This is pretty awesome.

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

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

"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

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

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?

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)

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

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)

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

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!

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



Yes, it's real.

This is Effin' Amazing

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

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)

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

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

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

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!

I'm the 155,652,174 richest person on earth! Discover how rich you are! >>

Best Onion Headline Ever

Politicians Sweep Midterm Elections

Best Headline Ever

Duct tape no substitute for a babysitter, police say

Kerry's Big Faux Pas

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

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?

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

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...

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

Straw Man Eaten by Crocodile! Film at 11!

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?

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

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

Movie Night

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!

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.

Understatement

A couple of minutes ago, on the TV in the cafeteria here at work, I saw Fox News running a report on current events, with a caption at the bottom of the screen reading "Mideast Turmoil".

"Turmoil"? "Turmoil"!? They're lobbing missiles at each other! That's not "turmoil", that's open warfare.

Tomorrow Belongs To Me

Who Said It: Ann Coulter or Adolf Hitler?

I got 11 out of 14...

I do think that this quiz would have been even better if it had included three authors: Ann Coulter, Adolf Hitler, and Michael Moore. Or possibly Al Franken, but there definitely should have been some representative from the left. Surely there is one who has said enough hateful things about conservatives to have been included in a quiz like this one. I'd do it myself, but then I'd have to, y'know, actually read some of the crap these people have spewed.

BTW, just to be clear: The person who created the quiz says elsewhere: "For this quiz I've replaced some of Hitler's pro-Aryan and anti-Semitic language with the words, "America", "Democrat", "liberal", and "the liberal media" to make the Coulter quotes a little more difficult to spot."

I mention this because some witless Republican (posting in the thread on Reason's website where this was linked to) pointed this out, saying "Jesus, people, do you all believe everything you read? [...] Liberals are not only liars, they're also gullible and stupid" (apparently mistaking "libertarian" for "liberal").

To which one of the libertarian Reason readers responded, "you need to have another web site tell you that Hitler didn't actually make statements about liberals in America, and you're calling other people stupid?"

Lions and Tigers and... Oh, my!

Ok, now CNN is clearly just reporting stories that are specifically targeted to get mentioned on "The Colbert Report":

Study: Warming turns bears into cannibals
"Environmentalists contend shrinking polar ice due to global warming may lead to the disappearance of polar bears before the end of the century."

I ask you, was there ever a news story that sounded more like it was deliberately designed to get Colbert calling for people to do their part to increase global warming, now!?

On a slightly more serious note, I really think someone ought to do a study of news reports. I could swear that the number of actual, serious news reports involving bears has increased dramatically since "The Colbert Report" started airing.

What a bunch of [FILL IN REACTIONARY DESCRIPTION OF GRANOLA-LOVING HIPPIES HERE]

I can't think of anything else to say about this story:

Before President Bush touched down in Pennsylvania Wednesday to promote his nuclear energy policy, the environmental group Greenpeace was mobilizing.

"This volatile and dangerous source of energy" is no answer to the country's energy needs, shouted a Greenpeace fact sheet decrying the "threat" posed by the Limerick reactors Bush visited.

But a factoid or two later, the Greenpeace authors were stumped while searching for the ideal menacing metaphor.

We present it here exactly as it was written, capital letters and all: "In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]."

Whoops, Apocalypticism!

Pic is coming

That picture from our little get-together is coming, it's just a little slow because, when I got back to Ohio, my PC didn't work. The replacement should be arriving soon...

Dolphin Suffrage Now!

Dolphins have names, "making them the only animals besides humans known to recognize such identity information, scientists reported on Monday."

"It's a very interesting finding that encourages further research, because they are using whistles as referential signals -- that's what words are," said Sayigh, of the University of North Carolina Wilmington. "Dolphins appear to be using these arbitrary signals to identify another dolphin."

As a general rule, I don't agree with animal rights activists. Dolphins are an exception: I think it's possible they should be treated as moral agents with rights, and that the only reason we haven't recognized them as such is our inability to communicate with them. Their cognitive abilities are impressive: Tool use, self-awareness, and now the use of verbal names. Perhaps more importantly, the stories of human divers in trouble being rescued by dolphins, who sometimes go so far as to attack sharks to keep them away from the humans, suggest at least the possibility of moral development, in addition to cognitive development. Given the possibility of moral agency, I'm inclined to treat dolphins as sort of provisional-persons: I can't really grant them full person-hood without more evidence, but at the same time I think we ought to avoid really egregious abuses, such as hunting them for food/sport, just in case.

Unnecessary Travel

Just to let the Madison contingent of my fan base know, I will be up in Wisconsin for the weekend of May 19-21. If anyone wants to get together, we'll probably try to hit Madison at some point. I'll be fresh from seeing "Spamalot" on stage in Chicago.

You Will Pay the Price for Your Lack of Vision

I don't want to be too disparaging here: Putting a tiny pair of eyeglasses on a housefly does require a certain mad kind of genius. But if you're going to all the trouble of laser-etching a pair of fly-sized glasses, why, oh why wouldn't you go all the way with it, and make them Groucho glasses?

Addition to Previous Movie Post

After watching Brokeback Mountain, we loaned it to someone Brenda works with. It seems she had wanted to see it, but her husband was too embarrassed to rent the infamous "gay cowboy" movie at the video store.

