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.

Martha Stewart

Only in America could a plutocrat convicted of insider trading find sympathy among her social inferiorspeople she would have either sterilized or mustard gassed, if the law permitted her.

Bruce Chapman

Seems to believe a petition signed by 400 PhDs and professors is convincing proof of Intelligent Designs widespread acceptance. A lazy dissembler, he blames the lack of actual research and peer-reviewed articles on ID on academic blackballing. Right, cause Galileo had it easy.

There are lots more. [Link)]

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. Still, there are plenty willing to take their chances.

[Link)]

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.

link

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.

[link)]

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? No Digg.” That misses the point entirely. Gmail has always been about “…so you’ll never need to delete another message,” and they meant it. And I hated it.

Gmail has also always been about lightweight, usable, management of our email. Making us jump through hoops to delete messages (and we want to delete messages, no matter how much storage you give us) was in obvious and painful contrast to that goal. All better now. Thank you. Now about that “Delete All…” button.

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. What this means is that I can now use Textmate to edit text in those awful html textareas. Groovy.