April 2006 Archives

There aren’t too many geek milestones we can measure a millennium out, but here’s one of them: exactly one thousand years ago, the brightest celestial event in recorded human history appeared in the skies over planet Earth, and lasted for three years. And we know about it because of the geeky astronomers in Europe and Asia who blogged about it. Tim at Goats Reading Books has a nice summary of everything we know about supernova 1006, which was first seen on April 30 or May 1, 1006, including what the geeks at the time had to say about it:

The "guest star" was widely noticed: observations have survived from China, Japan, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Italy, and Switzerland. It made a big impression on the Chinese court astronomers, who kept very meticulous records of its position, and who reported:

its appearance was like the half Moon and it had pointed rays...
[It was] so brilliant that one could really see things clearly [by its light]

Another astronmer in San'a, Yemen observed:

It rose regularly half an hour after sunset. It was not round, but rather was elongated; at its edges were lines like fingers. It showed great turbulence as though (reflected) in disturbed waters.

The monks at the Benedictine Abbey in St. Gallens, Switzerland also recorded the guest star:

A new star of unusual size appeared; it was glittering in appearance and dazzling the eyes, causing alarm. In a wonderful manner it was sometimes contracted, sometimes spread out, and moreover sometimes extinguished. It was seen, nevertheless, for three months in the inmost limits of the south, beyond all the constellations which are seen in the sky.

I like that the monks thought the supernova was “wonderful”...

Related cool links:

• Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is an illustration that approximates what SN 1006 might have looked like in our sky.

• The Wikipedia entry for the event discusses how bright the exploded star would have been: “Some sources state that the star was bright enough to cast shadows; it was certainly seen during daylight hours for some time, and the modern-day astronomer Frank Winkler has said that ‘in the spring of 1006, people could probably have read manuscripts at midnight by its light.’” Cool!

• A thread at Ask Metafilter discusses how to survive a supernova. (“Apparently, 30 light years is the bare minimum before mass extinction.)

• SF writer Charles Sheffield’s novel Aftermath speculates what might happen if one of the stars in the Alpha Centauri system went nova.

Maybe not quite, but speaking of cool things I just discovered on DVD, Showtime’s short-lived and too-soon-truncated Odyssey 5 is pretty damn close. From my review:

It might be the best show that ever got cancelled before it had finished what it had come to do, a science fiction drama that’s smart, gritty, and -- the toughest thing for TV SF to accomplish -- original. The crew of the space shuttle Odyssey, on a mission in 2007, witnesses the sudden and completely unexpected destruction of the Earth, only to have an alien bystander send them back in time in an attempt to avert the disaster. Of course, first they have to figure out why the planet blew up at all. Arriving five years in their past, in the show’s present day -- these 19 episodes ran on the cable network Showtime beginning in 2002 -- the three astronauts, one scientist, and one TV journalist have to overcome their own dislike for one another, contend with the rippling effects of their interfering in the timeline, and confront all manner of hot-button technological issues including gene therapy, artificial intelligence, and nanotech as they race against time to save the planet. Not every episode is an unqualified success, and the X-Files-ish stew of alien invasion and human conspiracy doesn’t quite gel, but this is one of the most fascinating examples of SF in TV history, one dedicated to exploring the genuine what-if ideas that fuel real science fiction, and their emotional impact on real people...

There’s more...

Weird synchronicity: I recently bought a cup of coffee in a little independent cafe (you know, not Starbucks or Cosi or one of those) and the wrapper thingie had an ad for the Cartoon Network series Robot Chicken. And almost simultaneously, I was assigned the Robot Chicken first-season DVD to review by my editor at Video Librarian, for which I’ve been reviewing TV on DVD for a while now.

I had not yet seen Robot Chicken when I bought that coffee, but I still found it interesting. Because for an ad like that to be successful -- for an advertiser to consider it money well spent -- the assumption has to be that a good percentage of the people looking for a caffeine fix will be interested in what you’re advertising. It’s one thing for Cartoon Network to devote its late-night lineup to cartoons meant strictly for grownups -- that’s niche, and really, how many people are expected to watch late-night on a cable channel way up the dial? (The ratings are apparently considered extremely good even though only a couple hundred thousand people are watching on any given night.) But it’s something else entirely to just figure that a lot of people who drink coffee will be into grownup cartoon stuff. It’s a mark of the mainstreaming of the geek ethos.

