So, it has come to this: Chris reviews TWILIGHT

Yeah, I've read Twilight, the first novel of Stephenie Meyer's vampire series that has sold bazillions of copies and is now threatening us with a second motion picture. Even though I'm hardly the target audience for these books, I figured that it's culturally relevant enough to acquaint myself with it.

And I have to report to all two of this blog's faithful readers that much to my surprise, I enjoyed Twilight more than I had anticipated. So far as vampire fiction goes I'm still going to consider Dracula to be the high bar, along with Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (the first several books anyway). But in Twilight I found a satisfying fulfillment of something I hadn't realized there had been a dearth of: a thoroughly modern-day American vampire mythos.

And that's the thing that makes me want to read the other books in the Twilight series: Meyer does establish quite a deep and empathetic lore in her tale of Bella, Edward and the Cullen clan of vampires. Yeah, they're vampires. I can finally buy into that. Up 'til now, what little I'd known of the vampires in the Twilight books had caused me to muster up a "meh". I mean, "vampires" who aren't afraid of sunlight, aren't repelled by garlic or crucifixes, etc.? Those aren't vampires, those are people with severe eating disorders at most. But having the read the book I kinda like this updated take on the vampire physiology, just as I thought Anne Rice had a brilliant and even sensible basis for vampires in her literature.

In other aspects, Twilight reads much like any romantic novel aimed at adolescents and young adults... and that's fine too. Vampire fiction cuts across a huge swath of genre. In this case it didn't detract from my personal appreciation of the novel at all, and I don't foresee it being a hindrance in my reading the other installments of the Twilight series either.

So if, like me, you've been wandering the bookstore aisles and inwardly debating whether Twilight is a book worth sinking your teeth into (or at least sinking into your wallet and plunking down money for), I'll have to give it a good recommendation.

And maybe sometime I'll even draw up the courage to watch the movie...

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Right now I'm watching THE SUPER HERO SQUAD SHOW

Y'all have got to check this out! It's on Cartoon Network and it's based on those cute lil' Marvel Super Hero Squad toys from Hasbro. But don't let that mislead ya: The Super Hero Squad Show is really more like Marvel Comics meets The Family Guy.

What sort of funny are we talking here? Captain America was just on the phone while wearing a Confederate outfit, discussing the re-enactment he's on his way to: "Hey it's the Civil War, what's the worst that could happen?"

Looks like I've found something new to DVR (in addition to those reruns of Are You Being Served? on PBS :-)

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What if the Internet was turned off?

"It's the not-to-distant future. They've turned off the Internet. After the riots have settled down and the withdrawal symptoms have faded, how would you cope?"

That's the grim scenario envisioned by Cracked.com, which asked its readers to send in their Photoshop-ped submissions depicting an Internet-addicted society suddenly having to make do without things like Twitter, Nigerian scam e-mails and online porno. At the link you'll find the top twenty entries, each hysterically funny... and clever!

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Obama declares national emergency because of swine flu

Read it here folks.

That's a helluva over-reaction to something that otherwise hasn't been inordinately differently from the typical garden-variety influenza. But to hear it from some people, it's already akin to the 1918 pandemic that killed millions in a very short period of time.

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If you can find them, and no one else can help...

...maybe you can hire... The A-Team!

ComingSoon.net has just posted this pic (click to significantly embiggen) of Bradley Cooper as Lt. Templeton "Faceman" Peck, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson as Sgt. "B.A." Baracus, Sharlto Copley as Capt. "Howling Mad" Murdock, and Liam Neeson as John "Hannibal" Smith - along with the team's signature van - from the upcoming film adaptation of the beloved Eighties television series. The movie is out this coming June.

Maybe if we're good boys and girls we'll get a teaser trailer by Christmas :-)

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N.C. State engineers create chip with storage out the wazoo

Some cutting-edge stuff coming out of North Carolina State University: researchers there have created a chip the size of a human fingernail that can store... get this... a TERABYTE of data!

In layman's terms that's about 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text.

The engineers made their breakthrough using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change.

