Archive for September, 2007
Posted by Matthew on September 22, 2007 at
3:50 pm
Through the magic of TiVo and Amazon’s Unbox video service, I was able to get all the pilots for NBC’s new shows a couple weeks ahead of their first airings on the network. There are several that look decent, actually; one that particularly drew my attention was the new drama called Life.
The primary reason I watched the pilot for Life was that the show’s star is Damian Lewis, who played Dick Winters in HBO’s epic Band of Brothers. I’ve never seen him in anything else (until now), but Band of Brothers was enough to make me watch anything that Lewis is in at least once, no questions asked.
In Life, Lewis plays Detective Charlie Crews who has just returned to the force after spending 12 years in a maximum-security prison for a triple murder he didn’t commit. The circumstances of Crews’ initial incrimination are kept mostly secret; it’s clear that this will be an ongoing, slowly unraveling thread as the show progresses (more on that later). Suffice to say, the 12 years he did in prison were 12 very hard years, with what seems an excessive amount of abuse. Obviously, he carries some deep scars, although he has apparently buried them enough to be allowed back on the force as a detective.
Charlie Crews appears to be a reasonably complex character. He used to be a by-the-book cop, but after spending so much time in the slammer he’s changed his outlook on life. He alternates between slightly quirky, genuinely nice, somewhat cynical, and just downright weird. Lewis plays it excellently, but the way it’s put together in this first episode makes the character feel slightly off balance; I think the writers still need time to “find” the character completely. To be fair, I have never, ever seen a show that nails a character completely before the end of the first season. These things take time. Fortunately, Life is pretty close. I like Crews; he has real issues and real potential, and his quirkiness — developed from his unique situation — makes him more interesting than most cut-and-paste Law and Order types.
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Posted by Matthew on September 20, 2007 at
10:02 am
Not that she ever liked him in the first place (and who does, really?), but Sen. Clinton let typical political diplo-speak fall by the wayside last night when she referred to the vice president as such, describing the administration’s attempts to keep Republican lawmakers’ support for the Iraq war.
“Vice President Cheney came up to see the Republicans yesterday,” Clinton said at the fundraiser. “You can always tell when the Republicans are getting restless, because the Vice President’s motorcade pulls into the Capitol, and Darth Vader emerges.”
I’m not exactly a big Hillary fan, but it’s nice to know that sometimes in Washington they see what the rest of us see.
Read: CNN Political Ticker
Posted by Matthew on September 19, 2007 at
12:22 am
What do you call the ‘@’ symbol? Although some people mistakenly call it an ampersand (which is actually the ‘&’ symbol), it may surprise you to know it doesn’t actually have a name. For something we use so frequently — it has to be one of the most often-used non-punctuation symbols in the modern world — it’s amazing that we haven’t come up with a slicker name than “the ‘at’ symbol.”
While designing a user signup screen, a buddy of mine at work asked that very question: what’s the actual name for the @ symbol? We were shocked to realize that none of us knew. A quick Google search turned up some interesting speculation on the symbol’s history; for one thing, there are a disproportionate number of cultures whose nickname for it is animal-related (e.g., the “hanging monkey”). That must mean something…but what, nobody seems to know.
Another theory is that it was developed by medieval monks as a shorthand to writing the word “at”, since it saved them two pen strokes when transcribing books. Man, and I thought modern technology made people lazy.
Finally, my personal favorite is the historical use of the @ symbol as an abbreviation for a unit of measurement, the amphora. It first appeared in a letter written by a Florentine trader in 1536. The amphora described the amount held by large terra cotta jar that were used to transport grain, spices, wine, and probably a whole host of other goodies.
Since the latter story is a much better-sounding explanation than a bunch of slacker monks, and the word “amphora” is just kind of cool by itself, we hereby declare that the @ symbol’s official name shall be “amphora.” Just in case we actually have any power to declare such things. Which we don’t. But hey, this is the Internet…weirder things have happened.
Read: What do you call the @ symbol used in email addresses?
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