A couple of months ago I was looking at the various online rss readers and didn’t find any that were acceptable.  But lately I heard good things about the new google reader and so I checked it out again.  And hot diggity is it ever nice… it’s a good replacement for the offline readers I’ve been trying to use at home and at work.

Google really is going to eat the entire desktop, aren’t they?

So much of the entertainment I watch is about murder.  Perhaps more than for most people as I quite enjoy the Sherlock Holmes genre so I’m a rabid consumer of lesser known shows like Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Monk.  In addition to those I also usually catch the more popular CSI and Law & Order shows — which adds up to a lot of murder.  There there is the news, which is also quite murder-heavy, be it school shootings or Islamic suicide bombers or whatever — the news of the day is probably about murders.
Except… I’ve never known a single person in my whole life who was actually murdered.   I’ve known plenty who have died through accident, suicide, overdose, disease… but never murder.  This is perhaps an obvious observation, but we are massively bombarded with these things which are actually exceptionally rare.  I don’t have a conclusion.

Forget about this whole “holiday season” nonsense.. I propose a new name: The Turkey Season.  In each of the following three months is a major holidays where turkey is consumed in massive quantities: Canadian Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

I like turkey season.

In America they call pamplemousse “grapefruit”. I mean really, who the heck looks at pamplemousse and thinks “oh I know, this is like a grape but it’s fruit so let’s call it grapefruit in order to indicate how similar it is to a grape”?

For one, grapes are fruit. Why are grapes not grapefruit? Also, pamplemousse is much much larger than a grape and has a totally different taste, it’s baffling to me how anyone could thing that one is even remotely similar for naming purposes.

an orangefruit.

Yes, that’s right: the Republicans in Congress have agreed on a ‘compromise’ which allows a tribunal established under the authority of the President, using whatever criteria or definition it wants (because the law, while it refers to the Military Commissions Act of 2006 does not apply its rules to the tribunal) to declare anyone to be an enemy combatant for any reason it desires, and takes away that person’s right to sue to challenge their detention. — Bound in a Nutshell

[update] the author of that post wrote in a comment here that he’s now updated his entry to reflect that it’s not quite as bad as it seems — it only affects non-US citizens.  Thankfully we don’t know any of those right?  Those guys totally won’t know what hit them, SUCKERS!

Last night my lovely wife snuck some spinach into my food.  I think she’s trying to kill me.

Last night I was looking for my netflix DVDs and searched much of the apartment unable to find them.

My lovely wife pointed out that the information about the in-apartment location of my netflix DVDs was readily available on the internet.

This has been a crappy day.

Those things are not related. :-(

Part 2 in an ongoing series of adventures staring your hero: me.

• Nintendo DS Lite
• Tin of Penguin mints (cinnamon, mostly full)
• Tin of Penguin mints (regular, mostly empty)
• Micro tin of Penguin mints (chocolate, containing Mario 64 DS)
• Velcro
• USB cable
• Pay stubb
• Angry letter from bank
• Three netflix discs
• Camera battery charger
• Some change
• Civ4 Warlords box
• Leftover stickers from the Book of Zogg fiasco
• Wooden back massage tool
• New Super Mario Bros cover art
• DOL Letter sans tabs

I am not well, I am good.

[update] Actually I’m all good, sorry for the confusion.

I hate them so much.

• heinz tomato ketchup
• trader joe’s hot sauce
• cup of cold water
• empty starbucks mug
• empty dan marino mug
• empty glass
• two three empty cans of sparkling pamplemouse drink
• company hat
• bowl with cherry pie stains (plus fork)
• bowl with some uneaten macaroni (plus fork)
• civilization 4 warlords box (plus cd sleeve)
• letter from the washington state DOL sans tabs
• file folder containing the original version of the sapphire manifesto
• straps of velcro
• leftover stickers from the book of zogg

‘Top of the Food Chain‘, by writer/director John Paizs, is a little-known Canadian film produced in 1999 on the subject of science & technology, culture, and religion. On the surface the movie is a loose parody of 50’s horror movies, but the intensely witty dialog and the outstanding performances by Campbell Scott and Fiona Loewi and others make the film a pleasure to watch.

