Sunday, April 30, 2006

Ed Nelson, UConn's Country Rappin' Rebounder, has signed a free agent contract with the St. Louis Rams as a TE.

22:17 c-dog

Dr. Who on Holiday - Green Day and the Timelords. The missus hates it when I crank up the Timelords version, maybe this one will be more to her liking.

18:19 c-dog

Colbert at the Correspondents' Dinner looks hilarious but unfortunately I can neither get my laptop to play sound, find my headphones, nor find the rebroadcast on the CSPAN schedule. Maybe you'll have more luck than I did. Still, just reading about it was entertaining.

08:17 c-dog

Saturday, April 29, 2006

The Bush administration has, in my humble and objective opinion, reached a state of such decline, such permanent and maddening incompetence, a state of standards so low it's impossible to use the word standards about them, that they are pretty much invulnerable to criticism and scandal. Really, what could they do? Shoot a guy in the face? At this point, when they screw up, the reaction is "Well, what did you expect?" At this point, we no longer measure the screw ups in terms of money or law, it's bodies and blood. How many dead in Iraq, or New Orleans, or on Cheney's "hunting" trips.

The new Boneyard, "More Big Lie" is all about bad following bad and I think it proves - throwing the president a bone here - that he's not as stupid as most of us think. In a sad way, the start of the Iraq war reflects Bush's "election." When you begin an endeavor with a Big Lie, there's really nowhere positive to go. Lies have to follow lies.

Labels: Conservative Goons

15:11 bone daddy

A collection of William S. Burroughs book covers. The Grove '92 ones - when Burroughs had become hip again - seem to be consistently the more boring. Neat site, though. (Via Ultimate Insult.)

15:07 bone daddy

Friday, April 28, 2006

Da Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na
Swingin' Jon Favreau to helm Iron Man. Thor is getting a movie a too? Shaun of the Dead was wicked good, so I wouldn't be surprised if Ant Man turned out to be the best of that lot.

13:53 c-dog

Thursday, April 27, 2006

"It's even curved towards the face to make the whole process so much easier." Settle down folks. He's talking about a banana. Or at least I think he is. He does slide it into his hand with a certain satisfaction that's not altogether culinary. Anyway, you should watch this video of some guy and Kirk Cameron from Growing Pains revealing how the ease of eating a banana proves God. If you can watch this and not giggle, God help you.

(But what about the pineapple?)

22:26 bone daddy

Police search for killer chimps. They escaped from a Sierra Leone preserve and mauled a group of local and American sightseers.

You'll note the photo accompanying the CNN story, captioned: "Chimpanzees are shown at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, in April 2005." The chimps look purple on green, much like TC's new design!

11:41 HD

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Not to get all one-up-y on c-dog after his tepid recommendation of Lucky Number Slevin, but I can without reservation sing some praises for John Boorman's 1967 Point Blank. Lee Marvin plays a criminal who is double-crossed and left for dead by his partner and wife in the opening scene. Instead of dying, he comes back for revenge, taking it out not only on the partner but the whole "organization" that swallowed "his" money, the outrageous sum of $93,000. I can see its influence in a ton of heist and bad guy flicks, from Reservoir Dogs to The Limey. I even suspect the influence goes into movies like The Sixth Sense and many an Elmore Leonard book. Although I never hear it mentioned in the lists of great movies from this era, for me it immediately jumps onto the list with Dog Day Afternoon and The Conversation. It's much better than contemporaneous movies that get more attention, like The French Connection or Bullet.

If it were updated, the fight scenes would be made more visceral. Still, this movie is suprisingly brutal and amoral. Influenced as much by art cinema as noir, some scenes make you wonder if they really happened without ever bothering to tell you. Many of these scenes are carefully composed - I saw the widescreen version - and have the pauses and silences of the era. For a movie in which every single person is utterly glum - there is literally one smile - there are some good laughs. Carol O'Conner (Archie Bunker) has a great scene as an organization boss. I saw it a few days ago and my enthusiasm hasn't diminished.

22:17 bone daddy

Saturday, April 22, 2006

The Kansas City Shuffle
Saw Lucky Number Slevin today. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying what easily could've been Bruce Willis trying to cash in on some more of that Pulp Fiction magic, a man's wristwatch being a key ingredient and all. If you're looking for a Saturday matinee with some twists and turns and dose of bloody violence, this is one of the better action movies to come along since, well, Pulp Fiction.

