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Because it’s a rainy Tuesday morning and I’m bored. Because I am easily amused and have too much time on my hands. Because I don’t embarrass these people enough by making them sing songs about genitalia and perform sketches about naked pirates. Because I don’t know what else to share with you right now and this is marginally better than nothing. But really, ultimately, just becase I can.

And yes, that’s all they do. The music will just repeat.

Over the weekend, I went to see Panic Room. If you like, you can read my thoughts in the little “Seen Recently” sidebar over there to the left. Personally, I like what Roger Ebert had to say about the film, which should come as no surprise since I tend to agree with Ebert on a lot of films and can usually understand where he’s coming from when we don’t. He writes:

The end game in chess, for the student of the sport, is its most intriguing aspect. The loss of pieces has destroyed the initial symmetry and created a skewed board — unfamiliar terrain in which specialized pieces are required to do jobs for which they were not designed. There is less clutter; strategy must run deeper because there are fewer alternative lines. Sacrifices may be brilliant, or they may be blunders, or only apparent blunders. Every additional move limits the options, and the prospect of defeat, swift and unforeseen, hangs over the board. That is exactly the way “Panic Room” unfolds, right down to the detail that even at the end the same rules apply, and all the choices that were made earlier limit the choices that can be made now.

The Peer-to-Peer Review Project seemed like a good idea at the time. The objective was “to let bloggers review other bloggers in a huge ring [and] introduce more bloggers to each other’s sites…” It sounded interesting enough, and far be it from me to pass up the chance to whore my weblog around, so I signed up.

Then, months later, when I had all but forgotten about the project, an e-mail arrived with the link I was supposed to review. I followed the link, poked around the site a little, and realized that I had almost nothing constructive to say. I wasn’t impressed or upset, and it wasn’t brilliant or awful. In fact, it wasn’t much of anything. There just wasn’t anything to write.

So I ignored it, until this morning when I checked my e-mail again and realized that the deadline I had thought was at least a week away — plenty of time — was, in fact, today. So I went back to the site, and I poked around a little, and eventually this is what I wrote:

My overall impression — and I wish it was not so; I wish I had more to say — is that newsance, aside from the amusing pun of its title and its straightforward, if relatively unexciting design, doesn’t have much to offer. The fact that there are only nine days of short entries, ending more than a full month ago, doesn’t help matters any. Authors Tom Biro and Misha Glezin bill the site (all eight entries of it) as “a collection of satire-ish articles manufactured by some of the most fantastic brains of our time for your reading amusement.” Obviously, that’s meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but, in all honesty, I wasn’t terribly amused by any of it. This short and seemingly discarded weblog reads like a halfhearted attempt at what the Onion and others do much better on a regular basis. And while perhaps it isn’t fair to hold newsance up to the standard of a professional publication like the Onion, it offers no special features and nothing to recommend repeat visits. A chuckle maybe, here and there, but not much else. I realize that, as a part of the peer-to-peer review project, we are encouraged “to go into detail with a few things”, but how much detail can there be in just over a week’s worth of entries? If its own authors lost interest less than two weeks into the endeavor, why should the average reader bother to even care?

And then, of course, after all of that was done and I’d fulfilled my end of the peer-to-peer responsibilities, I wandered over to Tom Biro’s personal weblog, where, wouldn’t ya know it, he writes: “i was thinking of going away from the silly newsance thing i had posted here for a while, and still haven’t deleted… i don’t obviously think i’m matt drudge or anything, but think it would be neat just to have a page with interesting news articles, rather than me posting them all over the place in my blog….”

I wish he had told someone that earlier. It might have been nice to review an active weblog.

The Friday Five, found initially via kottke.org

1. What are the first things that you do in the morning to start your day?

First, I wake up. I find this helps immeasurably. Then I grab a towel and some clothes and stumble to the bathroom for my morning shower. I get dressed in the bathroom not so much out of modesty — I live alone — but because I don’t want to traipse naked and wet across my cold, cold living room and its hardwood floor. Once finished getting dressed, I brush my teeth and pocket my keys and my wallet, usually spend a few minutes transfixed to the television or mesmerized by the radio while I struggle with the whole concept of being awake, and then I head out the door, locking it behind me. If I’m lucky, I have about five minutes to get to work. I almost never eat breakfast on weekdays, the only days I really have a routine. That might be a mistake — by eleven I’m usually famished and can’t think straight — but food generally doesn’t agree with me until I’ve been awake for an hour, and I have enough trouble allowing half an hour for getting dressed and my commute.

2. What are the last things that you do at night before going to bed?

I make sure my alarm is set, my door is locked, and then I climb into bed and turn off the light. Sometimes, but as often as I should, I leave on the radio, more because I know I’ll forget to turn NPR back on in the morning than anything else.

3. What daily routine have you recently added to your day?

My routine has stayed basically the same for years. The only real difference between now and a year ago is I have a better paying job and a car. But I’ve had the better paying job since September and the car since January, so I wouldn’t really call those recent alterations to my day. I am nothing if not predictable. But then, you probably knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?

4. What routine do you wish you could get rid of?

I’m happiest when I can sleep without setting my alarm at all, so I would like it if I didn’t have to be at work until at least 9 or 10 every morning. Then I could have more time to myself in the morning, more time to adjust — maybe even have some breakfast — and I could still cling to this dream of eight hours of sleep every night. So it’s not so much a routine I want to get rid of, as it is a rountine that needs some serious tweaking. I won’t even begin to bore you with the routines that need tweaking at work.

5. What’s the one thing that makes you feel like something is missing if you don’t do it some point within your day?

Hands down, Caption This. It’s just part of who I am. And, really, if I don’t be me, who will?

I continue to think spam can’t get any more confusing or annoying, and yet it continues to confuse and annoy me. Case in point: today, not ten minutes ago in fact, I received a fake virus warning. “A letter sent to you was infected with a virus,” it says. “It was deleted. Below are the headers of this message and information from the virus scanner.” This didn’t come from my virus detection software, though, and I’m quite sure there is no postmaster at unreality dot net. Maybe someone tried to send a virus using a faked e-mail address and my domain name, but overall what I received looks suspiciously like spam since it, too, comes from an address I don’t recognize. Which begs the question: if you’re not selling or promiting something, and you’re not sending a virus, a link or something else, what then is the point of spam?