Ever visited a web page that has text from one side of the browser to the other? (GNU is a particular offender.)

Here's a bookmarklet to give you sane margins:

javascript:var style=document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].style;style.marginLeft=style.marginRight='1in';style.maxWidth='7in';void(0)

White space can be a wonderful thing.

Update: fixed stupid typo. document, not documents

If you've got $17,000 to spend on a garden, your grocery budget may not be the most productive place to look to save money.

Pop-ups are back. You've seen them, right? "Take our short survey." "Subscribe to our magazine." Crap like that. Stuff that uses JavaScript and CSS to scroll out some stupid invitation to waste time and give up my (and your) personal information.

That's bad enough. An annoyance; mostly harmless. But now, there's 'click-jacking'. I suppose the lesson here is to stay away from facebook (done and done, at least for my part). But how long will it be before this "invisible action" crack is used some place else?

So much of the web these days needs JavaScript to work. What happens when it becomes too dangerous to surf with JavaScript turned on?

Update: I read down into the comments at the link, and apparently, 1) this is actually rather old, and 2) there's a Firefox add-on to guard against click-jacking. Too bad I like to use Opera, though :-(

Tony!
Michelle! (aww, they're married)
President Allstate!
Sylar!
Chloe!
Kim :-p (so far, not threatened by a puma!)

Looks like Jack picked the wrong day to quit shooting heroin!

I was just reading through the customer ratings for a used reseller over on amazon. Here's one that caught my attention:

"Great transaction - item exactly as described...couldn't ask for better!!!!"

The rating? 4 out of 5.

There is, of course, a lot I could write about regarding the second season. But I'm going to stick (I think) to just one topic, and the keystone of the whole plot. That is the Secret Evil Cabal Within Our Own Government (SECWOOG) vs. Heroically Restrained President Allstate.

Probably the most obvious problem is that President Allstate is too Heroically Restrained. Even early in the season, he is looking for a way to dodge a military response, apparently unaware that even attempting to detonate a nuclear bomb on American soil is still an act of war.

Then, after the bomb has gone off, he's still dragging his feet. The President simply cannot make military decisions based on the doubts of one field agent, even if it is Jack Bauer. And when he calls off the attack based on the initial reports of unverified evidence?

I know I'm supposed to be rooting for the President at this point; instead I'm thinking this is really not a guy I'd want as Commander in Chief of the armed forces. Senator Allstate was one of the few intelligent characters in season 1; it's really a disappointment they had to make him into a dope for season 2 to work.

Of course, there's plenty of problems on the other side of the issue. They're seriously going to go to war based on a single piece of uncorroborated evidence? Yikes.

And you can add a double "yikes" for the fact that they know the head of NSA is compromised. Any sort of SIGINT has to be viewed with at least some suspicion at that point.

And why on Earth do they need to launch their response less than 12 hours after the nuke went off (besides, of course, the fact that the structure of the show requires it)?

Ah, well. It was still fun to watch, and as usual, the best parts are when Jack Bauer is on-screen...

Suppose you've got some high-value prisoner. Does moving him around to different facilities every few weeks make sense to anybody? And speaking of (allegedly) highly secure facilities, does it make sense to have it staffed with 5 guys and a couple janitors? Does it make sense for it not to have it's own back-up generators?

OK, Mrs. Senator Allstate is now working on being a full-on psychopath. And Senator Allstate is... oh, wait! Senator Allstate susses out the adultery-for-blackmail trap his wife set. Hurray for at least one character that's not a dope! (On the bad side, how does Little Miss Hottsie Tottsie not realize any way forward from her situation results in her getting fired in very short order?)

Man, the Bad Guys really suck at tying up their hostages. That's 0-for-2 on Bauers getting the drop on them because they can't secure their prisoners.

And the Über mole is revealed. As I mentioned earlier, there are a limited number of choices for suspects, and once we know there are two moles, Nina's alibi has to be called into question. It was actually a good ploy to suggest George Mason (aka the Management Weasel Jack tranq'ed in hour 1) as the best alternate suspect.

And Teri Bauer gets killed because she thinks she and Nina are BFF :-p And BTW, if you're a mole, at risk of detection at a moments notice, don't you have some kind of one-button kill-switch to wipe any incriminating data? You can add the fact that Nina didn't have a way to 1) push a button and 2) beat feet for the horizon as soon as she was found out as another preposterous element of the plot.

----------------------

Other final thoughts:

• A lot of the stuff that I commented on is really just nit-picking and having fun. But one thing that really does bug me is when characters do something really stupid. That's why I was so glad Senator Allstate didn't fall into his wife's adultery/blackmail scheme; it would have required him to be stupid on at least a couple of levels.

• The whole Drazen family seemed to have this weird watered down, vaguely Eastern European accent. Was that on purpose, or were these guys just bad at doing accents?

• Dennis Hopper's part was disappointing... it really doesn't compare well to his similar small-but-pivotal role in the first "Speed" movie.

• One of the problems with the whole "this all happens in 24 hours" premise is that for at least some of the characters (like Teri and Kim Bauer in season 1), they really should be emotional basket cases well before the end of the 24th hour. I get that dramatically, they can't let major characters spend 6 hours curled up in a corner, but the result is that they seem to become emotional zombies.

