I don't play MMORPGs anymore, but if they'll let you be a Reaver I might have to check this out :-)
(Or, if a player is a Christian, the game should let him/her play as a Shepherd so they can walk around the game spouting spiritual stuff to other players. That might be even more fun than running harvesters in Star Wars Galaxies :-P)
Edutopia, it turns out, is the website of The George Lucas Educational Foundation.
Here's what the site has to say...
YOUTUBE PICK: BEST CAMPAIGN AD EVER!This made my day!! It's probably the closest I'll ever get to making an officially-approved Star Wars movie! Okay, kidding aside, it is an honor to get mentioned by this, an organization that I've long had a lot of respect and admiration for. When George Lucas did The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (wow... going on fifteen years ago!) I thought that show was an amazing means of teaching history to young people. I'll admit it: I applied for a few jobs with Lucasfilm over the years (what self-respecting Star Wars geek hasn't?). But even more than the chance to work on a Star Wars movie, I wanted to be part of the effort to use these stories as vehicles for innovative learning. THAT is going to be the long-lasting legacy of these stories. And although I never did it in an official capacity, I've absolutely played to the hilt any opportunity to use Star Wars and Indiana Jones to impart knowledge and values to my students. That's what I tried to do with this first commercial too. But I never thought it would wind up referenced on George Lucas's education website. That's just... wow!
It didn't win him a seat on Rockingham County, NC's school board, but Christopher Knight's Star Wars-themed video spot won him loads of giggling fans (1:01).
So to the good folks at The George Lucas Educational Foundation: thanks!! :-)
Today will mark the final time that the survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack will ever reunite. Their numbers are now fast dwindling.
"To remember."
I reported last week about Price appearing in court. I didn't know at the time but Price pleaded "not guilty" to the criminal charges of endangering advertisements, which carries the same penalties as does being in possession of marijuana. It's worth noting that there's been a petition to be sent to the state board of education calling for Price's fitness to serve on the board be investigated by the county board: if the county board agrees that he broke the law, they would have to vacate his seat.
If Price had pled guilty that would have been substantial grounds for his removal from the board (provided the board does abide by state law in this matter). If he's found guilty in court that's going to look even worse for him. At least one person with knowledge of such matters has told me that in all likelihood, Price's goose is cooked because there's a high probability he'll be found guilty... assuming, of course, that the board adheres to the law if he is.
Meanwhile, more candidates from the school board race have weighed in and said that Price has no place on the school board. On his Reidsville Free Press website last week Jeff Sykes called for Price to step aside. And now former candidate Penny Owens has published an e-mail she recently sent to Price:
Realizing you may not have had a chance to review the school board policies with regard to what we expect from our students, I have taken the liberty of forwarding this portion of Policy 4300 to you. I am interested in your comments, although I am sure you will not respond. How ironic that you do not exhibit these qualities yourself, but our students are expected to and you will have a position of authority over our students as a member of the school board.This is the heartmeat of the matter right here: the example that Ron Price, as a member of the school board, would be setting for the students of Rockingham County. How is it going to look to the children when they have someone who broke the law - and even admitted that he did it but brazenly refuses to be held accountable - who is running the schools they're in?G. Integrity and CivilityAll students are expected to demonstrate integrity, civility, responsibility and self control. This expectation is directly related to the board’s educational objectives for students to learn to be responsible for and accept the consequences of their behavior and for students to respect cultural diversity and ideological differences. Integrity, civility, responsibility and self control also are critical for establishing and maintaining a safe, orderly and inviting environment.
No doubt Price isn't going to do the right thing, and he's going to be sworn in on December 11th. But I have serious doubts that he'll be there for long. And even if he does manage to hold out, he's going to be a really lame member of the board in the minds of plenty enough people.
More as it develops...
