Today I got up early and ran in the Tortoise and Hare 5k in downtown Ann Arbor, hung out at home and finished editing a paper that I was unable to finish last night, and went out to lunch at ABC with Dave. Lame-ass Theresa and Rich didn’t join us, but that’s okay, they probably didn’t feel well or have time. Since I had no particular thing to do or place to be, and I didn’t want to go back home and sit in my hot, stuffy apartment for 6 hours, I decided to drive around to a couple stores and look for furniture or electronics that I could buy in the future (after I move next month or next summer). I headed for Art Van, the furniture store, to look at coffee tables, end tables, night stands, and couches. I saw lots of good ones, probably plenty of things Kathy and I would like, but it felt kind of pointless without her there (for her knowledge of home design and her opinion of every piece, as they will be joint decisions), but then I saw the TV store that existed in an annex in the back of the store: Paul’s TV. It is like the “home theater” section of Best Buy, just a medium-sized room in the back of the store, and it operates as an independent store. I’m sure they have plenty of TV/furniture deals in coordination with Art Van, but other than that, they’re separate.

I went back to Paul’s TV and sat down in an armchair to watch a plasma TV (Panasonic P50S2) and an LED-backlit Sharp (LC52LE700U) that were set up perpendicular to each other. I had a good angle to watch the Tigers game on both, though it was closer than I’d typically sit at home. The reason I sat down to watch those two, mainly the Sharp, is that the local appliance store ABC Warehouse had given me a guaranteed price of $1500 for the Sharp, to be delivered in August after I move, if I paid a down payment on it, but I saw that Paul’s TV had it for $1197. THAT…is insane. Paul’s TV never charges for shipping, whereas ABC Warehouse would have charged $50.

Naturally, my first thought was that this was too good to be true, but I double-checked the model number and size. I had been keeping track of many TV prices in a spreadsheet over the last year (yes, total loser-geek), so I had gotten good at memorizing model numbers and was already familiar with this one anyway. It was definitely the same TV, for $350 cheaper. Its MSRP is $2000. My second thought was also along the lines of, “This is too good to be true,” but referring to the picture quality—maybe this TV isn’t all that great, despite great reviews (at both Amazon and Newegg, which is a ringing endorsement, considering the tech-savvy videophiles who populate Newegg). It is that great. I thought that its colors might have been a little too bright or washed out compared to the plasma, but, first of all, that’s adjustable, and I don’t believe that the Sharp’s colors will be the slightest, remotest bit sub-optimal after I adjust them. One strong point of the Sharp LEDs according to reviewers is the color accuracy. The motion of the ball and players seemed nearly identical to the S2, with the edge probably going to the S2. I don’t know if that’s a by-product of the colors being turned up too bright, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The big advantage of the Sharp LED was, surprisingly, its black levels (and other dark levels). They were better than the plasma’s. Its blacks were blacker, and it was easier to distinguish a few details in dark places than on the plasma. This is despite the incessant claims by videophiles at CNet and everywhere else that plasmas’ black levels are so superior to LCDs’. Not these two. (Nor any plasmas in ABC Warehouse, which is the very thing that swayed Kathy and me towards the Sharp in the first place.) In and around the backdrop of Comerica Park, which is the dark, empty part behind center field that enables the hitter to see the pitched ball, more detail was distinguishable. It was July 4th, so the Tigers and Mariners were both wearing these special “patriotic” caps (here’s the Tigers one). Before the start of one inning, the camera zoomed in very close to a Tigers hat that was sitting in the dugout or in a shaded part of the stands or somewhere; I guess the Fox Sports crew had set it up there for the purpose of zooming in one inning. The LED-backlit TV was far, far more detailed and accurate in showing the lines of the Tigers’ English D and distinguishing the navy-blue textures of the middle and left side of that logo from one another. It was a mess of navy blue on the plasma, and a clear English D on the LED-backlit screen. Sold.

To make the end of this story rather shorter, I took this price to ABC Warehouse to challenge them to beat it, but I had no documentation, so all they could beat was the website’s price of $1497 (the $1197 was a special 4th of July sale). I went back to Paul’s TV, paid a 10% down payment on my credit card, got the receipt, brought it to the ABC Warehouse manager, who eventually told me he would not only match it but beat it by $100. I don’t know if he mistyped, misspoke, or miscalculated, but he actually gave it to me for over $160 less than Paul’s TV: $1102 after tax and shipping, compared to $1268 in total from Paul’s TV. That is INSANE, people.

