Been practically “off the grid” the past week - discovered and promptly became a fanboy of How I Met Your Mother, a CBS sitcom now in it’s third season. A little surprising for me since after the end of Friends and Will and Grace I thought the whole “group of young adults in the city” sitcom thing had been milked dry.

The premise seems generic at first. It’s told from the perspective of Ted Mosby in 2030, telling his children the story of how he met their mother. I was actually quite disappointed with the pilot - the characters seemed generic, and I was like “Bah I know how this’ll go”. For all the brilliance of Friends, you always knew Ross would end up with Rachel. But HIMYM pulled a doozie when it ended its pilot with future Ted stating to his children “And that’s the story of how I met your Aunt Robin.” Jeng jeng jeng!

At first I only continued watching because I wondered how the heck a show would last when it told you up front that no, its flagship couple would in fact *not* end up together, but gradually I began to appreciate what set it apart.

Flashbacks and creative narration have always made for good viewing - Friends had the hilarious bits of the gang in college, Will and Grace had that amazing episode where Will first came out to Grace. And House isn’t a sitcom, but the Emmy-winning episode Three Stories is a shining example of the method. HIMYM exploits these techniques to the fullest, using its narrative setting to jump back and forth in the “story” for that episode (because of this, HIMYM isn’t performed live and every episode takes about three times as long to produce).

It also rewards viewer loyalty by doing this even between episodes! In the third-to-last episode of Season 2, the story centers around Ted, but we see flashes of Marshall wearing a hat at his wedding table, and of Robin’s apartment with a particular ornament missing. The next two episodes tell us the stories behind them and weave deftly into the season finale. A far cry from the more episodic (and rerun-friendly ) format of other shows.

And of course there’s Barney, who steals every scene he’s in. I’m not sure whether it’s because Neil Patrick Harris ( who recently sort-of criticized Britney Spears guest appearance on the show ) is just a damn good actor, or if he gets all the best catchphrases (probably both). I’d watch the show for him alone!

The rest of the cast aren’t bad, but they pretty much stick to their roles, letting the script and direction shine instead. I thought Robin was too good-looking to be believable at first, but after a certain episode in Season 2 (”Let’s go the Mall!”) she was redeemed.

HIMYM uses Internet buzz well. Barney constantly refers to “his blog” in the show, which is an actual one hosted at CBS and updated regularly, but sadly it seems that its archives got lost in a site revamp. Josh Radnor, who plays Ted, has a blog at TV Guide.com, it’s not updated regularly but has some pretty good stories.

And yes, I’ll say it: HIMYM is as awesome as Will and Grace, and even - wait for it - Friends. Yes it’s that awesome! Too bad it doesn’t seem to be showing on Astro any more.

Popularity: 60% [?]

I think it’s amazing how US politicians are able to make fun of themselves (in a good way).

The Colbert Report was held in the University of Pennsylvania last week during the Democrat primary (For all the whiners about advertorials, it was titled “The Colbert Report: Doritos Spicy Sweet Pennsylvania Primary Coverage From Chili-Delphia - The City of Brotherly Crunch!” ).

Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama made appearances.

The screen backdrop “went down”, prompting Colbert exclaim “Are you telling me there’s no one in this theatre who can fix the mess we’re in?” In comes Clinton to the rescue. A quick fix later, she quips:

“I just love solving problems. Call me anytime!”

“Really?”

“Sure. Call me at 3 a.m.!”

Lol.

Later on was John Edwards, the ex-Presidential hopeful who guest-presented the “Word” section. He joked about how he was being courted by both sides for his endorsement: “I’ll support whoever presents the platform that is consistent with my values”, he said - with “UNIVERSAL HAIRCARE” written on the sidescreen.

Obama was less frivolous. He wasn’t in the theatre but made an appearance through a live feed, on the screen that Clinton fixed earlier. He preached a bit, but ended by putting “Distractions” “On Notice”.

All in all a good day for Colbert, and  he’ll probably be attributing Clinton’s win to the “Colbert bump”.

Meanwhile, I wonder when we’ll see Pak Lah pretending to fall asleep during a speech or  TDM saying “correct, correct, correct!”.