‘Top of the Food Chain’ is set in the fictional small town of Exceptional Vista, where most of the people left town after the local nut factory went out of business, leaving only a small handful of oddballs. When a famous atomic scientist (Campbell Scott) and two traveling salespeople visit the town, the town is plagued with problems. First the television reception suddenly fails all over town, and then residents start disappearing one by one, victims of hostile aliens.With the help of a sexy motel manager and her dimwitted brother, the people of town are forced to find and ultimately stop the invaders before they destroy the town and eventually the planet itself. The premise of the film might sound ludicrous, but that is an intentional part of the self-referential parody at the core of the movie.

This film comes as a great relief to those people who are tired of Hollywood’s tired routine towards science fiction. In fact, this film accomplishes the very task that ‘When Mars Attacks!’ failed at when attempting to cover a similar subject. It is unpredictable and funny in a way that high-budget Hollywood collaborative productions rarely accomplish, if ever.

The fast paced and well-written dialog is funny in a much different way than found in films like ‘Dude, Where’s My Car?’ or ‘Dumb and Dumber’ - but if you watch this film you should expect to have many of the quotes follow you around for a long time. In fact, even several months after watching the film many of my friends still refer to “the hilly, lumpy bumpy part of town outside of town”, or “aye, says Jesus, there’s the rub” - lines that do not sound funny when read in text but with the delivery by Campbell Scott and others they are unforgettable. In fact, you may want to go back and watch the film a second time, just to hear the parts of the dialog that you might have missed the first time.

However, this movie is most certainly not for everyone. It is quirky and odd, and very unlike the conventional straightforward plodding film that many moviegoers tend to expect. Some of the characters have odd sexual fetishes, while might make certain viewers squeamish, but there is no nudity or sex scenes. There is a little bit of gore and violence in the film, but it is done more in the low-budget tradition of implying violence and hinting at gore (a la ‘The Blair Witch Project’) - nothing that should bother most moviegoers.

Unfortunately, you will likely not be able to find this movie at your local Blockbuster. If you want to find ‘Top of the Food Chain’ for rental, you will probably have to find a specialty video store in order to find it. In the United States you may have to look for the film under the alternate title ‘Invasion!’, and in Europe look for ‘Welcome to Exceptional Vista’. If you enjoyed this movie, I have to suggest you look for other works by John Paizs, in particular ‘Crime Wave‘ (1985). ‘Crime Wave’ is a remarkably different film from ‘Top of the Food Chain’, but also quite enjoyable.

Another chance to forget my own birthday.  So if you forgot, you’re worse than hitler too.

One thing I haven’t seen much press on in the coverage of the recent coup in Thailand is why the military needed to intervene in the affairs of a democratically elected government.  I heard from some guy at work that there was an election there scheduled in November but was unable to confirm this — if true that means this coup was not about corruption at all but simply because they were unwilling to accept the likely results of the upcoming election.  That’s pretty scary.  Then again, when are coups not scary?

Can we like, roll back time to 2000 and replace Al Gore 1.0 with the current version and rerun the election?  Please?  Pretty please?

In his latest major speech, Gore hit two of my pet issues squarely on the nose: domestic payroll taxes and emissions taxes.   This man should be president.

A package I ordered recently (two cheap-ish optical trackballs) never arrived though Amazon and UPS both claimed it was delivered.  I suspect that it was delivered to the building office and then disappeared from there, but I’m not sure either way.  Regardless I sent their customer support a quick little email describing the situation and asked what the process was for things like this.
I got back a prompt reply, totally apologetic, offering to either deliver a new order or refund the money. Now that’s service.  Whether they are doing it because I spend a lot of money at Amazon or if that’s normal business practice for them, I don’t really care — I’m sold.  Rock on!

