check out the CW's promo for season three of veronica mars here.

i'm curious. of course this promo makes me all squee becauase i can't wait for the show to come back in september, but for those of you who haven't watched the show: does this actually make you want to watch it? what emotions does it evoke? does it make you puke? does it make you want to have sex with kristen bell? does it repulse you? does it make you want to go out and buy the previous seasons on dvd?

just curious.

it's stupid for me to like it, but i am liking it anyway:

yglesias: it's pretty weird to have one's social circle
pablohoney: defined by blogs?
yglesias: yeah
pablohoney: indeed
pablohoney: i have come to embrace it though
yglesias: I feel like we're the clique of the future
pablohoney: that is my favorite thing you ever said
yglesias: maybe we should get Tom to make a group webpage and that can be our slogan

indeed.

Charles is right: the Post seems to be slowly buying up the DC music scene, no doubt for nefarious ends. Travis Morrison works for the post.com as a web developer (and consequently really ought to have permalinks in his excellent blog). Chuck Brown is doing commercials for them. Chris Richards is writing a weekly column for the Style section. And while you've probably heard that Henry Rollins is moving back to D.C., you may not know that he's doing so in order to take an office manager position in the Post classified department. In fact, I'm sure you didn't know that, since I just made it up. Still, I bet he could put a prompt and decisive end to office pen theft.

Charles is also right about this: the style section should have better music coverage. I haven't really kept up with their online chats since David Sedaris Segal (what is wrong with me?) left, but my memory of his regime is that he talked endlessly about Guided By Voices (because they let him come onstage and play a couple of times), and no other relevant bands, ever (relevant = bands I like, of course). And this was well after the world had internalized GBV's important life lessons and moved on to ignoring their ridiculously voluminous output. Perhaps the new critic(s) are better, but I haven't heard anyone saying that that's the case.

This Singles File column is a great start, however, and I wish I'd been paying attention when it started up. But now I will! And you should, too: I've gone ahead and created a scrubbed style section feed with Feed Rinse. So if you just want to get new Singles File entries in your RSS reader rather than the entire style section, subscribe to this URL.

It's already scored me a good summer album candidate — immediately after the beach, naturally: the Pink Spiders CD, which is catchy, poppy & good (although also fairly old, so you may already know and be sick of them).

Hearing it made me suddenly wonder what's become of Feable Weiner, a band that's funny, talented and exuberantly stupid, in addition to being responsible for the most fun I've ever had at the Grog & Tankard. I did the necessary five minutes of Google research, but the details remain a bit hazy (and I'm not prepared to sort through the messages left on their myspace page). They seem to currently be on tour with Cruiserweight and "local emocore band that sounds like My Chemical Romance"; they've got a newish single on iTunes and a definitely new one at their label's site ($5 for a song? no thanks, regardless of the extras); and they have a recording diary for the allegedly forthcoming 2FN HOT full length.

But they also seem to have left their old label for a smaller one, and the diary's last entry was in October '05, seemingly in the middle of the recording process (or at least before mixing & mastering). You'd think they'd want the current tour to be behind a new release, if possible. Here's hoping the album they've presumably got in the can comes out before the season's barbeque grills go back in.

the first: last night after returning from some delicious margaritas, i saw a guy struggling with a heavy-looking box and trying to get into my apartment lobby. i ran to hold the door open for him, then was, like, huh. i hope i am not letting in psycho murderer dude. so i asked him if he was moving in, because i didn't recognize him. and he said, yes, he was moving into I2, but just for the summer. and then i wept tears of joy. because I2 is the apartment above mine. and that must mean that NUN has moved out. noisy upstairs neighbor is dead, long live noisy upstairs neighbor. of course, this only happened when i have approximately 10 days of staying in my apartment left, but i'll take what i can get.

the second: we're having a party! the O street gang (that sounds terribly retarded but i'm going with it anyways) is having a party june 10. no reason, except i'm in town and am super eager to see all the lovely d.c. people in one convenient place. if you didn't get an evite, don't feel slighted - i'm just disorganized. you're certainly all invited, so just shoot me an email if you want the details.

remind me to avoid republic gardens when i come back next week.