Pansy.

So, before loaning it to this person, I whipped up (so to speak) the World's Gayest DVD Cover* for it, just to annoy this guy I've never even met. For those who might also have some use for it, here it is (it's an insert for a DVD thin-pack, not the full-size DVD cases). Click for full size:


*Well, gayest without actually being gay porn, anyway. I do have some sense of compassion...

Oscar-Nominated Movies

Brokeback Mountain - I was about as unimpressed as I expected to be. This is one of those movies where people have intense, emotional conversations with each other while gazing off in opposite directions, instead of looking at each other. Y'know, the way people in the real world behave.

It also struck me as very obviously being a movie about homosexual men made primarily by heterosexuals. It contains/reinforces a bunch of heterosexual misconceptions about gay relationships - e.g., it's basically all about the sex, the sex is rough & macho, etc. I never got any sense of a romantic connection between them - it's a very Ancient Greek conception of homosexuality, where they're basically masculine camping/hiking/fishing "buddies", except they also have sex.

I can see why it had some mainstream appeal - it's a very safe movie for straight people. Sure, they're gay, but they're also basically disgusted by their own behavior, at least at first. It certainly doesn't present their relationship as in any way normal, which would have been much more groundbreaking and risky. And, at the risk of giving it away, it follows the normal mainstream Hollywood Rule of Gay Relationships: It must End Badly, preferably with the death of at least one partner.

I guess I've just seen so many other good little independent movies actually made by gay men, that this just seemed unrealistic and stereotyped, and surprisingly prissy about it all.

I Must Be a Violent Dope Fiend By Now

Violent video games linked to risky behaviors. Well, um, sort of.

First of all: I applaud the researchers for actually matching similar games for their violent vs. non-violent comparison. An earlier study I'm aware of compared playing Quake to playing Myst, and it's hard to imagine two games more different from each other in every conceivable way, leaving many, many uncontrolled variables other than merely "violence level". Here, they matched Grand Theft Auto III against The Simpsons: Hit and Run, which has very similar gameplay to GTAIII, but cartoonish instead of gritty & violent. Bravo.

But what effects did they actually observe? Those who played the more violent game:

1. Immediately afterwards, were less cooperative/more competitive.
   
2. Immediately afterwards, were more likely to interpret others' attitudes as hostile toward them.
   
3. Immediately afterwards, expressed more permissive attitudes toward alcohol/marijuana use.
   
4. Only among those with higher exposure to real-life violence, elevated systolic blood pressure.
   

Once again, we have a study that measures an effect (or several effects) immediately after playing a violent video game, but makes no apparent attempt to measure whether/how quickly this effect normalizes over time. Is there still a measurable difference an hour later? A day? Is the effect permanent and cumulative? We don't know...

Now, about the headline: It's a complete lie. The study has not in any way linked violent video games to risky behaviors. It has linked violent video games to permissive attitudes about risky behaviors. I'd like to see how the question was worded: It could be that violent video games just make players more forgiving of risky behaviors in others, but not more likely to personally engage in such behaviors.

It's also unfortunate that Reuters doesn't report any more information than one can glean from the abstract of the actual study. I don't really want to pay $15 just to find out the actual magnitude of these observed effects. How much more competitive? How much more permissive?

What Did You Do At Work Today, Daddy?

Boy, if you're familiar at all with what happened at Waco and Ruby Ridge, these pictures drawn by children of BATF employees/agents are really disturbing.

Random Rules

Just because I think it will be fun, I'm doing a "Random Rules", based on the new occasional feature in The Onion. To quote their explanation: "In "Random Rules," we ask our favorite rockers, writers, comedians, or whatevers to set their MP3 players to "shuffle" and comment on the first few tracks that come up—no cheating or skipping allowed."

So, here's mine:

Kronos Quartet/Terry Riley - "Salome and Half-Wolf Descend Through the Gates to the Underworld"
Nice modern/minimalist string quartet. This is from a long work called Salome Dances For Peace. I first heard part of it that was included on one of the Kronos Quartet's albums ("Half-Wolf Dances Mad in Moonlight", on Winter Was Hard). Frenetic, I think would be the word to describe most of it.

Peter McConnell - "Blue Casket Bop"
This is from the soundtrack for the computer game, Grim Fandango. The game is, I think, the closest anyone has ever come to producing Literature in the video game medium, and the musical score is one of the best I've ever heard in a game. This particular bit is a cool jazz number.

Devo - "Booji Boy and General Boy/We're All Devo"
This is basically just a short "filler" track from their best-of anthology, Pioneers Who Got Scalped. Not much to say about that.

Frank Zappa - "Run Home Cues #3"
Some of the incidental music Zappa wrote for the obscure movie, Run Home Slow, which he included on the album The Lost Episodes. I've never seen the movie. The music is somewhat unusual: For some reason the Run Home Slow music reminds me of Mahler more than most of Zappa's other orchestral music, which usually sounds more like Stockhausen.

