Friday, September 20, 2002

Firefly was alright...not great, but I was admittedly distracted by the ultra annoying diagonal interference on the cable. It seems to be worth a second look...the dialogue was snappy, the pacing was bouncy, and the standard plot worked decently. Supposedly, the pilot is a lot better, but Fox won't show it - it's nto as action crazy as Fox wanted.
9:00:59 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

I am the happiest boy in the whole wide world - I have good reading (Old Gods Almost Dead, a nifty Stones bio), good TV (Simpsons now, followed by the premiere of Joss Whedon's Firefly, which is supposed to be pretty good), and great eating (keema muttar - a great Indian lamb dish that I'd been craving for MONTHS, but couldn't remember the name of). Now if I only had something to drink...
7:46:45 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Remember, A Vote For The FX Party Is A Vote For America. Plastic::FilmTV::Politics: In the tradition of 'American Idol' and 'Who Want To Be a Millionare?' he proposes 'American Candidate', in which the network will run a candidate in the actual 2004 election. [Plastic: Most Recent] The scariest thing is that this candidate could be construed as endorsed by Rupert Murdoch. Eugh.
7:42:07 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

I remember hearing that the Simpsons episode featuring the World Trade Center would not be shown in syndication again after last year...but the beginning of the episode I'm watching right now jumped out at me, too. It's the one where Flanders and Homer run off to Vegas and accidently get married. It opens with Mr. Burns' casino getting exploded (they meant to implode it, but...) followed by debris and dust flying all over the place as the Simpsons and other bystanders run away from the cloud. Oy.

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Kavalier & Clay & Spiderman [bOing bOing] Holy sh*t! Michael Chabon, author of Wonder Boys, Kavalier + Clay, and more, is writing the screenplay for the next Spider-Man movie. That should, well, rock.
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LaBrea-Tarpit-1.08 [search.cpan.org] Nothing that interesting, just the name of a new Perl module. It works with some scanner called LaBrea. I just get a kick out of how Perl modules sometimes get named... we're working with something called LaBrea? Well, then, yeah, Tarpit makes perfect sense! =)
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posted by Coop at September 20 10:57 AM. The Rapture Index This rather bizarre site is the Dow Jones of the end of the world. From the site, "You could say the Rapture index is a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity, but I think it would be better if you viewed it as prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we're moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture. " Whacked... [MetaFilter] I wonder if my "Andrew Bayer For Messiah 2000!" campaign sent the "False Christs" category up at all?

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The NYT on the release of Bush document justifying pre-emptive strikes: "The National Security Strategy of the United States". Changes in Strategy By DAVID E. SANGER NYT 9/20/02 Sanger reports on the release and contents of a 33-page docuement, wherein the bush administration outlines the adoption of a foriegn policy that justifies US right to conduct pre-emptive strikes. One of the most striking elements of the new strategy document is its insistence "that the president has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago." "Our forces will be strong enough," Mr. Bush's document states, "to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." With Russia so financially hobbled that it can no longer come close to matching American military spending, the doctrine seemed aimed at rising powers like China, which is expanding its conventional and nuclear forces. [Blog Left: Critical Interventions] What gives us the right to be the biggest badass on the planet, anyway? Not that I want China capable of squashing the US like a bug or anything, but whenever you have such lofty goals, you run into trouble. We may not have a serious rival right now, but eventually someone (China and India are the most likely cases I can think of) will start getting close, and we'll see a repeat of the naval arms race between Britain and Germany leading up to World War I (as documented in Robert K. Massie's excellent Dreadnought), which seems a more apt comparison than the US/Soviet arms race... Britain came into the century with a navy that dwarfed all others on Earth combined. Germany decided they needed to have a significant enough navy to be noticed, and since they're just on the other side of the North Sea from Britain, Britain had to respond by building yet more massive battleships so they could continue to dwarf the Germans...you get the point.