I'm back from the beach, as you may have surmised. Photos and perhaps some recapping will come later, but at the moment I'm too exhausted. The short version is that it was a lot of fun. I showed up at work today around 1:30 saturated with sweat, dog hair and fatigue, but other than that the experience was uniformly great.

Oh, and for those interested: the EVDO worked wonderfully, but someone had an open access point very near our house, so it was unnecessary. It came in handy during the car ride back, though. The final stage of my EVDO catch & release strategy will come tomorrow.

Via Stereogum: Wayne Coyne's advice to a graduating highschool class. Part 1 is here, but not all that interesting.

This has gotten me in the mood to watch The Fearless Freaks again. What a great movie.

Prompted by a WSJ article, Bunnie, the man most frequently credited with cracking the copy protection on the original Xbox, lets us in on the work he's doing on the Xbox 360. The recent exploit that allows DVD dual layer backups of commercial games came thanks to the other star of the WSJ article — a guy named TheSpecialist (he didn't release his work, but it was replicated). Bunnie's been mostly quiet about the XB360, implying at times that he wasn't planning to really get his hands dirty with it.

Well, that didn't last. Exposing a chip's silicon and extracting the cryptographic keys hardcoded on it = BAD ASS.

woohoo! big congrats to my little brother peter, who just got his navy assignment for the next four years. the details:

he will be assigned to San Diego, CA on the USS Jefferson City, a fast Attack submarine of the Los Angeles class.

i have no idea what any of that means, but i do know san diego was one of his top choices (and, um, mine too. i wasn't going to be so excited about the prospecting of visiting him in, say, guam or connecticut). anyway, i'm so proud of him! you can see him in all his fabulousness in some flickr shots.

if you were to look up the phrase "work hard, play hard," i think this weekend thus far would be its definition.

index thus far -

hours worked since friday: dozens
hours of sleep: maybe 10
hours actually spent at my apartment in lakeview: one
pool games played: like, eight? (i'm getting better!)
times photoshop, dreamweaver and pretty much every application on my computer has made me their bitch: at least 17
beers drank: innumerable
temperature today: 90
planned swims in the lake: one if not more

happy memorial day weekend!

UPDATE: some photos.

Man, what a tease. Tycho of Penny Arcade wrote a paragraph with a reference to HilariousInjuries.com. Imagine my excitement! Sadly, it doesn't exist. Not yet, anyway. What a tease.

Well, while we're waiting for someone to monetize that idea, placate yourself with these two videos that Justin showed me earlier today.

And with that, I'm headed to the beach. But, as previously discussed, I should still be online. Beachblogging to come! Possibly!

I was talking about Google with Matt last night — more specifically, when they'll fall from grace. He thinks it might be a while, and considers the period when the Gmail Generation begins running for office a likely date for the turn, what with all the secrets that have been entrusted to them.

Personally, I think it'll be much sooner. The cracks in the facade are showing: Google Pages is a bust; Orkut is mostly a bust; Google Talk is mostly a bust; and I'm deeply dubious about Google Base ever turning into anything. Amazon S3 seems to have beaten GDrive to market. We'll see if they ever do a web-based office suite replacement, I suppose — their Writely acquisition is suggestive, but I have doubts about them being able to pull off a really compelling Word replacement in the browser.

There are plenty of failures that I'm forgetting, too. Google fans generally defend this hit-or-miss history by saying the company throws stuff at the wall and sees what sticks. But now they're having trouble with their core offering, too: from what I'm reading, their search difficulties extend beyond the Sitemaps problems I've been having. The "site:" operator hasn't been working correctly, and the debut of a new crawler codenamed "Big Daddy" has been wreaking havoc with folks' PageRanks.