When Kathy and I had first picked out the Sharp LED-backlit TV in June, I walked out of there telling her it wasn’t quite a steal, but it was a very good or great deal on a great, long-lasting, highly reviewed TV that we both witnessed outperforming every TV in the store with a remotely similar price. But $1100, THAT is a steal. It’s unbelievable. I am ecstatic. This has made my month.

I have seasons 1–5 of South Park on DVD, and I don’t ever plan on buying any more because every episode is available for free 24/7 at its official website, southparkstudios.com. I know there is abundant evidence that giving something away for free actually increases its sales, but I at least understand the basis of where the RIAA is coming from. I won’t pay a penny for South Park as long as it is available on demand for free.

One of the worst things Amazon.com has ever done is lump the reviews and ratings of the DVD version and the Blu-ray version of every single movie together, so that you can’t tell whether someone’s review and star-rating refers to the DVD version or the Blu-ray version, unless they state they’re reviewing the Blu-ray version specifically. What idiot thought of that? I can’t imagine the level of stupidity required to approve of that idea at multiple levels of management in the Amazon company hierarchy. It is inconvenient, counterintuitive, and simply inaccurate because the two different products are, um, different products!

So, it turns out my TV is a hell of a lot sweeter than I had ever thought. It is a Samsung SlimFit high-definition television. It is capable of displaying 720p and 1080i video. It’s only 30 inches diagonally, and it’s a cathode ray tube TV, so it isn’t as awesome as the larger TV I’m going to buy next summer, but, hey, that means it has a higher pixel density. I found this out because Kathy got me a Blu-ray player for Christmas, and I hooked it up to an HDMI port in the back of my TV (hmm, that should have made it obvious to me that it was an HDTV, but it never occurred to me), and it plays Blu-ray movies in very nice quality. I tried out my new Blu-rays of Star Trek: First Contact and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and I’m pretty sure they looked as awesome as they could on a 30″ TV. Maybe a new LCD (or plasma, if they existed at 30 inches) would show an improvement over my 3-year-old TV, but the Wikipedia articles on plasma displays and LCD screens indicate that, other things being equal, CRT produces the best picture in terms of color accuracy, sharpness, and blur. (The problem is, other things aren’t ever equal, not anymore.) However, CRT picture quality fades a lot sooner than the flat-panel displays, so I’m sure mine doesn’t look as good as it used to in high-definition. Those two movies looked really awesome, though; you could tell the source and the display were both high-definition.

I began to suspect that my TV was capable of playing video at some level of high definition (either 720 or 1080 vertical resolution) the night before I discovered it for sure, as I was reading my TV’s manual for probably the second time. I don’t remember reading a lot of it when I got it in August 2006. I think I was reading it to determine if it might be possible for me to use my TV’s remote control for both the TV and the Blu-ray player (both Samsung). I know it’s possible to use the Blu-ray player’s remote to control the TV, but I don’t think it’s possible to change the picture’s aspect ratio/zoom with the Blu-ray remote, and I’ll need this for watching regular TV content that is widescreen because I don’t have high-definition cable, so most things are 4:3, so I have to zoom in on a widescreen program to avoid having black bars on the sides and top and bottom. It might be possible, but first I’ll need to figure out how to navigate my TV’s menus with the Blu-ray controller; all it can do so far is power-off, power-on, and change the volume, channel, and input source.

Well, fuck you, you fucking Redditors! I submitted this article from the Daily Mash (Britain’s Onion), about how Santa hates ginger kids, to Reddit, thinking at least a few of them would get a kick out of it, especially since it is reminiscent of a glorious South Park episode. But, no, I went to check on it a day or two later and saw that it had a score of 0, meaning one more person down-voted it than up-voted it (it starts with a score of 1 upvote—yours—so its vote-score at a given time is the number of other upvotes minus the number of downvotes, plus 1). Probably one loser down-voted it and no one else liked it enough to vote. That person was probably a red-headed abomination himself, goddamned ginger motherfucker, I’d like to bash his face in…

So I have liked most of the clips of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon that I’ve seen online, but nothing prepared me for the blinding white light of brilliance that emanates from this clip. I first saw it posted on my friend’s Facebook page and have watched it about 10 times since.

Let me give you some background. I recall reading this article from the BBC News about the futility of the WEP wireless encryption protocol and the superiority of WPA. One of the network security experts they interviewed said something that blew my mind. Do you know how long it would take the best computer-hacking (password-guessing) programs to guess a 20-character password by brute force? (On average.) What would you guess? I assume it could only contain letters and numerals. So that’s 36 possible characters, times 20 places, and computers can try an awful lot of them per second. Would it take weeks? Years? Decades?

