I am the Law!

Another Will Ferrel short with a little girl giving him a hard time. This time she's a police interrogator.

What better way to watch the sunrise?

72 Virgins

The comments under this trailer are almost better than the trailer itself. The best bits are the cursive greek and "you're the bomb". It won't make any money, but I hope they make it. Muslims need to get over themselves anyway.

UPDATE: If you enjoy reading about this stuff, this is an excellent short piece on the now infamous "rage boy".

Conan the Librarian

link

Stuff

Because I'm tired of looking at Sopranos posts too.

A Udub scientist is trying to send information backwards in time. The kicker? It's all privately funded.

And here's a neato atlas to the universe. It's a good way to get a grasp on how insignificant we are. I would expound from that stepping off point, but I have class in the morning.

To meet my misogyny quota, here's an apt sexist joke for ya.

Oh yeah, happy solstice! The sun set around 10 tonight and the temperature's peaked between 60-75 for a month or so. Not a cloud. Seattle in the summer is a little secret we like to keep. I can safely impart that knowledge since only 4 people read this crappy blog.

Actually the last Sopranos post

I wouldn't break my swear if this wasn't the end all be all of Sopranos posts. This guy got it. Tony got whacked and there's copious amounts of evidence, most of which I missed because I've never seen The Godfather and I don't know a damn thing about Catholic mass (pun intended).

I am no longer upset about the ending, mostly because it should be obvious to everyone what happened.

The final Sopranos post, I swear

Two really good recaps of the season and final episode.

Note that it's on Salon, which has a draconian cookie policy. I disallow cookies, but greenlight sites I trust. That doesn't work on Salon. You have to leave cookies fully enabled to navigate their site. Hotmail is the same way.

It's really annoying to have to go into the settings and allow cookies, click the link to the next page(s) of the article, then go back into the settings and turn cookies off again and clear them out... then do it all again the next time you come by to read something... which is why I don't go to those sites unless it's something really really important like Heather Havrilesky writing about the The Sopranos (she's also the author of a mostly defunct advice blog that's really good).

I don't understand why Salon is invested in me allowing cookies permanently. If I'm willing to allow the domain salon.com to set cookies on my computer, that should satisfy them. But that's ok, there are lots of other sites out there to read. I don't need to patronize a site written by dicks.



I'll just say as my parting comment(s) on the lame ending, the only reason I care so much is because the series was so good. If I didn't expect more out of a show that has always exceeded my expectations, I wouldn't care about the ending. David Chase picked a hell of a time to go all artsy fartsy is all I'm sayin'. We've been given spectacular shows for 6 seasons, and then this. Only one person I know likes it.


Supposedly the actor who plays the federal agent said that the original ending had the guy at the bar approach Tony at the table before cutting to black. So Tony dies, as I suspected all along (and was my fill in the blank for the non-ending). I think he clearly died as it ended anyway, what with his and Bobby's conversation on the lake, which was flashed back to in the second to last episode (where Bobby said death would be an immediate cut to black).

I wouldn't be upset if that was consensus, but it's not. Everyone has their own idea of what happened. Why leave it ambiguous? And why build up all that tension in the last scene to then have absolutely nothing happen? We were deliberately fucked with and that's just not The Sopranos.

Pass the onion rings? That's what we get for being loyal fans for 8 years? Eff that. Either Chase was lazy, doesn't care about his fans, or is setting up the movie. I think he was lazy, but who knows.

Despite my disappointment at the major let down of an ending, the show is a big net positive. I still love the show and would recommend it to anyone. Start from the beginning and go all the way through. It's too bad you know the ending now, but just keep in mind that the point of a journey is not to arrive.

Spatula City

A classic from one of my favorite movies of all time, UHF.

Fun with referrals

(I wrote this last Sunday, but delayed publishing it until this Sunday because I recently put up a longish post and I know all 3 of you people only read this from work -- don't lie to me, I see the referral logs)


Long the respite of lazy bloggers the world over, I flipped through my referral logs to see what bizarre searches brought people here. I think I may have the best two referrals of all time.


This British guy seems to be having trouble with a collection agency. I love the all caps. Nice touch.


This guy from Turkey wants to find an LSD dealer in Seattle. I find no ends to the hilarity of this one. Oh sure, drug dealers have websites where you can just look them up and get illegal narcotics.


