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--Blogger Archives: June 2005-
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Movie Reviews (153)

Ten Most Recent Film Reviews:
--Infernal Affairs -- 5.5
--The Protector/Tom Yum Goong -- 6
--The Limey -- 8
--The Descent -- 6
--Oldboy -- 9.5
--Shaolin Deadly Kicks -- 7
--Mission Impossible III -- 7.5
--V for Vendetta -- 8.5
--Ghost in the Shell 2 -- 8
--Night Watch -- 7.5

Book Reviews (76)
Five Most Recent Book Reviews:
--Cat People -- 4
--Attack Poodles -- 5
--Caught Stealing -- 6
--The Dirt, by Motley Crue -- 7.5
--Harry Potter #6 -- 7

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See all 234 articles here.

Fiction
Original horror and fantasy short stories.

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(350 Rock Bands Listed)
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Diablo II
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BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: May 2007



Friday, May 25, 2007  

Vacation


I'm off to San Diego to visit the parents for the better part of a week. I won't be spending much time on the computer while I'm there and have no idea if I'll have a chance to update this blog. In other words... business as usual. Enjoy your holiday weekend.

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Thursday, May 24, 2007  

Summertime Blues and Fan Movie News


Much like the proverbial groundhog seeing its shadow and doing something or other probably involving a Bill Murray film perpetually airing on basic cable, this is the annual "it must be summertime if Flux is starting to bitch about hot weather as though he somehow thought it might not happen this year." It's been in the high 80s for a couple of days, and as usual when it's finally hot for several days in a row, I'm damn depressed. It hasn't been hot enough to bother with the A/C, but I've been sitting in front of a fan all day and sweating and wishing it were oh... November. November would be nice. Or I could just be somewhere it doesn't ever get hot. Bleh.

After trying (with limited success) to work on at least one of my myriad projects during the hot day, I kept waiting for it to get cooler so I could eat. One advantage of the hot summer is that I usually end up losing weight, simply because I never want to cook or eat anything other than like, fresh fruit. During the day, at least. What usually happens is I starve all day and come darkness/coolness I eat too much bad stuff. Tonight, for instance, I decided that I deserved a pizza after not eating but some orange juice and an apple all day. *urp*

While waiting for it to cook, I turned on the TV and while clicking around in 10:15pm, pre-SportsCenter/John Stewart show boredom I ended up hitting Resident Evil: Apocalypse and watching the last 45 minutes. Again. I'd seen that much of the movie before, and oddly enough, on the same channel I've never watched otherwise. Oxygen, which goes by "O" and which I always think means "The Oprah Network." It's basically a younger-skewing Lifetime Network, with nothing but women's shows, but not all the sappy soft focus Hallmark movies filled with commercials for minivans and Pampers.

I mention it since it's so weird that they have mindless bloody zombie action movies like Resident Evil 2 on. I guess it's kind of appropriate, the film primarily stars Milla Jovinovich, who is some sort of genetically-enhanced superhuman, as she and some other disposable fools roam around the improbably-named "Raccoon City" which has been turned into a zombie wasteland by a mutagen released by the Haliburton-esque Umbrella Corporation. The plot is of course entirely irrelevant, since the movie is just a long series of nighttime action set pieces, as the two female leads kill zombies with their bare hands and occasionally guns. Throw in some evil black-suited stuntmen guards for the Umbrella Corp., scheming and nefarious scientists, random innocent bystanders/comic relief, mutant cenobites, and incompetent anti-terrorist teams, and you've got yourself a movie.

Technically.