Frank Zappa - "Stinkfoot"
Well, my MP3 player is pretty heavily loaded with Zappa right now, it's only natural he'd be repeated. This particular track is from a bootleg concert recording - 23 May 1975, El Paso County Coliseum. As always, the musicianship is phenomenal. Decent guitar solo. This is one of Zappa's better band lineups, although my favorite lineup (at least at the moment) is probably the slightly-earlier Ruth Underwood era.

That's the usual five songs, but as an added bonus, here are the next ten that popped up, without comment (along with the album title they come from), just so you can see what a typical playlist would look like on the hypothetical Coolest Radio Station Ever:

nine inch nails - "All The Love In The World" (With Teeth)
Trey Parker - "The Trapper Song" (Cannibal: The Musical - Soundtrack)
Tom Waits - "Tango Till They're Sore" (Rain Dogs)
The Clash - "Police & Thieves" (The Story of The Clash, Volume 1)
Michael Nyman - "While You Here Do Snoring Lie" (Prospero's Books - Soundtrack)
Frank Zappa - "Intro" (Donna You Wanna)
Beastie Boys - "Alright Hear This" (Ill Communication)
The Chieftains w/ Gillian Welch - "Katie Dear"
Frank Zappa - "Muffin Man" (Kreega Bondola)
Frank Zappa - "Montana" (Cuccurullo Brillo Brullo)

Want some cheese with that whine?

"Insufferable self-importance", indeed.

(Disclaimer: This is not a comment on the relative quality of the actual films. I have not yet seen any of this year's Best Picture nominees.)

Movie Review (aka My First Netflix Rental)

Walk The Line - Wow, this was actually really disappointing. Perhaps I just had unrealistically high expectations from all the praise lavished upon this film, but I found it to be just a very average, run-of-the-mill musician biopic. All the formulaic elements are there: The pre-fame struggle, the "quit following your dream and get a real job so you can take care of me & the baby" scene, the "here, try some of these pills" scene, the "please respect me now, Dad" scene, and, of course, his entire life revolves around a single tragic event from his childhood. The performances are good, I suppose, although I never for a moment forgot that I was watching Joaquin Phoenix and not Johnny Cash (or listening to him, for that matter: For all the praise of Phoenix's singing, Cash was still much better). Probably worth seeing if you're a Johnny Cash fan, but I can't really recommend it much otherwise. As someone said, it's Ray with white people, except I would add that Ray was a somewhat better movie.

Weird Picture

In the Onion's review of the movie Ultraviolet, they display this still from the film:

What's weird is that this picture looks almost like a 3D rendering to me, except that I can't think of any good reason why they would CGI a character standing calmly doing nothing. I think it's the shadows - for some reason, the picture looks like a sample render designed to demonstrate ambient occlusion shadowing. For those who don't know what I mean, here's a quickie example I whipped up in Poser 6:

Because of the way ambient occlusion is calculated, it tends to over-emphasize certain small details like the belly-button. I left mine with the flat look Poser 6 gives with the default IBL/AO lighting (it lacks specular highlights), just to emphasize what I'm talking about. If I spent more time on it, matching lighting and so on, I suspect I could come up with something that looks even closer to the other pic. You can see some of the kind of "show-off the ambient occlusion" sample renders I'm talking about at this gallery page on e-frontier's Poser pages.

I don't think the Ultraviolet image is actually CGI, but I wonder if they've deliberately lit the scene in some way to make the live-action shots look as much like CGI as possible, in order to better match the CGI special-effects shots. And if so, I wonder how they did it.

I also think it's impressive that consumer/hobbyist-level software like Poser is now capable of producing output like that. Poser up through version 4 (and even 5 to some extent) was a whole lot less realistic than it is now.

Vote For Pedro

So that's why I was so unimpressed by Napoleon Dynamite: It's clearly just a rip-off of "Homestar Runner". I don't know how I missed that.

I'm not sure who it was that said it, but my favorite description of Napoleon Dynamite was that it is "an 'Independent Film' for people who don't really like independent films". Personally, though, I would be even more specific: It's Welcome to the Dollhouse for people who don't have the balls to really like Welcome to the Dollhouse.

Pen Stolen

Today on CNN.com, a headline on the "front page":


Now, I will admit to watching "American Idol". I'm not proud of it, but I'll admit it. Last night, four of this season's semi-finalists were eliminated: The two men and the two women with the lowest numbers of votes. None of the eliminated contestants even sang well this week, so even the specifics of which people were voted off didn't come as a real surprise.

So how in the bloody Hell is this news, when a television show proceeds exactly as planned? If they had booted four contestants because they found them participating in a Satanic ritual goat-sacrifice, that might be newsworthy*. What's next: "Price Is Right Contestant Wins New Car"?

And yes, the title I put on this post is a reference to a classic Onion story, although it was in their pre-Internet days, so it's not in their online archive.

*Not "front page" newsworthy, but probably worth mentioning. A Satanic ritual infant-sacrifice, now, that I'd put on the front page.

Still Here

I haven't posted much lately, because I've been busy at work. Having said that:

Is there any way we could do what we do with motorcycles, and require a special license to drive an SUV? In particular, as part of the test to get an SUV license, could we require that the driver demonstrate the ability to keep their SUV inside one goddamned lane?

And My Opponents Eat Puppies, Too!

