More Internet troubles for Bill

Poor me. If the Giants losing to the Packers wasn’t bad enough, now I am have weird problems with MS Internet Explorer. For several reasons I’m still using that software (Ev, are you listening?) rather than Opera and now I can’t access any web sites even though email and other Internet tools (like TextRouter and Opera) work fine. ATT Broadband support says there is a problem with the Winsock files on my computer but they can’t help fix it, I need MS support for that. But the support line there isn’t open on Sundays. Uck-fay!

Last night’s restaurant: House of Prime Rib

Are you in the SF area and in the mood for the best prime rib you’ll ever eat? Fortunately for me, my buddy persisted and after a couple of years finally got me to eat at the classic House of Prime Rib. The place has been on Van Ness for 50 years now and the food is still tops. As long as you want prime rib since that’s the only thing on the menu. I asked the waiter and he said they cooked 720 portions for the night (they had reservations for 560!). The meat just melts in your mouth. Vegetarians stay home but anyone else can enjoy this.

Tonight’s movie: In the Bedroom

This film has been getting tons of great publicity and awards already, so we decided to give it a shot. Besides, not much else left to see just now (Ali, The Majestic, Beautiful Mind all leave me a little wanting) so we went to the very nice Camera One in downtown San Jose and saw In the Bedroom. Much has been made about Sissy Spacek’s portrayal of the mother and she is touted as the frontrunner for Best Actress at the Oscars. But to me, this was Tom Wilkinson’s film far more than Spacek; he does a marvel as a man who must control his emotions in the face of tragedy.

This is the first time directing for Todd Fields, who is somewhat better known as an actor (Twister, Eyes Wide Shut, and a bunch of indie pictures), and even though the National Board of Review named him best director, I have a few bones to pick with his work. The pacing is too loose, the film runs 130 minutes and could have been cut to 110-115 easily. There is far too much use of foreshadowing, starting with the title and not leaving out the quaint wait at the bridge. And what’s with the girl’s chorus Spacek directs? That never gets tied in to the plot and seems to be included only to make her role meatier. Fields does a good job and in a year with somewhat meager pickings maybe he does get nominated for some of these awards but best director? I don’t think he gets the Oscar and he wasn’t nominated for a Golden Globe.

Marisa Tomei really has a chance to act here and does well; she got a Golden Globe supporting actress nomination. William Mapother plays the bad guy as if he was born to it; Mapother is Tom Cruise’s cousin and his credits show it (Mapother is Cruise’s real last name, Cruise is his middle name). A lot of juicy smaler roles here for Celia Weston, William Wise, Karen Allen, and a few more.

This film is all about faces, the dialog is minimalist (there’s a reason this is playing at an art film house). No explosions, much blood, and a lot of sadness. This is not a Hollywood movie but I enjoyed it.

Read my lips, part two

Some years ago we had a president who said very publicly and emphatically “Read my lips, no new taxes.” Then he had to take those big words back when it was obvious that taxes needed to be raised. Now his son has made a painfully similar vow: over my dead body will he allow new taxes or tax hikes. Will GWB end up on the same trash heap as GHWB?

Today’s horoscope

Typically, I don’t give much creedence to the idea that the stars and planets directly influence my life. But today’s horoscope as printed in the unlinkable San Jose Mercury News is so believable that I can’t help but think it must be correct. I am fated to be hired as a fashion consultant and for those of you who know me well, you must be wondering what took so long. My friend Viv says I will be the next Versace, whoever he is. But I know! Seems so obvious. Glad that my dream will finally come true!

Online jonesing for coffee

Turns out there are coffee equivalents of oenophiles and they have taken to the web. Reuters reports on Mark Prince, who runs the site http://www.coffeegeek.com and http://www.coffeekid.com, and a $400 espresso machine made by Italy’s Rancilio that is recommended for its ability to pump water through the grinds at the level of pressure required for real espresso. Then there is the additional $200-400 for a decent grinder. But hey, at least you get great espresso.

