STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE was released 10 years ago today

So very long we waited for it. And now looking back, it seems like only yesterday...

It was ten years ago today that Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace opened, the first Star Wars movie since 1983.

I saw it twice on opening day... and both times before 6 a.m.! The week before its release date I camped out overnight at the West End Cinema in Burlington, North Carolina (following a great evening of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Elon) so that I could get tickets the next day for me and a bunch my friends at the midnight premiere. And then a few days later The Good Morning Show on WFMY was asking some Star Wars trivia questions and asking people to call in with the answers. I didn't even know it was a contest at the time. The question was "What Star Wars planet has mile-high skyscrapers?" and bleary-eyed that I was just waking up, I knew it was Coruscant. So I phoned in and turned out I had just won two tickets for a 3:10 a.m. showing on opening day.

Long story short: about thirty of us saw the first showing of Star Wars Episode I at 12:01 a.m., and then I hightailed it to Elon, picked up good friend Clark and we sped off to Greensboro for his first time watching the movie, my second. A reporter from WFMY was there and he asked if we could stick around to be interviewed live for The Good Morning Show, so we did that for two segments and then headed back home.

Looking back on it, I've mixed feelings for The Phantom Menace. No doubt a lot of us now think that the movie could have been better. That our enthusiasm for it stemmed primarily from the fact that we had been starved of a new Star Wars movie for so long. But I also think that whatever shortcomings Star Wars Episode I had, were more than made up for by the subsequent two prequels. As its own film, it's not half bad, but not really half good either. Taken as the initial chapter of the Skywalker family saga that arcs throughout all six Star Wars movies however, it works pretty well.

But, that's neither here nor there. The reason for this post is to celebrate that day, ten years ago, when the fans' prayers were answered and we finally got a new Star Wars film. So Happy Birthday The Phantom Menace! :-)

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Bodybuilding championship canceled after competitors flee from drug testers

Over in Belgium, that country's bodybuilding championship has been canceled after drug testing officials showed up... which caused all the competitors to split the scene.

A doping official says bodybuilders just grabbed their gear and ran off when he came into the room.

"I have never seen anything like it and hope never to see anything like it again," doping official Hans Cooman said Monday.

Twenty bodybuilders were entered in the weekend competition.

Cooman says the sport has a history of doping "and this incident didn't do its reputation any good."

According to the article at Breitbart.com, three-fourths of all the entrants at last year's event tested positive for drug use.

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Study Ball: Probably the WORST educational product EVER

Any parent who puts this on their child in order to make him or her study should be chemically castrated with the harshest drugs possible. If they must rely on something like the Study Ball (shown at right) then they haven't a damn clue about what it means to be responsible parents at all!

(Yeah I know: this might just be one of those "tongue in cheek" gag products. But even so: I'd never want to hear of it being taken too seriously...)

The Study Ball is based on the old-fashioned "ball and chain" that prisoners were made to wear so as to inhibit any escape attempts. In the case of Study Ball though, it's meant to keep a child anchored in one place for a predetermined span of time: purportedly studying for exams instead of watching television, etc. Parents fasten the 21-pound Study Ball to a kid's ankle and then a digital timer counts down the "study time left", automatically locking when time expires. It can't be made to stay locked for more than four hours and it comes with a key that allows removal at any time.

What's next: turning entire kindergarten classes into chain gangs?

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Quentin Campbell fights the Zombies!!!

So a few days ago en route to see Star Trek at the Wachovia IMAX in Raleigh, good friend/fellow blogger Phillip Arthur and I stopped by HyperMind in Burlington, 'cuz Phillip is a fellow geek in good standing and I thought he'd get a kick out of this place, and we had plenty of time before the 10 p.m. showing (we also hooked up with Chad Austin, who really needs to update his blog sometime 'specially since he now has only 26 days left as a free man before taking the vows). But anyway...