To clarify my remarks from last night, here is the relevant passage (taken from the full text here):

We have entered a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite. [...] [E]very great movement of history comes to a point of choosing. Lincoln could have accepted peace at the cost of disunity and continued slavery. Martin Luther King could have stopped at Birmingham or at Selma, and achieved only half a victory over segregation. The United States could have accepted the permanent division of Europe, and been complicit in the oppression of others. Today, having come far in our own historical journey, we must decide: Will we turn back, or finish well?

OK, "great ideological conflict" = War on Terror, obviously, of which the war in Iraq is ostensibly a part. There are some who advocate pulling out of Iraq now, while President Bush believes we need to "stay the course" and finish what we started. So it seems to me that by drawing parallels with prematurely ending these noble endeavors of history, the President seems to be comparing the war in Iraq with Martin Luther King's march from Selma. He is implying that those who disagree with him about how to conduct the War on Terror, are engaging in the moral equivalent of allowing slavery, segregation, and the Holocaust to continue unimpeded.

Mr. President, just a suggestion: This is why so many people believe you are monstrously arrogant, because you engage in this sort of naked display of monstrous arrogance.

Holy Crap!

Ok, now I only saw about the last minute and a half of the State of the Union speech, but... did President Bush just compare the war in Iraq to Martin Luther King's march from Selma?

Happy Holidays

Yes, we're a little insane. By my estimate, we had a total of about 300 presents under that tree. It took us six hours to open everything. Here we all are preparing to start opening:

Here is my leftist/commie brother Mike playing with the talking Ronald Reagan doll Brenda & I gave him:

Not quite as perfect as the talking Ann Coulter doll he got last year, but that's tough to top.

Here's my other brother David and his wife Diane opening stuff:

Here's David's daughter Julia. She tried, seriously, to watch the entire 24-hour A Christmas Story marathon last year, so we had to get her this shirt:

This is David's son Byron watching my mom open something:

Here's my dad proudly displaying a cookbook we got him:

And this is Byron again wearing the Coolest Christmas Present Ever:

Yes, I did buy myself a Voice-Changing Darth Vader Helmet at the same time I got the one for my nephew. What of it?

As for my own haul, I got one of these. It's probably going to take me a while to fill that 20 GB drive, although I may just be able to do it without buying any more music than I already own.

Between Brenda & I, we also got:
All three of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle books (now I need to finish Cryptonomicon...)
A vacuum food-sealer
A deli slicer
The From the Earth to the Moon DVD box set
The Hanzo the Razor DVD box set
An obscure nunsploitation movie.
A whole bunch of rabbit-related books and calendars
And, let's be honest, a whole lot of other stuff

Awww, He Thinks He's People!

Elton John and partner 'tie the knot'

And according to the IMDB report, "The 'newlyweds' left Guildhall at 11:45am..."

Here we see one of the problems with only allowing civil unions, while leaving "marriage" exclusively heterosexual: The patronizing use of quote marks around words and phrases like "tie the knot". It conveys a sense of, "Awwww, look at the cute little gay people, pretending they're married! How precious!"

My preferred solution, by the way, is to remove the word "marriage" from the law books entirely. Those who oppose legalizing gay marriage have a valid point: "Marriage" is not just a civil institution, it is also a religious ceremony. The problem is, to the extent that they are correct about this, it means the government shouldn't be involving itself with marriage at all. So I say separate the parts out: Civil unions for everyone, gay or straight, for the legal/civil/secular reasons and benefits, and let the churches decide which relationships they will bless with the word "marriage". And, incidentally, I have no doubt that if this were the case, there would be churches willing to perform homosexual marriage ceremonies. United Church of Christ, for example.

Incidentally, although CNN couldn't manage to report on Elton and David's wedding without diminishing its status with quote marks, Fox News, those evil right-wing bastards, treated the union as real throughout their version of the story. One might almost accuse them of being fair and balanced...

Also, I'm heading up to Wisconsin for Christmas, so I probably won't be posting anything until I get back next week.

Sweeeeeeeet!

So, my sweetie bought me a Lite-On 5005x DVD-Recorder for my birthday. OK, it didn't exactly involve mind-reading on her part, since I basically sent her a link to the order page on Amazon.com and said, "Gee, one of these would be really nice...hint, hint". Still, check this out: It records on damn near anything - DVDs in all the writeable formats, and CD-R/RW, both VCD and audio CD format. That was actually the main thing I was looking for - I have some old audio tapes I'd like to transfer to CD, and it seemed logical that a DVD recorder ought to also be able to record audio CDs, although this is one of the only models I could find that actually claims to be able to do so.

But that's not even the coolest part. The coolest part is that after finding this and deciding it was the one I wanted, I did a little online research and discovered that there is a simple-to-apply firmware hack that enables an additional (3-hour) LP recording mode, turns it into a region-free DVD player, and disables the Macrovision copy protection. So, I now have the ability to watch DVDs with any region encoding, and copy prerecorded (and copy-protected) VHS tapes or DVDs to a new DVD.