Coaching wheel keeps turning

Notre Dame started things off, really, by firing Bob Davies, goofing with The Liar, then stealing Tyrone Willingham away from Stanford. Speculation began mounting about Denny Green in Minnesota and now he’s out. Then, after a fabulous win over Maryland Wednesday night, Steve Spurrier resigned as Florida head coach saying he’d done enough at the college level and wants an NFL job. Herbstreit speculates that Broncos coach Mike Shanahan migh welcome this change but points out that the new UF coach will face sky high expectations for the 2002 season.

SJ Mercury News (to which I prefer not to link) columnist Skip Bayless speculated this morning that Stanford University and 49ers coach Steve Marriuci would be a great match for each other. I could easily see Spurrier coming in to replace Marriuci except that he’s so used to being in total control of the program that he might not accept less than a combined coach/GM job, which isn’t going to be available with the Niners.

Other possible NFL changes (the league averages seven head coaching changes a year): George Seifert is looking mighty weary in Carolina and Jim Mora had a bad season in Indy (could his son, 49ers defensive coordinator Jim Mora, replace him?); even the great Tony Dungy needs to do some damage in the post-season to be invited back (note that Spurrier almost left UF in 1995 to take this job). LSU’s Nick Saban is mentioned as a possible replacement in Indinapolis but his current bosses want to give him a bigtime extension after winning the SEC and walloping Illinois. Mike Riley was fired by the Chargers Monday and is meeting with college ADs (he came to the NFL after a good stint at Oregon).

Pooling of interests will no longer be driving the bus

The Financial Times reports on one of the biggest changes to come along with the calendar change, the elimination of pooling of interests accounting in mergers and acquisitions. This accounting method allowed companies to to minimize the effect of so-called goodwill on their books by effectively treating the deals as mergers and not acquisitions. Goodwill, for the accounting-challenged, is the difference between the purchase price of a company and the book value; that is, if a company is being acquired for $100 million but has real assets of only $50 million, the acquiring company must book the goodwill for $50 million. For example, when Sun acquired NetDynamics (clearly a whale swallowing a minnow), Sun marked it up this way even though to any objective observer this was an acquisition and not a merger.

In deals not treated this way, companies had to charge off the goodwill against income over 40 years, thus reducing earnings and profits and looking not quite as good to Wall St. Fortunately, the accounting authorities also changed that aspect of their rules but I’m not as clear how the new standard will impact stock prices.

Searchers: Rex Grossman is not Jewish

Every so often I will look at the referrers list for my website. One recurring item is someone searching to find out whether University of Florida Rex Grossman is Jewish or not. Well, according to JewishSports.com’s Fall 2000 News, he isn’t. But because I have a previous weblog entry mentioning him and another with the word Jewish in it, both on the same archive page, I show up high in Google searches. Anyway, hopefully this entry will answer the question for you.

I also show up near the top on a search for sexy Better Bill sites but that seems more reasonable to me. Of course.

Consideration: gone the way of the dodo

People have complained that we are no longer willing to make any effort to minimize the impact of our actions on each other. This has become so embedded in our conciousness that Hollywood has made a big budget film about the consequences of a fender bender (although I have to say that from the linked trailer the film probably will suck). Even in my own neighborhood I saw a prime example of it, a moving van sticking out of a driveway and blocking half of the street even though the truck could have been backed up a few more feet with no problem:

Moving van blocking half of my street

Elections do make a difference

Columnist David Broder weighs in on President Bush’s Stealthy Pursuit of a Partisan Agenda. Safe workplaces, using law enforcement to make points on a social agenda, gutting ghetto programs that make a difference. Thomas Friedman, writing in the NY Times, makes the same point from a different angle. Important reads, this is precisely why I didn’t want Bush elected. Thank you very much, Supreme Court Justices.

Death of the West

Sounds kind of Lord of the Rings-ish, but Patrick Buchanan is writing about us in his new polemic. His new book “contends that the U.S. will be a Third World nation by the year 2050 [and…] predicts Europe will be inundated by an Islamic-Arab-African invasion and most First World nations, including Japan, will have begun slowly to vanish from the earth.” Lots of demographics to back him up but then we get to the crux of his explanation:

“Buchanan argues that the death of the Christian faith in Western countries is a primary cause of their dying populations. Whenever faith dies, the people die. A new atheistic civilization is arising, he argues, and is using its dominance of the culture and the courts to drive Christianity out of the temples of our civilization.”

