Now that we have the weather for it, it's time to come inside, throw some wood on the fire, snuggle up next to the one you love, and watch a timeless winter classic on the DVD player...
(Yes, I'm eeeee-vil :-P )
Cassius Clay - better known to the world as Muhammad Ali, is 65 years old today."Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!"
So I'm already saying that I'll be watching the two-hour season premiere tonight at 8. Which I'll admit it is pretty fun to listen to the bad ones then call up my parents to hear them laugh about them too.
There's one thing that came from making this video that I'm glad of, that I didn't realize until now: that some people in our society really are keeping the younger generations from finding its own leaders... and we direly need those.
But I'm going to withdraw this one for now. There's a better way to deliver this same message, I just know it. But until I know what that should be, this one is going to go back to my hard drive.
The guards in charge of the execution used rope that was too long, was the problem. There's actually a mathematical formula that executioners are supposed to follow that takes in the condemned person's weight, height etc. and from that it spits out how long the rope should be. Too short and the guy dangles there and slowly suffocates. Too much rope and it takes the poor sap's head clean off. Ideally, the drop is abrupt enough to violently break the condemned's neck so as to bring about unconsciousness as quickly as possible.
There are some things you learn in history class that you can't "unlearn", if you know what I mean...
In the past few hours Ain't It Cool News and quite a lot of other web outlets have passed on word about this... thing, that may or may not be a new Ghostbusters video game. Below are several videos credited to a company called ZootFly, that show the alleged game in action. It could be a fake though: some are saying that the below videos look somewhat like Gears of War for the Xbox 360. If this is something fan-made, an awful lot of effort must have gone into making this. It could also be a conceptual thing to sell the idea of a Ghostbusters game. But based on early reaction I'm seeing in a lot of places, this is something that many people are wanting to see happen.Here's a piece of concept art that's making the rounds on the 'net right now:
And here's one of the videos (you can watch some more at the Ain't It Cool News link):
Well, let's keep our fingers crossed (but don't cross the proton streams!) and maybe we'll see this. In the meantime if you've got an older game system or emulator software, you can always try to track down the Ghostbusters video game by Activision that came out twenty years ago. Even on the Atari 2600, it was a classic.
Which brings us to the matter of Vice President Dick Cheney, who said this today...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice PresidentA man who received FIVE deferments from draft service during the Vietnam conflict, telling America that it's obliged to have "the stomach" to keep sending its sons and daughters into a war with no clearly defined goal.
Dick Cheney said on Sunday the United States must show it has the "stomach" to win in
Iraq or it will confirm al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's view that Americans can be pressured to leave.U.S. allies helping in fighting terrorism -- Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Egypt -- must have confidence that the United States will stay until a successful outcome, he said."If the United States doesn't have the stomach to finish the task in Iraq, we put at risk what we've done in all of those other locations," he said on "Fox News Sunday."
Dick Cheney does not understand sacrifice. Those are not his children that he's sending to fight in his war. Had he actually served in the military, he would perhaps have some moral basis on which to stand... but he doesn't even have that.
How the hell does Dick Cheney get off telling Americans that they must possess "the stomach" when he's always lacked it to begin with?
This war is being perpetuated upon us by a bunch of old men who never had the will to fight for themselves, but also have no qualms about sending young men off to die for their own selfish purpose.
Well, somebody has to say it...
XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SUN JAN 14, 2007 18:17:05 ET XXXXXGood grief... it really has come to this point, hasn't it?IS FOX SET TO BLOW THE NUKES ON '24'?
Sun Jan 14 2007 18:14:34 ETAs Washington continues to raise concerns about terror threats on The Homeland -- a recent CIA report outlined a scenerio of possible "series of explosions using 'low charge' nuclear weapons" -- Hollywood and FOX-TV are set to up the ante with the new season of 24!
Few outside of the 24 set know the exact details of the new season unfolding, but studio sources claim producers are pushing hard to take it radioactive this time -- and keep it there.