At the moment, I'm unwinding after hooking it up. I need to unwind because, while hooking it up, I decided I needed to dismantle my entire home audio/theater setup and reconnect everything. The cords had simply become far too entangled. Plus, the glass shelves in my component rack had become loose and dangerous, so while I had everything out, I wanted to re-tighten the screws holding them in place. So adding this simple home theater component ended up being a 5-6 hour job. But, everything's hooked up and working again, Tivo was clever enough to reschedule recording the Daily Show/Colbert Report episodes it had been planning to record while everything was unplugged, and I applied the firmware hack and verified that I now have a region-free DVD player. Yes, Chameleon, this does mean I should finally be able to watch that Doctor Who DVD you sent me. I'll let you know how I like it.

For my next trick: I want to work around some of the limitations in the system. Tivo only has one S-Video output, which is currently running to the TV. I'd like to split that so I can run it to both the TV and the new DVD recorder (instead of the icky composite connection it currently has). Likewise, I actually still need to hook the old DVD player up such that I can record DVDs. But these things can wait for another day. For now, I'm well pleased.

Music

I know all the cool kids are using those little ear buds with their MP3 players, but I hate those things: They're uncomfortable, and the sound sucks. So why hasn't someone come out with a decent pair of real headphones with an MP3 player built right into them, so you don't even need a wire running anywhere? Heck, build it into a pair of wireless headphones I can use with my home stereo, so I can use them to listen to CDs/DVDs at home without disturbing the neighbors, and then take them right out with me to work or the gym to listen to the MP3s I've loaded into them. Is there something like this that I've just never seen advertised, or should I start trying to figure out a way to make money with this idea?

Granted: With the player up on your head, you wouldn't be able to see a display screen to select songs. However, an inability to select songs doesn't seem to have kept people from buying those little teeny iPods that only play songs in random shuffle order. Or satellite radio service, either. Hey: I wonder if satellite radio recievers have gotten small enough that you could strap one of them on the other side of these hypothetical MP3 headphones... :-)

Art or porn?

Art or porn?

You scored 10 out of a possible 10
There are two explanations for how you've done so well. 1: You're a devotee of great cinematic art, and recognise key moments in film history when you see them. 2: You have a huge stash of vintage porn.

"Intelligent Design" Theory Is Satanic

1 Corinthians 1:22-23 (NIV):

Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles

Feel free to follow that link and read the entire chapter, or examine some of the other translations.

To paraphrase this passage (and some of the context): Some people require evidence (signs) proving the message of Christ, others require logic ("wisdom", and remember that Greeks pretty much invented formal logic). But Paul is saying here that you cannot arrive at God through either signs or wisdom, evidence or logic, only through faith.

Now, in order for that to be true, it must be that God's existence cannot be proven through either evidence or logic. After all, if it could, then it would be possible to arrive at God through signs or wisdom. God's message would not be "foolish", as Paul calls it - it would be demonstrable fact. So the Bible itself tells us that God's existence must be taken on faith, that there cannot be either scientific (evidentiary) or logical proof.

Therefore, the "Intelligent Design" theory, to the extent that it is remotely scientific, must be anti-Christian (if it isn't scientific, of course, then it certainly has no place in a high school science class, does it?). The underlying basis of ID is that there are some things which are so "irreducibly complex" that they must have been designed by an intelligence, and could not have come into existence in any other way.

But if that were true, then irreducible complexity would constitute a "miraculous sign" that proves God's existence, which is precisely what Paul says cannot be. In fact, in order for what Paul says to be true, there has to be a complete, coherent scientific explanation for the existence of life that doesn't involve God. If there were no such explanation, then God's existence could be demonstrated through that "miraculous sign", and faith would be unnecessary.

Therefore, ID theory attempts to undermine the Bible; it is against God. Since, by definition, anyone who is against God is serving Satan, ID advocates are Satanists. QED.

"Rape Is No Laughing Matter..."

"...unless you're raping a clown."

I really hate being put in the position of defending these people, but I have to admit: I'm beginning to be a little bit disturbed by the way we're treating sex offenders.

Various places have passed or are preparing to pass ordinances forbidding registered sex offenders from residing within 2500 feet of a school, park or child-care facility. Only some of these ordinances appear to be restricted to offenders who committed crimes against children, despite the fact that I'm not aware of any evidence that those whose victims were adults are likely to attack children as well.

Ohio wants to make them display pink license plates. If that will make our children safer, why not go one step further: Make them sew some sort of symbol on their clothes. After all, the license plates would only allow us to target identify the ones who are driving. Which do you think would be better: A big scarlet letter, or a pink triangle?

Part of the problem here is that not every jurisdiction distinguishes between, say, a man convicted of repeatedly buggering six-year-olds, and an 18-year-old convicted of having sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend. In some places, both of those people are "registered sex offenders". Also, as I said, someone who raped an adult, while clearly evil, is not necessarily a particular threat to children. But people lately seem to be using the term "sex offender" as if it were synonymous with "child molester" (unfortunately, I can't find the article I read the other day where that was really obvious).

But the problem I have is even more fundamental than that: We're starting to act as if people who commit sex crimes, specifically, have no civil liberties. Whether some crimes are worse than others, or whether we're even defining "sex offense" too broadly, is beside the point. I'm not comfortable with the idea that there is an entire class of crimes, the commission of which means that the offender has forfeited all of his natural rights for the rest of his life. If we can do that to these people, however creepy and nasty they may be, how long before the government begins to treat, say, drug dealers the same way? How about "hate crimes"? Or DUI?