And holy crap, now that I’ve seen Robot Chicken? I’ll just quote from my own review of the DVD set:

Geek nirvana doesn’t come any sweeter or weirder than this mad amalgam of toy abuse and pop-culture spoofing: it’s like the entire shared childhood of Generation X ripped to shreds and scotch-taped back together again, with all the seams showing and all the entertainment mojo leaking out of the wounds. Crammed into each of these 12-minute episodes are more rapid-fire sendups than you can count of stuff we Xers hold dear (like James Kirk and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown) and stuff we love to hate (like Kirk Cameron and this-is-your-brain-on-drugs PSAs), often at the same time, and it’s all stop-motion-animated with Barbie dolls and action figures that become the objects of intensely silly violence that all of us who mistreated our playthings as kids will recall with a kiddy glee. But there’s real wit and some very clever commentary behind the goofiness, too: This is the staccato internal psyche of an entire generation made plain and brought to life. This is your brain on the speed that is contemporary junk vulgarity. And it is hi-fuckin’-larious.

It’s not a long review, but there’s a bit more to read over at FlickFilosopher.com.

Oh, and check out the list of allusions to be found in Robot Chicken -- it reads like a strange haiku about late-20th- and early-21st-century pop culture.

Or as close as this little feline maniac ever gets to rest...

Geeks don't come much geekier than this: My buddy Nathaniel, proprietor of the blog Film Experience, is madly in love with Michelle Pfeiffer, and he doesn't care who knows it. In fact, he has invited bloggers all over the Web (including yours truly) to come worship at the altar of La Pfeiff, and come they have, 35 so far on the occasion of Ms. Pfeiffer's birthday tomorrow.

I hope she at least sends out some nice thank-you cards...

It is TV Turnoff Week this week? Huh. Funny, but I didn’t hear about that on TV...

Look, I work at home. I sit in front of a computer all day -- writing, editing, webmastering -- and the TV is on pretty much the whole time. Just in the background, some noise to keep me company during all those long lonely days when the only other human being I have any contact with is the UPS guy, who’s starting to look really good in his little brown shorts. Typically I start out with CNN in the morning, until I want to strangle Soledad O’Brien, as if cutting off the oxygen to what passes for her brain would have any affect whatsoever; or until I want to strangle Miles O’Brien, who is so intriguing when he’s talking about the geeky stuff like space or technology that he clearly is very passionate about, and so vapid when he’s talking about anything else. Then maybe it’s on to the two hours of ER reruns on TNT, cuz ohmygod, who doesn’t want to have Dr. Kovac whispering in your ear, so to speak, while you’re working? And did you know that, holy crap, the Sci Fi Channel runs six-hour blocks of awesome old SF shows most days? It’s nice to look up once in a while from slaving away over the computer and see Agent Mulder’s snarky grin. Okay, sure, some days on Sci Fi it’s six hours of Knight Rider, which is unbearable, but there’s always some cool old movie in TCM, or Law and Order 18 hours a day on 12 different cable channels, or you can always flip back to CNN until it makes you want to throw things at the screen and start a revolution.

And so revealing!

Pointless crap, these personality tests, but like Japanese rice crackers, you can't eat just one. They're the crack cocaine of the Net. Or maybe Sudoku is the crack cocaine of the Net... I'm not sure yet...

You Are 28% Abnormal

You are at low risk for being a psychopath. It is unlikely that you have no soul. You are at medium risk for having a borderline personality. It is somewhat likely that you are a chaotic mess. You are at medium risk for having a narcissistic personality. It is somewhat likely that you are in love with your own reflection. You are at low risk for having a social phobia. It is unlikely that you feel most comfortable in your mom's basement. You are at low risk for obsessive compulsive disorder. It is unlikely that you are addicted to hand sanitizer.

