Tuesday Tosses

Just some short takes on a few items of potential interest:

Curious about some of those academic cliches? Then see here. Keep in mind, of course, that cliches arise from the preponderance of experience resorting to pithy familiarity to explain itself.

2Blowhards go on a bit about 300 in this piece. Still have to see the blasted thing myself, though girding oneself for an engorged video game of rampant decapitations is tougher than it used to be.

Stephen Greenblatt has a piece from the New York Review of Books about Shakespeare and the uses of power. Not as bad as some of his stuff, at least.

FreewareGenius has brought my attention a few progs worth checking out, some of which are really quite neat: I recommend Spyware Terminator and KlipFolio (a variation on the Google Desktop sort of thing). When you’re like me, working with a computer that went obsolete in the Carter administration, you get very picky about the progs you’ll keep, especially since so many of them these days tend to be as resource-taxing as a trophy wife. (Yeah, Firefox, I’m looking at you, ye who could suck Uranus through a garden hose.) Terminator does fast, efficient and regular scanning for spyware, and (unlike Spybot and such) offers a real-time protection function. KlipFolio sets up your widgets for email, RSS feeds, Flickr and YouTube updates, among other things, in a fashion that’s flexible and resource-light. It provides a nice little gestalt of what’s new on the Net before you even have to open your browser. Give ’em both a try.

File it under Interesting Times, as Quebec has elected its first minority parliament in almost 130 years. It’s a bit of a rebuke against Premier Jean Charest, but a slap in the face of the Parti Quebecois.

In need of a good laugh? An old chestnut for your savoury finger, Fry and Laurie’s Barman sketch. It’s almost as funny as an episode of 24, which yesterday brought President Palmer the Younger out of his medically-induced coma, even though we’ve still to learn anything about the status of President "Douchebag of Liberty" Logan, stabbed episodes ago by the former First Lady when she inexplicably mistook her ex-husband for a giant kiwi. Somebody really has to tell the 24 writers that nearly losing one President is unfortunate, but nearly losing two-- well, that just seems like carelessness.

Enough for now. On to Other Stuff.