Gameboy Advance and Apollo 13

Right now History Channel is showing Apollo 13: one of the best movies ever made in my book. Still remember seeing this at the theater on the Fourth of July in 1995.

Watching it now reminds me of some illustration I used to do when I was teaching website design to middle-schoolers. On the first day of each term I started the lessons off with what we can do with computers now, and how far along they've developed in so short a time. Like, in 2002 the World Wide Web was ten years old and a decade earlier there were probably less webpages on the entire net than you could count on both hands... and ten years later we were at like 10 billion.

The thing that really struck them in awe was the Gameboy example. I held out my Gameboy Advance and told them how there was more computing power in this one small handheld unit than there had been used in all the Apollo moon missions combined. And, it's literally true: there wasn't all that much raw computing that went into each mission. Most of it was simple telemetry. Otherwise, NASA's computers were acting like glorified calculators computing trajectories and engine burns.

Sitting on your desktop, right now, is probably the potential for more mathematical calculation than all of mankind had ever done up to about twenty years ago.

This is the kind of thing that crosses my mind when I'm awake at night...

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Katrina eying the Big Easy?

From NOAA a little while ago...Remember last season when New Orleans was threatened a few times, and it kept coming up how that town would get destroyed if a major hurricane hit? Right now they're projecting Katrina might be a Category 4 by the time it makes a second landfall.

Just wanted to post about this 'cuz I'm fascinated by hurricanes, and this is one I'll be watching a lot during the next few days.

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What OTHER reason do I have for blogging this early on Saturday morning?

Yup, it's another piece of brilliance from young master Kyle Williams...

The problem with trusting too much in reason, I believe, is twofold: First, Christianity is not reasonable. Paul himself declared the things of God to be foolish. To attempt to make the doctrines of Christianity reasonable from a human perspective and seek to "prove" things like creationism, Adam and Eve, and Christ's resurrection have more to do with a man-centered ego-trip than piety. Second, the basis for faith is not a vast knowledge of Christianized Western thought, nor talking points from Ray Comfort's ridiculous televangelism program. Yes, as Peter wrote, Christians must always be prepared to give an answer for their faith, but the grand rhetorical arguments of the greatest apologist shouldn't be the foundation for our faith.

And once again, WorldNetDaily is refusing to put Kyle at the top of their front page. Kelly Hollowell's piece is kinda interesting (I think the problem with this one is that she doesn't really focus on any one single subject) and Jerry Falwell's shallow essay is the often-repeated line of late that if you are against Bush you are somehow anti-American. It's a crime of logic that WND gives Falwell's piece a link but makes you dig through the site to find Kyle's stuff... the depth of which puts his elders to shame bigtime. Well anyhoo, ya got a link to him again so go check him out!

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Looks like Chavez took Robertson at his word...

Venezuela is suspending permits for foreign missionaries after Pat Robertson called for that country's president's assassination earlier this week.

So Pat, which was more worth it: building up the kingdom of God or pushing a pro-American agenda?

Who am I kidding? It's pretty obvious which side of things Robertson is really on, unfortunately.

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This one's for Doc: DVD review of Follow Me, Boys!

I'm gonna lay some things to heart with this one. It all started Sunday evening with a movie that until then I’d never really watched before...

One of the greatest heroes of all time, for me personally anyways, was Jim Valvano. About two months before he succumbed to bone cancer in 1993 Valvano spoke at the ESPY Awards and said something beautiful...

"To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special."

To laugh, to think, to cry... every day. I've never forgotten that. And I've tried to live those words every day in the twelve years since Valvano spoke them.

To me, that's also what a perfect movie is all about: it will make you laugh, and think, and cry. A movie that does those three things isn't just worth renting, it's a prime candidate for space on your DVD shelf. Movies like that are hard to watch sometimes: something about them just tugs at your heart and makes a lot of things you've carried around come pouring out. Stuff you didn't even know was there. It hurts to watch it almost... but when the credits roll, you know it was time well spent, because you finished it and came out of it different. Changed. Relieved of something. It makes you thankful for what you've got and for what you've been blessed with before. And you were entertained. As Jimmy V might say: that's a heck of a movie!

Well, Sunday night I saw a heck of a good movie and it's been on my mind a lot this past week. It made me laugh like mad. It made me reflect some things. It made me cry a lot. And in the end, I think I came away a better man for it.

