Chaplain Gentry - a really good fella through and through - notes on his blog that Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker are conspiring together on a new book... which is enough to give you pause if you know anything about either of these guys. Peretti is still best known for his book This Present Darkness, first published in 1986... can't believe it's been that long. Dekker rose to fame in the past couple of years with his "Circle Trilogy", of which I've only tried reading the first book Black and that went WAY over my head: think The Matrix meets The Chronicle of Narnia... but I'm gonna pick it up again soon. These two masters of the supernatural thriller are coming out with House later this spring. The plot of it sounds like, I told Geoff, "that movie Saw as conceived by Ned Flanders". It seems pretty interesting, and I have enough faith in both these writers that I may have to pick up a copy when it comes out.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Giving the blog a new look
It being a new year, I'm feeling like a lot of changes are in order, including this blog. I've made a few cosmetic alterations already (the font is not so "white" which I didn't notice 'til yesterday could have stood to be more easily read), including the sidebar: a little leaner and things juggled around somewhat. This blog is very much like myself: a continual work in progress, and its only natural that how it looks will reflect that. I'll be changing a few other things in the days to come, including new graphics etc.
Albert Hoffman turns 100 tomorrow
In 1938 he was a chemist at a Swiss pharmaceutical firm, where he began experimenting with the ergot fungus. His work led to the discovery of several useful drugs, but none of those would go on to have the impact as did the curious compound that was #25, which he called "lysergic acid diethylamide". Although the chemical had no apparent medicinal use, it would become very well noted for its consciousness-altering effects.
Dr. Albert Hoffman, the father of LSD, celebrates his 100th birthday tomorrow. In honor of all the wonderful good that LSD has given humanity, I propose that sometime tomororow we all listen to William Shatner's rendition of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".
Monday, January 09, 2006
Want to WATCH Monday Night Live?
So... want to finally see what this Monday Night Live thing is that I've been raving about for awhile now is all about? Media mogul and maverick mastermind Richard Moore has pulled off a technological coup and started streaming Star 39's television feed over the 'net, and it looks pretty darned good! Moore's Political Soup runs every Wednesday at 6 p.m. EST and if you want to check out Monday Night Live it airs tonight (and every Monday night) at 9 p.m. EST.Click here to start watching some of the most offbeat television anywhere!
(you might need to use Internet Explorer and the latest version of Windows Media Player)
Marathon Man
Chad Austin - who played George Lucas in our movie Forcery - ran the entire 26.2 miles of the Walt Disney World Marathon, his first-ever complete marathon. And he beat his expected time by a good bit too! Go to the link to read his account of what it was like. And congrats Chad!!
Jerry Falwell reveals worldly lust in Alito remarks
Rev. Jerry Falwell shows his true colors at long last. The power that he's been salivating for all these years is almost "his" and he can barely restrain himself from it. Reuters is reporting that Falwell made some pretty revelatory comments today regarding the Judge Samuel Alito hearings...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Christian conservative leader Rev. Jerry Falwell said on Sunday that confirming Federal Appeals Court judge Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court would be the biggest victory for his constituency in three decades.Maybe Falwell is using a different Bible than mine, but nowhere in my version can I find it that Christ commanded us to wield our might for the sole sake of changing earthly government."What we've worked on for 30 years, to mobilize people of faith and value in this country, what we've done through these years is coming to culmination right now," Falwell said at a rally on the eve of Alito's confirmation hearing.
"Now we're looking at what we really started on 30 years ago, reconstruction of a court system gone awry," Falwell said at a rally at a Baptist church in Philadelphia and broadcast on Christian radio and television.
"There could be a reconstruction of the U.S. Supreme Court in our immediate lifetime," said Falwell.
Falwell and others, including Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, urged supporters to press senators to confirm Alito, who is set to begin hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday.
"Go to the telephone, write your letter, get to your U.S. senators. Let's confirm this man, Judge Alito, to the U.S. Supreme Court," Falwell said. "And let's make one more step toward bringing America back to one nation under God."
