Unnecessary Thrills

Formal Zombie Poetry

2011-02-21T23:26:00.000-06:00

Neil Gaiman recently tweeted that "There is not enough Formal Zombie Poetry." So here's one I wrote about a month ago. Sent it to the letter column in The Walking Dead comics, but I don't know if they've even looked at it:

Outside, Looking In

Not hunger, quite; but want no feast can sate
We who are dead so yearn for what we’ve missed
To taste, to feel, to fill the hollowness with weight
We’re pulled, and by your gravity we’re kissed

I call it love, this ache to join your life
With us, diffusing warmth throughout our chill
We see your eyes, haunted by some grief
And only wish your heartache to be still

And though you shoot us down, yet still we come,
Again, again, we die and resurrect
But never do we sink so fully numb
To fail to feel the pain of your neglect

One day, I will break bread with you, my friend
We cannot lose, we cannot win, in the end

-----

Well, it amused me to write a pretentious, formal Elizabethan sonnet from the point of view of a mindless zombie. And yes, the slightly "off" meter was intentional (it is a lurching zombie, after all).

And, as a bonus, here's a formal alien invader/delusional serial-killer poem:

My Secret

I hide my real skin inside a cask
Of nutrients, recording what I see
for those above. To implement my task,
I've learned to mimic well humanity.

By day I show my mask, and play my role.
At night, alone, I wear the patchwork flesh
And dream of specimens in my control
Probed within a cold containment mesh.

And now you've found the cask, and seen me dressed
In my own skin, as I am, not as I seem.
And though you say you're glad that I've confessed,
Your eyes betray a stifled urge to scream.

This private shame, which was but mine to keep
Has fouled your mind; so, slicing in, I weep.

Actual Quote From Radio

2010-08-05T23:17:00.000-05:00

This is an actual quote* from a news teaser on the radio, heard on Tuesday:

Was the operator impaired on a thrill ride where an accident happened this week? We won't know until the police report comes out on Friday.

Well, by all means, let's speculate wildly until then. You could replace the word "impaired" in that report with anything: Was the operator asleep? Was the operator insane? Was the operator a kangaroo? We just don't know!

The other, more subtle, thing that struck me about this announcement was the helplessness of it: "We won’t know until the police report comes out." Because, apparently, they can't do any of their own investigative work, like, say, interviewing people who were there. But once the police report comes out, then we'll know, because police reports are issued by the Pope, and are the infallible Word of God.

*More or less - I'm quoting from memory, and it was a couple of hours before I took any notes.

Interesting Game

2010-07-16T02:37:00.000-05:00

I recently finished playing a PC game, The Whispered World. It's definitely a throwback, and I mean that as a compliment, being an old-school point-and-click adventure game, done all in hand-drawn cel animation. It's more LucasArts than Sierra - none of the Sierra-style punishing death scenes. The art style reminded me a bit of Discworld II, though the overall feel is closer to a fairy-tale storybook, rather than the humor of those two Rincewind games. Certainly worth playing, if you like those sort of games.

Personally, since adventure games have been one of my favorite genres since Zork, I consider it important to buy any (reasonably well-made) games that come along, in hopes of supporting their development and avoiding another long drought of decent adventure games, like the one that happened after Grim Fandango sales tanked (despite being the closest thing to Literature the medium has ever produced), until finally The Longest Journey came out after a couple of years.

Customer Service Above & Beyond

2010-07-03T00:35:00.000-05:00

Because I feel like this sort of thing ought to be noticed & celebrated, here (in probably descending order of interest to anyone other than me) are some companies who have recently gone above and beyond my expectations for customer service:

Over the weekend, Gamers Gate had a game expansion at 50% off, and I submitted a question to make sure it was compatible with the physical-disk version of the full game (the same product at Steam, for example, only works with Steam's download edition). By the time they answered, the sale had ended, but they let me buy it at the sale price anyway, despite the fact that it was arguably my own fault for not submitting the question until Saturday.

A while back I tried to subscribe to Better Software Magazine, but apparently the online order never went through. It took several attempts to contact the subscription department to check on it (I think the subscription coordinator may have been on vacation at one point), and by way of apology, they gave me a free 2-year subscription.

And PhilC kindly emailed me an updated data file pack for his Poser clothing converter, which I had purchased through an old online store that has since switched to a different system, because of which I don't think I had any way to actually prove to him that I had actually purchased the pack (unless he keeps his own records). I was actually prepared to re-purchase direct from him, and had just asked if the updates were significant enough to justify that.

So bravo, guys. For showing an interest in actually making your customers happy, this one thought he owed it to you to highlight that fact publicly.

Was the 'Lost' Island Hit By a Comet?

2010-05-24T22:36:00.001-05:00

I'm not quite stoned enough to understand it completely, but I feel certain that the secret behind Lost was originally revealed by the Firesign Theatre in 1974. Hey, wait a minute: The release date of that album is the same year Sawyer and the others joined the Dharma Initiative. Coincidence? I think not!

Sending from his own mind to yours, here is Nino Savate with 'A Psychic Minute.'

Can I say, hello? This is Nino the mind-boggler with Occult In Your Head. Today, let's get into holes: The most mysterious, importantest and vaguest subject of them all.

The whole Earth might be called a hole, if you're on the inside, looking out. And whole golden cities might be hid at the bottom of a bottomless pit. Even wholesome humans have holes, though we're hardly whole at all. In fact, we're wholly hole-y. As the Holy Book says in the Book of Holes, Chapter 1: 'And they knew not their holes from an ass on the ground.'

Holes are positively attractive. Let's go inside one and see... This is a typical hole. Not a hole in the wall, but a hole like a well. Well, well, what the Hell? That's the sun at the center of the Earth, and that's where this hole leads to. Heh-heh! What a nice, warm fire.

Next time, I'll think to you about gravity, and its opposite, comedy. Until then, this is Nino saying, can I say, goodbye?

Thought for the Day

2010-02-09T18:38:00.000-06:00

It seems to me that, to be consistent, anyone who is a socialist ought also to be a creationist, and anyone who is a creationist ought also to be a socialist. Because deep down, both socialism and creationism (or "intelligent design", at least) are based on the same rejection of the concept of emergent phenomena, the same refusal to accept the idea that order can arise spontaneously from the interactions in unplanned complex systems. And yet, I generally get the impression that in the Venn diagram of socialism and creationism, the overlap is quite small.

I Guess I'm a PC

2009-11-29T18:10:00.000-06:00

I started using iTunes recently (mostly because there are two official Frank Zappa albums that are only available through iTunes). I have been somewhat of a luddite about it - part of me likes purchasing physical media (even though CDs appear to be useless for archival purposes - some of my earliest purchases have already corroded). But in general, I like the idea, but the execution doesn't thrill me.

Now, I know there are thousands of people using and enjoying iTunes, so maybe I'm just too stupid to figure out how to solve the problems I ran into. So let me list them, and maybe someone out there can tell me what I'm doing wrong:

I can buy albums, and look at the albums in my music library. But if I want to burn a CD, I can't just select an album and burn it, I have to first move all the songs on that album to a playlist, and then burn that playlist to CD. Fine if I'm making a "mix tape", but it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that anyone might want to treat an "album" as a unit of music.
After burning, a little chime plays to let you know it's done. Unfortunately, if the burn was unsuccessful for any reason (as happens from time to time with CDs), the same chime plays. There is no error message or any other feedback to let you know the burn failed.
After burning successfully, the selection focus moves to the newly-created CD. When you eject the CD, selection focus returns to the Music library, not the playlist you just burned. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that anyone might want to burn more than a single copy at a time.
There is a nice feature to print CD case inserts. But there are no customization options at all - you either print one of their preset formats, or shove it. Too bad if you wanted to do something like print an album name above the track list (see first point above).
The software doesn't recognize my (non-iPod) MP3 player at all, which means I have to manually convert all my songs to MP3 (since it doesn't play their proprietary format), and then manually move them to the player.
When you export songs to MP3, it puts them all in the same directory. By default, the list doesn't show file types (though it can be made to do so), so in the default configuration, every song you've converted is listed twice, with no indication of which is which.
After moving the MP3 files to the player, I don't care about having that format in my iTunes folder on my PC hard drive, so I delete them. The iTunes software can, if you tell it to, detect that some of the files it thought were there are now gone, but it isn't smart enough to just remove them from the list automatically, you have to select and delete them from the iTunes list by hand.

It's almost as if they've deliberately designed the software to be as inconvenient as possible for anyone who hasn't purchased one of their iPods. And more generally, it seems like everything is fine and works great as long as you stay inside the little box of things they want you to do, but you start running into problems as soon as you get outside that box. Keep in mind, too, that this list came out of using iTunes basically over only two weekends.And that has been my experience generally with Apple products. Thinking back over the years, it seems like every interaction with any Apple product I've ever had has been dissatisfying in one way or another. From the locked-down feeling from the ancient Macs I had to deal with one semester in college, to the way Quicktime just never really "fit" well into a Windows environment, to this latest bit with iTunes, none of it has ever really felt right to me.

Customer Satisfaction

2009-11-03T19:44:00.000-06:00

So, like an idiot, a couple of weeks ago I went into my local GameStop and put in a preorder deposit on Dragon Age: Origins. At the time, no one bothered to ask whether I wanted the regular version or the Collector's Edition. When I went to pick it up, naturally all they had was the regular version, because only enough to cover the preorders were shipped to the store. As far as I can tell, this was also true of the regular version, since there were none out on the shelves.

And yet, somehow, the Best Buy not 200 yards down the street managed to have plenty of both versions on the shelf, available for anyone to just walk in off the street and purchase. So I did, and got my preorder deposit back from GameStop. Neither the poor clerk, nor the store manager standing next to him, even bothered to ask if there was anything they could do that would let me leave the store satisfied (not that there was, at that point).

Now, there are plenty of places to buy video games. Why in the world would I even want to set foot in GameStop ever again, when they clearly (A) aren't interested in selling new releases to walk-in customers; and (B) don't much seem to care about customer satisfaction in general? What does GameStop offer that I can't get anywhere else, with none of the aggravation? What kind of business strategy is this?

Upbeat Happy-Time Music

2009-09-14T22:59:00.003-05:00

I'm finding lately that I am more and more impressed with musicians who can produce upbeat music. I think it has something to do with that Bart Simpson quote: "Depressing teenagers is like shooting fish in a barrel" - the sort of angsty-young-person vibe is too easy. Happy music takes some effort.

For example, this:

Or this (and yeah, I know, it the song of theirs you always hear). And to me, I can even hear some pain behind here, but transformed into a cry of joy at the world:

Can't Sleep, Robot Will Eat Me

2009-07-15T12:32:00.004-05:00

Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

So, not just a man-eating robot, then, but a steam-powered man-eating robot?

Man, that's almost as cool as that billion-dollar dragon-shaped tank project they just cancelled.