Personally, I would like to think I'm a little more abnormal than that, but I suspect they're talking DSM-IV abnormal, not "please won't my alien parents who abandoned my on this rock when I was an alien baby come back and get me" abnormal.

Pretty accurate, as these things go.

Why, Snoop Dog? Why? And while we try to figure that out, herewith Run DMC, the Beastie Boys, and Vanilla Ice. And why does it not surprise me that the less-than-totally-cool rappers are white?

Some days I wonder why the hell I’m bothering spending time blogging for a few hundred people a day when I could be spending more time writing for FlickFilosopher.com, or working on my screenplays or the novel I’m supposed to be writing. And other times I hate myself for not posting for days and days, even with the perfectly justifiable excuses of being too busy and having nothing to say anyway, because why am I bothering if I’m not gonna bother?

And now maybe our lovely antifreedom, procorporate, anticonsumer Federal government may make all my online endeavors truly pointless efforts for me:

Greg Saunders at Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World digs up a possible geek influence for the hideous concept of standing “seats” to which The New York Times introduced us today, to our collective horror:

Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal.

The concept?

Damn, that’s evil. And the engineering geek who thought it up may have been inspired by... well, check out the This Modern World link.

Me, it makes me think of this:

You may never have thought you’d live to see the day when the phrase “the $12 million Bernie Taupin/Elton John stage musical adaptation of Anne Rice’s beloved vampire novels” could be uttered in polite company, but that day has arrived. (For those of you counting, this is sign of the apocalypse no. 7,092,164.) Lestat opens on Broadway tonight, and I had the very bad luck to attend a preview performance a few weeks ago.

Like many girl geeks my age, I devoured the Lestat books as a teenager, imagining my life would be immeasurably better should I chance to have my neck sucked by a sexy vampire and become an immortal rock star or something cool like that. But of course, this very cultural provenence is what was guaranteed inevitably to doom such a godforsaken idea as Totally Cool Awesomeness: The Musical! to totally frigid awfulness, with songs. Because some things -- like, say, the existential teenage-style angst of one who does not fit into the world in which he finds himself, and the curse of the person displaced in time -- cannot be reduced to a snappy tune and a spry lyric.

To wit:

Holy crap, did anyone else watch last week’s episode of PBS’s Nova, “Dimming the Sun”? The premise: “New evidence that air pollution has masked the full impact of global warming suggests the world may soon face a heightened climate crisis.” The three unexpected days of clear skies after 9/11, when all aircraft were grounded, showed that the artificial clouds that are airplane contrails are having a dramatic effect on how much sunlight reaches the surface of the planet, part of the overall impact that pollution is having on the environment, and it is scary as hell. Basically, we’re fucked, and it doesn’t even require secret government conspiracies to douse us unsuspecting Americans with aerosols via airplane exhaust.

Meanwhile, deliberate willingness to discard the scientific method for religious reasons as well as the willful ignorance of a scientifically illiterate populace continue to keep issues of global climate change from the forefront.

Since everyone's got their panties in a twist over immigrants who are supposedly ruining America, or something, a reminder of some of the people from other lands who came to these fine shores and helped make America what it is today: Carlos Santana (from Mexico), Charles Atlas (from Italy), and Gene Simmons (from Israel).

Doctor Who is awesome, no question about it (and yes, I’ve got lots to say about the most recent episodes, which I’ll get to as soon as I possibly can), but are you missing the Stargates just a tad on Friday nights? Me too. I don’t see why we couldn’t have Stargates and Doctor Who all on the same night.

If you’re really missing, say, geek-hunk David Hewlett’s snarky-smart Dr. Rodney McKay (from Stargate Atlantis, of course), then click on over to my other site, FlickFilosopher.com, and enter to win one of three DVDs of Dave’s flick Ice Men, a Canadian indie in which he demonstrates that he’s not just a geek (you did know that he’s a Net entrepreneur and -- yup -- an enormous Doctor Who dork, too, didn’t you?), he’s also an intense actor who steals every scene he's in. But then, we Atlantis watchers already knew that.