Lisa signed us onto Netflix, which might just be the best thing on the Internet in the history of anything: nine bucks a month gets you DVDs with no late fees and no drive back to the store. It also has a fraggin' humongous collection of movies. It'll even tell ya what's hot in your area (right now Phenomenon, Superman: The Movie and 28 Days Later are in this town’s top ten, go figure) and make some recommendations for you. That includes movies you probably never heard of or think to rent in the first place. So it was that Lisa found Follow Me, Boys! and put it in our queue.

I'd watched a little bit of this movie years ago, not really much at all though. I knew it was about a Boy Scout troop and I knew it was one of Doc's favorite movies (we'll get to who Doc was shortly). The DVD came Friday. Saturday we saw Must Love Dogs at the theater which was oooh-kay but it didn't have many dogs in it. It's a chick flick and Lisa said it could have been better but by that point she'd pulled the same trick on me to go see this with her that she used with The Notebook ("It's a World War II movie you'll love it honey!" when there was like twenty seconds of World War II in the whole thing. But anyhoo...). We watched Garfield on HBO later that evening which I wound up liking a surprisingly awful lot: a good easy summer evening's flick. Still, not cat or dog really "stuck" with me so far as movies went lately. Think I needed something more. Which brings us to the following night...

Follow Me, Boys is a neat lil' film released by Walt Disney Studios in 1966. It's got a great cast but there're four people that particularly stand out for me: first, there's Fred MacMurray. He was the father on TV's My Three Sons for several years and quite a few other movies including others for Disney, and his face was also the model for the look of comic books' Captain Marvel... who also happened to be Elvis Presley's favorite superhero. There's Vera Miles, who's done a lot of stuff including plenty more Disney movies over the years but she's perhaps best known as the sister of a certain lady who decided to take a shower at the Bates Motel in Psycho. Lillian Gish is in this too: she was one of the very earliest stars of the silver screen (she was in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance if that tells you anything) and was widely considered to be an extraordinarily beautiful actress when movies were just coming about as an art form. And then there's Kurt Russell – all of about fourteen years old here in Follow Me, Boys! – a long ways off from playing Snake Plissken or MacReady in The Thing.

This is the perfect movie that encapsulates what it means to be a Boy Scout. I really wish I'd seen this sooner, because of that and because this was a favorite movie of "Doc" Lewis. Who was he? Well, the guy was practically the grandfather I never had. Alan Lewis died this past December, just shy of his 97th birthday after a life that most of us could only imagine living. This is a guy who acted on Broadway, knew George Burns and Audrey Hepburn, was very close friends with Norman Rockwell, visited every state but Alaska, was a world traveler, was a comedian without equal, could dance up a storm, could have spent the rest of his life being an entertaining sensation... and in the end dedicated it to helping young people. He became a teacher, then a school board superintendent for 30 years (the average nowadays is 3 years in one system). Might also be worth noting that he had one of the largest collections of Hummel figurines in the world: the guy was an authority on them bigtime.

I knew Doc from the Boy Scouts, in which he was an active participant for most of his life. He got the nickname "Doc" 'cuz he worked the health lodge at summer camp, patching up everything from splinters to broken fingers and then some. Geez, what couldn't this guy do related to Scouting? Doc lent his knowledge of theatrical special-effects to the Boy Scouts, especially its service brotherhood the Order of the Arrow: imagine Scouts in Indiana regalia swimming across a darkened lake in the middle of the night... while carrying torches. Or weird smoke coming out of nowhere. That was Doc's little handiwork. He was also the master of the campfire ghost story: the stuff he would tell you in the flickering light was either a true story that would send chills up your spine, or the setup for some hilarious punchline that would have you howling with laughter.

There was so much to Doc's life that if I were to sit here writing about it all, I would probably be working nonstop for the next week and a half. The guy was literally bigger than life, and almost impossible to believe if you'd never met him. And I wanted to write something to this blog then about it but his passing... really impacted me hard. I didn't know how hard until I saw this movie. Ya see, Fred MacMurray's character in this movie, Lem Siddons... well, that's who Doc was.

