like cooking and cleaning.  The lower classes take care of that, while the 2nd highest class runs the store, and the top class manages.

Much of the first episode was dedicated to showing the kids getting used to the town.  There was a lot of crying, which could be expected, and some fighting among kids.

The kids vary in age from 8 to 15.  This creates some conflict, because at times the older kids strong arm the younger ones.  Some of the younger kids also

The kids also had to figure out how to cook.  They have ingredients and a cookbook, I believe, as well as a stove.  At first the kids had trouble getting the cooking done, but they seemed to catch on after a few days.  From what I understand, one of the kids gets burned by the stove, which brought on a lawsuit.  I can definitely see this happening, because these kids are pretty little and have to cook massive amounts of food to feed everyone.

The show does a good job of minimizing adult supervision of kids, so it appears that the kids are to a large extent managing themselves.  But the general structure of the show is controlled by adults, so it’s not so much a nation of kids, as kids organized into groups, performing tasks.

As for entertainment value, Kid Nation was decent…but I can see the novelty wearing thin.  I know a lot of people like seeing little kids do cute things and say funny shit, but that gets boring after a while.  Some kids are pretty impressive too - very mature with strong leadership capabilities.  But I’m not going to be able to stay interested in watching kids lead others for a whole season.  One smart thing that CBS did was to minimize commercials - I think the first half an hour of the show was

The show looks like it got decent ratings, but it was panned by many critics.  For all the controversy surrounding the show, however, it was very tame - the most conflict between kids was one kid half-pushing another.  The concept turned out to be very summer-campy, and you can tell there’s not going to be any real fights or big conflicts - just a lot of crying and bitching.

At the same time however, I don’t think the show was any more exploitive than any other show with kids.  All kids in showbiz are being exploited to some extent - often to the benefit of parents.  But in Kid Nation, at least the exploitation is temporary.  It seems at the very least to be a decent learning opportunity, and there are many worse things these kids could be doing.

Anyway, if anyone else has seen this show, tell me what you think!

The San Francisco Giants announced today that they would not bring back Barry Bonds next year for his 16th season with the club.  Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s record in August, but has been sidelined with injury for much of the season.

Bonds responded to the news on his website, saying that his time in the MLB is not over and he will continue to try and win a World Series ring.

The Giants paid Bonds $19.3 million, including bonuses, to bring back Bonds this year.  However, besides Bonds’ record-breaking homerun, there has been little reason to watch the club, who is 20 games behind in the NL West.

Now, I don’t know a lot about baseball, but it seems like Bonds is a huge draw for fans, and without him it will be pretty painful to watch the Giants.  But with all his injuries, the Giants probably figured it wouldn’t be worth to endure another year with Bonds, and money spent on his contract would be better spent elsewhere.

If Barry does come back, it will definitely be odd to see him in another uniform.  If he really wants a ring, he would go to the Yankees or Red Sox, right?  But I imagine it will be pretty hard for Barry to build a following in another city, since he is widely hated outside of SF.

And now what do I do with my Bond’s jersey?

If you want to understand why I am so dissatisfied with pizza in Hawaii, all you have to do is look at the picture below.  It’s from the homepage of the the largest local pizza chain in my hometown.  It’s good pizza, but not the best in the area.  It’s also not the cheapest.

Also, I feel I should mention, here is the text and photo from the buffalo wings menu:

“Our plump and crispy chicken wings are served with your choice of Buffalo-style (mild, medium, hot, or XXX), barbecue, or garlic.

1/2 Dozen - $3.25

One Dozen - $6.50

Small Tray of 50 - $24.95

Large Tray of 100 - $47.99″

I guarantee that these wings come with two things: a side of celery sticks and Bleu Cheese Dressing.  Why bleu cheese instead of ranch?  Because we’re not savages.

What some of you may not realize is that where I’m from, every town has at least one restaurant that does nothing but buffalo wings.  That’s why I bitch when the best I can get out here include the word “teri” somewhere in their description.