I mean it's stuff happening on a screen, for about 90 minutes, but I don't know if it would meet any real standard as a film, since nothing in it makes any sense. There's kind of a plot, and the characters don't change names in the middle or act in totally-illogical fashion. But that being said, nothing ever follows any logic. No one would ever react the way they react, none of the physical actions are ever believable, no one's motivations or behavior matches what a real human would do under those circumstances, etc. I think you could convene a small group of sane humans, break down the film into 30 or 40 individual scenes, and discuss them, and in no more than 10% of them would anyone in your film group be able to defend the behaviors or outcomes of the events on film. It's a complete jumbled mash of random excuses to blow stuff up or kick people through walls, and while Hollywood action pictures have a long history of that, Resident Evil 2 takes it to another, almost farcical level. It could have been a really funny movie, in the hands of a competent screenwriter/director. It's actually not that bad, I mean it's no Robocop 3, but that's mostly because the stars are much prettier and they had a lot more money to throw at the screen. I wouldn't say I enjoyed it, but it beat professional poker, and I was watching it under ideal circumstances: with one eye while cooking/cutting/eating pizza, enjoying the cool air that came with darkness, and surfing political blogs at the same time. I can't imagine sitting through it without commercial breaks or distractions, though.

The oddest part, and put it over the edge into blog-worthy, was the fact that it was on the O network, which meant after every 6-8 minute chunk of zombie killing and explosions there were 3 minutes of commercials for home decorations, and products to put on your hair, smear on your face, or insert into your vagina. Again, they certainly beat the cheap beer, Girls Gone Wild, and "male spray perfume with a butch name that will turn women into strippers when they smell you" commercials I expect with that quality of movie on basic cable, but they are a bit discordant.

Returning to the movie, it's got about the reviews you'd expect. RT tallied it at 19%, and since the movie's a few years old, there's an Ebert review. He sums things up pretty well, as usual.
The movie is an utterly meaningless waste of time. There was no reason to produce it, except to make money, and there is no reason to see it, except to spend money. It is a dead zone, a film without interest, wit, imagination or even entertaining violence and special effects.
I saw Hot Fuzz with Malaya a few days ago, and in a way Resident Evil 2 reminded me of it.

Hot Fuzz is a buddy cop comedy action pic by the guys who did Sean of the Dead, and it's very funny and clever and unbelievably over the top. It's inventive, and has literally every action movie cliche imaginable, to the point of self-referential distraction. That's the point, of course. Sort of like Team America, it's almost off putting the first time you see it, since you spend half the film shaking your head in an, "I can't believe they went there." sort of way. My point, if there is one, is that Resident Evil 2 is basically a straight, non-tongue-in-cheek version of the outrageously satirical action comedies. It's odd to compare the two types of films, since I think Resident Evil 2 could, with nothing more than slight editing and a bit of dialogue redubbing, be turned into a very funny comedy. It's already a visual self-parody, it just needs some dialogue to complete the task.

In the same way that good blogs are already far more interesting than the mainstream news articles they discuss/dissect, I can see a day in the not too distant future, as video editing and producing hardware and software get ever cheaper and easier to use, when amateurs will remix TV shows and movies into products far better and more inventive (to my demographic, at least) than they were in their original, stale, formulaic, mainstream configuration. People have been doing that already, from the JarJar-less remix of Episode One to TROOPS, to the purist edit of The Two Towers, to the approximately 500,000 AMVs on YouTube and elsewhere, with 4 or 5 minutes of scenes from an anime cut to some rock tune.

It's something to do while enduring a hot summer day, at least.

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Friday, May 18, 2007  

Most Popular Baby Names


The US Social Security Administration has just released their annual tally of the most popular baby names for the past year. And here it is.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Jacob
Michael
Joshua
Ethan
Matthew
Daniel
Christopher
Andrew
Anthony
William
Emily
Emma
Madison
Isabella
Ava
Abigail
Olivia
Hannah
Sophia
Samantha


The boy names are really boring/common, right? It's not just me? I've known at least ten guys with each of those names, and the only surprising news here is that Michael isn't #1, for a change. The female names are a bit more interesting, and while it's odd that the top 2 are basically the same name, at least people are at last sick of stupid IQ-sapping pop names like Britney and Jessica and Jennifer. Old fashioned, formal-souding names seem to be in as well, judging by 1900s appellations like Abigail, Isabella, and Sophia. And happily, there's only one stripper name on the list, though it's not such a happy development for all those cute little baby Madisons out there.

