Oh, Netflix

Today, Netflix gave me this:


Didn't get it? Well, it knows I like scary movies (or at least, browsing scary movies, as opposed to watching them) and recommends me a few. Among them is Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky In Our Times.

The longest point in pro-tennis and the longest match

You'd think the longest match in tennis would be some kind of memorable classic, right? Well, wrong. A not-altogether-unintentionally hilarious NYT piece:

Twenty-five years ago, on Sept. 24, 1984, Nelson and Jean Hepner, who were ranked No. 93 and No. 172 in the world, engaged in a 29-minute, 643-shot rally that remains the longest point played in a professional tennis match.

For comparison, during a match last month, Andy Murray and Julien Benneteau had a rally that lasted 53 shots, and it was the longest either of them could remember playing in competition.

The rally between Nelson and Hepner occurred in the first round of the $50,000 Virginia Slims-sponsored Ginny tournament at the Raintree Swim and Racquet Club in Richmond, Va., with Nelson finally prevailing, 6-4, 7-6 (11).

The 6-hour-31-minute marathon was itself the longest match in tennis history for nearly 20 years and remains the longest match completed on a single day.

And then some great lines:

Both Nelson and Hepner seem vaguely embarrassed that their names are in the record books.

Er, yes - I would be too!

The rally that put Nelson-Dunbar and Hepner in the record books came at set point for Hepner, who was ahead, 11-10, in the second-set tie breaker, which lasted 1:47 on its own.

“There was tons of lobbing,” Nelson-Dunbar said. “I would try to come in and she’d lob me again.”

After winning the point, Nelson-Dunbar collapsed with cramps in her legs. The chair umpire, who apparently maintained consciousness throughout the 643-stroke point, actually called a time-violation warning, but Nelson-Dunbar pulled it together and got back to the baseline to begin the next point.

How does a point go on for 29 minutes before one player or the other hits a winner or makes a mistake?

“We were both pretty much standing on the baseline lobbing,” Nelson-Dunbar said.

Hepner recalled, “I was just really concentrating and was very consistent.”

Two points later, Nelson-Dunbar closed out the match and apologized to the lines officials for its length.

“I felt so bad for them,” she said. “They were sitting out there so long, and they must have been falling asleep.”

But imagine this...

Among the astonishing elements to the match was this: If Hepner had won the epic rally, she would have forced a third set, and who knows how long the match might have lasted.

Line of the day

From The Onion:

Experts predict that the penultimate catastrophe will occur at approximately 7:15 p.m. Thursday night, when the social networking tool Twitter will be used to communicate a series of ideas so banal they will instantaneously negate the three centuries of the Renaissance.

inamorata, anyone?

A. O. Scott shows off his vocabulary today. Inamorata, anyone?

As in the previous installment (also directed by Carlos Saldanha), one element of “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” manages to be authentically charming, and also to make moderately ingenious use of the 3-D techniques that otherwise just add to the jostle and noise. I’m referring, of course, to the dialogue-free sequences, unrelated to the main plot, that involve a plucky proto-squirrel known as Scrat and his quixotic pursuit of an acorn. This time Scrat is distracted by love, and he and his inamorata, who is also his rival for possession of that acorn, breath whimsical, inventive life into the movie.

Quote of the day

Matt Yglesias:

Nobody will ever be able to tell friends he’s hiking on the Appalachian Trail again.

That's right.

Plato-lite

Brad Delong writes by way of Plato:

Agathon: "Under appropriate conditions of perfect competition, non-increasing returns, and the absence of externalities the market's decisions about the production and allocation of goods and services attain a point on the Pareto frontier. Every point on the Pareto frontier maximizes some social welfare function."

Glaukon: "Yes, of course."

Agathon: "Therefore the market, considered as a collective mechanism for making social decisions, chooses to maximize a particular social welfare function. It is instructive to consider what that social welfare function is."

Glaukon: "I resent the tone in which you are talking down to me."

Agathon: "You do not. This part of this conversation never took place in even approximate form in the real world. It is interpolated in order to bring readers of this weblog up to speed. Since I never said my last speech to you, you could not have resented it."

Glaukon: "And I want readers of this weblog to know that I am considerably smarter and more clued-in than he is letting me appear to be."

Agathon: "Are you quite finished?"

