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sunday, april 30
I have to say, I dig the way Andy draws: throw fascism, anarchism, Dürer, Lichtenstein, and Warhol into a blender; set to purée; serve chilled with a slice of Clockwork Orange. 9:30 PM + Great quote: "If two people have steady eye contact for more than 10 seconds, they're either gonna fight or fuck." 3:11 PM + More laughs. 2:50 PM + It's a good day for listening to this. 2:06 PM + Laugh. 12:46 PM + I really dig it whenever Salon's Andrew O'Hehir reviews a movie, because the dude just nails it every time. A few months ago he offered up a pitch-perfect pan of Mission to Mars (at the time, easily the worst film of Y2K), and now he brutalizes that film's runner-up in the badness sweepstakes, Where the Heart Is. My favorite line: "When a boom mike bobbing in and out of the frame interrupted a nervous, tender scene between teenage single mom Novalee Nation (Natalie Portman) and her geeky librarian lover, Forney (James Frain), the preview audience around me began to howl in outrage." That's exactly the kind of detail I want from a review. Of course, presumably pressed for time and space, Mr. O'Hehir doesn't provide a complete litany of the film's horrors, since I don't think Salon's formatting could accommodate the requisite nine concentric circles of hell. But god bless him, he scatters spoilers throughout his prose like so many landmines -- which isn't a problem when the film in question is already rotten to the core. (FYI: I wanted to see something else, but I was dragged to it somewhat against my will and under the misimpression that Ashley Judd might get nekkid. In case you've never noticed, she gets nekkid quite often in her movies, no matter the context.) 11:38 AM + Why does this page remind me of those old Leisure Suit Larry games I used to play on my Apple IIgs when I was a little kid? (The ones I had to get my mom to buy me.) [via justin] 1:12 AM + saturday, april 29 A friend writes, "this is kinda shady." Agreed. Although I think it's just as shady how the article, for all its brevity, is totally designed to lead you to make certain inferences that aren't necessarily justified ... yet. Still, I'm disinclined to put anything past the Feds. 8:48 PM + Does anyone else think Elián González looks like a scared Capuchin monkey in this picture? (And some of these shots look like they're from The Onion. Like this one. And this one -- gotta love the caption: "his new dog, Sinde" -- that oughtta take the sting out of all the media manhandling.) That little boy is gonna be mightily screwed up by the time this is all over. 1:13 PM + The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle is shaping up to be this summer's Inspector Gadget -- i.e., a glittery CGI trash pile that'll score a scandalous but slightly underwhelming $100 million due to spillover business from more successful pictures, as parents cave-in to the demands of rugrats coked up on high-fructose corn syrup. It'll soak up even more cash overseas, where incidentals like a coherent screenplay aren't of particular import to the Tom and Jerry crowd. Finally, it'll do a tidy business on video, when the same parents who snoozed through it in theaters decide it's a perfect addition to their babysitting -- er, home video -- library. Bah. 12:44 PM + Um, yikes. This is an action figure for kids? And this? And this? "Mommy, how do you spell pneumatic?" (From the upcoming X-Men flick.) 12:13 PM + Ev & Co. reenact the Blair Witch Project. 3:58 AM + Identify, indemnify; placate, implicate. 2:13 AM + friday, april 28 "Follow me here..." Fair enough. I like the commentary. 9:40 PM + My buddy Billy sent me a quick, clever forward purporting to be the transcript of an NPR interview between a female broadcaster and a US Army general. Of course, I ran a search for it online so I could link to it for y'all. (A little bit of bastard-Zen philosophizing: if it ain't online, does it really exist?) In my investigations, I came across this informative page, which not only repeats the anecdote, but debunks it. Normally, I wouldn't just link to something that too many people have probably already seen (with certain qualifications, of course), but this falls under full disclosure. Enjoy. 9:32 PM + This sucks. 8:08 PM + My favorite Stupid Blogger Trick™: when it hangs interminably and deletes my blog file. (Maybe Blogger™ operates under a subset of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- i.e., interacting with it in any way whatsoever will yield unpredictable results. Grumble.) 12:42 PM + When veteran thespian (and inveterate party animal) Oliver Reed died ninety percent of the way into the production of the upcoming toga epic, Gladiator, the producers were faced with a dilemma. The costs of reshooting his scenes with another actor were prohibitive; so instead, they used bleeding-edge digital effects to graft his face onto a body double, and finished his scenes that way. According to this article, "A three-dimensional image of Reed was scanned into computers and manipulated through programs that allow his face to smile and talk." Okay, that's intrinsically creepy, but what skeezes me out even more is that there's no mention of when exactly they scanned him in. Did they already have a scan on file? Or did they scan the corpse? If it was the latter, I think I have to go pee. The article goes on to discuss how digital effects have made period films more viable in general. I have to agree. I've always felt that futuristic films are inherently susceptible to a certain amount of fabulism (i.e., fancifulness), but as far as authenticity is concerned, it's historicity that's best served by seamless simulation. (A recent standout, in my mind: the subtle and highly effective composite backgrounds in Elizabeth.) 