8 Ways to Sunday

Financial strategist James Montier of German-owned investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein had some unusual advice for coworkers and clients in a recent memo. “Don’t equate money with happiness,” he said. Instead he encouraged readers to have more sex, get more sleep, exercise, meditate, and cultivate close relationships.

Seems like sound advice to me.

Fox News — known for its right-leaning bias — surprised last week by giving liberal pundit Michael Moore’s new film “Fahrenheit 9/11” a glowing review on its web site. Among other praise, reviewer Clive Davis called Moore’s movie “a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty, and at the same time a [sic] indictment of stupidity and avarice.” Davis cites a video of Bush reading to a group of school children on the morning of the attacks as the “most incredible” moment of the film. Sent to Moore by the instructor of the class Bush was visiting, it shows the President lingering for almost eleven minutes to complete his photo op despite having just been told that the country was under attack:

Instead of jumping up and leaving, he instead sat in front of the class, with an unfortunate look of confusion, for nearly 11 minutes. Moore obtained the footage from a teacher at the school who videotaped the morning program. There Bush sits, with no access to his advisers, while New York is being viciously attacked. I guarantee you that no one who sees this film forgets this episode.

In another refreshing instance of the press calling a spade a spade, the New York Times — a partisan media outlet in its own right — blasted Bill Clinton’s autobiography My Life in it’s Sunday book review section, chiding the former President for having written a “sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull” memoir.

In other news, record low temperatures have been reported in Hell this week. When asked to explain the underworld’s cold snap, a National Weather Service meteorologist said that it was agency policy not to comment on weather occurrences outside the earthly plane.

I’d recorded the 60 Minutes interview with former President Clinton earlier this evening, and I just finished watching it. I counted at least three, possibly four, advertisements for impotency treatments during the program. I realize that the 60 Minutes demographic probably skews toward older men, but isn’t that a little much?

Maybe the advertisers thought that Clinton’s appearance would attract the all-important horndog demo.

You know what I think is really funny? The couple in the Cialis advertisement are relaxing in separate side-by-side bathtubs, which always makes me think of the matching twin beds that married couples used in 1950s television shows. That was done because censors wouldn’t allow the TV programs of the era to imply that men and women slept together (shocking!), but what excuse do the aging boomer yuppies in this commercial have? Too cheap to spring for a hot tub?

Word has it that Half-Life 2 has been delayed yet again, this time until the fall. This disappointing, though not exactly unexpected, news has been cushioned somewhat by the release of a fan-created side-scrolling adventure called Half-Life 2D: Codename Gordon.

As far as I know, HL2D is only available to users of Valve’s Steam network client. Steam isn’t a bad little system, and it allows you to play some other Valve games for free. On the other hand, you have to be connected to the Internet the whole time you’re playing, even if you’ve already installed the game on your own hard disk drive. This is probably a piracy prevention measure, but it must suck for dialup users. Steam also breaks some older Half-Life mods and changes the way that saved games are stored — I can no longer find my saves to back them up!

Regardless of its drawbacks, Steam will be required to play Half-Life 2. Hopefully Valve will keep working on their delivery system now that work on the game is near an end. There are definitely still some bugs to work out.

Some overdue enhancements are underway at 8WTS. Because of problems with spam, I’ve removed my e-mail address from this site and put up a contact form instead. This should prevent my address from getting nabbed by any more e-mail harvesting spambots. The contact form is powered by Christopher Heng’s wizard-generated PHP Feedback Form — a very handy site tool that I’d recommend to anyone. You can access the form by clicking the “Contact” link under the “Navigate” header in the sidebar.

Also new is a list of referrers where you can see how people wind up at this site. This is partly intended as a small way to thank those that link to my site, and partly as a way to amuse oneself by looking at the weird search terms that bring people here (click “queries” at the top of the page). No doozies yet, but it’s only been running since last night. The referrer list is powered by Dean Allen’s Refer 2.1. You can access it by clicking on the “Referrers” link under the “Navigate” header in the sidebar. Publicly-accessible referrer logging has been removed due to excessive referrer spamming.

More changes are coming as I get around to it. I’ll be revamping my “About” page to be more than just a rehash of my first post and giving my photoblog its own about page with info on the equipment I use. I also plan to restore the master archive page to working order sometime in the next month or so, since this site desperately needs some kind of working “map” to facilitate quick browsing and help the victims of the occasional 404 error. Once all the basic workings of the site have been fixed and updated, I may address the cosmetic angle with a redesign.

We’ll see how I feel about that once I’m done with all the other work I’ve set out for myself.