This was kind of the point of the Larry Flynt case: If freedom of speech is to mean anything, then it must especially protect unpopular speech, because that is precisely the speech most likely to be censored by the majority. Likewise, if civil liberties and natural rights are to mean anything, then they must especially protect the most unpopular and reviled people in all society, because they are precisely the people most likely to be abused by the majority.

Yes, it's fun to fantasize about punishing sex criminals by castrating them with piano wire, but back in the real world, you don't really want to live under a government that would actually do something that barbaric, do you?

Incidentally, I suppose one could say very much the same thing about terrorists and those accused of supporting them...

Now that's Christmas spirit!

Go to this snopes.com page. Watch the video from one of the links they give.

I'm sending you to the snopes.com page about it, rather than one of the other multitude of places online that has this video, because they also provide a description of how it was done (and verify that it's real – I've seen it posted other places where people argued back & forth over whether it was live video or just edited together from still photos).

For Crying Out Loud

I recently decided to install the newest version of Apple's Quicktime. Now, first of all, I can't really say I've always had a love-hate relationship with Quicktime. Frankly, it's mostly just hate. I hated the way it used to assign itself as the default application for a bunch of file types without asking permission (and then continually check to make sure you hadn't changed any of them back). I hated the fact that, previously, you could end up with multiple mutually incompatible versions of it on your system, none of them working properly as a result, simply by having several different games installed simultaneously. I hate the way it just never quite fits neatly into a Windows system.

So, I downloaded the latest version. I logged in to my administrator account, installed Quicktime, and played a quick video to verify that it was working. When I logged out and logged back in to my regular limited-user account, Quicktime no longer functioned in this user account. At all. Gives an error message saying "Error 46: Could not find or load activex control". Funny, the previous version worked just fine.

Further investigation revealed it was a problem with some DLL's not being automatically registered for this user. Now, as you may know, you can register DLLs manually using a console command, regsvr32 . Tried that, didn't work. Error message provides no useful information, it just says registration failed. I next tried uninstalling, setting my user account temporarily as an admin account, and installing under that account. Quicktime now functions under this account, but not in the normal administrator account. In other words, Apple's installation package installs Quicktime in such a way that it only functions at all under the actual account you were logged into when you installed it. That's a problem because, following recommended best practices, I do most of my work logged in to my limited-user account, but some games only function when run as administrator, and since games often use Quicktime video, I need to make it work under both accounts.

Here is what I ended up having to do to fix it:

1) Log in as administrator, and temporarily set the limited user account to another admin account.
2) Switch to User account, install Quicktime.
3) Switch to true Admin account, start running a registry monitor program, and attempt to manually register the first DLL.
4) When that fails, examine the registry monitor trace to find where regsvr32 tried to change a registry setting with an "Access Denied" result, to determine what registry key needs to be changed.
5) Switch back to temporarily-admin User account, open the registry editor, find the registry key from step 4. Edit the registry key's permission settings, adding the Administrators group with full read/write permissions.
6) Switch back to the true Admin account. Repeat steps 3-6 until the DLL registers successfully (there may be several registry keys that need to have their permissions changed before it will work).
7) Repeat steps 3-7 for each of the 4 DLL's that need to be registered.
8) Reset the User account back to a limited-user account type.

Here's the problem: Apple seems to have set up their Quicktime installer under the assumption that you, the end user, use a single account for everything you do on your Windows PC. But Windows XP, especially the recent service packs, encourages you to set up a limited-user account for everyday use, and stay out of the administrator account unless truly necessary. This has always been the way serious geeks behaved, and XP now encourages regular folk to adopt the same habits. In this environment, in this day and age, why would Apple apparently not even bother to test Quicktime installation in such a system configuration? It's just baffling.

Now, it's also possible that there was something peculiar to my system that caused the problem. But since the root of the problem was a permissions issue with some registry keys specific to Quicktime, which means the registry keys themselves must have been created by the Quicktime installer, I can't imagine what there could be about my system that would be so different than what they developed/tested the installer on. The registry settings may have been created by the installer for a previous version, but surely they would have tested installing the new version over an existing install, right?

Video Game Proposal

Working title: "Play"
One-line pitch: An FPS based on kids playing with action figures.

In basic play style, this would be mostly a standard FPS - run through corridors blasting monsters, collecting power-ups, opening doors, etc. Visually, the design would be based around the concept that you are an action figure in a kid's game, and, as kids will do, he/they are making use of everything in their collection of toys.

So the environments may look like any kind of toy at all - a Star Wars-like playset, or playsets from any other toy genre for that matter (military, sci-fi, fantasy, etc.), or build from Lego bricks, or even made out of pieces of cardboard masking-taped together into rooms and corridors. Some levels may just take place on the floor and furniture of a kid's room.

Enemies would also be toys drawn from any style. Any moment you may find yourself facing bad-guy action figures, or rubber spiders, or perhaps the occasional Barbie doll (gigantic, in proportion to a standard action figure) or stuffed animal. Or even those rubber monster finger-puppets (complete with a visible finger emerging from the bottom and disappearing into the floor). Most of them should probably move in that peculiar bouncing puppet-gait children playing with toys always use for "walking".

