Signs

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First and foremost — creepy. Extremely so. Shyamalan excels when it comes to creating unsettling moods, and he uses that to full effect throughout the movie. Unfortunately, after ninety minutes of buildup, the end is something of a letdown — a bit too pat and sudden after all that suspense, not to mention an extremely heavy dose of ‘deus ex machina‘. I was reminded both of Chrichton’s ‘Andromeda Strain’ and many Heinlein novels — page turners ’til the very end, when everything just suddenly stops. Quite unsatisfying.

Having watched all three of Shyamalan’s films now (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs), I think he’s an excellent director, and a very gifted conceptualizer, but I also think he could benefit from turning over his ideas to a more accomplished writer. While I’ve enjoyed each of his films, I’ve also found each of them somewhat lacking. The Sixth Sense was very much a one-trick pony (worth watching only twice: once to be surprised by the twist end, and again to catch all the clues you missed the first time), Unbreakable was an interesting idea but was too distant and cold in its execution to really grab me, and Signs topped off an atmosphere of tension and suspense that many horror movies could really use with a letdown of a resolution.

Kevin's back!

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Kevin, sans dreadlocks

My little brother Kevin, who’s been visiting his fiancee Emily in Africa for the past four months (she’s finishing up a 2-year stint in the Peace Corps) got home recently. When he left, he had dreadlocks down to his butt — but since he shaved them off at some point during the trip, dad was kind enough to post a picture of the ‘new look’!

It looks like dad may be posting some of the pictures Kev took over the past few months, too. I’m looking forward to seeing more, and at some point, hearing more about the trip. In any case, it’s good to know he’s back and safe.

Welcome home, Kev!

Secretary

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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.

About a Boy

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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

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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

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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.

Waking up and heading for the shower

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!

Getting in line at the Apple Store

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. ;)

Watching children play

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.

Ducks in the fountain

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.

Outside a flower shop

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.

Dance demo in Westlake Plaza

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.

Underneath a planter in Freeway Park

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.

A coke at Fado's

7:30pm: My idea of an appropriate drink while hanging out at Fado’s, an Irish pub downtown — Coke!

Prom night transportation

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.

Caterpillar tents

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!

Dressed and ready to go out

10:07pm: Dressed and ready to head out to the club: basic black!

At the Vogue

11:00pm: At the Vogue, my club of choice in Seattle. Goth/industrial/new-wave. Woohoo!

Rick at the Vogue

12:00am: My friend Rick, sitting in his corner at the Vogue. I’m not sure he expected me to pull out the camera…

Me dancing at the Vogue

1:15am: Elephant picture #1: Me on the dancefloor.

Still dancing!

2:00am: Elephant picture #2: Me on the dance floor again. Shake that boo-tay!

That’s it for now —

Mayday preparations

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Had a good day wandering around Seattle yesterday taking pictures for the Mayday Project. Unfortunately, putting pictures up is currently on hold, as Rick accidentally walked off with my camera when he left the Vogue last night. Hopefull he’ll be over to drop it off soon, and I’ll be able to get the pictures posted…

The family walk

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The other day at work, I’d wandered up to the 7-11 up the block to grab something more than what our vending machines can offer us for food. On the way back, I passed a family walking down the street that had two of the cutest kids, and so I grabbed a quick picture for the site.

Enjoy!

The family walk

NORAD? Um, nope!

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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.

NORAD? I don't think so...

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.

NORAD? Probably.

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

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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:

  1. The newsfeed post will link back to the post on Dave’s website. The preferred behaviour, but unfortunately rare.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.