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Tuesday, December 31, 2002
 
Bowling for Columbine, Conclusion Well, the film raises a lot of interesting questions and is interesting to watch, but I was left a little bothered with it. Besides the ranting anti-US liberalism that characterized the first half, the film has an odd quality of being overly specific. I guess I just wish that, and no I didn't expect Michael Moore to solve this decades old mystery of American gun violence, something more had been established. By the time the film was over, I knew that America for some unknown reason has a lot more gun-related homicides than the rest of the world, but I already knew that. The arguments he made about Americans being overly afraid of things were interesting and made sense, but even this point, which was the only one that received a large amount of screentime, was never fully developed. Overall: It's an interesting documentrary that's worth seeing, but it really does fail to spend sufficient time actually looking for answers.
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Bowling for Columbine, Part 1 I'm about halfway through Bowling for Columbine and so I want to give my impressions now, and then I'll make another post at the end of the film. The film should be great, but Michael Moore's incessant crazy ultraliberal stirrings keep dragging it down everytime it gets going. As soon as he starts to make any good points, he suddenly veers off and tries to connect and contrast gun violence in the US with US foreign policy, which he obviously views as imperialistic. So of course we get endless footage of dead peope in Chile and US-appointed dictators accompanied by sometimes inaccurate text descriptions (such as one part that says the US ordered the assassination of shitty S. Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem). He's ruining his own points with all these off-target rants.
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Monday, December 30, 2002
 
Something to ponder Even the worst and most pathetic professional basketball player in the NBA has an almost perfect physique with so many well-formed muscles that they look like walking anatomy charts with skin and corn rows. [I tried endlessly to work the phrase adonis into this paragraph without sounding gay, but I was unsuccessful] Ever since I started watching basketball more frequently, I've felt more and more pathetic with every tiny injury my body occurs. Earlier today, I was skipping down the stairs in aqua shoes (like sandals but without all the toe exposure) and I promptly turned my ankle and fell. I had to sit on the floor caressing the wounded foot for 5 minutes and spent the rest of the night walking around like I'd been shot. But Kobe Bryant and others in the NBA nightly get their bodies smashed in by 250 pound gorillas who slam them into unpadded floors, then get up and run around with barely a grimace, scoring basket after basket. If I cut a finger, I stare at it endlessly. Overwashing it to the point that the wound reopens. They get their faces sliced off by the elbows of fast-moving burly men, run to the sidelines to have the blood wiped off, and then run back onto the court before the second free-throw has even been shot. Oh woe is me, and my puny unexercised thin frame! I still refuse to workout, however, because that would involve work, and I don't like work. Special Note to Scott: I'm gonna inherit the house. Allie is fighting me over it, but you never even drop by so we've convinced Mom & Dad you're not interested.
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Fucking stupid Well, the RIAA's website was hacked again. Though I shouldn't say "was" because it's still ongoing. You see, "hackers," don't go on vacation, but IT departments do. Hence, the RIAA's laughably ill-secured website now contains news articles running the gamut from instructions on how to have fun with a prostitute and some yams and ill-written declarations about fair-use of copyrighted materials. I'm not going to post the link, as I'd prefer not to spend the New Year in federal prison, but I'm am dumbfounded by the RIAA's idiotic security. Get this. To post news articles on their site. You visit a webpage with a very obvious url. BAM! You can edit and post news articles or alter page templates, and they'll appear on the RIAA's main page. For god's sake, this blogger posting software is more secure than that. Whoever runs that site should be fired for gross incompetence. edit: I should've said this earlier, but the posting page may have been set up by the hackers themselves. Prevoiusly, I thought they had just figured out the password to a previously existing page. N.B. I didn't post a link to the RIAA's main site because some of the people who have been fooling with it have also been posting rather disturbing images of a man's anus.
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Terrorists need to hire a PR agency Of all the Jews or Americans there are in the world for these Muslim fundamentalists to kill, why on earth would they decide to attack a US-funded hospital in Yemen? They must've spent their weekend watching the first half of Patriot games on the USA network, wherein Irish terrorists brilliantly expand their appeal to Western nations by shooting a small adorable 5-year-old American girl with an uzi. Luckily for them their audience, angry Muslims, isn't very discerning and I'm sure they'll be cheering about this new folk hero who bravely shot two female members of the great satan while they treated sick people for free.
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Sunday, December 29, 2002
 
