BioShock cosplay recreates Rapture at the Georgia Aquarium (WOW!!!)

This is about the most crazy awesome astonishing thing that I have seen all month...

Folks, that is NOT from a BioShock video game! Harrison Krix out of Atlanta built that unbelievably sweet Big Daddy costume, then contacted reps with the Georgia Aquarium and got some time scheduled there for a photoshoot. With Harrison in his Big Daddy gear and his fiancée in decrepit dress and scary makeup as a Little Sister, they brought Rapture to life amid real sharks and jellyfish.

Click here for MANY more images of Harrison Krix's BioShock session at the Georgia Aquarium, including some that Harrison has made wallpaper size for your desktop (and they will certainly be made useful, of that there is no doubt :-)

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THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER: 11 days 'til showtime

Last night we had our first technical rehearsal for Theatre Guild of Rockingham County's production of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Prior to that co-directors Jeff and Melissa Mericle had a "costume parade" where the cast got to show off the costumes they had put together for approval. The idea is to evoke a Seventies-ish look (since that's the time period of the original novel).

Although I didn't take part in the costume parade itself (since it had been provided by the Theatre Guild with special arrangement with the Madison Fire Department) I did put on my Fireman's getup for the first time, and kept it on when we rehearsed the fire scene...

I have an entirely fresh appreciation for firefighters now, after wearing that for just one evening. It is heavy! And that's still not all of what I'll be running around in during the show. Firefighter's attire is big and bulky and gets hot inside: it's like a Snuggie from Hell. But when you think about the alternative and then realize that at the present time there is no alternative... yeah, I have to really tip my hat to the men and women who choose to do this for real.

"Technical rehearsal" is just what it sounds like: rehearsing just as we've done for the past four or five weeks, but with things like props and furniture in place, going through the lights and sounds, etc. We'll do it again tonight, and then full-blown dress rehearsals next week.

Everyone is stoked about doing this show! The kids especially are doing a terrific job. Hope y'all will get to come and see them shine :-)

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Tip your waiter or get arrested in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania!

Leslie Pope and John Wagner were hauled away from the Lehigh Pub in handcuffs by the police in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania last week. Their "crime"? Refusing to pay a tip!

If you're frustrated by poor service at a restaurant, think twice before you decide to not tip. You may be in for a bit more than just a dirty look from the waiter.

"Nobody, nobody wants to be forced to pay a tip or be arrested for terrible service," Leslie Pope said when her happy hour ended in handcuffs.

Pope and John Wagner were hauled away by police and charged with theft for not paying the mandatory 18 percent gratuity totaling $16 after eating at the Lehigh Pub in Bethlehem, Pa. with six friends.

Pope claimed that they had to wait nearly an hour for their order and that she had to get napkins and silverware for the table herself.

"At this point I became very annoyed because I had already gone up to the bar myself to have my soda refilled because the waitress never came back," Pope said.

After the $73 bill came, the group paid for food, drinks, and tax but refused to pay the tip. After explaining the bad service to the bartender in charge, Pope claimed he took their money and called police. The couple was handcuffed and placed in the back of a police car.

"I understand that, you know, we didn't pay the gratuity, but it was a gratuity, it wasn't something that was required," said Wagner.

The owner admitted that the group waited unusually long for their food, but said the pub was extremely busy that night. He said managers offered to comp the food, a claim the couple denies ever happened.

Obviously we would have liked for the patron and the establishment to have worked this out without getting the police involved," said Deputy Police Commissioner Stuart Bedics.

Police charged them with theft since the gratuity was part of the actual bill. However, it is doubtful that the charges will hold up in front of a judge. The couple is scheduled to appear in court next month.

Bet that's one place that's gonna lose some patronage!

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GeekTyrant's retrospective of ALIEN

2009 marks thirty years since Ridley Scott's film Alien was released. Alien remains one of the most classic and influential science fiction movies ever produced... and it has not only held up against the test of time, it's one of the few films of the genre that actually seems to get better with each passing year.