10:24 AM + thursday, april 27 I'm a monochrome sample. Cool. (And in good company, too.) 10:38 PM + Just caught The Virgin Suicides. Admittedly, it's a much more auspicious debut for Sofia Coppola, as director, than was her previous debut, as an "actress," in The Godfather: Part III. (When I first witnessed her disastrously limp participation in that oedipal opus, I was filled with contempt ... which has since softened to pity, but that's still a put-down.) The Virgin Suicides is a competent and stylistically assured effort. My main exception to it is that it really has much less to say than it seems to think it does. There's a lot of flat irony (which I will summarize thus: "Gosh. The seventies." Roll of the eyes.), and an even flatter narrative. We already know the titular fivesome is headed toward extinction. The film merely manages to capture some fragments of that trajectory. And while the broken-ness of the progression is obviously intentional, it ultimately fails to justify itself. Yes, its dreaminess conveys the delicate, stifled eroticism of a certain sort of "old fashioned" upbringing, but since neither the girls nor their parents (battle-ax Kathleen Turner and nerd-creep James Woods) are rendered in anything but the broadest, feathery (-haired) strokes, it all plays out like one of those static, inert cautionary sex-ed films they made us watch in the sixth grade (an impression only compounded by Giovanni Ribisi's intrusive water-torture voiceover narration). Or a really long feminine hygiene commercial. Flush. Next. 10:24 PM + Hmmm. Isn't the First Amendment supposed to protect parody? 5:47 PM + Nifty cool and pretty damn slick, in a speculative, circa-1987 sorta way. [via slashdot] 10:02 AM + Just a thought ... maybe Microsoft's continuing stock spiral is a controlled dive of sorts. My buddy Marc pointed out yesterday that, in the past, the company has employed all sorts of creative accounting to bolster its bottom line. (I guess it actually makes more money from various investments than it does from sales of shrink-wrapped software ... although I'm probably oversimplifying hideously ... I'm an English major, not a business major.) But lately, it's been issuing warnings and stuff. So this got me thinking. Ever seen The Hudsucker Proxy? Remember how the Hudsucker Industries executive board decides to depress the company's stock on purpose in order to buy back large quantities of it? Maybe that's what's going on. Actually, since I barely know what I'm talking about anyway, why not extend the analogy to include another great industrial-dystopia fantasy -- Batman Returns? Maybe Bill Gates is gonna build a massive power plant outside Seattle that secretly siphons energy out of the city, à la Max Shreck. It could happen ... rrrright. 7:43 AM + wednesday, april 26 A strangely appropriate confluence: commercial propaganda plus political propaganda equals parody. [via underachievers] 11:22 PM + Making fairly good progress considering I only implemented this design ... yesterday, was it? Anyway, I've made a few more sections live. There's a bit of personal information, some stuff about traveling, and some readings (well, only one book so far -- haven't had much time for personal reading this year, but that ought to change during the summer). The format is more or less an evolution of my oft-mentioned old site ... which will be taken down as soon as I graduate and land a job (it's listed on my current résumé, ya see). The rest of the sections will be up soon. I just have to fiddle with 'em a little. 6:55 PM + Okay, let me qualify an earlier remark. I hate a large chunk of California, but I dig San Francisco. 4:49 PM + Happiness is getting props from someone whose work you respect and admire. 4:34 PM + I hate California. I love this. 2:55 PM + Passerby offers an apt summation of yesterday's click-through windfall: "Derek points me to dink who points me to highindustrial." Precisely. Like chaos theory ... not really. More like trickle-down, but a drip is a drip. Who's thirsty? 12:20 PM + Several weeks ago, there was a rather pointless discussion in my Independent Filmmaking class (a confederacy of dunces if ever there was one) about how only Americans are stupid enough to mimic the acts of violence they witness in movies and on television. This is complete one-way-glass, wraparound-shades bullshit. Basically, individuals commit crimes, and any given individual is not a nation. To paraphrase Tolstoy, all shitty people are shitty in their own unique way. To wit, with French inflections. 12:03 PM + I spent about fifteen minutes on the phone yesterday discussing the relative merits of The Phantom Menace versus Batman and Robin with my little brother, who's six. Small children aren't overly concerned with minor details like budget bloat, hack directors, and terrible screenplays, so our exchange was mostly limited to hardware -- light sabers and freeze rays and whatnot. I abstained from my usual cynicism, so as not to warp his post-toddler brain. I did make a few attempts to shift the topic over to The Iron Giant, which is dearer to my heart, but, alack, he would have none of it. 12:00 PM + tuesday, april 25 What the hell does "hell for leather" mean, anyway? 10:46 PM + My buddy Jon made like King Solomon today and presented a modest proposal of sorts regarding the whole Cuban Boy imbroglio: "Why don't they just cut him in half?" I certainly don't doubt that they've considered it. Shudder. 