It’s simple: Keep only 100 things, not including anything in your shared household, anything you might want to use later, anything with personal history, or any books. Then get rid of crap you’re not using, like a yoga mat, and some extraneous clothes and the pewter LotR figurines. Voila!

Zabaduba describes in detail this guy’s self-parodying “purge.”

So, Dave was so disgusted by his cluttered lifestyle that he’s rebelling by living in a fully furnished house (with piano!), with a completely stocked kitchen and loaded bookshelves, while keeping all the personal items he doesn’t use everyday in a box for a year. Wow. Inspiring.

Judging by the comments, there are too many people who still think that good intentions and high-flown ideals are what count. Why do you have to bother to set up a Game with a Namegoal like 100 Thing Challenge … and then make a mockery of it right from the get-go by taking more than 100 things out of the running for elimination? Why can’t you just get rid of crap you’re not using, like the average rest of us?

Oh yeah … that wouldn’t gain you the admiration of a slice of the masses. But dude, as long as you’re sacrificing, I’ll be happy to take those LotR pewters off your hands.

If you’d just been extracted from your car by the jaws of life and people were trying to shoulder up not to offer help but to snap you with their cell-phone cameras, would you joke about it? Nope, I wouldn’t either, but apparently Morgan Freeman did.

[Charleston Sun Sentinel editor] McFerrin said bystanders converged on the scene trying to get a glimpse of the actor.

When one person tried to snap a photo with a cell phone camera, Freeman joked, “no freebies, no freebies,” McFerrin said.

Swift recovery to you, Mr. Freeman.

What a circus Green Bay’s management is making of Favre’s wish to unretire. Granted, the wish lends itself to spectacle. In a perfect world Favre would have made sure he was really serious about retirement before going ahead with it, but c’est la vie. NFL Commissioner Goodell has now reinstated Favre, so Green Bay’s choices remain: Play him, trade/release him, or dangle money enough that he will retire at their command.

Management is being extremely silly here. They say they want to move forward with Favre’s replacement QB, but they won’t release Favre because they’re afraid he’ll sign with the Vikings.

This is not even silly; it is downright stupid. There are only two possibilities here that should dictate management’s action: Either they believe 1) That Favre can play at something approximating his optimal levels; or 2) That Favre cannot play at these levels. If they think he can play, they should have taken him back, no questions asked, except with a little private grumbling and a sop to his potential replacement. The man should have earned a little leeway, not to mention loyalty, by now. Replacement QBs will come and go, but in Green Bay there is only one Favre, even with his star slightly tarnished by a false-start retirement. If they believe he cannot play, they should have quietly admitted him back to the rosters and quietly released/traded him. Because if they don’t believe he can play, what harm does it do anybody but Favre himself and the Vikings if he goes to the Vikings? Certainly wouldn’t hurt Green Bay; in fact they’d have a prime opportunity for their players to show the old man that he should have stayed off the field. An ignominious end, certainly, but that risk should be left up to Favre to take.

Seems like management’s letting its pissiness at Favre’s desire to do something other than what they want to dictate its actions. They need to come down off the high horse and make a decision based on football, not their bruised egos.

Autograph seekers outside the theater where David Tennant is playing Hamlet and Patrick Stewart is playing Claudius are limited to asking them to sign Hamlet-related memorabilia, as opposed to “bags” … bags!!! … of Doctor Who stuff, and presumably Star Trek stuff as well.

I am so embarrassed for these people. If I ever meet David Tennant I will be finding something better to say than begging him to write on Who stuff, I can tell you.

H/t Daddyman.

IMDb appears to be down. After Amazon was down for two hours earlier today. Is somebody doing a one-by-one hit job on the Ten Wonders of the Internet? Is Fark next, or Wikipedia, or eBay?

Link via Ace.

Update: Turns out IMDb has been owned by Amazon for the last ten years. Shows how much I follow business news. But at least it explains the outage, which continues as I write this.

So I joined the Associates program, thinking to pick up a few cents here and there on people’s Amazon orders. I was aware there are no referral fees on items I buy myself, but stupidly overlooked this part:

This includes orders for customers, orders on behalf of customers, and orders for products to be used by you, your friends, your relatives, or your associates in any manner.

Okay, that’s pretty restricted–my mother almost never orders from Amazon because she doesn’t like wrestling with a click system rather than just picking what she wants and filling out an order form. She orders through Amazon specifically because I set up the portal on my blog–thus essentially referring a new customer to them, the ostensible purpose of the program–and her purchases don’t count because she’s my mother?

It’s understandable, if a bit narrow. But what really got my goat was the offensive and condescending expressions of the Amazon flunky who wrote back to my query about why there were several orders but no referral fees in my account. He accused me outright of ordering all the items myself, when actually some were ordered by my mother as aforementioned and some were ordered by Daddyman. He then snidely mentioned that Amazon is not running a “discount program” here. Yeah, no duh, moron.

And because their system is “proprietary,” he condescendingly declines to explain to me how they “know” I ordered the items myself. Hey, Sherlock? My mother has my same last name and Daddyman lives at my same address, though we aren’t married and thus aren’t even related. I pretty well grok on my own how you “deduced” these items were nefariously purchased by me. But you’re dead frackin’ wrong–I have zero interest in old episodes of Doctor Who.

