Bigots and Marriage

Posted by | Filed under Politics, Rants

I had been con­sid­er­ing right­ing up my feel­ing regard­ing this insane pro­posal to amend the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion to steal the rights of a sub­set of Amer­i­can cit­i­zens. How­ever I was catch­ing up on the news in the blog­sphere when I stum­bled upon Mr. Scalzi’s dis­cus­sion of the sub­ject:

Why aren’t peo­ple ask­ing the mar­riage big­ots flat out what they have against mar­riage? Against mar­ried cou­ples? And by what right are they able to say that cou­ples who are already legally mar­ried should have their mar­riages declared null and void? This pro­posed amend­ment breaks up mar­riages. God damn it, peo­ple should be hol­ler­ing this at the top their lungs every time one of those mar­riage big­ots gets all sanc­ti­mo­nious about what mar­riage means. Peo­ple ought to be get­ting these mar­riage big­ots into a cor­ner and get­ting them to admit that they need to destroy legal, lov­ing mar­riages in order to accom­plish their goals. We ought to be get­ting these mar­riage big­ots admit­ting that they have to strip away rights these Amer­i­cans already have to do what they want to do.

I highly rec­om­mend you read Mr. Scalzi’s post in full.

Update: The com­ment thread on Mr. Scalzi’s post is rather long. I hadn’t com­pleted read­ing it yet, when I posted this arti­cle. Heck, I’m still work­ing my way through it. How­ever the rea­son for this update is one of Mr. Scalzi’s replies to a com­ment was so dead on that I sim­ply must quote him again.

As I’ve said a num­ber of times in the past, the most “activist” judi­cial rul­ing I can think of in recent times was Bush v. Gore, and I think it was wildly poorly decided. How­ever, you don’t see me hop­ping up and down like a frog on a plate, bitch­ing about that damned activist Judge Scalia, because in my opin­ion, regard­less of whether I like the rul­ing or not, the judi­ciary was doing its proper role. So, basi­cally, if I have to live with a piece of crap rul­ing like Bush v. Gore, my sym­pa­thy for boo-hoo con­ser­vates bitch­ing about “activist judges” is around about zero.

Review: X-men, The Last Stand

Posted by | Filed under Movies, Reviews

X-Men: The Last Stand (Original Motion Picture)

X-Men: The Last Stand
My rat­ing: 2.75 out of 5.

Yes­ter­day, the wife and I headed out to watch a mati­nee of X-Men: The Last Stand. I was plan­ning on writ­ing up a review of it for MovieCom­ment1. But when I got over to the site I found; I found he’d already writ­ten his own review. And not sur­pris­ingly2, we have com­pletely dif­fer­ent opin­ions on both the cur­rent X-Men movie and the prior ones.

Brett Rat­ner was selected as the direc­tor for X-men: The Last Stand as Bryan Singer was busy work­ing on Super­man Returns. Unfor­tu­nately, this means the 3 part of the X-men series attempts to focus on the action/battle sequences rather than the char­ac­ter devel­op­ment which made the movies inter­est­ing. Mr. Rat­ner even went so far as to make the bat­tles flow as much like a comic book bat­tle as he could. This was a hor­ri­ble mis­take as the dif­fer­ences in the two medi­ums do not allow the flow of a comic book bat­tle to work well on the screen. In a comic book, the audi­ence accepts that the artist can­not draw every detail of a bat­tle and they fill in all of the details they need/want with their imag­i­na­tion. With movies, we have a long his­tory of war movies which show that the film­maker can show sig­nif­i­cantly more detail. So when we have mul­ti­ple scenes in the mid­dle of bat­tles where noth­ing is hap­pen­ing; it’s just bor­ing (e.g. dozens of mutants sup­pos­edly leap­ing to the attack and all we get is them leap­ing over the rubble).

