Wow…now that was an interesting film. I can definitely see why Kirsten’s been suggesting it! A fascinating portrayal of two people breaking out of their respective self-imposed psychological prisons to find support and love through a light S&M, D/s relationship. Wonderfully done, too — they manage to present a fetish that has a lot of misunderstanding among most people as something that, while unusual, is not freakish, and is actually healthy and liberating for both of the parties involved. Admittedly, it’s not a fetish that I’ve got much interest in, but I’ve certainly got more of an understanding of and appreciation for why some people do find it to their taste. I’ll probably be keeping this disc long enough to listen to the commentary track (from the writer and the director), just to get a bit more insight into the film.
Geekery
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
About a Boy
Hugh Grant plays his “charming slimeball” routine to a T, as the world’s shallowest bachelor who finds acceptance, and hidden depths, after stumbling into becoming a surrogate father figure for the quirky son of a troubled single mom. Quite enjoyable, with a lot of cute lines.
Besides — even though it was in all the trailers, his reaction to being asked to be the godfather to his friends’ newborn daughter is priceless! “Let’s face it, I’d make a horrible godfather. I’d drop her on her head at her christening, forget all her birthdays until her 18th when I’d take her out, get her drunk and, let’s face it, probably try to shag her. This is a horrid idea.”
Today's vocabulary
If I do manage to escape the angel, I’m not going to be able to make my living as a professional mourner, not if you people don’t have the courtesy to die. Just as well, I suppose, I’d have to learn all new dirges. I’ve tried to get the angel to watch MTV so I can learn the vocabulary of your music, but even with the gift of tongues, I’m having trouble learning to speak hip-hop. Why is it that one can busta rhyme or busta move anywhere but you must bust a cap in someone’s ass? Is “ho” always feminine, and “muthafucka” always masculine, while “bitch” can be either? How many peeps in a posse, how much booty before baby got back, do you have to be all that to be all up in that, and do I need to be dope and phat to be da bomb or can I just be “stupid”? I’ll not be singing over any dead mothers until I understand.
— Levi, who is called Biff, in Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore
Mayday! My life, May 10th, 2003
Here we are — one day of my life, my entry into the Mayday Project.
Since most of my Saturdays generally involved hanging around my apartment, doing laundry, dinking on the web, and other such fun stuff, I actually made an attempt to get out of the house for the day (since 14 pictures of my computer monitors wouldn’t be very interesting). The times aren’t exact on-the-hour, as I don’t have a watch, so I just took a ton of photos throughout the day (140-some) and grabbed decent ones around the right time for this page.
12:00pm: Waking up, heading for the shower. One of the benefits of having shaved my head is that I don’t look too terribly goofy first thing in the morning — hard to have ‘bedhead’ when you’ve got hair 1/8 of an inch long!
1:15pm: Saturday was the Grand Opening for Washington’s first Apple Store, in Bellevue, so I hopped a bus out to the Bellevue Square shopping mall to check it out. When I got there, it was about a 30 minute wait to get in — apparently the first person to line up showed up at 6:30 in the morning, and at one point the line stretched around the shopping center! It’s not a computer — it’s a cult. ;)
2:20pm: There are two spots inside the Bellevue Square mall (which is huge) set aside as playspaces for children not as much into shopping as their parents — a good spot to spend a few minutes after finishing drooling over computer toys.
3:10pm: I spent a while wandering around the mall, and after I couldn’t take anymore, I started heading back into Seattle. There was a fountain by the exit of the mall, that had two remarkably brave ducks swimming around in it, hoping for handouts from the shoppers passing by.
4:05pm: Once back in town, I spent a good amount of time wandering through the Pioneer Square area before heading towards the Pike Place Market. This was taken just outside of a flowershop in Pioneer Square, which was almost invisible except for the petals strewn across the ground outside the entrance.
5:08pm: Heading back toward the apartment and passing by Westlake Plaza, I stumbled across a bunch of kids doing some sort of dance demo/fundraising — one guy on a drumset laying down rhythms, with five or six other kids dancing. Some pretty impressive breakdancing, too.
6:01pm: I went through the Convention Center Park on the way back up to my apartment. There’s a large planter in one section — this was taken flat on my back underneath the planter.
7:30pm: My idea of an appropriate drink while hanging out at Fado’s, an Irish pub downtown — Coke!
8:07pm: Prom season in Seattle. Lots of the standard limos all over the place, but every so often you spot someone with actual class.
8:50pm: The trees around my apartment were covered in this webby, filmy stuff — at first I thought they were spider webs, which creeped me out a bit, but it turns out when I took a closer look that they’re actually caterpillar nests — nifty!
