While watching TV tonight, we saw a totally retro promo for the American version of the British TV series, Life on Mars, about a police detective who goes back in time to 1973 after being hit by a car. The promo even features what sounds like Ernie Anderson doing the voiceover. Anderson, the iconic 1970s/80s ABC TV promo announcer, has been dead for 11 years, so I don’t know who they got to copy his voice.
There’s even a retro version of the ABC logo at the end. Awesome.
A gay man has won the Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat from Colorado. If he wins, he’ll be the third openly gay member of Congress. (That doesn’t include all the closeted gay Republicans, of course.)
Jared Polis, 33, is the founder of BlueMountain.com.
Mr. Polis, who poured more than $5 million of his own money into the campaign, narrowly defeated Joan Fitz-Gerald, the former State Senate president, and Will Shafroth, a conservationist, winning just over 40 percent of the vote.
Mr. Polis, who made a fortune co-founding an online greeting card Web site, bluemountain.com, and was elected to the State Board of Education in 2000, is favored to win in November against the Republican candidate, Scott Starin, as well as candidates from the Green and Unity Parties, in the mainly Democratic Second Congressional District. …
According to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, a group that supports gay candidates for public office, Mr. Polis would be the first openly gay man elected to Congress as a nonincumbent.
There have been five other gay and lesbian members of Congress, including the current Representatives Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, both of them Democrats. All but Ms. Baldwin did not go public with their sexuality until they were elected.
Here’s Polis’s campaign website.
In my previous post, I told a little anecdote illustrating that when I was as a kid, I thought I was very smart, sometimes even smarter than adults, and yet I’d never heard of the concept of Ï€r2. But I worried that some people might not get the joke, so I decided to sneak in a little explanation at the end of the post.
And I messed up.
I implied that πr2 belongs to algebra, when it really belongs to geometry.
I knew this, of course, but for some reason I was thinking of the wrong type of math.
The irony is that in writing a post about how this one time I thought I was being witty but wound up making a fool of myself, I thought I was being witty but wound up making a fool of myself.
I corrected the error so that nobody would ever know the difference. Except I know of at least one person who saw the error, because he e-mailed me to correct me, and therefore I worried that there might have been others who saw the error, so I felt compelled to write this explanation. Which means that those of you who hadn’t read the post before I changed it, or who don’t use RSS feed readers, now also know I made an error.
This whole post feels like something Faustus would write, except that I didn’t end it by saying that my error means nobody will ever, ever love me.
(I kid, Joel. I kid.)