3:13 PM + Just plain creepy. 8:35 AM + Uh-oh -- here we go again. 7:01 AM + A more functional redesign, in preparation for post-college life. As I transition the format of my old site to this domain, the links across the top will become active ... in due course. 1:09 AM + sunday, april 23 Nice. Keeping the Faith had almost no drop-off during its second week in wide release, which means it's got legs. I'm Right this minute, I'm listening to ... (Ordinarily, I find wallpaper electronica to be pretty ... well, flat ... flaccid. The overrated and, frankly, disappointing score from The Virgin Suicides being a recent example ... although I should probably listen to it some more before I start issuing such declamatory/defamatory remarks. But Fight Club ... music every bit as jagged -- gleaming, serrated -- as the film. Happiness.) 12:16 PM + saturday, april 22 Yikes. [via psionic] 8:09 PM + Caught U-571, which is a fairly middling WWII yarn. "Middling" is very precisely the word I want to use, as the film lacks a beginning and an end. It seems director Jonathan Mostow is so captivated by his central premise that he more or less fails to properly frame the story. The credits literally begin to roll just as the climax has petered out. The performances are adequate (Jon Bon Jovi mercifully has only three or four mumbly lines of dialog); the visual effects are somewhat sub-par for a $60 million production (obvious use of models and water tanks; clumsy digital composites); and the cinematography is extremely perfunctory -- neither gritty nor glossy. But don't get me wrong, the movie isn't a wash-out. It holds together competently. It's just not very exciting. 1:49 AM + friday, april 21 No wonder Americans are among the fattest people in the world. 4:59 PM + thursday, april 20 Hmmm ... Mya or Ananova ...? 1:36 AM + My buddy Will says this vid gives him nightmares. Me too. (So why do I keep replaying it?) 12:03 AM + It's good to remember. 12:01 AM + wednesday, april 19 My friend Saryn has been brainstorming ideas for her final film class project. She brought this up last night during a screening of the new Ethan Hawk-starring Hamlet (more on that egg-and-cheese atrocity later). She mentioned her sudden interest in the Philadelphia Zoo. I told her that I remembered there being some sort of fire there a few years ago, in which the monkey house and its primate occupants were reduced to ashes. Admittedly, any violent loss of zoo animals is a sad, sad thing -- but in the context of a snarky student short film, it becomes subversive fodder. So we tossed around titles like "Monkey Panic" and "Did You Replace All the Monkeys that Died in the Fire?" Later, Saryn sent me this creepy link -- whence have sprung a couple of possible scenarios for her film. (A) "Mommy, what happened to the monkeys?" "Well, Junior, there was a hideous fire and they all died screaming and flinging themselves against the bars of their cages." With some trepidation: "B-burned alive?" "You betcha!" Junior is sad. "Why the sad face, little man? I've got a little surprise for you. You know what happens to good little monkeys who die in horrible fires?" "They go to heaven?" "No, silly, heaven is for white people. Monkeys are ... well, this is what happens to monkeys..." The rest is left to the imagination. (I doubt most children are very pleased at being duped into seeing a bunch of "memorial" skeletons. Yuck.) (B) Since the fateful blaze was set alight on Christmas Eve, begin with a voiceover of a little girl reciting the opening lines of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas ... accompanied by shots of various "cute" animals sleeping (i.e., "not stirring") in their cages. Then interrupt the soundtrack with some ska-punk music (preferably more punk than ska), and have the girl growl, Exorcist-style, "BUT THE MONKEYS WERE ON FIRE," accompanied by a "disturbed" child's drawings of what happened (remember that cat enema page? the old Crushed Cards site would also work as inspiration, except it's pretty much defunct). Okay, back that paper I'm supposed to be writing.... 6:38 PM + Anyone wanna recommend a novel for me to read? As I've discussed before, I already have a list I must get to, but I think I need something to cleanse the palate first. I've been reading a lot of jacked-up, surreal or hyper-real stuff lately. I'm in the mood for something more classically proportioned, more discreetly elegant. Something along the lines of The Age of Innocence, say, or I Was Amelia Earhart or The Secret History or ... maybe even The Sheltering Sky. Suggestions? 12:55 AM + tuesday, april 18 I like. [via suffocate] 10:20 PM + The Japanese are so deadpan (no pun). [via malapropism] 6:06 PM + This is plenty hilarious. Another reason not to keep pets. (Does anyone else think it's a peculiar affectation among humans -- animals themselves -- to domesticate other animals for non-agricultural purposes? I mean, isn't that the sort of frivolous behavior that's gonna nail our karma come extinction-time? Admittedly, I'm being totally one-sided about this. There's lots of frivolous behavior that I completely condone and indulge, but pets smell bad and ... well, most of them aren't very smart. And did I already mention the part about smelling bad?) [via go2mac] 3:21 PM + Britney Spears' new song is stuck in my head ... "oops," indeed. Most unfortunate. (On the track, she sounds like a cross between Katie Holmes and Donald Duck.) 10:59 AM + This holds promise, assuming it's executed properly. Of course, John Carpenter's filmography is a litany of hell crap, even though he continues to entertain a core fan base. But all