As it was such a beautiful evening, I skipped the overcooked hotel pasta and took a nice long walk (with a little bit of time on the train) over to Arlington for dinner at Ray’s Hell Burger. Some of you might remember hearing about this place on the news: last spring the President dropped by for lunch, leading to the strange non-controversy known as “Mustard-gate”.

Since then, I’ve been telling myself I was going to go; a little hole-in-the-wall burger joint serving freshly ground, high-quality beef and gourmet toppings (foie gras, truffle oil? – here’s the menu) served up quick, hot, and cheap. People say it’s the best burger in DC, or perhaps the east coast. Given that I’m pretty much always within spitting distance of the place, I had to see for myself.

Tonight was my night, and Damn…it was good.

Really, it’s that simple; probably the best burger I ever had. Fast food is forever ruined for me. If you have the means, I highly suggest dropping in for a bite.

While I’m certainly not an expert in these things, I’ve taken just enough art classes to understand the concept of complementary colors and how the human eye processes them, and I read just enough about film to recognize digital color correction used to set tone and mood, especially in the last decade or so. This sort of color correction has been around a while; The Matrix was all shades of green; Blade was almost completely desaturated of color, except for vibrant reds, and the Underworld series is almost totally blue. Much of the time, it’s very effective, adding additional layers of atmosphere to the experience of watching a film, especially a film portraying a hyper-real world, such as in the films I just mentioned.

Of course, there can be too much of a good thing. Take Auto-tune, a bit of pitch correction software that lets record producers fix bum notes – it’s been around for a long time, used unobtrusively to shave off the rough edges of a performance and make your CDs sound better. But, after a bit of innovative experimentation on a Cher tune in ’98, now it’s ubiquitous – nearly everybody uses it, and seems to us exactly the same software settings: once you know what you’re listening for, you can’t not hear it. It’s gone from innovative to cliche.

Color correction is the same way; everybody’s using it, but they’re all using it in exactly the same manner. Almost every film, every piece of visual media out there, is orange and blue.

This started out as an interesting use of color theory; the idea being that human skin tones exist mostly within the orange range, and opposite orange on the color wheel is the blue/teal range. With human flesh tones being the focus of almost every frame of film in almost any live-action color film ever shot, digitally tweaking the palate to highlight the oranges and blues and mute other shades, the subjects on-screen “pop”, drawing the eye the way an uncorrected image wouldn’t. However, what started out as an interesting trick has quickly become overdone.

This effect, in moderation, is interesting and eye catching (hell, I used it unconsciously in the color palate on this site!). Run unchecked and rampant, its Transformers 2:

Now, go forth into the world and try to not see this. I dare you.

What wonkette said: Just pass the damned thing, and own it. Health care reform is the kind of thing politicians should be proud of delivering to their constituents, not trying to run from while still passing it.

So, House Democrats, go with “deem and pass” if you feel you have have to if it’ll get this this good-but-not-perfect bill passed (not that I think you need to). Let’s get in on the books and doing some good for real people, then we can get on with making it better. Remember, Social Security and Medicare were crap initially as well; A couple of tweaks later, however, and they’re something even rabid anti-government fanatics don’t want to give up!

This health care bill is a good first step at putting out a winning product; there’s no need to be ashamed of it.

I’m not feeling particularly ambitious today, so here’s a picture of a rat with a pan flute (which is almost a tin whistle):

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

In today’s latest edition of “People elsewhere on the internet have said interesting things”, I point you, dear reader, to the always excellent slacktivist, where the author examines the way American political factions have advocated for their position on health care reform in terms of popular game show programs. In short, President Obama and most of the Democratic party are playing Jeopardy!, trafficking in factually correct information (or at least exhaustively researched and supported hypotheses and projections) about the plan, while the Republicans, for the most part, are playing Family Feud, where the correct answers do not matter so much as as what surveys determine the most popular answer to be, and they’re asserting that health care reform is so unpopular it wouldn’t show up on Richard Dawson’s big board.

His point is that perceptions are much easier to influence than facts, and the Republicans have become masters of influencing public perception of policies, to the point where people will oppose a given position that can be factually stated to be in their best interest, through the use of obfuscation, distraction, and confusion, and repeating something often enough and loudly enough that the public accepts it as conventional wisdom, backing it up with psuedodata about “what the polls say” while dismissing the facts cited by the experts – “popular” is (wrongly) held up as always being equivalent to “correct”.