My favorite part of the list? The line right below the table.
Note: Rank 1 is the most popular, rank 2 is the next most popular, and so forth.
Just in case you'd forgotten that it was a US government site, they had to throw that bit of numb-skulled idiocy in to help you remember.

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Saturday, May 12, 2007  

Caution, this is Sparta.


And I thought there were no more funny jokes to be made from this now-iconic line. I have to admit I laughed my ass off at this one.



Source.

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Christianity's Top Sins Against Science


I don't think I've ever linked to Pharyngula before, and since it's a great blog that I've been reading for quite a while, I should take this opportunity to do so. It's written by P. Z. Myers, a Biology professor at the University of Minnesota, and covers science, biology, religion, atheism, octupi, and more. Myers does a great job at the largely thankless task of taking on and taking apart mainstream anti-evolution arguments, and I thought this recent post was quite link-worthy. Another blogger asked for a list of the ten worst things Christianity has done to Science. The guy was looking for stuff like Galileo's trial or various excommunications of scientists, but Myers went for a much broader scope in his ten twelve examples.
II. Literalism. We in the evo-creo wars know this one well. If the Bible says it, it must be literally true. There was a world-wide flood, there was an ark, the earth is 6000 years old, etc. One antiquated hodge-podge of a book becomes the arbiter of truth, with the added benefit that its clutter and inconsistency and diversity of authorship means you can justify anything with the right random quote.

IX. Inflexibility. The first time I heard this argument I could hardly believe it: religion never changes, while science changes all the time, therefore religion is better. Its premise is false, for one thing — religion changes all the time, and I daresay that if we could use a time machine to gather together a group of Essenes with a matched group of Southern Baptists, we'd have us an entertaining bloodbath—but for another, why would inflexibility and absolutism be considered virtues? I have no illusions that any of us have perfect knowledge of all truth, so please, give me a philosophy that will adapt to the evidence and provides a path to perfecting our knowledge.

XII. Faith. Faith is the greatest sin of religion. I despise it; I'm particularly appalled that it is so universally regarded as a virtue. Listen, if I ever call someone a "person of faith", you should be aware that I have just insulted them terribly. It's astonishing how easily that sails over people's heads, though.

Faith is this amazing idea that it is a good thing to hold incredible beliefs in the complete absence of evidence to support them; the more outrageous the belief and the weaker the logic behind them, the stronger your faith and the more virtuous your conduct. It short-circuits everything that works in the world and puts ignorance on a pedestal.

Faith is the opposite of science, yet it is also one common element that you will always hear valued in religion. It is the number one most common excuse for holding peculiar superstitious beliefs in spite of the evidence against them, their violations of sense, and their foundation in wishful thinking and rhetorical vapor—it's the one word non-answer to every criticism of religion. Faith. You might as well just say "gullibility" or "ignorance" or "delusion"— it's all the same thing.
There are heaps more posts along these lines, along with weekly squid-porn, so check it out.

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Thursday, May 10, 2007  

Terminator 4-6?


Some cool movie news today.
The Halcyon Company has announced plans to revive the cyborg-battling movie series with at least three more films, after the production company purchased all rights to the dormant franchise for an undisclosed, though likely eight-figure, sum. But while Halcyon founders Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson are looking to begin preproduction on Terminator 4 as soon as possible, they will do so without a leading man. Or man-machine.

Plot details for the fourth film have been kept under tight wraps, though are said to pick up with John Connor, heir to the rebellion, in his thirties, leading the remainder of the human race in its ever-worsening battle against the machines. As the film will mark the beginning of a new trilogy, rather than a continuation of the previous three installments, its unlikely that the Terminator himself,
Arnold Schwarzenegger, will even take part in the film reinvention, other than perhaps a cameo.

