Mar052007

Jack Bauer to Speak to West Pointers About Torture

When the series 24 premiered way back in 2001 (has it really been that long ago? Wow…), I thought it was brilliant, inventive, exciting, and, above all, grown-up television. Yeah, the plot was full of holes when you viewed it from the mile-high, all-season-long perspective, and the show suffered a bit from the “one-damn-thing-after-another” quality of the cliffhanger serials from which it descended. But when taken episode by episode, 24 was (and still is, despite its flaws) compellingly watchable, suspenseful storytelling that makes a strong argument for serialized TV drama being the modern-day equivalent of Dickens’ episodic novels.

I’ve loyally stuck with 24 for the past five seasons, but I must admit that I’ve done so with an increasing sense of discomfort. My growing ambivalence for the show is partly a result of the inevitable decline that comes as any TV series ages out — in other words, the concept is just getting tired — but a much bigger issue for me is the question of torture.

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Mar052007

I Need Remedial Geography

Jaquandor turned me onto this geography quiz thingie, which asks you to name as many states as you can in 10 minutes. I went into it rather cockily, figuring I spent all those years reading National Geographic, so I ought to clean up, right? Eh, not so much… I named 40 states in about four minutes, then managed to pick up only three more as the clock ticked off the final six minutes. I couldn’t for the life of me think of Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, or Wisconsin.

I think I’ll skip the one that asks you to name 192 U.N. member states in 10 minutes. I’ve already been humbled enough for one morning…

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Mar022007

R. Jason Bennion… Sooooooooper Geeeeeeeenius

When I received my very first debit card (completely unsolicited, I should note) ten or twelve years or however long ago, I was unimpressed. The way I saw it, I had no need for this new-fangled card thingie. I used cash for most of my transactions, and, in the immortal words of grumpy old men everywhere, that was how I liked it. Once a week, I happily went to my neighborhood bank branch in person — no doubt with an onion tied to my belt, as was the style of the time — to obtain that week’s allotment of greenbacks. There, I enjoyed talking to a pretty teller who actually recognized my face and acted happy to see me, a definite fringe benefit to my cash-only way of doing things. (Must’ve been the onion.)

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Feb282007

Jet-Man and Earthrace!

Just to end the day, here are a couple of things that made me say, “coooooo-uhllll,” like Bart Simpson when I saw them:

First, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan (who occasionally takes a break from politi-blogging for cooooo-uhlll stuff), it’s Jet-Man, a crazy Swede Swiss guy who likes to bail out of airplanes with a small, jet-powered wing attached to his back. Jet-Man’s website compares him to Batman, but this guy reminds me more of The Rocketeer.

If you’ll recall, in the Rocketeer movie starring Billy Campbell, Howard Hughes himself asks our hero, “What was it like strapping that thing to your back and flying like a bat out of hell?” Good old YouTube provides us with something of answer:

If flying like a bat out of hell doesn’t appeal to you, how about taking a ride on a futuristic superboat that’s powered by biodiesel and pierces through waves instead of riding up over the top of them? The boat is called Earthrace, and its crew is currently trying to circumnavigate the world in record-breaking time using only renewable fuels. It’s a cool cause (i.e., trying to draw attention to the possibilities of biodiesel) and a really wicked-looking machine, too (hi-res photo here). Not surprisingly, given my obsessions, it reminds me of Amidala’s personal chromemobile from Attack of the Clones. I’ll be following this one with great interest…

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Feb282007

30th Anniversary Star Wars DVDs Delayed?

The Digital Bits is reporting that the rumored 30th Anniversary Ultimate Star Wars Saga box set that was supposed to come out this year may get pushed back because the suits at Lucasfilm were disappointed by the poor sales of last year’s original trilogy release. You know, the one whose only real selling point was the inclusion of the unaltered theatrical cuts, which, to no one’s surprise, turned out to be of less-than-stellar quality. Hey, Uncle George, here’s a tip: those who are interested in owning your revisionist CGI’d Special Edition versions already do, probably two or three times over. You want to make a few more bucks off your fan base? Then reconsider your attitude about those theatrical cuts and give us what we really want: the unf***ed-with editions in clean, anamorphic transfers that will look good on our new-fangled HDTVs. It really is that easy. Just give us these movies the way they were when we fell in love with them. Don’t worry about impressing today’s FX-jaded kids; don’t worry about trying to make them match up with the prequel trilogy. Just give a little gift to those of us who’ve been there for you since the beginning. We’ll be happy to open our wallets again for a product we actually want.