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One of many weblogging tools you'll find here on Phillip Pearson's server is the Comment Monitor, a way to check a Radio Userland weblog for comments. I used it this morning to discover around six or seven responses that never went anywhere because I completely overlooked them. Radio servers ought to generate an RSS feed of the 15 most recently-posted comments. David Bayly has an RSS tool for Manila that does this, which I've been using for a while as a fast way to keep up with the message board for one of my sites. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Salon Blog Tips] Agreed. I get so lost when Internet Explorer loses its history and suddenly all links haven't been visited - I go to my Comment Monitor and everything looks new, but isn't. I'd love a way to ping me when I get a comment - just a handy little featurette.

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Das Experiment seems a lot like the Stanford Prison Experiment, except in Germany and with techno. [Memepool] Actually, that's EXACTLY what Das Experiment is...I want to see it, but it's only playing in New York and LA. It's got the male lead from Run Lola Run! It must be good!
10:31:54 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

The population clock in the upper right of this page is broken right now - I've been trying to find a way to let the Census Bureau know it's broken, but no luck. However, I have found that the population of the world right now is over 6.25 billion, and the US population, by the Census approximations, is exactly 288,088,888 right now. That's a lot of 8s. Yeah, I'm a dork. And I'm easily entertained.

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Alright, what the hell is going on in the world? Two shirtless men, reported as a father and son, charged out of the stands in the ninth inning of the Kansas City Royals/Chicago White Sox game in Chicago last night...everyone's first reaction was 'Oh, look - a couple yahoos trying to run the bases and get on TV,' and they waited for security to tackle them.     Then these guys went after the first base coach for the Royals, Tom Gamboa, and began to beat the living shit out of him. And yes, it was just as bizarre as that sounds. They just started pounding him, punching him and kicking him - you can see him on the ground in the picture on the right, taken just before the first Royal out of the dugout made it to the scene...his arm (I don't know who it was) is the one coming at the father on the left side of the pic. The entire Royals dugout emptied, followed by their bullpen, and they jumped into the fray.     It took a few minutes for security to regain control - I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear that the Royals' players did their best to beat the crap out of the attackers in return. A White Sox outfielder saw a pocket knife fall out of one of the attackers' pockets, just to make it all more disturbing and frightening. They got dragged off the field and face various charges. Gamboa suffered a few cuts and bruises, but walked off the field under his own power. This is just WEIRD.

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Israeli troops besiege Arafat HQ. A large explosion rocks Yasser Arafat's West Bank HQ as Israeli tanks tighten a siege begun hours after a suicide attack in Tel Aviv. [BBC News | Front Page] Let me guess - they're going after Arafat because he was behind the suicide bombings, right? That'd be a valid reason for besieging his compound, even if they had no evidence, I guess. But no, they're not actually claiming Arafat had anything to do with the suicide bombings - though they are accusing pretty much all of his aides. I've long wondered this: how the hell does Sharon expect the Palestinians to stop terrorism when you're destroying their infrastructure? It's a little late to worry about this now, I know, but still - WTF?

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Falun Gong 'TV hackers' jailed [BBC World] These guys are hardcore, no question. I'll admit, I get more interested once technology comes into the picture - but the whole persecution of Falun Gong is strange and bad...someone my sister went to college with got arrested and detained in China for protesting on behalf of Falun Gong. I've never really understood what the problem the Chinese gov't has with Falun Gong is - anyone able to explain it?

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I may have mentioned Baseball-Reference.com in the past - it's a great site, with pretty much every statistic the baseball world has ever generated. They've come up with a cool way to raise money:  you can sponsor pages. Sure, they could be sponsored by corporations with advertisments, but the main attraction is for individuals to sponsor their favorite players. I paid $45 to sponsor Dwight Evans' page...the link isn't there yet, but I thought it was worth it - I love the site, and Dewey was one of my favorite players as a kid. As I said, this is a nice way to raise cash for a site like this...

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