Ad-Aware I was thinking of reinstalling Lavasoft's Ad-Aware, the anti-spyware program, because I hadn't run such a test on my computer in weeks, but as soon as I looked for a new version, I ran headfirst into controversy. It seems the program hasn't been updated in a while, and some people are downright enraged about it. Basically, since it hasn't been updated, it won't catch all the newer evil spyware schemes on the net and may even bungle the removal of some, leading to serious issues for the end-user. I've since heard that the next version of the program will be released in February, so I think I'll just wait for a few reviews of that and then I'll download that version. I'm leery of when small-time developers make release dates. One of my favorite programs was formally Evrsoft 1st Page 2000, a delightful little free webpage creation program that was state-of-the-art ... 2 years ago when it was first released. Since it was created by students with busy lives, they made promise after promise of a new up-to-date version, but months and months passed. They'd often fail to update the website's main page for half a year at a time. It's this lack of updates that burns me up about these tiny developers. Of all the things involved creating a program, typing a short update to inform your users what's going on is the easiest, yet least observed part of the process. Whether I was following Half-Life mods (such as one called Hostile Intent that I've literally waited for over two years to be released) or simple freeware programs, it's always amazed me at how these developers, who, god bless them for all the work they put into these projects, don't ever update their webpages. It's positively painful for the user who's defended the developer and stood by the program, and who'd be satisfied by even the flimsiest of news updates. What was most pathetic, however, was how many of these tiny developers updated their websites the day after September 11th with weeping posts and upset declarations, only to then immediately return to their habits of never posting information. This meant that several sites I visited during all of 2001 still had updates crying about 9/11 while everyone else was already celebrating New Year's. /end rant
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Irregardless I feel like I already made this post, but rather than check my archives, I'll just write it and hope for the best. Anyway, I'm a little sick of the Associated Press. I mean, they do a great job of getting the bland and expressionless news reports that every news site on the web uses, but in a way, they're almost too efficient. Lately, when I miss Laker games, I've gone to either CNNsi or ESPN's websites to find out about the game. However, there's really no reason to visit both because they both just take down the Associated Press report, word for word. If you're a website whose sole purpose is to deliver sports news, isn't it a little odd that you're just reciting prefabricated AP articles? There's an awful lot of cable news channels and news websites out there now, but I sometimes wonder if there are actually less real reporters. Thanks to the magic of the internet, only one person in an AP office has to do any work (not that typing up a loose recap of a basketball game is all that difficult), and soon we've got a dozen different news sources all regurgitating it. The more fierce news competition becomes, the more and more necessary it becomes for these sites to rely on sources like Reuters and the Associated Press to just mass-produce the news for them. I guess there's no real solution, since the news sites don't want to waste money paying their own writers to make half-page basketball game summaries, but it'd be nice if a few of these stations explained to me why we need to have 50 different news sources if all they're going to do is read the exact same script.
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Saturday, December 28, 2002
 
What the hell? Somehow, Scott has stolen my post about Dell computer ads, then traveled back in time and posted a day before me. The son of a bitch! This is the last time I discuss anything with him, the scene-stealing pathetic excuse for a man.
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Why have you forsaken me, Steven!? Remember back when everyone in this country was joking about how awful the Dell computer commercials were because they had overused Steven, the "You're getting a Dell" guy? If only I could take back every word of criticism I made about that poor son of Tennessee. Dell's new commercials are painful. I feel like they're trying to kill me, one stupid idiotic ad at a time. Oh how I miss Steven. Sure, his character in the commercials was vapid and annoying, but he was vapid and annoying in a predictable and non-threatening way. These new Dell commercials with the group of fake "interns" who help people discover the joy of Dell computers through the use of blind idiocy ... they're just so awful. Why settle for dirty pond-scum like these interns when you can have refreshing tap-water like Steven.
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Friday, December 27, 2002
 
Network Abyss Many network TV stations touted that their sweeps performance this past year was based almost entirely on regular TV shows, and not crazy ratings stunt programming like "When Zebras attack the Elderly." This is, however, a very very bad thing. Not because I wanted to see any shitty TV specials, but because the networks seem to have used everything up. Christmas-time TV always stinks, but this year feels particularly awful because absolutely no one is running new episodes. Everything is old and boring. I know I should be using this time to get through my Tivo backlog, but it's been so long since I've seen half the shows I have stored on there, that I just don't feel the impetus to get started. Damn you network advertisers! Damn ye to hell!
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Disconcerting The biggest problem with online gaming right now is that you have to do it with people. Most of the people I've played with on Xbox Live have been either very quiet or nice folks. I had a great conversation with one, in fact. However, last night, I was playing a little online basketball, and I was stunned to discover the lengths to which some assholes will go to win. Okay, so this guy basically devises a rather silly scheme wherein he picks the NBA Eastern All-Stars (all the best players of the East) against me, after I had chosen the Knicks. Hardly an even match, but the guy was so immensely awful at the game that he was losing anyway. During the entire game, he'd pause every minute or so for abnormally long times and occasionly right when I was in the middle of offensive moves. Then when it's clear he's losing, he just pauses the game, and walks away. You see, the Xbox Live servers record who wins and who loses, so by just pausing the game, he guaranteed himself the win. Because as soon as I pulled the plug (afterall, he could've kept the game paused for weeks if he wanted to), the game automatically counted as a win for him and a loss for me because I was the one who disconnected. Pretty pathetic. I just hope I don't run into too many more people like "ThrillKillaUT!" online.
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Thursday, December 26, 2002
 
Paramount is stupid Rehash. I saw Star Trek: Nemesis. It wasn't good, but it wasn't bad. Not worth nearly the amount of angry blathering its release has engendered in Star Trek fans' hearts. In the world of Star Trek, I'd describe it as tap-water. Not bad, but too middling and meek to be really savored or liked.
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Monday, December 23, 2002
 
Bye Going to Vegas. Be back by the end of the week. Will probably spend my time writing college essays since I can't gamble.
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Sunday, December 22, 2002
 