The trouble in search-land seems like big news. If they can't keep a handle on the cornerstone of their business, the company will stop looking quite so much an eclectic whiz kid and begin appearing a bit more like an ADD-addled savant. Now that they're public, a loss in confidence could send their suspiciously dot-commie culture and strategy spiralling off into unpleasant places.

Or maybe I'm just feeling pissy because Gmail has been screwing up all day. Either way, I'm souring on GOOG.

cliptip's got a nice little phoenix video up that you should watch to get your friday started. the video itself is nothing too special, but i'm still obsessed wtih the band and the song is, as cliptip says "a perfect little pop song." they're just SO FRENCH.

more tunes on their myspace page, all of which are real good. yeah, pitchfork calls them "soft rock." but they mean that in a GOOD WAY. good soft rock. and i'm old.

A small victory, it's true. But I had to fight long & hard with Windows XP to get this far. The Mac has a nasty habit of quickly hanging up the connection when the Airport is simultaneously on. I think that's because OS X is clever and tries to save you modem charges when you have cheap wifi. Let's hope it's really clever and doesn't extend this policy to when you're sharing your modem connection over an ad-hoc wifi network.

It's on, people. Come see the excellent Deleted Scenes and Georgie James. And, as if that wasn't enough, there might — just might — be some temporary tattoos given away. I know!

I'll be there, although I'm afraid I won't be sticking around too long after Georgie James' set — there's morning news to be rounded up, chest colds to be fought and pre-beach packing to attend to. But although I won't be rock-and-rolling all night, it should still be a fun time. Hope to see you there.

Yeah, they've got me onboard for another season.

because i don't have enough to do as it is, i suddenly got the urge to upload all of my photos that live on the blog to flickr. just for safety's sake. the first ones to go are some taken in italy over the past three or four years - you can see the beginnings of my uploading effort here. they're pretty disorganized, though.

sigh. what did we even do before flickr?

UPDATE: there are just a crapload of new pictures up there, so you may as well click through on all of them. this one is a favorite. I LOVE TED LEO.

I'll be tuning over to the Lost season finale at 9, but for the moment Charles and I are watching the two-hour American Idol extravaganza (that doesn't include the red carpet telecast, of course). So far it's pretty awesome. Do you like... scatting? Yeah, I hate that shit too. But we got some of it!

And Live played! Remember Live? They had that song that was about abortion, maybe? Well, their lead singer and one of the American Idol contestants (possibly the one who Fuel has an embarrassing crush on) just had an epic falsetto/bald-off in their ridiculously high-heeled boots and sweaty, billowing synthetic shirts. They will presumably take alternating shifts on tour/in cryogenic suspension, supported by an increasingly cybernetic backing band, allowing rock-FM summer festival victims to enjoy "Dolphins Cry" well into the next millennium.

Also, Katherine McPhee sang with Meatloaf, who looks and sounds like he could drop dead at any moment.

And now Wolfgang Puck is brandishing a lobster at newly short-haired Kelly Pickler, who is either a masterful comic actress or simply proof that my taste in women is the product of a deeply sick misogynism. Either way, the segment is pretty fantastic.

Alright, focus: why am I writing this? To protest the travesty that's about to unfold. It seems clear that Taylor Hicks is going to win this thing, despite Katherine McPhee being talented, beautiful, and scary in exactly the right way. Now, I've got nothing against the idea of the women of America publicly proclaiming their love for a prematurely gray shlub — I'm kind of partial to the idea, actually. But not this shlub. Not this Michael McDonald-aping motherfucker. I can't take another lifetime's worth of whiteguy-soul-filled MCI commercials. I was counting on the original abomination to eventually die... or at least be imprisoned by some sort of unbreakable enchantment. Don't take that away from me, America.

