I'll never miss a 'Daily Show' again: Well, like so many other weblog folks have done recently, I wrote a little TiVo blurb (a poem, actually, in my case) and won a free 14-hour-capacity TiVo. You can do it too, just go to http://giveaway.tivo.com/giveaway/. They're giving away 10 (or maybe more) a day... nice way to simultaneously ditch excess inventory, build customer loyalty, and get positive word-of-mouth, if you ask me. Not to mention, they get the fruits of hundreds of people's creativity very cheaply. Smart marketers there.

We were going to get ourselves a TiVo for Christmas, but the itch to get one sooner has been very strong (at least for me); this will let us try it out for not-so-much $ (you still have to pay for the service), and I get the buzz from having "won" a "contest" (though it sounds like it's really not that hard to win [MetaFilter discussion]). Cool.

Hey, does anybody know of a place I can get Mac OS 9 for less than $90? I'm thinking about getting the Mac OS X beta, but they say you need OS 9 to run it properly. Spending $120 to run a beta doesn't seem like a smart move...but then again maybe I'll crash less with 9 than with 8.6... I don't know. Anyway: any suggestions for cheap sources of OS 9?

Bush's four-dollar routine that he and his surrogates use everywhere ("I know most Americans are too stupid to understand actual numbers, so here, I'll use a simplistic prop. See? This is MUNN-ee. Munnee good, yes? Vote for me!") is not only patronizing and insulting, it's thoroughly misleading. Gore's lies about his dog's prescription drug costs at least had some connection to reality:

• Wag the Dog by Paul Krugman [NYTimes, thanks to Ethel the Blog]
  Anyone who has looked at [Bush's] campaign's own numbers ... knows that this isn't right -- that the tax cut would actually use up more than a third [not a quarter] of the surplus. But most commentators seem to think that this is a minor detail -- a quarter, a third, what's the difference? (About $450 billion, but who's counting?)
  
  Mr. Gore got the details wrong but represented the basic situation correctly; Mr. Bush also got the details wrong but fundamentally misrepresented the situation. And that's not the only difference. Mr. Gore told his story once, and didn't repeat it after the details were questioned. Mr. Bush continues to tell his story even though it is demonstrably inconsistent with the numbers his own campaign has put out.

I remain surprised that this is the best candidate the Republican Party could field.

Thanks to Lilly for the pointer to an interesting recent chat with J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5.

• JMS Chat from 20 September 2000 [Scifi.com]
  jms: ...at conventions, the actors tend to get character questions, or B5 universe questions...and I get "When are the DVDs coming out? Is there going to be any more merchandise?" Understand that in what follows there is NO point of comparison, I'm not fit to carry Rod Serling's pencil box, but if *I* had access to Serling at a convention, I *sure* as heck wouldn't be asking him when the TZ DVDs were coming out.
  
  jms: ...in fact [Vir] was the stronger character than Londo. Sure, Londo was more *colorful*, but that ain't the same thing as *strong*. Confronted by the same or similar circumstances, Vir generally chose well; Londo did not.

Here's another, somewhat-less-interesting one from earlier this year:

• JMS Chat from 21 June 2000 [Scifi.com]
  Q: How hard is it for you to go on to other stories/genres after being steeped in the B5 universe for so long?
  
  jms: It took some doing initially. It's the analogy of the horse that gives rides in the park for kids, and spends years walking in the same circle...then one day it's set free...and goes out to the pasture...and walks in circles... there was kind of a psychological hiccup when B5 and Crusade ended, and it took me a while to really get back on my feet again creatively. But that's always the case with TV... when I was on Murder She Wrote for 2 years, it took some adjusting to stop putting Jessica Fletcher into Babylon 5 episodes.
  
  jms: ...the first one to do Garibaldi/G'Kar Slash fiction gets it in the neck.

The Internet joke Gore read on Letterman wasn't original...

• AL GORE; JOKE THIEF! [Modern Humorist]
  The Modern Humorist campaign sticker reads: "Al Gore: He gave us the Internet and he can take it away."
  
  It appeared on Modernhumorist.com on August 16...

...but, as Lyn pointed out to me in conversation at the time, the list was likely made up by Letterman's writers, not Al his own bad self. If one cries 'plagiarism', one should take care to catch the real culprit.