Of course, there are other reasons why the Ah-nuld won't be featured on the big screen. He has a bit of a schedule conflict due to matters of a more gubernatorial nature.
That and he's fricking old! I know they can do wonders with movie makeup and special effects, but unless we're to believe the robots are building Terminators to look older, just to screw with John Conner's head, Arnie the septuagenarian death machine seems a bit of a stretch.

As for the plot, I would have been happier if T3 had just jumped right past the stupid human years and into the future robot wars, and since T4 has to, given how T3 ended, that's good news to me. I thought the best parts in T1 were the flashback memories to the future, with laser tanks and flying HKs and battles on vast fields of human bones, etc. Just as long as the pussy actor they had for John Conner in T3, and his awful sidekick Claire Danes don't make the casting call, I'm so there.

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Wednesday, May 09, 2007  

World Obesity Comparison


Not to delve into the whole "is BMI an accurate measure of actual fatness" issue again, but I saw a link to this page and enjoyed it for the clever visual representations. Some guy got the percent of adults with a BMI of 30 in lots of countries around the world, and translated them into cute little flag-bedecked pill bugs. Well, stick bugs in some cases. Three guesses who's number one?

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Saturday, May 05, 2007  

Site Stats!


While taking a break from writing something very boring tonight, I suddenly remembered that I had a cool sortable engine with which to view my site stats. I used to view and post about them all the time, perhaps a bit too often, but hadn't in forever. In fact, as best I can tell from searching back through the Blogger archives, my last post about site stats was a 2005 year in wrap up, posted December 31, 2005. As far as I can remember, that was also the last time I thought to look at site stats, so this quick survey will be as much news to me as it is to you. Except that I sort of actually care (enough to check every 17 months, anyway), and you're just killing time at work.

Here are the top page loads since Feb 2007 (January 2007 and earlier are not showing in the stats.) Pages not listed are ones that exist only for search engines, to deny image hotlinking, are part of the function of the Blogger script, etc. (#3 Robots.txt, for instance.)

2. /band-names/h.shtml 37,633 8.57%
4. /index.html 18,633 4.24%
5. /slang-dirty.shtml 18,023 4.10%
6. /slang-sexacts.shtml 9,737 2.22%
9. /articles/penis-size.shtml 4,819 1.10%
10. /band-names/t.shtml 4,076 0.93%
11. /articles/castration.shtml 3,773 0.86%
12. /band-names/a.shtml 3,510 0.80%
13. /slang.shtml 3,059 0.70%
14. /blogger/2005_08_01_archive.html 3,013 0.69%
15. /blogger/2006_02_01_archive.html 2,992 0.68%

You get the idea. Names of rock bands and dirty words = Google gold! The rest of the Band Names alphabet of pages dominate the overall top 50, though I have no idea why H is so absurdly busy. That one page has accounted for eight and a half percent of the total page loads on this site so far this year. WTF? There must be some weird search engine ranking going on there. I don't even have any currently-famous bands or names listed, as far as I can tell. Sammy Hagar, Geri Halliwell, Hanson, Ben Harper, PJ Harvey, Helmet, Jimmy Hendrix, Hole, Buddy Holly, Hoobastank, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Whitney Houston. Honestly, WTF? (There's no "Hilton, Paris" listed on that page, so that can't be it.)

The other odd thing are the two Blogger archives 14th and 15th place. Those pages don't even exist anymore, since I changed the archives from weekly to monthly. If you click them you just get the whole month, rather than the week the links are trying to point to. So where/how did the pages load at all? Is there a link pointing to them somewhere? And why the first week of August 2005 and the first week of February 2006?

Other stat counts aren't as useful since I haven't had time/inclination to update other sections. The Articles haven't been added to in forever, and probably won't ever be added to again, since I'm using the blogger keywords now to sort shit. I hope to have time this summer to go over more of the old posts and enter them into the blogger script backdated, just so they'll get keyworded. I've been adding keywords to more of the blogger posts (since that feature didn't exist for the first year I was using blogger) but I've got like 400 more old posts to add into that, yet, and then oh... 3.5 years of almost daily updates before then, back when I was actually blogging often enough to make this crap worth your bookmark. In other words... don't hold your breath in anticipation.


