So what did I think of it? I watched many of the episodes of the original The Electric Company a few years ago when they ran on Noggin, and was surprised at how well the show had held up over the years. The Electric Company circa 2009 remains faithful to the purpose of its parent... but is a fresh and rapid-fire delightful update aimed at a new generation. And I was surprised at how many homages to the Seventies series there are: right down to paying tribute to Rita Moreno's immortal warcry "HEY YOU GUYSSSSSS!!!" Didn't spot an appearance by Letterman (no, not the late night TV host) but there was an animated spoof of 24, among other clever sketches. The one with the farmer and his mixed-up signs: can't help but wonder if the original show would have ever tried to be, dare I say it, "risque"? :-)
All in all, I thought that the new The Electric Company holds a lot of promise, and maybe even quite a bit of entertainment value for (ahem...) those of us among the "older" set. There's a lot of potential here for PBS to have another classic show on its hands.
Now all it needs is something on par with Morgan Freeman taking a bath in a casket...
Final Language PostedThere is no reason at all why this bill, as bloated as it is, should not be in standard rich-text Acrobat format. 1,419 pages? In a document containing all text and no images, that would be extremely quick and easy to download, not to mention convenient to search and scan.
Posted at 11:00 pm on Thursday, February 12, 2009The final language has been posted; you can find links to the various docs at the Speaker's website. Update: The speaker's website is apparently down. Imagine that. Docs are also available here.
The total size of the four major files is over 100MB, and consists of 1419 pages. Three of the four files are huge "scanned" PDFs, meaning they were created by printing the original document and then scanning it in again --- and therefore contain no real "text" that can be easily searched. This will make our parsing process difficult and more time consuming, so we most likely won't have our versions ready until midday tomorrow. But we'll see...
But instead, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has published the "stimulus" as unwieldy scanned images.
In my mind, either the House website staff is inept and incapable of fully grasping available technology, or this is a deliberate attempt to prevent the legislation from easily being scrutinized by the public.
I'm inclined to believe the latter.
Alexandre Philippe is a filmmaker who is currently working on an ambitious project called The People vs. George Lucas (here's the official website: PeopleVsGeorge.com). Tonight, Alexandre and his crew released the first trailer for their film.
Behold!
Want to see it drastically embiggened and high-deffed? Mash down here!
And at 1:29 into the trailer, there's a black and white clip showing "George Lucas" furiously typing. No, your eyes ain't deceiving you: that is Chad Austin from my first film Forcery (click here to watch THAT movie)! Alexandre contacted me about using Forcery awhile back, and all of us at KWerky Productions are thrilled to have been invited to take part in this project.
The People vs. George Lucas is scheduled for a 2010 wide release. As you can expect, it will be a pleasure to keep y'all posted about it in the meantime :-)
...and listen very, very carefully to the scene early in the episode where Jin, Danielle and the rest of her team are on the beach. In particular, listen to the voice that's reading out "the numbers" on the radio.
It sounds like Hurley's.
As if this story isn't loopy enough already!
The patient has now been without detectable HIV for two years now, and is not currently on any antiretroviral medication. However, researchers warn that the therapy is "too extreme and too dangerous to be used as a routine treatment", and that a third of those who undergo it die from complications.
I'd still chalk it up as a victory for this kind of medical research, though. Who knows what kind of refinement might eventually come from such a development. And gene therapy is still a very new field: during the next ten or twenty years, we're likely to see even more powerful advances.
Maybe if you rack up a high enough score, it'll unlock Hooded Justice and Mothman as playable characters :-P
So to the Tarheels: congratulations!
(I just don't want to have to make a habit of saying that :-P)
And "This Place Is Death", tonight's episode, was one of the richest of the series to date.
I thought it was also one of the strongest of the Sun and Jin-centric episodes, and doesn't it say something about Lost that Sun could be in 2008 and Jin could be back on the Island in 1988, and this show still make sense? After how powerful the reunion between Desmond and Penny was, I'm of the mind that the setup is happening before our eyes for something much, much more intense when Jin and Sun find their way back to each other. They'd better get back: I know hordes of people who will be honked-off enraged if that doesn't happen.
The scenes in 1988 with Danielle and her team explored a lot of ground in a surprisingly short amount of time. I've wondered what "the sickness" was that 2004 Danielle was talking about... might it have something to do with "Smokey"?
Daniel and Charlotte: seemed handled a bit clunky, but I'm willing to see how this plays out. Jeremy Davies proves once more why he was the perfect choice to play Daniel: nobody does off-kilter lovable nerds better than he :-)
Ben's emotional blow-up in the van was an excellent scene. Michael Emerson shows again that he is one of the best actors working in the medium right now. More and more it's becoming easier to take Ben at his word, and I don't think he was being deceitful at all when he talked about what he and others had done to protect the Oceanic 6.
So... Locke has done it. He has turned the wheel and is on his way. Can't wait to see the story of "Jeremy Bentham" unfold once he gets to the outside world.