This was an old classic, Netflix has been trying to get me to see it forever but lately I’ve been put off older movies because of the lower production values and often weaker writing and acting.  North by Northwest though shattered my expectations, it was a very wonderful film that was well written and executed.  To summarize the plot briefly it’s about a “normal guy” who is mistaken for a spy and is drawn into a world of intrigue and suspense.  If you haven’t seen it yet (I think I was perhaps the last person on the planet to see it), check it out.

I heard from several sources that this movie was hillarious so I took the unprecedented step of even watching it in the movie theatre a while back.  Except, it wasn’t all that great at all.  I’m really wondering what all the hype was about because while it had some really funny moments it wasn’t even a great performer in its own genre.  Sacsha Baron Cohen did a really good job with his stereotyped character as did the rest of the performers but it just wasn’t as great as everyone said it would be.  It was a decently funny movie, that’s all.

Don’t eat spinach, it can kill and most likely will kill you if you get within 20 metres of some.
Thankfully by total coincidence my wife left town for a bit so I’m about as safe in this area as one could possibly be.

Joey JoJo Shabadu Jr — you coming to visit tomorrow or what? I need to know how urgently I need to clean up my apartment.

[Update: dude I totally just cleaned my frigging kitchen instead of taking care of skippy’s website concerns* so you’d better not be bailing on me now]

[Update #2: nevermind]

*read: playing civ4

Muslims are so pissed off by the mischaracterization that their religion is linked with violence by an Emperor of the Byzantine Empire that they hold violent protests worldwide.
Seriously, Emperor Manuel II Paleologos of the Byzantine Empire, cut that out already! If you don’t stop talking about the link between violence and Islam, they’ll hold more violent protests and kill people.

Unless you are John Hodgman*, you can only be an expert at so many things. Two of the areas that I know much better than the general population are computer technology (deliberately vague) and US immigration. What is interesting is that I quite frequently see dramatically false examples in the mass media relating to current events. For computer technology this is of course nothing new, I’ve grown to accept that to reporters they have just given up on trying and just try to paste something down that is grammatically correct-ish. Glaring factual errors are just par for the course in this arena.

So during my long ordeal with immigration into the US I managed to become quite the expert on procedures and things that most people won’t experience. This gives me perspective on news items like this one which tells me that just as they do with computer technology, reporters are just making stuff up as they go along with regards to immigration too. They take a story about a guy who (a) didn’t know what kind of visa to get; (b) screwed up and did the things out of order; and (c) is subject to standard US immigration practices — and they turn it into a sob story about how The Man is denying Arabs from getting into the country.

Guess what, sfgate.com? If the dude was legally married to an American, he could apply for a K-3 visa without having to leave the country. He could get his security clearance done inside the US in any of the time following his legal marriage. Getting fingerprinted, questioned, and barred entry into the US while they judge the merits your case is standard operating procedure.

Entry into the USA for non-citizens is not a right, it’s a privilege and when you declare your intent to immigrate they don’t want to let you in until they make sure you qualify. It super-mega-sucks, I can personally attest to this, but it has nothing to do with the dude’s name or country of citizenship. That’s just a bunch of nonsense written by people who don’t know what they are talking about written to serve what I assume to be a predetermined agenda.

I am also reminded of the times in both my personal and working life where I have been privy to a situation that was considered newsworthy. There was an “act of god” type accident at a job site my father’s company was tangently involved in, and also the company I work for launched a new product. In both cases the various media agencies put out incorrect facts and made unwarranted conclusions that would mislead viewers/readers. The reporters took the angle they wanted to report on an tried to jam the facts of the case into their story (for better or for worse).

It begs the question**, does the media get anything right about anything at all? It really can’t just be a coincidence that all of my exposures have been so bad, can it?

Notes:

* Wow really?? That’s frigging AWESOME you read my blog.
** Sorry was that incorrect? I meant, it literally begs the question.

Or I suppose more correctly, “can’t sleep, playing civ4 all night”.