Paramount is Stupid Well Star Trek certainly has gone downhill in recent years, but Paramount seems dedicated to running it into the ground just a little bit quicker. They're quite upset to see that Star Trek: Nemesis is likely to become the least successful Star Trek movie ever (please keep in mind that some of the old Star Trek film openings it's being compared to haven't even been adjusted for inflation but are still beating it). My question is what the hell did they expect to happen? They opened a Star Trek film one week ahead of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Yeah, the film technically opened below expectations, if you can call raising 18.9 million instead of 20 million drastically underperforming, but I'm sure that would've been adequate enough to carry it for a few more weeks of money making if they hadn't so badly mismanaged everything.
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Speaking of Time Magazine I was going through their old Person of the Year covers...
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Time: Intellectual Wusses I was annoyed when they picked Rudy Giuliani over Osama Bin Laden last year as person of the year, but I atleast understood and could see how Rudy Giuliani would be the clear non-evil front-runner. This year's decision, however, makes no fucking sense. Time has decided that Cynthia Cooper, Sherron Watkins, Coleen Rowley are Time Magazine's Persons of the Year. That's right, these three women, who no one even remembers, most influenced the last year. Apparently a few women who wrote some memos early in the year had more effect on all civilization than say the North Korean communist government which declared it had Nuclear weapons not long ago. Or hell, even Bush again would've made some sense since he is sending us all off to war pretty soon. Where's the Time magazine that made Hitler, Stalin, and Khomeini each Person of the Year? The award now looks like more of a joke than ever, and from the Time.com poll below, it looks like most people agree:
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Saturday, December 21, 2002
 
The following is for Asparagirl The following link is for Asparagirl: http://www.squidge.org/~praxisters/TBlotr.html If you are a man who is in anyway insecure about his sexuality or a woman who would not be thrilled with seeing disturbing Lord of the Rings homoerotic "slash" artwork, please do not click that link. PS: If "slash" means what it means, then does that mean that Slashdot is a site dedicated to stories about homosexual liaisons between dots of the same gender?
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Vast Right-wing Conspiracy at work again All this talk of Hillary Clinton being the democratic nominee now or in 2008 is just that. Talk. It's the media looking for a story where none exists. I sincerely doubt Hillary could even win a democratic primary. All this poll says is that she's got the most name recognition of all the current candidates, which makes sense since she was first lady for 8 years.
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NBC is saved Well, apparently Friends will have one more "final season". Watching the networks fight it out in ratings every night has always been a favorite hobby of mine, so this was of particular interest. NBC has bought themselves time now to create some new hit comedy. If both friends and frasier had ended this year, next year NBC would've gotten their ass kicked by CBS. Now they'll have friends to cling to again. For ratings data I like to visit MediaWeek and read the second column from the bottom.
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Wednesday, December 18, 2002
 
No Prize Contest I'm holding a contest with no prize. The winner is the person who guesses (using the comment system) the exact date on which hostilities with Iraq will begin, or failing that, the person who comes closest. Specific dates are required. None of this "Late January/Early February" stuff. My selection is February 7th, 2003.
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Bah humbug My mother notified everyone within three continents that I was deferred from my early decision college choice. Her speed was amazing. There are people in Kenya who know about it.
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Tuesday, December 17, 2002
 
FUCKING COCKSUCKING FUCKING FUCKERS! Why is it that everytime I find a pair of shoes I like (Air Force I black low), Nike cancels the brand? Everyone loved my shoes. I was literally complimented on them frequently. Including a brotha' who said they were "ghetto." Unfortunately for me, Nike doesn't just cancel a brand, they delete it off the face of the earth. My shoe was not a failure. It's so fucking popular that I visited "vintage" shoe sites for it (keep in mind I bought this shoe less than a year ago) and found they were all sold out of it. In fact, Nike now only sells the shoe in special colors in Korea and Japan to celebrate soccer matches. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU FUCKING NIKE BASTARDS!?!?! I want to pay you your exhorbinant shoe prices! I want to support your horrible abuse of Malaysian and Chinese factory girls. BUT YOU WON'T LET ME BUY MY FUCKING SHOES! I've tried every reseller I could find via google. This shoe is everywhere on the net in different colors, but it's sold out. Clearly this was an extremely popular shoe for it to go up along side early 90's Air Jordan shoes on the vintage market and to be even rarer than those shoes. Why, then, did Nike cancel them!?!?! edit: Wow. It turns out my shoes were "ghetto." I refer you to this piece by breakout rap star Nelly, entitled "Air Force Ones:"
said give me two pairs (cause) I need two pairs So I can get to stomping in my Air Force Ones(big Boi) Big Boys stomping in my Air Force Ones

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If you build it ... it will work? That's the question I'm asking myself about President Bush's new missile scheme. It's surely more realistic and less, well, insane, than former President Reagan's star wars missile defense system (the one with the lasers, guided pigeons, and rampant treaty violations). What still doesn't seem clear to me is whether the damned thing will work at all. Frankly, I'd prefer that this country never be put in the position to ever have to test such a "shield" in real combat to prove its worth. It's the sort of thing that's impossible to fight against because it fits so well in an advertisement: "Senatar Blah Blah doesn't support missile defense. He wants your children to fall to the ground clutching their tiny faces, as blood pours out of their eyes and their many radiation burns."
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Monday, December 16, 2002
 
Karma Let's take a look at my day. We start things off, and there's cat vomit on my car. I don't mean on the tires or something. A cat climbed onto the roof in the night, vomited over the side, and the vomit not only stuck onto the side of the rear passenger window but also imbedded little fish-shaped regurgitated dry catfood into the groove where door meets car. Then I get to school. Heavy, heavy rain. Heaviest rain we've had in Los Angeles in a long while. On the one hand, this means I'm quite wet, but it also means that the vomit will be relatively washed off my car thanks to mother nature. It also means California may shake off the relative drought it's been having the last year. So on the whole that's pretty good. No word from my early decision school, but that's to be expected and not really a negative. So so far, my day would be a break-even affair. However, it gets pushed just that little extra bit into positive territory by the fact that Californians are so reluctant to change their sunny attire, no matter the weather (a few were still wearing sandles today as they trudged through 3-inch puddles), that today's school day featured many unofficial and unintentional wet t-shirt contests.
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Sunday, December 15, 2002
 