And I found this excellent photo blog, which apparently put me on the sidebar. In bloggy reciprocity, she's now on my sidebar too. Washingtonians, unite!


It baffles me how people find me (maybe they were looking for the Bathroom Habits Survey, which is by far the most popular post I have ever created -- it's responsible for fully a quarter off all my admittedly meager traffic).

I can't imagine strangers find this even remotely amusing. I don't write to gain an audience. I've even asked to be de-linked when I was getting too much traffic from a blog. I write for my own enjoyment, and for my close circle of friends who come by. But if you really want to read this crap, I'm happy to have you along.


I've had Yak Pack over there for awhile. I noticed him the same way I found Sequim, in the referrals. He got added to no fanfare, so here's the fanfare. Trumpets! I really wonder how he came across this blog all the way from Malaysia, which interestingly has a flag that looks alot like ours. His sidebar is a small eclectic mix and I am curious to know how I got on his short list. He doesn't post much, but it's honest and an interesting slice of life from the other side of the world. Big shocker, it's alot like life here.

I'm glad to have him as a reader even though we never communicate. I've always felt very comfortable hanging with Asians and Indians here in America and I like to think that extends across the oceans.

In a rare admission, I really appreciate Asian traditional family values and their work ethic, and I like to have that exposure as it helps temper my exploits somewhat (it doesn't work, but I like the reminder anyway). Not to over generalize, but Asians are always going back to school or getting promoted or sacrificing for their families in a way I really admire but don't emulate often enough.

Yes I'm generalizing by race and yes it's prejudiced. But it's not racist if it's positive, right? Maybe. I'm just calling it like I see it. My ex-gf, who is Indian, used to say that I was Asian. She called me an "egg", white on the outside, yellow on the inside (I preferred the term "broken toilet", but there you are). She was from Singapore, so even though I've never been there, Malaysia was demystified for me through her stories about how beautiful and moderate it is.

Make no mistake, I am full blooded American and western in every sense of the word. But half the point of being an American is shopping around all the millions of sub cultures we have here and taking the good aspects out of whichever one you like.

Take India for example. I'll take the food and the art and the family values, but you can keep your stupid caste system and rampant sexism. Burning women alive on her husband's funeral pyre because her existence is meaningless without him? Go fuck yourself. (that doesn't really happen much anymore ever since the British outlawed it long ago -- sometimes good things come from colonization, small though they may be -- but the rigid gender roles persist)


I'm painting with a broad brush obviously, and that means what I'm saying isn't entirely accurate, but I tend to lump all of south east Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and China/Korea/Japan into one big cultural category. All the Asian readers just threw up a little in their mouths. I'm sorry. But it's no different than other cultures lumping Europe, North America, and Oceania into one group. Generalizing helps us understand and make sense of the world. You just have to be cognizant of the fact that it's an approximation and there are always exceptions.


I now have the overwhelming urge to ride a motorcycle across Asia.



This whole thing reminds me of one of my main pet peeves, when people say technology and the internet divides and isolates us. I couldn't possibly disagree more. It's because we've industrialized agriculture that we're not spending every day tilling a field.

Tribal societies often were/are centered around the procurement of water. The women in Darfur leave the camps to walk miles one way just to get water for the family, and expose themselves to the Janjaweed rape gangs in the process. The thought of going any farther than the faucet for water is inconceivable to us.

It's because factories in Indonesia crank out so many clothes at such a cheap price that the job of the tailor outside of high end shops is all but defunct. That may distress a trained tailor, but this is clearly a net positive for the rest of us. When your shirt has a hole in it, you go buy another one because it not worth the time and expense to repair it. The availability of cheap goods frees us up to concentrate on other things, like curbing global warming or inventing microprocessors or sending robotic missions to Mars. Those advances in turn increase the pace of future discoveries. Technology and industrialization, along with capitalism, has been the best thing to happen to the human race.

I recently heard an interview on NPR with the creator of The Lonely Planet travel guide books. He was plugging his new book and I found the part about North Korea most fascinating. I've read travel logs from peoples' trips there before, so I wasn't surprised to hear that he was escorted everywhere by a minder and not allowed to walk away from the group and interact with the locals. Except he did anyway. He walked far from his hotel and came upon a hospital. In the garden there were nurses and doctors minding a fruit and vegetable garden. Think about that. Doctors, subsistence farming, in the capital city. That's what life is like without the benefits of technology, such as easy travel and global markets.