Glaukon: "Plato at least worked harder to make his information dumps fit more gracefully into the conversation. I want a better author.

Agathon: "Are you quite finished?"

Glaukon: "Yes."

Read the whole thing!

Articles without a point?

I've never understood the purpose of articles like this (now at the top of the NYT "Most Emailed" list).

I understand the purpose is to be funny and wacky but to my mind, this one goes way off the mark. The overwrought hysterical tone doesn't help although I suppose some find it funny. Now if you want something really funny about technology, then check out this video (the embedding is disabled, sorry): the tone is perfect, IMHO. Learn something from it, Virginia!

Wow

This has got to be the most outlandish news item I've read in a while. The most remarkable graf meanwhile has to be this:

The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities. It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room. The investigators say they do not know if this facet has been employed.

And this:

Still going strong, the operation continues to invade and monitor more than a dozen new computers a week, the researchers said in their report, “Tracking ‘GhostNet’: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network.” They said they had found no evidence that United States government offices had been infiltrated, although a NATO computer was monitored by the spies for half a day and computers of the Indian Embassy in Washington were infiltrated.

I wonder what the Indian Embassy's response is going to be.

The Chinese response, meanwhile, is short and swift:

A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York dismissed the idea that China was involved. “These are old stories and they are nonsense,” the spokesman, Wenqi Gao, said. “The Chinese government is opposed to and strictly forbids any cybercrime.”

Also don't forget to check out the accompanying photograph of the Toronto researchers, dressed up as if they were taking part in a photo shoot for a Robert Ludlum novel:

PhD Comics question

So do we interpret from this that Tajel is actually Indian?

Because I always thought that she was from, I don't know, Lebanon.

Netflix read my mind

The chick-flick He's just not that into you opened today at the box office. Since I loved Drew Barrymore's technology monologue in the trailer, I was interested in knowing whether the movie was any good. (Well, from the reviews, it turns out that the Barrymore monologue is pretty much the highlight of the movie, see, e.g., Roger Ebert -- so I guess I'm watching it on DVD).

But anyway -- after reading Manohla Dargis' withering take in the NYT, I wanted to see what some other critics thought of it -- so I went over from metacritic to Owen Gleiberman's review in Entertainment Weekly. The review mentioned John Hughes' Some Kind of Wonderful ("always underrated", says Gleiberman):

But then I realized why Gigi and Alex really do seem like characters out of Some Kind of Wonderful. There's nothing to their relationship — nothing at all — but the thin, Hughesian predicament the two happen to be in.

I popped over to Netflix to put it in my queue and guess what? Check this out:

There it was, Some Kind of Wonderful, staring right back at me -- I didn't even have to go and search for it.

I guess the stars aligned for Netflix today -- if more stuff like this happens, people are going to believe that the folks at Netflix are wizards or something. (Or maybe their algorithm mines our thoughtstreams. Ha.)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Via Kieran Healy:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen's classic novel to new legions of fans. [Link]

Messy medical metaphor of the day

From the back-cover of a manga comic book I found in a bookshop the day after Thanksgiving:

Can the dentist drill deep enough into the heart of the young school boy to find
the painful memories hidden within?

Do you want to move to Canada?

I guess this is at least two weeks too late but what the hell - it's still funny!

Line of the day!!

I can't resist posting this. The "Today's Fortune" on my Orkut page says:

Today's fortune: You have an unusual equipment for success, use it properly

!!

The erection theory of power (yes, you heard that right!)

Via Daniel Drezner, from Gideon Rachman's column in the Financial Times

I got an insight into the thrill of power recently, when I had lunch with a friend who had helped to handle a national emergency in Britain, working from the emergency bunker known as Cobra – which sits beneath the Cabinet Office near Downing Street.

“What was it like?” I asked him. “Brilliant,” he replied. “There are all these video screens and generals and admirals sitting around in uniform. You have to say things like: ‘It is 3.45pm and I am now bringing to a close this meeting of Cobra emergency command.’”

Is my friend uniquely juvenile? I suspect not – just unusually honest. He certainly believed that all the other officials around the table were delighting in the little rituals of crisis management. “I guarantee that everybody around that table had an erection within five minutes,” he mused.

