I was consciously avoiding mention of this, but unfortunately, it doesn't look like the issue is going to blow over. You might have seen the doodad on the right on Gizmodo or your local news. It's called TV-B-Gone (catchy!) and it does what you'd expect: it turns off televisions. It's basically a universal remote with a single button that cycles through all of its available codes.

Fan-fucking-tastic. It was bad enough to have to listen to the people with a pretentious philosophical opposition to TV. Now these people have been given an actual weapon in the battle to save us from ourselves. Make no mistake, these are the exact same people who shine laser pointers on movie screens. Self-righteousness and a subscription to the New Yorker are the only things separating the two ends of this particular demographic.

Hating TV is fine -- hell, I resent it, although I'm definitely in its thrall. But clearly this thing is designed primarily to irritate people whom the owner deems stupider than himself.

So what's the solution? Our options are somewhat limited. Remote controls use a binary infrared signal that looks kind of like this:

Only longer. As anyone who's had to program a universal remote knows, there's not much standardization in the industry -- different brands use different codes.

The solution will likely require the creation of a signal format that allows a TV work with only one (or a couple) of specific remotes at a time. This is complicated somewhat by the slowness of the hardware used in TV sets. Higher-end consumer IR receivers like the one in your phone or laptop can handle speeds of at least 9600 bps, but the one in your TV was probably made using less than two dollar's worth of parts. They may not be able to handle a fast signal. An even more important consideration is the noise that real or artificial light can introduce. The signal needs to be loud and slow, like those punk kids ahead of you on the escalator.

This speed limit means you've got to keep the signal short, to allow quick responses. But it still has to be long enough to accomodate bits that differentiate not only all of a device's functions, but the different devices themselves (so that your DVD player knows to ignore your VCR's "play" command). It may be tricky to accomodate the necessary changes and keep your channel surfing as spry as it currently is.

In a way I hope the TV-B-Gone really takes off, forcing the industry to finally sit down and draft an ISO standard. Presumably they'd add a privacy code to the signal large enough to prevent jerks like the inventor of the TV-B-Gone from messing with your stuff more often than every few minutes (during which time they'd have to cycle through all potential values for the privacy code).
From a practical standpoint, this means that when you buy a new remote, you'll have to introduce it to your TV through some onscreen menu, telling it to trust its signal -- similar to how Bluetooth pairing works, if anyone here owns any BT gadgets.

On the upside, this would mean that, once introduced, any modern TV remote could work with any modern TV without any configuration. But I wouldn't hold your breath for this. In the meantime, I think we'll start seeing a lot of black electrical tape being discreetly applied in restaurants and bars.

wow, i can't wait to hear from all the people who said andrew sullivan only turned away from bush because of the FMA justify why josh chafetz and daniel drezner have decided to vote for kerry.

well, it's apparently crap weather time here in the nation's capital. it normally happens like this: we regularly get a brilliant couple of fall weeks, which eventually fade into a pallid gray sky, drizzling rain, and dropping temperatures, until we get a potentially dreadful winter that doesn't let up until april.

hurray!

it's this kind of gray, dreary weather that makes it seem like you're constantly walking underwater that always, every year, inspires me to listen to depressing music. and elliott smith is constantly at the top of my Favorite Musicians Who Make Me Feel Like I Want to Die, or At Least Sleep and Cry Hysterically All Day.

mr. smith has been one of my favorite singers since high school. yes, i jumped on the "good will hunting" bandwagon, but i have stuck persistently by his side ever since. i wrote terrible, florid, teenage articles about how much i loved him. i traveled from charlottesville to d.c. and back in one night to see him in concert. i drank wine and felt artistically melancholy while listening to "between the bars" over and over again. and it literally hurt my heart when i read that he had committed suicide almost a year ago today.

in no small matter of timing, smith's new album, "from a basement on a hill", was recently released. apparently it had almost been finished at the time of his death, and a couple of close friends (one of whom is that female bassist from the jicks that tommy thinks is hot) helped master and arrange the tracks.

i haven't yet bought the album, but my dad has been emailing me several articles that review it. unsuprisingly, most of the pieces, which are largely positive, contain grandiloquent and flowery remarks on elliott's death and music (it's always seemed funny that no one, including myself, can write about elliott smith's music, which is at its heart very simple and unaffected, without sounding like a bombastic idiot).

i'll certainly buy the record soon, but one thing that i pray and hope doesn't happen is that elliott smith's memory and music get turned into the huge, unneccessary whoredom that is jeff buckley's legacy. buckley has been dead for seven years; every scrap of everything that he's ever half-assedly recorded has been put out; and his live performances have been repackaged over and over again. there's a difference between honoring a musician's works and exploiting them. i understand that it can be difficult to let go of the memory and brilliance of a musician who died in their artistic prime, but at some point, it has to happen. or you lessen the intensity of everything they put out while they were alive.

jesus christ. when did harry potter movies become the newest receptacle for british musicans? in addition to franz ferdinand's cameo as the wyrd sisters in the next harry potter movie, and their addition to the soundtrack, jarvis cocker, formerly of pulp, will also have a cameo and will write the score. is this savvy marketing or the worst idea ever? i can't decide.

i do think the JC addition is rather cool. i'm not so sure why i think franz ferdinand's cameo is terrible, while jarvis cocker's score will be wonderful, but it probably has to do with the fact that i've wanted to have sex with jarvis cocker since i was seventeen.

anyway, who's next? damon albarn? liam gallagher? THOM FUCKING YORKE?

I think this is pretty great: an Oregonian troublemaker submitted fake, anti-gay marriage arguments to the state voter's guide and got them published. Via Sullivan.