The final scene, where the gang meets Eloise inside the church: can't help but think that portends some amazing stuff next week. Eloise speaking in the teaser about how "this is how the Island was found" while showing the weird pendulum is painfully tantalizing. Can't wait 'til next Wednesday to get here to find out more.
Okay so... thought? :-)
At least 600 pieces of spaceborne shrapnel are now plaguing the sky, no thanks to an unprecedented collision between two satellites in low-Earth orbit.Early yesterday, 790 kilometers (490 miles) above Siberia, an inoperative Russian satellite called Cosmos 2251 smashed into Iridium33, a communications satellite. Ground radar is now tracking the hundreds of resulting bits of debris, hoping that none of it will smash into any other satellites or the International Space Station.
When asked which satellite was at fault, NASA scientist Nicholas Johnson said, "they ran into each other. Nothing has the right of way up there. We don't have an air traffic controller in space. There is no universal way of knowing what's coming in your direction."
The good news, if there is any, is that Iridium Satellite LLC still has 64 satellites in unusually low orbit, relaying calls between special satellite phones (the U.S. Department of Defense is one of its biggest customers).
I wonder if one of them was trying to speed through an intersection...
This is a sad day for the very many of us who have faithfully followed the "scurrilous commentary" of Fred Reed. The renaissance man behind Fred On Everything announced yesterday that he is ending his regular columns, owing to upcoming surgery for a corneal transplant (as Reed puts it "this being the belated result of a largely forgotten foray by the US into military adventurism").Reed shared his reasons for beginning his web-based column, and he speaks for many of us in conveying the biggest reason why a lot of us do this, in whatever way we can. He also admits some inevitable frustration with it all...
"My reasons for inditing the sucker were, first, to see whether a web column could work and, second, to get away from the strangling grasp of political correctness. A third reason, common I suppose to most columnists, was the hope that, however minor my voice might be, in combination with thousands of others it might engender pressure for slowing the rush into the high-tech medieval twilight that the culture has undertaken.As with everything else he has written that I've read over the years, it's a great essay. Our thoughts and prayers go out to him, and here's hoping that the Internet's best curmudgeon and best-known expatriate will be back in the saddle sooner than later :-)"This by now is clearly quixotic. The civilizational changes we now see are both irremediable and beyond control. The peasantrification and empty glitter of society, pervasive hostility to careful thought, onrushing authoritarianism, and distaste for cultivation are now endemic. I do not know where these lead, but we are assuredly going to get there. Fuming buys nothing."
I've got friends in Mexico City who tell me they can't believe us Yanks aren't talking about this "enough". Juarez, straight across the border from El Paso, has seen more than fifteen hundred murders already in the past year. Many of them have been of the "send a message" variety... particularly the bodies that the police are finding sans heads.
So maybe this'll open some eyes: the government of the state of Texas is bracing for a likely collapse of Mexico's authority and the millions of refugees that would no doubt be streaming north to escape the chaos.
Should this happen, the services infrastructure of the United States... well, it ain't in such hot shape either, is it?
Whatever happens, it will assuredly not be anything like this great clip from the Latino Comedy Project...
And guess what else ACTOYS has snagged? I hate hate hate that Michael Bay wasted the name "Devastator" on a mere army tank in Transformers, so I'm betting they'll stick another name on the Constructicon combiner.
Whatever it's gonna be called, the Constructicons gestalt is one pure angry design that looks hella kewl!
Seibertron.com has a lively discussion going on now about the Fallen and, ahem..., "Devastator".
I just hope it won't require a Masters degree in engineering to put the toy of that thing together.
"For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind..."-- Hosea 8:7
ABC's hit show Dancing with the Stars returns for a new season on March 9th. And it's been confirmed that joining singers Jewel and Belinda Carlisle, gymnast Shawn Johnson and rapper Lil' Kim will be none other than Steve Wozniak, AKA "The Woz" and co-founder of Apple Computers.I might have to check this out. Steve Wozniak has always seemed to be a pretty cool guy. He's currently active with a Segway Polo team (though that might not help his footwork much on the dance floor).
Too bad Circus of the Stars is no longer on television: we could have probably seen Steve Ballmer throwing chairs on the high wire.
I could easily see this trend continuing, and into some potentially very interesting new territory over the next several years. Like, f'rinstance: a group of video bloggers, armed with inexpensive equipment and bleeding-edge Internet bandwidth, setting up a live operation on par with anything Fox News and CNN is doing.
Don't think it can't happen.
According to a story on Bloomberg.com, the total cost of all the bailouts that the U.S. House and Senate are pursuing with this "stimulus" package, is going to come out to, at least, $9.7 trillion.
Here it is for people who like to look at lots of zeroes...
It's said to be enough to pay off 90% of all the homeowner mortgages in this country.
I'm going to paraphrase a line that I heard from a movie several years ago...
"The country is headed for trouble. The country is headed for grief."
