During my leave of absence from blogging, magazine-writing, and so on, this page exists primarily as a blogroll. I recommend that you browse around through the blogs linked to over there to the left. If you desperately miss my writing, you might sample some of my academic work.
My sabbatical will end no earlier than June 2005, and may last until September 2005 or later.
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Apropos of absolutely nothing...
but according to google, no one's really put this together before.
There was something grimly appropriate in the mid-career stall of former Lois Lane Teri Hatcher in those embarrassingly awful Radio Shack commercials with Howie Long (c. 1999, pre-Desperate Housewives.
Because Superman himself had an embarrassingly awful mid-career stall as a Radio Shack celebrity endorser.
Probably about twenty other people remember this, but in 1980-- in the doldrums when the only writer who could really handle the Bronze Age Superman, Elliot S! Maggin, was on hiatus writing novels instead of comics-- there was a Superman one-shot comic that was one big product-placement ad for the TRS-80, paid for by Radio Shack, and starring "the TRS-80 whiz kids!"
The comic centers on the ability of a couple of elementary-school kids sitting in their computer lab at school to do the fancy arithmetic that, apparently, Superman always did in his head before using his powers but was temporarily unable to do because he'd breathed in some special kryptonite dust courtesy of Major Disaster. He still had precise control over his powers, and could still calibrate them mathematically, so that when he was told to fly at a 44.28 degree angle to the ground at 6432.9 mph he could do just that. He could moreover measure things just by looking at them, so he could tell the TRS-80 Whiz Kids via walkie-talkie (or something) that a plane was crashing from a distance of 16,985.3 meters. The step that he couldn't perform was the super-calculation of his intercept path, in-between the super-measurement and the super-calibration of response.
No, it makes no sense whatsoever-- it's as ridiculous as any Silver Age "Jimmy Olson the gorilla-headed boy" plot, but with all the earnestness that came from combining late-70s enthusiasm for kids programming in BASIC with sheer commercial opportunism.
I'm deeply embarrassed by how much I liked this bizarre Cary Bates-written monstrosity when I was 9.
but according to google, no one's really put this together before.
There was something grimly appropriate in the mid-career stall of former Lois Lane Teri Hatcher in those embarrassingly awful Radio Shack commercials with Howie Long (c. 1999, pre-Desperate Housewives.
Because Superman himself had an embarrassingly awful mid-career stall as a Radio Shack celebrity endorser.
Probably about twenty other people remember this, but in 1980-- in the doldrums when the only writer who could really handle the Bronze Age Superman, Elliot S! Maggin, was on hiatus writing novels instead of comics-- there was a Superman one-shot comic that was one big product-placement ad for the TRS-80, paid for by Radio Shack, and starring "the TRS-80 whiz kids!"
The comic centers on the ability of a couple of elementary-school kids sitting in their computer lab at school to do the fancy arithmetic that, apparently, Superman always did in his head before using his powers but was temporarily unable to do because he'd breathed in some special kryptonite dust courtesy of Major Disaster. He still had precise control over his powers, and could still calibrate them mathematically, so that when he was told to fly at a 44.28 degree angle to the ground at 6432.9 mph he could do just that. He could moreover measure things just by looking at them, so he could tell the TRS-80 Whiz Kids via walkie-talkie (or something) that a plane was crashing from a distance of 16,985.3 meters. The step that he couldn't perform was the super-calculation of his intercept path, in-between the super-measurement and the super-calibration of response.
No, it makes no sense whatsoever-- it's as ridiculous as any Silver Age "Jimmy Olson the gorilla-headed boy" plot, but with all the earnestness that came from combining late-70s enthusiasm for kids programming in BASIC with sheer commercial opportunism.
I'm deeply embarrassed by how much I liked this bizarre Cary Bates-written monstrosity when I was 9.
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
THIS POST DOESN'T EXIST...
I'm officially on a blogging hiatus. And no one's paid attention to this site in ages, since I moved to Volokh. But, even though no one reads this, I have to post:
The Red Sox win the pennant! The Red Sox win the pennant! And the Yankees lose the pennant!
I believe!
All credit to my brother Aaron. His birthday was Monday, and David Ortiz gave him the special birthday present of two game-winning hits in the same calendar day.
I'm officially on a blogging hiatus. And no one's paid attention to this site in ages, since I moved to Volokh. But, even though no one reads this, I have to post:
The Red Sox win the pennant! The Red Sox win the pennant! And the Yankees lose the pennant!
I believe!
All credit to my brother Aaron. His birthday was Monday, and David Ortiz gave him the special birthday present of two game-winning hits in the same calendar day.
Monday, May 10, 2004
A new, permanent top announcement:
The standard way to read only one blogger's posts at Volokh only lasts for a week. At this BlogRunner aggregator, you can read all of my posts as if they were a separate blog, back to spring 2004; this one goes from spring '04 however far back you like.
Just in case you're interested.
The standard way to read only one blogger's posts at Volokh only lasts for a week. At this BlogRunner aggregator, you can read all of my posts as if they were a separate blog, back to spring 2004; this one goes from spring '04 however far back you like.
Just in case you're interested.
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