It's Cold!

I know that this is sick, and anyone who's actually reading this can feel free to remind me that I'm crazy when the dead of winter comes, but it's finally cold here!!!! First of all, that means I can put my air conditioner in the basement, which gives me like two extra square feet in my living room. That may not seem like much, but since the whole apartment is 380 square feet, two extra ones in the room you spend the most time in is a HUGE asset. HUGE, people.

Also, I am so excited about the cold weather. This is ridiculous, I know. I hate being cold. I hate it a lot. But ironically, that's why I enjoy cold weather. Allow me to explain:

1. You can add more clothes when you are cold. There is a limit to what you can take off when it's hot. Even if you're an exhibitionist, you can be butt-naked and still feel like you're in the pit of hell.
2. Other people think it should be warm when it's cold out. In other words, for once they agree with me!!!! No more office at 60 degrees! No more wearing a wool sweater when it's dripping hot outside!
3. I look more attractive when it's cold. I can wear tights to hide my cellulite! I don't need to have my cleavage properly ventilated (although I do enjoy that). I can wear attractive scarves without looking like a librarian!
   
4. I get to wear boots!
   
5. Wool socks! Hooray!
   

I'm really excited. The down side is that I can't put any of my summer clothes away. I will pretty much have to wear tank tops when I'm in my home, because the baseboard heat makes it about 80 in my house. Not that I mind 80, but you can't exactly wear your wool sweater in there.

Small price to pay. Just like the obscenely expensive long underwear I just bought...

Tivo Fakeout

Today I got my cable hooked up, which means that I can finally enjoy the glory of my new TV and my new Tivo. I had read horrible things about the cable card installation process, and the lady on the phone at Time Warner really had no idea what I was talking about. But the dude on the truck really did know what he was up to, and once he was here he got everything squared away in record time.

This is the first time I've had a Tivo with two tuners in it, though, so tonight at 7:00 I decided to check and see whether it was recording Ugly Betty as it was supposed to. I looked and saw the little red light on, and I was thinking, "ohboyohboyohboy," but when I turned the TV on, it was Iron Chef. Confused Tivo, I thought, and went back to do what it told me to, which was to complete guided setup.

Turns out I was confused. My Tivo was saying, "I'm busy recording Ugly Betty, but maybe you'd like to watch Iron Chef while I finish." D'oh. So now I have 18 minutes of Ugly Betty, which was supposed to be my inaugural program on the new Tivo. Oh well. I'm sure I'll come to terms with the luxury given time.

Kitchen Duds

I love watching Gordon Ramsay on television, and I'm even willing to watch "Hell's Kitchen," even though it's not nearly as good as any of his UK programs. But I'm not sure the American version of "Kitchen Nightmares" is going to make its way onto my regular viewing schedule. The first couple of shows were pretty good, but now that I've seen the third one they all seem...a bit samey.

There's a lot wrong with it. The voiceover narration ("we are all out of footage, so let us show you the canopy outside and tell you what happened next..."), the sheer profusion of cameras (they shouldn't ever have to resort to voiceover, with all those cameras around), the overnight makeovers. I have a lot of quibbles, but I think the last straw is the hugging. Of all the adjectives I'd use to describe Gordon Ramsay, not one of them is "huggable." But hugging him seems to be a tradition. He's going to think we're a bunch of wackadoo huggers over here in the states. Which we are, compared to most English people with a camera all up in their personal business, but still. I guess it's nice that these folks are overcome with gratitude. It just seems staged.

So disappointing! Thank goodness for BBCAmerica.

The Sound of Brooklyn

Sometimes, late at night, as I'm drifting off to sleep, I just lie in the dark and listen to the noise of the city. Or, as luck would have it, the noise of the other folks in my building, which is infinitely more entertaining.

My super and I have discovered that both of our upstairs neighbors are obsessed with cleaning at odd hours. His neighbor vacuums at midnight. Midnight! Last night I was finishing a book, and at 2 a.m. my upstairs neighbor started scrubbing something. Something hollow and resonant and on the floor. I wanted to be outraged, but I was just too tired.

But that's nothing. More puzzling is the fact that somewhere in my building, the AFLAC duck has swallowed an angora sweater. It's been hacking away all summer trying to cough it up. Someone needs to feed that duck some ipecac. I mean, it's a duck, not a billy goat. At least, I think it is. It's certainly not human...

3000 Hours Painlessly Donated

This article is amazing. It has to do with the effort to scan books so that they can be accessed electronically, and the issues that optical character readers (OCR's) have deciphering distorted or poor-quality texts. You know those words that you have to type in to comment at websites or to search for tickets at Ticketmaster? This program feeds words that the OCR fails to recognize into those sites, so that humans logging into websites effectively correct the OCR's mangled version of the text. So people are painlessly donating 3000 hours a day to the effort of digitizing books. How awesome is that?

My only issue with the article is this. How on earth do you get CAPTCHA out of Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart? I get CATTTTCHA. Does the P somehow mean that there are four T's?