"Big Man Japan"

2009-05-12T23:43:00.001-05:00

Holy crap, this movie sounds like the awesomest thing ever. The official synopsis:

A middle-aged slacker living in a rundown, graffiti-ridden slum, Daisato’s job involves being shocked by bolts of electricity that transform him into a stocky, stick-wielding giant several stories high who is entrusted with defending Japan from a host of bizarre monsters. But while his predecessors were national heroes, he is a pariah among the citizens he protects, who bitterly complain about the noise and destruction of property he causes. And Daisato has his own problems –an agent insistent on branding him with sponsor advertisements, an Alzheimer-afflicted grandfather who transforms into a giant in dirty underwear, and a family who is embarrassed by his often cowardly exploits. A wickedly deadpan spin on the giant Japanese superhero, BIG MAN JAPAN is an outrageous portrait of a pathetic but truly unique hero.

Official website/trailer
"The Strangling Monster" clip
The Stink Monster" clip

Puzzle From Hell

2009-02-07T09:42:00.003-06:00

Someone gave us this puzzle for Christmas. Now, before you read any further, follow that link. Looks like a perfectly ordinary puzzle, apart from the funky shape, right?

Here's what makes this particular puzzle a form of torture:

There is no indication whatsoever on the box that it is a shaped puzzle. Looking at the packaging, it appears to be an ordinary rectangular puzzle. It's hard to start by finding the edge pieces when the box art lies to you about what shape the edge actually is.
The pieces fit together very loosely. We semi-jokingly said that the easiest way to tell if two pieces were a fit was if they fell apart when you touched them. When it's all done, there is a full inch of play across the entire puzzle - you can squeeze the pieces together and stretch them apart by a full inch. I measured.
The title, "Snowy Trees", is a misnomer. It should be called "Snowy Tree", because whoever created the picture only bothered to paint one tree, and then used Photoshop to copy and paste that tree everywhere else. Oh, sure, he transformed some of them a little: One of them is squished down really squat and wide, another is stretched out tall and skinny; one is flipped to a mirror image of the rest of them. But it's the same goddamned tree, over and over.

We didn't let it beat us, though:

What the Hell?

2008-12-18T12:23:00.002-06:00

Is it just me, or does this article summary from the front page of CNN.com sound more like an Onion story?

No good way to tell kids they have cancer
When her mom and dad called her into the den, 9-year-old Gigi Pasley thought they were going to tell her a big surprise, "a good surprise" she said. Instead, they told Gigi she had cancer. "She burst out with this awful sound, a moan, a scream of complete and utter agony," said her mother, Jessica Pasley. The Pasleys learned that day there's no good way to tell your child she has cancer. full story

Gimme gimme gimme

2008-12-01T03:29:00.001-06:00

My Amazon.com wish list:

Review

2008-11-24T23:05:00.003-06:00

Juno - Not bad. Mostly, it works. It does try too hard to be hip &mdash seriously, you actually wrote a character saying the line, "Honest to blog?" And isn't that song Juno and Bleeker play together at the end awfully contempo-indie-folk for someone who spends the rest of the film talking about Iggy and the Stooges and the 1977 punk explosion? But, on the trying-too-hard-to-be-hip, aggressively-quirky score, it's nowhere near as bad as Napoleon Dynamite, so there's that. The always-watchable J. K. Simmons does good work as Juno's dad. Overall, worth seeing once, anyway.

Well, That Didn't Take Long

2008-10-27T23:06:00.004-05:00

Her name, we think, is Binky:

I say "we think", because when we got her at the Milwaukee Humane Society, they said her name was "Monty", but since rabbits tend to be difficult to sex when they're young, we suspect someone probably told her original owners she was male. So she needs a new name, and she's been shy about letting us know what it should be, but "Binky" seems to be the one that's sticking most.

She and Buster seemed to hit it off pretty well when we took him to the Humane Society to meet her, but there have been some altercations since we got her home. They're currently in separate (but adjacent) cages, and we're taking it slow with supervised play dates.

Oh, and this guy was there, too. His name is Babyface Joe, apparently:

Well, we had been watching Verminators, and it kept making me want another pet rat to keep in my computer room, so he can sit on my shoulder while I'm up here. Yeah, I'm a little strange.

RIP, Suzi

2008-10-26T03:38:00.004-05:00

She passed away some time last Sunday night.

Movie Review

2008-10-20T03:06:00.001-05:00

Across the Universe - Easily the best [fictional movie musical focused on other people performing Beatles' music] ever made. Of course, since the only other entry in that particular genre is Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the bar is set kind of low. Across the Universe makes it over that bar merely by not being an atrocity against man and nature.

It's... not great. The part where an Uncle Sam recruiting poster sings "I Want You", followed by American troops carrying the Statue of Liberty through plastic Vietnam jungles singing "She's So Heavy"... yeah, that's taking the symbolism a bit too far. The scenes in the bowling alley, with shots pretty much cribbed directly from The Big Lebowski were bad enough, but then to later call back those scenes with ten Vietnamese women painted white, falling over... I had to pause the TiVo long enough to exclaim: "Did I really just watch a metaphorical representation of a Vietnam war atrocity as bowling?" Um, wow.

On the other hand, Eddie Izzard was predictably entertaining as Mr. Kite. The actor playing Jude was good, and performed his songs quite well. And I was glad to see they were able to fit Joe Cocker in.

But the story never really coheres. As a film, for the most part, it's basically just a strange hybrid of Moulin Rouge!, Hair, and, for some reason, Dreamgirls. With, yes, just a pinch of the aforementioned Sgt. Pepper. It's really obviously not a depiction of the real 1960s, but rather of some kind of mythic-'60s, where Jimi and Janis were in a band together until they were split up by an evil record producer, only to later get back together for a rooftop concert. Where Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters tripped on a bus to Timothy Leary's home. Where people got high by miming smoking a joint, and where the negative consequences of heavy drinking and drug use are only obliquely hinted at. Where all the young men were drafted, sent to Vietnam to witness horrors, and returned home broken. All of which may have been mythically true, but reality was never that simple.

Oh, and during all the Liverpool scenes, I kept wanting the extras to start singing "Every Sperm is Sacred".

As an aside: Why is it that no movie made since about 1980 seems to be able to get '60s hair right? I'm not even sure exactly what it is, but all of the hair in this film, from Evan Rachel Wood's long-straight-hippy-chick 'do, to her brother's "what is Kurt Cobain doing in 1972" look, is just somehow obviously modern. I don't even know exactly what it is they're doing wrong, but if you look at Woodstock, or other movies actually made at the time, it's just not right somehow.

Financial Reporters as Faith Healers

2008-10-06T19:40:00.003-05:00

In Penn & Teller's book How To Play With Your Food, they have a great bit about "alternative (i.e., quack) medicine (homeopathy, acupuncture, etc.):

Every malady does one of three things if left untreated:

1. It gets better.
2. It stays the same.
3. It gets worse.

After trying any bogus treatment, one of three things will happen.

1. It'll get better.
2. It'll stay the same.
3. It'll get worse.

As long as you have a spiel for each of these three eventualities, you can be a healer that some people will believe in:

1. "See I told you."
2. "We arrested it."
3. "I guess we need more of it."

Because everyone wants hope and it's easy to explain any course an affliction may take, there are many many cures that people believe in.

The financial reporting around the recent $700 billion bailout reminds me of this. Back before the first vote, the stock market went up a bit, and CNN.com reported that this was because of anticipation of a bailout being passed. Then the House rejected it, the stock market went down, and CNN.com said it was because the bailout didn't pass. Then the market went back up again, so CNN.com said it was because in anticipation of the Senate passing the bill. Then the Senate passed the bailout, and the stock market went back down, so CNN.com said it was because of fears the bailout wouldn't pass the House again. Then the House passed the bailout, but the stock market still went down, so Friday and today CNN.com says it went down despite the bailout.

No matter what the market does, they are apparently incapable of interpreting it in any way that fails to support Bailout = Good.

Over the next few weeks/months/years, I expect to see any/all of the following reported, depending on what the market actually does:

1. "See, the bailout worked!"
2. "See, the bailout stopped the market's downward plunge!"
3. "Alas, the bailout didn't go far enough."

And also:

Things I Learned From Watching Turistas

Having drugged eight people in order to kill them and harvest their organs, the best way to transport them to your "operating room" is to tie two of them up and carry them, but leave the other six alone to awaken on the beach, and blindly hope that they will then wander randomly into your lone accomplice in a village some miles away, who will trick them into following him to his "uncle's house" in the middle of the jungle.

When you are killing someone in order to harvest their organs, it is still necessary to swab down the surgical site with iodine beforehand, to prevent infection. Surgical mask and gloves, however, are optional.

Brazil's medical system, though short on transplantable organs, has access to the most powerful local anesthetic known to science, which allows a person to remain conscious, semi-lucid, yet in no apparent pain while their abdomen is opened up and their liver and kidneys removed.

Traveling from somewhere along the coast of Rio de Janeiro to a city with organ transplant facilities takes more than six hours by helicopter.

Tiny pockets of air trapped in underwater caves are perfectly breathable and have plenty of oxygen for up to five people at a time.

Audiosurf

2008-09-14T17:06:00.004-05:00

Audiosurf - Very cool little game for $10. I heard of it when it was highlighted as one of the PAX 10 indie games this year. Basically, it's cross between Tetris and a racing game: You're piloting a vehicle along a roller-coaster-like track, and hitting blocks to form color-matching sets. There are a bunch of different modes, in three rough groupings of difficulty, including one popular one where you simply try to hit colored blocks, while avoiding gray ones.

But the cool thing about the game is that the shape of the track, and the color and density of blocks, are calculated from some kind of waveform analysis of your own CDs or MP3s, which then play while you run that track. For example:

It should be obvious that one of the joys of this game is plugging obscure, weird, eclectic songs into it to see what it does with them. Each song has its own individual online leaderboard, so you can compare your performance with others. For example, here's an obscure song (from the A Mighty Wind soundtrack album), but not so obscure that I'm the only one ever to play it, where I currently hold the top spot in Pro mode.

LOTRO

2008-09-13T16:29:00.000-05:00

This is my main character on Lord of the Rings Online:

Spore

2008-07-27T04:43:00.002-05:00

Stuff I've created with the Spore Creature Creator.

Visit Spore.com

Movie Review

2008-07-22T17:40:00.002-05:00

The Dark Knight - Oh, Hell yes. I'm not even going to try to write anything coherent, here, I'm just going to list off a few of the things that make this worth seeing, and I'm mostly going to try and highlight things that haven't been mentioned in very many published reviews. Incidentally: Yes, we went to an IMAX screen.

The elaborate bank heist that opens the film.

That car chase. The one that includes both a helicopter crash and a semi flipping end-over-end.

The cross-dressing Joker.

The Joker coming out of a hospital and getting annoyed when all of his bombs don't go off.

"You complete me" is now no longer a cliched, cheesy punchline.

"I'll do what you shoulda done ten minutes ago."

The Two-Face makeup.

The way they used what I see (in the comics) sometimes as the Joker's masochism: He keeps getting into fistfights with Batman, someone he has no chance of beating in a straight-up fight. One of the most chilling things in the film is Batman beating up the Joker, trying to extract information from him, and the Joker just laughing the whole time and saying, "You have nothing to threaten me with." He doesn't care if Batman beats the crap out of him, because he knows it doesn't change anything: After he gets tired of punching, Batsy is still going to have to play his game.