Let me explain to you how Christians like Jerry Falwell see things. In their minds, the individual Christian does not matter. One Christian cannot make a difference in this world. The solitary brother or sister in Christ has merit if and only if that Christian submits fully to "the cause", of which people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and James Dobson happen to dominate the agenda as its "leaders". Listen to how they word things: "What we've worked for...", "what we've done...", "Now we're looking at what we really started...", "...in our immediate lifetime", "(Let us) confirm this man..." Falwell and his kind have only gotten as far as they have because they've appealed to their fellow Christians to join together in collective might, in a fashion that runs fully counter to what Christ wanted of His church. The church is supposed to be a witness to this world for God. It's focus is meant to be on serving others, not serving itself. It is not supposed to gain control over this world for God. It's been said that "one plus God is a majority", but Falwell and his ilk dare tell us that "one plus God is not enough".
I prefer how Stanley Hauerwas put it: "Let me be as clear as I can be, the God of 'God and country' is not the God of Jesus Christ." And he's right. And people like Jerry Falwell believe that God created government which rules over men, instead of the Founding Fathers's view that God frees men, who then establish government. And herein rests the true motive of people like Jerry Falwell: they want temporal power over other people for themselves. They want to control government and be as high priests of it, because they have yielded to the oldest temptation: that they may become like God themselves. The Falwells and Robertsons and Dobsons of this world are no different than the Nazis who once plundered Europe for religious artifacts: they want to lay hands on a power created by God for their own selfish purpose.
Now this may surprise you, but I wouldn't mind seeing Alito confirmed. He's one of the very few people nominated by President Bush that I think warrants serious consideration. I'm very appreciative of the fact that he seems to be strongly pro-life, and that's a stance that I can show you that I've been vehemently supportive of for more than ten years now...
...but, the kind of support that Falwell and Dobson and others are bringing to the table is not borne out of pure Christ-like for others. It is instead driven by a desire to have dominion over others, and in the end this desire can only corrupt whatever apparent good they claim in achieving "victory", until it inevitably self-destructs.
Rediscovering Thoreau
The last time I read Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, we were about two months away from going to war with Saddam Hussein for the first go-round. I was a junior in high school and the version we read was somewhat redacted from Thoreau's complete essay, but it got me thinking about a lot of things pertaining to what freedom really is and how we choose to use it. When I started my published writing career several months later with a series of letters to the editor of this area's biggest newspaper, it was partly because of Civil Disobedience that I was led to do so.
But until this past week I'd never read the entire essay in full. And then I came across a really good quote by Thoreau (from his A Plea for Captain John Brown):
"Many, no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by habit, and they cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are. Accordingly they pronounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves."In other words: Do what you believe is right and screw what anyone else has to say about it, because they secretly hate and despise you... for you possess strength that they do not.
Well, that quote got me curious about Thoreau for the first time in fifteen years, and I went looking for more of his work. And that's how I came across a really well-annotated edition of Civil Disobedience.
Now I wish I'd spent a lot more time in the intervening years studying Thoreau, and the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and other writers of the Transcendentalism movement. That seems to be the school of thought that best describes my own philosophical leanings, although I also believe that there is one ultimate truth as established by God that we are called to understand... but that understanding only comes, as the Transcendentalists believed, through personal introspection and reflection. To them, understanding was an act of the individual, and not the corporate. Indeed, very little could come about from the will of incorporated might. And considering how big a mess we are in today because of collectivized thinking, Transcendental thought is looking awfully refreshing.
And it's so funny to me: Just about everything that I've been trying to express with my writing for more than a decade, everything that I've been led to understand through experience and intuitiveness that I've tried to share in one form or another... and there was Thoreau right there, having already said it more than a hundred years before I was born.
The past few days have had me experiencing a personal "renaissance" of thought. Once again - maybe really for the first time and yes I do mean to say that - I'm discovering what it is I believe in regarding personal responsibility, individual liberty, and the relationship between people and government. All these years of college and various jobs and different situations and times of personal and spiritual growth, and the kind of person they've made me to be (hopefully a good one)... reading some of this stuff this past week has been like an affirmation for me. But I also cannot help but believe that I've a long way to go still with my understanding of things: people like Thoreau and Emerson, they were the real masters.
So I've read through Civil Disobedience twice now, and have been thoroughly struck at how so much of it applies to where we're at today. Thoreau's style isn't quite as fluid as that which modern readers are used to - he writes in distinct units of thought - but it's still very readable... maybe moreso than most op-ed pieces that get published nowadays. This man wastes no time cutting to the heartmeat of the matter: this is an essay about ideas, not ideologies.
And what powerful ideas they are...
"...This government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way."Dear Lord, these are the kinds of ideas that would start a second American revolution, if enough people were allowed to think about them!!"Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward."