While we were in HyperMind, I spotted this game box and took a picture of it with my new cellphone. It's something called Zombies!!!, the "Director's Cut" version. And I've been told that it's a pretty popular tile-based strategy game. But what caught my eye was the chainsaw-wielding protagonist fighting off the undead on the front of the box.

I can't figure out if that's supposed to be Quentin Tarantino or Bruce Campbell.

Just for fun I took it around the store and showed it to some more people. The opinions were pretty evenly split: about the same number of people thought it was Bruce Campbell as thought it was Quentin Tarantino.

What do you think? If you need a better look aim your sights at the Zombies!!! entry on BoardGameGeek.

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"No Fly, No Buy Act": New York congressb*tch conspires to deprive citizens of Second Amendment without due process

(I soooo wanted to put an "i" in that word, but as it's a Sunday I'm trying to restrain myself.)

Longtime readers of this blog already know that I loathe, loathe, LOATHE the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration, and damn nearly everything else that George W. Bush implemented in the name of "national security" when he was President. I have never liked them for a very many reasons: that these were measures that were rushed into becoming enacted with little consideration or even seriously reading the language of the associated bills, for one thing. Because there are numerous fascist connotations surrounding it all. And because the Department of Homeland Security and everything connected with it has proven to be the most abused, corrupt and inefficient example of government bureaucracy to have come along in a VERY long time.

But most of all: because I have never doubted that the purpose of the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration has never been to protect us from "the terrists".

The real, albeit unstated goal of the DHS and the TSA, has been to "protect" the federal government from the American people.

I defy anybody to tell me that I'm a "kook" or "crazy" for saying that, in light of the bill that Carolyn McCarthy, Representative from New York's Fourth District in the U.S. House, is now sponsoring...

The "No Fly, No Buy Act", if passed and signed into law, would automatically deprive EVERYONE on the federal government's No Fly List from being able to legally purchase a firearm.

Pardon me for saying this but: What. The. Fvck...?!?

(Came perilously close that time. I'm trying hard, folks.)

In other words: If this become law, the government will be able to take away anyone's right, guaranteed by the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, to purchase and possess a gun (and possibly anything else deemed to be a weapon)... by merely putting that person's name on the No Fly List. There will be no due process. A person will not have to first be found guilty of committing a felony. All it will take is a single asshole practically anywhere in government and accountable to no one, entering your name onto the Transportation Security Administration's No Fly List. A thing that we as citizens have no right to easily and swiftly contest or even to know how one's name came to be on the list to begin with.

So the federal government has already been at work to unjustly deprive many of the right to travel freely. McCarthy's bill seeks to now deprive us - at the whim of any politician or bureaucrat - of the right to self-defense WITHOUT ANY DUE PROCESS!

We don't have to be worried about "the terrace over there", my friends. People like Carolyn McCarthy do far worse damage to the United States than any terrorist could possibly dream of pulling off.

And at the risk of sounding cliched: if stuff like this does not bother you, then you are not paying enough attention!

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Wolfram Alpha takes search engines to a whole new level

So as you can see from the screen capture on the right, I couldn't resist having a little fun with it. But all joviality aside, Wolfram Alpha might be the hugest leap forward in search engine technology since Google debuted more than ten years ago.

Calling itself a "computational knowledge engine", Wolfram Alpha takes your query and then instead of trying to match it up with a best result, it computes an answer from a vast base of structured data. Ask it "2+2" and it will give you 4. Punch in some quadratic equations or other advanced math and Wolfram Alpha will spit out a bunch of graphs for it. Tell Wolfram Alpha "Greensboro, North Carolina" and it will give you a map of the town's location, the population, average elevation from sea level and some other relevant data. Ask for the weather in a certain place on the day that you were born and Wolfram Alpha will tell you that too. And those are just for openers: you wouldn't believe what Wolfram Alpha can do with a string of notations for nucleic acids and how it'll find 'em in the human genome, among other things.

Wolfram Alpha is open for public "testing" this weekend, before it officially launches tomorrow. Give it a whirl! This is definitely the future of Internet searching.

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Last night: STAR TREK. In IMAX.