that aside, and speaking strictly in terms of the project's rough schematics -- coolly disaffected flights of capitalistic future shock (or future schlock, in this case) can be slick and invigorating. Aliens (wonderful for so many reasons) is a case in point. Another: Total Recall. (I'm supposed to say Blade Runner, but I'm no fan of Ridley Scott. Dude overplays his hand ... although I will say that Gladiator is looking pretty prime. Time will tell.) 12:25 AM + monday, april 17 "Ad nauseam" being one of my favorite Latin expressions, I'm generally disinclined to promote encyclicals, but given that this one involves small children, and small children are entitled to experience everything (well, everything wholesome, anyway) at least once -- even the excesses of the internet -- I'm passing along a notice from what is purportedly Ms. Griffin's fourth grade social studies class at the West Elementary School in Stoughton, Massachusetts. Ms. Griffin's students are studying geography, see, and are asking people to email them with their "city/town, state/province, and country." They will be plotting the results on a world map in their classroom. So drop 'em a line: Karen_Griffin@stoughton.k12.ma.us Near as I can tell, the address is legitimate (i.e., it's not a front for a porno clearinghouse). I'm presuming they'll be getting loads of Stateside shout-outs, so I encourage all you international folks out there to write them, toward their edification. Tell your buddies. Peace. 7:28 PM + Wow ... I thought Edward Gorey died a long time ago. Guess not. In some ways, I think Tim Burton's already inherited his mantle. 3:06 PM + This article is piffle, but something caught my eye: "Hopkins was knighted in 1993 and the University of Wales gave him an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in 1988, the same year he donated £1 million to help preserve Snowdon, Wales' tallest mountain, according to BBC News." Okay, my question is: How exactly does one "preserve" a mountain? Was it in danger of falling over? Or perhaps suffering from a dearth of picturesque snow and fauna? I mean, what exactly were the measures taken to that effect? Are they talking about ecological conservation? Or what? Weird. (It seems somewhat unnatural to attempt to preserve artifacts of nature, since nature is a dynamic and self-defining thing to begin with. Then again, I could be missing the point entirely. After all, I don't recycle.) 1:35 PM + Ivory tower penis envy. (Incidentally -- yeah, I saw that intriguing little picture and had to find a bigger version of it; ergo, my previous post.) 12:57 PM + This photo of the Keck Observatory in Hawaii is beautiful, almost surrealistic -- simple geometry reflecting the elementary nature of astronomic inquiry, and concomitantly belying the underlying complexity of the technology involved. Two scoops of vanilla amidst whipped-cream clouds, abutting an ocean of air. 12:49 PM + I hope this isn't true. Sounds like one of the signs of the Apocalypse. 12:09 PM + I know I already gave this props a few days ago, but I really do think it's funny. The diction is deceptively colloquial and the insinuations are surprisingly astute. Clever, understated parody. 11:36 AM + Uh-oh -- even more tabs. Ugly ugly ugly. [thanks, marc] 11:12 AM + She has a nice voice. 2:32 AM + sunday, april 16 I take that back -- this is way scarier. I think I'm emotionally scarred. (Actually, ya know what? They look sorta like those talking Chicken McNuggets in the old McDonald's ads. Those were scary too. Food should never talk. Scary scary scary.) 7:17 PM + Do you like scary movies? My friend Bill from California was nice enough to pass along some screen captures from my all-time favorite horror movie, Baby Geniuses. (Warning: not for the faint of heart.) The only thing scarier, by my reckoning, is the Shroud of Turin. Jeepers! 3:56 PM + I tend to acquire books as they catch my interest and then tackle them collectively during the summer, when the hours are more forgiving. On this year's docket so far, in no particular order: The Physics of Consciousness, by Evan Walker; The Martian Race, by Gregory Benford; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers; The Keys to the Kingdom, by Kim Masters; All Tomorrow's Parties, by William Gibson; and Alice in Many Tongues, by Warren Weaver. Experience tells me that at least five or six more titles will have accrued by summer's end, but these just happen to be my most recent 1-Click orders. 2:25 PM + I got food poisoning yesterday. That was loads of ... well, I'm supposed to say "fun" with a sarcastic rolling of the eyes, but why beat around the bush? I was laid up in bed all day, must have slept for something like twelve hours. Ginger ale is my new best friend. I'm still recovering. My pancreas sends its regards. 2:12 AM + saturday, april 15 Through a glass, darkly. 11:09 PM + "For a brief moment, it appeared that the Web was going to be the perfect high tech battering ram to cram Americanese down everybody's throats. The fact that the lexicon of MTV was the mother tongue of the first generation of webzines and chat rooms seemed to ensure the dominance of English as the global lingua franca well into the 21st century. Americans didn't need translation -- at most, we needed a phrase book when we wanted to soak up local color in a country so backward they didn't speak our language. 