Top daily posts for 2007.

1. /blogger/2007_01_01_archive.html 135 7.42%
2. /blogger/2007_02_01_archive.html 129 7.09%
3. /2007/02/figure-skating.html 118 6.48%
4. /blogger/2007_03_01_archive.html 84 4.62%
5. /2007/02/valentines-gift-giving.html 45 2.47%
6. /2007/03/pc-vs-mac-commercials.html 42 2.31%
7. /2007/03/iraq-and-future.html 41 2.25%
8. /2007/02/band-names-mail.html 41 2.25%
9. /2007/02/carpe-diem.html 40 2.20%
10. /2007/03/im-not-sure-this-whole-driving-thing-is.html 39 2.14%

A pretty irrelevant list. I can't search just on daily post, but only daily posts and archive months have a "2007" in the URL, so the filter pops them up. I clearly haven't made any individual posts of any consequence to anyone. Over the same time period the H band names page got 38,000 hits, and the dirty slang page got nearly 19,000, so a top ten list that doesn't even get all the members into the 40s is beneath notice. Besides, all of these posts were seen by most people when they were on the main page, or on one of the monthly archive pages, and those views don't count on this list.


Top blogger pages, Feb-May 2007. A boring list. All archive pages for the top 70 or so. Scrolling down further, the listing gets all wonky, with weird combined URLs that are all broken. I certainly never posted them and haven't ever seen them to click on, so it's some kind of bug in the blogger script, I guess. These sort of bugs are why the error page is the #1 total page by page loads. Examples: (These are all malformed. They don't take you anywhere. Clicking them will not give you a warm, happy feeling.)

88. /https:/www2.blogger.com//index.php 28 0.10%
19 0.07%
90. /blogger/%E2%80%9Dhttp://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18925391.300%E2%80%9D 19 0.07%
91. /blogger/%20http://www.google.com/search 19 0.07%
92. /blogger/_a 18 0.06%
93. /blogger/customer-reviews/0316011770/ref=cm_rev_sort/002-2274860-2892802 13 0.05%


Articles, page loads Feb-May 2007. The % listed is of all pages in the /articles section.

1. /articles/penis-size.shtml 4,819 13.88%
2. /articles/castration.shtml 3,773 10.87%
3. /articles/kiddy-porn.shtml 2,954 8.51%
4. /articles/food-mc-blog.shtml 1,976 5.69%
5. /articles/food-mc-diet.shtml 1,307 3.77%
6. /articles/kournikova.shtml 864 2.49%
7. /articles/playboy.shtml 759 2.19%
8. /articles/porn-women.shtml 746 2.15%
9. /articles/circumcision.shtml 660 1.90%
10. /articles/index.shtml 578 1.67%

Same as always on these. Sex, sex, and sex. Surprising number of hits to the Master Cleanse articles. People must be curious about it and searching for info. God help them. I still can't stand the idea of maple syrup or lemonade, and it's been like 3 years. Again, none of these contain anything written more recently than late 2002, and none have been updated since around 2004. So the results might skew very differently if I actually kept my own website up to date.


Reviews, page loads in 2007. The % is pages loaded in the /reviews section.

1. /reviews/m-ong-bak.shtml 2,089 8.68%
2. /reviews/m-bloodrayne.shtml 1,081 4.49%
3. /reviews/b-the-dirt.shtml 659 2.74%
4. /reviews/f-claim-jumper.shtml 642 2.67%
5. /reviews/f-hungry-hunter.shtml 616 2.56%
6. /reviews/index.shtml 613 2.55%
7. /reviews/b-marilyn-manson.shtml 394 1.64%
8. /reviews/m-garfield.shtml 363 1.51%
9. /reviews/m-infernal-affairs.shtml 346 1.44%
10. /reviews/f-marie-callendars.shtml 315 1.31%

This list is kind off wanky too, since I haven't written and added a review to the reviews section since September 10, 2006. Also, all the reviews on the site were first posted in a daily update, so theoretically half (or more) of the search engine referrals go to those pages, rather than the one in the reviews section.