Extrapolating slightly, my friend developed what you might call “the erection theory of British foreign policy”. His argument was that British government’s bias towards the “special relationship” with the US, in preference to the European Union, has something to do with the thrilling nature of American power. “If you fly into Camp David on a helicopter,” he assured me, “it’s instant arousal. But if you have to go to a European summit in Brussels, its so depressing you’re impotent for a week.”

He he he.

Email of the day

Some kid mails Richard Chappel, after using one of his papers for a college homework assignmentl:

I made the mistake of copying your "Rousseau and Freedom," paper from your blog [link]. I am sorry. My university is going to charge me with cheating. Can you please do me a big favor and temporarily take down "Rousseau and Freedom,"??? I will owe you forever. Please let me know if you can help! Thank you!

Thanks,
[Name redacted]

Fun, eh?

A kick in the balls

Jon Chait is probably the funniest political journalist writing today. If you want an example, read his column on Ari Fleischer's (the former Bush administration spokesman) WSJ column on the tax code. I'll only quote his kicker of an ending here (see the two photographs for illustration):

I'll give Fleischer the benefit of the doubt here and assume that this isn't an outright lie, but rather he couldn't read the table correctly. Let me explain it this way, Ari: Suppose that a few years ago, 37 percent of your scalp was covered with hair. Today, only 31 percent is. Would you say that your hair has increased or decreased over that time?

Paragraph of the day

Geoffrey Nunberg begins his blog-post on apologies and their functions with this priceless paragraph:

When I was an undergraduate at Columbia, a bunch of my friends and I spent a lot of long afternoons and evenings at the movie theaters along West 42d Street, where for less than a buck you could see a double or triple feature of gangster movies, war movies or westerns. That was well before the area was sanitized and Disneyfied, and the theaters were--well, "seedy" doesn't really do them justice. The seats and carpeting were shabby and permanently saturated with a mixture of fluids, processed and unprocessed. The balconies were sharply raked, the rows so close together as to make even the economy section of a United Airlines flight seem positively spacious. And the clientele was a mix of movie buffs, lonely guys, and down-and-outers who considered 99 cents a stone bargain for a warm place to sleep off a bender. So it was that a friend and I found ourselves in the balcony of a theater one rainy evening watching an Anthony Mann western when we heard a middle-class male voice behind us saying in a loud, indignant tone: "Sorry? You piss on my date and you're SORRY?"

Just so we are clear: the post is actually on what apologies do -- or are supposed to do -- and the discussion covers both J. L. Austin and Erving Goffmann. Goffmann's take (from Nunberg's post):

The most enlightening discussion of this that I know of comes (not surprisingly) from Erving Goffman, in his books Interaction Ritual and particularly Relations in Public. (Goffman's account has since been built on by others, but his story will do for here.) Apologies, Goffman said, are remediation rituals that

represent a splitting of the self into a blameworthy part and a part that stands back and sympathizes with them, and by implication, is worthy of being brought back into the fold.

As a ritual, Goffman insists, the apology is independent of the substantive penalties that may be attached to an offense:

After an offense has occurred, the job of the offender is to show... that whatever happened before, he now has a right relationship--a pious attitude--to the rule in question, and this is a matter of indicating a relationship, not compensating a loss.

Interesting.

The things that turn people on ...

This gem, from a New York Times piece on sexual desire:

“Listening to Noam Chomsky,” said a psychologist in her 50s, “always turns me on.”

Paragraph of the day

David Edelstein on Pierce Brosnan:

No one who sees the first fifteen minutes of Seraphim Falls can doubt that Brosnan is the movies’ supreme grunter: He is to acting what poor Monica Seles was to tennis. He added grunts to his feats in his Bond movies, presumably to make 007 seem more human, but they were too jarring in that high-style context. Here, they make for a powerful soundtrack. The movie opens with him taking a bullet in the shoulder (aggghhh!), rolling down an embankment (uggghh arrrr), tumbling into a raging river (raahruuuf!) that dumps him over a falls (yaaaaaaaaah), digging the bullet out of his shoulder (arf%^Sssss$#yyy!) with a big knife and then cauterizing the wound (ayyyeeeeeeeeee!!!). I’m not being facetious: This is very impressive stuff. If his acting career ever stalls, he could make a fortune dubbing kung fu pictures.