TN-what? It doesn't surprise me that TNN's gains in viewership in the last year have been largely eroded recently. TNN is The National Network, the cable channel formerly known as The Nashville Network. TNN's real problem is it has no identity. It's the most confusing amalgam of unrelated shows you've ever seen. The reason for this is that they're desperately seeking the 18-49 year-old male demographic, but they're too scared to stick to any one theme. So they've got Star Trek, Wrestling, CSI reruns, Pamela Aderson Lee sex cartoons, and lowcost talkshows about aliens. They've tried to also build up some attention by running movies like the Godfather uncut. However, their advertising scheme is so remarkably inane that I was actually surprised when blood DIDN'T come out of my eyes during viewing. To advertise the godfather, they had quickly edited color-tinted footage of teens dancing at a rave while the godfather played in the background. And then they'd show the tatooed and drunken teens mouthing the words to famous scenes from the film as they played on a giant screen before cutting back for 1.2 seconds of a girl having a seizure on the dance floor. These commercials epitomize the undisciplined, unfocused nature of the network's search for an audience. On the one hand they've got the godfather; not exactly a fresh new draw for kids. So what do they do? They advertise it with images of kids at a rave in a feeble-minded attempt to grab the youth audience. And I'm not surprised that Star Trek: The Next Generation has had a downturn during the last year on their network. They have no concept of running reruns properly. In their regular syndication, they run early season episodes almost exclusively (early season episodes of TNG are quite bad on the whole), and then interrupt with little marathons. What this means is that the truly great Star Trek episodes rarely, if ever, air, and you end up seeing the same 3 episodes you never liked to begin with replayed 400 times. The whole thing reeks of committee thinking. "Kids like surfing, right? Let's but baywatch on 22 nights a week!" "Young males like scifi, right? Let's buy a bunch of scifi shows this week!" "Young males like boobies, right? Let's give Pamela Anderson Lee $200,000 to stand around."
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The big boys Anyway, I visited Kausfiles today and he linked to a Mr. John Ellis. He said that the Democratic race would end up between Lieberman and Gephardt in the South Carolina primaries. There's some nice logic, but I don't know about either of those choices. Afterall, Lieberman is rather monotonous, will do terrible in the South, and pisses away his chances at Hollywood money donors everytime he goes on his pet-topic of media evil. And while this may not yet be important in elections, he is absolutely hated and despised on the internet by video game enthusiasts (luckily, the most vocal appear to be illiterate potheads who don't vote). Of course, he has the best name recognition of all the remaining candidates and he did place second in several recent Democratic nomination polls. As for Gephardt. I just don't like that guy. He's so slimy. People say Al Gore has always wanted to be president, but Gephardt has always felt to me like a particularly icky politician. He's supposedly got the labor vote tied up in the primary, which I'm sure gives him a big edge there, but I don't see him bringing anything useful to a national ticket. John Kerry could probably never win a national election because he's from Massachusetts, but I think it's more than probable he'll be a big front-runner, no matter what the polls say now. I think he's gonna have a real leg up on the other democratic hopefuls because he got his name out the door in a rather official way before the Gore announcment. Oh well. Only 23 months until the election.
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Gored by CNN So I'm eating a hotdog and I start flipping through the channels and suddenly I see some confusing text that makes me do a double-take. "Gore decision not to run a surprise says fmr. spokesperson." I kept thinking, are they talking about the speculation of his former spokesperson, or has he announced something? Well, as you should know by now, Al Gore is NOT running for president. Some have already speculated he's waiting for a democrat to get his ass wooped by Bush and then to swoop in like a redeeming angel to win in 2008, but I think that's some heavy speculation. Immediately after I saw this, I tuned to all the news networks, but I found out that they're all worthless once the big news is out there because all they could do was speculate about mythical conversations between Gore and Lieberman, or Gore and Clinton, or Gore and Henry the Eigth. My gut tells me that John Kerry most benefits from this decision. By being bold enough to essentially announce his run for the presidency by filing those papers a few weeks ago, he's really placed himself at the top of the heap very quickly. Everyone else like Daschle, Gephartdt, Lieberman, and Edwards, hasn't been bold enough to put their names forth, so Kerry suddenly is the only big name officially running for president. I suspect that these other names will try to resolve this situation soon by filing papers as quickly as possible, though I can't be sure. This is perhaps the final chapter in Al Gore's seemingly insane nature for only doing things well when they don't matter. When did he give his greatest speech? Right after he finally conceded Florida and it didn't matter. When has he been his funniest and most human in appearance? Right before announcing he won't run for president. Now he gets to decide who becomes the Democratic nod by throwing his support and name recognition around.
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Oh my god! Forgive my excitement. This is the greatest movie ever made!!! I mean, holy shit god fuck wow! This is so great! Oh, vaguely-bearded Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer is right now convincing completely expressionless Happy, who is baby new year, why he shouldn't hate himself. But there's danger because they're doing it next to a giant condor that has kidnapped the new year in order to cheat death. Before this, Rudolph and his companions were trapped in a block of ice, possibly because they were trying to imitate David Blaine, but ala Superman's heat vision, he used his bright-red nose to melt his way free. But HE LEFT ALL HIS FRIENDS THERE TO DIE! And all of this is being narrated by father time who has the worst color highlights in his hair I've ever seen, and a face that inspires terror, rather than jolly Christmas cheer. He's also surrounded by vaguely menacing machinery that controls the lives and deaths of all people in the world. Oh no! The evil condor has discovered Rudolph and Happy have escaped! Wait. Rudolph has knocked him off a cliff (a federal crime, by the way) and freed his friends Ben Franklin, the bearded Medieval knight, the black cave man, and the giant whale with a clock on its tale! IS THERE TIME LEFT TO SAVE THE NEW YEAR! Thank god. Santa is here with air support! He's going to personally deliver baby New Year, who has a toothy grin and curly golden locks. NEW YEAR'S IS SAVED! This is the greatest Christmas Ever! I've already set my tivo to record the December 24th rebroadcast so I can catch this from start to finish. God Bless the Fox Family Channel, God Bless us Everyone!
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Saturday, December 14, 2002
 
