I can’t figure out how to link it, grr. Go here and click on “Coaches”. It would help if you actually have seen it on the TV, though, since the video isn’t terribly high-quality.

I think the guy in the commercial is supposed to be, like, super-hot. Is that the impression you get? But…I dunno, he just seems kind of freaky to me. His proportions are way off–he’s about a foot too short for his torso, or something. And his waist, which I think is like 18 inches, is just disconcerting.

I just realized the newest travesty of the Committee from Hell.

One of the tasks is to write the answers to FAQs and the brief on-screen search tips.

Of course that task has fallen to the most verbose, obscurantist member of the team. How could it be any other way?

So there’s the whole tizzy about the AIG bonuses, but I’m not going to get into the rightness or wrongness of any faction’s actions or positions or whatnot.

What I’m wondering is…well, we need some appropriate nomenclature first, don’t we.

These bonuses are clearly not “bonuses” in the way I think most of us would think of bonuses. It seems to me that anything construable as a genuine bonus is also something that can be only expected outside the normal course of things. If you’re guaranteed a bonus, then to my way of thinking it’s not a bonus but instead, y’know, regular old compensation.[1] The case here, as I understand it, was such that the bonuses were nominally in lieu of regular compensation, but that’s just a stupid abuse of semantics–if you sign up for a $1 salary and a guaranteed $750K year-end bonus, then you’ve effectively signed up for a $750,001 salary, yeah?

But that’s not what they’ve done, and what I want to know is, why? What’s the benefit in contracting for a $1 salary + $750K bonus instead of a straightforward $750,001 salary? There must be some sort of advantage, surely; are bonuses taxed differently than salaries?

Again, I’m not interested in the right or wrong here; I’m genuinely interested in, and befuddled by, the why.

[1] “Guaranteed” here means “the guarantee of a non-trivial sum”, not “the guarantee of a percentage of profits” or other payout indexed to (corporate, division, or personal) performance. It seems to me that the bonus-like payments in question cannot possibly have been pegged to performance, as the performance of the entities in question was billions of dollars less than zero.

For the last two years, every time I’ve started dieting I’ve gotten sick within two days. Like, unable-to-leave-the-bed-except-to-run-to-the-bathroom sick.

Every time I’ve gotten sick has been within two days of starting a diet.

There’s a 1.0 correlation between dieting and illness, is what I’m saying.

This, to put it in scientific terms, sucks ass.

No spoilers. Just go here. Srsly.

It’d take to long to get into why, but I’ve read several comments on and one review of the movie A.I. this evening. Not all of the comments were appended to the review, which is kind of interesting.

So what I’m wondering is, why does it seem that about half the viewers thought the nth generation robots at the end of the movie were aliens? I know that that they were intentionally stylized to look like contemporary ideas about Grey-style aliens, but that was kind of the point. They come on screen, you look at them and go, “Wha? Aliens?” but then you look again and realize “Ohhhhhhh. Robots. Symbolic robots.”

But it seems like about every other viewer looked at them and went “Wha? Aliens” and then looked again and said “Aliens? That’s stupid.”

The thing that I find fascinating is the fact that a seeming majority of the comments trashing the movie cite the inexplicable and thematically inappropriate insertion of aliens as the big movie-ruiner. Which would make sense, I guess, if they were aliens and not symbolic robots that kind of perfectly work thematically by showing the evolution of robottery from the dumb-machine carnival automaton of the Blue Fairy fortune-teller booth through David the Boy Android and on to the alienish superbots of the future.

I wouldn’t say I’m a huge fan of Sandra Day O’Connor–she was a Reagan appointee, after all–but I just saw her on The Daily Show and was bowled over.

I think it’s her bearing and presence, cut from the same cloth as Ann Richards and Molly Ivins. [1] O’Connor’s a little more school-marmy, maybe, but still the kind of person you can sit and listen to for hours.

So, really, what’s in the water down there?

[1] I miss Molly Ivins. Sigh.