Without the ease of global communication and transportation we wouldn't know much about anything outside of a hundred mile radius. But today I can fritter away my hours waiting for The Sopranos final episode to come on, writing this silly blog that a guy in Malaysia is going to read. And after all the bullshit, we'll see that we're not all that different. And the next time someone tries to demonize America or Muslim countries, we'll both know better. The internet brings people together; it doesn't drive them apart.

Some say all the technology allows us to concentrate on warfare too much. There may be a point there, Iraq being the obvious example, though pre-industrial societies were hardly peaceful. War is a regrettable aspect of the human condition, but at least we have the luxury of expending huge sums on smart bombs that help minimize innocent deaths.

One of our most effective weapons is a cement block in the shape of a bomb. Broadly, it's called a kinetic weapon. It has no explosives, just momentum. It's guided in just like a normal smart bomb, by a guy pointing a laser at the badguy, with all kinds of wireless communication and processors crunching on algorithms that puts the bomb from a plane flying at super sonic speeds, tens of thousands of feet in the air, to within feet of its target. We wouldn't be able to develop such a system if we were concentrating on raising grain. We would fight wars the Russian way; that is, completely level the city, then send wave after wave of men.

Of course, all that said, technology is only as good as the people using it. As Americans, this is particularly apt to our ethical standing in the world, a battle of ideas we sadly seem to be losing.

A gun, genetic engineering, even a spoon, can be used for good or evil. You can refine uranium to provide power to your people, or you can use it to incinerate that pesky little upstart country that wounds your pride so much. We can develop the strongest, most humane military on the planet, but if the wrong guy is in charge, it can get used improperly. That's a consequence of poor leadership though, and not an indictment of industrialization/technology/capitalism which has unquestionably been the greatest thing to ever happen to us, despite its failings.

If we're ever going to get off (vid) this planet and thusly save the human race from extinction, we're going to need those factories in Vietnam to make our shoes for us so we can spend our time and profits building spacecraft. Private companies are building spaceships! That ought to give you chills.

There may be hope for us yet, if we keep cooperating. We can make it, but there are no guarantees. This vid affects me more than it should (Carl Sagan might be the greatest pothead to ever live, here's another good one). I won't be satisfied until we have an Enterprise.



All that because some guy in Turkey wants a drug hookup in Seattle. I love the internet.

Ladies' man

I recently came up with the most romantic thing you could possibly do for a woman.

Get your special lady a box of high end chocolates for Valentine's Day. It's empty except for a nice red envelope with her name on it and maybe some hearts around it or something. Inside the envelope is a coupon to a plastic surgeon and a note that says, "Because you're too fat".


There are several things wrong with this, but the main one is that I have to actively censor myself from doing such things. It's cruel yes, but hilariously so. Perhaps this has something to do with why I'm blogging on a Friday night.

I actually stay in on weekends deliberately, so this isn't a sign of my unpopularity (my lack of a girlfriend is the sign for that). I stay in on weekends and go out on weekdays. The way I see it, I have a 5 day weekend and no job. Woohoo!

School starts Monday morning bright and early though. The party is basically over.

Sopranos counterpoint

This look at how it could have ended makes the real ending not quite as stupid and disappointing as it was.

I'm not as mad as I was about the non-ending, though I still think it's lazy rather than clever. I just realized he was setting up the movie. And once I got over my indignance over that, all I could think was, Oh boy, more Sopranos!

So it's not so bad after all. Of course, now I can't get Journey out of my head.

Is indignance a word?

Bizarre

This is simply the most bizarre website I have ever seen. It's worksafe, just... odd. Very odd. I don't want to give anything away. Just go and look, then read my comment.

Not pretty wicked

Mr. Wizard is dead.

Sopranos finale

I had a comment here that I'm taking out because even though it was vague, I don't want to spoil the final show in any way. I watched it clean and if you're going to watch it, so should you.



Originally David Chase wanted the opening sequence to be to The Beatles' Why Don't We Do it in the Road, but they wouldn't agree to let him use it. Here's a mashup showing how it would have gone.

There's probably spoilers in the comments there or something, so don't go complaining to me if you read something you didn't want to.

I put my comments on the final episode in the comments, but this article sums up my feelings, though I wouldn't go as far as the author (spoilers galore).