When the movie opens, Lem Siddons is part of a traveling band that's touring around in a bus. Lem is a good musician, but he's got other plans for his life: he wants to settle down somewhere and become a lawyer. So when the band stops in the little town of Hickory, Lem decides that this is as good a place as any to get started. He finds work doing stock in a local general store and starts cracking open books on law, studying to someday pass the bar exam. Eager to fit in with his new surroundings, Lem attends a public hearing one night about the town's young boys: it's felt that some kind of activity should be provided for them to be involved with. It's brought up that Hickory could use a Boy Scout troop, and Lem volunteers to help organize and lead it. It's just going to be for a short time, he thinks, and then he'll get back to studying so he can move on to become a lawyer.

That's the setup for this movie. Anymore and I would be treading too close to giving away a lot of delightful twists and turns that happen to Lem and his boys for the next twenty-some years beginning with 1933. We see Lem take on the first boys of the newly-inaugurated Troop 1. We see him reach out to Whitey (Kurt Russell), a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who feels like an outsider to the rest of the town. We watch and laugh as Lem wins the heart of Vida (Vera Miles), and share their heartbreak as she shares some terrible news with him. We watch these characters grow up over the years, dealing with circumstances and coming into their own, trying to make the best of what life is giving them...

...and ultimately that's what the heartmeat story of Follow Me, Boys! is about: Lem's plan for his life and what happens to it after he makes this initially insignificant choice of helping out with the town’s boys. In some people's estimation, what happens to Lem is a failure. But that's just going by the world's standards. For Lem, it couldn't have been any happier than what comes of his decision to volunteer, and the commitment he makes to the town and its boys. In the end, we see that the town has become just as committed to him.

Maybe that's why after we finished watching Follow Me, Boys! that I started crying like nobody's business. This movie made me think about my friend Doc, and the choices that he made in the course of his life. He could have been a Broadway legend, or a big screen sensation. He chose to give that up and became something else. He became an inspiration for there's no telling how many thousands of young men over the course of his life. I know that there would have been a lot missing from my own life had Doc Lewis not been involved with it in so many ways.

That’s why Doc was one of the two people I dedicated Forcery to. And I might dedicate another movie to him someday, if it has a bigger reach than this first one did: though Doc gave up acting for something else, I can still honor his memory this way by putting him in a movie in even this little way.

Follow Me, Boys! made me cry. It made me think. But it also made me laugh so hard that it literally hurt! Lem’s boys do some pretty outrageous things over the years, and I'm thinking of two things in particular: when the very first troop attempts to build a meeting hall on their own. And what happens to the troop in 1944 when they wind up in the middle of an army wargame. Again, I'm not going to spoil it here but trust me: it's a hoot! The scene where Vida shows up at the Scouts' camp with some home-baked goodies... well, again I shouldn't say too much here, but it's a pretty funny lil' bout of spite that goes on, that's for sure! Given the sheer number of laughs, I would chalk Follow Me, Boys! up as an overall comedy, instead of an outright drama. Yeah it'll tug at your heart but it'll play with your funnybone too!

This is a movie about another time: when nobody thought twice about trusting young boys to the company of one man (thanks for nothing, Michael Jackson) and everybody in town knew everyone else. When life for a young person was about other things than videogames and the Internet. This was a time when small bands still roamed the countryside to play for whatever audience the next town could give them. Reflecting on things after seeing Follow Me, Boys!, I think it's safe to say that there was a lot more freedom back then, and we only think we're still that free now. Except we either don't use it, or we really don't have it anymore. This movie is about the way America used to be. Lord willing, it's about a way America could be again.

The DVD is packed with extras, including a "looking back" documentary featuring many of the grown-up child actors that made up the Boy Scouts. There's also a neat gallery showing the movie posters and lobby cards from when it was originally released to theaters. If I've any complaints about the DVD though, it's that the movie seems all too obviously shot in a widescreen format and on this release Disney made it full-screen pan-and-scan. Maybe someday – most likely post-Eisner era – Follow Me, Boys! will get a much more faithful transfer. It also shows no signs of being digitally enhanced or cleaned up (i.e. there are scratches visible in more than a few places). But these are really pretty minor, and do little to distract from the quality of the movie.

So if you're in the mood for a little something different to watch and you're up for some classic vintage Disney with timeless qualities coming to us from yesteryear, and just want a darned good movie all the way around, give Follow Me, Boys! a shot. If for nothing else than because this is one of the first times that we all get to see Kurt Russell before he started making movies about Elvis, escaping from New York and fighting extraterrestrial bodysnatchers.

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Is Xbox game a vision of our Shattered Union?