'The only thing I'd rather own than Windows,' Sun's Scott McNealy declared to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1998, 'is English.'" A great article in the latest Wired on Machine Translation (computers facilitating useable exchange between languages -- the holy grail being some approximation of Star Trek's "Universal Translator"). Suggested further reading: Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which combines ancient mythology with popular culture in a way that puts Indiana Jones to shame. 11:48 AM + friday, april 14 Okay, apparently the main character in this film is a chick, but when my friend Amy and I saw a poster for it downtown, we were like, "Man, that's a dude." I mean -- look at her. I guess that's just a really unflattering shot they're featuring there. I dunno. The actress' name is Rachel Griffiths, and by all accounts she's a female, but I'm still not convinced. Scary. There's an ad in the current issue of Premiere featuring the same photograph. Whoever approved it should be fired. 7:30 PM + Corporate hijinx: More good press for Microsoft; and yet another reason to dislike EverQuest. (I dislike video games in general -- 1998's grossly under-appreciated Grim Fandango excepted -- but EverQuest holds a special place in the pit of my stomach. When I interned at Sony last summer, many of the drones would play it during lunch instead of ... say ... going outside. And we're talking Manhattan, here -- lots to do and see. But no ... not when there were magic amulets to be traded. Grrr. In all fairness, the people at Sony were lousy human beings for a plethora of reasons ... I'd be remiss in blaming it all on their affinity for a lame D&D simulation.) 11:41 AM + (Shameless plug:) The job search continues. Graduation looms nuclear ... six weeks and some change ... tick tick tick. I'd like to have the employment thing worked out, because I plan on traveling most of the summer, and I'd rather not get b(l)ogged down in unprofitable dilettantism upon my return. Looking, looking, looking ... sigh. (Ideal work loci: SF, NYC, Toronto, Vancouver, Seattle, London, Paris ... Barcelona ... New Zealand ... hehe. Anywhere but here. Four years in one place is enough.) 3:26 AM + My buddy Jon got written up in the school paper yesterday. He recently sold his first screenplay to MGM. He says that once he's famous, Josh and I can be in his posse. Well, actually ... specifically ... Jon said Josh can be a baby genius and I can be his wrangler ... but why split hairs? Either way we'll get to indulge in capers ... like, say, toppling Stonehenge ... while Jon is busy casting Oliver Platt in his next film. (Yeah, there are some in-jokes in here.) 1:19 AM + They've got to be kidding. [via psionic] 12:05 AM + thursday, april 13 I just came back from the symphony. I should go more often. (Well, I'm going again on Saturday. It's a start.) It helps me think. The graduated darkness of the music hall, the lambency of the orchestra ... it draws you into your obsessions. It's a good thing. 10:33 PM + Coolness quotient. 6:27 PM + Hmmm. Blogger sure is down a lot. I guess it's a server thing. 5:06 PM + Repellent yet fascinating. And very sad -- for the terrible ways in which people dehumanize each other, and are then further dehumanized by a system ostensibly erected to ensure our basic human equity. A terrible cascade, a downpour. Sorrowful. Sometimes unavoidable, perhaps? Perhaps. The perpetual dilemma of human misconduct. [via rainybaby] 5:05 PM + Rabi's right, this is nifty. 5:05 PM + This is actually pretty cool. (Too bad it's at Wesleyan. Snicker.) 2:30 PM + Gag. Sort of like Hannibal Lecter telling you that digestive enzymes are good for your complexion. 11:16 AM + This is intriguing. 11:15 AM + A dream from last night, still lingering: Things started off with me defaulting on some sort of (credit card?) payment and being sent to a small town in New Hampshire as "punishment." I use quotes because, in my dream, the town was beautiful, and I was "incarcerated" in a hotel not unlike the one from The Shining, although its main atrium was more reminiscent of the Amber Room in Russia's Catherine Palace. Flash forward to me traversing the town's immaculate main street in the quickening dusk, having just missed the last (eight o'clock) screening at the only movie theater. So I went back to my hotel room and found it already furnished with my belongings, as if I had lived there once before -- or had been for a while, maybe forever. There was no television in the room. I began rifling through drawers and cabinets, looking for something to read. Curiously, I happened across the Book of Mormon. Then I woke up. Being a thoroughly irreligious person, I find no significance in any of this, although I can't imagine what was stewing in my subconscious to have conjured it. 11:13 AM + Fact of the day: Venezuelans have the best sex. [thanks, marc] 10:23 AM + wednesday, april 12 This is spare and well-written, almost a prose poem. 10:57 PM + So I attended this totally last-minute, snarky, digitally-projected screening of American Psycho last night. One of those "let's build word-of-mouth by showing it to college hipster-posers before it goes wide" deals. There were ads for underarm deodorant attached to the ... um ... "reel." (Met with sarcastic cheers and laughter from the audience.) How did I like the film? I thought it was pretty tedious -- a surprisingly inert, airless thing. I remember there's this one part where Christian Bale brings down this shiny, expensive axe on Jared Leto's face (it's in the trailer, I'm not ruining anything) and the resulting spurt of blood hits his own face -- only, just half his face, as it so happens. I remember saying to one of my friends, "Gosh, just half his face." And received the reply, deadpan: "Symbolism." And then Christian Bale turns completely around, so his relatively pristine left facial hemisphere is visible to the audience, and we all just sort of groaned.... So my verdict is: amateurish. Like filming the "surprise" ending in broad (as opposed to heretofore artificial) daylight, with the camera suddenly looking UP at Christian Bale. That's totally filmmaking for beginners. In a movie that's attempting to satirize something that's already very obvious and overstated (i.e., the 1980s), a lack of subtlety is a fatal lapse. D.O.A. 10:10 PM + Humorous disinformation is a good thing. 