Can't Sleep, Robot Will Eat Me

Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies

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

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

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

"Big Man Japan"

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

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

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

Puzzle From Hell

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

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

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

We didn't let it beat us, though:

What the Hell?

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

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

Gimme gimme gimme

My Amazon.com wish list:

Review

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

Well, That Didn't Take Long

Her name, we think, is Binky:


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

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

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


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

RIP, Suzi

She passed away some time last Sunday night.

Movie Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

Financial Reporters as Faith Healers

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

Every malady does one of three things if left untreated:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And also:

Things I Learned From Watching Turistas

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

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

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

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

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

Audiosurf

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

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



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

LOTRO

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

Spore

Stuff I've created with the Spore Creature Creator.

Visit Spore.com

Movie Review

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

The elaborate bank heist that opens the film.

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

The cross-dressing Joker.

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

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

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

The Two-Face makeup.

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

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

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

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

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

The Cycle of Creation

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

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

Guitar Heroes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movie Reviews

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

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

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

And, another in a continuing series:

Things I Learned from Saw III

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

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

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

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

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

Bunch Of Commies

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

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

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

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

Geeky Cool

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

Where Do I Sign Up?

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