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This is certainly a remarkable time for the art of video games. And that is exactly what Gears of War 2 is: art of the highest caliber.
Everything about it is just darned perfect. And there's one scene in particular in the game... you'll know what I'm talking about if you've played it already... that is absolutely heartbreaking. For that bit of music alone, Steve Jablonsky deserves beaucoups of awards.
I thought it was at least twice as good as the original Gears of War, and that one got tons of play already at the Knight Casa.
Okay so anyone who's played it and waited through the credits: is he still alive?!? And what is he talking about?
And did anyone else think that the lab facility segment of the game asked a lot of questions that will hopefully be answered in the inevitable sequel?
EDIT 2:09 p.m. EST: If you've played through the game you've probably busted a gut laughing at Cole's rant on the microphone to the Locust Queen. Here it is courtesy of YouTube (WARNING: harsh language)...
Focus on the Family is going broke. The ministry ummm... "organization" is being forced to lay off 202 employees, supposedly after campaigning for Proposition 8 (the "gay marriage" ban) in California cleansed its coffers of over half a million dollars. It still has 950 employees though.
(What does any outfit like Focus on the Family need with more than a thousand employees?! I know of a few others who get by with much less overhead.)
Maybe if Focus on the Family was more responsible with its own house, it might have some legitimate clout. That's been pissed-away though, and a lot of it has to do with silly stunts like "boycotting" businesses that don't use the word "Christmas" enough (read Kevin Bussey's thoughts on that, which I agree with him on most things anyway but on this point I especially have to concur.)
I've written about it before here and I'll do it again: I once came very close to going to work for James Dobson at Focus on the Family. It was a long time ago. Now I thank God that He didn't send me off to Colorado to be an employee of that shyster. Focus on the Family has completely lost sight of the things that are supposed to matter most to us as followers of Christ. Dobson? He's prostituted his principles and sold out the soul of his ministry (if not his own as well) to "sit at the king's table" and hope for a little shred of worldly power. Don't believe me? That fool Dobson doesn't have vision enough to see past his fixation with the Republican Party (yeah I called him a "fool": deal with it) and "winning elections", each one he cries out is "historic" and "too important for Christians to miss out on".
Dobson and Focus on the Family are as much part of the problem with this country as an out-of-control Congress and President Bush wasting our money, an incoming President-Elect who is going to be just as bad, and the whole damn complacent "media" that lets them get away with it. I've no sympathy for Dobson or Focus on the Family and if they go down in flames, so much better for the people in this country who are sincerely following after Christ for the right reasons.
See the photo on the right? That's me a few years ago on Thanksgiving, holding a golden brown, succulent deep-fried turkey. It's considered the second most dangerous form of cooking known to man (after preparing fugu) and I've done it plenty of times since 2002. And especially for family and friends, who have always enjoyed the exceptionally juicy meat that comes from preparing the bird this way. It's a taste that I've become rather addicted to. And I was looking forward to doing up one or two or even more next week...
But this will be one Thanksgiving that I'm gonna have to do without my beloved fried turkey. So is everyone else who does this that I've spoken to. I wouldn't mind paying for it but the people around me keep telling me to "save your money".
The reason: the price of peanut oil has gone through the roof.
When I first started doing this, I could buy a three-gallon container of peanut oil for twenty bucks. Last year it was $25. I was in a meat market yesterday afternoon, one of the best places in town, and three gallons of peanut oil this year is a whopping thirty-five dollars.
I always have to buy two containers for my frying needs.
I chatted some with the manager and he said nobody is buying any this year... and usually they've done quite a bit of business selling it already.
"What's your take on why the price has gone up?" I asked.
"Bad biofuel decisions," he replied.
Doesn't surprise me. I've been hearing all year that biofuel subsidies have wrecked havoc with cooking oil across the board. And then you factor in that peanut production is down anyway, and the stuff does become a valuable commodity.
But the manager also told me that it's the economy in general which is the reason why most people are going back to basted this year. There's not as much free money to spend on what by all rights should be a gloriously prepared banquet to share with loved ones.
For fiscal irresponsibility leading to desecration of an honored method to treat a bird as noble as the turkey, I've got just one thing to say about the miscreants who've wound up in charge of our money:
Back in 1967, about the same time that the band was working on the "White Album", the Beatles recorded an extremely avant-garde track they dubbed "Carnival of Light". The 14-minute long song was said to consist of the Beatles going completely off the chain, with screams of "Barcelona!", a church organ being played full-tilt, and a bunch of other seemingly random sounds. It was never released because it was deemed too weird and "ahead of its time".
In the more than four decades since, "Carnival of Light" has taken on something akin to the status of urban legend among Beatles fans. Some wondered if it had even been recorded at all.