But there's one normally-noxious player on the screen that I'm actually growing to tolerate: Ryan Seacrest. Sure, he's awful in every conceivable respect. But think of it this way: if it weren't him, who would it be? What's the Death Takes A Holiday scenario? I'll tell you what: it's Billy Bush. And no matter how awful Seacrest is, it seems unlikely that he'll ever become president. We need to support Ryan; if that slot opens up, it's not going to be Dunkelman taking over. It's going to President Billy and First Lady Jenna and their hemophiliac children.

Lesser of two evils, people.

clearly my blogging ability up to this point has been driven by my frenetic obsession with veronica mars and my impending move to atlanta, and now that those two topics have dried up, it has become apparent that i am a big empty vessel, devoid of any content. the media management project goes full churn for the next two weeks, stopping only for alcohol fuel along the way, so it's likely blog stuff from my end of the site will be pretty lacking. but still - random things for your discussion:

I'm heading to the beach this Memorial Day weekend, and I'm intent on bringing the internet along with me. Last year I still had a fly-by-night dialup ISP that only charged you in months when you used the service. That business model has since run its course, and I'm casting about for another way to ensure connectivity. Needless to say, the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

So I stopped by the Ver/iz/on store on my way home and signed up for EVDO service. By the numbers: $80/month, $150 for the PC5740 card and — most importantly — 14 days to return it all. I'll still get charged a prorated fee for the service I use, so it's not totally shady. Just mostly.

There's one complication, though: the card doesn't work with Macs. Well, okay, it sort of does: I've already gone through these instructions, but they mean it when they say the account has to be activated on a PC. Sadly, Charles' laptop isn't up to the task (it's always been flaky about PCMCIA cards, and refuses to recognize this one). But we have one sort-of-working PC laptop at work, and a number of EVDO cardholders who've successfully gotten their Powerbooks working with the nominally PC-only technology. So spirits remain high.

Remember when I was singing the praises of Google Sitemaps, only to quickly reconsider? Well, I'm moving from "reconsidering" to "being kind of pissed off".

For those who don't know, the idea behind the sitemap is to give Google a specially formatted file that says "here's where my content is, here's when it was updated, and here's how important each piece of it is relative to the rest". It's supposed to make the Googlebot that crawls your site work more efficiently, and give you better results. Personally, I'm sick of having old-style URLs (e.g. 001234.php) showing up for our site.

But so far the sitemap hasn't managed to do anything except banish every included URL from Google's systems entirely. Which is pretty much exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to do. I posted the following message to the Sitemaps Google Group; I'll let you know if I hear anything back.

I hope someone can help me figure out what's going on. Last week I submitted a sitemap for my blog (http://www.zunta.org/sitemap.xml). Everything seems to be working properly according to my Google Sitemaps account dashboard.

However, since submitting the sitemap every page that is in it has been excluded from the index, including many that I know used to have relatively good pageranks. I know that there have been some recent hiccups with the site: operator, but this applies to other queries as well. I wrote an SSH tutorial with the word "sshirking" in its title a while ago that got a number of links and attained a high pagerank for the unusual word "sshirking". The proper permalinked URLs used to be among the top hits; now they can't be found anywhere in the index (as proven by entering the full url as a query, e.g. http://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/2005/08/30/sshirking_work_1/index.php).

What's more, the old version of these pages -- before I changed permalink naming styles -- are still in the index. http://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/004498.php was the original URL of the above link (it now redirects to the proper URL). Only this second, less descriptive URL (which is NOT in the sitemap) is still in Google's index. It's only the files included in the sitemap that have been dropped from the index.
I tried deleting and resubmitting the map, and have patiently waited since May 18 for a new crawl to include the results. Nothing so far.

Can anyone tell me what's going on? Right now it seems that having a sitemap achieves nothing other than nuking your results from the index entirely.

It turns out that Feed on Feeds + this incredibly simple PHP XML-RPC library = your own Technorati. Well, okay, not quite — you'd still have to write your own app to crawl the internet for new blogs and add them. And I have some concerns about using the FoF RSS reader in a shared hosting environment — seems likely that those lengthy 4x/hour blow-crawling sessions are going to start getting noticed by somebody eventually.

