Yep. I continue to be amazed that anybody with the Cary town government thinks that this controversy can possibly end well for them.

The best-case scenario — from their perspective — is that they fine the guy until he loses his house (which he’s already said he’s willing to do). They “win,” but meanwhile Cary is revealed to be the totalitarian police state its detractors have long called it.

Worst-case, they lose the First Amendment lawsuit, which would invalidate their sign ordinance and completely undermine whatever point it is they think they’re making.

Either way, I don’t see how any elected official could possibly see this as a good career move.

To state the obvious, sounds like it’s time to consider shutting down the whole yearbook thing. I mean, really, is it worth all the work and expense to produce something that so few students even care about?

I didn’t see the point of a college yearbook at USC back in the ’80s — at least not at a major state university, where most of the student body consists of complete strangers. Today, with Facebook and other such online resources, I’d say it’s time to call it a day.

An excellent point. The whole notion of anything called The Late Show is becoming meaningless. The show is on when I want it to be on.

How long will it be before people start wondering what the title Saturday Night Live is supposed to mean?

The TV networks finally seem to be coming to their senses. The New York Times reports that network executives are beginning to see what many of us knew all along: DVRs are a good thing.

Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year.

And rather unsurprisingly, when you include DVR playbacks, ratings for some shows improve dramatically. The article mentions substantial ratings boosts for shows like House, Heroes, and FlashForward; the biggest increase was for The Office, which gained 26 percent when DVRs were included.

In an ironic twist, the article also mentions the so-called “Leno effect”: topical shows like talk shows have lower relative viewership when DVRs are included (nobody wants to watch a topical show three days later). While the networks used to consider it a good thing for a show to be “DVR-proof,” they’re realizing that that just means fewer people will watch.

In an unrelated but equally heartening story, Ars Technica reports on a survey showing that consumers of P2P music downloads end up buying more music than they otherwise would, not less. Which means the record labels have been busily persecuting their biggest customers. Are we surprised?

I found a News & Observer blog post that confirms that the Barrel Monster I saw at the State Fair was indeed created by Joe Carnevale, the creator of the original, whose career seems assured. In fact, he apparently created two new Monsters for the Fair; the blog post shows a picture of one I didn’t see (I saw the one at Gate Nine).

The post also includes a photo of the Barrel Monster entry in the pumpkin-decorating contest, and credits ten-year-old Spencer Mangum with its creation.

I’ve always rather liked the idea of making e-mail non-free, but I was looking at it from the perspective of the sender: associating a cost with sending e-mail will reduce the amount that gets sent. (This idea has been proposed as a remedy for spam, and one that I think makes a lot of sense. A trivial per-note cost wouldn’t bother most of us, but it would put spammers out of business.)

You propose an interesting twist, where the amount you pay to send a note is proportional to its importance (to you, anyway). It would be fascinating to see how such an economy would affect the mix of e-mail one receives; but I’m not sure whether it would be good or bad. After all, the sender’s sense of what is important is often not the same as mine.

Oh, and I think sense 3 of exemplary is what was meant: “serving as an example, instance, or illustration.” A correct usage, if not the one normally employed nowadays.

I must say, that’s the most convincing reason I’ve yet heard for Obama’s Nobel.

Regarding the Nook, I’m happy with my Kindle, and this leaked information about the competition doesn’t make me less so. Much is made of the Kindle’s closed architecture, but people forget that it’s capable of reading standard .mobi e-books; and just about anything can be converted into a .mobi file.

I’ll admit that the ability to lend books to friends is something I’ve wished for on the Kindle. But there’s no reason why the Kindle couldn’t add that feature in a firmware update, and if B&N plans to offer it (and has gotten publishers to agree), I’m sure Amazon won’t be far behind.

You certainly covered all the ones I would have thoughts of. The main ones that spring to mind when I think of heavy-handed analogy are “A Private Little War” and “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” (I hesitate to call “The Omega Glory” allegory at all, because it imported the Cold War explicitly.)

It’s worth noting that the tradition of such allegorical stories continued well beyond the original series. Unfortunately, the results were uneven at best; for example, consider the Next Generation episode “The Outcast,” which I regard as one of the weakest of that series purely because it was so transparently “The Gay Rights Episode.” In my opinion, the writers were so busy trying to cleverly encode their message that they forgot to write a good story.

One more comment: I won’t dispute the notion that M*A*S*H began as a commentary on the Vietnam War; but it’s worth noting that that war ended only a few years into the run of the show; it would have been silly to continue commenting on Vietnam until 1983. Rather, I think M*A*S*H became a vehicle for a more generalized (and sometimes naive) antiwar message.

Phil Collins says he has lost the ability to play drums (or even pick up his drumsticks) since undergoing spinal surgery earlier this year. That’s not good, but the article goes on to say that Collins won’t let it stop him:

He told the newspaper he plans a new CD that will feature covers of 30 songs from the Motown label in 2010.

“I want the songs to sound exactly like the originals,” the paper quoted him as saying.

I question the point of such a project, but it’s certainly true that an inability to play an instrument shouldn’t be an obstacle. All he has to do is copy the original recordings and release them under his own name; who would know the difference?