The Joker as ultimate nihilist: What he most wants to do seems to be to demonstrate that deep down, there's no such thing as morality, or fairness, or justice. That all the things that motivate Batman are illusions. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether he is successful in this.

I wonder where they're going to go for a villain in the third film. There had been some talk of using the Joker in some way, and speculation about whether they would cast another actor, or just revise the Joker out of the planned story. Personally, I would be perfectly happy to see another actor in the role. The character is by definition mercurial, so it wouldn't bother me at all to see even a radically different interpretation by another actor.

Whether that happens or not, though, what villains are left in Batman's rogue's gallery that could work in the "realistic" vein these two Nolan films have portrayed? Possibly the Penguin, though not in the mutant-raised-by-zoo-penguins version from Batman Returns, obviously. The Riddler might work as a serial killer, of the type who writes taunting letters to the police; the riddles would be his way of expressing his superiority.

Beyond that, I'm afraid you start veering into Clayface and Killer Croc territory, which would be difficult to pull off in any "realistic" way. Unless, of course, they just decided to go all-out weird and have him face Bat-Mite.

The Cycle of Creation

2008-07-16T17:52:00.001-05:00

We seem to have come all the way back around to...

Before the beginning, there was this turtle. And the turtle was alone. And he looked around, and he saw his neighbor, which was his mother. And he lay down on top of his neighbor, and behold! she bore him in tears an oak tree, which grew all day and then fell over -- like a bridge. And lo! under the bridge there came a catfish. And he was very big. And he was walking. Yes! And he was the biggest he had seen. And so were the fiery balls of this fish -- one of which is the sun, the other they called the moon.

Guitar Heroes

2008-07-08T00:01:00.004-05:00

This is nothing new - it made the rounds on the internet last year - but just in case anyone reading hasn't seen them, I highly recommend the St Sanders "Shreds" videos. Hy-larious.

For the unaware, these are by a Finnish video artist named Santeri Ojala. What he's done is take video performance clips of various guitar heroes (Van Halen, Clapton, etc.) and dub new guitar solos over the videos. Bad guitar solos. Rather like the "experimental free-form jazz odyssey" Spinal Tap is forced to perform after Nigel quits.

Think of it as sort of like an instrumental music version of a What's Up, Tiger Lily?/J-Men Forever kind of thing. The thing is, he does such a good job simultaneously matching what the video shows them playing (well enough to actually fool some people), but at the same time being so completely out of character... well, really, it's indescribable. Just watch. I particularly recommend the one featuring Ozzy Osbourne on hand-claps.

Steve Vai apparently has a sense of humor*, and loved them. Yngwie Malmsteen, not so much: Rumor has it that he's the one who complained to YouTube about copyright violation**, resulting in the creator having his account banned. Oh well, the videos are still there, so I consider it my civic duty to ensure as many people see them as possible...

Also: The non-music related one is fun, too.

*Probably a necessary survival trait in Frank Zappa's band, where you run the risk of having your groupie exploits immortalized in a song like "Stevie's Spanking".

**Despite this obviously being parody, and therefore falling under the Fair Use exception.

Movie Reviews

2008-06-11T18:45:00.002-05:00

Hairspray (2007) - An OK movie, in spite of John Travolta. Every other actor in this film did a great job (particularly the lead girl playing Tracy), but Travolta was so atrociously bad that I actually found myself getting through his scenes by developing a mental block around him, erasing him from the film and fantasizing someone better in his place. Just off the top of my head: Harvey Fierstein, Tim Curry, Nathan Lane, John Goodman; hell, Robert DeNiro could probably have done a better job. I've seen Monty Python sketches with more convincing female characters (as played by men in drag).

I'd love to know what kind of accent Travolta thought he was speaking in, but mostly he suffered from something I know I've seen before, though I'm not sure where (possibly Wesley Snipes in To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar): He doesn't play the character as a woman, or even as a drag queen. He plays the character as a straight man in drag, with a bit of a "wink" to let the audience know that "I'm just playing around here, you know - I'm not gay". As a result, he holds back just enough to make the whole performance seem uncomfortable and unconvincing.

Beyond illustrating the dangers of stunt casting, it was a competently-filmed version of a Broadway-musical-ized movie, but the original film was still better. For one thing, in the original film, the whole theme of racial integration sort of snuck in. It paradoxically gained power by not being the main focus. In the Broadway version, it's there pretty much from Scene One: The very first Corny Collins song talks about the "white kids" on his dance show. It's obvious right from the start that racial integration is what Hairspray is "about", in this incarnation. That may also be what the original was "about", in some sense, but it made its points with more subtlety. And there's a word I'll bet you never expected to apply to a John Waters film, eh?

And, another in a continuing series:

Things I Learned from Saw III

Serial killers have the magical ability to track down a person who witnessed a drunk-driving hit-and-run, even though they explicitly did not testify in the trial.

Her failure to testify in the trial meant she was morally deserving of punishment, even though the injustice in the case wasn't that the driver went free from lack of evidence, but rather that he was given a short sentence. Somehow, testimony from an eyewitness would have prevented that, apparently.

Someone who is alive and presumably generating some amount of body heat through metabolic processes, albeit hanging naked in a freezer, can not only freeze to death, but actually be coated with a layer of solid ice in a matter of minutes just by spraying them with (liquid) water.

Bare shotgun shells with no gun barrel surrounding them at all nevertheless still fire directionally.

You have a ring of said shotgun shells around your neck, rigged to go off and blow up your head if the Rube Goldberg Killer's heart stops. Your husband comes by with a gun. Instead of shouting something unmistakable and unambiguous like "If you kill him, I'll die", stick to less direct exclamations like "Wait", "Don't", that sort of thing. If he really loves you, he'll stop and ask for clarification before attacking the guy holding you both hostage, and who just forced him to crawl through six kinds of hell.

Bunch Of Commies

2008-05-30T17:36:00.000-05:00

For work, I'm reading the study materials for INS 21 - Property and Liability Insurance Principles. Here is an actual question from the study guide:

Social Security is a federal government program that (among other benefits) provides a base-level income to beneficiaries who reach the age at which they can collect benefits. Justify the need for this program to be administered by the federal government.

Obviously, my personal, honest answer would be, "I cannot justify it, because I do not believe that such a need actually exists," but I don't think that's the answer they're looking for.

This is just one example of a trend I have noticed in the study materials: Wherever there is any discussion of federal or state regulations or insurance programs, the authors automatically and silently assume that such things are (A) desirable and/or necessary, and (B) cannot possibly exist except through government action.

Geeky Cool

2008-05-30T01:48:00.001-05:00

This guy has some really cool customized action figures. In particular, because I'm a sucker for both Star Wars and alternate-universe type things, the Steampunk Star Wars and Star Wars 1942 collections caught my eye.

Where Do I Sign Up?

2008-05-26T17:25:00.001-05:00

Here is the PPT investor presentation for Greg Costikyan's new business venture: Beer Over IP.

Those Young Whippersnappers With Their Weird Hair and Loud Music

2008-05-24T03:52:00.002-05:00

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge says "You will never achieve in a video game. It is not really success."

Leaving aside questions of the nature of "achievement" and "success" in different pursuits, my favorite quote from Mr. Rogge is "We need to hire more young people. If they have baggy pants and pink hair, that's OK."

Mr. Rogge added, "Hey! Get off my lawn, you hooligans!"

Reviews

2008-05-16T00:02:00.002-05:00

First: This is difficult, but... OK, I'm just going to say it: The recent/current series of Doctor Who are actually better than even the Tom Baker years. Yes, I know, Tom Baker was the Doctor during my personal golden age, so I am naturally supposed to look on those episodes with such nostalgia that nothing could possibly measure up, but there it is: The new ones are better.

In the old classic Who, good as it was, you'd never have seen them do something as daring as the episode "Blink", where the Doctor and his companion are barely even present in the story. In "Utopia", when the twist involving Derek Jacobi became clear (which I won't spoil here, in case anyone reading hasn't seen that episode), I sat bolt upright in my chair and yelled, "Holy shit!" The voiceover from the alien fiend at the end of "Family of Blood", where he talks about the "wrath of a Time Lord" in downright mythic tones, was brilliant. If I had a criticism, it would be that I wish they could find a way to resurrect the rest of the Time Lords, because frankly, the "I am the last of my kind" whinging is beginning to get a little tedious, and I did like the concept a little better when he was a renegade/outlaw, anyway. But that's nitpicking. Solid, solid show these days.

And the spin-off, Torchwood, by the way, is just as good, kind of like a cross between The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But with more sex: I have a theory that one of the as-yet-unstated effects of the Cardiff Rift Energy is to turn everyone near it into an insatiable (and bisexual) sex maniac.

Next: No Country for Old Men - Amazing, as you should already know. All I really have to say about it is that it makes a very interesting companion piece to Fargo. They share some similarities, but where Fargo ends on a note of hope, No Country is much bleaker, more nihilistic.

Finally: Hard Candy - Good, not great. Ellen Page gives a very good performance. A better movie on a somewhat similar theme was Under Suspicion.

As always, beware of spoilers below. Plus, some of my comments about the ending may not make sense unless you've seen the movie anyway.

The basic idea of the movie is the same as the basic idea behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer: What if the innocent waif you think is the prey turns out to actually be the predator? In this case, Page plays Hayley, a teenage girl who allows herself to be lured back to the home of Jeff, a "fashion photographer" she met on the internet. But just as it looks like he's going to get her drunk and molest her, she drugs him, ties him up, and proceeds to punish him for his sins.

There are some definite plot problems: Much of what happens only makes sense if Hayley is uncertain about whether Jeff really is a pedophile or not, and is searching for either evidence or an admission, but the ending makes it clear that she actually already knows the answer to that question. Also, he periodically does things that seem to foil her plan, only to turn out to be part of her intricately plotted scenario. For example, part of the girl's plan requires that Jeff escape from where she has tied him up, at a certain time, but not earlier. His getting loose cannot have been unintended, because her real goal, her planned ending to everything, requires that he chase her up onto the roof, which he couldn't do while tied to a table. On the other hand, if he had extricated himself earlier, she wouldn't have gotten to try out her castration skills.

I thought Hard Candy could have used a better ending. As it was, it was ultimately a kind of one-dimensional child-molester vigilante-revenge fantasy. We, the audience, are pretty clearly meant to cheer the girl on, especially when she delivers lines like "Who am I? I'm every girl you ever took pictures of/molested/fantasized about/etc." I kept wanting the guy to respond with something like, "No, you're not. You're you, doing this to me, for your own reasons, because it makes you feel good. No. You don't get to be an avenging angel, the personification of all my sins; you're not a personification, you're just a person."