Other than the visual style, the concept allows for some other unique points. One "power-up" possibility would be for the player to be lifted up out of the level, getting a "birds-eye" view of the playing field. Certain enemies might have a special ability, when killed, to come back to life immediately by yelling "Nuh-uh, you missed!" Somewhere in there should probably be a "Christmas" level, in which a bunch of completely new enemies appear, sequentially, accompanied by obstacles of bows and wadded wrapping paper. I have no doubt other such ideas will emerge during development.

If I had the necessary modeling/animation skills, I'd do this myself as a mod for one of the existing FPS's.

This Just Gives Me A Pre-Headache

Two Million U.S. Teens Are Pre-Diabetic
"The average level was 89.7, within the normal range, but 7 percent of the children in the study were in the pre-diabetic range" [100-125].

PRE-diabetic? There weren't enough of them with actual diabetes to frighten people, I guess, so they had to start calling essentially normal kids "pre-diabetic" in order to scare the public.

This could be the start of a whole new trend: Smokers can all be called "pre-cancerous". Anyone whose blood pressure is 125/85 or so is "pre-heart attack". It might be difficult to distinguish between the "pre-anorexic" and the "pre-obese" - probably best to just flip a coin, there.

Or maybe we could save time and just start referring to everyone as "pre-deceased".

The Horror, The Horror! It Burns My Eyes!

First, a dilemma. Or at least, it may be a dilemma for open-source GNU/Linux fanatics with no social lives: "Hmmm. I enjoy masturbating to pictures of Japanese women in bondage, but unfortunately this one is all covered with Windows logos. What am I to do?"

If you're curious as to, um, "what in the hell?" it might help to look over this Wikipedia entry. Make sure you watch the video. The list of characters might come in handy for that.

Oh well, surely it's only a matter of time before someone produces something similar just for Linux geeks, right?

Now, as if all that wasn't already bad enough, in the process of putting together this post, I accidentally ran across a page full of H. P. Lovecraft entities, depicted as cute Japanese anime schoolgirls. Remember, kids: Some things, once seen, can never be unseen.

There Are No 14-Year-Old Girls on the Internet

Xenia nabs No. 82 in sex sting
"McNeal is the 82nd suspect arrested since the part-time Xenia Internet crime unit started in March 2000."

And a Review of a Movie I Haven't Even Seen

Doom - I can tell this movie is, ahem, doomed to be craptacular just by having seen the trailer. A movie based on a first-person shooter videogame, and the trailer includes some shots of carnage from a first-person POV (from what I've read, there is a lengthy first-person segment toward the end of the film). And not just any first-person POV, but a first-person POV that precisely duplicates the first-person POV of the game, with the player's selected weapon sticking out from the right side of the screen. The astounding lack of creativity necessary, the sheer bloody literal-mindedness of duplicating the FPS POV onscreen... well, the only thing I can think of that would be worse would be using actual shots of gameplay in the movie.

Movie Update

Robots - I agree with everything Joe said about it. Pretty, but hollow. I was particularly bemused by the female love-interest character: She seemed to take the main character's side for no reason other than that the "Female Love-Interest" character slot was unfilled, so she slid into it solely in order to fulfill that expected role in the story. Also, the Rube Goldbergian "Crosstown Express" scene at the beginning was cute, but it really needed to have then become a running joke through the whole movie: Off in the background of city scenes, we should have occasionally seen one of those cage-balls whizzing through the air with a faint "aaaaaaAAAAAAAAaaaaahhhh!" audible. That sort of thing.

Land of the Dead - That's the way to do it! And yes, that's a reference to the Zombie Punch and Judy puppet show briefly visible in one scene. I'd say overall that this is not quite as good as Night or Dawn, probably about on par with Day. Certainly better than the Resident Evil movies, roughly equal or slightly better than the Dawn remake. And Romero demonstrates once again that zombies don't have to run fast to be menacing. Still, I think I'll imagine that this takes place somewhere in the middle of the earlier movies, before the events depicted in Day of the Dead (or perhaps even the start of a completely separate storyline that just happens to share the element of zombies), simply because Day is so wonderfully, bleakly apocalyptic. I like to think of that one as truly being about the very end of the world.

I Love Criterion

Criterion, makers of the best DVDs around, has an edition of Kurosawa's masterpiece, Ran, coming out this fall. Note that when it comes out, it will be the third DVD release of this movie. Yes, I already own the other two, both of which are plagued, to a greater or lesser degree, by problems in the subtitles. Mostly some typos, but there's one other thing that has bugged me about them...

So I recently submitted a comment to Criterion through their website:

Comment: Please tell me that in the subtitles for the upcoming Ran DVD, you'll get the "My...Lord" gag right.

Here's what I mean: In the scene between Kaede and Jiro, after she has seduced him, where he's getting dressed in the background and she's laying down, she starts out by saying (in Japanese) "No-... Tono?" With a significant pause between them. This translates as "My... Lord?", "tono" being the Japanese word for "lord", and "no-" being a prefix meaning "mine".

The way she says it, with that pause, it is as if she is unsure what their relationship is, now that they have made love. "My...Lord?" or "My...Lover?", "My...Husband?" (or, given Kaede's nature, as if she is *pretending* to be unsure...).

