Every once in a while, I find myself seeing some remnant of a faddish act from decades gone by on TV and think, “gee, what ever happened to those people?” And alas, long after many b-list celebrities fade into oblivion, their lives often end up taking terrible turns for the worse.

And so it is with Victor Willis, the former “cop” in the ’70s act The Village People. Willis left the group in 1980, and the remaining Village People lived out their slide from b-list to c-list to… z-list? by replacing Willis with a new Cop, Ray Simpson. Why Willis left is a mystery. Maybe he thought he could make it on his own… who knows? Whatever the reason, it turned out to be the wrong choice:

Victor Willis, who co-wrote some of the band’s hits such as “In the Navy” and “YMCA” has had a number of run-ins with the law since he left the group in 1980 and now faces as much as five years in prison, said Morley Pitt, assistant district attorney in San Mateo County south of San Francisco.

“It’s just sad that his life has spiraled down to the point where in all likelihood he’s going to go to prison,” Pitt, who said he enjoys the song “YMCA”, told Reuters. “You never like to see anybody go to prison, let alone somebody who is 54 years old.”

Willis was arrested last year on charges of possessing a gun and cocaine, but he disappeared after agreeing to a plea deal that set a maximum sentence of 16 months behind bars, Pitt said.

They say that cops are dead meat in prison. But does that also hold true for ’70s cop-impersonator gay icons?  It looks like soon enough, we’ll find out.

Microsoft has announced yet another delay of the much-touted Windows VIsta release, from late 2006, to January 2007. Maybe.

Considering all the wonderful features that have been pared from the promised list, one is beginning to wonder if MS can really deliver.

For the past several years, random stenciled-in and spray-painted grafitti art has been common along sidewalks, brick walls, manholes and any other reasonably spray paintable edifice on public property. It first started out with text-based socio-political-economic messages (“Stop Bush!” or “A Tree Used to Be Here!”), that on the face made some sense, and would presumably make some people stop and think.
But then the messages started to revert to images.  And they also began to get pretty random and, well, puzzling. For instance, there’s The Cat, which is among the longest-lasting and most persistent of the messages. There’s also the more recent and random likeness of the late Jerry Orbach. And then there’s The Passion of The Saget:

“The Passion of the Saget”
Part of the Urban Stencil Art Gallery

Yes, you WILL obey!

While it’s no big Earth-shattering development that the Catholic church has been… well, a bit of a laggard in keeping up on that whole science thing.  After all, there are still Catholic apologists out there who still insist the Earth is the center of the universe.

So it’s no surprise, the kind of statements the Pope would make when he encounters a gift like an iPod:

Vatican Radio employees bought the Pope his iPod to commemorate his first visit to the station’s headquarters.

“Computer technology is the future,” the Pope is reported to have said when presented with the gift by the head of the station’s technical and computer support department.

Well, one thing’s for certain: Nostradamus he sure is not. Don’t expect him to fortell anything significant anytime soon, considering his proclamations are about, oh, four decades behind schedule.

Before I go into this rant, let me just say that I love the fact that the advent of a wired universe permits people to correct their mistakes so easily. I certainly could not possibly have made it through college (hell, I couldn’t even make it through life) without that little electronic wonder known as the Delete key. There’s no way I could imagine the hardships faced by people writing up papers and presentations in decades prior, where one simple typo or grammatical lapse would require that person to rip up the page and start all over again. To the editor of WISYWIG editing editing: I salute you!

Likewise, the modern technological age has permitted those performing other tasks to similarly clean up their mistakes after the fact. Computer software on the fritz? Download a patch, and it’ll be taken care of. Cell phone hanging up on calls for no reason? Hook a cable to your cellphone, and reflash its firmware… problem solved. Car’s blowing up for no apparent reason? Get the word out about a recall. Problem solved… kinda.

While online updates are useful, and even serve to improve upon some already-great products with functionailty that may not have been available at product launch, the phenomenon has unfortunately also engendered a bit of lazyness. Now, getting something right the first time is no longer a necessity. Pre-launch product testing no longer appears to be as thorough as it used to be; if there’s a problem and it can be fixed by software, many times a manufacturer will just push an update whenever it gets around to fixing the problem, and hope everyone downloads it.

I suppose I can put up with that. But when the bugs start creeping into basic tangible objects, like, oh, a user’s manual, then that’s how we know a company’s given up.

Take for instance, a page out of a garmin GPS Receiver manual that I recently stumbled across:

Wow, so that feature does “xx” huh? ANd I can turn to page “xx” and find out more? Gee, thanks Garmin.

Of course, you could argue that I could just download the updated PDF of the manual, but alas it too has the same errors.