I’ll review Ice Men and another Hewlett flick, Nothing, soon over at FlickFilosopher.com.

Oh, and yesterday was Dave’s birthday. Happy birthday, Dave!

Damn, there’s no new Lost tonight. I hate that. I wish ABC would take a page from British TV -- or from HBO -- and give us 22 straight weeks of new episodes, with no reruns, and be done with it. I hate all these fits and starts -- it’s bad for the momentum that a show like Lost needs.

And -- hooray! -- I’m not the only one who feels that way: the producers do, too:

The producers of Lost are seeking a new scheduling model for the show in the US to curb the frequency of repeats.

Most US series, including Lost, typically air 22 new episodes each season over a period of 36 weeks, meaning that new episodes are often punctuated with repeats of old episodes.

US Lost fans have complained that having to wait many weeks for a new episode has ruined their enjoyment of the show....

Although Lost's broadcaster, ABC, is unwilling to adopt a similar strategy, show producers have come up with a compromise solution.

"We're lobbying ABC for when the show is on, it's on, and when it's off, it's off," exec producer Damon Lindelof told E! Online. "So, we want to air it in three acts next year. You know, blocks of seven, seven and eight. But in order to do that, we have to roll the show out in October instead of September, and hopefully that will work out."

[from the British site Digital Spy]

Maybe we’ll get lucky and ABC will relent.

In one graphic depiction of the events on United 93, the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania, passengers are seen bloodied and battling hijackers wielding knives.

"We've got to stop them! Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center," one passenger says, about to land a punch on a hijacker who has stabbed a passenger in the back with a knife.

[from Reuters]

It was announced back in February, but the news is really just breaking now: In September Hill & Wang will publish a graphic-novel version of the Congressional 9/11 Commission Report. Which is notable in itself, the use of the tools of what had once been considered kid stuff to lay bare the facts of a many-threaded historical event, as Publishers Weekly noted back in February:

BUMPED UP: We have a winner! Click through to see JEAN's winning caption.

In honor of the weird-stuff-from-outer-space vibe of the way-cool, way-gross Slither, which opened today (read my review here), I'm proud to announce the first-ever Geek Philosophy giveaway contest. The winner will receive a four-book set of ooky paranormal aliens-among-us “nonfiction” paperback books:

I’m not saying that all bloggers read comic books, or that everyone who’s active online in an Xer, but...

The two news stories caught my eye today: though they appear at first to have little to do with each other, they both reveal a certain rise in social power of the demographic at the intersection of Geek and Xer.

First, The Guardian has this to say:

Lightning struck near the tiny valley town of Livingston, Mont., the other day, frying a radio tower and, for a few long hours, plunging some of its 7,000 residents into an Internet-less world. "I wasn't above having thoughts of God's wrath," says Walter Kirn, one of those residents, a novelist and critic who lives by himself on 500 acres of hay and roving herds of antelope. The laptop sitting on his kitchen table rendered useless, Kirn tried typing into his cellphone, then drove through town, trolling for anybody with an unbroken connection. A segment of his newest novel was set to be published in a matter of hours, and it wasn't even written.

[from the Los Angeles Times]

Oh man, and I thought I was a procrastinator...

Okay, one more bit of fun with Christians on this Easter Sunday:

Make your own church sign at Church Sign Generator!

In which I attempt to be as blasphemous as possible on this, the holiest day in the Christian calendar. (Disclaimer: Since only believers can blaspheme, I cannot actually commit blasphemy. But I can try.)

It’s kinda weird, ain’t it, how as science makes miracles less and less necessary as explanations for Stuff We Haven’t Figured Out Yet, some people just can’t let go of the crutch of religion. So, while we have had, in the past few weeks, revelations of more and more evolutionary “missing links” -- which we’ve never really lacked for, despite what creation fantasists say -- we also have the bizarre specter of something like this, from the Washington Post:

Used to be, I would spend most of a Sunday reading The New York Times, which made for a pretty relaxing day of lazing around, drinking tea, and flipping through just about every section of the paper (except for sports). But that was years ago now -- I read news online today, and the idea of newspapers kinda makes me laugh: Who wants to read yesterday’s news today on a dead tree when you can read today’s news now with no sacrifice required of Arboreal-Americans?