Beware, Dorkiness Lies Below I really really really don't want to see Star Trek: Nemesis. Everything I've heard about the plot makes my skin boil with Trekkie-angst. There are a few problems with this, however. A. I like Star Trek. B. Though most of the reviews are negative, there are also quite a few people who say the film is fun. C. I've yet to drive myself to a film, which I think borders on the criminal. I've been reading a lot of reviews, but I've noticed a few nasty trends. Nearly everyone out there seems to disagree with me about which Star Trek films are good and which are bad. I know I should just shrug and think of this as a matter of opinion, but to me, the greatness and suckiness of certain Star Trek films is fact and not mere opinion. Here's my very dorky ranking, which excludes Nemesis since I haven't seen it.
  1. Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan
  2. Star Trek VIII: First Contact
  3. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
  4. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
  5. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
  6. Star Trek IX: Insurrection
  7. Star Trek I: The Motion Picture
  8. Star Trek VII: Generations
  9. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
I've always felt that Insurrection is rather unfairly maligned. Yeah, it wasn't great, but it really wasn't bad. There were fundamental flaws in the premise because the moral aspects of the story were inappropriately treated as black & white, but it's still quite an enjoyable film if you give it a chance. What's surprised me about other people's lists, such as the one found at PvPonline, is that no one seems to like Star Trek IV, which I think was delightful. I'm left wondering what to think because some critics have reviewed Nemesis with a scathing hatred and passion that would seem overboard even if the film had somehow maimed their children with a combine. Others, such as my friend Kevin, have reported that the film is actually quite a bit of fun. I'm personally afraid to enter myself into the debate because I feel trapped by movie theaters. I'm not one to walk out of a film. It's the same reason why I watched all 20-hours of Taken even though I hated it by hour 12. I'm always hopeful that the filmmaker is going to turn it around because I fear that if I leave, I'll suddenly miss the best part. So if I go to see Nemesis, then I'm in for the long haul, and despite how many hours of the day I spend sleeping or napping or luring spiders to their doom, I'd be quite annoyed if I felt I'd wasted by two hours and my ten dollars at the cinema.

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Reminder Al Gore will be on Saturday Night Live tonight. I'm excited because I can't imagine what the hell they're going to do with him. Gore in a dress? Gore as a stoner? Gore trying to kill Darrel Hammond? We'll have to watch and see.
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Addendum to Taken This is an addendum to my review of taken. I'm watching the last two hours right now. I had hoped that these last two hours would be so fantastic and packed with revelations that they'd atleast lift the series up to an overall rating of medicore. Unfortunately, these last two hours may contain the greatest concentration of stupid, mind-numbingly tedious bullshit ever described as Scifi. It's just been awful. The so-called revelations about the aliens are grossly uninteresting and derivative of every story ever written about aliens. The plot is being pushed by ridiculous arbitrary devices that are the only source of conflict, and nothing has happened. It's a 20 hour miniseries and nothing has happened! NOTHING AT ALL! It's like watching paint dry but hearing that in the next viewing there'll be some great revelation about the paint, only to find out that the great revelation is that it's paint which is in the process of drying. And the schmaltzy manipulative music is some of the worst I've ever heard. Quite frankly, I could've made a more interesting special about aliens using a digicam. This is the most boring miniseries I've ever seen and it's a tremendous waste of potential. This really could've been good: they had the right budget, the right producer, and the right source material, but they've turned out a steaming pile of turgid crap. For shame.
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Friday, December 13, 2002
 
