idealism vs. reality

"When I'm ruling this country with an iron fist, you'll be first against the wall!"
"Sure, they all say that. Then it's like, "uh, before we summarily execute you for crimes against the supreme leader and what not, could you, uh, fix the computer for us?""

Have to say, my crimes against the aspiring supreme leader are pretty serious, what with me dissing her taste in music and so forth.

why can't this stuff Just Work?

I've been playing a flash-based Sudoku game for the last several months: Fingertime Sudoku. It's got the best interface I've seen for feeding numbers to the grid, and generally throws me puzzles I can finish inside four minutes with the occasional 10-12 minute stinker. Anyway, this past week it stopped working for me. I get the grid, the UI, but no prefilled numbers. Tried it from the office laptop, it's fine, but from the home laptop, it's useless. From either home laptop (both run identical configs). Even with cache flushed and proxy disabled. WTF?

found in a newspaper, no less.

The Chap, a Journal for Modern Gentlemen. You are, as the site says, entering a doffing zone.

you'd expect this, really

Hans Zimmer's score for Gladiator is like Hans Zimmer's score for The Rock if it were transferred to Ancient Rome, in as much as you could picture a bunch of Roman heralds attempting to parp out the brass sections in much the same style as they end up on the score.

movie mashup clip I'd like to see

Vader doing his "I find your lack of faith disturbing" routine, except revoiced to say, "Sometimes I doubt your committment to Sparkle Motion".