So, following are my suggestions for better endings:

1) Leave the ex-girlfriend out (because having her show up just unnecessarily complicates the scene I'm about to describe). After driving Jeff to confess and hang himself, Hayley goes downstairs and packs up her things. A TV on in the background shows a breaking news story: They've found the missing girl, Donna Mauer, alive, and the man who kidnapped her is in custody. Jeff actually was innocent, as he had originally claimed. With this ending, you've made an interesting point about revenge, and about the reliability of confessions obtained under torture.

2) Similar to the last one, but insert the news report shortly after the scene in which Jeff stabs one of his pictures repeatedly while saying, "This is what I am. Thank you for helping me see that." Have him go on to say, as he stalks Hayley with the knife, that he really has always been attracted to young girls, but that he never had the balls (heh) to act on those urges before. But she's helped him, and now he's going to start with her. That can play out any number of ways - she could shoot him, for example - but now you've made another interesting point about revenge, and about violence breeding violence.

3) For a real shock: After Jeff gets loose from the table, reaches down and discovers the castration was faked, he goes into the bathroom and finds Hayley in the shower, where he joins her, and she embraces him. They're actually lovers*, and this whole thing was acting out his castration fantasy (yes, there are men who are into that sort of thing). Perhaps he might compliment her on adding the videotape, to imply that this is not even the first time they've done this. This ending wouldn't make any interesting points about revenge, but it would blow the audience's minds.

*If that's the right word for a relationship between a grown man and a teenage girl. Although, you could also put something in here to suggest that Hayley is actually older than she appears to be - perhaps she just dresses to look younger as part of the fantasy scenario.

New Bunny Cage

2008-04-09T23:46:00.001-05:00

I've added some pictures of the new bunny cage we just built to the Flickr album.

Best Webquiz Ever

2008-03-08T16:10:00.001-06:00

The COMBINED GENDER IDENTITY AND TRANSSEXUALITY INVENTORY (COGIATI)

Your COGIATI result value is: 30 Which means that you fall within the following category:
COGIATI classification THREE, ANDROGYNE
What this means is that the Combined Gender Identity And Transsexuality Inventory has classified your internal gender identity to be essentially androgynous, both male and female at the same time, or possibly neither. In some cultures in history, you would be considered to be a third sex, independent of the polarities of masculine or feminine. Your gender issues are intrinsic to your construction, and you will most likely find your happiness playing with expressing both genders as you feel like it.

And yeah, the author of this test clearly intends it to be a serious attempt at helping people who are confused about their sexuality and gender identity. I'd feel a lot worse about belittling it by calling it a "webquiz" if I hadn't read this.

Where Were You in 2000?

2008-03-07T17:05:00.002-06:00

From a CNN.com story about the possibility of allowing Democratic primary "revotes" in Florida and Michigan:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean says Florida and Michigan cannot be given passes for violating rules that were clear to them, and the DNC would not pay the bill for their errors.

"The rules were set a year and a half ago. Florida and Michigan voted for them and then decided that they didn't need to abide by the rules. When you're in a contest, you do need to abide by the rules," he said.

"You cannot violate the rules of the process and then expect to get forgiven for it," he said.

Dean said he has to run a process that yields an honest result, and, "The only way to do that is to stick to the rules that were agreed to by everybody at the beginning."

(emph. added)

I could swear these arguments sound familiar...

Snow Pictures

2008-02-17T12:52:00.002-06:00

New Flickr album up - pictures of the pile of snow in our front yard.

Awwwww...

2008-02-06T16:38:00.000-06:00

Yes, I did it - I broke down and submitted a picture to icanhascheezburger.com:

moar funny pictures
That's Suzi, my very own bunny.

And then I saw this, and couldn't resist captioning it. No, that's not my very own llama:

moar funny pictures

Start Hoarding Cookies Now!

2008-02-01T15:42:00.000-06:00

Once upon a time, obnoxious busybodies started passing laws banning smoking in public places. When this happened, some of us warned, "next they'll be outlawing fattening foods". The obnoxious busybodies scoffed, "That'll never happen".

Well, apparently while scoffing aloud, deep down inside they were thinking, "That's actually not a bad idea..."

To quote from a proposed Mississippi law: "Any food establishment to which this section applies shall not be allowed to serve food to any person who is obese".

I feel like there should be a long string of exclamation marks after that sentence.

!!!!!

Early Results

2008-01-08T14:46:00.001-06:00

On my way in to work this morning, the radio reported that the polls had opened in New Hampshire, and that Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain were currently in the lead(s). All I could think was, "It's EIGHT-THIRTY IN THE GODDAMN MORNING" in New Hampshire! The polls have been open, what, half an hour? Obama and McCain are the favorites among people who get up really early?

Of course, I decided last night that I really wished the Republicans would nominate Duncan Hunter for President, with Fred Thompson on the ticket for VP, just so that the bumper stickers would read "Hunter/Thompson '08". But then, I've given up on hoping for anything but entertainment value from politicians, anymore...

Xmas Pics - My New House Edition

2007-12-24T11:51:00.001-06:00

I just put up a Flickr album of a few pictures of my new house, decked out for Christmas. Pics later of the big celebration at my folks' house.

Government Logic

2007-12-21T17:01:00.000-06:00

Government steps in to ease flight delays

Fewer flights will be allowed in and out of New York's airports at the busiest times as part of a Bush administration plan to help reduce delays at airports across the United States.

So their plan to reduce inconvenient travel delays is to allow fewer flights? Do they not understand what the word "delay" means?

Delta's senior vice president of network and planning, Bob Cortelyou, said the caps in New York will "be great for our customers" because they will almost certainly ease delays at JFK, and thus lead to fewer disgruntled passengers, and fewer missed connections.

So they won't be disgruntled by not being able to book a flight at all? Or is it just that they'll be pissed off at the government for limiting flights, instead of being pissed off at Delta for being unable to accurately predict arrival times? Not really "fewer disgruntled passengers" so much as just shifting the source of the disgruntlement.

Look on my stapler, ye mighty, and despair!

2007-12-21T12:37:00.001-06:00

My birthday present this year:

Milton Waddams: [talking on the phone] "And I said, I don't care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I'm, I'm quitting, I'm going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they've moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it's not okay because if they take my stapler then I'll set the building on fire..."

Oh, good

2007-12-07T11:52:00.000-06:00

This is exactly what I was hoping would happen. Not all punishments need to be government-imposed.

I'm Glad I'm Not On Their QC Team

2007-12-06T14:30:00.001-06:00

A new patch for the online game "EVE Online" makes it impossible to boot Windows XP. Apparently, an extra backslash in the installer causes it to delete an essential system configuration file.

That QC team must be feeling embarrassed. I know I always hate it when I miss a subtle little bug like hosing the operating system.

I suspect that what happened here is that they tested the patch itself, but neglected to test the installer. And that probably happens more often than it should - perceptually, the installer isn't part of the "real" software you’re testing, so it's easy to overlook. The moral of the story: Don't forget to test installation scenarios.

Catching Up

2007-12-02T22:50:00.000-06:00

As predicted, here's a pic of my Halloween costume from this year:

Also: Our pumpkin carving:

The Banality of Evil

2007-10-15T23:13:00.000-05:00

Boot camp employees not guilty in boy’s death

The defense said Anderson's death was unavoidable because he had undiagnosed sickle cell trait, a usually harmless blood disorder that can hinder blood cells' ability to carry oxygen during physical stress.

Or, in other words:

Sam, there are very rigid parameters laid down to prevent such things happening. It wasn't my fault that Buttle's heart condition didn't appear on Tuttle's file.

Would You Like That Mild, "American Hot", or "Thai Hot"?

2007-10-04T11:32:00.000-05:00

I want to eat here:

A Thai restaurant's spicy chilli sauce sparked fears of a chemical attack and led police to evacuate a busy London street.

I Consider Your Argument Misinformed

2007-09-26T18:52:00.000-05:00

If for some reason you haven't seen it yet, you may want to check out Zero Punctuation, a (relatively) new videogame review column in the form of short web-based videos. The snark is worth viewing, even if you don't actually play videogames. You also might want to start with the first two, which appeared on YouTube before the creator sold out.

Anyway, at the moment I want to highlight one particular quote from his review of the ultra-violent "Manhunt":

...then the media generally start drooling the usual uninformed questions as to whether wholesome, boyish pretend violence has any correlation with the real world.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: No, and go fuck yourselves, you ignorant, scaremongering cockbags.

Movie Night

2007-09-22T11:06:00.000-05:00

Death Proof - I never made it out to the theater to see Grindhouse in its original form, so I can only evaluate this as a movie in itself. As such, I would say: Not bad. Certainly worth seeing, at least if you're a fan of the sort of cheesy '70s car-crash movies it pays tribute to. It's not without flaws: There's a section (apparently new to this version) in black and white for no good reason (I can't imagine even a bad theatrical print from 1971 suddenly losing color for a reel). And for a good chunk of what comes after that, it almost seems as if Tarantino forgot that he was trying to recreate the experience of watching a low-budget movie in a grimy theater in the '70s, because the picture just loses all the scratches and things he'd added to the earlier part and becomes a crystal-clear modern-looking film. There are also a few moments that felt like Tarantino just plain showing off his encyclopedic knowledge of pop-culture. Overall, though, certainly not Tarantino's best work, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Having mentioned some of this movie's flaws, I also feel obligated to point out something that isn't a flaw, but which others have called such: The dialogue scenes. Someone calling himself IndustryKiller! on Aint It Cool News put it most succinctly:

Also their conversations go on absolutely forever, especially that diner sequence, which brings the film to screeching halt when tarantino [sic] take 15 minutes to say what could easily take three to five.

I swear, all I could think as I read this was, "Goddamn, have you ever even seen a Corman-esque '70s action-horror movie at all? They were chock full of long, boring, pointless dialogue scenes. In fact, as I was putting the DVD in and started up the movie, I remember wondering how Tarantino was going to deal with/recreate the long stretches of downright boredom that tended to creep into the movies he was homage-ing. Thankfully, he dealt with it by putting in long stretches of Tarantino Dialogue™, which at least tends to be more interesting to watch than what actually ended up in most of the real '70s grindhouse movies.

I've seen several reviews complaining that '70s exploitation movies were short, and thus didn't have a lot of unnecessary stuff in them, but it's just not true. Movies today are edited much tighter and quicker than they used to be. George Lucas comments on this in one of the Star Wars DVD commentaries - that he tried to make the original as fast-paced as he could, but that by today's editing practices, it's downright flabby. That also tended to be true of the kind of movies Tarantino is referencing, and often doubly so.