But for now, and for a limited pool of blogs (say, all the DC-related ones), it's working pretty well. You can probably guess where this is going...

Anyway, why would I want to do this instead of just using Technorati's open API? There are a few reasons. One, to restrict the search results to a particular pool of blogs that I have control over. Two, to avoid paying Technorati money. And three, for fun. Sort of.

So, the weekend. It happened, there's no denying that. On Friday I watched basketball and drank beer with Matt, Kriston and Charles, and it was good. On Sunday I saw The Da Vinci Code with Mark and Rebecca, and it was not (although it was good to see M & R). In between I somehow managed to pick up a cold and an accompanying case of nocturnal laryngitis: for the past two days I've lost my voice right around 8pm. Yesterday it occurred somewhere during the course of the movie, so it's not from overuse.

But, my fascinating symptoms aside, the big excitement of the weekend was making the trek to the Argonaut on Saturday. This has been on my to-do list for a while. I like U Street just fine, but there's no denying that its cachet diminishes a little bit more with every new trainload of prelaw girls crammed into tubetops. Not that, you know, *I* am an authentic participant in U's cultural offerings. It's just that I, too, own a Gap card. I've been on a GSA schedule. I drink light beer, and shop at Ikea, and have strongly-held opinions about olive oil. I'm sorry. I can't help it. But I find these things just as noxious in others as you do, and consequently try to avoid doing my socializing in the presence of too many similarly callow twentysomethings.

In order to achieve that goal I'll eventually have to identify the next bar scene ahead of time, so that I can enjoy it in its unspoiled state/get a head start on ruining it. The early indications have been that H Street is going to be that scene. It's got all the signifiers: climbing real estate prices; a new music venue and several bars that are threatening to open; race-baiting WaPo gentrification articles; and, of course, the neighborhood is terrible, aka "edgy". Surely this is where one ought to go to find the city's artists, poets, intravenous drug users and other creative types. In my mind I had pictured Paris cafe culture, only with more stupid t-shirts and public urination.

So on Saturday Kriston, Matt, Ian, Valerie, Sommer, Genevieve, Jon and I — fortified with sausages and beer — ventured out from the shadow of the Ellington, hailed a couple of cabs, and headed east. "That's right by my house!" said the cabbie. He didn't seem like the indie rock type, though.

Well, we went to the Argonaut, and it was pretty good. The Sierra Nevada-ish house beer was okay, and the prices were okay, and the jukebox was okay. But there was barely anyone there on a Saturday night. The only folks out on the street seemed to be in the process of a) waiting for the bus or b) getting arrested. We had a fine time, but I don't feel particularly compelled to go back.

The X2 makes it more convenient and awesome-sounding to get there than I would have guessed. But until some more stuff opens up and some more people start going, I don't see a particularly great reason to head to Trinidad.http://www.zunta.org/tomsblog/archives/005333.php

elizabethtown really IS as bad as everyone said it was!

the only redeeming part is the use of ryan adams' "come pick me up," perhaps maybe one of my favoritest songs ever. here's a live mp3, to help make your evening prettier. cause mine sure has been ruined by this crapola film.

1. catherine finds out she'll be working out at cnn.com in atlanta this summer. promptly starts freaking out about housing on the blog.

2. matt (who, incidentally, catherine knows through kyle) spends approximately two billion hours giving catherine neighborhood/general atlanta advice.

3. catherine spends approximately two billion hours on craigslist, which yields absolutely nothing.

4. matt is kind enough to post bulletins to friendster and myspace saying his clueless internet bud could sure use a decent place to live in atlanta.

5. matt's kind friend jeanie says, hey! i just bought an enormous gorgeous house in east atlanta. i might be willing to sublet a furnished room or two for the low low price of $400 including utilities and internet for however long you need.