Popularity: 52% [?]

You reach the season end of a show you recently started watching… :(

BUT then you notice the scrollbar at the bottom - there was another episode left to watch!!

How I Met Your Mother has been growing on me . Been getting cranky after being too long away from sitcoms! It seemed lame at first but blossomed out after the middle of the first season. Surprising for a show that tells you in the first episode that the main love plot ala “Ross and Rachel” is doomed not to work out! Not quite up there with WnG or Friends yet, but I’m giving it time. Barney especially is a legendary character.

Exhibit A: ”The greatest pickup line of all time”

Popularity: 56% [?]

Note: I was planning Snippets to be just a mishmash of everything interesting I find on the Web but would never have the time to blog about. I thought making it a fortnightly thing would be fine, but it appears a lot happens in two weeks :/. Oh well.

Malaysia

• Hamilahton, mother of maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof who was recently revealed to be working as an escort girl in UK, starts a blog to tell her side of the story.
• GSC’s website is hit by a trojan that can potentially exploit IE to steal user passwords.
• Malaysia Airlines is hit with an RM900k loss after a ticket price typo.
• Faizal Tahir, who was recently censured for baring his chest onstage during an 8TV concert, receives the most AIM (Anugerah Industri Musik) nominations this year.
• A Samad Said hits out at the Education Ministry for omitting his works from the national curriculum because they are too “difficult”, also blames DBP for the decline of Malay literature.
• Dr. Chua Soi Lek starts his own blog.
• Tengku Faris, Crown Prince of Kelantan, says that non-Malays should not seek equal treatment, and that their citizenship is owed to the Malays.

Tech

• A class action lawsuit is being brought against Apple for fitting newer iMacs with inferior TN displays. (For those who don’t know, the widely-used TN panels cost roughly half of a higher quality S-IPS/PVM panel, and have much worse viewing angles and colour reproduction.
• Sony BMG is found to be using pirated software after one its employees called tech support with an invalid key.
• It seems that buying an upgrade edition of Vista without actually “upgrading” allows you to nearly halve the price.
• President Bush is apparently caught with pirated songs after talking about his iPod in an interview.
• Universal claims that promotional CDs sent out en masse still belong to them.
• A power grid in San Franciso is hacked in less than a day by a team of penetration testers.
• A Microsoft exec talks about Vista’s UAC at a conference and informs participants that it was “meant to annoy”.

Science

• A study shows men are much less able to tell when a woman is interested (or rather, disinterested ) in them, and vice versa.
• The youngest planet ever discovered could be less than 2,000 years old.
• New data from spacecraft orbiting Venus suggests that the evolution of the planet was “too fast”, ultimately rendering it inhabitable.

Teh Internets

• Two bloggers die “on the job”, sparking reflections on the frenzied pace of news today. (One of the victim’s final emails said: “Have come down with something. Resting now posts to resume later today or tomorrow.”).
• TIME begins compiling its annual index of the top 100 most influential people in the world. The online version again sees Korean pop-star Rain at the top, followed closely by Stephen Colbert and Shigeru Miyamoto.

  Context:

  There are also a number of spinoff lists, including the top 25 blogs and a list of top lists.

Religion/Culture/Issues

• A young Saudi woman is murdered by her father for using Facebook. [related] Also, a Saudi court increases a gang rape victim’s sentence because she “used the media to influence them“.
• In a case of legality over morality, two public defense attorneys disclose that their client had boasted of committing a murder he was on trial for 20 years ago. They felt it would breach the lawyer-client privilege.
• The family of a baby born with two faces in India refuse medical care, claiming that she is the incarnation of the goddess Shakti.
• A raid on a polygamist cult in Texas frees 400+ children [related]

World/Politics

• China eases its restrictions on Wikipedia ahead of the Olympics.
• Zimbabwe’s elections sees its dictator of 28 years, Robert Mugabe, losing his grip on power. (Go tsunami!)