Not Quite Movie Reviews

2007-08-28T16:12:00.000-05:00

Things I Learned from Hostel

When running a thrill-kill-for-profit organization that involves kidnapping tourists, it is best to nab just one or two members of a group at a time, allowing their friends to get suspicious and spend a day or two investigating (and potentially talking to and frightening away some of the other guest/victims at your Hostel of Doom), rather than just grab all of them at once. This is true even when there is a steady flow of paying customers coming through, requiring a constant supply of victims.
A sadist whose motivation is ostensibly his frustrated desire to be a surgeon nevertheless includes power tools as well as surgical tools in his torture repertoire. Nothing satisfies that urge to perform delicate surgery like ripping through someone's shoulder with a power drill.
A chainsaw which has been dropped to the floor will cut entirely through a man's thigh underneath it, even though all the weight of the chainsaw is at the back where the motor is, not in the blade, leaving a good few inches between the blade and the floor when the saw is at rest.
An enterprising sadist could actually make money by purchasing (non-American) victims through "Elite Hunting", harvesting all their transplantable organs, and re-selling them on the black market. According to this article, one kidney alone would fetch enough in Turkey to cover what this organization supposedly charges to let you kill a Russian. Anything you can get for his other organs is pure profit.
Despite this, if you operate a business like "Elite Hunting", you should just have your cleaning crew incinerate the bodies, valuable organs and all, rather than attempting to extract all possible profit in return for the enormous risks you're taking.
Eastern Europe is plagued by vicious gangs of small children, who will cheerfully beat several gun-wielding grown men to death in exchange for a sack full of chewing gum.
The optic nerve is actually a tube containing some sort of disgusting yellow pus, which will squirt out when it is cut.
In Slovakia, Asian women with half their face freshly burned off are apparently so common, they don't attract so much as a curious sideways glance from passers-by.

Things I Learned from Saw II

Serial killers whose M.O. involves elaborate deathtraps might, just might, have some elaborate deathtraps in place protecting their lair. The police in this film learned this particular lesson the hard way. Apparently it hadn't occurred to them before entering the building to be watching out for that sort of thing.
There exists a slow-acting nerve gas whose operation is so predictable, a timer can literally count down how much time remains to anyone breathing it. This gas also causes internal hemorrhaging, despite being clearly referred to as a nerve agent.
If I should ever find myself with one arm stuck in a box with razor-sharp blade flaps arranged in a one-way door configuration, I will simply hold the razor flaps open with my other hand and pull my arm out, rather than inextricably trapping myself by sticking my other arm into the other one-way razor door in the box. Especially if I have already spilled the life-saving nerve gas antidote that was inside the box.

Discworld Map

2007-08-26T01:50:00.000-05:00

Just for fun: Although it has been years since I've done any RPG-ing, I do still maintain a copy of the latest version of Campaign Cartographer, just because I love maps. Using the tools/instructions from an installment of their "Cartographer's Annual", I threw together this map of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, in a style inspired by the 16th century maps of Gerard Mercator (click for full-size):

Note, if you're familiar with the official published Discworld Mapp, you'll see a few differences, based on the ostensible reason that the map was created by a cartographer in Ankh-Morpork. Therefore, Ankh-Morpork is near the top of the map (rather than toward the bottom, as in the official map), and the further away from Ankh-Morpork and the Circle Sea region you get, the less detailed and more inaccurate the map becomes. So most of the Circle Sea area is pretty close to "reality", other parts of the continent are fairly accurate (but not very detailed), the Counterweight Continent is pretty much right, but with a few errors, and the least-explored areas - XXXX and the Lost Continent of Ku - are wildly inaccurate.

Here's also a close-up of the Circle Sea region:

The Game Turn Indicator marker does not expend movement points, nor does it exert a Zone of Control.

2007-08-13T17:58:00.000-05:00

Old-school wargaming has now disappeared up its own asshole: Decision Games has expanded & re-released "War in the Pacific". Seven maps. 9,000 counters. $420.00. And, and, their future games page indicates that Richard Berg is working on an updated re-release of "Campaign for North Africa", although it sounds like that one will be smaller, and much more affordable at $200.00.

BoardGame Geek

2007-08-07T02:34:00.001-05:00

Just for fun, I've added a widget to the sidebar on here that will show you five random games from my collection, as tracked at BoardGameGeek. I've decided I want to start getting back into games - there are some really interesting ones coming out these days - and having them pop up there may help motivate me.

Told Ya!

2007-07-27T18:13:00.000-05:00

Over at the Ludwig von Mises Institute's web site, Paul Cantor echoes my own brief comments about the film, in much more detail, in "Flying Solo: The Aviator and Libertarian Philosophy"

Zappa Plays Zappa

2007-07-22T15:06:00.000-05:00

First of all: You know you're in for a treat when any band comes out and opens with "Echidna's Arf (Of You)". I read in a local free left-wing paper that last year's ZPZ tour focused more on the Overnight Sensation/Apostrophe' period, but that for this year, Dweezil wanted to play more of FZ's more "serious" (for lack of a better word) music, and the set list certainly reflected that. They did do some of the expected stuff from those albums, but there was no sign of "Dinah-Moe Humm" at all. Instead, we got to hear a trilogy of "Son of Suzy Creamcheese/Brown Shoes Don't Make It/America Drinks and Goes Home" from Absolutely Free, "Cheepnis" and "Pygmy Twylite", as well as the aforementioned Echidna, from Roxy & Elsewhere, "Carolina Hard-Core Ecstasy", "Advance Romance", and "Muffin Man" from Bongo Fury, and even "G-Spot Tornado" from Jazz From Hell.

There were several songs that used video footage of Frank playing guitar solos, while the band on stage played the rest of the parts. This was used particularly effectively during the encore, when Dweezil traded solos with his father, in which they were both playing the same guitar. And I have to say: Dweezil has grown up into a damn fine guitar player. His soloing style is clearly heavily influenced by Frank, although it is subtly different. Perhaps more conventional, although that's not really a good description for playing that is still so FZ-esque. Great stuff, anyway. And a fine, satisfying concert overall.

Housewarming Party

2007-07-13T08:22:00.000-05:00

Brenda & I are planning to open up our new house to anyone who’s willing & able to come by, this Saturday from 1 to 5. There’s still some unpacking left to do, but it’s pretty much a home at this point. We’d love to see any of you who are able to make it.

Please let me know if you plan to be there, if you have any drink preferences, or if you need directions or anything.

Hope to see you there!

Wisconsin Lawmakers Have Too Much Free Time

2007-07-10T16:48:00.000-05:00

And hate dogs, apparently (though perhaps not as much as Mitt Romney). From the WSJ, via Reason:

A Wisconsin legislator wants state law to govern how divorced couples handle custody disputes -- over their pets.
...
"I wonder what it was that made someone think that they need to have a special statute for this?" asked Madison divorce attorney Steven Bach, who said he'd had only a handful of pet-custody cases in his 33-year career.
...
Nicky Symons of McFarland thinks she knows what unleashed Albers' legislation.

The legislator is married to Symons' ex-husband, Steven Anders.

In 2003, Symons and Anders divorce was finalized. The divorce included wrangling over who would have to care for and pay for their dog Sammi, short for Samantha. The dispute arose, she said, because neither she nor Anders, who married Albers this year, wanted the aging dog, but their three children did.
...
Albers' bill would prohibit judges from ordering couples to share the placement of a pet -- the arrangement the judge ordered for Sammi -- unless both sides agree to that. If they can't agree on what to do with the pet, the bill allows a judge to give the pet to one spouse or order it sent to the Humane Society.

That seemed "awfully draconian" to Brian Bushaw, a Madison attorney who sits on the State Bar of Wisconsin's family law committee.

"It doesn't sound fair to the dog, frankly," said Bushaw, who doesn't speak for the Bar.

I'm Moved In

2007-06-28T10:01:00.000-05:00

I'm officially Moved In, and holy crap, am I tired. We're not unpacked yet, of course – the house is chock full o' boxes – but we have a functioning refrigerator, bed, and TV, so at least we have everything we need to survive while we unpack everything else. And Brenda has a job interview on Monday, at a place literally just down the street from the house.

I'm sure a house warming party will happen at some point. Give us a couple of weeks to get most of the boxes out of the way, and the living room furniture delivered, and then we'll send out invitations.

I Always Suspected This

2007-06-20T07:50:00.000-05:00

A 42-year-old dishwasher in Sweden has had his love of heavy metal music officially declared a mental disability (thus entitling him to government disability benefits).

Pictures here, though you won’t be able to read that article unless you understand Swedish.

Artemy Lebedev Is My New Favorite Person

2007-06-08T15:42:00.000-05:00

In addition to the infamous "Optimus" computer keyboard – the $1,500 keyboard where each key is a programmable display screen (and yes, I want one) – he’s got other stuff for sale. Like this awesome clock. And these plush emoticons. And this cool eraser.

More House Pics

2007-05-22T16:29:00.001-05:00

Here's a Flickr album with all the pictures I have of my new home. Note that I haven't moved in yet, so the furniture in the pics is not mine...

I'm Buying a House

2007-04-24T07:22:00.000-05:00

I've accepted the seller's counteroffer on a beautiful 2-story house in Watertown. It looks like this on the outside:

It has this family room:

But that picture doesn't even show the gorgeous wood paneling on the wall in there. You can see a hint of that in this picture of the stairs down to the basement, but even that doesn't do it justice:

Four bedrooms, finished rec room in the basement, and a four-car garage. I'm going to be swimming in garage space.

My Kingdom for a Cable Modem!

2007-04-21T23:58:00.000-05:00

Until I can find more permanent living arrangements, I'm staying with my parents while I work the new job. Which means I'm stuck using their dial-up internet connection (at least at home - the office does have a faster connection, obviously, but for the first three weeks, I'm spending all day in a training class, so I never have more than a few minutes to do anything).

This, of course, creates a great incentive for me to find somewhere to move to, and quickly. Fortunately, I have already gotten pre-approval for a home loan, and we have been looking at several quite nice houses in the Watertown area. Life should be improving soon.

Scary/Exciting: Wisconsin Bound

2007-04-12T12:52:00.000-05:00

It's official: I have been offered and have accepted a job at AQS, in Hartland, Wisconsin, and I start Monday. Yep, I'm relocating back to the Land of Cheese.

Brenda and I had kind of started talking about "someday" relocating up there in order to be closer to my parents. They're both still in great health, but they are getting older, and eventually they may need someone a little closer at hand to help out occasionally, and my situation seemed to be more flexible to do that than either of my brothers. Plus, we've both wanted to get away from this building we own down here in Dayton so we can stop being landlords, and we really need a lot more space than we have here. This has ended up happening a lot quicker than we had thought, but they've offered me almost $20,000 more than I made last year, which would be tough to turn down even if we hadn't already been contemplating an eventual move up there.

So, since I have to start right away, I'm going up there this weekend and stay, temporarily, with my parents, until I can find something more permanent for Brenda and I to move in to. The eventual goal is to find something somewhere between Hartland and Madison - ideally, I'd like to be within 25-30 minutes of Hartland, but a little west so that I'd be close enough to zip into Madison on the weekends now and then. Hit the farmer's market, meet up with folks for the occasional pint, that sort of thing.

So, if anyone knows of (A) a decent but inexpensive home for sale, or rent, say somewhere around Watertown or the like, or (B) anyone in that general area looking to hire an accountant or payroll specialist (since Brenda still needs to find work up there), we'd love to hear about them...