"Time to wake the country up!" a top FOX source told the DRUDGE REPORT over the weekend. "I do not think there has ever been TV done like this, the viewer is going to be completely riveted."
The source claims executives are prepared for any fallout from local municipalities that may be on the receiving end of plot turns and twists. How many cities 24 puts on 'nuke alert' is unclear.
FOX has set a highly-controversial espisode of 24 to air Monday night, opposite NBC's GOLDEN GLOBES.
In 2002, White House officials questioned the timing and release of PARAMOUNT's action movie SUM OF ALL FEARS -- a movie which depicts a nuclear bomb unleashed on an American sporting event!
One senior Bush official, who spoke to the DRUDGE REPORT at the time, claimed the movie crossed over the line of civic responsibility and commerce.
Developing...
I mean, the line now between real-life and fictional entertainment has become so blurred, that the possible use of nuclear weapons on an hour-long TV drama rates as serious breaking news. Worse, the producers are said to be "prepared" for the outcry from the cities they plan to wipe out. On the show. Not in the real world. Just on teevee. Which is fake...
And to think that some people thought that the whole "Who Shot J.R.?" thing was too much.
I tried to get into 24. Honest. I missed the first season except for the finale where Kiefer Sutherland shot Dennis Hopper about 5,348 times in the space of six seconds with that gun and thought that maybe I should give it a try the next season. That came along and I watched for about three episodes before it lost my interest. That's not to say 24 is a bad show, just that it's formula never caught hold with me. I've always thought that Kiefer Sutherland is a great actor, too (my favorite performance of his is probably in Flatliners). Maybe I'm missing something by not "getting" 24 and this really is supposed to be a big deal. But for what might happen on the new season of 24 to rate as serious news over everything else that's going on in this world... well, that says something about where our sense of priorities are, in my humble opinion.
But if anyone is willing to write me and tell me personally that I should give 24 another go and that this is something I could definitely dig, I might be willing to check it out again.
How are we supposed to have faith that the government is not also examining the records of people who have come out with open disagreement about what this administration is doing? How can we possibly believe them that they have only the best of intentions at heart when they do things like this?
Well, how can we?
Amendment IV of the Constitution of the United States:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.So where are the justly-issued warrants in these searches?
Or is it that in the name of fighting "the terrorists", that things like that don't have to be adhered to any longer?
Why do "they hate us for our freedoms" when we don't really have freedoms to begin with anymore anyway?
Why should anyone believe that the America that is going to result from what these people are doing is going to eventually be an America worth defending at all someday?
What's going to keep another presidential administration from really abusing these powers sometime in the future, and probably sooner than later?
How can anyone, with a clear conscience, defend what the people in this administration are doing to this country?
Presumably, tonight's opener for Rome's second season will have the funeral of Caesar and the beginnings of the seizing of the empire by Mark Antony (James Purefoy) and Gaius Octavian (Max Pirkis), who is going to wind up becoming Caesar Augustus.
The first season of Rome was like The Sopranos B.C., and some of the most brutal yet captivating storytelling I've seen on television in recent years. Season 2 will hopefully bring more of the same. Enjoy it while you can though: word is that HBO won't be funding any more Rome beyond this season because of the production's high cost. Meaning that Rome is probably going to be like Carnivale: another HBO show that was ended before it could live up to its potential. Sic transit gloria mundi...
The revels begin again tonight at 9 p.m.
Rolling out from Nikko Home Electronics is the R2-D2 DVD Projector.It projects DVDs up to an 80 inch width onto walls or ceilings with apparently really good image quality. "Artoo" also boasts an iPod port so you can play music through him, as well as playing standard music CDs. He also moves around with motorized wheels in his legs, and you control it all with a remote control shaped like the Millennium Falcon. He may not be able to project real holograms and he probably doesn't have any stolen plans for the Death Star inside him (or maybe he does, who knows?) but this still seems like a pretty snazzy toy for any Star Wars fan willing to pay $2000 for it. Thanks to "Weird" Ed for this great find and sending it this way!