Addi­tion­ally, I have to take issue with MovieComment’s claim that Storm looks espe­cially good in the action sequences. Her *quote* fly­ing *quote* scenes are with­out argu­ment the worst spe­cial effects in the movie. I haven’t seen wire work that awful since John Cleese played Sir Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and at least he was intended to look stu­pid swing­ing around on that rope. Then there’s the whole “wheee! I can spin!” crap they came up with for Storm. For cry­ing out loud, this char­ac­ter is the­o­ret­i­cally sup­posed to be the human mutant equiv­a­lent of Mother Nature and they’ve got her spin­ning around like a f’ing top! Still some of the other actions sequences weren’t too bad. Pretty much, any of them focus­ing on Wolver­ine were good. The bit with Kitty Pryde (aka Shad­ow­cat) and the Jug­ger­naut was really good (the end of that sequence was par­tic­u­larly funny).

The addi­tion of other char­ac­ters to the team in this film was both good and bad. Good in that they picked Shad­ow­cat and Colos­sus3. Bad in that they did not really do any­thing with their char­ac­ters and they failed to con­tinue devel­op­ing some of the other char­ac­ters from the pre­vi­ous movies. Most notably, Rogue’s sto­ry­line was pretty much dropped and con­verted into a weird, teenage angsty thing which didn’t play well on the screen.

Speak­ing of bits which didn’t play well on the screen, the cli­max of the movie with Jean Grey/Phoenix and Wolver­ine blew seri­ous chunks. To any­body who liked this scene, I apol­o­gize but Famke Janssen’s per­for­mance just did not pull off the seri­ous­ness of the moment. Maybe with a bet­ter direc­tor she could have done it, but I guess we’ll never know. Hmm, maybe they can do some sort of director’s cut but bring back Bryan Singer to do it so we could get a decent movie. That could be very inter­est­ing. Over­all, I’m glad I went to see the film (for the new char­ac­ters) but I’m extremely glad we went to main­tee and used some coupons we had. If I had to pay the full, evening ticket price; I would have been seri­ously pissed off.

Oh yeah, if you’re read­ing this review prior to watch­ing the movie; stay in your seat until after the cred­its. There’s one more scene after the cred­its are over which you don’t want to miss.

1 A movie/dvd review site run by a friend of mine.
2 He has con­sis­tently stated he believes Dumb and Dumber is not only a good movie, but one of the fun­ni­est he’s ever seen. While I find that movie to be an abhor­rent piece of utter excre­ment.
3 My par­tic­u­lar favorites.

Funny Comment Spam

Posted by | Filed under Life

Even though I run mul­ti­ple plu­g­ins to block com­ment spam; some still makes it into my mod­er­a­tion queue. Mostly it’s annoy­ing and bor­ing, but this bit cracked me up.

Your site is very cog­ni­tive. I think you will have good future.

If you don’t also find this amus­ing, then I prob­a­bly just need more caf­feine this morning. :)

Update 2006-09-13: Oddly enough, this post is sud­denly get hit with all kinds of com­ment spam that actu­ally makes it past my fil­ters and into the com­ment mod­er­a­tion queue. As such, I’m here by clos­ing com­ments on this post.

Update on the Nibble

Posted by | Filed under Life

Unlike the major­ity of Amer­cians, I did not head back to the office after the Memo­r­ial day week­end. Well, not back to my office any­ways. Instead, I whipped out my inter­view suit1 and went to a job inter­view. It was a really good thing that I left early to get there as I got slightly lost. I stopped at a cof­fee shop and got direc­tions. Yes ladies, men can and will ask for direc­tions when we know we’re lost2.

After get­ting the direc­tions sorted out (I missed over­shot the street I needed to turn onto by 1 block), I arrived at the company’s office3. The build­ing looked sur­pris­ingly new, though it was a bit warm inside. Though that could have been a com­bi­na­tion of me being ner­vous and me hav­ing “suited up”. I had to fill out some paper­work (boil­er­plate HR back­ground check autho­riza­tion forms) and then waited a bit for my inter­view. Shortly, my inter­viewer showed up and took me back to his office. We went over my resume a bit, though it turned out his copy of my resume was miss­ing the infor­ma­tion about me being a UofI grad­u­ate. For­tu­nately, I had pre­pared for that even­tu­al­ity by hav­ing mul­ti­ple copies of my most cur­rent and most generic4 and I gave one of these copies to him. We dis­cussed what sorts of things I do for my cur­rent employer, what I did dur­ing my col­lege days and so forth.