OK, a day later, -- and this is spoilerish -- what bugged me a little now bugs me more. The idea that someone, even a coroner, can get a bulletproof vest and fake blood packets on short notice then be willing to risk that someone who's intending to shoot them will hit the packets and not decide to shoot them between the eyes, not to mention the unlikelihood that nobody would notice they're wearing a freaking bulletproof vest, it's all just a bit much. To me, it seems like they decided to take a lazy shortcut and didn't have enough respect for the audience to even try to pretend otherwise. There are probably more glaring credulity straining elements, but they were masked better, or at least an attempt was made to explain them.

14:25 c-dog

Friday, April 21, 2006

Have No Fear!
In local movie news, Underdog is filming in Providence.

20:57 c-dog

From SD-6 to ST:11
J.J. (Alias, MI:III) Abrams to Direct 11th Star Trek movie. My feeling for a while has been that what Star Trek needs is a reboot. While this isn't that drastic, I'm liking the idea of revisiting the original characters with new actors. It was a bad idea to go back to the (future) past with Enterprise, but this movie does seem like step in the right direction.

I still feel a full on reboot of the original series, cherry picking the best episodes, grabbing the best stories from the novels, planning the five year mission and doing it as a closed-end series so it could have a proper story arch is the only way to revive the series short of pushing it ahead another couple hundred years or so.

As far as Abrams goes, I liked some of Alias and will probably check out MI:III even though Tom Cruise freaks me out. It never would've occurred to me to look in that direction for Trek and maybe that's not a bad thing. Bryan Singer looked like an inspired choice for the X-Men and that's turned out to be be pretty forgettable, but I would've rather seen someone with a less commercial vision at the helm.

Still, it's new Star Trek and for whatever reason that still gets my inner geek all stirred up.

(link via Ghost in the Machine)

20:44 c-dog

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and 24's Chloe will be on an upcoming episode of Gilmore Girls. This will mark the first time I notice that I didn't watch Gilmore Girls.

23:22 bone daddy

50 Greatest Film Adaptations: The titles that leapt off the page.
Nitpick with the list: several were made into films at least twice and the list doesn't reference which version is supposedly the best ... for example which "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"?

It's been a long time since I read "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (Mr. Raccagni's class) but with Muriel Spark's recent passing and now the inclusion here, I guess I'll throw it on the Netflix list.

via Robot Wisdom

18:04 c-dog

As we've just gone through the Easter season, comics readers have probably gone through a handful of unfunny, preachy B.C. 'toons (now, with rhymes!). Anyway, enjoy this Bizarro cartoon. (Via Neilalien.)

08:43 bone daddy

Friday, April 14, 2006

Did everyone know there's a Yo La Tengo video game? Very old school. It's Breakout with two balls, and synthed YLT songs playing in the background. It's trickier than it seems, which is probably why they give you about 50 lives. I hope I can listen to "Autumn Sweater" the same way again.

23:18 bone daddy

Sunday, April 09, 2006

Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball League ID 349865 "Test Monkey Attack"
I've created a Rotisserie Baseball League on Yahoo with just four two one no open slots (five players total). It's AL only, a pre-ranked autodraft so no live draft scehduling issues, and is designed for the casual owner (limit of 3 trades and 3 Free Agent pickups per player, so it's pretty much set it and forget it).

Stat categories for hitters are: HR, R, RBI, OBP, & SLG -- that's right, no AVG or SB.
For pitchers it's: W, K, SV, ERA, WHIP

Season will start Monday, 4/17.

17:15 c-dog

May Not Have Played a Great Game of Phase 10 last night but I sure showed our guests how to eat pistachios with ruthless efficiency.

12:37 c-dog

Saturday, April 08, 2006

Another web fave is the Washington Post's online sudoku. It's got the best notes system, at least for my solving style, and I think it's the easiest to use without a mouse. I'll usually do the Times and the Daily Sudoku as well, but I'll always work the Post first. There's also websudoku and a speed challenge one at sudoku fun that I haven't tried yet. Am I missing any good ones?

13:05 c-dog

Friday, April 07, 2006

Netvibes
I'm finding that I'm using Netvibes a lot more these days instead of surfing around to a lot of different sites. It's not perfect and I don't think it'll ever full replace My Yahoo, because I use Y mail, calendar, notes, and track my fantasy sports through it, but as far as aggregating the RSS feeds for many of the sites I like to visit, along with just keeping a list of bookmarks, nothing else has worked as well.

Just as my page was starting to get unwieldy from the number of bricklets, they went and rolled out tabs today. If you're always on the same pc, it may not be worth the effort of setting up, but between having a desktop at home, borrowing the missus's laptop when I can't be bothered to walk up the stairs, and the work pc (which is only used for surfing on lunches and breaks, of course) it's nice to have the one spot that's got my stuff no matter which I'm on.

