Steven Soderberg’s Bubble is being released “Day and Date,” meaning simultaneous release in theaters and on DVD. Of course theater owners are panicking. Tell you what, make your big-theater-movie-going experience significantly better than the one in my living room and we’ll talk. Your problems have nothing to do with release windows.

The BEAST has a compiled its list of the 50 Most Loathsome People in America for last year. It’s funny, and a little sad. Yes, Pat Robertson is still #1. Here are a couple of clips… Tommy Hilfiger Egomaniacal designer of drab, ironically patriot-hued clothing, manufactured by Chinese migrants who overcrowd the equally drab Pacific Rim factories of the United States Commonwealth of Saipan, favorite illegal vacation spot of Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay.

Duane Johnson has created a handy Rails plugin which converts each line of the all-too-often-seen-during-development Rails backtrace into a link. Clicking on any of the links opens that file directly in Textmate, and places the cursor on the line in question. This will save me more time than I care to admit. [Link]

I don’t play the lotto. Of course that means I won’t win. But I won’t win if I play either. 3 Quarks Daily’s Abbas Raza has written an interesting piece along these same lines. He thinks it’s even worse. Someone once pointed out that for a round trip of more than 14 miles, there is a greater chance of dying in a traffic accident then there is of winning 100 million dollars in the NY State Lotto.

Michael Mandelbaum takes a look at America’s global role. It’s significantly more positive than much of what we hear lately. The rest of the world complains that American hegemony is reckless, arrogant, and insensitive. Just dont expect them to do anything about it. The worlds guilty secret is that it enjoys the security and stability the United States provides. The world wont admit it, but they will miss the American empire when its gone.

The big, smart, louder half of Penn and Teller – Penn Jillette – has a podcast on FreeFM. [link]

A great list of memory-jolting things from “back in the day.” A couple of favorites… Your first VCR cost $1,000. You watched HR Puffenstuff as a child, but now that you’re older, you really understand that it would have been much better had you known about drugs at the time. Schoolhouse Rock played a HUGE part in how you actually learned the English language.

Most of you have probably already seen this Honda advertisement using a choir of people making sound effects, but just in case… Direct link to mirror of Honda Ad It’s wonderful

Finally! My longed-for, dreamed-of and always-missed Gmail “Delete” button! Hurray for Google. Yes, I know there are Greasemonkey scripts that will add the same button in Firefox, but this is different. This is Google listening to what must’ve been nearly *everyone* begging for a simple delete button. The pallid basement dwellers who hang out on Digg are quick to point out that “sheesh dude, it’s like a two-line bit of code, what’s the big deal?

It seems like every day I discover something new about the wonderful Textmate editor. Today it was the “Edit in Textmate” extra. To install (from within Textmate), select Automation->Run Command->Textmate->Install Edit in “Textmate”. From that moment on, whether you’re working in Safari, Mail or any number of other apps, you can simply hit Command-Control-E and edit your text right in Textmate. When you’re finished, hit Command-S Command-W and you, along with your edited text, are back in the original app.

Collect, say, 10 or 20 photos of Linsay Lohan. Crop each of them so that her nose is always in precisely the same place. Then animate them rapidly in sequence. Kinda hypnotic. [link]

I don’t remember much about my first time with David Lynch’s Eraserhead. I was quite young. What I do remember is that I suddenly understood that there was a difference between “watching a movie” and having a “cinematic experience.” Eraserhead was my first run in with the latter. It’s frightening, baffling and completely defies any attempts to classify or explain it. When the girl behind the radiator sings “In heaven, everything is fine.