I don't know if the last two Star Wars prequels were even shot at resolution that high. It might even be something that rivals an IMAX image. Westinghouse is saying this new HDTV technology is meant for "high-end" uses like industry and medicine... so it'll probably be a while, if ever, that we see something like this in our living rooms.
Incidentally, the new set we bought a month and a half ago is a 37" set with 1080i HD resolution. A lot of people have told me that unless you are watching on a set bigger than 50", no one is able to tell the difference between a 1080p image and one at 1080i. I've been watching ours for any tell-tale flicker and so far I haven't seen any. So I'm expecting this set to last us several more years to come before we buy either a 1080p set... or one at 2160p :-)
This is almost beat-for-beat what happened in the early 1980s between VHS and Betamax. Back then the porn industry chose to go with VHS, partly because of Sony's policies (Sony also made the stupid decision to only let their consumer units record about an hour of stuff, thinking that "nobody would want to record anything longer than an hour"). The result was that a lot more VHS players were bought as opposed to those who bought Betamax. A quarter century later and Sony is doing almost the same thing. You wouldn't think that something like porno would encourage that widespread an adoption of technology... but I guess enough people wanted VHS instead of Betamax just because of that.
I'm sort of hoping that HD-DVD will bear out in the long run, but not because of this. It has to do with the name: "HD-DVD" just sounds like the natural progression of DVD, where a lot of people will be told about Blu-ray and wonder "what's that?"
This is the second post in a row that has to do with toilets somehow: weird trend, that. The Fish 'n Flush has a standard toilet tank core surrounded by a transparent aquarium. Among such uses for this novelty, "Some people think we're nuts but other just love it and parents are using it to help their children with potty training." For $300 you too can have a school of fish swimming around the family throne.This is a much better video than my first video blog post that I did yesterday. Think I've gotten into a good groove now when it comes to speaking into a camera for an audience of... what, four or five? :-) Some friends provided great feedback on that first video, that I'm trying my best to take to heart. Anyway, here's a new one. Enjoy!
So I'm laughing at Bush right now because the man has very obviously become John Kerry...
John Kerry in 2004: "I have a plan."How did America get to the point where someone this shallow and disattached from reality could become President?George W. Bush in 2007: "This plan can work!"
EDIT 9:32 PM EST: Bush said that "...our policy should focus on protecting Iraq’s borders..."
When is he going to get around to protecting OUR borders? You know: the borders of the country that he swore an oath to uphold and defend?
Good lord, we really do have a deranged man in the White House, don't we?
So I've been playing the heck out of Marvel Ultimate Alliance and a short while ago finished it, with just less than 30 hours put into the effort. I used every character at least once except Daredevil, who I couldn't unlock until late in the game. For the final battle I used Spider-Man (wearing the Stark Armor), Wolverine (in Classic costume), Deadpool (in Assassin gear) and Thor (wearing Asgardian Armor). It's a very tough battle involving not just Doctor Doom - who now has god-like powers - but multiple evil duplicates of the Fantastic Four. By the end of the fight only Deadpool and Thor were still standing and fittingly enough I was able to use Thor to deliver the finishing blow.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance delivered what may be the most awe-inspiring moment I've ever beheld playing a videogame. Last night I got to the missions on the Skrull planet. As soon as I saw Galactus walking in the background I was like "Daaaaaaaammmmmm..." The guy is positively huge! We're talking as big as a mountain. And then he finally takes notice of you and when he starts coming after you... well, let's say that I'm keeping the saved game from just before that point, just to show anyone who comes over so I can see their eyeballs get all bugged-out. When you finally engage Galactus, you are in for one of the coolest videogame sequences in the history of anything as the Silver Surfer zips all around the world devourer's head. Just simply amazing. This was from the original Xbox version: if/when I get an Xbox 360 I can't wait to see what this scene looks like on that.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance is one of the most epic games I've ever played, and the ending sets itself wide-open for a follow-up that might be just as staggering. Yeah it has a number of bugs (that I hope will get ironed-out in the sequel) but those are easily overlooked for how fun it is to play. Definitely recommended no matter what platform you happen to own.