Working at the nanoscale, the engineers added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers -- a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers. The discovery represents a 90% size reduction compared with today's techniques, and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity.

Click here for the official press release from Dr. Jagdish "Jay" Narayan and his team at N.C. State., including how the processes they've discovered can also be applied to fuel economy, reduction of heat in semiconductors and engine design.

I'm already giddy about the thought of one of those chips in an iPod...

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Nifty, Nifty: "Weird Al" Yankovic is FIFTY!

Fifty years ago today, on October 23rd 1959 in the little burg of Downey, California, proud parents Nick and Mary Yankovic celebrated the arrival of a son. They dubbed their newly-spawned offspring Alfred.

A few years later a door-to-door salesman arrived at the Yankovic home in nearby Lynwood and offered either guitar or accordion lessons at a nearby school. Nick and Mary chose the accordion.

And with that fateful decision, the world would never be the same again...

Along with millions of his fans throughout the world, The Knight Shift blog and its proprietor wishes a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY today to "Weird Al" Yankovic!

God bless you and yours Al. Can't wait to see what the next fifty years bring from ya :-)

(And while we're on the subject, why not celebrate Al's birthday by giving him some hard-earned royalties? Mash down here to order The Essential "Weird Al" Yankovic 2-disc CD set, due out this coming Tuesday!)

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Man pleads guilty on charge of drunk-driving his La-Z-Boy

62-year-old Dennis LeRoy Anderson has rigged his La-Z-Boy recliner with a lawnmower motor, stereo and cup holders for his beer. Last year following drinking "eight or nine beers" Anderson crashed his... thing... into a parked car after leaving a bar in Duluth, Minnesota.

Anderson has now plead guilty to a DWI charge. The judge has sentenced him to two years of probation.

(That is definitely a new one for the "Hold muh beer and watch this..." file!)

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Understanding Einstein's energy

Energy Tribune has a BRILLIANT essay by William Tucker about Albert Einstein's classic equation E=mc²: the formula describing the interchangeability between mass and energy. Tucker's essay not only lays out E=mc² in terms that anyone can easily grasp, it also argues why current efforts at renewable energy are not sufficient. Instead, Tucker lays out a solid case - using simple mathematics - for the use of nuclear energy and why it has a far less malign impact on the environment than we have come to accept. If you want an eye-opener of a read, check it out!

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Awright, 'fess up y'all

How many poor saps out there were waiting in line at midnight to buy a copy of the Windows 7 operating system?

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Claudville, Virginia gets first public white-space network

The town of Claudville in Patrick County, Virginia - a place where I have lots of ancestral roots - is the launching site of the much-awaited white-space network technology! Described as "Wi-Fi on steroids", white-space allows for much more bandwidth over larger areas. A bunch of it just got freed-up from switchover to digital television transmission earlier this year (what, you didn't think that all that spectrum was just gonna go to waste, didja?). This first network comes as a result of collaboration between Microsoft, Dell and Spectrum Bridge.

Okay well what I wanna know is: does the Wal-Mart in Patrick Springs carry white-space routers already??

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Gears of War Snuggie

Epic Games PR lass Dana Cowley has Twitter-ed about the latest creation from Epic's studio a few towns over in Cary: a prototype Gears of War snuggie! Yes, you can now wrap yourself in luxurious warmth and the body armor of legendary COG hero Marcus Fenix... all at once!

Ehhhh... personally I'd rather have official Gears of War Underoos :-P

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It's that time of year again

And if you buy extra boxes of chocolate chip, the Girls Scouts will even give "protection" for your place of business.

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Russia watches American "Self Immolation"

'Tis painfully ironic that these observations are being made in Pravda, of all places. Stanislav Mishin writes...

It can be safely said, that the last time a great nation destroyed itself through its own hubris and economic folly was the early Soviet Union (though in the end the late Soviet Union still died by the economic hand). Now we get the opportunity to watch the Americans do the exact same thing to themselves. The most amazing thing of course, is that they are just repeating the failed mistakes of the past. One would expect their fellow travelers in suicide, the British, to have spoken up by now, but unfortunately for the British, their education system is now even more of a joke than that of the Americans...