The 10 p.m. show was sold out at the Wachovia IMAX in Raleigh. Thank goodness for Fandango!

And you still have a week to catch it in its limited IMAX run. However it is that you see Star Trek (click here for my review) I'll definitely recommend watching it in a theater with others. The crowd was just as enthusiastic about Star Trek yesterday evening as they were on opening night a little over a week ago and we found ourselves catching stuff that we didn't notice the first time around.

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TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN score by Steve Jablonsky ON SALE JUNE 23rd!!!

Praise be the Allspark, we do NOT have to go through this crazy mess a second time...

Good friend of this blog Kartik Kaul has passed along the word that Steve Jablonsky's score soundtrack CD for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will go on sale June 23rd! Also on the same day will be a "Music From..." CD for the movie. Which is all well and good but uhhh... as most people know it's the orchestral score that we are mostly interested in on this blog :-P

Here's the link to the score CD's page on Amazon.com where you can pre-order it. Which I've already done for mine :-)

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Selective Myopia: James Dobson decries "utter evil" Congress

I still can't believe that I almost went to work for this guy...

James Dobson of Focus on the Family is telling his radio listeners that there is now "utter evil" coming out of Congress. What scares Dobson, he claims, is so-called "hate crimes" legislation: the proponents of which want tougher penalties for those convicted of criminal acts committed against others because of "sexual orientation".

Now folks, I'm against "hate crimes" legislation myself. Because in my mind there is no such thing as a "hate" crime. Does the motive honestly matter why somebody chooses to hurt another, if the end result is the same as any other circumstance? I have as much sympathy for a victim of a criminal act as I will for any other... but I'm not gonna consider one victim to be any more "special" than someone else because of alleged precipitating criteria. So as far as that goes, I will say that I have to agree with Dobson.

Where I can not agree with him however, is what is very apparently his underlying motivation for saying such a thing. Indeed, there is little doubting the motivation for much of Focus on the Family's "ministry"...

"I want to tell our listeners something has come up that is so shocking and so outrageous, we must make our friends out there aware of it," he said on his daily radio program.

"I'm going to speak very bluntly today because there's no other word for it: the utter evil that's coming out of Congress," he said. "I've been on the air 32 years and I've never seen a time quite like this.

"The radical left controls the executive branch through the president, and the Congress where the Democrats have control of both the House and the Senate," he said, adding the courts are expected to move even further to the left."

Anytime I hear phrases like "radical left" or "far right", those pop a honkin' big red flag in my head... 'cuz such words scream what this is all about. And his very tired hyperbole like "so shocking and so outrageous" isn't working in Dobson's favor either.

James Dobson is primarily interested in "his side" regaining political control of Congress and the White House.

Except James Dobson apparently fails to realize that "his side" had both for most of the past decade, and accomplished... what, exactly, in that time?

Professing Christians in America like James Dobson still believe - and very foolishly, I will add - that this country can be saved through politics.

They are so much more wrong about that, than I can possibly put into words.

These people have become blinded by might. They have placed more faith in their own understanding than they have placed in the Christ whom they claim to follow.

And as I have said before: people like James Dobson have no sincere interest at all in issues like "gay marriage" and abortion being defeated and going away. Opposition to them brings in a huge amount of money to organizations like Focus on the Family. Why else did the Republicans never make any serious attempt to pass an amendment to the Constitution protecting "traditional marriage" when they controlled Congress? Because so long as they can keep promising to oppose it, there'll always be plenty of well-meaning rubes gullible enough to keep voting for them.

This is all a game, folks. The politicians in both major parties have been playing us like pieces for too damned long. And people like James Dobson and too #@*&-ing many others don't care one whit about what is right: they just want to have a seat at "the king's table".

So if we can't put our faith in politics, what do we put our faith in, then?

Maybe... God?

And not the "God" that people like Dobson would have us believe has decreed that "Thou shalt not vote against any Republican", either.

I mean a serious and sincere turning away from what we want: rejecting any desire for worldly power, and heartfelt repenting of ever having lusted for such a thing.