Entertainment

• Mass Effect for the PC is delayed a month from its initial launch date of May 2008.
• More juicies about Fallout 3
• A comprehensive list of games to look forward to in 2008-2009

Interest

• An 80-year old man has been phoning his wife’s voicemail every day to hear her voice. She passed away in 2005. In a network upgrade, the voicemail was lost, but after hearing of the story, the telco restores the voicemail from their archives.
• Rustylime has a photoessay comparing family food expenditures around the world.

Popularity: 100% [?]

99% of anything free runs on advertising. That much is true. I don’t have anything against adverts, heck I work for an advertising company and I go early for movies to catch trailers.

But intrusive advertising only serves to turn people off, a kind of reverse branding.

Straight to the point, from the newly redesigned (i.e. more space for ads ) Star Online:

Riots in Tibet? Time for DiGi!

Sunbear dies in zoo? Time for DiGi!

Two girls die in fire? Time for DiGi!

Heck it’s even in headlines:

Yes, it’s time for DiGi!

First of all, I am intensly against textlink ads in newspapers. I thought NST’s fullpage redirect ads were bad enough, but I call it unethical when you put text ads in articles. Yes you get clicks and views, but these are more likely to be from people thinking that they link to more information. Even the bare minimum of double-underlining ad links isn’t adhered to.

The algorithm is also positively inane:

Picking up “friend” and “family” is a huge stretch by itself given how generic the terms are. More suitable would be “handphone”, “phone call”, etc. But “1″, “5″, “10″? Are you freaking serious here?!:

God the person who did this should be shot. I have to say I’m not surprised Star found such innovative way to prostitute itself even more, and again it might give nice view rates, but hey so do flyers I find stuck on my parked car that I use to wrap fish with later. Where’s the link to that boycott group on Facebook again??

[edit]And yes, I am aware of the irony that the DiGi ad is on my NN ad unit at the time of writing.. but it’s not intrusive!!
[edit2] Forgot to mention that the fact that the algorithm doesn’t check for spaces or fullstops to confirm words reminds me very much of the buttbuttination phenomenon.

Popularity: 56% [?]

Before the Flood, there was a canopy over the Earth. This canopy protected the Earth from harmful UV rays. This canopy protected the Earth from harmful UV rays. During the Flood, the canopy fell onto Earth as water, meaning that after the Flood there was no longer a protective canopy.

As a result of this, life on earth is exposed to UV rays and the harmful effects of radiation. That is why we have genetic diseases today, e.g. Down Syndrome and homosexuality, as opposed to before the Flood when man could live for nearly a thousand years.

One of my earliest articles was the Just World effect, also known as victim blaming, where man reasons that misfortune occurs because one deserves it - or inversely, that if something good happens to you, you must be a good person.

The quote above illustrates the other side of the spectrum and it’s not exaggerated - it was recited to me with a straight face. It sounds like Calvinism’s total depravity, only more depressing and more irrational. Taking the Flood literally is already pretty shaky, what more trying to whip up science from a time when people didn’t know what the water cycle was! The same person declared there would have been no sicknesses or deaths if not for the Fall - I asked what would happen if a flu virus invaded the body, and from the response I got, I gathered virii and bacteria must be the products of Sin too.

I really felt like I was in the twilight zone for a moment. It has to be pretty depressing thinking you’re living in such a damned world.

Popularity: 65% [?]

Malaysiakini recently reported on a study by the Centre for Independent Journalism which analysed the election coverage by the mainstream papers:

According to the report, The Star was the most partial among English newspapers in terms of elections reporting in favour of Barisan Nasional (BN) with 63.12 percent its election reports being ‘pro-BN’.

The daily was also found to have had the smallest proportion (5.5 percent) of pro-Opposition reports, while 31.3 percent of its stories were ‘neutral’.

…

While the NST had slightly more space (5.9 percent) for pro-Opposition stories than the Star, it had only slightly more (31.31 percent) of neutral stories.

In terms of pro-BN stories, NST is up there with Star as having 60.29 percent of its stories being in favour of the ruling coalition.

…

The Sun was found to have dedicated the most space (40.87 percent) in its pages to ‘neutral stories’. Just over 16 percent of its stories, furthermore, could be described as pro-Opposition.

Pro-BN stories, however, still dominated the free newspaper with just under 43 percent.