Michael Bay: Cinematic Genius

2007-04-10T23:54:00.000-05:00

As I have said before, even in this very forum: Judged by his full-length films, Michael Bay appears to be a talentless hack. However, I believe he is a master of the short-short film - i.e., the television commercial. His "Aaron Burr"/"Got Milk?" commercial is darn good (if somewhat one-dimensional), but his Levi's "Elevator Fantasy" is, in my honest opinion, one of the Greatest Films Ever Made (assuming a broad enough definition of "film"). Yes, I am entirely serious about this. Now that it's available online (it wasn't when I made that earlier post), you can judge for yourself, if you never saw it or don't remember it:

There's also a high-res version viewable at Bay's official website.

Austrian-School Idol

2007-04-03T15:35:00.000-05:00

Every year, American Idol has a couple of predictable "controversies", which people somehow manage to be surprised by, even though the same ones happen, as I said, every year. One of them is the mid-season or so ouster of one of the expected favorites (e.g., Jennifer Hudson), which we haven't quite reached yet in the current season. Another is the relatively untalented contestant who ends up lasting much longer than he/she deserves. This season, that is the infamous Sanjaya Malakar.

It occurs to me that this predictable pattern illustrates an argument, first proposed by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, that socialism cannot work even in principle. The argument is known as the "calculation problem", and what it says is that in a socialist system, capital goods have no prices (since all transfers of such are simply internal transfers within the government-owned system of producers), and that in the absence of the information conveyed by price signals, it is impossible to rationally calculate the most efficient use of those capital goods. To oversimplify a bit: Without prices, one cannot know what goods really are the most in demand.

This is the problem with American Idol: Voting for contestants is virtually costless (there is only the negligible cost of time spent dialing the phone). It therefore conveys no real information about the preferences of consumers. If you really wanted to know which singer people preferred, what you should do is sell singles/mp3s of each contestant's performance every week, and kick off whoever sells the fewest copies of their song. Free votes are not (necessarily) going to translate into actual sales, once money enters the equation. Without a price, those votes tell us nothing about the actual demand for recordings of one singer versus another.

Extrapolating the implications of this line of reasoning as it applies to votes in a political democracy is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

Apparently, I'm Climbing Everest Every Night

2007-03-27T15:36:00.000-05:00

I went to the sleep clinic recently to get my sleep apnea (which I knew I had - it runs in the family) diagnosed and treated. The results: Apparently they consider anything over five episodes of breathing cessation per hour to be a diagnosis of "sleep apnea", and over 30 per hour is "severe". I averaged 130 per hour. That's one-hundred-and-thirty.

My O₂ saturation levels were below 90 for 70% of the time I was asleep, and dropped to a low of 53 at one point. It seems to be typically about 80 for people staying at the main Base Camp on Mt. Everest, for crying out loud. I don't know why I haven't just suffocated to death in my sleep before now.

No Blood For Peanut Oil!

2007-03-16T12:08:00.000-05:00

Q: What Are We Fighting For? A: Peanut Storage.

As Reason's Hit & Run describes it, the "pork-encrusted Iraq emergency funding bill" includes $74 million for peanut storage in Georgia, $25 million for spinach growers, $120 million for the shrimp and menhaden fishing industries, and various other junk, totalling $20 billion of the $124 billion spending bill.

One assumes these things don't actually have anything to do with Iraq, if only because the alternative is even more terrifying: That our Iraq strategy is somehow dependent on an adequate supply of peanuts, spinach, and shrimp. Perhaps we've decided that all we need for a stable Iraq is to get them hooked on Thai food.

Reviewin' Fool

2007-03-06T16:17:00.000-06:00

Tideland - Terry Gilliam's latest movie: The one that about 75% of critics thought was atrociously awful, and the other 25% thought was a work of genius. Yes, it's somewhat divisive. In the opening scene, the main character of the film, a 9-year-old girl, cooks up a hit of heroin for her junkie father, and then helps untie his arm after he shoots up, and puts his cigarette out for him so he doesn't burn the house down as he sinks into a stupor. By the end of the film, she will have spent time nestled in the loving arms of his decomposing corpse, made friends with a strange woman with an uncomfortable obsession with taxidermy, and played kissing games with a brain-damaged adult male. Gilliam has described the film as "Alice In Wonderland meets Psycho", which seems appropriate. The film depicts a group of people who seem about one or two steps away from becoming The Texas Chain Saw Massacre family.

One thing that amazes me is the number of critics who completely missed the point. This is amazing because, before the movie begins, Gilliam himself appears onscreen and speaks directly to the audience (warning them that "many of you will hate this movie"), and he explicitly states the point he was trying to make, which is that children are more resilient than most people nowadays give them credit for. "They're designed to survive," he says, "and when you drop them, they usually bounce." Where many of Gilliam's other films deal with the tension between fantasy and reality, sanity and insanity, this one is about the tension between childhood innocence and adulthood. As such, there are things in it that are horrifying when seen with an adult's perspective, that are... well, let's just say "less horrifying" when viewed by an innocent child.

Personally, I would rank it somewhere between awful and genius. It's not Gilliam's best film (that would be a toss-up between Brazil and Twelve Monkeys), but it's less disappointing than his previous movie, The Brothers Grimm, and I'm frankly mystified by the extreme level of animosity some critics seemed to have toward it.

Heck, I'll Review Anything

2007-03-03T16:13:00.000-06:00

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened - Not bad at all. First of all: It's a traditional adventure game (albeit with a 3D, GK3-esque interface, rather than 2D point-and-click) featuring Sherlock Holmes investigating a global conspiracy of Cthulhu cultists. How could I not play this game? Better yet: Despite being essentially a Cthulhu by Gaslight adventure, it also remains true to the authentic Holmes stories by not including anything that is unequivocally supernatural. The story ultimately leaves it ambiguous whether the cultists' activities would actually have awakened Cthulhu and destroyed the world, or if they were merely insane. Furthermore, this game is blessedly free of anything like the obnoxious timed stealth puzzle that intruded into the previous game in the series. The graphics are at times breathtaking, with lovely animated reflective water, bump-mapped surfaces, lovingly modeled gory, dismembered victims... Voice acting is consistently above-average for computer game voice work. I didn't encounter any game-crashing glitches. All in all, a solid game for adventure fans, Holmes fans, and Cthulhu fans. And you don't even need to leave the house to play it - it can be purchased by direct download.

However, I will say, "The Awakened" is sort of an uninspired title. I sort of prefer the original French title, La Nuit des Sacrifiés. Also, in a peculiar affectation, many of the characters in the game appear to be named after various personalities from the early history of pen-and-paper RPGs: There's a Dr. Gygax, a man named Arneson, and a couple of books authored by E. Otus and D. Niles, although they seem to have left out the obvious Petersen.

Now that the NDA has been lifted...

2007-02-17T14:40:00.000-06:00

Here you can see a man of Gondor looking over the town of Combe (described in Robert Foster's Complete Guide to Middle-Earth as a "village in a valley in the eastern Bree-land.")

This is, of course, a screenshot from the beta test of Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. So far, I'm generally pleased. There are some Tolkien purists who object to the liberties being taken*, but so far I haven't seen anything that completely breaks it for me. I may change my mind if the "Lore-master" character class starts tossing explosive fireballs around at higher levels.

Much (ok, all) of the gameplay is virtually identical to World of Warcraft. Many people are disappointed by this. I'm not sure I am - WoW does so much right that just lifting essentially the same gameplay out of the generic-fantasy setting of WoW and plonking it down into Middle-Earth, with a less cartoonish graphic style... I can't complain very hard about that.

There are some clever and surprising touches, as well. For example, like other MMORPGs, this has a "newbie" area for new players/characters to get their feet wet without facing anything too deadly. For men and hobbits, this transitions seamlessly into the main game, but for elves and dwarves, those newbie quests take place years earlier. Actually, in the case of elves, I think it may be centuries earlier. As a dwarf, you get to start out in the Blue Mountains just as Thorin and Company are preparing to set out on their quest to the Lonely Mountain. Elves are present during an attack on the elven Refuge of Edhelion (not listed in Foster, unfortunately) by a group of corrupted dwarves, and then "return" to its ruins centuries later for the main game.

Basically, I like it well enough that I've already pre-ordered it. I'm contemplating whether I want to go all out and pay the $199 for a "lifetime membership", instead of the monthly fee - if I stay on it for 2 years, it'd be worth it, and I think I may do that. If you're interested (and have a fairly hefty computer...), they're doing an open stress test next weekend that you can sign up for at Gamespot.

And boy, it sure is pretty, ain't it?

* A particularly obtuse example: A group of characters working together in this game is, naturally, labeled a "Fellowship" (in WoW, they're called a Party. It's just "flavor" text). In this post, someone actually says, "I still am wondering why in Eru’s name a Fellowship does not consist of nine players". In other words, because the "Fellowship of the Ring" consisted of nine people, he believes that all "Fellowships" should always and exclusively consist of exactly nine people. Gaaah.

This is pretty awesome.

2007-02-08T14:39:00.000-06:00

Technology in the year 2000, as predicted in a 1950 issue of Popular Mechanics.

I particularly like the amusing image of businessmen with documents "held up for examination" over their video phones. And yet, in the very same article, they talk about 5-cent facsimile document transmission over "telegraph" lines. I guess it didn't occur to them to link those two concepts: Even in the world they describe in the article, I'd pay the nickel to send the actual document around to my videoconference colleagues, just to avoid putting myself in the ridiculous position of holding paperwork up to a video camera for them to read.

And forget the personal helicopter (I've seen how people drive on the ground): What I want is the $5000 house, where I can clean the living room just by hosing it down.

More Movies

2007-02-08T12:17:00.000-06:00

The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch - Not as good as the original. This is mostly some new interview footage interspersed with outtakes from the first movie. There are a few good bits in the interviews, particularly with Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, and Bonnie Raitt. Unfortunately, there's also a tiresome running gag that's basically an inferior retread of an old Python bit, with Jimmy Fallon as a rival documentarian stealing Idle's microphone. Recommended for serious fans only.

The Notorious Bettie Page - Very nice. Gretchen Mol does a simply amazing job of recreating the innocent playfulness of Page's modeling and film-loop work. The look of the film is great - it's in both black & white and color at various times and places, but the color scenes were shot on old film stock, so it looks like the sort of Technicolor/Kodachrome color film available in the period (while watching, I had assumed they'd just created that look digitally during the color-balancing stage, but apparently they actually shot on old color film stock).

Creativity On Parade

2007-02-01T12:32:00.000-06:00

"Teri Polo is set to reprise her role as Ben Stiller's wife in "Meet the Little Focker," the third installment of the movie franchise."

Boy, we sure weren't expecting that, were we?

NCR Invents Time Travel

2007-01-25T11:57:00.000-06:00

NCR earnings up 16 percent after restructuring

The global restructuring of its manufacturing resources and market adoption of enhanced payment systems in ATM technology are among the reasons that NCR Corp. today announced a 5 percent increase in 2005 fourth quarter earnings and expects to generate 2 percent to 3 percent year-over-year growth in 2007.

Amazing how that "global restructuring of its manufacturing resources", which NCR only just announced on Jan. 11, and which hasn't actually, physically happened yet, managed to increase revenues in the 4th quarter of last year.