EDIT 3:16 AM EST 12-8-2006: Price has changed his blog again. This time he's telling us to "Look for the complete and factual account of the sign incident on this web page in the near future." He's also already calling himself an "AT LARGE Member Rockingham County Board of Education. Dedicated to serving the students and citizens of Rockingham County"... nevermind the fact that there's still three and a half days before he's actually sworn in.
If the "complete and factual account" of the sign incident is still to come, why hasn't he shared it with us already? I mean, telling the truth shouldn't be the hardest thing to do in the world, especially for a Christian.
My take on this? We won't hear "complete and factual" from Price until it passes muster with his attorney.
I will say this though: when I was the Humor editor at TheForce.net, the Star Wars Holiday Special did provide a lot of great pics to use in the "Captioning" feature. I went back and tracked 'em down: #36 and #37 are from late 2000 and a year later I ran #57 (again featuring Harvey Korman as the weird 4-handed alien "Julia Child") and #58 (that's Art Carney with Chewbacca's son Lumpy... yeah this was a pretty forgettable special awright). I remember those captions especially well 'cuz everyone really enjoyed poking fun at the Holiday Special. And these aren't from the special but I still have a lot of fondness for #41 (a pic from the B-movie Yor: Hunter from the Future) and #61 (doesn't Andre the Giant look so much like Emperor Palpatine in that shot? :-).
Anyway, if you really absolutely must, don't let me stop you from watching the Star Wars Holiday Special. It should be seen by every Star Wars fan at least once in their life. After that, even Jar Jar Binks looks pretty good.
(Look in some of the more prominent "political discussion" forums if you want to see what I mean. Which is one of the reasons I quit doing those.)
I'm a follower of Jesus Christ. I also hold to many more traditionally conservative values than I do with other political leanings. That said, what's depicted in this picture disgusts me. And not because of the intent these students probably had in mind either. I suppose the "conservative" students at the University of Texas think of themselves as particularly clever for having come up with this. To me it's a display of intellectual shallowness. It shows that the students are incapable of thinking outside the box that their political philosophy has confined them to. There's definitely nothing Christian about it...
That's an "ACLU Solstice Barn" that the Young Conservatives at the Austin campus of the University of Texas have set up. Mary and Joseph have been replaced with homosexual "Gary and Joseph". The Magi are Stalin, Lenin and Marx. Of course they also had to do the "currently stylish" thing and throw in Nancy Pelosi. Here's the story at WorldNetDaily if you want to know more.
I've no love for the ACLU. I think they've done a few good things over the decades but those have been woefully overshadowed by too much lunacy, like attacking public display of manger scenes at Christmas (oh I forgot, it's "the holidays"). They're too much known for the evil they've done as opposed to the good. I've no problem with attacking them as an organization...
...but there is a line of appropriateness and good taste. And these "conservative" students have crossed it with this display.
I don't care if Stalin, Lenin and Marx are insulted, if it's not done as crass as it is here. What bothers me is the inclusion of Pelosi. These "conservatives" and far too many others desperately want to hate someone for the "sin" of being a Democrat. It's not like when Bill Clinton was President: Lord knows that man deserved the ridicule... but loathing someone because you are expected to do so by your political party shows how little free will some people have. To me, there's no difference between this and the "Two Minutes Hate" from Orwell's 1984. This just happens to be more sophisticated. But it still serves the same purpose: focus the people's raw emotion on something, let them vent their anger... so they'll be distracted from the things that really matter and hence become more controllable. And isn't that what this whole thing is, really: a show of power and control?
Those aren't conservative values. At least, not any that I wound up adopting over the years. Neo-conservative maybe, but not classic conservatism.
Bottom line: these "conservative" students are accomplishing little more than showing everyone how very proud they are to be willing to be used as tools to further something as ultimately meaningless as a political agenda. And they're doing as much damage to the imagery of Christmas as the group they are attacking with it. If there is anyone with adult maturity among the Young Conservatives at the University of Texas, they should tear this thing down tonight.