Let's get rational You'll all be glad to know that Dateline learned its lesson from the DC Sniper case. Rather than sensationalizing the story, tonight they point the finger at those who are really to blame. No, not the snipers; videogames are at fault! You'll be glad to know that because I've used my Xbox controller to play Halo (the game Dateline singles out), I can apparently now kill people from afar with ease! Why, we should ban these "video-games" from stores so that no one can learn how to kill from them. Hmmm, we should probably also bar all people from military service because the sniper did enter the army (though Dateline believes that his arms training while in the army would never have been sufficient for his murder spree if he hadn't honed his skills shooting alien soldiers on a giant space ring). Oh, and kill all the black people because the snipers were black. Oh, and then, just to be sure, we should ban car trunks because the Snipers used them. And then we'll all finally be safe and relaxed for the holidays, though I imagine burying all those black people will take a while.
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Quit freaking me out! Well I was utterly calm and fine two days ago. Unlike my mother, I don't expect to be accepted by my early decision college choice, so I had managed to keep myself from getting too worked up about waiting for the decision. This would've been a good thing because I'm under the impression that Stanford's Admission emails are running a week late. But then I came to school this Monday. Everyone was crowding computers and checking their email every few minutes. I really hadn't been that concerned. I'd managed to largely set aside in my mind the fact that decisions were coming so soon. But all this frantic activity as people wait for their futures to unfold before them has left me rather on edge. What's most annoying, probably, is that I know a lot of really smart people, so all around me are people being accepted into Harvard and UPenn, which makes me feel like I've failed even though I haven't even gotten my first rejection yet. Oh, and why do people care when I ask them their GPAs? I hear that they've gotten into Harvard, and I'm curious as to their GPAs because I want to know whether the thresholds have increased or decreased this year for acceptance, but they all act like they'd be embarrassed to say. For god's sake, you got into Harvard, what do you care if I know how many points above a 4.0 you are.
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Taken sucks I still have to watch the last two hours of Scifi's Taken miniseries, but it's safe to say now that it sucked ass. Tommorow they have 2 hours (or more accurately 1.5 hours factoring in commercials) to resolve the entire alien storyline in the series. It's a 20 hour miniseries, and they've put off the actual story until the last 2 hours. The teasers for the series have actually been much better than any of the individual episodes. Every day it seemed they were finally going to stop pussy-footing around and actually reveal something about what the aliens were up to, but instead they've had fake-out after fake-out. Tonight's fake-out was actually a pretty neat idea, but it just wasn't appropriate for the second to last episode of the miniseries. Things should be starting to wrap up or atleast heading towards a conclusion, but it seems like the storyline hasn't even gotten off the ground. The series probably could've been saved if they had just cut its running time in half. That would've forced them to drop half the uninteresting storylines and love stories that have dotted the 50 years the story covers. All the episodes have jumped so quickly forward in time that I feel like I saw last week's episodes years ago. The details are already fuzzy, but the one thing I know for sure is that there was no need whatsoever for such a detailed backstory for each of the three families. I don't need to see every important event in the life of someone's great grandfather, grandfather, grandmother, mother, brother, and sister to understand the character. It's a 20 hour miniseries about aliens that's only had about 10 minutes featuring aliens. Extremely disappointing.
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These titles are tougher to come up with than you think I may have spoken too soon when I declared Blistex Clear Advance to be the bizzigity bizzomb of lip balms. It smells great and looks masculine, but I noticed today that my lips were scraping off. I mean, there were just pounds of dead lip skin. So for now I'm retreating back to medicated blistex ointment until I can get a handle on the right ratio of Blistex Clear Advance to use versus other brands of lip balm. Non-Sequitur: Al Gore's position on the impending Iraq war feels untenable. Some of what he says makes sense to me, but there's this air of pussy liberalism in it that makes me think he isn't going to change the stereotype of democrats looking weak on foreign affairs.
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Thursday, December 12, 2002
 
Wow! I didn't expect president Bush to smash Trent Lott like this. When I first heard about Lott's comments, I assumed it would be talked about for a week, and then it'd be eventually dismissed as liberal angst among democrats anxious to attack Republican leadership. What I didn't count on is Lott's own unpopularity with many Republicans. I can't say this for sure, but I think that Republicans who don't like him are using what should've been an easy to defend situation (if the Republican party had offered atleast a uniform defense of "that's not what he meant but he's sorry") to take Lott's job. I may be making bad predictions again, but these Bush comments are frightfully harsh, and Lott's attempts now to apologize in every media venue possible make me think he's paniced and knows that Republican office-seekers smell blood in the water.
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Tuesday, December 10, 2002
 
Defending Trent Lott ... DEFENDING TRENT LOTT!?!?!? Black leaders are calling for Trent Lott to resign over a rather stupid comment he made that sounded like an endorsement of 1940's segregationist policies. It's all pretty ridiculous. I think the man's a real dilhole P.O.S., but I don't think you can look at his comment and say that it proves he's a racist. He was just trying to complement the senate's favorite skeletal centenarian, Strom Thurmond, and let his comments dip into the realm of the intensely stupid. His apology was definitely weak. I mean, referring to segregationist ideals as "discarded policies" is hardly a harsh condemnation. Still, this is really all much ado about nothing. edit: Woops. The Drudge Report is making me look stupid. Turns out Trent Lott said the exact same fucking thing 22 years ago. That's quite a bit of time to fix your wording.
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Ahoy, Ye Matees! Turn over your scuds! Rather than discussing the massively disturbing fact that North Korea is shipping scud missiles to tinhorn dictators in Africa, I'll focus on the fact that it was a "Spanish Frigate" that intercepted the scud missiles. I imagine that the frigate sailed with a full mast and the image of the Spanish monarchy adorning its flag. Its gleaming wooden sides and stout cannons inspiring fear in all in their path. "Ahoy! Ye Matees! Drop your deblumes and any scud missiles ye be carrying in violation of ye UN Resolution!" Their 17th century accents would ring in the air as they stumbled across the deck, dodging pile after pile of parrot droppings.
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Monday, December 09, 2002
 
Advertising I wanted to try my hand at advertising. IN A WORLD WHERE LOVE WAS OUTLAWED... IN A PLACE WHERE FREEDOM IS A MEMORY... THEY SOUGHT TO FIGHT AGAINST ALL THE ODDS! COMING TO SCOTT'S ELECTRIC LOVE BUNKER + ASPARAGIRL'S BLUE PAGE OF BLOGDOM! NOVEMBER 2003: WILL YOU BE READY?
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Whatever
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Sunday, December 08, 2002
 