Tony Jaa remains popular; I think that review was the most viewed in 2005 as well. Why anyone's searching on Bloodrayne is beyond me; I don't even have a review of it on that page since I've never cared enough to force myself to sit through it. I just enjoyed blogging about how much everyone said it sucked. Also, what's with all the restaurant review hits? Who searches for Marie Callendars online anyway? Corn bread fetishizers?


Browsers:

1. Internet Explorer 915,647 58.20%
2. Firefox 381,067 24.22%
3. Mozilla Compatible Agent 93,760 5.96%
4. Safari 65,192 4.14%
5. Opera 21,220 1.35%
6. Mozilla 17,037 1.08%
7. msnbot 10,053 0.64%
8. Yahoo MMCrawler 9,616 0.61%
9. Netscape 7,303 0.46%
10. msnbot media 6,777 0.43%


Referrers:

1. (no referral) 70,553 54.95%
2. www.google.com/search 18,991 14.79%
3. images.google.com/imgres 8,819 6.87%
4. google.co.uk/imgres 3,023 2.35%
5. search.yahoo.com/search 2,214 1.72%
6. google.co.uk/search 1,949 1.52%
7. www.google.ca/search 1,707 1.33%
8. search.yahoo.com/search/images/view 1,616 1.26%
9. images.google.ca/imgres 1,271 0.99%
10. images.google.de/imgres 1,193 0.93%


Overall, there are a surprising (to me, at least) number of page loads. Almost 1.6m in the last 91 days, around 14k a day, which would work out to about 6.5m in a year. I've always said I wouldn't put ads on this site and I have no intention of doing so, but just out of curiosity, anyone know what kind of CPM you average from Adsense or Google ads or whatever?

Also, be sure you check back in 17 months for more long lists of URLs and numbers you didn't read this time and don't really care about anyway.

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Friday, May 04, 2007  

WTF of the day.


This news item is both perplexing and um... perplexing. A German "performance artist" has built himself a giant hamster ball out of steel pipes, and is walking/rolling across the country. The article shows him in the ball in the tiger cage of the local zoo, which is odd enough, but it gets really strange when they detail why he's doing this.
He propels it by simply shifting his weight in a walking motion, and aims to cover 13 miles a day. 'I got the idea for this because, about a year ago, I hit a low and realised how little help there was out there,' he said. 'I set about thinking of a way to publicise those who need pyschiatric help and came up with this. 'Basically, the whole concept is about finding the courage to do something and inspire courage in those who have lost their confidence along with much else.'

Psychiatric patients from clinics in the region helped him create the rolling globe and some were present to see Drossel roll into the tiger enclosure.

After his encounter with the cats he was trundling on through the state, aiming eventually to finish in his home town of Warburg on April 28. Karl-Josef Laumann, the health minister for the state, is backing the stunt. He said: 'Psychiatric patients are often stigmatised and ostracised in our society. This must change.'
Yes, and nothing will change that faster than footage of a psychiatric patient rolling around a tiger enclosure in a giant hamster ball.

I can't decide if this is a cool idea, or totally misguided. Is doing something stupid and crazy to make people think, "Wow, that's really stupid and crazy." really going to spur those who need help to visit a shrink? What's the logic? "I might be insane, but at least I'm not that nut who spent all summer rolling around Germany in a giant hamster ball built by mental patients?" Is doing something certifiably idiotic really the best way to demonstrate that you're no longer in need of psychiatric care, and to spur others to enroll in it?

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Sometimes it's better not to know.