6. catherine says hell yes!

and that is the story of how the internet saved catherine from living in a box outside of the CNN center this summer. i never thought i'd owe anything to myspace, but turns out, you just never know!

as for my dc stint, i'll be home from friday, june 9 until probably sunday the 18th, when i might head back to chicago for a few days to pack up all my worldly possessions. hopefully i'd drive back to dc by tuesday the 20th, then drive down to atlanta friday the 23rd. good lord, 26 hours of driving in one week, here i come!

and thus hopefully ends the period of catherine posting a boring blue streak about her logistical plans for the summer. praise be!

Everyone says they're behind the curve on music (or at least running behind schedule on telling the rest of us what's good). Hah! You don't know from behind the curve. I just downloaded The National album last week — beat that! Anyway, I like it, although I'm not as enamored as others have been. Reminds me a lot of Emmett Swimming (remember those guys? I would be completely unsurprised if it turned out I knew one of their former members without realizing it). "Abel" and "Baby We'll Be Fine" are genuinely great tracks, but it hasn't really blown my mind as an album.

More 2005 releases that I'm just getting to now: the Animal Collective album seems pretty disappointing when compared to "Grass" as a single. Maybe I need to listen to it more.

Downloaded the Bell Orchestre album on the strength of their status as an Arcade Fire side project. First: no vocals. Do you like the sound of an orchestra tuning up? Do you wish you could listen to it for 53 minutes? Then this might be for you. There's one or two pretty tracks, but it's fairly repetitive. Not a huge number of ideas are on display. For AF-affiliated pop violin, you're better off with Final Fantasy.

Speaking of side projects, Sunset Rubdown is a part of Wolf Parade Enterprises. If you really, really like Wolf Parade (and I do), you might like this. If not, you probably won't.

On DCeiver's recommendation I'm listening to the new Rainer Maria, which also seems to have the National's "sounds like a particular unremarkable rock band from the late 90s, only somewhat better" thing going. K's Choice, in this case. Or perhaps Rilo Kiley (although I really like Rilo Kiley).

Really, the only genuinely great thing I've been listening to is the Figurines album, which has now taken over large parts of my frontal lobe. "All Night", "Silver Ponds" and "Other Plans" are particularly good. Who knew Danes could sound so Canadian? Anyway, you probably ought to download it.

Everybody is jumping on the Da Vinci Code movie bandwagon — Charles said he could scroll through six pages of Tivo listings tonight before he got a screen without a Dan Brown-related documentary on it. It's disgusting. But also not something I'm above.

So, two things. First, How Things Work has got a tie-in that's worth reading. Apparently Dan Brown was too busy collecting highly suspect Biblical conspiracy theories to actually do any research for the parts of the book set in the present day.

Second, here's my Da Vinci Code review/parody from way back in 2004. Everyone tells me my writing has been a big disappointment since then, so I may as well squeeze one last gasp of relevance out of it.

The Da Vinci Code
Big thumbs down. The only interesting aspect of this book is the conspiracy-theory theology, for which the author can really only claim credit as an editor. I can't say whether any of it is plausible or not — I'll leave that to biblical scholars and that crazy guy at the farmer's market from whom Catherine and I tried to buy goat cheese one time, who wouldn't shut up about Mary Magdalene, the Holy Grail, and the Divine Right of Kings. His cheese was good, but not crazy good.

What I can tell you, though, is that Brown gets a bunch of other stuff wrong, which doesn't bode well for the viability of the biblical mumbo-jumbo. For instance: calling "left brain" thought "irrational"?! Okay Dan, the left/right brain thing is a horrible oversimplification, but if you're going to use it then at least realize that the left hemisphere is credited with language and LOGIC. Also, public key encryption is not the same thing as putting a secret message in a locked container. Sorry. Not even close. In fact, that's not even encryption, dumbass! I can't bear to talk about his magical solar powered hard disk voice recorders.