8:43 PM + Like Ryan, I also have a low tolerance for supposedly humorous email forwards, but you've just gotta appreciate this. [via sixfoot6] 6:38 PM + The upcoming Rocky and Bullwinkle movie already looks horrible -- and now there's this CVS tie-in. What, Kmart wasn't available? How low can you go? [thanks, marc] 6:31 PM + If you leaned out my window and looked straight up, you would see ... 12:45 PM + Overheard: "I was stupid, they were snotty; we were collectively unpleasant." 12:30 PM + A friend writes: "It seems stupid at first, but you never know when you'll need to know how to prepare human flank steaks." (Have I mentioned that I've been eating more vegetables lately?) 12:24 PM + Priceless. 10:26 AM + Enjoy. 12:24 AM + tuesday, april 11 Please tell me that dude in the picture is not Cate Blanchett's husband. 11:41 PM + The article may be titled "Going to Pot," but it's really about the pot coming to you. [thanks, marc] 7:57 PM + There's a latency period between the dead-tree publication of a Wired article and the posting of its online analog, but now that the April issue is live, I'd like to direct your attention to this piece. It's about Lake Vostok -- "gin-clear," 150 miles long, 31 miles across, 1800 feet deep ... and hermetically sealed beneath 2.5 miles of Antarctic ice. It hasn't been disturbed in nearly 30 million years. The technology employed to study it is fascinating -- the implications for exo/biology even more so: "A kind of ultimate time capsule, Lake Vostok is a perfect laboratory for investigating evolution and illuminating the possibilities of life farther off." It's a good read. It made plane-hopping in Spain last month more tolerable. 9:48 AM + Whoever wrote this sentence deserves some sort of raise: "Cabbie Crack said the Hollywood star was a joy to drive from the moment he got into the taxi munching a cheese and tomato sandwich." Cabbie Crack. Anyone wanna register that as a domain? I hereby grant you permission and will even waive the usual finder's fee. 8:20 AM + Enjoy. 6:54 AM + This is just stunning, absolutely beautiful, but ... er ... what is it? [via malapropism] 1:00 AM + Askin' for trouble: So this uReach internet voice messaging thing has been going around ... so I thought, why not try it out ... so why dontcha put on your sexy best voice and leave me a message: 1-877-487-9955, extension 655. The call is free, apparently. I just wanna see how it works, and this seems like the perfect forum for such an investigation. Chalk it up to curiosity/perversion. I couldn't find a "cancel service" option anywhere on the site, although you can be certain I'll do just that once the fun has seeped out of this exercise. But I'm getting ahead of myself -- the fun has only just begun! So c'mon, be a sport. I'll give you some link love if you do. (By the by: if you already know me, are related to me, or in some way speak to me on a regular basis, don't participate -- that would be, like, incest or something.) Okay, enough provisos and quid pro quos -- call the number! 12:47 AM + monday, april 10 Hey, is the Mac version of Opera ever gonna be released? 11:36 PM + If watermelons are mostly water, you should be able to dice and freeze them to use as ice cubes, right? Or would that be gross? (Think fibrous watermelon bits floating around in your drink.) 8:00 PM + Josh is right: At first I was creeped out by it, but then I just ... kept ... staring ... 6:47 PM + Last week I wondered if the stuff inside your stomach after you've eaten is pretty much barf. This week, a friend with some sudden and unfortunate experience in the matter writes in with her assessment (excerpted to protect the privacy of the projectile vomiter): "...the food didn't even get broken down ... (refuting your eating food which becomes puke theory in this instance ;), but the bathroom smells like marinara sauce and hot hoagies now. yuck." Hmmm. Inconclusive. Case remains open. I have little personal anecdotal evidence to contribute, I'm sad to say. I haven't thrown up since I was sixteen -- in a mishap commonly referred to as the Eleventh Grade Community Service Ice Cream Sundae Incident. Chocolate syrup, M&M's, nuts. Everywhere. It wasn't happiness. 3:16 PM + Cute. 1:30 PM + I guess there's been some talk about looksmart's weblog directory -- namely, how it ain't exactly comprehensive. Regardless, I appear to be on it ... not that this impersonal descriptive blurb is gonna score me very many hits: "Daily commentary includes entertainment, current events, and culture, and provides the necessary Internet sources." I mean, they could've at least said something about retrograde sex monkeys. 12:06 PM + Nice redesign, Ryan. 11:19 AM + Yeah, this gives me the creeps too. "Hide-your-face-in-the-dirt embarrassing" is a pretty good summation. (And check out the stultifying trailer.) Frankly, I can't imagine the rationale behind greenlighting an obvious turkey like "Battlefield Earth." (I have my suspicions, but I don't feel like inciting any litigation.) 