So I had a tub of sour cream in the fridge last night, and I was considering cooking something that sour cream could be usefully applied to. Before things escalated to that extent though, I began to wonder just how old that sour cream was. The creamy white goop is rather known for its perishibility, after all. So I started debating it, and trying to remember when I bought it, and the more I thought, the more suspicious I became. Pretty soon I'd not only talked myself out of making taquitos supreme, but had decided to throw away the sour cream as well. But before I did, I had to check to see how rotten it was.

Why? Good question. I was already committed to not eating it and throwing it out, so why bother looking inside the container? Did I crave the sight of green/brown/yellow mold creeping across the surface of the pristine whiteness? Perhaps, but I didn't get that joy, for there was no sign of mold within. It didn't even smell janky.

Paradoxically, that just made me more suspicious. I had decided it was old and rotten, therefore it was supposed to be old and rotten, and the fact that it was old and maybe not rotten merely deepened my suspicions. I dumped it out and washed out the container for future emergency storage needs, and as I did I tried to construct a metaphor that would analogize this situation. Why do people (obviously including myself) have to check to see if something is gross or dirty or rotten when we're throwing it out anyway? You know you look at a bandaid when you change it, or peer closely at the mold on the surface of bread you never got around to eating, etc. I think it's just curiosity, and it's not just potentially cat-killing, but psyche-scarring.

So here's my advice. If you're in a bar and some hot (by bar lighting, at least) girl all but picks you up, and you two end up making out in your car and suddenly she's got her head in your lap and you're thinking it's the best night ever... when she's leaving, don't check. Do you really want to know if "she" has a vagina or not? Think of it as the Eddie Murphy correlation. Except, of course, Eddie wanted a transsexual prostitute.

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Do we still have to feel bad,now?


So one of the Saint Louis Cardinals' pitchers died last week when his car crashed into a tow truck parked on the shoulder of a freeway. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth because he was so young and it was a senseless tragedy, etc. Today the autopsy results were released and um... yeah.
Hancock's blood-alcohol level was 0.157, nearly twice Missouri's legal limit of 0.08, Graham said.

Police chief Joe Mokwa said 8.55 grams of marijuana and a glass pipe used to smoke marijuana were found in the rented Ford Explorer. Toxicology tests to determine if drugs were in his system had not been completed.

An accident reconstruction team determined Hancock was traveling 68 mph in a 55 mph zone when his SUV struck the back of a flatbed tow truck stopped in a driving lane. Mokwa said there was no evidence Hancock tried to stop. He did swerve, but too late to avoid the collision.

Hancock was not wearing a seat belt, but Graham said the belt would not have prevented his death.

Mokwa said Hancock was speaking with a female acquaintance about baseball and baseball tickets and that the conversation ended abruptly, apparently when the accident occurred. A police report said Hancock told the female acquaintance he was on his way to another bar and that he planned to meet her there.
So he was very drunk, and stoned, and speeding, and not wearing his seatbelt, and talking on the phone to some groupie/hook up about meeting her at another bar at 1 in the morning when he drifted out of his lane and slammed into a tow truck, which probably had about 50 flashing lights on the back of it. Honestly, is this still a tragedy? Or a Darwin Award?

Let's just conclude that he was a very stupid rich young jock doing the sort of thing stupid rich young guys always do, and be glad he didn't kill anyone else in the process.

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Wednesday, May 02, 2007  

Happy "Mission Accomplished" Day!


It's the fourth anniversary of the day Dubya declared the Iraq Attack a completed success, and Think Progress has all the (depressing) relevant stats.

Total US Troops Wounded: Then 542. Now 24,912.
Total US Troops Killed: Then 139. Now 3351.
Insurgent Attacks per/day: Then 8. Now 149.

Hey, what do you want for a measely $421 billion dollars? It's not as if we could have used that money to repave every road and renovate every school in America. Or just given every single one of the 300 million men, women, and children in America a check for $1400.

Remember when Bush was running for president and we all used to laugh about how his poor judgment and lacking job skills had lost him a fortune in various sweetheart business deals his daddy's rich friends handed him? And how we all thought those days were past once he became president? Little did we know...

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