But we also got off topic sev­eral times dicussing a vari­ety of side issues: my Japan trip, Mind­bridge, work­ing for com­pa­nies who close their local offices, being a non-traditional col­lege stu­dent and so on. While I do not have an over­bu­dence of inter­views under my belt; this one felt like it went extremely well. I really felt like I made a con­nec­tion with the inter­viewer5. As it turns out, the com­pany is look­ing for 1 per­son for their com­puter oper­a­tions depart­ment and 1 for their data ware­house. Accord­ing the inter­viewer, the oper­a­tions posi­tion is a bit lower than what I’m really look­ing for in a start­ing salary but he thinks I could be a good fit for the other posi­tion as well. He went on to say the com­pany really needs to get these posi­tions filled quickly before their busy sea­son hits and I should hear some­thing back in a cou­ple of weeks.

Since the inter­view went so well and the only rea­son I was on time for it was the help­ful cof­fee shop; I went back to have myself a lit­tle snack6. The shop is called the “Cof­fee Talk Cafe”. When I got there after my inter­view, the only peo­ple in it were the staff. The lady behind the counter was very friendly and we chat­ted for a bit. She wished me all kinds of good luck on my inter­view, while she rang me up. I got a tof­fee nut latte and a orange/pineapple muf­fin. I ate in the shop and so they nuked up the muf­fin, putting a lit­tle but­ter on top. It was divine. Yum, yum. *smile* It took them a lit­tle bit to make the latte and when the lady brought it over we chat­ted a bit more. Appar­ently, I resem­ble the lady’s brother and in my suit look very “professor-ish”. I left a lit­tle bit after that and am now home chill­ing out. I’ll br brows­ing the online want ads in a lit­tle bit (look­ing for other nib­bles) but right now I feel really good about today and the inter­view I had.

1 Okay, it’s really my only suit.
2 We just don’t think we’re as lost as you think we do.
3 Per my long stand­ing habit, I will not be dis­cussing who they were.
4 Given time and avail­able brain­power, I pre­fer to cus­tomize my resume for the com­pany & job I am apply­ing for.
5 Did I men­tion this per­son is also the hir­ing man­ager? Oh well if I hadn’t yet; I have now.
6 To be pre­fectly hon­est, this was my break­fast. I was feel­ing too ner­vous prior to the inter­view to want to eat anything.

Are you a hoopy frood, like me?

Posted by | Filed under Life, Links

Towel Day Self Portait

If so, you bet­ter have your towel with you today! As today, is Towel Day.

For those not famil­iar, Dou­glas Adams was one of the fun­ni­est writ­ers of our time. He wrote a won­der­ful series of radio plays which were con­verted in a a series of books and a TV show and later into a really awful movie. This was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In this, Mr. Adams wrote:

A towel, it says, is about the most mas­sively use­ful thing an inter­stel­lar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great prac­ti­cal
value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the bril­liant marble-sanded beaches of Santrag­i­nus V, inhal­ing the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off nox­ious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Rav­en­ous Bug­blat­ter Beast of Traal (a mind­bog­gingly stu­pid ani­mal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a bush, but very rav­en­ous); you can wave your towel in emer­gen­cies as a dis­tress sig­nal, and of course dry your­self off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More impor­tantly, a towel has immense psy­cho­log­i­cal value. For some rea­son, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) dis­cov­ers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will auto­mat­i­cally assume that he is also in pos­ses­sion of a tooth­brush, face flan­nel, soap, tin of bis­cuits, flask, com­pass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Fur­ther­more, the strag will then hap­pily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might acci­den­tally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, strug­gle against ter­ri­ble odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reck­oned with.

After Mr. Adams’s death some lunatics decided to cre­ate Towel Day as a trib­ute to his genius. I only heard about it this year (about a week ago to be more pre­cise) and decided to join in on the fun. And the fact that I’m telecom­mut­ing to work today had absolutely noth­ing to do with that deci­sion. *grin*

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