"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys , and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?"
"All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote."
"I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of this wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reasons to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought."
"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?"
"Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight."
"When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of the question, and their regard for the public tranquillity, the long and the short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and they dread the consequences to their property and families of disobedience to it. For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. It will not be worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again."
"...The state never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior with or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men."
"Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."
I mean, can anyone be found in our federal government - or even our local ones - who believes like Thoreau did? This one essay totally destroys any validity that either the Democrats or Republicans, or the so-called "conservatives and liberals" have worked so long to establish for themselves. It's especially a slap in the face to all the "small government" Republicans who've come to Washington since the '94 election, who have only let government grow that much more overbearing and intrusive.
Can you envision an America where the tenets of Civil Disobedience are adhered to? No excessive taxation. No bungling in foreign lands. No PATRIOT Act. No more major political parties. No more "leaders" installed by special interests. From then on, it would be each man (and woman) and his or her conscience to guide this land. We would give all the damnable opportunists who have taken our money, our liberty, and our children's futures a good swift kick in the butt... and keep kicking them while they're down. Civil Disobedience reads like a manifesto for the common man to stand against the entrenched elites that would have him robbed of his individuality.
Dear God, why can't more people in our own time write the way Thoreau did? Why can't we take his ideas to heart and strive to apply them to ourselves and our government? Why, it would completely overturn more than a hundred years of bloated government. There would finally, at last, be a government of, by, and for the people... but government that is shown the line and told "to this point and no further".
Ever have one of those moments when you feel like everything crystallizes and you can finally see something you can't fully describe in words, but it irrevocably alters you? That's what it's been like for me the past half-week or so since discovering this, and some other stuff. And I like to think that it's going to have an effect on my writings from here on out, either here or elsewhere. If nothing else, I like to think that my personal meditation on Civil Disobedience will encourage others to do likewise, and grow from it.
And I hope and pray that I live to see the day when the ideas that Thoreau was expressing here - about what it means to be real men and women - take their rightful place in dominance over the hearts and minds of this country's people.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
Did Dumbledore die?
Of all that transpired in the fictional realm during 2005, none shattered the senses more than what unfolded in the pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Millions of fans bought the penultimate chapter of the Harry Potter saga... only to reel in horror as J.K. Rowling took everything to be expected of a children's book, dragged it out into the street and shot it in the head. And out of everything that went so terribly wrong in this sixth book of the series, nothing was more heartbreaking than what happened at the end of Chapter 27, during the Death Eaters's assault on Hogwarts: Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of the school and mentor to Harry Potter - and one of the most beloved characters of recent literature - murdered with the Avada Kedavra curse... by none other than Professor Severus Snape!Call it the "Who Shot J.R.?" of the new millennium: since the release of Half-Blood Prince, the events that took place in its final chapters have become some of the most hotly debated subjects on the Internet. Most especially the question of what exactly did take place atop the tower that tragic evening, when Professor Dumbledore was mercilessly killed by the very person he had sworn could be trusted...
...Or was he?
Like a forensic pathologist, David Haber has meticulously sifted through the pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, taking notes and comparing this book to what we know from the previous chapters. And he's come up with a theory that's pretty interesting to anyone who's a Harry Potter fan. At Dumbledore Is Not Dead.com, Haber lays out a lot of evidence suggesting that there was much more going on in the final pages of the book than what was readily presented before us. His case is compelling: that Albus Dumbledore did not die, as the wizarding world believes he did. Read what David has put together but be warned that like any good scholar, he has been quite thorough with his documentation.
(Personally, I think Dumbledore is dead, but I was impressed enough with David's work here that I really felt led to make a mention of it here :-)
Hostel territory
There's something awfully off-kilter in a country where (supposedly) the use of torture is condemned... but Hostel becomes the top-grossing movie at the box office on the first weekend of the new year.
King Kong in Brevity
The Brevity comic strip is a new one to me, but this strip they ran on December 14th is so funny that I might have to check it out from now on...
NASA contract with Russians to use Soyuz not a good sign
CNN is reporting that NASA has signed a deal with the Russian government to use its Soyuz spacecraft to bring relief crewmembers and cargo to the International Space Station. It'll cost $21.8 million to send a single passenger one-way to or from the ISS.