Canada's Identity I'm not going to tear into this Canadian article with the sort of detailed insults and analysis I would usually peform when disagreeing with a column. The article is about why it's okay for Canadians to feel morally superior to Americans, and it does this without really insulting Americans very much. Here's what grabbed my attention: "Lots of others resent Americans, envy them, wish they'd get out of their faces. Some people hate Americans. Many others love them. Lots of people both love them and hate them. Only Canadians, though, dare to feel morally superior to them." Well that's simply untrue. Plenty of others feel morally superior to the US, like Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America, and Africa. for example. I recently read a rather long piece in the Nov. 25th issue of National Review detailing Canada's lack of identity. I thought it made sense, but how exactly could I trust this clearly America-loving author to give a real accurate portrayal of something as supposedly complicated as Canada's psyche. What's odd is how exactly today's article fits with the National Review's portrayal of Canadians. Essentially, the Review said that Canadians had an identity crisis that had led them to now seek their own national identity by being Not American. On its face, this probably seems a bit harsh and perhaps ego-obsessed for the US to believe that Canada defines itself against us, but today's article certainly seems like a great example. Besides the silly point above where the author tries to make Canada special by saying it's not the US, there are also other points in the articfle that follow The Nation's critique of Canada. Like using the term Americanization to define any attempt at government change that isn't approved of. Afterall, I don't think that switching to a two-tier health insurance system is somehow Americanization, since the US really has no national system at all. Obviously I can't take two articles and define a nation with it, but I think it may be wrong to dismiss the National Review's bold assertion when it seems to fit things so well.
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Pure Genius Please go visit the following site immediately: Diction-araoke.org. I can't count how many copyright laws they must be breaking, but dear lord was it worth it. Here's my favorite of this group's takes on popular music: The Ramones "I wanna be sedated" as sung by online Dictionary sound files.
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Friday, December 06, 2002
 
Taken by Purple and Yellow [I apologize in advance to everyone not from Los Angeles. I understand that you all hate the Lakers and Los Angeles with a passion.] YES! HOLY SHIT GOD YES!!!! ...sorry. I've got a lot of adrenaline left-over from watching the Lakers incredible comeback victory over the Mavs. I hadn't been watching the game since I had a music concert and since Scifi's Taken was on, but now I'll just have to tivo tonight's episode of Taken because I couldn't tear my eyes away from the Lakers' 4th quarter. What's really sad is that my sister and dad went to the basketball game, and since my sister was tired and needed to wake up for a job interview, they left after the third period. Dad missed one of the greatest comebacks in NBA history. I'm still not sure the Lakers will even make the playoffs this year, but dear god did that game excite me. Now I just have to hope the lakers can prove it wasn't a fluke by building on this momentum.
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Thursday, December 05, 2002
 
Steven Spielberg's Taken Tonight's episode of Taken was absolutely awful. Easily the worst of all the episodes so far. The pacing was beyond awful. And while I admire the series' attempts to keep things fresh with different story telling techniques, this week's attempt at horror was awful. They basically recreated all the conventions of every terrible horror movie. Mysterious mummy disappears. Horrible secret. People splitting up to search for someone and getting killed one by one. The classic "Don't worry baby, let's have sex here in the woods, there's no mummies for us to worry about." We learned basically nothing new about the aliens and their plans. The only interesting plotline, the government's investigation, essentially stalled out and had no part in the episode. And the protagonist for tonight's episode was thoroughly uninteresting and I actually hated him the most of all the characters so far, which is really saying something since another recurring character has killed like 12 people. The story has focused on three families, but it totally ignored one tonight, and the one that it focused on, it horribly mangled with idiotic plot twists, illogical emotional developments, and cheesy as all hell dramatic music. Here's hoping this show rights itself and fast tommorow because I can't take many more episodes like tonight's.
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Comp-oo-tur? So a school chum from my Latin class visits this blog occasionly (if you ever see me posting comments shouting about Soviet russia or other non-sequiturs, it's likely him), and he mentioned it in class. Of the 16 or so people in the class, at some point, all of them said "Wait, Simon, you have a webpage!?" It was as if I had walked into the room and told them I was a nephew of the Queen of England. I could understand minor interest in what my webpage was about (though they all looked at me strangely when I used my new love affair with Blistex Clear Advance as an example of the sort of things I write about), but the way they acted, it was as if creating a webpage was a foreign concept to them. I mean, there are what, 3 billion plus webpages out there, so there should've been nothing astounding about the idea that someone in their class might create a webpage. I didn't see too many people blink back when students used to trade stocks using the tech lab computers. I guess I don't have much of a point with this post. It's not like I had high expectations of them; I just thought it was stunning how many people considered this most basic use of the internet as some form of high sorcercy.
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Daily Skygazing I'm still watching Steven Spielberg's Taken miniseries. It's been okay so far, though the ideas have been a little generic and one character has killed so many fucking people that I've lost count. I have hopes for its future though because they've been touching on more interesting notes lately. One issue I have with it though is that each episode seems to take place 5 or so years after the last, and then there's a sudden flurry of events that change things. Perhaps a more gradual timeline would've made more sense. Oh, and please take note of this link, which will take you to Nasa's astronomical picture of the day. Attractive pictures of nebulas and whatnot along with a nice paragraph explaining what they are. Updated Daily.
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Wednesday, December 04, 2002
 