This one got on my short list of upcoming video games to look forward to a few days ago when I first heard about it: Shattered Union from PopTop Software, arriving on the Xbox (and Playstation 2 and PC) on October 4th.It's a turn-based strategy game set in the year 2014, following the break-up of the once-great United States of America. This write-up from Business Week does a better job of explaining it:

So here's the deal. In the not too distant future the U.S. is the victim of a ridiculous amount of terrorist attacks, the most devastating being the nuke that vaporizes Washington D.C. One minute the President is celebrating his election victory and the next he, his cabinet, and the White House are vaporized. With no commander in chief/Congress, which is essentially the same as going away for the weekend and hiring a bunch of teenagers to watch your house, the country becomes totally unglued. Suddenly several states form their own unions and break off from their neighbors, becoming Greater California, New Republic of Texas, the Yankee Union (though I'm almost positive that New York and Boston will still argue over baseball), Arcadia (which is comprised of Pacific Northwest), Dixieland (I don't want to even imagine which states make that up), and finally the Heartland. Also, to make matters worse, a bunch of foreigners who call themselves the European Expeditionary Force thinks they know what America needs, but they're just sticking their noses where they don't belong. Yup, it's a real mess, as in worse than my closet.

There's some really good screenshots and Quicktime movies over at GameSpy that set the tone for what this game is set to offer. It looks pretty disturbing, to be honest: who's to say we aren't headed for a scenario like this in the not-too-distant future? Our political system is already corrupted beyond redemption, several states (especially those on the border with Mexico) are getting fed-up with Washington's laziness in handling the illegal migrant problem, and all it would take is one well-placed terrorist act to wipe out everything necessary for centralized rule and then the whole thing would fall apart in a... well, a shattered union. I'm gonna be keeping my eye on this one, it might be well worth investing in.

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Brock Peters passes away

Maybe you didn't know the name, but you certainly remember his face... and especially his voice: Brock Peters has passed away at the age of 78.

He was the actor who played Tom Robinson in the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird (with Gregory Peck playing defense attorney Atticus Finch). That's gonna be the role he'll be remembered for most, but he did tons of other things too. Years after Mockingbird he played Admiral Cartwright in two Star Trek movies, the more recent being Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in 1991. For some reason that's the role I remember him in best: Cartwright's voice rising in protest to the other Starfleet officers, telling them all that the Klingons couldn't be trusted. 'Twas a great performance. Peters also was a voice actor on several cartoons.

But one other role that most people may not know Peters had: he was Darth Vader. When National Public Radio did their audio dramas of A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and then finally Return of the Jedi, it was Brock Peters who did the voice of the Dark Lord of the Sith. I've got the Jedi one in audiocassette form when it came out some years ago and it must be said that Peters did an amazing job giving us a Vader on the verge of redemption.

Thought I'd make a note of that here on the blog: a great actor has gone from us, and one well worth remembering.

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How gullible are you?

Take the Gullibility Factor Test and find out. I only missed one question, rating me as a "Free thinker" in the top 5% among people. Admittedly, a few of the answers I gave were just good guesses (like the gas hydrates one, which I'd never heard of before) but otherwise I'm pleased to hear that if this were The Matrix "you would have taken the red pill, completed the combat training, and started fighting (and beating) agents from day one." :-)

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Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1629!

A group of historians in Great Britain spent a year living the life of Welsh farmers from the 1620s. They did the same farmwork, wore the same kind of clothing, ate the same food, and practiced the same hygiene as a typical family in Wales would have during the time of the Stuarts. They made a few interesting discoveries along the way that could be applied to our life today. Well worth a read.

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Pat Robertson is a Christian?

On his 700 Club teevee show today he called for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez by the United States government.

No further comment.

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New Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire trailer hits the 'net!!!!!

The Beauxbatons carriage. Mad-Eye. Fleur. The Yule Ball. Gillyweed. Ron in a tux. The World Cup attack. Cho. Dragons. Krum. The Goblet of Fire. Fred and George. Durmstrung students. The maze. Dumbledore. Mer-people. Tombstones. Cedric. Harry Potter.

Starting with Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling takes everything you know about children's books out into the street and shoots it in the head. Looks like the movies are going to keep pace and by the time we get the one for Half-Blood Prince... geez that's going to be one painful piece of cinema.

It's gonna be a long wait 'til November but the Leaky Cauldron has the new international trailer (with French subtitles) that oughtta drop jaws all over the place.

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Happy Birthday to Ray Bradbury!