GeekTyrant has posted a fine retrospective of Alien, including some thoughts and observations that had never occurred to me before, as well as lots of trivia that will now doubt come as new information to many people (like how H.R. Giger's designs for the Facehugger were held up by alarmed U.S. Customs agents at the airport, prompting writer Dan O'Bannon to drive on over and explain that they were meant for a horror movie).

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Chad Austin makes THE NEW YORK TIMES!

A little over three years after my photo appeared in The New York Times, now it's life-long friend Chad Austin's turn! New York Times is running a story about the SAS Institute in Cary, where Chad works. The story is mostly about how the company is the biggest independent software company in the world and how its fast gaining attention in the corporate world, but there's also a lot about how SAS gives some awesome benefits to its employees. And among the photos in the slideshow accompanying the story there's this pic...

See those legs in the foreground wearing the blue-trimmed shoes? Those are Chad Austin's legs!

Sorry girls but as nice as Chad's calves are, he is a married man as of this past summer :-P

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Ahead of his time: Michael Crichton on the global warming fraud

"F---ing pissed!" And that was one of the more polite e-mails that have come in since Friday afternoon when this blog and many others spread the news about the Climate Research Unit at University of East Anglia getting hacked. That 61-megabyte .zip archive has gone viral across the Intertubes and bunches of blood-boiling stuff is still being gleaned from the correspondence between climate "scientists" that points to a decades-long conspiracy to promote paranoia about global warming at cost of rigorous and honest study.

Well, many people have been saying for a long time that global warming is fake. And few argued against global warming as articulately and passionately as did Michael Crichton. The acclaimed bestselling author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain addressed global warming in his novel State of Fear. It was one year ago this month that Crichton passed away, but I've no doubt that he would have been very pleased with this weekend's news... and would probably smile from knowing he was so far ahead of the curve. If you're interested in some serious discussion about the Earth and its climate, I greatly recommend reading Crichton's 2005 lecture "Complexity Theory and Environmental Management". It's a rather long read, but one rife with all sorts of solid information (the thing about Chernobyl severely made my jaw drop).

And I'm gonna do something that I've never done before: if you maintain a blog, SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT THE HACKING OF THE CRU! I'm seeing the traditional press start to finally disseminate this news, but they're (perhaps understandably but that's still no excuse) being awfully slow-pokish about it. This very well might be the biggest scam in modern history, when you consider all the money that's been wasted and legislation that's been enforced in the name of "global warming". Should that make everyone "f---ing pissed"?!? Yer #&@%ed right it should!!

If sincere investigation bears out that this has been a fraud, then careers must be forever destroyed and I'll even suggest that a lot of climate con-artists need to be strung up from the nearest telephone poles by their circular reproductive units. With piano wire.

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Chris Knight's somewhat typical Sunday

Right now: catching up on e-mail and news.

Later: writing more of the novel that I've been working on for National Novel Writing Month, which as things stand now won't be finished by the end of November because of all the good stuff that I'm finding to add into it. But what will be done by then should still be enough to meet the 150-pages needed to qualify as "done" for the month. I'll just put the finishing touches on it later :-)

Later still: painting some more of my army of Orks for Warhammer 40,000 and then laying out all my works for turkey frying on Thursday.

And done already this morning: videography of the baptisms of a friend's children at a church in Greensboro. I'd never done a baptismal job before.

Maybe someday I'll get to film a bris. But please... no tipping! :-P

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Linguist spends first three years of son's life speaking only Klingon

An expert at linguistics used nothing but the fictional Klingon language from the Star Trek franchise when he spoke to his son for the first three years of the kid's life.

Dr. d'Armond Speers wanted to observe whether baby Alec would pick up Klingon as naturally as most babies learn English or any other real language. Speers was especially giddy about the prospect of Alec's first word being "vav" (the Klingon term for "daddy"). Although Alec, now 13, doesn't speak Klingon at all, at the time "He was definitely starting to learn it... When Alec spoke back to me in Klingon his pronunciation was excellent."