MS: Work for us, get threatened?

Microsoft of course sees Linux as a threat to their business, particularly on the server side of things. So they do what any large business would and set up a group of people with extra knowledge and tools to support the sales team. And its true that execs would prefer competitors/targets find out too many details about such an effort. But the part I find really creepy about this memo from Windows division VP Brian Valentine is his threat to monitor whether his own staff are forwarding his internal email to outsiders. Which must have happened for The Register to get a hold of it, eh?

“PS: I used to run Exchange — so if you think I am not tracking this message, think again. Don’t forward it! And if you have forward rules that have forwarded this message, then perhaps you should think again about forwarding internal email with those rules. I want to give you folks all the information I can in a very open way. If we continue to have bad apples or careless people out there, I will not be able to help you by sending this kind of information!”

Paces, routes, Fates

[In lieu of some more prosaic thoughts on the turn of the year, I offer this poem]

Take in the breath of life around you

Feel the joy and challenge and sadness

Is it cold and crisp or hot and wet?

Hammer or feather, what is your choice?

Or do we have a choice to make?

The Fates lay claim to that right

To measure the paces and map the routes

Each day, each minute turns a new page.

A deep pit where gleaming towers once stood

Say otherwise as the children and widows cry

To Hell with the Fates and their plans made real

Away with the heart, dig deep with knives.

Other folk stand up, ready to be counted

Ready to make some difference if they can

Barriers to the goal must be swept away

If these burning hearts can be made true

Fates take a seat, listen to the cries of Men

Watch for the blooming flowers in the crisp Winter

Feel the trees sway in the heat of Summer

Waiting to feel again the winged energy of delight.

Inspired by rainer marie rilke’s as once the winged energy of delight [via dangerousmeta]

Lord of the Rings: Fan fiction

Fan fiction has been around for a long time, mostly inspired by science fiction series like Star Trek and Star Wars, but others have taken the Lord of the Rings as their source. Tales from the Prancing Pony is one such story, allegedly recounting the 1886 vacation in Middle Earth by three English civil servants and includes photographs and other illustration. Gil Williamson wrote it in 1998 and posted it to the web the next year. Interesting effort but not having quite the appeal of the original as there is little drama in this travelogue.

Naked Slashdotters, run scared now

[Continuing the sex theme] Commander Taco, the man who launched a thousand flames, asks Slashdotters the question “So for those of us who don’t go “Out” for holidays and prefer sitting on our asses…What are you gonna do?” While he was mainly thinking of television marathons (and got mostly predictable results), some responses were quite frightening. As TomC says, “The thought of slashdotters naked is frightening.” One married poster is hopeful a Sex and the City marathon might lead to some for his own self, which leads one to wonder what kind of marriage he has.

Gettin’ biz-zay!

A Santa Cruz woman named Lish Daelnar hopes to eventually chart every sexual pairing on Earth in ASCII in the Sexchart. She also wants to get written up in Wired but Wired News will do as well, so she’s achieved that. Somehow I don’t seem to be on the chart yet–I’m not BigDaddyBill–but I’m looking it over to see if I connected with anyone listed. Should you be on here? After all, Courtney Love, Drew Barrymore, and Jello Biafra are. All it takes is a wet kiss or better with someone already listed. Note: most folks (Goddess4U, shewolf, extrabob) are shown by their online handle so if I do get on, it will be as capspace.

A crappy day in the NFL

If you are a Bay Area or New Jersey football fan, it sure was. 49ers, Raiders, Giants, and Jets all lost winnable games. So the Giants are out of the playoffs, the Jets must win next week, the 49ers are likely to lose any chance at hosting a wildcard game, and the Raiders, who’ve played like crap for the last month, need a win next week to assure a first round bye. The Jets could have backed in with a Seattle loss today, but of course Flutie wasn’t up to that task. And off course the Jets play the Raiders next week so both can’t get what they want.