And much of our society accepts this without question. Part of it is that the modern media enables such confusion – in the attempt to appear “balanced” or whatever, modern journalism has abdicated its responsibility to present factually correct information. Instead, the media (particularly cable television news) presents every issue as having two equally valid and opposing positions, with no regard to whether the position a given talking head is advocating is factually true or even logical. There is no factually “correct” or “incorrect” check applied to information; nobody gets credit for being right or for presenting a cogent well-supported argument; they’re scored basedon how good they are at convincing people their position is the better one regardless of its basis in fact, or barring that, who’s better at shouting down the other guy.

But I don’t think that’s the only reason for it.

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Fark dot com posted a link to an article in the Telegraph about how English store chain Asda (aka Walmart UK) has a habit of hiding away products with names which might be construed as purile double entendres so as not to provoke childish laughter from patrons.

Amongst all the squirrel photos and links to images of even more potentially dirty-sounding products, there is to be found a certain nugget of wisdom:

The longer I live, the more I realize that life is like 6th grade.

This is, to a large extent, true. Adults still laugh at childish body part and function jokes – it’s the way we’re wired. Life would be a lot easier and possibly more fun if a small minority of people didn’t decide that they’re too embarassed by their more childish tendencies and as such, feel it’s their duty to protect the rest of us from the threat to societal order inherent in the occasional references to genitalia that sometimes crop up in day-to-day life.

…and for the record, cock flavoured soup is delicious.

…that really makes today’s xkcd work.

An evening out. At the historic National Theater in downtown Richmond, VA. On stage, perennial household favorite Jonathan Coulton and headliners They Might Be Giants, performing, in its entirety, and, improbably, in reverse order, the seminal 1990 album Flood.

First up, internet troubador Jonathan Coulton, who I’ve seen in a different venue twice in as many years, and is, by all rights, a terribly talented and entertaining fellow, seemed honestly surprised by the rousing welcome he received. By the time he’d wrapped up his 25 minute or so set, those who didn’t know him already had become fans, and that’s a good thing, because it means he’ll probably come back to town on his own before too long, and save me a two-hour drive to The Birchmere, his usual venue ’round these parts.

After a short break, TMBG took the stage, presenting a mix of favorites, including “Fingertips” and “The Guitar”, before launching into Flood, backwards (which really, is probably a better way to do it live, given that they get to all but close out with “Birdhouse In Your Soul”), breaking once (where one would flip the tape/record) for, of all things, a puppet show.

See that bass drum in the photo above? There’s a camera on top of it, in front of which the Johns performed as their sock puppet avatars, with the proceedings projected onto a screen above the stage, where, among other things, they serenaded a photo of Meg Ryan.

Yeah, it was a weird show. Entertaining, but weird.

It’s actually been a few years since I’ve been to a “real” rock show, with lights, and electric guitars, and a big-ass PA; it was LOUD. As you can see from the photo above, while we spent JoCo’s set about eight feet back from the stage, we retreated to the rear of the venue, near the location of a very generous bartender, for most of the Giants’ set. In addition to being able to see the entire stage, the sound mix was better from back there.

It was an evening of great fun, overall. There are a few more photos over in the gallery, if you’re interested.

Marvel at the spectacle of Patton Oswalt vs. John Hodgman in the Ultimate Science Fiction Trivia Challenge throwdown on WFMU’s Best Show:

Wackety Schmackety Doo….That is all.

In the last two and a quarter centuries of American history, it’s always been fashionable for politicians and politically motivated organizations to include callbacks to well-known historical documents and quotations in their speeches and published materials. President Obama titled his speech on race in America during the 2008 campain “A More Perfect Union,” referencing the Preamble of the US constitution. Fatuous GasbagsTV/radio personalities borrow titles from Thomas Paine pamphlets for their screedsbooks. Borrowing bits of (usually incorrectly interpreted) history is the Tea Party movement’s stock in trade, or at least the source of much of their iconography.

There is a lot of good to be taken from the words of the Founders. There’s a great deal of wisdom and poetry to Jefferson’s prose in the Declaration of Independence, and in words of the “Committee of Five” (but mostly, apparently, Madison and Hamilton) in the US Constitution. They also left a lot to improve on (The three-fifths compromise, slavery in general), but over the years, our country has made great strides toward correcting these oversights. That’s their most important legacy, really: the Constitution as a “living document” that can be interpreted and amended by future generations as necessary.

However, The Declaration and the Constitution are hardly the only written records left to us by the guys who got the whole American experience started. They were pretty prolific gentlemen, and there’s a lot of good in some of the lesser known pieces.

In that spirit, this latest entry in the occasional stuff I like a lot series makes mention of a few of those other documents worth noting lying scattered about the cradle of liberty:

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