The author of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes and a bazillion other good stories hits 85 today and alongside Isaac Asimov probably ranks as the worst ecological disaster of the past hundred years: ever think about how many trees died for the wood pulp to make paper for all this guy's books?!

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The News & Record printed my letter to the editor...

You can read it here on the News & Record's website. Since it's something about their blogs, it seems only right to mention it on my own :-) It's evoked quite a lively debate too, from the looks of it. I just posted a response of my own, something that was a little longer than the paper's policy on editorial letters would allow. Ahhh the wonders of electronic publishing...

Anyway, I'm proud that they saw it fit for publication. And if anyone is finding their way over here from it, let me say welcome to ya!!

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Gonzo send-off for the master of the artform

It could only have happened at a funeral for Hunter S. Thompson...
About 350 friends of the late writer - including Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in the movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - descended on Thompson's ranch at Woody Creek, Colorado to blast the gonzo journalist's cremated remains into the air in a fireworks display.

Here's the monument that's been raised to Thompson's memory: it's only like two feet taller than the Washington Monument (which is probably how Thompson would have wanted it) and the moment when Thompson's mortal remains were supposedly dispersed into the stratosphere...

Hunter S. Thompson has always held a lot of fascination for me, ever since I first read about him back in '89 (it was a Time magazine story that had that photo of Thompson shooting a typewriter with a shotgun out in the snow). Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of my all-time favorite books (and the movie just keeps getting better with each new viewing). Something about the guy's style, how it was like a running commentary of whatever flashed across his synapses (which were more often than not pretty well "chemically enhanced"). I've tried - and failed, miserably - to honor his style at times, but I just can't nail it. Maybe someday. That's one of my missions in life as a writer: to develop my own voice as a gonzo journalist, not in imitation but inspired somewhat by Thompson... minus the drugs 'course :-P

Anyway, I thought it would be pretty fitting to honor his memory (even though others may not agree with me doing so) with a journalistic nod of my own. Happy trails "Raoul Duke", wherever you are...

You can read more about Thompson's funeral here.

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Can I play it on my Atari 2600?

If you've ever wanted to play id Software's original Doom game on your iPod or your digital camera or your calculator or your Kenmore microwave oven (am not sure about that last one though) go to ItPlaysDoom.com and find a port so you can get your Doom fix anywhere and everywhere.

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AMC's month-long James Bond run is good watchin'

AMC channel has been running them in sequential order every weeknight this month and right now they're showing The Man With The Golden Gun (with Christopher Lee as Scaramanga, who also predates Krusty as the the original "man with the superfluous third nipple"), so this has been the perfect time to watch all those James Bond movies that I've never caught before. I'll sadly admit that most 007 flicks have always been just off my radar range (the last one I saw was GoldenEye and I thought it was a rollickin' hella good ride!) but I think I'm finally starting to "get" the chemistry that's made this such a classic movie series. Friday night they ran The Spy Who Loved Me, which I'd also never seen before (as was the case with The Man With The Golden Gun the night before that) and tomorrow night they're playing Moonraker, the very first Bond movie I ever saw (when ABC ran it one Sunday night back in '84). I'm hard-pressed to tell you which Bond is my favorite though: I'm a big fan of Pierce Brosnan in the role, and Roger Moore is always gonna have a special place 'cuz he's the one I really "grew up" with and I've never seen the Timothy Dalton ones, but Sean Connery's Bond - the one that many argue was the greatest - is starting to really grow on me. As for favorite villain hmmm... well gotta love Goldfinger, and Scaramanga, and Blofeld of course (whatever did happen to SPECTER anyway?) but I think we need to see a return of Jaws: Richard Kiel is still looking pretty buff, c'mon put the cobalt teeth back in him and turn him loose! Anyway, most of these movies seem very dated by today's standards, but something about them still holds up pretty well. Who knows, maybe someday I'll have to make room on my shelf for a bunch of Bond DVDs :-)

EDIT: Richard Kiel is back as Jaws!! He reprises the role in the videogame 007 Everything or Nothing. Also starring in the game are Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, John Cleese as Q, Judi Dench as M (LOVED her in GoldenEye) and Willem Dafoe as the usual Bond supervillain. It's available on Xbox so I may have to check this out! :-)

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Favorite post of the week

Of all the posts I made this past week, this one has paws-down gotta be my favorite :-) Guess I'm a sucker for little dogs or something...

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