Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Halle Berry wins Razzie…and respect

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Kudos to Halle Berry for actually showing up to accept her Razzie award for Catwoman!

Halle Berry staged an Oscar-worthy parody of her Academy Awards meltdown at last night’s 25th annual Razzie awards in Los Angeles. Breaking with tradition, the Catwoman star showed up in person to collect her award as the worst actress of 2004.

Explaining her decision to attend the event, Berry said: “My mother told me that if you couldn’t be a good loser then there’s no way you could be a good winner.”

Berry famously broke down at the podium upon winning the 2002 best actress Oscar for her role in Monster’s Ball. She mimicked that moment again last night, faking sobs on stage for a full minute while clutching her Academy Award in one hand and her Razzie (actually a spray-painted golf ball) in the other.

But her speech, when it finally came, went out of its way to spread the blame for Catwoman’s failure. “I want to thank Warner Brothers for casting me in this piece of shit,” she announced to tumultuous laughter. She added: “I’d like to thank the rest of the cast. To give a really bad performance like mine you need to have really bad actors.”

I’m impressed. Good for her!

iTunes “Feel the Fury” by Merlin from the album Just Say Anything (1991, 4:44).

Just stop talking

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Many years ago, I went to a summer camp in which one of the activities was horseback riding. This ended up being a less-than-successful experience for me, though, as as soon as I got up in the saddle the horse reared up, dumping me rather unceremoniously on the ground as I slid off the saddle and over the horse’s rear end.

Last night, as I was talking to Alicia, Laurie and Robert outside the Vogue as I was preparing to leave, I started to try to relate this story after Alicia mentioned that she has four horses at her place out in Snohomish.

So what words actually managed to fall out of my mouth?

“I was on a horse once…it got me off. (pause) It threw me off…aw, dammit….”

And much laughter ensued, along with Laurie’s observation that, “So this must have been bareback, I suppose?”

Some days, I really should just keep my mouth shut.

iTunes “Smear Body” by Nitzer Ebb from the album That Total Age (1987, 5:49).

MT-Blogroll

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I’ve just updated and revised my blogroll over to the right. Instead of relying on an external service to manage my blogroll, I’m now using a new plugin from Arvind Satyanarayan called MT-Blogroll that implements blogroll management directly into the Movable Type interface.

So far, I’m definitely liking it — it allows for categorization of links, descriptions, and XFN data (though I’m not currently using the latter two items), has a bookmarklet for quickly adding links, and seems to work just like it should. The one downside is that I’ll no longer be able to display recently-updated weblogs in bold, but I can live with losing that for being able to manage everything centrally on my own server.

I’ve also updated my list of currently running Movable Type tweaks to include MT Blogroll (and one other tweak that I’d forgotten in the initial post).

iTunes “Twisted Secrets Vol. 2 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Twisted Secrets Vol. 2 (full mix) (1997, 1:04:33).

…ask what you can do for your country.

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One night, George W. Bush is tossing restlessly in his White House bed. He awakens to see George Washington standing by him. Bush asks him, “George, what’s the best thing I can do to help the country?”

“Set an honest and honorable example, just as I did,” Washington advises, and then fades away.

The second night, Bush sees the ghost of Thomas Jefferson moving through the darkened bedroom. Bush calls out, “Tom, please! What is the best thing I can do to help the country?”

“Respect the Constitution, as I did,” Jefferson advises, and dims from sight.

The third night sleep is still not in the cards for Bush. He awakens to see the ghost of FDR hovering over his bed. Bush whispers, “Franklin, what is the best thing I can do to help the country?”

“Help the less fortunate, just as I did,” FDR replies and fades into the mist.

Bush isn’t sleeping well the fourth night when he sees another figure moving in the shadows. It is the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Bush pleads, “Abe, what is the best thing I can do right now to help the country?”

Lincoln replies, “Go see a play.”

(via Dad)

iTunes “Into the Trap” by London Symphony Orchestra, The/Williams, John from the album Star Wars Trilogy: The Original Soundtrack Anthology (1983, 2:39).

My Movable Type tweaks

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I got an e-mail from a friend who’s in the process of switching over to Movable Type, and he asked if I had any recommendations for plugins or tweaks to the core system. Here’s a look at what I’m currently using:

C-List Blogging

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According to Dave Pollard’s breakdown, I’m a ‘C-List Blogger’.

Extrapolating some work I did last year, only about 20,000 blogs (a mere 0.4% of all active blogs) have a sizeable audience (more than 10 regular visitors and more than 150 hits per average day), and readership in a typical day is only a little more than three million people, each spending an average of about 20 minutes flitting among 15 blog pages.

