I was an extra in a music video once:
You can see the back of my bare-ass-bald head beginning at the 3:48 mark (I’m in front of the hot redhead). Interesting shoot for an interesting band. I pretty much had no idea what the hell was going on. This was back during my days as a music video company executive (ah, 2003…), and I was baby-sitting the camera. Not a happy story.
PMI on how to review Jonah Goldberg’s new book.
Kinda NSFW.
Kinda disturbing.
Way bemusing.
I think it says all I have to say on the topic.
Of all the movies in the latest Oscar nominations, I’ve seen exactly four of them:
Of the four, the only one I didn’t find disappointing on some level was “Transformers,” and that was just because I had no expectations whatsoever.
Seriously, though, I’m pulling for “Bourne” for film editing–based on what little I know of the subject, that part of the film kicked ass (think high-speed fight scenes). On the other hand, I didn’t like how the techno remix of Moby’s “Extreme Ways” broke continuity with the first two films. Minor criticism, I guess.
The whole Baby Boomer/Generation X/Generation Doofus nomenclature has always struck me as just a marketing tool, especially since so many people seem to be barely left out of categorization. My parents, born in 1944 and 1945, missed inclusion in the Baby Boom (beginning in 1946). I was born in 1974, and it was unclear for quite a while whether I fit into Generation X or not. Now generation labels are thrown around all over the place.
Here’s an interesting test to determine your generation based on technology usage rather than date of birth–it makes more sense to group avid Wii-players together than just people born between Year A and Year B. As an example, I was at Ikea a few weeks ago and was mystified by a teenage girl who, while examining fabric samples and talking to her mother, was furiously writing text messages (“texting,” as the kids say) on her phone at a remarkable rate. It seemed like super-human multitasking.
Apparently, though, I fall on the high end of tech savviness, as the quiz puts me firmly in Generation Y (18 points!). Chronologically, I’m near the end of Generation X, though.
I wore through a Nirvana cassette in high school and once broke a closet rod because of all the plaid flannel shirts I owned–that must merit inclusion in Generation X, right? Plus, I think a great many recent technological advances are stupid (HD television, mostly–a topic I’ll expound upon in a later post.) I feel more Generation X than Y (although I never participated in a mosh pit), so maybe I’ll just split the difference and say I’m part of Generation X.5.
Join us. We have coffee.
I haven’t seen Cloverfield yet, but I’m sure I will at some point. The History Channel’s “Life After People” premieres tonight, too. It gets me wondering–and I have no answer to this question–what it is about the destruction of familiar landmarks in movies that is so dang entertaining.
A few examples include Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and Armageddon/Deep Impact, a nice compilation of which is found here:
Think of it as disaster porn: the “money shot,” if you will, of all these movies is the mega-CGI scenes of destruction and mayhem. Maybe we as a culture just need to be repeatedly desensitized after events like 9/11 and Katrina, and watching NYC get blown up/flooded/smashed by a monster/inundated by leprechauns is the way to do it.
Or maybe we’re just a nation full of assholes. Hard to tell. Anyway, I prefer the much more sober, survival-against-all-odds Battlestar Galactica over fluff like Armageddon.
And besides, the spoilers about the Cloverfield monster make it look pretty silly.
Reprinted from a comment thread without the permission of the author, because it made me chuckle:
[T]his reminds me of the day I disproved God with calculus, in calculus class, at a Catholic high school. Let me see if I remember it…
Let {C} be the set of all possible truth claims that might fill a particular gap in our knowledge. If we have no reason whatsoever to choose one possible claim over another, the probability of each claim being true is 1/n (where n is the number of truth claims).The believer makes the mistake of assuming that n = 2 (i.e. “Jesus” and “Something Else”). But the elements of a set must be discrete: “Something Else,” unlike “Jesus,” is not a discrete claim. “Something Else” is itself a set of discrete possibilities, all of which must be counted individually among the truth claims of {C}.
If the believer cannot introduce any reasons (i.e. arguments) to narrow the set of possible claims, then the membership of {C} is limited only by our imagination. As Vishnu piles upon Odin, as telepathic koalas who control the weather bump into the invisible leprechauns who tuned the Universal constants, n quickly approaches infinity — and the limit of 1/n, the probability of any one claim being true, falls to zero.
Q.E.D. ……?
I really don’t remember my high school calculus class too well–I’m one of those people who can honestly say I won’t ever need calculus for my job. I get about as far as n = ∞, so 1/n becomes infinitely small, and then I get lost.
My inner hippie is shitting blue cupcakes over this, but this is one damn cool piece of logging equipment:
Thank you, John Deere. And seriously, let’s not get the Lorax involved in this. He speaks for the trees.
Drudge Retort has the news:
On the evening of Saturday January 17, 1998, the internet gossip merchant Matt Drudge posted a story that opened the most sensational scandal season in the history of the American presidency. He reported that Newsweek magazine had killed reporter Michael Isikoff’s story about President Clinton’s sexual relationship with a former intern. The next day he had her name: Monica Lewinsky.
Ah, sweet memories…times were so much simpler then, right?
An out-of-control high school party makes international news, somehow.
Otherwise known as total douchebag Corey Worthington Delaney of Melbourne, Australia—a 16-year-old idiot who threw a party while his parents were on holiday that raged so out of control it has made international headlines: “More than 500 people turned up [the] house in Melbourne and police were called when neighbours complained about the noise. Some of the revelers went on a rampage and police cars were pelted with glass bottles while nearby houses and gardens were vandalised. No one was arrested but at least 30 officers, a helicopter and the dog squad were needed to break the party up.”
Shakesville has the complete transcript of the interview with the kid, who is, in fact, a douchebag. I also wouldn’t be surprised if he has bumper balls.
Here are two bits of news that brightened my day, at least somewhat:
1. A former executive for the company that makes Enzyte has testified as to its total inefficacy, further noting as follows:
In some cases, company founder Steve Warshak required customers seeking a refund to get a notarized doctor’s note stating the pill had no effect. “He said it was extremely unlikely someone would get anything notarized saying they had a small penis,” testified James Teegarden Jr.
2. The Virginia General Assembly is considering a bill to outlaw “bumper nuts,” those scrotum replicas you see hanging from the bumpers of trucks owned by people who don’t have any friends. Urban Dictionary defines them as “prosthetic testicles used to adorn the oversized vehicles of those who think very highly of themselves.” Lest you worry about the First Amendment implications, read on:
Objects that resemble human genitalia would be banned from display on vehicles, under a bill proposed Tuesday by Del. Lionell Spruill Sr.
The accessories, sometimes called “bumper nuts,” often are found on the back of pickups.
“They’re offensive to some folks,” said Spruill, a Chesapeake Democrat. “It’s OK to express yourself, but citizens have the right not to be subjected to something vulgar.”
Remember, the legal standard for “obscenity” is if “when taken as a whole, [it] lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” I don’t particularly support the bill, mostly on knee-jerk libertarian grounds, but I also don’t really worry that banning truck testicles is merely a gateway to substantially greater government control of speech.
I also don’t think it’s speech. It’s fake nuts hanging from a truck.
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