Sad but funny CNN was asking for it when they decided to let people submit drawings of replacements for the World Trade Center. If you'll visit the submission page, you'll find 15 or so uninteresting but reasonable proposals next to a dozen insane, poorly drawn trillion-dollar building proposals.
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Lesser Miracles Now that I've expounded for a paragraph about the miracles of life and existence made known to us thanks to wondrous mother science, I feel the need to touch on a lesser miracle: Blistex Clear Advance lip balm. As my friends and family can attest, I'm addicted to lip balms, ointments, and creams. If I don't get my fix atleast once a day, my lips crack and begin to bleed. This obession with lip protection, however, comes at a price. I always carry atleast two pieces of lip balm in my pocket, but I've never been able to settle on one brand. I switch around, almost as if the chapping of my lips were some form of adaptive bacteria that needed to be hit with stronger and stronger anti-biotics. There's regular Chap Stick, Blistex Medicated ointment, Kiehls fancy lip goop, the brand with the little gator on it, and about 800 different types of special "natural" or "extra-medicated" side-brands. The problem is that virtually all these ointments advertise in the same way. A woman skiing and gripping her face because of her chapped lips. This feminized image and the glossy nature of most lip balms left me feeling as if my manliness was being undermined with every lip smack. But now Blistex has fired back; clearly someone in their marketing department realized there's a place for men in the highly competitive facial ointment arena. Blistex Clear Advance comes in a dark grey container. The box has a picture of a rugged, square-jawed man's face, complete with five o'clock shadow. And the commercials focus on its no-gloss formula, which makes it ideal for the man who doesn't want to look like he's been taking make-up tips from Christina Aguilera. Now I can apply lip balm with the confidence of knowing my manly essence in protected; plus it has a great berry smell that makes it a joy to apply!
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Simply stunning However much I may seem like the classic teenage cynical asshole, certain do things make me feel all oogy and special. Such it is with the human genome project. Here's a great little article on CNN explaining that the human genome and the common laboratory mouse's genome are incredibly similar. I just find this endlessly fascinating. It's incredible to think that these tiny changes in a few strands of DNA are all that separate us from mice. That's just remarkable to think of. We, who have touched the stars and harnessed the atom, have 40% of our genome exactly in common with the lowly mouse, ever present subject of our experiments. Detailed scientific explanations like these make some people feel that religion must be worthless and our existence can be justified in science alone, but miraculous discoveries like this just make me appreciate all the more how incredible the miracle of life is.
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Tuesday, December 03, 2002
 
Taken The longest two hours of my life. [SPOILERS FOLLOW] I swear to god, I thought the first installment of this mini-series was never going to end. And that's not to say it was awful or even bad. Basically, it has potential but the premiere was flawed. There were plot points that I predicted miles away and then had to watch unfold for hours. There were characters that took me 25 minutes to tell apart because they all had the same 1940's GI haircuts. There was a murder that I could see coming a half-hour earlier but it still made no sense. The most fundamental flaw was thankfully not very present, which is that the human beings didn't act like human beings would in those circumstances (and I'm not including Alien-influenced human beings). One nitpick that drove me fucking insane. Okay, they've got this shapeshifting alien that can control people's thoughts. So what do they do? The keep it in a fucking room with a swinging hinge door! That's right. There was no lock in the door. Intergalactic travel, english, and interspecies breeding are all simple subjects for this alien to grasp, yet it fails to figure out how to push a fucking swinging door! The other annoying thing was the narration by that really young actress. She does nothing wrong, but it's all written so terribly. It's filled with all these statements and things that are so desperately trying to sound noble and mysterious that they just come off as silly and annoying. Still, I'll watch for a few more nights because there's definite potential here, even if the so-called amazing new alien CGI they promised was thoroughly underwhelming.
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Monday, December 02, 2002
 
Cease and Desist Well, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to shut the DrudgeReport down for crimes against sanity. He's followed up his laughable attempt at being outraged by Sen. John Kerry's haircuts with an even more laughable attempt to sound outraged about the rumor that Hillary Clinton's haircut costs twice as much. For fuck's sake drudge, when you don't have an interesting scoop, don't just start printing random things. You keep this up and that fedora on your head is going to be ashamed to be seen with you.
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Pullitzer! Thank god the DrudgeReport is here! If it wasn't for his ace reporting, I wouldn't know that I'm supposed to be outraged that Sen. John Kerry's haircuts cost 150 dollars. My god! Imagine if other rich people enter politics and claim to represent the people. The gall of this man!
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So much to hate The Scifi channel is making their big push into homes this week with their 20-hour Steven Spielberg produced alien abduction mini-series. While I'm certainly interested, there are a few things upsetting me. One is that I simply can't imagine watching 2 hours of alien abduction every night for 10 days. What happens on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, which are my big TV nights. This sort of thing would've been better done during the summer when there's less competition, but that's unfortunately when Scifi runs new episodes of all their original series so they pushed it. Also, to try to make sure this is an event that creates the Scifi brand, they've changed their logo. Instead of the minimalist saturn logo, they've now got a huge freaking saturn next to "SciFi" in giant honking letters. You factor in the widescreen boxes, and the fucking thing looks to take up an 8th of the screen real estate. And finally, I watched part of the very uninformative making-of special, and they did something that really burned me up. Nearly half the whole thing was head shots of the actors involved speaking extemporaneously in front of single-color backgrounds ala the Apple Switch ads. This is not a way to convey information; this is a way to inflict pain.
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Sunday, December 01, 2002
 
Sounds Good The word on the web (AintItCool.com) is that Disney's next big animated flic will feature Mickey, Donald, and Goofy. That sounds good to me. Donald in particular is a delightful character that never really got the silver screentime he deserved.
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Wouldn't things have been better... Here. I didn't make this, but it's an old favorite of mine:
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Table Salt discovered to be salty CNN has a new article up entitled Sen. Kerry may run for President. They love to put cutesy titles over stories about murderous rapists and toilet thieves, but god forbid they make a mildly informative or interesting title for a real story like this one. Anyway, Kerry filed some papers indicating that he will want to officially explore the possibility of a Presidential run. Yeah, that's not big news, but he's the first of the Democratic prayerfuls (until Bush's numbers go down, I feel this is a more accurate term than hopefuls) to actually do anything.
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