October 2005 +x

Bleep-bleep.

I'm watching What the Bleep Do We Know right now, and less than fifteen minutes into its dramatic recreations and philosophical talking heads, I'm reminded of the words of another great philosopher:

Horseshit, Clark.
- Cousin Eddie Griswold

Now, I'd read the fantastic Salon article on the film when it first hit theatres, so I knew to expect some wackiness (such as the Tacoma housewife who heads up the School of Enlightenment and claims to be channeling a 50,000 year-old warrior spirit called Ramtha). But I'm less than fifteen minutes in, and the film makes the unqualified claim that the Native Americans literally COULD NOT see Columbus' ships arriving, because they had never seen ships before. They could see ripples on the waves but were unable to physically see the ships because it didn't match their reality.

People lauded this film? Were they asleep? Thankfully, I've read a lot about bullshit cults and seen plenty of crappy movies before, so, unlike the Native Americans with Columbus' ship, I'm able to see 'What the Bleep Do We Know" without any trouble.

Holy Nuttiness update: Thirty minutes in, and now we hear that meditation caused a 25% drop in violent crime in Washington DC in 1993, which they could predict based on "48 other studies." Not surprisingly, there's no mention of how "violent crime" was measured, nor what the 25% figure refers to, neither in terms of time period, nor comparison to a control. I'm sure the science behind that is real solid.

Oh, what the hell: Now they're saying that writing words on water bottles changed the STRUCTURE OF WATER MOLECULES in such a manner as to match THE EMOTIONS WRITTEN ON THE BOTTLE. I give up; my incredulity has been officially exasperated.

October 31, 2005 at 10:38 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

links for 2005-11-01

October 31, 2005 at 9:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

aqua-chachi


aqua-chachi
Originally uploaded by starlen.
Best costume this season. Okay, maybe not the best, but, considering the high embarrassment factor (it's aquaman, the least essential superhero ever, and he's wearing green fishnets to make it happen), we'll give Chris that title anyway.

October 31, 2005 at 1:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

links for 2005-10-31

October 30, 2005 at 9:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

MT 3.2 Upgrade

I decided to upgrade my Movable Type installation when I noticed I was getting comment-spammed last night, and read that 3.2 had much better spam controls. In the process, I noticed a bunch of spam trackbacks on the Man of India post.

This has been a mildly frustrating experience, to say the least. After a whole lot of trial and error, I seem to have gotten things swinging again, but my comments have disappeared from my MT interface (though they're still on the entries), and I can do everything (so far) but rebuild my site (without fail, I get a 500 error). Which means those porn spam trackbacks are still there. Aaarrgh!

I removed the trackbacks directly from the code for the individual page. Apologies to anyone reading this that happens to be a fan of midget and tranny porn, as those links have been removed.

Any help with the rebuild site issue is appreciated, and sorry for the geek post.

October 29, 2005 at 11:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

links for 2005-10-29

October 28, 2005 at 10:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

links for 2005-10-28

October 27, 2005 at 10:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Feed Update

I'm consolidating and moving all of my feeds over to http://feeds.feedburner.com/splitlevel. I'd certainly appreciate it if you made the move with me, and let me know if you see anything weird on the way.

October 27, 2005 at 2:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Beastly!

spencer is going to eat this ball.

So, I tell my dog Spencer, yeah yeah yeah, that floating ball trick is pretty cool, but man, it freaks me out when you do that thing with your eyes, but he still does it every time.

October 21, 2005 at 10:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

What the Flock?

I'm writing this from my Flock browser, which is downloadable now (though currently in developer/beta), and so far, it is grrrrrrrrrreat.  Within minutes of downloading, I was able to hook it up to save my favorites to my del.icio.us account, grab images from my Flickr account to drag and drop into posts, and post to my Movable Type-powered site (I would link to it, but, hey - you're here).

The posting interface is a simple WYSIWYG editor, and I haven't done much research yet to see if I can turn it off, as I'd prefer to do my own coding.  Aside from that, it's all pretty fantastic, and I'm looking forward to making it my new browser once it's stable.  (Not that it's crashed so far.)

October 21, 2005 at 11:27 AM

The Gospel to All the World

the gospel to all the world

Ten more pages of Listen and Do up on Flickr. Be sure to click all sizes button to read the text and download a larger size proper for your coloring needs. Oh, and don't miss Jesus in the massage parlor.

October 20, 2005 at 12:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Underrated Films

The Onion AV Club has put up a list of what they think are the most underrated films of the last decade. They picked a surprising number of films on my own version of that list: American Psycho, Solaris, Trouble Every Day, Session 9, Velvet Goldmine, and Lost Highway. I don't think that Office Space really qualifies - I understand no one saw it in the theaters, but it's pretty universally hailed now - less underrated, more poorly marketed.