I know our own Space Shuttle program is grounded for the time being and that something needs to be done in order to transport personnel and equipment to the station, but this isn't a very good indicator of the current status for either NASA or the United States. There's been remarkably little innovation in the way of manned space flight to come out of this country in the past two decades: the proposed Crew Exploration Vehicle isn't even a clearly defined concept at this point, now a few years before the Space Shuttle is due to be retired. So in a situation strikingly parallel with how the Romans eventually came to rely on foreign mercenaries, we are having to hire other countries and the technology that has traditionally been regarded as inferior to our own in order to keep up our end of things. I'm not "dissing" the Soyuz spacecraft - it has a pretty good history of being a reliable workhorse - but this is a vehicle that's forty years old that we are now putting the brunt of our space effort onto.
Guess what I'm trying to figure out is: Where has our technological creativity gone to?
Saturday, January 07, 2006
The only thing about "Bareback Mountin' " I intend to post
Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) is slamming NBC's Gene Shalit because Shalit has (gasp!) said he doesn't think that the new film Brokeback Mountain is all that good.
You know: "the gay cowboy movie". Now, I have no intention of seeing Brokeback Mountain - ever - but I know some people who have. People I happen to trust quite a bit. And as one of them put it, if Brokeback Mountain had been about anything but the homosexual relationship between two cowboys, it would not have been that big a deal. But that one thing has become the point about which the entire movie is now being labelled as "groundbreaking" and "revolutionary". And now, as evidenced by GLAAD's response to Gene Shalit, if a person does not buy into that and furthermore disagrees that Brokeback Mountain is a good movie, this somehow equates that person with being prejudiced against homosexuals.
Admittedly, I happen to believe that there's a lot of things very wrong with homosexuality. For a lot of reasons too complex to adequately detail in the time I'm wanting to give to this. To me it all boils down to whether the concept of love is something that can be defined by physical expression at all. Oh yes there's definitely acts of love we express to others, like hugging and kissing, and things beyond that... but can love itself be framed within the context of sensual pleasure for sake of that pleasure and still be considered to be true love? The act of deepest physical love is one where both participants simultaneously yield to and receive from one another... but how can there possibly be something beyond mere carnality when that act is either only one of giving or receiving?
Like I said, my take on this is really, really complex. And I'm not the kind of Christian who is going to condemn to Hell anyone that I happen to meet who's doing this: Lord knows I've done enough things in my life - none of which even approached this kind of behavior, by the way - that would readily condemn myself. But neither should people like those at GLAAD condemn someone for the weak infraction of not believing that Brokeback Mountain is a very good movie. If someone is willing to say that this film is wrong, that's their right. If another is willing to be so bold as to point out that the biggest reason this movie is being called a success in some quarters is that it relies too heavily on the concept of gay love between cowboys, then that's my right to do that too.
What it all comes down to is this: is Brokeback Mountain that strong a movie to stand on its own without relying on the crutch of a novel gimmick? Just going by what I've seen so far, there doesn't seem to be that much faith in the film without regarding that.
I don't really care to spend seven bucks watching gay cowboys "go at it"... so what else is there in this movie that would make it worth my money?
Friday, January 06, 2006
No encore, please!
The world's longest-running concert is underway in Halberstadt, Germany, as the second chord has sounded in a performance of John Cage's "organ2/ASLSP".
The performance is not scheduled to finish until the year 2639!
From the article:
Second chord sounds in world's longest lasting concertHey it could be worse: project organizers could have chosen to perform Iron Butterfly's "In A Gadda Da Vida" instead!
Thu Jan 5, 11:12 AM ETHALBERSTADT, Germany (AFP) - A new chord was scheduled to sound in the world's slowest and longest lasting concert that is taking a total 639 years to perform.
The abandoned Buchardi church in Halberstadt, eastern Germany, is the venue for a mind-boggling 639-year-long performance of a piece of music by US experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992).
Entitled "organ2/ASLSP" (or "As SLow aS Possible"), the performance began on September 5, 2001 and is scheduled to last until 2639.
The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord -- G-sharp, B and G-sharp -- not sounding until February 2, 2003.
Then in July 2004, two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded and are scheduled to be released later this year on May 5.
But at 5:00 pm (1600 GMT) on Thursday, the first chord was due to progress to a second -- comprising A, C and F-sharp -- and is to be held down over the next few years by weights on an organ being built especially for the project.