If there is evil at work in the land, it is because we - all of us, including the professing "conservatives" and "Republicans" - let it happen by trusting in ourselves more than we trusted in God.

Yes, this demands that thing called "humility" which has become inordinately out of fashion among too many of those who claim to follow Christ. But that is what it is going to require.

And until I hear a call for that coming out of the mouth of James Dobson, I see no reason why any of us should consider him to be a real "Christian leader" at all.

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Rheum palaestinum: The plant that waters itself

All sorts of interesting science news coming out of Israel these days. Last week there was the world's oldest patch of exposed soil. Now comes word that a variety of desert rhubarb can irrigate itself: the only plant in the world known to have such an ability.

Mash down here for the fascinating story of Rheum palaestinum: the plant that waters itself.

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Brain does complex problem-solving while daydreaming

Perhaps Wally from Scott Adams' Dilbert is on to more than he realizes...

From ScienceDaily...

Brain's Problem-solving Function At Work When We Daydream

ScienceDaily (May 12, 2009) — A new University of British Columbia study finds that our brains are much more active when we daydream than previously thought.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that activity in numerous brain regions increases when our minds wander. It also finds that brain areas associated with complex problem-solving – previously thought to go dormant when we daydream – are in fact highly active during these episodes.

"Mind wandering is typically associated with negative things like laziness or inattentiveness," says lead author, Prof. Kalina Christoff, UBC Dept. of Psychology. "But this study shows our brains are very active when we daydream – much more active than when we focus on routine tasks."

For the study, subjects were placed inside an fMRI scanner, where they performed the simple routine task of pushing a button when numbers appear on a screen. The researchers tracked subjects' attentiveness moment-to-moment through brain scans, subjective reports from subjects and by tracking their performance on the task.

The findings suggest that daydreaming – which can occupy as much as one third of our waking lives – is an important cognitive state where we may unconsciously turn our attention from immediate tasks to sort through important problems in our lives...

I totally, totally agree with this assessment. If for no other reason than because I happen to believe that our minds are a wondrous creation and should be allowed to unfold and develop at their own pace just as much as we say that we encourage such a thing. There is power in play, so to speak. Look at a company like Google, which practically mandates leisure time while its employees are on the clock: not many firms that are as creative and applied as they are.

And I think the evidence speaks for itself about how this study relates to the more formative years of an individual. People like Albert Einstein didn't allow their minds to fit "the pattern". He let his mind roam and play as he saw fit, and from it came an understanding of the universe that shattered all previous paradigms.

So at the risk of being punny, what y'all think? :-)

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When there's no more room in Hell, the dead shall shop the Earth!

Leave it to the federal government to re-define the old saying about "death and taxes".

THOUSANDS of the dearly departed are receiving "stimulus" checks. It's been estimated that "between 8,000 and 10,000 checks for millions of dollars" worth of publicly-financed "economic recovery" is being written out to those who are long beyond such temporal concepts as money and spending.

And some of these people, it turns out, never received a Social Security number! Meaning that to the government they weren't officially alive to begin with.

Sorta brings a whole new meaning to "the undead" when you think about it...

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Jacob... and Esau? LOST Season 5 finale prologue

This one episode opening has everything that makes Lost the best show on television, and perhaps even of all time: character, dialogue, mystery, special effects that complement but never overwhelm the story... and that amazing score by Michael Giacchino.

I've watched this episode twice since it aired last night, but I've gone over this scene a dozen times again at least. I'm inclined to believe it has a lot of portent about the sixth and final season of Lost: that the story we've been watching, hasn't been the real story at all. That everything we've seen during the past five seasons has been a setup for a cosmic battle between good and evil, God and Satan.

So here it is: the opening scene of "The Incident", where we finally see the face of Jacob and learn that he is not alone on the Island...

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FDA sez: Cheerios cereal a drug

Here's the letter from the Food and Drug Administration to General Mills, telling the company that it is marketing its Cheerios cereal as a drug.