Well folks, guess what? If Paul McCartney has his way and if he can convince Ringo Starr and the estates of John Lennon and George Harrison, "Carnival of Light" is going to see a release at last.
Think about that for just a moment: it's looking very likely that a "new" Beatles song will be coming out soon.
Gotta also be curious as to whether "Carnival of Light" will be a playable song in the Beatles video game that Harmonix is putting out next year. Then again, I'm the type who seriously wonders if the game will end when you play the "John has a girlfriend" concert :-P
A Christmas Story, the classic film of Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley) who pines for a Red Ryder BB gun in his stocking in Indiana circa 1940, was released twenty-five years ago today, on November 18th 1983...
"How about a nice football?"
I saw it twice in theaters when it came out. First Mom and Dad took my sister, my best friend Chad and I to see it, and then two weeks later our Cub Scout troop watched it together. Good times!
In honor of today's occasion, this evening leg lamps will be aglow in living room windows across America.
This is what happens when otherwise normal individuals don't think for themselves with the minds that God gave them...
It was thirty years ago today - November 18th, 1978 - that the Jonestown Massacre occurred at the People's Temple Agricultural Project near Kaituma, Guyana. Following an ambush at a nearby airstrip (which took the life of United States Representative Leo Ryan), People's Temple founder and leader Jim Jones told his followers that their enemies were coming to destroy them and that the only option left to them that afforded any "dignity" was to commit "revolutionary suicide".
Jones then ordered his faithful to drink cyanide-laced fruit drink. Many families used syringes to squirt the deadly poison into the mouths of infants, before they themselves ingested the fatal fluid. All told, 909 people - including Jones, who was later found with an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head - killed themselves in the largest non-natural loss of American life up 'til the September 11th, 2001 attacks. Four more of Jones' followers took part in a smaller mass suicide not long afterward in Georgetown. The final death toll was 918 people.
If anyone's been wondering why I think loons like local cult leader Johnny Robertson and his self-proclaimed "Church of Christ" need to be countered, this is a big reason why. If left unchecked, God only knows what a hate-filled man like Robertson might do to others. Could you at all trust a man who accuses a congregation of child pornography, regularly harasses other churches, tries to break up families and has a "bomb threat" painted on the side of his own building? I hate to say this but I'm hard-pressed to believe that a mind like Robertson's is at all far removed from the mentality of Jim Jones. Maybe if some folks in San Francisco back in the day had stood up to Jones, the Jonestown tragedy would never have happened.
This is positively unlike anything that I have ever seen done with Star Trek...
...and I think it's awesome!
For this one, I'm gonna direct you to the full glorious Quicktime version (it's Trailer 2). I just took a look at it in 480P and was blown away. Wait 'til you see the first scene in this thing: it's probably the most UN-Star Trek-ish image produced in the entire forty-some year history of the series.
Today marks an extraordinarily dubious anniversary for the Star Wars saga. Because it was thirty years ago tonight, on November 17th, 1978, that CBS aired the first and last broadcast of The Star Wars Holiday Special.
The two-hour schlockfest is now widely considered by many to be the absolutely worst block of television in the history of anything...
"One of these things is not like the others..."
I'm not even going to try to pretend to make sense of this... thing. If you want to see it, you'll be able to find it all over the 'net and if you don't want to see it well, that's two hours of your life that're your own to spend how you wish. I remember watching this as a way wee lad on the night that it aired, and even then I thought it was pretty terrible. I mean, Harvey Korman as a four-armed alien version of Julia Child?!?
No wonder that George Lucas has strenuously prayed - both privately and publicly - that every copy of The Star Wars Holiday Special might somehow be incinerated. The "special" came to be considered the low point in the careers of everyone involved, including Bea Arthur and Art Carney. Let's not even mention Carrie Fisher singing "What Can You Get A Wookiee For Christmas (When He Already Owns A Comb)?". Or Mark Hamill's post-motorcycle accident "Mannequin Skywalker" plastic-faced visage that reeks of way too much makeup.
Little wonder then that The Star Wars Holiday Special has been branded the worst moment of the entire franchise...
What the hell were they thinking?
But to its credit, The Star Wars Holiday Special did make a few (a few mind ya) decent contributions to the saga. The Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk was introduced, though it wouldn't get any more screen time until Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in 2005. So was Chewbacca's family, which would be cemented in the mythology's canon by way of Expanded Universe literature. And then there is Boba Fett: the most famous bounty hunter in all of fiction made his debut in an animated segment during the special, just in time to whet fans' appetites for more of him a year and a half later when The Empire Strikes Back came out.
And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the fun that I got to have with The Star Wars Holiday Special when I was Humor editor of TheForce.net: it provided plenty of "bantha poodoo" for the Star Wars Captioning feature, like this one and this one and this one and this one.