Just because, here's a pic of the llama in front of the llama that almost trampled me on my trip to Hells Canyon. Did I mention I almost got trampled by a llama?

Water

Ponds of water have been found on Mars (unconfirmed). I wonder if they'll find the trees Arthur C. Clarke thought he saw there?

UPDATE: The claim has been retracted.

Spring Cleaning

I've been giving my apartment the ultra clean. Not only am I moving all the furniture and going over every square inch of the floor with a carpet shampooer, I'm also going through every drawer and tossing half my shit. You know, the kind of thing you intend to do when you move but never actually accomplish? Well I'm doing it. Going through everything.


It's interesting what you decide to keep. My Color Day t-shirt from 1996? Hell yes! How else am I going to remember riding around with RCR and the Swedish exchange student in my Jeep, launching eggs at other cars from the giant slingshot we had rigged up across the rollcage? (Color Day was our senior day in highschool) I vaguely recall waking up that morning to JB and some others shooting me in the face with squirt guns.

We had running water balloon battles out the top of convertibles all day. If we hadn't drank so much the night before, we might have made it to the parade in time. But we snuck in the lineup anyway, unfortunately in front of a carload of people armed with supersoakers who drenched us the whole way.

There are a bunch of other ones I kept too, purely for symbolic reasons. They're so old I probably won't use them even to work out. I just want the memories only something tactile can bring you, and t-shirts are easy to keep. I also have two drawers full of my old highschool journals and a few bags of notes I'm afraid to read.

I haven't made it to the closet yet, but I wear the same damn seven shirts every week, so it should be a Salvation Army bonanza. I'm looking forward to unearthing the Starwars Transformers I hid in there a quarter or three ago. I justified the purchase by saying I'd give them to my nephews, but it turns out they don't know or care about Starwars or Transformers. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Not that you need reminding, since I'm so sure you all care as much as I do, but don't forget about the Transformers movie coming out on the 4th of July.


I'm getting rid of almost all of my musical equipment. This is kind of sad, but not really. It's sadder looking at a high end guitar I never learned how to play (an absolutely gorgeous Epiphone acoustic/electric that looks alot like this). It belongs out there in the world bringing joy to someone rather than sitting in a corner collecting dust. I have a backup standard acoustic (Fender Redondo) which is a fitting learner guitar anyway.

I was a little emotional when I handed my original bass over to some nerdy balding guy who didn't know what the fuck he was doing with it. I flashed back to learning the bassline for Blister in the Sun in the hallway 10 minutes before tryouts for my junior high talent show.

Some girl (LS) kept bugging me to teach her how to play something and I kept trying to get her to leave me alone because I was about to perform in front of the judges and the only other song I knew was a simplified Smoke on the Water (wrap your mind around that one). This was my first taste of the mysterious magnetic attraction between musical instruments and females. I would later use this for my nefarious purposes (that means nookie), but at the moment I just wanted to learn the new song, dammit!


Balding nerdy guy snapped me back to reality as he immediately detuned my sweet old bass way way too low and attempted to slap. I cringed. Oh well. You can't blame a beginner. And a hundred bucks for a bashed up bass I got over a decade ago, used, in a ripped up cardboard case ain't bad. I still have my 5 string that almost all of my time was spent on anyway.

By the way, back to 13 land, we made it into the talent show and that was my rock band debut. We sucked, but no one knew any better at that age. I gave bunny ears to LS in a prom picture which she probably still hasn't forgiven me for. I was also the MC for the talent show and I really liked that job because you could stand behind the backdrop and look up the cheerleaders' skirts while they performed (no, we never grow up).

Years later I smoked up with the lead singer's Mom who was also my calculus teacher (while I was currently her highschool student). A good friend (TG) woke up on the floor behind her couch to the sounds of her explaining to her husband that it's ok, these are her calculus students. Good times. These are the sorts of heart warming memories you lose when you get rid of the material object, which is why I kept those ratty old t-shirts that some future lady in my life will toss out without a thought.


I'm giving my drums to my nephews. All I have is a crappy set of bongos and a nice set of congas. I love the congas, but space is at a premium and I rarely play them. I've always really wanted a djembe anyway. I love this because it's always been a joke with me and my siblings, that I would give drums to their kids. I've used it as a bargaining chip, blackmailing them to do something or I'm giving their kids a drumset. It's not as much fun as teaching them to curse or dispensing firearms, but it will do. I still plan on getting an electronic drumkit, but not until I move into a bigger place.