So while I understand that you have to protect yourselves from being taken advantage of, and that orders from the same household should probably be restricted from the program, still, that’s not the same as me ordering them myself to try to hoodwink you. When you accuse people of that, you destroy a lot of goodwill and good faith. Yeah, it’s embarrassingly stupid of me not to have noticed the “relatives” part, but it’s offensively condescending for you to send a lengthy, rambling email accusing me of acting in bad faith instead of simply pointing out the problem and the restricted items. Thus my membership in the Associates program is finished. Hire some people who know how to respond to emails without acting like people who invite their friends and family to use their Amazon portal are deceptive little weasels who really are only after discounts for themselves.

Well, all right, he was round the bend when Episode I was made, but now he’s so far gone I can’t even see him any more: Shia LeBeouf as the new Indy, with Harrison Ford coming back as the elder statesman a la Connery.

“I haven’t even told Steven or Harrison this,” he said. “But I have an idea to make Shia [LeBeouf] the lead character next time and have Harrison [Ford] come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie. I can see it working out.

I guess I’m dumb even to be surprised and dumber still to be sad about this kind of thing. This stuff is aimed at the generations following on to mine, and they don’t care if things we treasured are ruined–they’ll plunk down their money and Lucas will gather it up.

But I doubt Lucas has come to terms with that in his own mind. He still seems to have no clue that these are not good ideas from a creative/story point of view. I haven’t seen the new movie yet; it doesn’t matter whether Shia LeBouf is the new Ford or spends all his time chewing scenery. It’s not about that. It’s about a creative institution: Indiana Jones. Don’t show him to us getting old, sitting around, giving advice to the new protege. We don’t care about that. He was a man at a moment in time, and we don’t want to know how Lucas thinks he ages. We don’t want him to age at all. Enough, already. Connery worked because he was a static character also: Introduce him, boom, he’s old, he’s Indy’s father, accepted, he’s a name actor with charisma coming out his ears and we all love him. Wild cheers. Exit to applause–a lesson Lucas has never learned. His lesson is more like “wring out every last drop.” I thought it was only television execs who were supposed to be so heartless to their product–execs who have no hand in writing, casting, or shooting the work. Lucas should know better. Why doesn’t he?

As for Lucas’s comment that the current Indy movie will be the “exact same experience” the other three were, all I can say is, actually, I hope so.

Recount being an HBO film written by Danny Strong of Buffy Evil Nerd Mastermind fame. So why is Warren Christopher upset at his portrayal in the film? Ah–because he is shown as not aggressive enough to get Gore the win.

“I was stunned by the excerpt,” he said in an interview. “Much of what the author has written about me is pure fiction. It contained events that never occurred, words I never spoke and decisions attributed to me that I never made.”

The film portrays Mr. Christopher as blocking attempts by other Gore advisers to rally protesters and to take the fight over disputed ballots to court. He is depicted as backing away from confrontation during a meeting with Mr. Baker, seeking compromise and negotiation as the Republicans prepare for war.

And what does it make you, exactly, when you seek compromise and negotiation while your opponents “prepare for war”?

“I think a lot of the strategizing in the script that I saw was somebody’s hindsight rather than what we had to deal with in the immediate aftermath of the election,” Mr. Daley said. He added: “The perception that Warren Christopher was some wuss who got hoodwinked by Jim Baker is absolute fantasy in the mind of somebody who is trying to make themselves out to be bigger than they were.”

…

Writing on huffingtonpost.com, Jeffrey Wells calls it “a thoroughly engaging, first-rate political drama.” But, he added, “I can’t see how this film won’t be seen as having done serious damage to the reputation” of Mr. Christopher, whom Mr. Wells says is portrayed “as one of the great all-time wimps.”

Oh. It makes you a “wuss” and a “wimp.” I believe that right there is something known as “irony.”

Oh, ho, ho, irony! Oh, no, no, we don’t get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony’s not really a, a high priority. We haven’t had any irony here since about, uh, ‘83, when I was the only practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was tired of being stared at.

As for the Nerd Mastermind himself, I’ll leave you with his idea of Warren Christopher’s characterization:

Mr. Strong disputes that characterization. “It was our goal to show him as a noble statesman who held a deep concern at how the rest of the world would be negatively affected if the United States was not able to handle a disputed election in a nonviolent manner,” he said.

Come on, now, Danny/Jonathan. Even your erstwhile HuffPo reviewer is not buying that.

And Gib marvels in fascination at the spectacle of a former Secretary of State taking on … Jonathan from Buffy.

Via Whedonesque.

Obama as Messiah Rising from the Oregon Waters.

Alas, however, that is recognizably Portland, OR, behind him.

H/t Ace o’ Spades.

Real Archaeologists ™ on Indiana Jones:

Indiana Jones managed to retrieve the trinket he was after in the opening moments of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” He pretty much wrecked everything else in the ancient South American temple where the little gold idol had rested for millennia.

Though he preaches research and good science in the classroom, the world’s most famous archaeologist often is an acquisitive tomb raider in the field with a scorched-earth policy about what he leaves behind. While actual archaeologists like the guy and his movies, they wouldn’t necessarily want to work alongside him on a dig.

Indy’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach to archaeology will be on display again May 22 with “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” in which he’s sure to rain destruction down on more historic sites and priceless artifacts.

Silly me, I thought it was the giant boulder booby-trap, the Nazis, the heart-yanking, child-enslaving Kali cult, and the built-in earthquake in the Grail cave that did the damage.

Seriously, I can’t believe they got anybody to go on record for this article:

“It is rather adventurous in a way, because for the most part, you’re going to some exotic country and delving into their past. But it’s not an adventure with a whip and chasing bad guys and looking for treasure,” said Bryant Wood, an archaeologist with Associates for Biblical Research.

It’s … it’s … not?

I may cry.

H/t J.