10:07pm: Dressed and ready to head out to the club: basic black!
11:00pm: At the Vogue, my club of choice in Seattle. Goth/industrial/new-wave. Woohoo!
12:00am: My friend Rick, sitting in his corner at the Vogue. I’m not sure he expected me to pull out the camera…
1:15am: Elephant picture #1: Me on the dancefloor.
2:00am: Elephant picture #2: Me on the dance floor again. Shake that boo-tay!
That’s it for now —
NORAD? Um, nope!
There’s a very interesting site that I found via Atrios that, among other things, has a very comprehensive look at the events of Sept. 11^th^ in this timeline. They seem to have done a good job of piecing together the various news reports about the events of that day, comparing them and questioning the many inconsistencies that exist.
From there, I started browsing through the rest of the source site, the Center for Cooperative Research. Looking at another page on the site, a more straightforward timeline of Sept. 11^th^, imagine my surprise when I saw a picture captioned ‘NORAD’s war room in Cheyenne, Wyoming,’ that, rather than being a picture of the Norad control room, is actually a screen shot from the 1983 adventure/suspense film Wargames!
As important as I think it is that we continue to investigate the events of Sept. 11^th^, and the events surrounding it, when a site does something like this — no matter how good their overall intentions may be — it only serves to damage their credibility. The webmaster of the Center for Cooperative Research should either replace that photo with a real photo of NORAD (if such a photo exists in the private sector), or simply remove the Wargames photo. Leaving it there can only damage how seriously people take their site, no matter how much effort they’ve put into their research.
Update: I e-mailed my concerns about the picture to the webmaster, and they’ve replaced the former photo with one from Discover magazine. While I’ve never been in NORAD, and therefore can’t assert to the photo’s accuracy firsthand, it does look far more likely to be the real thing (more realistic graphics on the monitors, more realistic computer terminals, less flashy overall — and I don’t recognize it from a movie!).
Two Dave Winer grumbles
I don’t have as many issues with Dave Winer as many other people seem to, but he does occasionally come up with something that I’m tempted to comment on. Today, I gave into the temptation…
Today, Dave is looking back at announcing RSS:
“RSS is an XML-based format that represents what we in the Frontier community call a ‘weblog’….” The funny thing is that it wasn’t grandiose. At that time all weblogs were done in Frontier.
Not really. Frontier may well have been the first commercially available software built for creating and updating weblogs, but I was keeping my weblog up in 1999 (and even prior to that, I think I started using my site to keep my family updated on my life sometime in ’98), using the ‘old fashioned’ method of manually updating my website. I just didn’t know it was a weblog back then.
Unfortunately, at some point during my many site redesigns/updates, I was a fool and trashed all the old static HTML pages of my site from before I started using software to automate my site updates, but I can at least point to my first post using software to automate the process, and the post where I realized I was a ‘blogger’.
So Frontier may have been the first software for weblogs, but weblogs themselves were around pre-99. We just didn’t necessarily know that they were “weblogs”! ;)
Secondly, something I’ve whined about in the past: Dave’s RSS feed drives me up the wall.
Every other RSS feed I subscribe to links each post to its corresponding post on the source website, so when I find something interesting in my newsreader and click on it, I’m taken to the website. Dave’s feed, unfortunately, doesn’t. It seems to have one of three possibilities:
- The newsfeed post will link back to the post on Dave’s website. The preferred behaviour, but unfortunately rare.
- The newsfeed post will link to whatever the first link in Dave’s post is. For instance, if Dave is commenting on a post on someone else’s site, when I open his post in my newsreader to follow up on it, I’m taken to the link that he’s commenting on, rather than his comments. Incredibly annoying.
- The newsfeed post won’t link to anything at all. This seems to be the least common of the occurrences, but common enough that I run into it from time to time.
Seems to me that since Dave is such an RSS evangelist, and one of the co-creators of the format, he could at least create an RSS feed that doesn’t make his readers want to thwack him upside the head every time they try to follow up on something he says!
But maybe that’s just me.
My Netflix queue
After severely decimating my movie collection, I got to talking with one of the guys at work, and he gave Netflix a glowing recommendation.
It looks like a handy little service. You select what moves you’d like to rent, and then subscribe for a \$20/month fee. As movies become available, Netflix sends them to you. You watch them, then send them back. No per-day charges, no late fees — just send them back whenever you’re done. You’re allowed to have three out at a time, and when you send any back, more from your list get sent to you.
So, I figured what the heck, and signed up. ~~If anyone’s really morbidly curious, I’ll keep track of what’s in my queue here.~~ Feel free to suggest some, too!