So yeah, we like it a lot. And though I'm on the conservative side when it comes to new technology, I must admit that I would love to get as much out of this as I can. The sound quality is perfect for us as it is (I doubt I'll ever spring for a Surround Sound or home THX system) but when it comes to playing DVDs, well...
I'm waiting at least two years, and see which of the two competing high-def formats becomes the standard. But all the same, I'd love to get as good a picture as can possibly be produced from my collection of DVDs.
So for the past several days I've been researching standard DVD players with the "upconversion" feature, or sometimes called "upscaling". That means that the player enhances the video data from the DVD for output through the HDMI channel. A lot of people swear that this makes standard DVDs look really good on an HDTV: that even at 1080i it's pretty stunning. If there's any way to make my precious Star Wars saga or The Lord of the Rings look that much more awesome on this high-def set, I'd certainly fork over a reasonable amount of coin for it.
So if anyone knows of a DVD player with upconversion that would be well worth the money, that you know does a really good job at improving the resolution/color/other stuff, I'd appreciate it if you could please recommend it to me :-) Thanks!
And I'm a voracious reader too, and there hasn't been time to do that much either. The rumor is that the seventh and final Harry Potter novel is due to come out on July 7th (#7 on 7/07/07, wouldn't that be cool?) and I'm hoping to re-read all six of the current books before then. In the meantime I'm catching up with stuff that's come out lately, like the new Star Wars novel Darth Bane: Path of Destruction and Michael Crichton's latest thriller Next. I'll probably be picking up Orson Scott Card's Empire - a speculative novel about a modern day civil war in America - pretty soon.
But in the meantime, ever since finishing Next a few nights ago, I've immersed myself in another book. One that I've read many, many times over the years...
Those are the very first words that you find when you open the cover of Helter Skelter. If anything, it's an underwhelming warning that isn't adequate enough at all. Because after more than three decades, Helter Skelter is still the most classic true-life crime book ever written. And no matter how many times I've read it, the book continues to horrify.
This is the same copy I bought in May of 1992, a few weeks before graduating from high school. My best friend Chad had been reading it and he said I would probably ummm... well, "enjoy" isn't the right word to use, is it? One of the local stations happened to run the Helter Skelter TV movie like a week before I got the book, and that piqued my curiosity all the more. Once I started reading it I could barely stop.
This is still the definitive book about the Charles Manson murders. Written by Vincent Bugliosi: the man who prosecuted Manson and the other defendants in the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murder case. This is the textbook that should be studied at length by every judge, lawyer, and member of the law enforcement in the country, and anyone else interested in the law. Helter Skelter is not only an amazing study in how to build up and prosecute a criminal case, but it's also a dire chronicle of official blundering and the negative impact of departmental rivalry. I still cannot comprehend how the investigators originally did not believe the murders at the Tate house and the ones the following night at the LaBianca residence were connected in spite of the similarities... like ummmm, the words written in blood at both scenes.
By the way, 2006 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Helter Skelter two-part made-for-TV movie. It came out not long ago on DVD if you ever want to watch it. Apart from the names of some of the characters being changed (the most obvious being Manson's defense attorney Irving Kanarek, who came Mr. "Scoble" in this production) it's probably the most accurate film adaptation from a book I've ever seen. One thing I happened to catch is that during the raid on Spahn Ranch in the movie, Juan Flynn is dressed exactly as he is shown in the photo in the book, even though Flynn has no speaking role in the film. It's the small details like that which make this movie so good. And it must be said: the portrayal by Steve Railsback of Charles Manson is still one of the most chilling ever seen of any character in movie history. Too bad that his performance was so awesome that Railsback wound up getting typecast because of it and since then has mostly found work playing other murderous wackos (he even played Ed Gein in a movie about that case).
Anyways, I'm re-reading Helter Skelter now, and at the rate I'm going I might have 9 or 10 more books read by New Year's. Which is all the more impressive considering we've got that new 37-inch high-def TV set (maybe I'll play the Helter Skelter DVD on it for Lisa to watch :-P).