This phenomenon has been called “shadow boxing“, e.g. the papers would print articles bashing Anwar Ibrahim over something he had said - only that since the papers had been carefully obliterating any coverage of Anwar, no one actually knew what Anwar had been talking about.

In the aftermath of the tsunami, there were many people who simply found that they did not know anything about most of the opposition MPs. This was a direct result of the newspapers abdicating their responsibility to the public.

To be fair, the coverage given to the Opposition government-in-waiting has “improved” in leaps and bounds. The Star even quickly started a daily “Know your ADUN” section. But the jury is very much out on whether this is the result of genuine soul-searching, like what Gerakan is doing; or whether this is more in line with Samy’s laughable flipflops on Hindraf.

Wong Chun Wai whined about why the MSM’s live election coverage lost out to their online competitors:

The websites of mainstream newspapers had an even tougher time, being overly cautious on accuracy, particularly on results, and not wanting to rely too much on unconfirmed news.

In the end, the alternative media scored better as it did not have to worry too much about accuracy. An example was the newsflash on the purported 14 unopened ballot boxes in Lembah Pantai, implying there would be rigging. The report turned out to be false.

A patently lame accusation, giving that the Star had been publishing full-page lies threats advertisements for BN - I would prefer a newsflash that is corrected in minutes over blatant propaganda!

His excuse makes no sense anyway - polling ballots are counted at the stations by representatives from each party, and forms are then issued. The media certainly had people at counting centers. Why would you offer “live” election coverage and then wait for official announcements anyway?

The Star also published the results of a survey commissioned by itself in collaboration with IIUM a week before the elections, claiming that newspapers were still the source of information for the public:

The newspaper is still the principal choice of media for Malaysians as their source of news and information, despite the rising popularity of Internet usage.

On the credibility of the Internet, The Star-IIUM election survey revealed that the gap is wide between those who ticked “totally disagree” and “totally agree.”

A total of 29% respondents totally disagreed about believing content on the Internet, but only 5% said they totally agreed with the notion that Internet content could be believed.

Internet penetration is also low among the 2,930 respondents, with 58% of them saying that they don’t surf the Internet at all, compared to 6% who use it daily.

On belief in Internet content, Malaysians were asked to give ratings from “totally disagree,” “disagree,” “agree,” and “totally agree.”

IIUM’s Prof Datuk Dr Syed Arabi Idid said the poll results were highly revealing of the Malaysians’ distrust of the Internet, and agreed that the newspaper and television were still the main information staple of the public.

“Generally, the poll revealed that Malaysians have doubts about information published on the Internet,” he added.

Yes, I’m laughing too. Recently however, NST published another survey with “slightly” different findings [backup link]:

In the study, 64.5 per cent of those aged from 21 to 30 years trusted blogs and online media for reliable information compared with 23.1 per cent who relied on the television and only 12.4 per cent on newspapers.

Of those between 31 and 40 years, 61.7 per cent believed that the information in the blogs and online media was true while 23.5 trusted the television and 14.8 per cent the newspapers.

One wonders how Professor Datuk Doctor Syed Arabi Idid conducts surveys with a 60% error margin.

Did the media believe their own spin? It would seem so, judging from ex-Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin’s last press conference, where he obstinately, pitifully, quotes the findings from the Star’s poll:

Scandals and scoops come and go, but at the end of the day the foundation of a paper is its credibility. Without that, a paper is nothing. When you have the trust of only 15% of your readers, it’s time for serious soul-searching. That the predicament of the MSM mirrors that of BN speaks volumes of how politicized our media is. And the solution is the same. Change!

Test yourself: You hear of a riot in Penang. Do you

1. Go to Malaysiakini
2. Go to Malaysia Today
3. Go to [other blog of choice]
4. Google it
5. Turn on the TV for the hourly bulletin
6. Buy the newspaper, or visit their website.

When you think about it, we are doing Malaysiakini, Malaysia Today, and the numerous unemployed women out there a disservice when we call the newspapers the “mainstream media”. Are they still “mainstream” when no one takes them seriously? Perhaps, like the ex-BN governments in five states, we should now call them the “alternative media”.

Popularity: 96% [?]