This dude should have tried getting his son to speak fluent Sindarin or Quenya. Now that would have been impressive!

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Boeing creates laser weapon that shoots down flying aircraft

The photo on the left is an unmanned aerial vehicle (like those drone aircraft that are being used by the military) being tracked and destroyed while in flight by a laser weapon developed by the Integrated Defense Systems unit of the Boeing Company. This isn't the first practical laser-based weapon to be developed, but the technology is certainly getting refined at a brisk pace. For all intents and purposes, these are full-blown "laser cannons" like something out of Flash Gordon or Star Wars.

Aim your browser here for more, including the next technical goal that Boeing is setting out to accomplish: mounting these laser weapons onto sharks.

(I'm kidding! :-)

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It's an odd commentary on our culture...

...when all the literature on the front shelves of the bookstores is about either vampires, zombies, or Sarah Palin.

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Not much going on here today

How's things over at your place?

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CLIMATE RESEARCH UNIT HACKED! 61 megabytes reveal massaged data on global warming?! Did scientists conspire on climate scare?!

Ho-lee HELL!! This could turn into one of the biggest stories of the decade... scratch that, decades!

Could it be that the whole "global warming" thing has been nothing but a colossal scam on damned near every man, woman, child and dumb animal on the planet?!

The Intertubes are smoking hot this afternoon from the news about University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Unit getting hacked and a heapin' big pile of material being leaked online. The 61 megabyte file can be downloaded here. But if you want the gist of it, Watts Up With That has a bigtime discussion going on, including excerpts from the hacked stuff.

And if this small sample is any indication, a bunch of scientists have a lotta 'splainin' to do. There are e-mail exchanges among researchers about hiding data reflecting temperature decline over the past three decades, and even adding on to temperatures. There is also some troubling discussion of political ramifications of the climate research which strongly suggests that it has been severely tainted with outside interests.

Just... wow.

And according to the story at Watts Up With That, the Climate Research Unit has canceled all e-mail passwords and is now admitting that the breach is real. The plot thickens.

This demands to be the hardest-hitting story of the next week if not the next several months. It also needs to be thoroughly investigated... and let the chips fall where they may.

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WWII IN HD: Best high-def programming I've seen yet!

My DVR just received a massive enema. Gone is stuff that I've recorded like P2 and Krull and Clash of the Titans and Stroker Ace (though how that got scheduled is beyond me, and I'm still trying to figure out how I wound up with Yentl). So now I've got plenty of disk space to record WWII in HD from the History Channel.

HOW did I miss hearing about this until now? Well, no matter 'cuz History Channel is broadcasting them again and if you've got a high-definition television you really owe it to yourself to catch this, because you've never seen World War II as clear and brilliant as this before. See that still image? Those are British soldiers coming ashore at Normandy, and it looks so crisp and sharp you'd swear that this was footage gathered just yesterday.

If History Channel puts this out on Blu-ray... well, between that and Star Trek that's prolly gonna be more than enough to pull me into adopting a Blu-ray player at last. But 'til then, watch WWII in HD however ya can!

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LOST Season 6: February 2nd, 2010

ABC's Lost, perhaps the most defining and innovative show of the decade, will begin its sixth and final season on February 2nd, 2010. That's a Tuesday night by the way, which is where Lost will be from here on out (apart from a break for the Winter Olympics). Eighteen hours spread out over sixteen episodes will begin with the two-hour season premiere, "LA X".

Can showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse wrap up everything in those 18 hours?! In no particular order we've got: the smoke monster, Jacob, Richard's eternal youthfulness, Walt being "special", Christian Shepherd and why he's still walking around, the statue, the Temple (which we have yet to get a serious look at), the food drops, why Marvin Candle uses those names for different DHARMA films, the hollowed-out Bible, the Black Rock, whoever thought to build the pendulum inside the Lamppost station (I've thought since last season that there's some importance to that), Sun and Jin and how the heck they're supposed to reunite, how "the rules" don't apply to Desmond... and what promises to be an all-out epic war between Benjamin Linus and Charles Widmore for control of the Island if not of the Earth itself.