The only version I've seen that subtitled that line in a way that preserved that hesitation was an old VHS release. There, it was translated with "My..." on one subtitle, and "...Lord?" on a separate subtitle a moment later. Both DVD releases up to now have just rendered it as "My lord?" which, while technically correct, utterly fails to convey the significance of the line.

I'm just hoping I can count on Criterion to finally get it right.

I just recieved the following response (after an earlier preliminary note that the rep had forwarded the question to the folks working on the subtitles):

Dear Scott,

Our DVD of RAN will include the ellipsis in question.

November 22 seems to be the release date. I can't wait.

Wow. Just, wow.

I've written on the general topic of Jack Thompson before, and given my libertarian politics and love of video games, my opinion of his crusade against them should come as no surprise. Not that I don't understand him: Headline-chasing is so much more profitable than ambulance-chasing if you're a useless hack attorney, isn't it?

But the latest round is something to behold. First, Jack offers $10,000 to charity if any video game company will publish a game based on his proposal. I'm not going to go into great detail about the proposal; suffice to say, it is clearly the lunatic ravings of a disordered mind. I will just point out this, though: His point, such as it is, is apparently that when game publishers refuse to publish a game in which the player massacres game publishers, it'll be evidence that the publishers fear the effects such a game would have:

How about it, video game industry? I've got the check and you've got the tech. It's all a fantasy, right? No harm can come from such a game, right? Go ahead, video game moguls. Target yourselves as you target others. I dare you.

I will simply mention here that such a game not only already exists, but Thompson mentions it by name in his very proposal: In Postal 2, one of the levels is set in the offices of Running With Scissors (the developer of Postal 2), where you are free to slaughter the developers to your heart's content.

So, enter Penny Arcade. Gabe sent Jack an email the other day pointing out that $10,000 was pretty lame compared to the half-million dollars worth of charity gamers had given through their charity, Child's Play. Jack's response, apparently, was to call Gabe and yell at him for a few minutes, including saying that:

He suggested that if Gabe mailed him again, he would be sued so fast that his head would "spin,"

This is a practicing attorney, remember. Threatening to sue someone for the vile, malicious tort of sending him an email.

Now, a conservative and anti-violent-video-game organization, the National Institute on Media and the Family, has asked Jack to kindly stop mentioning their name "in any way that would give the impression that we support your efforts." Jack's response to this bit of news includes statements like:

He is the latest casualty in an escalating war started by a reckless industry whose socipathic [sic] poster child is [Take-Two Interactive president] Paul Eibeler. Dr. Walsh has now cast his [lot] and his efforts, whether wittingly or unwittingly, with him.

At this point, I believe that Jack Thompson could not make himself look any more ridiculous if he started wearing a big red nose and floppy shoes.

Whedon, You Magnificent Bastard

Serenity - First of all: Go see it. If you are already a fan of the show, chances are, you already have. If you aren't already a fan of the show, go see the movie anyway. If possible, spend the 14 hours necessary to watch all the episodes of the show first - you'll appreciate the film even more - but the two friends of ours who had never seen the show before we took them to the movie still loved it. If you like science fiction at all, you owe it to yourself to see this movie.

It's Han Solo done better than George Lucas ever managed, even back when Han still shot first. It's a better depiction of space as "the final frontier" than any of the Treks. And it's all done without resorting to having sound effects in space like everyone else since 2001 has felt the need to do (there is sound during the Big Climactic Space Battle, but their excuse there is that it takes place in the upper atmosphere of a planet, not in full vacuum).

I'm not even going to describe the plot, because ideally you should see the movie without having read any spoilers* first. I will, for that very reason, praise the trailers for the film: All the ones I've seen manage to give a sense of what the movie is like without actually giving away the entire story (as most trailers any more seem wont to do). It includes a bunch of humerous lines of dialogue, most of which occur within the first fifteen minutes of the actual film, thus leaving the rest of the movie to be discovered as you watch it.

A quick aside about the TV show: Prior to a few weeks ago, neither Brenda nor I had ever particularly gotten into Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We both thought the movie was kinda cute, and I had gathered that the general consensus was that the TV series was even better, but we'd never bothered to watch it.

As I wrote earlier, the Sci-Fi channel recently started showing Firefly, and I TiVo'd the first few episodes. On the strength of those, Brenda insisted I go out and purchase the DVD set so we could watch the rest of them without delay. On the strength of watching the rest of the episodes, we have since purchased all of the Buffy DVDs, and most of the Angel DVDs, and are working our way through them. Firefly is that good, that I immediately trusted that whatever Whedon had done in the earlier series had to be worth watching (and I haven't been disappointed). Serenity is of similar quality.

*Later on, after you've seen the film, come back here and follow this link if you want to see the inspirational story I suspect Joss Whedon had in mind when he wrote the line, "I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar..." That version doesn't quite use exactly the same words, but the sentiment is certainly there, and it makes sense in context, looked at with hindsight.

And then go read Julan Sanchez's Chock-Full-O-Spoilers review in Reason for a discussion of some of the libertarian themes in the film, as well as references to Sartre and Camus. And this one for more such discussion, and links to even more.