I'm too upset to continue. Judge for yourself. I've helpfully supplied a lengthy excerpt. Implied spoilers ahead.

"Robert!" Sophie gasped. "I've found something!"

Robert Langdon strode across the old church floor. Resplendent in his tweed jacket, Langdon looked every bit the respected Ivy League academic that his plodding intellect and limited vocabulary belied. With his smolderingly generic white guy good looks, those who wrote about him were frequently prompted to shamelessly compare him to Harrison Ford, although if Mr. Ford's schedule precluded his participation in such a comparison, Michael Douglas would probably also be okay.

"What is it, Sophie?"

"My... My grandfather... He's left us another clue!"

He certainly had. There, on the floor below him, were ten carved letters, which no one through the centuries, except perhaps a few hack thriller writers, had ever noticed.

CKUF HET EPOP

"What does it mean?" breathed Sophie, breathlessly. Sophie's demeanor was unusually flustered. Well, probably unusually. Actually, it wasn't entirely clear what her demeanor was usually like. She was definitely a woman, though, and attractive. Oh yeah! Also she was a cryptologist. It has to do with codes or something.

"Isn't it obvious?" smirked Langdon. His training was coming in handy now. Yes, he thought, symbology is a real academic discipline.

"It's perfect, Sophie. Your grandfather was a genius. He's perfectly summarized the beliefs of the secret society to which he belonged. All in this simple statement.

"You see," he continued, "CKUF seems to be an archaicized variant of cuff — by the way, English is conveniently the de facto language for ancient materials relating to the Grail for some reason. Most likely your grandfather included double velar stop phonemes knowing that Hebrew possessed no C equivalent, and Latin no K. Genius!

"HET is more puzzling — until one considers that the Church has persecuted all ideas associated with the concept of left, or Sinister, due to its association with the sacred feminine! Your grandfather omitted the S as a poignant inside joke — echoing and decrying the Church's shameful legacy! What genius!

"HET then becomes HEST — as in Hester Prynn, of The Scarlet Letter. CUFF HESTER. What better symbol of the Priory of Scion's struggle against religious misogyny than this bold, bumper-sticker-ready summation of the ages-old persecution of the assertion of female sexuality? It's genius!"

"And EPOP?" asked Sophie.

"Most likely a nonsense word, designed to throw off Grail seekers. Your grandfather was obsessed with duality, Sophie, and unlikely to be interested in phrases containing more than two words. He was a genius, Sophie."

"Duality? I don't understand."

With that, Robert embarked on another lengthy discourse into the meaning of ancient symbols, frequently accidentally slipping out of dialogue and into tracts of wild theorizing from an unaccounted-for narrator. None of the words were too big, though, so nobody noticed.

"And that's why," Robert concluded, "Any story involving men and women, opposing forces, or objects that are more round than they are pointy, is a secret code for how Jesus hit that Magdalene shit."

His words echoed through the impressive space of Westminster Abbey, its grand expanses dwarfing the scene below, although if using a location shoot to capture the scene was too expensive it could probably be simulated pretty well with bluescreens.

"I see," said Sophie, staring into Robert's eyes. She was conflicted: in the face of the raw sexual potency of a Harvard academic any woman would have a hard time keeping her lust in check. Yet Sophie sensed that showing her attraction now might hurt her chances with Robert later. Men — and in particular men who were screenwriters — didn't seem to like it when there was any romantic groundwork laid prior to women throwing themselves at bookish hero types upon the conclusion of their adventures. Still, those symbologist eyes...

"Tally Ho!" Their reverie was broken. Sir Leigh Teabing made his way across the church toward them. "As you may recall, I'm dreadfully eccentric and British," Teabing continued, his voice echoing off the walls as if it had been recorded on a soundstage and the reverb added later.

"Leigh," growled Langdon, upset at being interrupted. "Now is not the time. Need I remind you that we're being hunted by an unknown evil mastermind who seems to know our every move? And that in the course of our adventure we have met only three or four characters, half of whom we already know to be bad guys?"