Update: Trying to keep track of my rental queue was rapidly becoming fairly obnoxious to try to deal with as I kept adding stuff, so I’ve discontinued that. I’ve also moved my mini-reviews to posts of their own, rather than perpetually adding comments to this post. They’ll show up on the main page, or you can always check the MovieReviews category listing to catch up.
Peace is our profession
Operation Strangelove: On May 14^th^, host a screening (even if it’s just for yourself!) of Dr Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)!
Be part of a national anti-war action on May 14. Screen “Dr. Strangelove,” and raise money for groups still working hard for peace, justice and relief in Iraq.
Pre-emptive strikes. Cowboy diplomacy. Men conspiring in the War Room, bent on world domination. Weapons of mass destruction. And most terrifying of all, an invasion begun for one overwhelming reason: precious fluids.
Forty years after its filming, the dark and explosively funny “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” seems like a satirical time bomb planted by Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern, set to detonate on Bush’s doctrine of unilateral warfare, anytime, anywhere.
As the war on Iraq winds down (at least on TV), as the perils (and profits) of occupation loom, and as the Bushies plot the next pre-emptive strike, Operation Strangelove aims to show the warmongers in their true light.
On May 14, put on a screening of “Dr. Strangelove” — in your living room, at the local theater, on campus, on your laptop, anywhere you can — and say no to unilateral invasions, to endangering our troops for the sake of oil, to flouting international law and the world community in the name of empire. Follow the film with discussions, forums, debates. Keep talking. Keep acting. Let’s give new meaning to the old Strategic Air Command motto, “Peace Is Our Profession.”
(via Kalilily)
iTunes Man
(by Scott Taylor, with apologies to Billy Joel, sung to the tune of ‘Piano Man’)
It’s nine o’ clock at the iTunes store,
A phenomenal crowd’s logging on,
There’s an old man on AOL
Finding music from ages bygone.
He says, “Steve can you play me a memory?
“I’m not really sure how it goes,
“But I typed in a track and got album names back!
“And I’m not even wearing my clothes!”
Oh la da da diddy da da, la da diddy da da da.
Sell us a song, you’re the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,
And you’ve got the pricing just right.
Now Claude at Vivendi’s a friend of mine
And his business is selling CDs.
And knows the solution for store distribution,
But he’s worried about MP3s.
He says “Steve I believe this is killing us!
“All these pirates don’t pay us a dime.
“Well I’m sure that you could be a billionaire,
“If you could sell music online.”
Oh la da da diddy da da, la da diddy da da da.
Sell us a song, you’re the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,
And you’ve got the pricing just right.
Now Paul is an iPod enthusiast
Who listens to Jazz with his wife
And he’s chatting with Maxine, who’s still in the rap scene
And probably will be for life.
And the waitress is downloading Dixie Chicks
As the dial-up man slowly gets Stones
Yes they’re sharing the bandwidth from Akamai
But it’s better than P2P clones.
Sell us a song, you’re the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,
And you’ve got the pricing just right.
Its a pretty good crowd for just Macintosh
And the PC guys give me a smile
Cause they know that iTunes will be Windows-bound soon
If they just can hold out for a while.
And the AAC sounds like originals
And rights management isn’t a pain,
And they sit at the screens of their iTunes machines
And say “Man, this is worse than cocaine!”
Sell us a song, you’re the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,
And you’ve got the pricing just right.
(found on /.)
Renew! Renew! Renew!
Well, I’m still here and kicking around, so it seems I didn’t go up in a fiery explosion in the ritual of Carousel. Frankly, I’m relieved — I’ve always said I wanted to go out with a bang, but not that literally.
Incidentally, for those who I may have entirely lost with my birthday post, I highly suggest you check out the movie Logan’s Run. Classic sci-fi.
Anyway, overall a good day yesterday. Wandered around town for a bit with Prairie, and went down to see X-Men 2 midway through the day. Very, very cool — I’ve never been a huge comic person, but I’ve read enough about the X-Men over the years to be very impressed with how they’re handling the movies. Accessible and fun action-adventure flicks for the masses, with a lot of intelligent nods to the fans and creative ties to established comic book canon while creating a new storyline. All in all, lots of fun.
Spent the evening hanging out with Chad and Prairie at the Bad JuJu Lounge and bouncing around at the Vogue. I’d tried to get ahold of Rick and Candice too, but never reached them. Was a little bit of a bummer, but the three of us had fun. I just got a call from Rick, though — he’s collecting Chad and heading this way, and we’re going to go find something to do for the afternoon. Woohoo! Off to go play…