This guy said that on average, it would take longer than the entire history of the universe to guess a 20-character password by brute force. Fourteen billion years! Wow! This is verified by the all-knowing God Himself.

A computer that could perform a billion billion computations per second would require 10¹³ years to guess a 128-character phrase, which is 1,000 times longer than the age of the universe. A 256-character password would require 3×10⁵¹ years.

No one has any way of even guessing how long the universe will last. It could be 3×10⁵¹⁵¹ years. If it lasts that long, it probably will have died in ice many eons before, killed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It doesn’t matter. That old saying about monkeys on typewriters has no relevance to the actual universe. Not just monkeys, humans, the Earth, and the solar system, but the entire universe itself could not last long enough for it to happen. You could make it a trillion trillion monkeys, who can type as fast as Lieutenant Commander Data can read, and they would never come even remotely close to producing a single page of any Shakespeare play.

Also, see the 2nd one and the 3rd one.

On SportsCenter this morning, their daily internet poll was “How do you feel about the Yankees, Love ‘em, Hate ‘em, or Indifferent?” and the result was funny. See for yourself (this is several hours later, after I submitted my “Hate” answer and screen-grabbed this image for blagging purposes…so the time and sample size are both large):

Click here to view the embedded video.

After that press conference, the Red Sox ended up facing the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series. That series is one of the most famous postseason baseball series because the Red Sox came back from a deficit of 3 games to none to win the series, 4-3. That’s the only time in MLB history that a team has won a series after being down 3-0. I never thought I’d see it happen. (It happened twice in the NHL and still hasn’t happened in the NBA). It was also famous for the two appearances Pedro made in Yankee Stadium, in which the Yankees’ organ player and 50,000 fans combined to rouse Pedro with their famous “Who’s Your Daddy?” chant. It started in game 2 when Pedro started and lost, and it continued in game 7, also at Yankee Stadium, when Pedro came in for two innings of relief with his Red Sox up 8-1. He didn’t pitch very well in that outing, either, giving up two runs before settling down and keeping his team up by a comfortable margin.

I tried as hard as I could to find a video of one of those two outings so you could hear the chant resonating through Yankee Stadium, but thanks to the idiots at Fox, it is surely unavailable to the human race forever. But if you’re not familiar with it, imagine what a chant of “Let’s go, Yankees!” would sound like, with the organ going, “Dun dun da-da-dun,” in between the chants, going up an octave each time, but the fans were shouting, “Who’s your daddy!” instead. It sounds just like the “OVER-RATED” chant.

I did manage to find a fan’s video of the “Who’s your daddy!” chant at Yankee Stadium this past Thursday when Pedro pitched for the Phillies in game 2 of the 2009 World Series. I’m sure this video doesn’t do it justice. It must have been louder than that, coming from every corner of the stadium. I couldn’t hear an organ, either, which gave it a nice, old-fashioned baseball touch in 2004.

I didn’t hear the chant on TV myself because I went downtown to watch the game at Bar Louie with five of my friends. It was a lot of fun watching it with them and all of us cheering for the Phillies. Pedro pitched well in Yankee Stadium for the first time since at least 2004, but he still lost because A.J. Burnett pitched better.

I wore my new red Detroit Red Wings hat because I wanted to wear a reddish hat that was close to the dark red of the Phillies to show my support for them that night. That sounds kind of lame because they aren’t even close to the same team, and Philadelphia fans, in fact, hate the Red Wings, but it’s the gesture that counts. (My red Georgia hat feels too tall and awkward on me, so I don’t wear it anymore, and it’s a brighter red than the flimsy, pre-faded, worn-out-looking Red Wings hat that I bought anyway.) However, my Red Wings hat came in handy in a very unexpected way. Near the end of our night there, after we had finished our meals and most people had finished their drinks, the waitress came over and said the bartender wanted to give us a free round of shots because I was wearing a Red Wings hat! Ha! We obviously laughed in disbelief about that. But not in front of the waitress. I’m not even a good Red Wings fan. I’ve never been to a game, I only watch them occasionally, and I only know their famous players. I jumped on their bandwagon and bought a hat so I could wear it to softball next year and because I couldn’t find a new copy of my flimsy, worn-out-looking Braves hat (which is smelly and dirty from wearing during softball). The shots were the bartender’s own creation, the first time he’d ever made it. I forgot what he called it, but I think it had triple sec and some kind of blueberry syrup in the bottom. We all agreed it was good.