This is what happens:

1. the wife goes out of town
2. the husband stays up all night playing civ4
3. the husband is tired from lack of sleep
4. the husband doesn’t update his blog much

Don’t you see what happens, Donny?

Video games are cool. Tell a friend. Earn some money!

My own game store is here, but any potential rewards I’d get will go to charity.  Check it out anyhow though it’s pretty cool.

Yeah, it’s overhyped today, the media talks about it way too much, blah blah blah.  But right now I don’t care.  Maybe I’m getting sentimental in my old age, who knows.
This is a picture of Manhattan that I took in Feb 1998 from the observation deck at the World Trade Center when I was visiting NYC with my good friend (and sometimes commenter) Joey JoJo Shabadu Jr.  I still can’t really believe it’s not there anymore, even though I’ve been to the site since then.  Pictures of the NYC skyline just seem like they are missing something, even five years later.

(more…)

When kind readers like yourself make a great suggestion in response to an entry, do I laugh and mock?  (sometimes) No!  I listen and follow the sage advice.

Today I announce that I have turned a comment into reality, and followed fluffy’s advice in a comment and got some premade meatballs which I will have with my next serving of pasta which is destined to be… tomorrow!

My lovely wife points out that Whistler is the same word as hitler with just two extra letters.

Also, I invented a new saying: “the worst thing since sliced hitler”.

That is all.

You know why spaghetti and meatballs is so awesome? Because you get both a good sauce (ground beef in sauce is just not totally awesome) but also meat at the same time. Starch, sauce, and protein but not all mixed together in some unholy concoction! You get the best of both worlds instead of some mixture that does justice to neither.

However, meatballs are a frigging pain in the butt to make. So that’s why you go out to get them, and at a nice restaurant too because they’ll have the best sauce which is part of the whole point of having them separate right?

NOW YOU ARE CATCHING ON.

Miss me?

To celebrate my return, here is a picture of Margaret Thatcher with a hilter mustache.

The gleaming eagle
Swoops down and catches its prey
Then goes to its nest

The desert sand blows
On a deserted island
Then goes in the sea

A drop of water
Is a crystal in the sea
That shines in the sun.

(more…)

Don’t expect your usual worse than hitler blog reading goodness for the next while eh?

[update:  If you pay them an entire arm and leg, they will give you wireless internets access.  So maybe I won’t be as offline as I thought.]

Semi-prominent linux hacker mjg59 has a rather apt humourous description of burning man and web 2.0.

Reading this pretentious salad menu of an fancy-dancy Irish “pub”, I am reminded of a story my mother once told me about her trip to Ireland.

Her and a friend were at a restaurant somewhere in rural Ireland, and they ordered a “green salad”.  The waiter was dumbfounded by this request and the staff had never heard of a “green salad” before so they asked my mother and her friend what this “green salad” was about.  They replied that it was a salad with greens… it’s kind of difficult to explain what a “green salad” is.  I mean come on, it’s a green salad, not very complicated eh?
What they were eventually served was a salad comprised of every green item in the restaurant, peas and green beans and green peppers, etc.  Just a bunch of green things assembled, following the request quite literally.

So when I see how pretentious this place tries to make salads be in an Irish context, I cannot help but laugh.

Since my last entry, Alaska Air cancelled the flight I was to be on altogether, which hopefully improves the chance of my getting a refund eventually.

Also my totally awesome mother booked us at a rockingly swank place in Whistler so our honeymoon will be wonderful.

I canceled my flight this morning, so no Cabos san Lucas for me and the lovely wife.  We are instead going to beautiful Whistler BC which we hope will not have a hurricane hit.  It will be a very different kind of trip, for sure, but still nice.

The airline has not yet canceled tomorrow’s flights, but they have refunded the airline portion of the trip.  The kicker is, they won’t refund the hotel yet because they cannot know what the refund policy is like for the hotel because the hotel staff have evacuated.  We’ll see in a few days if I will get that refunded automatically too or if I’ll have to fight for it.