So what did Peter Cullen, the guy who voiced Optimus Prime, do in between the last Transformers movie (1984) and the new one?

Apparently, he has been the voice of Eeyore on Winnie The Pooh.

Just in time for the movie, a line on the show made me laugh out loud. That hasn’t happened in a while. They showed something like 6 consecutive episodes tonight, and one of them ended with this:

Homer (to Bart): “For old times’ sake, let’s go drive around while I sing public domain songs out the window.”

(cut to them in the car singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”)

There’s an old hacker saying “Information wants to be free.”

It has been used to explain many information-age phenomenon, but I thought of it in particular yesterday when I was reading about the leak of the final Harry Potter book. Even though it was to come out in less than a week, some guy actually got a copy and took digital pictures of every page. I think there are well over 700 pages, although he did seem to take pictures of two of them at a time. Still, that is an enormous amount of work. He could have just read it himself, tossed it in a corner and been smug for a week. But he went to a lot of trouble to get it out there, with little or no benefit to himself. In fact, he’s got to know that only lawsuits and sorrow could follow. Still, what motivates a guy like that?
I actually scanned in a whole book last year but that was because it was out of print. Otherwise, i’d have just sent my friends an amazon link.
P.S. if you don’t know what the subject line is referring to, click here.

Today’s vocabulary word: Squircle

“I had always been fascinated by baseball statistics. I didn’t care about the statistics in anything else. I didn’t, and don’t, pay any attention to statistics on the stock market, the weather, the crime rate, the gross national product, the circulation of magazines, the ebb and flow of literacy among football fans and how many people are going to starve to death before the year 2050 if I don’t start adopting them for $3.69 a month; just baseball. Now why is that?It is because baseball statistics, unlike the statistics in any other area, have acquired the powers of language.”

-Bill James, Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (1985)

Apparently, it is big news that summer is hot.

One upside to having relatively extreme weather in New York City is that the national news, which is almost entirely based here, gets all riled up about it.

I wonder what it must be like for someone in Phoenix when Brian Williams says things like: “Temperatures in New York soared to 94 degrees today, and residents are trying their best to cope.”

Which can be translated as:

“Do you know how hot it is here where I live? Holy crap! This weather is making me very uncomfortable! Allow me to tell you how much it sucked to come to work today.”

Man, this guy is such a douchebag.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19586943/

Four words:
Duck Season, Wabbit Season

Oh god.