14:55 c-dog

Top Ten Tom DeLay quotes. My thrill that he is na-na-na-na-hey-hey-goodbye and likely prison-bound is matched only by my sadness that someone this mean and stupid could (a) get elected and (b) become a leader of a political party.

13:31 bone daddy

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Condoleezza Rice made news by admitting there were errors made in Iraq. (Does "Well, Duh" mean the same thing in England?) Her spokesman, however, made the truly amusing comment, later claiming that Rice was speaking figuratively. That kills me. A spokesman should know how to speak, correct? What was figurative? Was her admission merely an example of how an admission should be made if one were needed, which it wasn't? Or did the mistakes she admitted to not really exist? I'm sorry, but the mistakes were actual. Examples of hypothetical things include: WMDs, ties to 9/11, armor on a Humvee, broad support for Chalabi and cheering masses.

22:46 bone daddy

Maybe this is why guys aren't usually invited to baby showers?

An argument at a baby shower escalated into a brawl in which one man was shot and the pregnant guest of honor was beaten with a stick, police said.

It's a little known rule of etiquette, but if a guest beats you with a stick you should not enclose the restraining order in the thank you note. Send them seperately.

22:34 bone daddy

The name Bernard Goldberg may not immediately ring a bell, but you've heard from him. He wrote about the moral decline of the Clinton White House, about how the women who worked there wore pants and how they had a Christmas tree with condoms and drugs on it. This stuff got talked about in the media quite a bit, never mind that the charges were bogus (the Christmas tree one, some women probably did wear pants). Gingrich also at one point alleged that some percentage - I don't recall the exact number and it isn't important because he made it up - of the Clinton White House staff used drugs. And we talked about these charges and about how every action, even imaginary or harmless ones, of anybody associated with the Clinton White House reflected Clinton's moral failure.

Anyway, appropriate of nothing, I refer you to the child sex arrest of Department of Homeland Security spokesman Brian Doyle. (Update: apparently there are more sex offenders in the federal government than just this guy. How many makes it a characteristic? Via atrios.)

22:25 bone daddy

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

They're not extinct!
New dinosaur a turkey - World - theage.com.au
Turkzilla is out there. I've seen it.

20:59 c-dog

TC Makeover
As a slightly belated 6 year birthday present for TC, HD freshened up the look and incorporated my Aunt's painting into the banner. I'm digging it.

19:42 c-dog

Name Dropping
A bunch of guys from work are in Dallas this week and caught the Red Sox game last night in Arlington. Following are are some reactions passed along after they ran into several of the players in a bar after...

• David Wells is obese
  
• Kevin Youkalis is a snob.
  
• Jonathon Papelbon is awesome. When T---- was talking to him, it looked like David vs Goliath. He has to be something like 6 foot 7.
  
• Tim Wakefield, who got rocked by the Texas Rangers earlier in the night (10 - 4) was nice. We offered to buy both Tim and David Wells a drink, but they declined.
  
• Shinerbock is very good.
  
• Hopefully, the beer that Josh Beckett drank will negatively effect his pitching today.
  
• Eggs and bacon at 3:00 in the morning are good.

12:50 c-dog

I had the Maryland-Duke woman's championship game on in the background during the first half when it looked like Duke was rolling to a dominating, boring victory, a la Florida on the men's side. I started paying attention as a young, mistake-prone Maryland team fought and fought and suddenly couldn't miss anything, including a three with six seconds left to send it to overtime. A great game, and not only 'cause Duke lost. Maryland won with freshmen and sophmores, suddenly leaping ahead of Tennessee, becoming the team to beat next year. Like many good coaches, Duke coach Goestenkors is permanently saddled with "can't win the big one" status until her team proves it wrong.

10:44 bone daddy

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Get Stuck
Okay, you say, maybe UConn's season ended with a first round loss in the Big East tournament and maybe the talent was more talked about than displayed in the NCAA tournament but at least, you say, the season didn't end with a player's embarrassing, tepid, and homophobic country rap. Oops. Someone Ed Nelson respects should sit him down and tell him that everyone would prefer he knock down a couple of layups instead of queers, and there's no way he's going to intimidate any "thug" from the "hood" until he knocks down a couple of salads. (Via To Wit.)

20:59 bone daddy

Saturday, April 01, 2006

The religious background of superheroes. Click on the character's religion for documentary evidence. Every geek knows about Daredevil, but the Hulk and Punisher are both catholics. Who knew? (Update: Check out the pictures grouping them by religion. The Legion of Latter-day Saints don't look so tough, even with "Straight Arrow." Ben Grimm is Jewish? Okay.)

20:57 bone daddy