But seriously: The Cable Guy, The Newton Boys, Bringing Out the Dead, Carrie 2, A.I., and not one but two M. Night Shyamalan films? Did they watch these films?

In order, they are either a.) evidence of a certain star's slide into hacktacularity and not as funny as it might have seemed at the time (and just barely then), b.) a crappy TV movie hiding in the guise of a theatrical release with a bunch of otherwise good actors underperforming; c.) a Martin Scorsese film as Martin Scorsese parody (and one of the only films I've ever truly wanted to walk out of; d.) a low-grade, unnecessary remake masked as a sequel; e.) an uninteresting, overlong mess that makes the idea of androids/robots (which, like ninjas, should always be awesome) boring; and f.) lame attempts by a director to recapture the success of an earlier film by retreading the same tricks.

I'd argue those films are actually quite overrated, especially considering how often most of them are held up as underrated (except for The Newton Boys and Carrie 2, which most people/critics/lists rightly ignore).

I'd suggest that Super Troopers is underrated, but I have a hard time convincing many of my friends of this fact (no, really, it gets funnier each time). I think True Romance is the best thing Quentin Tarantino's name has ever been attached to, though I'm not sure it's quite underrated (and is a few years early for this list). Both the 25th Hour and Bamboozled were pretty fantastic efforts by Spike Lee (even if the latter has a few missteps). I think Nightwatch was far better and scarier than people give it credit for (and the "it's obvious who the killer is" complaint misses the point, I think). Julien Donkey-Boy and Jesus' Son are both films I don't see enough about, as are The Devil's Backbone, Ratcatcher, George Washington, and All the Real Girls. Oh, yeah, and Reign of Fire, which was AWESOME. It had DRAGONS, people, and Matthew McConaughey as a live-action GI Joe.

There's a much larger list that Chud put up a year and half ago that I'd recommend checking out. I found some pretty great stuff from it, including a little-known, little-seen (but great) film from the writer of The Exorcist called The Ninth Configuration.

Anything else I should be seeing that maybe I don't know about?

October 19, 2005 at 7:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Listen and Do: One for Jesus!

I'm putting the entirety of Listen and Do up on Flickr 10 pages at a time, and I'll be pointing out a highlight or two as I do so. The scans are fairly large jpegs, for anyone who wants to break out their crayons.

So, the text that accompanies the rest of this page says:

Jesus gives us all our money.
He wants us to thank Him for the money.
He asks us to give one out of every 10 pennies.
This money is for God's work.
He wants us to give other money, too.
Jesus gives us everything that we have.
Let us thank Jesus.

I'm mostly okay with the first part (though part of me thinks, if Jesus gives it to us, but wants some for himself, why not keep it in the first place? It seems less, I dunno, rude that way). But it's the "he wants us to give other money, too" that troubles me - that's awfully open-ended, like a friend who's always short on money who says he only needs a hundred bucks, then throws out "or whatever else you wanna give me" after you hand him over that first cool hunny.

I'm glad that a.) I didn't read this as a child and b.) Jesus only seems concerned with money, and not, say, G.I. Joes or Transformers.

October 17, 2005 at 8:31 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Thanks, Moviefone.

I want to see when Atom Egoyan's new film is playing this weekend. I go to Moviefone to accomplish this, and Moviefone tries to make it as hard as possible to do so. See, in case you don't already know, there's a little box on every page that lets you search for a movie or enter your zip code to get listings for your area. I'm willing to bet this is how most people use the site, and so it's appropriately placed right at the top for all to see.

Today I didn't see it, because instead, all I saw was this:

That's a floating Flash advertisement for the DVD release of Will Ferrell's stupid soccer movie (sorry Will). There's no way to close this advertisement or make it disappear. My only recourse was to click on a link to a subpage (I swear I'm not at all interested in Elizabethtown) to get access to that stupid box.

Limiting access to your front page and what is probably its most crucial function for most of your site's visitors doesn't seem like the smartest idea.

Anybody got any suggestions for a better film listings site? Is there some crazy google maps/tickets mash-up out there I don't know about?

October 14, 2005 at 11:25 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Boing'd!

Well, that's an interesting experience. About 75 comments later, I'm a bit surprised by the reactions to a 51 year-old coloring book. I'll be posting the rest of the pages beginning later this week (there are 60-some-odd pages to this thing, so it'll take a bit of time to finish scanning and posting), so check back in or grab a feed, and I promise you won't be disappointed.

October 11, 2005 at 11:10 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Listen and Do: Man of India

I picked up a children's activity book called "Listen and Do." The copyright date is 1954. I'm planning on scanning the entire thing eventually, but in the meantime, click the image below to see the full page of this particular gem:

Update: I'll be posting the rest of the pages beginning later this week (there are 60-some-odd pages to this thing, so it'll take a bit of time to finish scanning and posting), so check back in or grab a feed, and I promise you won't be disappointed.

