2/05/2010 4:18 PM Hi. I'm retiring this blog and moving to a better place. Find me at Vomitron.com and don't forget to update your RSS feeds. -Brett # 2/03/2010 4:19 PM There. I fixed it. -Brett # 2/01/2010 12:16 PM The electoral college system is dumb, but EC reform probably won't happen in our lifetime. One solution is to do an end-run around the whole system and re-draw state boundaries with an eye toward equalizing the population across all 50. Check out the map that would make this happen. Hilarious. -Brett # 1/22/2010 1:07 PM Pampers decided to completely change their Cruisers line, and it's rubbing parents the wrong way. Wasn't that clever? Seriously though, they've completely changed the composition of their Cruisers diapers, and the new version is awful. Ad Age reviews the changes - a thinner diaper that's 25% more absorbent - and appears to side with Pampers in blaming a vocal bunch of Internet complainers for not appreciating the diaper's improvements. I can speak from firsthand experience - they are improvements. But those improvements are far outweighed by the discomfort that the new scratchier, smellier, and leakier Cruisers have unleashed in my house. The new style is slowly being rolled out across the country, but the packaging isn't changing at all so I never know what I'm going to find inside when I open up a new box... When I first saw the new-style diapers I'd just assumed I just got a bad batch from the factory and decided to use them anyway since they were mostly still usable. They are awful. Everything that the Internet is saying is true. The reviews on Pampers' own site are particularly scathing. Pretty sure we'll be switching brands soon. -Brett # 12/30/2009 11:22 AM National Geographic magazine has been around for over 120 years. They're now selling a digital compilation of every issue all the way back to #1 in 1888. You can buy it on either six DVDs ($90) or a 160GB hard drive ($200). They don't provide any specs on the scans other than to say that they're "high resolution," so there's no way to know whether or not the photos of topless african ladies with the neck-stretching rings be suitable for computer wallpaper purposes. (If anyone I know ends up buying this collection I will be sure to update this post with that info.) Amazon has it even cheaper on DVD for just $43 without the leather case. This seems like a killer app for the Kindle. A Natgeo-branded Kindle with this collection pre-loaded would sell like gangbusters. DRM and capacity issues will probably prevent that from ever happening though. -Brett # 12/21/2009 9:14 AM The unofficial Rapidshare Automatic Downloader for free users will save you hours of work. You just paste in a bunch of Rapidshare URLs and it sits through all the countdowns and presses all the buttons for you. This is particularly helpful as we near the end of the 2009 Christmas sharity season, as an overwhelming majority of those bloggers all use RS exclusively. -Brett # 11/18/2009 9:04 AM Back in 2001 Leonard Maltin approached Dick Cook at the Disney studio with an idea to reach back into the studio archives and release old Disney material on DVD. The plan went forward and the end result was a series of extremely limited edition DVD releases sold under the name Disney Treasures. There have been nine 'waves' of Treasures releases over the past nine years totaling 30 SKUs in all. A lot of the material in the Treasures series had never been released to the home video market before so this was a pretty big deal for fans of Disney history. These aren't feature films either - they're full of things like restored Disney shorts, wartime propaganda films, Mickey Mouse Club content, and made-for-TV clips about space travel in the 1950s. It's aimed squarely at the adult collector - not their children. The scarcity of the discs has really helped them keep their value on the resale market, and if you had the time or patience to track them all down it would cost you at least $800. Some of the edition sizes on the releases have been as small as 30,000, so if you didn't pick them up within the first few days then getting fleeced on eBay was your best bet. I've never had much of an interest in anything that Disney does outside of their theme park operations, so I only have one Treasures set - the Disneyland set from the first wave. D23 members can now pre-order a 54-disc re-release of the Treasures series for $500. This set is even more limited - just 3,000 copies are being made. As large and expensive as it may be, it oddly doesn't include three of the previous releases - "Elfego Baca and The Swamp Fox," and the first and second seasons of Zorro. It's still an excellent value, and I have no doubt that flipping it on eBay will be an easy and lucrative proposition. So I ordered it. I don't intend to hang on to the discs for very long, if you know what I'm saying... -Brett # Miss a day? Visit the - Archives - Make these ads disappear! Install an ad blocker today!