Holy cripes crispies, this season of Lost is going to be insane!

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Food Nazis strike again! Movie theater popcorn = 3 hamburgers?!?

The first time I heard about Center for Science in the Public Interest it was 1994. That was also the first time these ninnies went after movie theater popcorn. They declared it wasn't safe because of the coconut oil that most cinemas pop their corn in. The very next day EVERY movie theater listing in the News & Record posted declarations that their popcorn was free of coconut oil.

Those bastitches at Center for Science in the Public Interest made it damned near impossible to get a decent bag of popcorn at the movies for many years after that. Thankfully (well in my book anyway) most chains went back to using coconut oil.

But I learned something from that incident: that it's ridiculously easy in this modern world for someone or a small group of people to hide behind some fancy-pants official-sounding name that cons the media into thinking they're "legitimate". And from there they can claim anything and get away with it, no matter how outlandish. Who ARE the people at Center for Science in the Public Interest? Did anyone in the press do any hard questioning or fact-checking about their accusations at the time?

And that's why Center for Science in the Public Interest has borne a whole 'nother title in the vocabulary of Chris Knight these past fifteen years: the Food Nazis.

And now they're at it again! Once again the target is movie theater popcorn, which the Food Nazis at the Center for Science in the Public Interest insist is the equivalent of three hamburgers.

What the...?!?

Center for Science in the Public Interest claims that the findings were arrived at by "an independent lab". But when you look at CSPI's official release about movie theater popcorn you can't find any solid reference to this "laboratory". We have to take Center for Science in the Public Interest's word that the analysis was conducted and that these were the results being reported.

I don't mind saying this: that's piss-poor scholarship. It wouldn't merit a passing grade on a college paper and it wouldn't hold up under scrutiny in a court of law.

For all we know, CSPI pulled these "findings" out of their collective ass and thinks we'll be none the wiser. Jayne Hurley and Bonnie Liebman, the two "scientists" who published this alleged "study", are each longtime activists with CSPI, and the organization itself has quite a history of unfounded "attack dog" tactics.

These are jerks with nothing else to do but try to ruin a good time for everyone else so that they look superior and un-reproachable.

Just trickery trickery trickery, friends and neighbors. Don't fall for it.

(And when I go to see The Road next week, I'm buying an extra-large tub of popcorn with plenty of butter in honor of Center for Science in the Public Interest!)

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Box art for BIOSHOCK 2

Don't even think of bugging me about anything come February 9th 'cuz I've already cleared my calendar for that date and Lord willing I'll be spending all of it immersed in BioShock 2. And at last 2K Games has revealed the cover art for the hotly anticipated sequel to the 2007 original first-person shooter that blew minds and won awards all over the place.

I'm really digging the BioShock 2 logo: more decrepit than the one for the first game and now encrusted with barnacles and other sedentary sea life. And look: the Big Daddy is so ticked-off that he's smashed a crack in the game's cover! But what's seriously wigging me out is that... thing... to the left of the Little Sister's head. Is that a group of fish or someone's face?

Just two and a half more months before we get to return to Rapture!

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New wallpaper protects against bullets and bombs

Want to seriously protect yourself and your loved ones against flying debris, bullets and bombs? Consider covering your living room in X-Flex wallpaper. Developed by Berry Plastics in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the X-Flex Blast Protection System is touted as wallpaper that will stop a wrecking ball and worse with a single sheet of the stuff. X-Flex is two sheets of polymer wrap with a Kevlar-like material sandwiched in between. It's self-adhesive and covering an average-sized room takes less than an hour. Berry Plastics obviously had the military most in mind for employment of their product, but the company is already seeing a market for X-Flex in buildings constructed in areas prone to tornadoes and hurricanes.

I'm wondering how 'spensive this stuff is. X-Flex probably has a hideous price tag. But if nothing else I could see papering your bathroom with it and hunkering down in the tub during a tornado and really being secure :-)

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