Cage originally conceived "ASLSP" in 1985 as a 20-minute work for piano, subsequently transcribing it for organ in 1987.
But organisers of the John Cage Organ Project decided to take the composer at his word and stretch out the performance for 639 years, using Cage's transcription for organ.
The enormous running time was chosen to commemorate the creation of Halberstadt's historic Blockwerk organ in 1361 -- 639 years before the current project started...
(By the way, composer John Cage did a lot of weird stuff, the music-historian who is my wife has just informed me. His "4'33" was especially laughed about in college, she said: a three-movement piece comprised of four and a half minutes... of dead silence!)
Best frozen pizza I've ever eaten
My Mom has been getting a lot of good food from Schwan's. She finds what she'd like to order from the Schwan's catalog, tells the deliveryman what she wants and gets her new order when he comes back around two weeks later. Lisa and I have been "ordering" through her and getting incredibly delicious stuff like chicken alfredo, potato skins, shrimp scampi, and some darned great ice ceam. Well last night I had their regular-sized pepperoni pizza (I think it's item #901) and I gotta tell ya: this is bar-none the best frozen pizza I've ever tasted in my entire life. Everything about it, from the crust (lightly dusted with cornmeal) to the sauce - maybe the best sauce I've had on a pizza anywhere - is just darned perfect. It puts most restaurant pizzas that I've experienced to shame. If nothing else it must be said that it does not taste like it's a frozen product at all. Schwan's also sells the same pizza in one-person servings, in boxes of six. Can't recommend this highly enough. If you appreciate a good pizza and wanna try real gourmet eating for a very good price, give Schwan's a try.
The Ice Storm... ten years later
This week marks the ten-year anniversary of the 1996 blizzard/ice storm that paralyzed much of the East Coast. Can't believe it's been that long. In this area it was really two storms: one that covered the place in ice and snow and then a second one hit a few days later with much more ice. There wasn't nearly as much precipitation as there'd been in the Storm of the Century three years earlier (I doubt anything I'll ever live to see will be comparable to that) but it still ended up being a major nuisance for everyone affected by it.
The thing I remember most about the storm was that it forced me to move into my first apartment much sooner than I'd expected. I was taking a winter-term history class at Elon and my new roomie was off in London for the entire month: nobody was in the apartment and the last roommate had owned most of the furniture, so the place was really bare. Well, during the first storm I wound up staying one night in my old dorm room, made the very careful drive back home the next afternoon and heard that a second storm was on its way. I figured the logical thing to do was to hole up in the apartment a lot sooner than anticipated, so I'd be close to campus if we had class the next day. So I packed up a sleeping bag, a lamp, some books, and the TV/VCR combo I'd gotten for Christmas - and a few other essentials - into the car and headed for my new digs. I got the car unpacked and headed out to find food and some entertainment to hold me over in case I got iced-in with nowhere to go. I wound up getting a Battletech novel and a Doctor Who videotape ("The Five Doctors" episode) from the Burlington mall and then one of those 2-pizza deals from Little Caesar's (and some breadsticks 'course), and some two-liter Cokes. The accomodations that night - my first ever in my own apartment - were Spartan to say the least: without my own bed for the time being I had to sleep on the couch. But as I ate my pizza and watched the video, with the ice that ended up trapping me indoors for the next two days falling outside... I felt so much triumphant pleasure. Like a king over my own domain. It didn't matter that I barely had anything at all in the apartment: that it was my very own place to live in for the first time in my life was all that mattered to me. And I was loving it! It was so much fun in fact that a few years later when I moved into my next apartment, I just had to replicate the ritual of eating pizza while watching that same Doctor Who tape on my first night in the place.
Lotta good memories that were had in that apartment, along with a few crazy ones and some that... well, no one would ever believe me if I wrote about it here. But they all started with the ice storm ten years ago this week. And I just felt led to share my own memories about it, to add to those of anyone else who probably remembers the storm also.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
I started a new blog
There's not much to look at so far... I mean, really not much at all... but I started up a new blog a few days ago. I had the idea this past weekend to create an online journal covering developments along the county line between Guilford and Rockingham counties here in North Carolina. The area between Greensboro and Reidsville has started to build up in recent years: lots of new homes and businesses coming to what has for the most part been one of the most rural places you can imagine. The first idea that popped into mind about what to call it was "The Guil-Rock Guardian", but that sounded too dry: even though this is meant to be a serious blog I wanted a more colorful moniker, like those of The Neely Chronicle and The Rhinoceros Times. So I thought about it for the better part of thirty seconds...