These were taken at 10 p.m. on the night of December 2nd, 2006, from the corner of Scales Street and Gilmer Street in Reidsville, North Carolina. The first is looking north up Scales (you can just see the Confederate monument way down the street)...
This next one is looking toward the big mural...
I'm going to take a few more nighttime pics of places around here decked out for the holidays in the next few weeks. And a short while before I took these, I snapped some pics of the inside of our station. So if you ever wanted to know what the real innards of a TV station look like, your chance is coming up soon :-)
The "Hillary as a dominatrix" element is from a 1993 issue of the old Spy Magazine. On the night of November 4th, 1996 - the night before the election - posters showing her in that getup with the caption "Put yourself in bondage, Elect Clinton on Tuesday" appeared all over the Elon College campus. That lil' bit of mischief was the work of myself and two friends. Now here it is ten years later and I've made another "Put yourself in bondage" graphic. I never thought this would be happening again, but with reports coming in that she's serious about running for President the circumstance kind of demanded it.
I could say more about this, but I'll save it for some other time.
How many ways should you be able to shut off a laptop? How about nine? Microsoft's long-awaited Vista operating system, launched for business customers on Nov. 30, includes that many options, according to programmers familiar with the software. That's two shortcut icons and a shut-down menu with a full seven options.It definitely didn't stem from this, but awhile back I decided that I won't be upgrading to Windows Vista for quite some time: Possibly not for a year or even more. Windows XP has been working just fine for me for almost five years now, with the fewest problems I've ever encountered from a Windows operating system. I don't see how my current productivity is going to be increased or improved upon by adopting Vista. And I would even go so far as to ask others to seriously consider whether it's worth the time and effort to change over to Vista from something already known to be pretty reliable.The number of choices has some techies chortling at what they see as the sheer absurdity of it all—and others astounded that the software giant could come out with something so unwieldy after years of development. Critics say that Vista, for all its capabilities, could end up being too complex for the average consumer. After all, how many features do you need for the computer equivalent of a light switch? "I'm sure there's a whole team of [user interface] designers, programmers, and testers who worked very hard on the OFF button in Windows Vista," writes Joel Spolsky, a New York software developer, on his blog, "but seriously, is this the best you could come up with?"
I was in the Wal-Mart Supercenter at around 10 o'clock on Wednesday night. It was just a short trip to get a few things and although I knew it would probably be a longshot, I checked out the book section to see if they had Orson Scott Card's new novel Empire, which just came out this week and I've heard a lot of raves about it. Empire wasn't there (I'll probably get it sometime this weekend though) but there was another book that caught my eye...The barcode superimposed over the silhouetted monkey would have piqued my curiosity anyway, but the fact that it had "MICHAEL CRICHTON" printed in big red letters on the front cover certainly didn't hurt any either. I've been enjoying Crichton's stuff for about fifteen years now. Maybe over the holidays I'll check out State of Fear, which "Weird" Ed said was a whompin' good read. But I enjoyed Timeline and Prey plenty enough, so I figured this was worth a gamble. So without knowing anything else about the book other than what it read on the inside of the jacket, without even knowing that this book existed at all before finding it in Wal-Mart, I plunked down eighteen bucks and bought Next.
With each novel Crichton takes what subject matter that his interest is focused on at the moment, researches the hell out of it, then churns out a rollickin'-good story that's part techno-thriller and part cautionary tale. Crichton has run the gamut of topics over the year with animal behavior (Congo and The Lost World), quantum physics (Timeline), nano-technology (Prey), Japanese-American relations (Rising Sun), sexual harassment (Disclosure), and whatever it was that The Andromeda Strain was about in addition to being a damn scary story.