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Feb282007

I’m a Unitarian?

Hmmmm… this is unexpected: according to the Belief-o-Matic&#153 over at BeliefNet, the religion that most closely matches my personal beliefs (at least as interpreted by an online multiple-choice-style quiz) is Unitarian Universalism, with Liberal Quakerism and secular humanism tied for second place. Mormonism, the dominant faith of my home state and the one with which I have the most personal experience and knowledge of, came in at number 24 out of 27 possible matches. That’s lower than Islam, Hinduism, and even Scientology.

I usually self-identify as an agnostic — I’m not comfortable flat-out denying the possibility of the divine, but I have a lot of doubts, and religion simply doesn’t play any role in my day-to-day existence, except for those moments when living in Utah inevitably demands one to deal with it — so I expected this thing to tell me I was a big ol’ secular humanist. The Unitarian and Quaker results genuinely surprised me. And to be honest, it also surprised me that Mormonism ranked so low. After all, I was raised here, immersed in that faith, even if I wasn’t practicing it; most of my family and friends are LDS, and I really don’t think of myself as hostile to Mormonism, at least no more so than I am to any other religion. (By which I mean that I object to those of any faith who would tell me how to live my life or that I’m not a moral person because I don’t do all the things they do, but I really don’t care what people do or do not believe themselves.) You’d think that a lot of Mormon ideas would be present in my belief system simply by default.

I’m probably making too much of this — after all, Internet quizzes have also told me that I’m Arthur C. Clarke and Spider-Man, and I should know to take them all with an iceberg-sized grain of salt. Still, it’s food for thought, isn’t it?
If you’re interested, the complete breakdown of my results is below the fold:

Continue Reading…

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Feb282007

A Thousand-Dollar Brownie?

Via Boing Boing, evidence that we have become a hopelessly decadent society:

…a restaurant in Atlantic City has come up with a $1,000 brownie… Brûlee’s “Brownie Extradordinaire with Saint Louis” is a chocolate brownie made with Italian hazelnuts, dusted with edible gold powder and served with a very rare port. After each bite, the dessert captain squirts a mist of the vintage port on your tongue with a $750 atomizer, which incidentally is yours to keep.

The online menu for this place can be found here, if you want to see how the better one percent lives.

I can’t begin to describe how offensively vulgar I find this. I am utterly disgusted by the thought of rich, spoiled bastards with more money than sense ($1K is equal to four payments on my Mustang!) eating a precious-metal-encrusted brownie while a lackey (no doubt dressed in velvets with a powdered wig, just like they did in the good old days before the guillotine spoiled the party) silently stands by to squirt wine into their lazy mouths because they can’t be troubled to soil their fingers by lifting a frakking glass. I wonder if the restaurant also offers to complete the whole experience by sending a perfumed peasant home with the diner to wipe their tushy with a napkin of fine Egyptian linen? I imagine the gold powder does improve the aesthetics of the inevitable conclusion, at least.

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Feb272007

How Do You Torture a Proofreader?

It’s been a while since I posted any examples of especially bad prose encountered during my day job as a mild-mannered proofreader at a major metropolitan corporation. I was beginning to think that I’d never again find anything dunderheaded enough to bother sharing with my Three Loyal Readers.

I was wrong. Check this out:

A period is defined as the amount of day’s/weeks it takes…

It’s not Egregious Corporate Speak in the sense of being a conglomeration of marketing buzzwords and other jargon, but it definitely appears to have been deliberately designed to give me a headache. The thing I don’t get is why more than one day requires the apostrophe while more than one week does not. Does someone think there are different pluralization rules for different time periods?

Oy.

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