Unsolicited Advice

My main entertainment for the past week or so has been the fact that Paul Doucette has finally gotten his own Twitter account. Rob Thomas has been on forever, and there's a main band account that at least three of them (Thomas, Doucette, Kyle Cook) have access to, but up until now for some reason Doucette hasn't seen fit to get his own. He has remedied this, and there has been a steady flow of deadpan snark ever since. Broken up once, very briefly, when he decided to tweet a photo of Rob Thomas -- phone in hand, posting to his own Twitter feed at the same time  -- at lunch. Which is funnier than it has any right to be. I follow what is perhaps a surprising number of people on Twitter, considering how often I forget I even have an account. It's one of the first places I check when I'm investigating someone. Tweets seldom have the benefit of an outside proofreader, which means it's a good way to determine if someone is normally an idiot when their PR people aren...

I try not to read too much on the Gawker sites, on the grounds that they make me weep for humanity (except sometimes Jalopnik -- I don't know a damn thing about cars, but I do listen to Car Talk, and Moggie is my source for all things Top Gear ), but somehow in my feed I've found a link to a story about Aaron Swartz . I decline to comment on the legal aspect of this case, primarily because I hadn't heard of it before, and the author here is decidedly partisan. I might look it up, and I might not. It depends on how much time I've spent recently railing about how we, as a species, might be too retarded to live. I will comment, however, that from what I have seen of MIT in general, I find the author's characterization of their response to the case believable. One of the things that really pissed me off about Arizona is that the "bootstraps" mentality seeped into everything. There are still people out in the desert who would sooner watch their entire lives...

IBM purges sections of supercomputer Watson's memory after it begins swearing. Excuse me while I laugh until I injure myself. In a way, this is tremendously impressive. The guy who covered it for io9 summed it up rather well , when he commented that if he'd been in the room when Watson started to drop the word "bullshit", his "hair would have stood on end". Profanity is one of the weirdest parts of language, and it is particularly weird in English, where the word 'fuck' can be folded, spindled and mutilated into almost any grammatical function you care to try. One of my best party tricks is pinpointing who isn't a native English speaker (and what their first language is) and an easy way to get your fingernails into cracking a problem like that is to watch for who swears weirdly, and in what way they're going slightly caterwampus. You can even use it to distinguish English dialects in writing, where an accent can't be heard -- although...

You remember when I linked to Daniel Radcliffe 's guest stint on QI, and pointed out that he seemed to be a smidge terrified of Stephen Fry, despite the fact that he nailed the responses to several of the obscure historical questions that the panel wasn't even supposed to be able to answer? And Fry was trying so very hard to encourage him to have a conversation that didn't involve stuttering and accidentally calling him 'Mr Fry, sir'? He has apparently gotten over it.  That's from The   Daily Mail , so you can ignore all the words on the page that aren't "Daniel Radcliffe hugs Stephen Fry goodbye outside of a restaurant somewhere in London," because they're probably either scaremongering or lying outright, but that's basically what happened. Not terrified anymore! Hooray! Other than that, my only observation is that I thought Radcliffe ended up taller. Emma Watson must really be tiny.

I think a lot of things about a lot of people that do not make it here. Much of what I do in psych profiling involves reconstructing narratives -- of events, of lives, of motivations. It is experience, and intuition, and guesswork, much of which I can never check. And quite often, I am guessing about things of which most people do not speak. They fall into that curious chasm between things that are only for intimates, and things that are fair game for public observation. Things which are visible, but almost always politely glossed over. The terminally socially-anxious bite their nails over these things, so important and so impossible to ask about. The relatively normal are often flustered to hear them spoken of aloud. Curiously, I find that compliments are more startling than criticism. People who have consciously steeled themselves against bitter comments can be the most taken aback by praise. I air a lot of these observations to friends, but do not post them here. Private gossip ...

I have fallen utterly in lurve with The Sarah Millican Television Show . She has the cutest voice I have ever heard (yes, I am aware of what Brits traditionally think of the Geordie accent, and I don't care) and she will be back to use it again in series two, which starts going out on January 15th. Millican is the latest in a long line of one of my favorite comedic archetypes, the Dirty-Minded Dippy Blonde. Marilyn Monroe's movie roles were mostly dumb blondes, but she did DMDB live in press conferences all the time, such as the time someone asked her what she wore to bed, and she responded, "Chanel No. 5." Gracie Allen was one of the all time greats, as you can see in this here  representative sample of the TV version of the long-running sitcom she did with her husband, George Burns. The difference between dumb blonde and a dirty-minded dippy blonde is that anyone can play dumb blonde -- you just have to look vacant and confused and get yourself rescued all ...

A brief demonstration of how the sherlocking thing does not have an off switch: I ran into these photos a few days ago. [It's Noel Fielding again, behind the scenes working on Luxury Comedy , from the site at e4.com , but that's irrelevant for this particular demo.] Mog had found a different photo from the same stream posted to tumblr, and linked me to it; I did what I always do and pitched it through TinEye and GRIS to see if I could find any more from the same session. Now, I asked Mog what about these things got her attention, and it was more or less that the pictures were nice to look at -- she likes watching people when they're busy arting, and she likes him, and the snapshots came out nicely in the purely technical sense of not being underlit or out of focus or featuring any part of the photographer's thumb. Moggie, it should be noted, babysits a lot of university servers for a living, with a degree in anthropology and a background in theater tech; you ...