• Watching the series on DVD loses some of the immediacy of the "happens in real time" premise too. When it's being broadcast, the plot clock follows along with the wall clock. On the DVD... not so much. Even if you wait to start watching at the top of the hour, if you take out the commercials, previews and coming attractions, you're left with about 42 minutes of actual show. I suppose you could pause the DVD at each commercial break, but... well, yeah, right.

• On the other hand, watching the series on DVD gave the plot a little more immediacy, since I watched it over the course of a few days, rather than the 5 months the broadcast version took.

Jeeze, Mrs. Senator Allstate is quite the piece of work, isn't she?

Apparently the cure for Exploding-Car Onset Amnesia is to be nearly shot, and then dramatically rescued at the last second.

Kim Bauer just has the awesomest track record in picking friends.

Yay, Dennis Hopper!

Beep boop... beep boop... only four hours left!

Jack rescues his family, and it looks like the whole Gaines team is dead. I guess that means we've seen the last of Evil Twin Photographer Dude? Wow. I realize I've been obsessing a bit on this guy, but it seems like all the most preposterous elements of the plot have centered up on him, including

• Plastic surgery is magic! We can make one guy look like another close enough to fool at least casual aquaintences!
• We want to be very discreet when we eliminate Original Photographer Dude. So let's blow up the airplane he's on
• And, for the pièce de résistance, we're going to blackmail Jack Bauer into a position so we can frame him up for the murder of Senator Allstate!

Oh, look--here's the New Assassin Dude, and it's David Gilmour, circa 1985!

Oops... Dreamy McKidnapper is still alive, and Kim's going all "Stockholm Syndrome" on him. Does she ever do something that's not stupid?

They're going to send the Staff Hottie undercover (har) on a date with the new Assassin Dude? Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?

Pro tip: when a car slides down a hill, it usually doesn't explode in a fireball like it's full of dynamite. I'm just sayin'. And now, we have exploding-car onset amnesia. That kind of thing happens all the time. Right?

OK, so the Bad Guys removed Real Photographer Dude from the plane's passenger list. Still, why not just jump him in the airport parking lot or something? (Yeah, yeah, I know--sploding plane gives the set-up part of the plot some much-needed life (particularly for a show that hadn't been picked up past 13 episodes yet)).

...and the real Bad Guys start to show up. Has Zeljko Ivanek ever played anything other than a tightly-wound, bitter antagonist?

...and the official motive is revealed: revenge. They are still violating one of the basic rules for evil overlords: "#4: Shooting is not too good for my enemies." They almost certainly could have had Senator Allstate, Jack Bauer, and his whole family dead--all they had to do was dispense with this contrived frame-up plot.

Ah, well. I should say, though, in spite of my plot-point nit-picking, I am enjoying the story. Plus, Dennis Hopper shows up in the second half. He always did a good job as a mentally-unbalanced bad guy.

• Oh, look! They didn't forget about the Evil Twin Photographer Dude.
• The Bad Guys are tapped in to all the CTU security cams? Awesome securty, guys.
• The mole is revealed! Not that much of a surprise, since 1) It can't be Jack, 2) it's not the guy their making look guilty (Tony), 3) Nina has an alabi, and 4) that pretty much leaves one other suspect...

OK, so their plan for explaining how the Photographer Dude survived the plane explosion was... hope nobody would notice he was supposed to be on the exploding plane?

And their goal is not only to assassinate Senator Allstate, but frame Jack as the shooter? Needlessly, needlessly complicated.

Just finished Hour 6. The whole blackmail Jack plot is moving along (although the whole Guy Who Is Not Who He Seems To Be bit doesn't make a lot of sense... if he was just there to kidnap Jack's wife, why didn't he move at his first opportunity?

Meanwhile, the whole Evil Twin Photographer Dude subplot has pretty much disappeared. They are going to get back to that, right?

Also, Jack's kind of a big-mouth with the whole 'Search for the CTU Mole' thing, isn't he? So far, he's told Nina, Jamie, and the known-to-be-on-the-take Management Weasel Dude. Mr. Tight Security.

OK, so the Bad Guys want to assassinate Senator Allstate for reasons yet to be explained. Apparently, this is their plan:

1. Use plastic surgery to create an Evil Twin Photographer Dude
2. Send an agent to seduce Real Photographer Dude, steal his credentials, and then
3. Remove Real Photographer Dude by (very publically) blowing up the plane that he's on
4. Evil Twin Photographyer Dude can now use real credentials and (evil) twin-ness to get inside Senator Allstate's security perimeter.

I'm sure Hour 3 will feature developments whereby it is explained how the Photographer Dude could have survived the exploding plane (actually, I've read more of the wikipedia page on this season than I should have, and I know that somehow this is going to become an even-more-ridiculous assassination-by-blackmail plot).

(I also know enough about 24 to not hold my breath waiting for explanations as to why the Bad Guys are executing a Fantastically Contrived and Hopelessly Fragile Evil Plot)

Oh, brother moment #1:

"If I give you a phone number, could you hack in and get all the internet passwords connected to it?"

Developing...

On the other hand, there is this:

1. Do not lie to Jack Bauer. If you do, he will shoot you in the leg with a tranquilizer dart, and when you come to, he will have enough blackmail material to get anything he wants to know.

[T]he most potent FX are Downey's eyes -- those big, expressive brown orbs that seem to be highlighted with natural mascara to make them pop. Downey uses his body like a dancer or an acrobat, but has there been any other actor since, maybe, Bette Davis whose eyelashes are so vital to his performance?

His eyelashes? Dude...