Using Shirky’s Power Law, and adding in RSS subscriptions to the hit count totals, that would break today’s blogosphere audience down roughly as follows:

Total
Hits/Day		 Average
Hits/Day
per Blog		 Minimum
Hits/Day
per Blog		 Average
Aggregate
Reader
Attention/Day
per Blog
100 A-list bloggers 15 million 150,000 15,000 1700 hrs
2,000 B-list bloggers 5 million 2,500 1,000 62 hrs
18,000 C-list bloggers 9 million 500 150 13
hrs
80,000 up-and-coming bloggers 8
million		 100 50 2.5 hrs
5 million remaining active bloggers 15 million 3 0 –

According to StatCounter, right now I get an average of 968 unique visitors per day — but according to FeedBurner, I have another 319 people watching my site through one of my available RSS feeds (8 subscribed to my comments-only feed, 30 to my excerpts-only feed, 225 to my full-post feed, and 59 to my full-posts-plus-comments feed), which puts me at 1,287 readers per day, placing me on the low end of the ‘B-List’ category.

Of course, the one major caveat to this is that many of those 968 daily visitors are just hits from Google searches, and in order to keep my ego in check, StatCounter is only registering an average of 70 returning visitors per day. Refiguring my numbers that way, that gives me 389 regular daily readers, just under the average in the ‘C-List’ category.

However you want to break it down, though, I think it’s pretty damn cool that I’ve got in the neighborhood of 400 people keeping an eye on my ramblings from time to time.

Now, who are all of you people? ;)

(via Jacqueline)

iTunes “Medina” by Outback from the album Dance the Devil Away (1991, 6:26).

Theatre Plans

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The Seattle Times has announced the 5th Ave. Theatre‘s 2005-2006 season. Lots of good stuff coming up, including The King and I, but the one that’s really catching my eye is Sweeney Todd.

I’ve seen Sweeney Todd on stage once before, years ago in Anchorage, and just recently was thrilled to see it heavily referenced in Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl. Should be fun to get a chance to see it again, it’s just the sort of twisted stuff I get a kick out of.

A bigger stretch for Armstrong and his audiences is a planned 5th Avenue mounting (Oct. 25-Nov. 13) of composer Sondheim and writer Hugh Wheeler’s macabre, musically daring epic about a barber’s bloody one-man crusade against the injustices of Victorian England.

“The show is so layered and amazing in its writing, themes and score,” says Armstrong, who’ll direct. ” ‘Sweeney Todd’ was on Broadway recently in a chamber version, but we’ll have a full orchestra for this. And big theater voices to handle the songs.”

iTunes “Suck (Double Dipped and Plastered)” by Pigface from the album Feels Like Heaven, Sounds Like Shit (1996, 6:17).

Flickr being bought by…everybody?

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For the past few days, rumors have been flying around that Yahoo is buying Flickr.

Whatever the truth of the matter, never let it be said that Flickr isn’t handling the rumors with good grace and a sense of humor. While the general public won’t see anything different, logged-in users are seeing a new logo on the page. Even funnier, the filename for the graphic is gossipgossipgossip.gif.

Here’s a quick look at just what we’ve got, then:

Flickr Gossip

iTunes “Rat Poison” by Prodigy, The from the album Voodoo People (1995, 5:31).

Critical Mass

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Critical Mass, Seattle, WA While I don’t currently own a bike, so I couldn’t join in the ride, I did wander down to Westlake Plaza today to catch the gathering of riders for this month’s Critical Mass ride.

I got there a bit before the official 5:30 gathering time and spent the next half hour randomly walking through the assembled bikers, snapping shots as I went — here’s the Flickr photoset.

One of the guys there had an LED messageboard bolted on to the back of his bike that scrolled the message “CRITICAL MASS www.seattlecriticalmass.org We’re not blocking traffic. We ARE traffic!” as he rode along. I thought this was pretty nifty, so snagged a quick video of it while he was talking with a couple other bikers.

Problems in Critical Mass?Interestingly enough, when I got home, I spent a couple minutes working on cleaning up the audio of their conversation. Apparently there’s been a bit of dissent in the ranks, with a few different factions (with only a 23-second audio clip, I don’t really know what the dispute is about), and these guys were egging on the guy with the sign to step up and take control. Click on the picture to the left to watch the video (704kb QT .mov or 2Mb higher-quality version) and hear their conversation.

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