I should perhaps mention here that there doesn't seem to be anything in NCR's actual earnings statement or press release that attributes this past increase to the upcoming restructuring; that appears to be entirely the fantasy of the Dayton Daily News staff writer who wrote the news story.

Big Pile of Movies

2007-01-22T12:27:00.000-06:00

Recently viewed:

Pan's Labyrinth - I'm put into a peculiar position with regard to this film. It's a good movie, but I'm forced to say I was disappointed by it, because I had read several reviews which had led me to expect it to be spectacularly wonderful, so I was disappointed when it was merely good. When someone says something like, "For several minutes after seeing the movie, the only thing I could think of to say was, “Wow!”", I'm looking for something on the level of 12 Monkeys, Amélie, or A Very Long Engagement. Pan's Labyrinth is not on that level. Yet, it is a good movie, and it was worth seeing.

Dreamgirls - Pretty impressive. I've occasionally been in movies before where the audience applauded at the end. I think this may have been the first movie I've ever been in where a performance brought about an ovation in the middle of the film. I'm speaking, of course, of Jennifer Hudson's big number, "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going". What I found impressive about that, specifically, is that it would have been very easy for Hudson to let the song do all the emoting in the scene for her, but she doesn't: She acts, through the song, and she's playing simultaneous anger, betrayal, heartbreak... Yeah: She earned that Golden Globe. Eddie Murphy is also amazing, and boy, they sure didn't shy away from Beyonce's character being "loosely based on" Diana Ross, did they? There are some really recognizable hairdos and outfits in there.

Eragon - Enh. This felt like it was written by a 17-year-old D&D geek. Oh, right, it actually was... A particular favorite moment of mine was when the Good Guys are all waiting in their fortress for the Bad Guys to come and get them, and they basically just sit there waiting while the Bad Guys break through the stone wall surrounding the Good Guys' fortress. Um, guys? Why aren't you up on top of that wall, throwing rocks down on the Bad Guys who are breaking through it? You've been taking strategy and tactics lessons from those RPG nerds who played the "Siege of Minas Tirith" at Gen Con years ago, who immediately marched the entire vastly outnumbered Gondorian army outside the walls of the city and into the fields to meet the enemy (who promptly slaughtered them), haven't you? By the way, if you value your sanity, don't read that IMDB discussion thread, "Paolini or Tolkien?", wherein fans "debate" which one is the better writer.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room - Pretty good, despite its obvious anti-corporate, anti-capitalist bias. Early on, the narrator poses a question that goes something like, "Was this just a few unprincipled men? Or was it the dark side of the American Dream?" Well, personally, my answer is the former. I am sick and tired of people pointing to things done by individuals and blaming the entire capitalist economic structure. This wasn't a failure of "capitalism", it was that guy. Theft and fraud are not inherent to capitalist economy - they're aberrations, and these people would have found some unscrupulous way to make themselves rich at others' expense under any economic system, and I would argue that under any system other than capitalism, they would have had a much easier time of it, and would probably never have been caught. Still, the anti-corporate bias of this documentary was not quite as bad as I feared/expected, and it isn't hard to look past if you already know at least a little bit about California's energy "deregulation" and the crisis it caused.

That Ain't Half Ominous, Is It?

2007-01-18T16:10:00.000-06:00

As you may know, the company I worked for recently announced some pretty significant layoffs, though ones which do not affect me directly. This also came shortly after the company split off a major division into a separate company.

Given this context, can you blame me for being a bit concerned about the fact that my boss just sent out a meeting notice for next Wednesday, to everyone who works for him, with the vague subject heading of "Department Meeting", and a completely blank message body?

(I have since been assured that, at least, this is not anything dramatically bad. No mass firings or the like. Still, in the current environment, he couldn't have produce any more of a feeling of looming dread if he had left black cards with our names printed in white on each of our desks...).

Big Pile of Christmas (Part Three)

2007-01-05T16:11:00.000-06:00

This year's highlights:

A bunch of pants, some shirts, and a couple of pairs of shoes. Don't scoff, I did really need them.

Heroscape, plus a couple of expansion sets - a really cool-looking boardgame, with the added advantage that it should work well as a 2-player game, so Brenda & I can play it without having to find any other people willing to play a "children's game". It seems to be sort of a strategy-game equivalent of the old simplified-RPG-type game Heroquest (and I think it's by the same designer). I actually got two copies of the basic game set, and I was sorely tempted to keep them both, but ended up giving one to my nephew. Perhaps I'll ask for another copy next year... The primary online community for the game offers home-brewed scenarios that require up to five copies of the basic set.

Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy for the PS2 - Very nice. I had the first one, and it was plenty o' fun, even being based on the crappy prequels. Therefore, being essentially the same game but based on the Good Ones, I would logically expect this one to be even better.

Only One Place of Redress - a book about how African-Americans have been harmed by government labor regulations (including minimum wage laws) through the years.

A copy of the V for Vendetta DVD, complete with a Guy Fawkes mask. Now I know what I'm wearing for Halloween this year.

Overheard on Penn's Radio Show

2007-01-04T12:42:00.000-06:00

Sexual-Political Identity
Republicans: Don't put anything up your ass.
Democrats: You can put things in your ass, but it must be approved, regulated, and taxed by a federal agency.
Libertarians: Put anything you want up your ass, just don't call me to take it out when it gets stuck.

Big Pile of Christmas (Part Two)

2006-12-24T21:38:00.000-06:00

Just because technology has made it possible, here is a picture of this year's Christmas haul taken earlier today:

Here's a little better view of the tree itself:

And here are a bunch of bloggers disagreeing with each other, earlier this year:

More Amazement

2006-12-20T12:55:00.000-06:00

Here's another great one: Zappa's band covering the Allman Brothers' song, "Whipping Post". Those of you with more "mainstream" musical tastes may enjoy this one more than the other one I posted about:

This footage is from the concert video, "Does Humor Belong In Music?" The album/CD version of "Does Humor Belong In Music?" seems to use a recording of this song from a different performance, but I actually prefer the version from the video.

That's a Knife!

2006-12-19T09:13:00.000-06:00

OK, this new Swiss Army Knife is going on my Christmas list now.

Yes, it's real.

This is Effin' Amazing

2006-12-18T14:21:00.000-06:00

This is Frank Zappa and the (1968 lineup) Mothers performing "King Kong" on what appears to be British television. Try to ignore the cheesy '60s video effects that creep in toward the end and just listen to the glorious awesomeness.

There Are No 14-Year-Old Girls On The Internet

2006-12-08T09:30:00.000-06:00

An Allen County schoolteacher is the 75th person charged by the Fairborn Internet Crimes Unit, police said.
[...]
Police said the science teacher at Elida North High School attempted to meet a detective, who posed as a 14-year-old girl in Internet chats during the past month, for sex.

Penn Jillette made an interesting point on his radio show a little while back: He suggested that there's a risk here that these guys they're trapping like this might never have tried anything if they had been talking to an actual teenage girl, because they might have then realized how shallow and uninteresting actual teenage girls really are. In other words, is it possible that some of these men are only trying to meet the "teenage girls" they're talking to, because adult detectives posing as teenage girls are more attractive (intellectually/emotionally) than actual teenage girls?

Big Pile of Christmas (Part One)

2006-12-04T15:37:00.000-06:00

In preparation for this year's trip to Wisconsin for Hogswatchnight, I have created a DVD filled with MP3s of Chrismahanukwanzakah music, with the intention of letting it play in the background while we open presents, thereby escaping the dismal prison of any particular radio station's playlist, while also avoiding the need to get up periodically and change discs.

Since this DVD contains 971 songs, I'm hoping we'll be able to get our unwrapping done without the DVD player having to repeat more than the first couple hundred or so...

God Damn It

2006-11-28T16:43:00.000-06:00

The mainstream media is at it again. A study shows short-term effects on brain activity when playing video games, and that these short-term effects are different depending on whether the game is violent or not.

"Our study suggests that playing a certain type of violent video game may have different short-term effects on brain function than playing a nonviolent, but exciting, game... What we showed is there is an increase in emotional arousal. The fight or flight response is activated after playing a violent video game," Mathews said.

No real surprise there, if you ask me.

Mathews said he hopes to conduct additional studies on the long-term effects on brain function of exposure to violent video games.

So what is CNN.com's headline on this story about (rather unsurprising) short-term effects, in which the researcher explicitly makes it clear that the results say nothing about long-term effects? Why, naturally, the headline summarizes the story thusly: "Study: Violent video game effects linger in brain"

Why, yes, that does seem to be precisely the opposite of what the study actually examined, thank you for asking.

Proposed Constitutional Amendments

2006-11-28T15:49:00.000-06:00

If you've been reading this blog for a long time (and really, why would you?), you may remember that back in January of last year, I proposed a Constitutional amendment so that, upon re-election, any returning incumbent president would be required to append to the normal oath of office, after promising (again) to protect and defend the Constitution, etc., the new phrase, "And this time, I mean it."

I would now like to propose another amendment:

(1) Any law passed by Congress shall expire on a date five (5) years after the date on which the law takes effect. Once expired, the law shall be null and void, exactly as if it had been repealed by act of Congress.
(2) For all laws currently in effect at the time this amendment is ratified, the expiration date shall be the month and day of the original effective date of the law, with the year of expiration to be determined by the rightmost digit of the statute's number: Add that number to the year in which this amendment is ratified to determine the year in which that section of the US Code will expire.

Basically, by adding an expiration date to all laws passed by Congress, you give them something important to do. My psychological theory is, Congress needs to Do Stuff in order to feel important. If they spent an entire session just sitting around and not passing any laws, Congresspeople would feel useless and unimportant, and that's not why they went into politics.

With my proposed amendment, Congress can keep itself busy passing laws, without actually adding new laws, or at least without adding pointless or even downright destructive new laws, since they'll be able to congratulate themselves for at least keeping murder and treason illegal. And the more time they spend on actual important stuff like that, the less time they'll have to get... meddlesome.

EDIT: One other point: By setting the expiration date at 5 years, it deliberately does not match the terms of office for Senators and Representatives. This increases the likelihood that a "different" Congress (i.e., with a different balance of power) will be re-examining the law as it approaches expiration.

Movie-Film Review

2006-11-15T11:11:00.000-06:00

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan: Funniest movie of the year, certainly. I would rank this as being in the same league of funny as South Park, Team America, and Bad Santa.

I've seen some reactions that, I think, miss the point slightly. I don't think Borat is ultimately about exposing the "bigotry and ugliness" running rampant in America, though that is one element of it. I think Christopher Hitchens got it right: It's fundamentally about politeness.

We want to be polite to people, at least people as seemingly innocent and charming as Borat comes across, and to be tolerant of people from different cultural backgrounds. But the Borat character presents people with an insolvable dilemma: We want to be tolerant of other cultures, yet Borat apparently comes from a culture that is itself so bigoted and intolerant as to be, well, intolerable. You can see the tension in people dealing with this paradox, between the urge to be polite and accepting, and the urge to confront him. Frankly, I have more respect for the people who do confront him, and refuse to put up with his bigotry just because it comes packaged in a pleasantly innocent Latka-esque character. It's the folks who try to get along with him that end up pining for the return of slavery.