The FDA's problem, it seems, is that General Mills is claiming that Cheerios reduce cholesterol too much.

Meanwhile, those damned Enzyte commercials with "Smilin' Bob" continue to broadcast claims of "male enhancement".

I wonder if this means there'll be a run on Cheerios at the grocery stores now. People do not like being told by their government that something is "bad" for them like this, when they have been enjoying it for so long.

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Last LOST post-episode reaction until January 2010

I am literally hoarse from screaming during the past two hours.

Just the opening few minutes of tonight's Lost fifth season finale, "The Incident", whammed everyone hard upside the head and didn't let up.

Last week we got "Follow the Leader", which was marginally an episode focusing on Richard... even though we didn't actually find out anything new about him that we didn't already know. I enjoyed that episode but for the past week, that lack of new mythology when given the opportunity has bugged me a lot.

So what do we get to make up for it this week? How does Season 5 end?

With a Jacob-centric episode.

Whoa...

Jacob. The statue (a hella lot more about it than has ever been revealed before). The Black Rock. The "lists". What happened to Rose and Bernard. Vincent! How Hurley got talked into going back to the Island. The incident at the Swan station. What happened to Dr. Chang's arm (which I totally called on Twitter several minutes before we saw it)...

Won't be sleeping tonight again, like every other Lost season finale.

The two biggest questions for the next nine months: if Locke is still dead, then who the #&@* is that who went into the statue to see Jacob?

(My guess right off the cuff: that's really "the Monster" that's been imitating Locke all this time, and it was the Monster that we saw goading Jacob on the Island in the 1800s-era first scene of tonight's episode. There is some kind of enmity between Jacob and whatever the Monster really is, and the Monster has been trying to kill Jacob all this time. And now, in a master stroke of irony, Benjamin Linus himself has been manipulated into doing what the Monster has failed to do on its own thus far.)

And as Marvin the Martian once put it: "Where's the Ka-boom?! There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering Ka-boom!" LOVED how the episode ended with the total reverse of the usual Lost black card: blinding white this time, with Lost in black lettering.

Ye gods, my brain is frazzled after the past two hours!

Okay, I'm gonna have to watch that again. The scenes with Jacob alone might make this the most important Lost episode to date.

And if tomorrow is like any other Lost finale day-after, I'll likely be posting some more thoughts and observations as they hit me :-)

EDIT 11:44 p.m. EST: So... what is it that "lies in the shadow of the statue"?

Richard answered in Latin: "Ille qui nos omnes servabit".

Just hearing from multiple sources that it translates into English as "He who will save us all."

Discuss!

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No jokin' about no smokin': North Carolina to ban lighting up in public

For the record: I don't smoke. I don't recommend anyone taking up smoking. It's a nasty habit and I've seen what it can do to one's health. It's not something I'd wish on anybody.

But I'm also of the mind that it's left to the individual whether or not he or she chooses to smoke. And that means that it should be up to business owners to decide whether or not they allow smoking in places they own like restaurants and bars.

And I also have come to believe that in the few short months since she was sworn in, that Bev Perdue has already become the worst Governor that I have ever seen North Carolina have in my lifetime. She's already "effed"-up our educational budget bigtime. Now this...

"An important and historic day for North Carolina." That's what Perdue declared today as she announced she would immediately sign a bill just passed by the state's General Assembly that will BAN smoking in ALL public places.

In all honesty, I never thought I would live to see the day that smoking in public was outlawed in, of all places, North Carolina: the biggest tobacco-producing region in the world.

And as I said before: I don't smoke, and wouldn't want anyone to take it up either. But as an infringement on individual liberty, what Governor Perdue and the General Assembly are doing is wrong.

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$9 TRILLION unaccounted for by the Federal Reserve...

...and they haven't a clue where all that money went.

Watch as Inspector General Elizabeth Coleman of the Federal Reserve stumbles and stalls as she tries to 'splain how in the world did her bunch lose $9,000,000,000,000:

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