A piece of useless crap that is more important to me because I read it in print before I saw it online

Dan Savage is a sex advice columnist. In his Feb 28 2007 "Savage Love" column in the Village Voice (I'm too lazy to find the online version), he chastised a reader for fantasizing about Anna Nicole Simpson now that she's dead. I think he was wrong to fantasize about her before she was dead, but that's just me. In doing so, Savage listed some random dead people. Whenever I think of a random dead person I think of Abraham Lincoln - just a lazy habit from my youth. Dan's list made me laugh out loud. Here it is out of context 'cause I'm blogging, not writing for the New York Times:

Which is why no one beats off to James Dean or River Phoenix or Marilyn Monroe or Mary Todd Lincoln without feeling a little creepy, a little hopeless, and a little closer to the grave himself.

First of all, he broke the "three things" comedy rule by mentioning four things. Secondly, Mary Todd Lincoln. IITL!

Survey time

Can someone out there help? I can't decide which one of these is more erotic. They sure look good together.

consumer electronics recapitulate video game history

It's time to finally write down my theory from at least 10 years ago when I noticed how excited people were to play simple games such as hangman on the web when 8-bit computers like the Apple ][ did it over a decade earlier. The theory in a nutshell is:

As a technology develops the games it can play retraces the history of video games

It's either profound or obvious. There are some exceptions to the rule- most notably Tetris which seems to belong in the late 1970's but debuted in 1985. Plus, of course, some devices are better at certain types of games than others.

So where are we in 2007? People are playing early 1990's games in flash. We can now play Doom (1993) on digital cameras, PDAs, and MP3 players but not without a lot of hacking. These are often linux squeezed onto a consumer electronics device that runs a linux version of Doom. I'm not sure if I should count this kind of hackery.

Speaking of MP3 players, I recently bought my wife a brand new state-of-the-art Apple ipod nano. It comes with four games - two are arcade games: Arrow (a game like Hustle from 1977) and Breakout ( like Breakout from 1976 but not as sophisticated as Super Breakout from 1977). The other two games are a quiz game and solitaire. Videogame versions of those are from the mid 80's at the latest.

Johnny Ryan's Angry Youth Comix

Um, Garfield got dropped from the LA times. Columnist Gene Weingarten described Garfield as "a strip devoid of originality, devoid of guts, a strip cynically DESIGNED to be inoffensive and bad, on the theory that public tastes are insipid. Whoa, Gene. What about Garfeld ? Also, if you've ever wanted to see Linus smack Charlie Brown in the face with his balls, "Peanuds" is the closest you'll come.