I'm Rich, Bee-yotch!

2006-11-15T08:59:00.000-06:00

I'm the 155,652,174 richest person on earth!

Discover how rich you are! >>

Best Onion Headline Ever

2006-11-08T17:11:00.000-06:00

Politicians Sweep Midterm Elections

Best Headline Ever

2006-11-01T13:09:00.000-06:00

Duct tape no substitute for a babysitter, police say

Kerry's Big Faux Pas

2006-11-01T08:49:00.000-06:00

GOP slams Kerry for telling students to study or "get stuck in Iraq"

It appears that we have now arrived at a point where American politics is conducted entirely by outrage: Political discourse now consists exclusively of being offended by some remark made by someone on the other side. And don't mistake this as a dig at the Republicans, just because they're the ones whose turn it is currently to be offended. The Democrats are just as guilty.

I hate CSI: Miami

2006-10-18T13:08:00.000-05:00

First of all, CSI: Miami, which has always been the least well-done of the franchise, has lately become a show that I watch mostly to make fun of. It hasn't quite sunk to the MST3K-levels of 24, but it's getting there. My private fantasy is that they will find a way to bring in William Shatner to play David Caruso's father in a cameo.

This week's episode dealt with eminent domain abuse, which is a worthwhile topic. Basically, the city government had condemned a whole street of houses, so that a developer could build a high-rise hotel there, all in accordance with the Supreme Court's recent lousy ruling in Kelo v. New London. At one point two of the CSI characters had this exchange of dialogue:

"It's hard to believe that this kind of thing can happen in this country."
"Well, capitalism opens a lot of doors."

NO! No, no, no! Armed (government) thugs forcing you off of your land at gunpoint is not "capitalism", goddamn it! If anything, it's closer to socialism than to capitalism.

Look, under true free-market capitalism, the developer would negotiate with each homeowner on that street to buy their land at a mutually-agreed-upon price. If "the city needs my hotel", as the developer asserts in the episode, then he will have no problem finding investors and backing to purchase the necessary land. The current owners will get what they feel is a fair price, they'll be able to buy a new home elsewhere (assuming that's what they want to do with the money), and the developer and investors in the hotel will make a profit (assuming they've judged the demand for hotel space correctly) - everyone wins. On the other hand, if the developer cannot find backing to purchase the land at its true value (i.e., what the owners are willing to sell for), then that is the market's way of telling you that it doesn't really need a high-rise hotel that badly.

Eminent domain takings involve the use of government force to obtain property for less than what it would cost in a free market. What makes eminent domain abuse a Bad Thing is not that it is an example of capitalism, but rather that it is violent government interference with capitalism.

Is this another "Farewell" tour?

2006-10-10T16:29:00.000-05:00

Streisand to heckler: 'Shut the @#&% up'

There was Streisand, enduring a smattering of very loud jeers as she and "George Bush" -- a celebrity impersonator -- muddled through a skit that portrayed the president as a bumbling idiot.

Though most of the crowd offered polite applause during the slightly humorous routine, it got a bit too long, especially for a few in the audience who just wanted to hear Streisand sing like she had been doing for the past hour.

"Come on, be polite!" the well-known liberal implored during the sketch as she and "Bush" exchanged zingers. But one heckler wouldn't let up. And finally, Streisand let him have it.

"Shut the (expletive) up!" Streisand bellowed, drawing wild applause. "Shut up if you can't take a joke!"
[...]
Once the outburst (which Streisand later apologized for) was over, Streisand noted that "the artist's role is to disturb,"

Oh, bullshit, Babs. You just thought your fanbase would all enjoy a little Bush-bashing, and when some of them expressed disapproval, you freaked out. You weren't trying to "disturb" anyone, you were trying to preach to the choir. It just turned out that some of the choir weren't on the same page.

Reviews

2006-10-02T17:20:00.000-05:00

Movie Review: We watched Memoirs of a Geisha last night. Nice costumes and production design, but not much else. It's one of those "love stories" where the great lovers meet once, exchange maybe four sentences between them, and then spend years apart pining for each other. Which in this case is made a bit creepy by the fact that that first meeting is between a middle-aged businessman and a 9-year-old... I was also hoping for a bit more about the actual day-to-day life of a geisha, but since both the novel and the film were written and directed by westerners, perhaps that was expecting too much. Oh, and it was a little bit distracting to watch all those Chinese people playing Japanese characters - though I suppose that if the blatantly Scottish Sean Connery can play a Russian sub commander, that sort of thing can be overlooked.

Book Review: Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett. This is the latest in the Tiffany Aching sub-series of Discworld books, aimed at younger (i.e., adolescent) readers. You know, the Harry Potter books are decent enough, and I’m glad they’ve got kids reading, and reading big thick books at that. But none of them have yet contained one of those little passages that Pratchett tends to have all over the place, that just drop your jaw with how well-written it is. The ones that hit you like a sledgehammer in the chest, like this one, which appears at the end of a chapter in which a funeral occurs, after the grave has been filled in and all but one of the mourners have left:

Tiffany sat on a stump and cried for a bit, because it needed to be done. Then she went and milked the goats, because someone needed to do that, too.

If there has ever been a more perfect expression of grief, and of the letting go of grief, in the English language, well, I've never read it. And the fact that a passage of such exquisite beauty can inhabit the same book that features six-inch tall blue highlanders shouting "Ach! Crivins!", a witch who specializes in holding her breath and swimming away underwater after being thrown in the river by paranoid villagers, and a kitten named You (as in "You! Stop that!" and "You, get down from there!"), just makes the whole thing that much more amazing.

To anyone reading this: If you like Harry Potter, you need to meet Tiffany Aching. The book to start with is called The Wee Free Men, and is followed by A Hat Full of Sky and then Wintersmith. According to Pratchett (at a convention in 2004), the fourth one will be called When I Am Old I Shall Wear Midnight, but we don't know yet when that one will be written and published.

After those, you'll probably want to consult the L-space Web Reading Order Guides and perhaps read the "Witch" sub-series, since several of the same characters are involved in those. Or just start back at the beginning with The Colour of Magic and read 'em all through in chronological order.

I wonder if they even know...

2006-09-28T12:52:00.000-05:00

I can't tell you how proud I am to be living in Cornhole Country.

Straw Man Eaten by Crocodile! Film at 11!

2006-09-07T11:39:00.000-05:00

By now, I'm sure anyone who cares knows that Germaine Greer took the opportunity to gloat over Steve Irwin's tragic accidental death, saying things like "The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin". Not satisfied with being merely insensitive, Greer spouts ridiculous, PETA-like levels of delusional lunacy.

But my personal favorite bit is this:

You can just imagine Irwin yelling: "Just look at these beauties! Crikey! With those barbs a stingray can kill a horse!" (Yes, Steve, but a stingray doesn't want to kill a horse. It eats crustaceans, for God's sake.)

So, here, Greer imagines something she thinks sounds sort of like what Irwin might possibly have said, and then proceeds to criticize him for saying it. I hate to point this out, love, but you're taking issue with a "Steve Irwin" who only exists inside your own head. I'm skeptical that the real Steve Irwin would ever have said "With those barbs a stingray can kill a horse", since that statement is patently untrue.

What the Hell?

2006-09-03T23:32:00.000-05:00

I really have nothing to add to this commentary about Ohio's plan to allow judges to designate people as sex offenders, without actually requiring that they first be convicted of any crime.

I Want This

2006-09-02T21:59:00.000-05:00

This has got to be the coolest thing in the goddamn world.

Movie Night

2006-08-23T14:05:00.000-05:00

Wolf Creek (Unrated version)

I'd have to describe myself as "unimpressed". It's essentially Texas Chainsaw Massacre set in the Australian outback, only it's just one guy instead of a family of psychos, and it lacks TCM's sense of humor, if you can call it that. Three young tourists in Australia get kidnapped and tortured by a sadistic psycho. Now, I’m not going to say it's a bad movie just because it's a misogynist torture-fest (that would be hypocritical: I do own a copy of Bloodsucking Freaks in my DVD collection, after all). But it’s a bad misogynist torture-fest.

It had two major problems, as well as most of the usual minor problems (characters doing inexplicably dumb things*, for example); some spoilers may follow:

1) At the start, it claims to be "based on true events". But there’s a big chunk of the film that depicts events that went unwitnessed by the only survivor, and the recap at the end says that "No trace of [the other two] was ever found." If you’re going to claim to be a "true story", you need to make sure that everything you show was either witnessed by someone who survived to the end, or could have been pieced together/inferred from the evidence the police find later.

2) It uses what I would call the "super-competent serial killer" – For example, out of a garage full of cars (from his prior victims), how did he manage to be hiding in the back seat of the ONE CAR our protagonist got into and tried to start? He’s also an absolute dead-eye shot with a rifle from hundreds of yards away. Just supremely skilled at everything he does. You can kind of get away with that sort of thing if your killer is supposed to be supernatural (e.g., Freddy Krueger), but if he's just a crazy guy, it breaks suspension of disbelief when he’s that lucky and that good at absolutely everything.

Nice cinematography of the Australian scenery, though. Probably not worth sitting through just for that. The movie does start off with some promise, because we spend about 40 minutes before anything horrific happens, just following the characters on their trip. I almost said "getting to know the characters", but that isn't really true, since they don't really have identifiable personalities, they're just sort of generic "carefree young person" templates. But once the screaming starts... put it this way: It's not the worst horror movie I've ever seen, by a long shot. But if I want to watch pretty scenery, I'd rather put on the Discovery HD channel; if I want to watch a scary/disturbing horror movie, I'd rather stick in Texas Chainsaw Massacre; and if I want to watch a misogynist torture-fest, I'd rather subscribe to one of the hundreds of S&M-oriented internet porn sites. All of which renders this film spectacularly pointless.

*By "inexplicably dumb things", I mean, for example: If you've snuck back into the killer's lair, while he's otherwise occupied, for the specific purpose of finding a getaway vehicle ("If I'm not back in 5 minutes, start walking."), why, in the name of all that is holy, WHY would you climb down into a HOLE in the GROUND underneath a water tower? And then act all shocked when all that's down there is the rotting corpses of the psycho's past victims. What did you think you were going to find? A subway station? That burrowing vehicle from The Core, maybe?

Reading is Hard!

2006-08-07T15:22:00.000-05:00

Wasn't this an episode of "Yes, Minister"?

From Reason's Hit and Run:

In April, 327 members of the House of Representatives voted for a classified intelligence bill, thereby authorizing some of the administration's anti-terrorism measures. 96 voted against it. And according to The Boston Globe, approximately a dozen representatives read it...

It really doesn't come as a surprise to me that our lawmakers don't bother to read laws before voting on them. This certainly isn't the first time it's been reported on, even discounting BBC sitcoms. That doesn't make it any less disturbing, mind you, just less unexpected.