For what it's worth, I think The Star Wars Holiday Special stands as a curious fixture of not only a successful legend, but of a cultural mindset as well. Something like this is a unique product of the Seventies: there's no way it would have been sanctioned even a few years later. For that at least, I have to render some faint appreciation for The Star Wars Holiday Special.
Anyhoo, if... if... you want to find out more, check out StarWarsHolidaySpecial.com. And if you just want to see how this fiasco begins, here's the opening courtesy of YouTube...
And among the other intriguing things in this new promo: Juliet uncovering what looks to be another hatch, Daniel wearing a mining helmet underground, Locke at Jacob's cabin, Sun locked in a room demanding to be let out, and what looks to be the words "DHARMA Initiative" that flashes by very rapidly (don't blink or you might miss seeing it).
Twenty years ago yesterday the Buran (shown landing at left), the Soviet Union's answer to the American-made NASA space shuttle system, launched from Kazakhstan for its first test flight. It wound up being its only mission to date. A few years later the fall of communism left the program in limbo. The only flight-worthy Buran was destroyed during a roof collapse at the Baikonur facility in 2002, although a number of others were already in production and one is currently on display in a museum in Germany.
But with the space shuttle fleet due to be retired in less than two years, Russia Today is reporting that interest is being rekindled in the Buran system for use as a service vehicle for the International Space Station and perhaps other purposes as well. Despite its visual similarity to the American space shuttle, the Buran was in many ways the superior vehicle (the feature that its designers were most proud of is that it can be launched and landed un-manned). And the Energia booster system that was developed parallel to the Buran is an absolute beast of a launch vehicle: it's said to be powerful enough to send a payload to Mars. Click here for more comparisons between the American shuttle and the Russian Buran.
I would love to see the Buran finally get some serious use... and achieve the appreciation that I've long thought was due her and her creators. I've been a devout student of the Russian space effort for well over a decade, ever since I made it the topic of my senior history thesis while at Elon (and I ended up presenting my research about it at a national conference in Rochester, New York). In spite of how screwy and completely wrong the the Soviet government was, the scientists and engineers who were forced to live under that regime still had a total passion for technical achievement (often in defiance of how much the Soviet bureaucrats got in their way: do some research on how Kruschev screwed-up a lot of Sergei Korolev's projects). Buran is a terrific vehicle and now at last she has a chance to soar and shine.
...got to meet Cecil L. Cline, the project manager for the Saturn V rocket program (he also worked on the Polaris and Poseidon missiles and the C-5A Galaxy transport plane in addition to many other engineering marvels) and received an autographed copy of his book A Soldier's Odyssey.
A Greek scholar has conclusively proven that the classic "Dead Parrot" sketch made famous by Monty Python's John Cleese and Michael Palin actually goes back sixteen hundred years.
Hierocles and Philagrius were the original comedy duo who came up with the concept. Except in their version it wasn't a dead bird, but a deceased slave. One man complains to a friend that the slave he bought from him died not long after purchase. The friend replies "When he was with me, he never did any such thing!"
Also among the 265 jokes found in the Philogelos: The Laugh Addict collection are some poking fun at marriage. One of them goes: "A man tells a well-known wit: 'I had your wife, without paying a penny'. The husband replies: 'It's my duty as a husband to couple with such a monstrosity. What made you do it?'"
The New York Times is reporting that Hormel is pulling out all the stops to keep up with a sudden demand for Spam. The classic "mystery meat in a can" was first introduced over seventy years ago and ever since has become a staple food for hard economic times, having cemented that status during the lean years of World War II. And now as many seriously wonder if we might be on the cusp of another Great Depression...
Hormel declined to cooperate with this article, but several of its workers were interviewed here recently with the help of their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 9. Slumped in chairs at the union hall after making 149,950 cans of Spam on the day shift, several workers said they been through boom times before — but nothing like this.
Spam "seems to do well when hard times hit," said Dan Bartel, business agent for the union local. "We'll probably see Spam lines instead of soup lines."
The article further reports that Kraft is another company seeing an upswing in the demand for its "low-budget" products, particularly macaroni and Velveeta.
A few weeks ago Apple hired Mark Papermaster to be its new head of development over the iPod and iPhone lines. All well and good... except that Papermaster was also previously the vice-president of the microprocessor and chip technology at IBM, and there was a "no-compete" clause in his contract with his former employer. Papermaster has countered that he's going to be involved in entertainment devices: something that IBM has never pursued and thus, the clause is invalid in his case. It's now wound up in the courts, where IBM is suing to keep Papermaster from working at Apple.
Now we know why IBM is really interested in locking Papermaster out of the Jobs Mob...
IBM has been developing something called "racetrack" memory and it's afraid that the technology it developed will wind up in the iPod and iPhone. And it's easy to see why Apple could conceivably be interested in implementing it in their own products:
- Racetrack memory could store 500,000 songs, compared to 40,000 in the current 160 gigabyte iPod classic. That is also equivalent to 3,500 full-length movies.