"Righto!" replied Teabing, hurrying off nervously. "Cheers!"

Suddenly, Sophie gasped. "Holy fucking shit, Robert!" she exclaimed. "I think this might be an anagram!"

"Another one?"

who is responsible for this?

Hmm. Remember a day or two ago when I mentioned some quick & easy ways to generate a Google Site Map for your MT/WP/Drupal site? Well, you might want to hold off on that — all of a sudden we seem to have dramatically fewer entries in Google. I'm having trouble finding blog posts that I know were available before.

Hopefully this is just a case of Google clearing our their old entries prior to picking up the new ones from the site map. I'm taking some steps to make the sitemap more accessible, then I'll give it a few days to settle down. But right now this seems like a pretty bad way to optimize your site.

i may have been unhappy with the direction the season finale took grey's anatomy, but this video they filmed from this week's upfronts is basically comedy gold. (via)

Saw this on BoingBoing yesterday and meant to blog it, but then didn't: FeedRinse is a pretty neat idea. Put your various RSS subscriptions in, combine them into channels (if you so desire), then set up filters on various criteria.

Why would you want to do this? Maybe because you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about when I write about tech stuff, and don't care to learn. You could filter out all of the tech posts from our feed and just see the others. Or you could just view posts by Catherine. Or add richer keyword filtering to a Craigslist feed.

Sadly, their site is a little too slick for its own good — in order to keep up with the guy's 19 or so different blogs, I tried to put together a "Kriston" channel. Unfortunately, the dynamic feed-adding process seems to have a bug; when I added new blogs I'd get empty select boxes instead of meaningful UI elements. Oh well.

But it's still a good idea, and probably works just fine in IE or Safari or Camino or Opera or something. And the feed filtering stuff works fine, I believe — it's just the channel-creation feature that's broken. Once they get the kinks sorted out, this will be the kind of thing that ends up being unepectedly useful on a regular basis.

so i just registered for the 2006 marine corps marathon.

*shrug*

don't worry, this time around i won't be trying to bilk you all out of $2,000 for cancer.

When Google Sitemaps came out I didn't really bother to check it out. Custom-authoring some arcane XML format in order to support one (admittedly gigantic) private company? No thanks.

Well, it's been a while, and folks have gone ahead and done all the hard work for us. So if you want to be sure Google can find everything on your site (and that it'll know when you've updated it), you might want to follow one of these sets of instructions:

• Movable Type (ignore the bit at the end about URL encoding; just submit the sitemap here)
• Wordpress (submits it for you)
• Drupal (ditto)

just fyi: it looks like UPN will be rerunning most if not all of season 2, so this would be a good time for those of you who've seen season 1 to catch up. the first episode was already tonight, but you could torrent that if you wanted to. so, yeah. tuesdays, 9pm!

i just saw an ad for a movie starring keanu reeves and sandra bullock, who play star-crossed lovers, one of whom appears to be...a time traveler.

clearly, the movie industry has found the solution to sagging ticket sales and apathetic audiences.

well, looks like i have a 99% sure subletter. phew! too bad i totally ignored the issue of NUN. i'm an evil person. i've also got a place to live in DC in the fall as well. (i'm really just sticking around there to see if the balcony will burn down again.) all that's left is finding a place in atlanta, which is proving much more hellish than i would have liked. thankfully, i have atlanta encyclopedia matt at my disposal, which has already proved helpful. for now, two out of three ain't bad.

sweet. via tvguide:

Straight from the horse's mouth, Rob Thomas just e-mailed me to confirm that Veronica Mars has been renewed for a third season. The show got a 22-episode order that, depending on ratings, can be reduced to 13. Very reliable sources, meanwhile, are also telling me that One Tree Hill will be back and that Everwood is, in fact, dead. Talk about injustice.

now if only we could guarantee the first three episodes 7 million viewers apiece, i'd be a happy lady.