(snip)

That brings us to Cap and Trade. Never in the history of humanity has a more idiotic plan been put forward and sold with bigger lies. Energy is the key stone to any and every economy, be it man power, animal power, wood or coal or nuclear. How else does one power industry that makes human life better (unless of course its making the bombs that end that human life, but that's a different topic). Never in history, with the exception of the Japanese self imposed isolation in the 1600s, did a government actively force its people away from economic activity and industry.

Even the Soviets never created such idiocy. The great famine of the late 1920s was caused by quite the opposite, as the Soviets collectivized farms to force peasants off of their land and into the big new factories. Of course this had disastrous results. So one must ask, are the powers that be in Washington and London degenerates or satanically evil? Where is the opposition? Where are the Republicans in America and Tories in England?

Twenty years ago communism collapsed under its own weight and today the people of the former Soviet Union get to watch the same thing happen to the United States, slowly but surely. Those folks know of what they speak probably better than most anyone else on the planet.

There's plenty more harsh truth in the rest of Mishin's essay.

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BATMAN & ROBIN is the most important comic book movie ever

So sayeth Marvel's president Kevin Feige... and it's pretty hard to disagree with his logic. 1997's fourth and final installment of the original Batman film franchise, notes Feige, "was so bad that it demanded a new way of doing things. It created the opportunity to do X-Men and Spider-Man, adaptations that respected the source material and adaptations that were not campy." Batman & Robin was such an atrocious waste of celluloid that it's now deemed the benchmark at which comic book film-making hit rock bottom and began the climb toward sincere and serious adaptations like The Dark Knight... because at that point things certainly couldn't have gotten any worse!

GeekTyrant has more thoughts from Feige. And also from Batman & Robin scribe Akiva Goldsman, who demonstrates enough sincere repentance about the mess that was Batman & Robin that maybe we should finally forgive him and Joel Schumacher for their involvement. In retrospect Warner Brothers was hellbent on making an overblown toy commercial, and not a real movie...

(But it also goes without saying that others before have also claimed that "we were only following orders".)

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What the...?!?

Sesame Street has spoofed AMC's Mad Men?!?

Considering that once upon a time Sesame Street did a parody of Twin Peaks starring Cookie Monster, can't really say that I'm surprised Children's TelevisionSesame Workshop would also adapt what is currently one of television's hottest shows for pee-wee appreciation :-)

Next month begins Sesame Street's fortieth season. Wonder if they could do a send-up of House or Lost sometime...

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Sequoia accidentally releases source code for its voting machines!

I absolutely hate, hate, HATE the very idea of electronic voting. Cannot say nearly enough rotten about it. I've no doubt that a lot of our more recent elections have been compromised and rigged - one way or another - by paperless tabulation. In a saner age, enough Americans would have gotten honked-off enough to have marched on the corporate headquarters of Diebold and Sequoia, burned the buildings down and sown the sites with salt.

Well friends and neighbors, tonight I get to grin a big 'un: Sequoia has inadvertently released the source code of its voting machines and... wonder upon wonders... already the code is shown to be breaking election law!

"Sequoia blew it on a public records response. ... They appear... to have just vandalized the data as valid databases by stripping the MS-SQL header data off, assuming that would stop us cold. They were wrong. The Linux 'strings' command was able to peel it apart. Nedit was able to digest 800-MB text files. What was revealed was thousands of lines of MS-SQL source code that appears to control or at least influence the logical flow of the election, in violation of a bunch of clauses in the FEC voting system rulebook banning interpreted code, machine modified code and mandating hash checks of voting system code."

Want to examine the code for yourself? studysequoia.wikispaces.com has whatcha need!

And truth be told, right now I'm kicking myself for having nearly flunked-out of that C computer programming class I took during my first semester at Elon. But I harbor no doubt: better minds than mine in such matters are going to be picking out a bunch of interesting - and quite possibly very illegal - stuff from this code.

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