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