Which brings me to the point of the big clean, other than the general nastiness this place was accumulating. I need a functioning home office and a study area (other than the tv tray in front of the recliner that I have been using) because I'm going back to school. Since I'm moving everything around anyway, I might as well clean and sort through it all. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to study yet, though I have a pretty good idea. I'm not going to talk about it here though. Not until I'm sure.

The "office", if you can call it that (it's really just a nook), will be as wireless as possible. I got a used Brother laser printer that will actually work with my Mac, unlike my now useless Lexmark. I'm contemplating my first legacy phoneline in 5 years due to my constant need to fax stuff. A wireless router is on the way from Amazon. I even got a dry erase board and a filing cabinet.


No, I have no idea what bipolar means, why do you ask? What exactly do you mean by "manic phase"? Ahh!

The luckiest calf in history

link (youtube)

My feelings on Paris Hilton exactly

link

UPDATE: I have to admit, Paris crying for her Mom and saying "it's not right" was kind of hilarious. But in a perverse way I sympathize with her. This is probably the first time in her life anything she did had any consequences.

Time waster extraordinaire

I give you Desktop Tower Defense. This is all part of my secret plot to get ahead by lowering everyone else's productivity. The game got alot more fun when I figured out you could upgrade the towers.

UPDATE: I can get them all but the last flying bosses. My record was almost 6000 something. Anyone else partake?

Sopranos

Discuss the second to last episode in the comments if you like.

More random crap

In honor of the 30th anniversary of the release of A New Hope, HBO showed all 6 StarWars episodes in a row, from crappy first one on up to Jedi. I watched the whole thing. Yeah that means all of them. Go ahead, just shoot me.

The transition from III to IV isn't smooth at all. I plan on foisting these movies on my nephews in the classic order rather than starting them from I. These are the sorts of important decisions uncles have to make.

One thing I have to mention is that the effects in the new ones are amazing, the beginning of Episode III especially. All those primitive x-wings flying around whuppin' ass? That's some good childhood relivin'!

But what bothered me was that I was paying attention to the effects. When Luke was about to be executed off Jabba's sail barge, all I thought was "Oh no! Luke's about to die!" Watching these new ones, all I can think is, "Damn, those effects are cool!" Each has its own value, but a compelling story will always win in my book.

Greatest StarWars quote of all time: "You came in that? You're braver than I thought." Let's just go ahead and avoid the stories this conjures up.


If anything warms the cockles of my black libertarian heart, it's Mr. Rogers pleading for PBS funding in front of the Senate. It almost brings a tear to your eye; Mr. Rogers, the wimpiest pushover you've ever seen, making his case under one of the most stressful conditions possible. He won, by the way (no thanks to Mr. McFeely, who was mysteriously absent). (Note to self: if I ever create a children's program, don't have a character named anything resembling "feely".) (Hey kids, let's play hide and seek in this field of old refrigerators!)


I don't like to talk about the war here, but since I broke the taboo just a few days ago, I'll slip this one in here too.

People seem to be shocked that we're planning on keeping the troops in Iraq past 2009. I don't understand this. Of course they're planning for that. I assume "they" is the Pentagon, which would be derelict in its duties if it didn't plan for all contingencies, especially the one that seems most likely to come about.

If I had to guess, we'll have troops there until we're senior citizens, unless the war really starts to go badly. Not that it's all puppies and pizza now, but Iraq is nothing like the bloodbath Vietnam was. And until it becomes one, the populace at large will remain transfixed by America's Next Top Model or some sports championship. In short, no one cares. Not enough flag draped coffins. Sad, but true.

I just find the notion that we're pulling out any day now naive. I'll go ahead and go on record: we're not pulling out in our lifetimes (assuming nothing fundamental changes, like there's a draft or the casualty rate goes way up). A new democratic president may pull out 20,000 or so to make a gesture, but that's as far as I see it going.



The world record stone skip (50 skips). Wow.


Why does a macho testost-a-movie like Rambo First Blood Part II have a lame 80's song for the credits? It just seems so out of place. Yeah it's from the 80's, but so was Predator, and it has a cool soundtrack. But Predator is, of course, the greatest action movie of all time, so comparing it to any other movie is unfair.


I don't know why this link keeps appearing below.