With Next, Crichton returns to the topic that he found huge success with in Jurassic Park: genetic engineering. But instead of being mostly a polemic against tinkering with DNA as Jurassic Park was, Next is instead about the ramifications that are coming with the industrial craziness of selling and patenting genes and other bodily tissue. That's what the book is "about", but Crichton usually uses one subject to spin into a confrontation on multiple fronts and Next is no exception. He makes us think about what it means to be in a world where your own DNA may be the legal property of somebody else, where companies plot to genetically emblazon the McDonald's logo on the shells of sea turtles and where "wet artists" are attempting to cook-up foot-long cockroaches for household pets. That's the stuff you definitely can't miss. But Next is also about how modern people are too susceptible to believing everything they read simply because they see it on television or the Internet (the book's running gag about blondes going extinct and the part where one character "plants" false data to be found on Google illustrates the point).
Next has so many multiple plotlines that it would seem you would lose track of them all, yet Crichton always keeps the story coherent and focused on the disparate stories until they ultimately find convergence. It's like Syriana meets Jurassic Park. Just as the tagline of last year's film Syriana was "Everything is connected", that could easily describe Next... even though the probability of all these plots dealing with corporate genetics overlapping with each other does take some suspension of disbelief. The dominant storyline involves Frank Burnet, a 51-year old cancer survivor whose body is discovered to be producing unique proteins that vigorously destroy cancerous cells. What Burnet didn't realize until it was too late was that he had unwittingly signed off on ownership of his protein-producing genes to his doctor, which then wound up in the possession of genetics research firm BioGen. Burnet loses his bid in court to regain legal ownership of the cell lines and BioGen is naturally exultant to have won against the $3 billion claim. But when Frank Burnet is found to have disappeared following the destruction of the cell lines in an act of sabotage - coupled with the mysterious vanishing of all the lines' backups and genetic data - BioGen brazenly assumes their legal ownership of Burnet's cells regardless of where they may be found. So it is that Burnet's daughter Alex and her young son Jamie become the prey of a bounty hunter hired by BioGen to track them down and have them biopsied.
That's one of the things that made Next so thrilling a read for me: I'm not saying here that Crichton is a "hack writer" at all, but his more techno-centric novels do tend to follow a pattern (i.e. Jurassic Park, Timeline and Prey). With Next, Crichton amply shows that he can dispense with his tried-and-true formula and still be on top of the game so far as this genre of fiction goes. In some ways I thought that Next was the most un-Crichton-ish of any of his novels that I've read. But the maddening mixture of true-life fact and what-if speculation in Next is definitely vintage Michael Crichton.
This may be the most wild assortment of characters that Crichton has ever jammed into a single novel. There is the typical entrepreneur who dances around matters of ethics that's found in most Crichton novels. The billionaire venture capitalist. The evangelical Christian geneticist who enjoys considerable political clout. A single-mother attorney. The unscrupulous hospital pathologist. An eco-anarchist. The researcher who's been investigating autism. A sixteen-year old girl caught using fertility drugs for bizarre purpose. A Sumatran jungle guide. A young scientist and his neer-do-well older brother... and their nosey mother. The security guard who enjoys looking at seventh-grade girls too much for his own good. Gerard: one of the best characters that Crichton has ever come up with. And Dave: a chimpanzee with unusual parentage, to say the least. All of these and more make for an off-the-map oddball Greek chorus in the tragi-comedy about genetic commercialism that is Next.
Next is a novel loaded with both horror and hilarity. There are some parts of the book that will positively keep you awake at night from fear. And there are others that had my wife hearing me hysterical with laughter from a few rooms away. Mostly frightening regarding the repercussions of commercial genetics, often funny, always educational and very entertaining, Next is one of the best novels that I've read in recent memory. It's one of Michael Crichton's better books... and that's saying quite a bit.
Next is absolutely recommended reading. A book well worth picking up now before waiting for the paperback to come out. And no doubt a lot better than the inevitable movie will be (though I think that Gerard would be a heck of a great character to see realized on the big screen).
"Motivation is when your dreams put on work clothes"Thought that was well worth sharing :-)