- Racetrack memory uses much less power. A single battery charge would last for weeks (though using the screen in video mode on an iPod with such storage would still drain some juice).
- Racetrack memory would last for decades, and not be subject to wear like hard drives or flash memory.
- Racetrack memory will be much cheaper to produce.
Sounds kewl, eh? The only real obstacle is that IBM still deems racetrack memory to be in the experimental stage, and that we won't be seeing it in products for another decade.
Here's a suggestion: Steve Jobs should direct Apple to buy out IBM. That way his company will have Papermaster's contract lock stock and barrel, and Apple can hustle like nobody's business to get racetrack memory in its toys by no later than 2010 or 2011.
A half-million songs on a single iPod. That would be like the last iPod that I would ever need :-)
It's gonna be so weird to finally see the movie adaptation of Watchmen. Ever since this blog's beginning I've been writing about the efforts to get this film made, and usually it's to share some pessimism about whether it could be done right... or at least done at all. Like yesterday evening I conveyed some concern about Zack Snyder's admitting that the ending of Watchmen, which he's directed, is going to be different from the book.
Funny how things can change in just twenty-four hours.
Okay, I'll say that I again have faith in Snyder. That I believe he will indeed pull off the impossible, regardless of whether the squid is in there. Tonally, this looks completely right. Rorschach's voice is exactly as I imagined it would be when I first read the book in 1990. But the thing I keep thinking about most from this trailer is Jon's voice: Billy Crudup is evoking the right kind of disaffection for a god no longer interested in the world around him. And then his scream of "LEAVE ME ALONE!"...
Think I might have to see Quantum of Solace this weekend, to catch this trailer on the big screen (well also 'cuz I liked Casino Royale too :-)
We've known they were out there for over a decade. Now two groups of astronomers have captured the first photographs of planets orbiting stars far beyond our own solar system. Images of the star HR 8799 turned up three planets, including this first-ever direct photo of an alien world...
In case yer wondering: these are not planets anything like our own Earth. They're believed to be more along the lines of the "gas giants" like Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. But with increasingly refined imaging technology, astronomers tell us that it's no doubt just a matter of time before a world - possibly one that could harbor life - is found waaaaaaaay out there!
USA Today is running a story about the high rate of crime among the Transportation Security Administration's federal air marshals. One marshal used his badge and top secret security clearance to smuggle cocaine and drug money. Another attempted to "disappear" his ex-wife via a contract killer (who was another federal air marshal). Still another used his authority to engage in child pornography. There have been dozens of such cases since 9/11, when the number of marshals ballooned from about thirty to more than thirty thousand.
Maybe it's time to reiterate a suggestion that I made over two years ago. During the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks I proposed the creation of "citizen marshals": ordinary American citizens who, after a background check and some training, would be allowed to carry firearms on commercial airlines as a volunteer service to their fellow countrymen.
From my post in 2006:
Such persons will not be affiliated with any law enforcement agency or the government at all. Being appointed "citizen marshals" merely means that they have no outstanding criminal record, that they possess qualities of good character and are otherwise sound and considerate human beings. Being a citizen marshal would be an unpaid position... but then, anyone wanting to be such a marshal for the right reasons would not want any financial compensation anyway.
Citizen marshals would be the only regular civilians who would be allowed to board commercial passenger planes with a firearm, and adequate ammunition. They could even be given a special badge that designates their status for all to see. Ideally, there would be more than one citizen marshal - with guns - aboard each flight.
The thought of becoming a citizen marshal should not be entertained lightly by anyone, and there should be incentives in place to dissuade those who might potentially abuse their appointments. The penalties for doing so - be it from impersonating a licensed citizen marshal to unholstering a firearm aboard a plane in flight without legitimate caues - should be extremely severe. As much or even more than what we expect from police officers who "cross the line".
But... a flight with an armed citizen marshal or two (or three or four) would be the safest possible airline trip in terms of passenger safety outside of technical malfunctions. Even the mere possibility that a jetliner might have a citizen marshal onboard would automatically make that plane a "poison pill" for anyone contemplating a terrorist act.
Ask yourself again: would Mohammed Atta and his fellow terrorists been so quick to pull out the box-cutters on September 11th, 2001 if the slightest thought entered their minds that not only might they not reach the cockpit, but that they would be shot dead the moment they started trying?
Let's face it: Transportation Security Administration has been a colossal farce from the very beginning. I consider it one of George W. Bush's biggest failures. The entire thing has been nothing but "security theatre" on a grand scale. Personally, I can think of at least a dozen ways off the top of my head that TSA's "procedures" could be defeated for a much worse re-enactment of 9/11.
And when I read stories about air marshals out of control, it solidifies that much more my belief that regular American can do some things better than their government.