...and came up with The Guil-Rock Gremlin. Which may turn out to be quite appropos if/when I wind up having to use it to throw a monkey-wrench into the works for some reason. But for now it's merely there to document what's going on in the "Greensboro/Reidsville metropolitan area". I'm gonna work on graphics for it this weekend (trying hard not to use images from Steven Spielberg's Gremlins movies). So if you're living around the county line between Greensboro and Reidsville (I'm gonna try my best to cover news and issues in both counties) give The Guil-Rock Gremlin a looksee!
Race the Knight: Mario Kart DS with Wi-Fi is kewl!
Previously I mentioned here that Lisa got me a Nintendo DS for Christmas and that I've been really impressed with Nintendogs. We got a few other games here too: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (which has one of the hardest beginnings I've ever played in a videogame), Super Mario 64 for the DS (still getting used to the crazy camera controls), Pac'nRoll (Lisa's a nut for anything having to do with Pac-Man), and on New Years Eve I ran out and got another game that I'd heard nothing but good about: Mario Kart DS.
First of all, this is a great game in and of itself, even in single-player mode. Longtime fans of the Mario Kart series (going all the way back to the Super Nintendo) will find that this has all the action and humor you'd come to expect from the line. But as any of us who've played a Mario Kart game knows, the real fun is when you play with friends and compete in the race while throwing Koopa shells and Bob-ombs at each other (the one I really hate getting hit with is the lightning bolt that momentarily shrinks you): No telling how many times Lisa and I have thrashed each other playing Mario Kart Double-Dash on the Gamecube. Ideally you and your friends will each have a Nintendo DS and at least one Mario Kart DS cartridge (the game uses the DS's wireless capability to let multiple systems run off one cartridge). But what if you don't know of anyone else with a DS, or what if you do and that friend is located on the other side of the state... or even in another country?
Enter Nintendo's new Wi-Fi Connection: an online service offering free Internet gameplay on DS (and the Nintendo Revolution when it comes out) games that support it. The service just started up in November and there's not many games out at the moment implementing this feature, but there's an awful lot of promise in this, if how Mario Kart DS uses it is any indicator.
Basically, the Nintendo DS has IEEE 802.11 wireless capability built-in. If you take it (and a Wi-Fi enabled game) to most any public "hot-spot" with wireless Internet - or if you have an 802.11b or 802.11g wireless router on your home network - you can access the Wi-Fi Connection with a minimum of configuration on the DS end. It may take a little playing around with the manual settings though: it was two hours from the time I first plugged Mario Kart DS in before I established a hook-up with Wi-Fi. The very first time I tried picking up our wireless network in the apartment, the DS didn't detect it... but it did find two other wireless networks broadcasting the "linksys" factory default ID (here's a tip: CHANGE YOUR SSID when you set up your wireless network!!). I had to type in - via the DS's touch-screen - the SSID of our network before it found it, and then the DS needed our router's WEP encryption key (another tip boys and girls: turn on your WEP or WPA encryption). Still didn't get connected until I told it to auto-obtain both the IP address and the DNS info. Immediately after I did that the DS was able to log in to the Wi-Fi service.
What's Mario Kart DS gameplay like over Wi-Fi? There can be up to four players racing each other, and you would swear that the other three are right in the room with you: it's that good. Now, I haven't won a single matchup yet (I've won a few races but not enough to be #1 overall) but it's still a heckuva lotta fun to race against opponents who are apparently playing in France and Japan. You can customize your cart to reflect your unique identity, via your own racing emblem and nickname: my emblem is a red field with "Ride Hard Die Free" written in black, and my handle is "knghtshft".
And if you happen to know someone who does have a Nintendo DS and Mario Kart DSD, you can give him your friend code to race directly against that player, instead of Wi-Fi simply pitting you against random players. I haven't tried this out yet but if anyone wants to play me, shoot me an e-mail and register my friend code: 111731-598707. I'll take on all comers! And if my track record is any indication, you'll probably beat me hands-down... but I'm still up for a good challenge :-) Oh yeah, and if you want some help in finding good folks to race against, WiTendoFi.com, DS Meet and DS-Play will get you hooked up with nice people that you can send a friendly note to... before you try to run them off the track.