7:52 AM + This looks laughably bad, and this doesn't even manage that. 12:01 AM + sunday, april 9 There's something beautifully understated about this entry in the 5k award contest -- rather like the wallpaper in a child's bedroom come gently to life. (Feed the frog by dragging the flies into its mouth. Requires a DHTML-compliant browser.) 10:38 PM + A veritable vomit odyssey. [via rainybaby] 10:20 PM + Riddled with irony. [thanks, marc] 4:39 PM + "Eighty-one homeless people are about to move into a shelter in Novato, California, that more closely resembles a college campus than a sanctuary for the down and out." Hmmm. That's funny, you could say the complete opposite is true of most university dorms. This exercise in misinformation (all lies, I tell you -- alert HUD!) is a case in point. 4:03 PM + The award for most soothing use of an incidental Flash animation goes to ... 2:44 PM + Any book review that employs the phrase "retrograde sex monkey" is worth a perusal, says I. 2:42 PM + Blow-job privileges aside, being the President of the United States of America sucks for any one of several reasons. Today's reason -- having to issue trite, impersonal, Miss America-esque statements whenever there's a tragedy. To wit: "This terrible loss of life is a reminder of how so many men and women in the nation's military put their lives at risk, each and every day, so that we might be a free people, and the cause of peace can be advanced throughout the world." You want fries with that? I mean, is anyone really comforted by this mad-lib, magnetic-poetry jingoist boilerplate? (Am I allowed to say the President sucks? Is Echelon gonna frisk me?) 12:10 PM + Those wacky French are at it again. (And check out the rack on that bust.) 10:35 AM + Drip. Drip. Drip. 5:35 AM + This is funny as shit, and perpetrated with more subtlety than is immediately apparent. (This entry is my favorite.) [via thinkdink] 2:01 AM + Can anyone tell me the name of the classical music piece that comes on about thirty seconds into this teaser? I like it, dunno what it is. 1:44 AM + saturday, april 8 Something I have to see for myself one of these days: an auroral display. 9:56 PM + A friend writes: "Remember that Michael Moore letter to Eli‡n? Here's Salon's take on the situation. Dude, his family's fucked up." I concur. [thanks, marc] 6:50 PM + I'd totally buy one. 12:15 PM + So beautiful it hurts: a windy day here in filthy Philly, and I captured some trash doin' a little dance, just like Wes Bentley in American Beauty. (Yeah, I'm being sarcastic.) 11:28 AM + Simultaneously cute and creepy. [via kottke] 10:02 AM + Yeah, Evan's right: she's hot. And this is her blog, apparently. (Her ironic posturing is a little self-conscious/forced, methinks. The lady doth protest too much.... I'm probably going to get in trouble for saying that. Bah. It's just an observation.) 1:06 AM + friday, april 7 Today from H'wood: Sibling revelry and other karmic calamities. 2:38 PM + Ordinarily, I would say anything swords-and-sorcery-related can bite my ass (with so many incredible phenomena within the realm of physical possibility, why preoccupy oneself with dragons and trolls?), but the sheer scale and sophistication of this production are enough to overcome innate biases. Great director and an interesting cast (Cate Blanchett and Liv Tyler in the same movie ... nice). Here's some background. 10:57 AM + Continuing with today's focus on web sites with manufacturing-minded nomenclature (the Pauly Shore entry is pertinent because he's a t-o-o-l), we have assembler.org, which features some nifty-slick DHTML. [via kottke] 10:26 AM + Here's the story behind Constructor, which is cool as hell and pretty much everyone has been linking to. The most enjoyable use of Java I've seen in ages. 10:08 AM + Yes, this is most unfortunate. [via saturn] Actually, I have a little Pauly Shore anecdote of my own. I literally ran smack into him one night at some horrible party at Cannes last May, and a friend and I couldnât resist the irony of shaking the hand of a man whose entertainment effluence I have pointedly avoided my whole young adult life. Mr. Shore was pretty dusted by that point, and was no doubt oblivious to our obvious smirking. Rumor had it that his limo had been making the rounds at various revels, offering rides to sad-sack girls who couldnât get into the parties. Fellatio, anyone? 12:07 AM + thursday, april 6 Today's time killer: The Advertising Graveyard. 6:45 PM + Quote of the week: "Chris Columbus directing Harry Potter? It could've been worse. They could've given it to Joel Schumacher." - dvdfuture's Ken Pierce. [via jeffrey wells] Side note: I've actually never partaken of the Harry Potter phenomenon, but I have this strange intuition that the books probably suck. (I'm totally judging them by their cheesy covers.) I wish some of the literature I thought was really great as a child would hit the big time. Like this novel. (Ideal director of a film adaptation -- besides me, of course -- Terry Gilliam.) 11:01 AM + Wow ... letting complete strangers into your life to run your errands ... and finding them over the internet. Sounds like a recipe for getting your cat raped. [via evhead] 12:56 AM + Yep, this trailer is rated R all right. 12:06 AM + wednesday, april 5 Oscar Censured by Mexican Catholics: I'm guessing they don't like the home-grown fare either. 10:58 PM + "Whoa" is right. [via thinkdink] 7:26 PM + Tim Burton is awesome. And Ryan's a good man for directing me to this quote. 