Atlantis, AI, Jay and Silent Bob, Say Anything

While my DVD purchases are nowhere near what they used to be now that I don’t have the extra income and employee discount from Suncoast, I do still occasionally pick one up here and there. I’ve picked up four over the past month (see? Four in a month!) — here’s the scoop….

Atlantis: The Lost Empire: Disney’s most recent animated flick. I thought this one was very under-appreciated when it came out in the theaters, which was a shame — though not entirely surprising. It’s Disney’s first PG-rated animated film since The Black Cauldron, and one of their few non-musicals. It’s also got a much more adult-oriented sense of humor running through it, which I very much enjoyed. Well worth seeing, though — I really like the fact that Disney has finally decided to stray from the standard formula that they held to for so long, and I hope that the fact that A:TLE didn’t perform as well as it could have in the box office doesn’t scare them away from experimenting in the future.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: Hey — it’s Kevin Smith! Sure, there’s not exactly much in the way of a plot, and many of the jokes won’t connect with people who haven’t seen the rest of his films. Being a Kevin Smith fan, though, I think it’s pretty funny. If nothing else, the news bulletin warning people to “stay away from the C.L.I.T” (Campaign for the Liberation of Itinerant Tree-dwellers), and watching Ben Affleck and Matt Damon rip on themselves by selling out to make Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season are worth watching. At least…I think so.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence: The single best film Spielberg has done, one of the best movies of last year (if not the best), and certiainly one of the few must-see “thinking person’s” sci-fi films to come out in recent years (the only others I can think off off the top of my head being Gattaca, Contact, and 2001). I watched the movie last night, and will probably be digging into the special features tonight…most likely with a seperate post to follow.

Say Anything: One of my favorite 80’s films, and the one to cement John Cusack in my brain as an actor to keep track of. This is the second in the unofficial ‘Cusack series’ that my friend Royce and I enjoy, where though they’re all seperate and unrelated films, we like to put them in a series simply because they star John Cusack, and he plays roughly the same character in each one. For the curious, here’s the series in full as it stands right now: Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer for his formative High School years, Say Anything for High School graduation, Grosse Pointe Blank for the 10-year reunion, and High Fidelity for the thirty-something years.

Vocabulary lesson

Each year the Washington Post’s Style Invitational asks readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one leter and supply a new definition.

Here are the 2001 winners:

Intaxication:
Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
Reintarnation:
Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
Foreploy:
Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
Giraffiti:
Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
Sarchasm:
The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.
Inoculatte:
To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
Hipatitis:
Terminal coolness.
Osteopornosis:
A degenerate disease.
Karmageddon:
It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s all, like, a serious bummer.
Glibido:
All talk and no action.
Dopeler Effect:
The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
Ignoranus:
A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

Fun with Google

A pair of articles that I wanted to comment on, but don’t have time to right now. Very interesting reading, though, especially if you read or write a weblog (such as this one), or if you use Google for your searches.

Ollie North

If memory serves, Ollie North used to amuse himself by drawing up various scenarios for martial law — and if the thought of that doesn’t set off a screaming gibbering fit of paranoia in at least some small part of your brain, then we might as well just toss in the towel right now, just forget all this nonsense about the rule of law and representative democracy and just go ahead and coronate King George Junior the Second as our Supreme Leader and Beloved Enlightened Commander and be done with it.

Tom Tomorrow

Sci-Fi themes, then and now

Tonight I popped in the original version of Rollerball. Very cool flick, I’ll post more thoughts on it later on. However, I did find a HTF thread about the recent remake, and one of the members made a really neat post concerning the differences between Sci-Fi themes of the 70’s and today. I didn’t want to lose track of his post, so I’m copying it here.

Read more

Hippies on Mars!

Mars is tie-dyed!Pictures of Mars released today by NASA show giant tie-dye pattern, which could indicate the presence of Deadheads on the planet.

March 2, 2002

Spacecraft Sends Its First Images of Martian Hippies

By MICHAEL “WOODY” HANSCOM

Eleven months after its departure from Earth and four months after its arrival at Mars, the Mars Oddysey spacecraft has finally settled into its working orbit and started sending back pictures and other sicentific observations of the planet.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration yesterday made public the mission’s first mapping pictures and other data, including evidence of significant amounts of tie-dye patterns on and under the Martian surface.

“The signal we’ve been getting loud and clear is that there are a lot of hippies on Mars,” William Boynton, a planetary scientist and ex-Deadhead at the University of Arizona, said at a news priefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calf., where the mission is managed.

The findings are based on photos showing the presence of large multi-colored patterns, especially in a broad region from the planet’s south pole to 60 degrees south latitude. Mission scientists said the patterns most likely indicated the presence of hippies. The extent of tie-dye at the North Pole cannot be determined, the scientists said, because the northern hemisphere is just coming out of winter and most outdoor tours are summertime only events.

The detection of a tie-dyed surface was made by three gamma-ray spectrographic instruments. When cosmic rays strike the planet’s surface, they set off reactions that produce distinctive gamma rays that are in effect signatures of the chemical elements in the soil.

In a statement, James Gavin, chief scientist of the Mars exploration program at NASA and Grateful Dead historian, said the preliminary assessment of hte gamma-ray results indicated the likely presence of tie-dye in the upper few feet of the Martian surface. Scientists for more than two decades have speculated that Mars was not always such a cold, arid, silent place, and could have great music festivals, enhanced by stores of lysergic acid diethylamide bound in polar ice caps and permafrost.

“Further analysis and another month or so of tracking the Martian tour patterns will permit more quantitative assessment of these observations and allow for a refined interpretation, man,” Dr. Gavin said.

Scientists estimated that at most, Deadheads account for just a small percentage of the hippies on the Martian surface, but are spread over vast stretches of the landscape, mixed with Phishheads and other sub-classifications of hippie. Tie-dye is considered an indispensable ingredient of hippie life, and its presence on Mars is of increasing interest to scientists who suspect that Jerry Garcia didn’t die, but has merely retreated to a previously unknown hiding spot.

The main objectives of the $300 million mission are not only to search for deposits of tie-dye, but also to map the distribution of LSD in Martian ice and examine radiation hazards that tour promoters would face when selecting concert venues. The spacecraft is operating in a circular orbit 200 miles above the planet.

The fact that the spacecraft got there at all and is sending data is a source of no little relief to NASA officials and scientists. At the last opportunity, in 1999, the agency suffered a double failure when an orbiter and a lander each crashed on approach to Mars. That forced the cancellation of a landing mission for this year and led to new management of the Mars Odyssey mission.

Roger Gibbs, Odyssey’s deputy project manager, said, “We have a very well-operating spacecraft, man, and the results have exceeded our expectations.”

The only serious problem, engineers said, is that the instrument for detecting LSD on Mars stopped communicating and had to be turned off last August. In measurements on the way, however, the instrument indicated that the daily dose of LSD concertgoers would face during Martian concerts would be more than twice the dose endured by fans in the heyday of the Greatful Dead’s Earth-bound tours.

R. Stephen Saunders, the chief project scientist, said “can you imagine the trip that would send you on? As soon as we get the shows set, I am so there, dude.”

The spacecraft’s camera system, designed for mapping the planet’s surface and looking for more clues as to suitable oudoor concert venues, is taking pictures in visible and infrared light. The infrared instrument has produced detailed temperature maps of the Mars surface by day and night. Some of the infrared images, scientists said, are 30 times sharper than anything previously available, and can read the slogans painted on the sides of the VW minibuses moving the Martian hippies from show to show.

© 2002 The New York Times Company and Michael “Woody” Hanscom, inspired by the press release posted in this post on the HTF.