October 11, 2005 at 9:15 AM | Comments (120) | TrackBack

Superstitious!

Links

October 11, 2005 at 7:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Proposed Squid Death!

I felt pretty confident that I had the squid problem solved with my python idea. However, ever-vigilant & patriotic land-lubber Brad has brought to my attention a curious detail he noticed in this article about the Southern California otter ban:

Capturing an otter that strayed out of bounds was a daunting task. Divers wearing specialized equipment would sneak up on an otter while it was asleep.

Armed with this new information, Brad writes: "I think we need to get ahold of this 'specialized equipment' and attack the giant squids while they sleep. Cephalopods be gone!"

While I appreciate the fervor of Brad's squid-hate, his idea is crazy. To wit: otters are adorable creatures who give out magical hugs - they want to be snuck up on by people. Squid, on the other hand, are pure raging evil. Everybody knows that squid don't sleep, and that they've got eyes all around their squishy heads. You could try to sneak up on it, and then, just when you thought you had it, you'd discover that its eyes weren't really closed at all, but that it was peering at you through the slits of its eyelids like some kid cheating at a classroom game of seven-up, and then it'd pull some tentacle-fu and stuff you into its hungry gaping maw. And it'd probably laugh while it did it.

Now, if we could further specialize this equipment to a.) shoot torpedos and/or lazers and b.) fit pythons, then we might be getting somewhere.

October 10, 2005 at 9:52 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Squid Problem: Solved.

I think I've just found a solution for the squid problem.

Now, a 13-foot python won't be able to take on a giant squid by itself, but you get a couple of 'em - like, maybe one for each tentacle and one for the head - and you've got yourself a fight. Or maybe we'll need to somehow breed larger pythons, or cross-breed them with anacondas like the one that ate Jon Voight in that snake documentary from a couple of years back. (I think it was called Anaconda.)

Of course, then we'll have to figure out how to get rid of the snakes. Because, let's face it, if that thing can eat a six-foot alligator (or Jon Voight), I'm little more than a meal on legs.

October 5, 2005 at 9:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Don't.

I've been attempting to listen to all of the songs in my iTunes in alphabetical order, which, apart from taking forever, sometimes leads to some interesting playlists. For example, there's a whole lot of tracks labeled "(untitled)", and there are countless "deaths."

It looks like, so far, "Don't" songs take the cake in terms of quantity and variety. According to the songs I'm currently listening to, there are many things that shouldn't be done.
Don't:

  • Be Light
  • Believe a Word
  • Cha Hear Me Calling to you
  • Cha Stop
  • Close Your Eyes
  • Even Sing About It
  • Ever Get Tired
  • Go to Pieces
  • Have to Be So Sad
  • Let Our Youth Go to Waste
  • Look Back
  • Look Down (three times!)
  • Love You
  • Make Plans this Friday
  • Mind if I Do
  • Mug Yourself
  • Save Us from the Flames
  • Say a Word (Hot Chicken #2)
  • Start
  • Stop Believing
  • Stop Till You Get to Bollywood
  • Take Your Guns to Town
  • Tell Me No
  • This Look Like the Dark
  • Touch My Bikini
  • Try
  • Wake Me (Meow mix)
  • Wake Me Up
  • Worry About the Government
  • You Want Me?

October 5, 2005 at 10:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Harriet Miers' Exodus

So, I drafted up this:

I haven't been keeping up with news much lately. Or with anything really, but that's the subject for another post I'll never write. So, I'm watching the Daily Show, the only TV I almost never miss, and they're covering Bush's announcement about Harriet Miers, wherein he says this:

Harriet Miers has given generously of her time and talent by serving as a leader with more than a dozen community groups and charities, including the Young Women's Christian Association, Childcare Dallas, Goodwill Industries, Exodus Ministries, Meals on Wheels and the Legal Aid Society.

My ears perked up at Exodus Ministries. If you're not familiar with them, they're the group that will help you be, you know, not so gay - their slogan is Freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.

So, that should go well. And, if you think that the fact that Bush appointed her as the head of the Texas Lottery Commission when he was governor makes this whole think smack of Brownie-style cronyism, it's only fair to point out that Harriet Miers has never been a judge.

And then I found this:
Miers, the "Exodus Scandal," and Why our Devotion to the Truth Hurts Us. Good point about the fact that, after having a similar reaction to mine, lefties online discovered that Harriet Miers dealt with a different Exodus Ministries, one that deals with ex-convicts, and, for all intents and purposes, has nothing to do with healing homosexuals. Given the lie we all wanted to believe, the left self-corrected and debunked the myth before it gained a foothold.

Apart from that, as far as I know, the Texas Lottery Commission still refers to the Lottery Commission in the State of Texas, and the "never been a judge" still refers to Miers' never having served on a judicial bench before. So, we've still got that.

October 3, 2005 at 11:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

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