5:16 PM + This has been making the rounds. Funny, to be sure, but it looks bogus to me. (Blah blah blah Mahir. Blah blah blah.) 3:43 PM + It's like I always say: gray is good. 10:19 AM + I'm all for making schools safer, but this just seems like an opportunity for abuse. And speaking of abuse, lately I've also been all for Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh -- it's just plain better than Netscape Communicator, which, at more than three years without a proper upgrade, is quickly turning into the Confederate war widow of web browsers. But maybe this'll change my mind. (Update: It's not gonna change my mind. Damn thing looks like Unix and runs like -- well, like the first-gen beta it is. Ugly and slow. And very unstable. If Microsoft pulled a stunt like this, the digerati would be up in arms. So this is what Netscape's been working on since 1997. Yikes.) (PS. Marc, thanks for the links even though you don't have a homepage I can link back to. Hehe.) 9:50 AM + I just applied to a bunch of jobs. I'm eminently, imminently employable, you know. In case you didn't know. 2:32 AM + Some spot-on Census humor from The Onion. Ah yes, the Census ... er ... I don't know what I did with mine. It's probably in a landfill somewhere by now. 12:39 AM + Astronomy Picture of the Day: another time killer. And this image is simply stunning. 12:04 AM + I sort of tidied up my "workspace." 12:03 AM + tuesday, april 4 A refreshingly minimalist layout. [via keith] 9:44 PM + I think Adobe wants to be Macromedia. I think it used to be the other way around. 6:03 PM + Incidentally, I think this shot encapsulates what's wrong with Eyes Wide Shut. It's boring, studious, overly posed and painfully contrived. Ridiculous. Okay, let's give this dead horse one more kick and call it a flop. 'Nuff said. 5:32 PM + This is purdy funny, although I can't comment on the politics. I haven't really been following the story. I ain't gonna, neither. My bad. [via powazek] 2:49 PM + (I alphabetized the links on the left. Finally.) 2:30 AM + For all you kids out there who are still wondering what that censorship fuss was about during last summer's Eyes Wide Shut media blitz, here's a page with a breakdown of what American audiences didn't see, along with an obligatory and thoroughly illegal MPEG of the hedonistic goods. Pure high-bandwidth silliness, good for a chuckle while it lasts -- hopefully the suits at Warner's won't have shut it down by the time most of you read this. (My two cents: I still think the film is middling to embarrassing. One of my friends summed it up best when he referred to it as "that shitty Kubrick gangbang movie." Yeah!) 1:42 AM + The Straight Dope is a total time killer. I even found out what the fuck is up with Esperanto. [via evhead] 12:21 AM + monday, april 3 This is what I'm listening to right this minute. 8:41 PM + Now this is what I call big science. [via rabi] 2:32 PM + I've been having this dream. It takes place high up in a massive office complex shaped like an inverted "T" -- north-south corridor bisecting an east-west corridor. In the dream, some friends (anonymous, familiar only to my dream self) and I are trapped in this building by some sort of corporate researcher in a white lab coat. We always start off in a central cubicle-filled place where the researcher introduces us to this menacing robot he calls Gyro. Gyro looks like the ED-209 from RoboCop, or one of Steve Burg's creature designs from (the terrible, misanthropic, shitty) Virus. The researcher tells us that Gyro is a juggernaut, that he will stop at nothing, will reduce us to nothing, will think nothing of it. Then he sets us loose with Gyro bounding, catapulting, and generally barreling after us. We end up fleeing into a stairwell, in a state of controlled binary panic -- which is when I wake up. My dreams usually aren't this vivid. They usually just involve me being myself in some ordinary situation, like talking to someone or walking around or what have you. So this one's interesting. I wouldn't quite call it a nightmare, because I always seem to be aware that it's a dream -- a simulation -- even while it's occurring, with my dream self wondering what movie the monster is from. But there's a genuine sense of Darwinian dread to the proceedings. Maybe I've been reading too many Wired articles. Hmmm. 11:44 AM + sunday, april 2 One of my friends from the spring break trip to Spain recently put some of his own photos online. I've mirrored one here that I like a lot -- great geometry, wonderful washed-out colors, almost vintage. It was taken in Majorca. 11:39 PM + Panda Antivirus Platinum: creepy packaging. 11:04 PM + Sheryl says the text is too big in my new layout. This is interesting, because I have often been accused of the opposite -- a tendency toward small type sizes. This redesign has been an attempt to address readability issues -- big font equals less eye strain. I don't like the trade-off, but it feels necessary. Your thoughts? Think of it like porridge -- Papa Bear's, Mama Bear's, Baby Bear's. Which is it? 2:00 AM + Conventional wisdom from a friend: business plans are to Silicon Valley as screenplays are to Los Angeles -- i.e., everyone has one. (Gosh, is it the twenty-first century already? Someone wake up Gibson and Giger -- and hurry up with that nanotech.) 12:27 AM + saturday, april 1 It's you-know-what day. I guess this means I'm supposed to post something fictitious and vaguely ironic here. Nah. I've never understood the purpose of "just kidding around." Don't get me wrong, absurdity is certainly funny, but cheap semantic inversion (i.e., unsophisticated deception) just seems like a clock-killer to me. I still remember the indignities of eight grade French and its investigations into a peculiarly Gaulish interpretation of the celebrated day. Insensible. 12:04 AM + |
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