But last year, I got the crazy notion in my head to try to reclaim those lazy Sundays, since Sundays have morphed into just another work day for me now, and so I ordered the weekend edition of the Times, which means that on Saturday you get the Saturday paper and all the sections of the Sunday paper that aren’t supertimely, like Arts & Leisure and the Book Review, and all the coupon circulars and such. And then on Sunday you get the Sunday newsy sections. And after three months of papers piling up and never getting read -- and after the revelation that the Times had withheld a story the previous November about Felony No. 8,455 of the Bush Administration because the paper’s editors were worried it would influence the presidential election when that was precisely what it should have done, and rightly so -- I cancelled my subscription.

This is fake:

This, holy crap, is real:

Oh no! Not the comfy chair!

(I hear he totally hearts MySpace, too.)

If you’ve ever wanted to hear Anderson Cooper groan in ecstasy -- and you know who you are, you shameless Anderson Cooper worshippers you -- and you weren’t watching AC360 last night, you missed your chance. Because one of Anderson’s top stories of the night -- illegal puppy smuggling from Mexico! pretty blond American moppets heartbroken when sick and wormy wetback puppies die! dear god won’t someone think of the children! -- had him pretty much orgasmic over pictures like this:

And this ain’t nothing yet:

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) reached the red planet on 10 March 2006. During its tenth close approach to Mars—its 10th periapsis—the MRO spacecraft turned its cameras to view the planet's surface. Although the images acquired were over a factor of 10 lower in resolution than will ultimately be obtained when the spacecraft and its payload are in their final orbit, these test images provide important confirmation of the performance of the cameras and the spacecraft.

More:

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has an interesting tale on his blog, This Modern World, about censorship and the Internet. In a nutshell, a fan of his in Kuwait bought one of his collections of cartoons, The Great Big Book of Tomorrow from Amazon, but the package was opened by Kuwaiti censors at customs and a page was torn from the book. Tom replies:

The cartoon that the guardians of morality in Kuwait found offensive can be seen here. It’s the same cartoon that the guardians of morality in Oklahoma found so offensive when it first ran (more on that here). It’s nice to know that my little cartoon can help fundamentalists the world over discover how much they really have in common.

Whoever invented chocolate bunnies was genius: a fertility symbol made of an aphrodesiac? Brilliant!

Connecting these rabbits to fecundity is rather... disturbing, but in the same spirit of rampaging religions taking over ancient pagan symbols and customs, I offer Easter-weekend bunnies: Bugs Bunny, Roger Rabbit, and that goofy Trix rabbit.

The blog Meme Therapy, aka “the science fiction podcast that's addicted to big ideas,” asked me to contribute my answer to the question “Is there a place in the real world that gave you the impression that it was ripped out of the pages of a science fiction story?”

So my answer, which you can read here, was, in short, Iceland, which I visited too many years ago and would love to see more of and swim in the Blue Lagoon again -- travel site Geographia calls it “perhaps the most supernatural looking body of water on Earth.”

In related unrelated news, it has just been revealed that the Icelanders are the geekiest geeks of all:

Iceland is most web-savvy country, with a study showing it has the highest concentration of broadband users....

The leading countries in broadband use per capita all had more than 25% of their net users subscribing to such a service. Iceland led the field on 26.7%.

By comparison, the UK was ranked 12th with 15.9%, just behind the US with 16.8%.

[from BBC News]

I collect links to intriguing geeky sites, hoping for a chance to write more about them than “Hey, look at this cool site!” But that opportunity does not always present itself. So here’s a peek into those bookmarks, just to put 'em to some damn use:

The Escapist is pretty much the most beautiful online magazine I’ve ever seen... and it’s also the most intriguing site about the geeky subculture of gamers I’ve come across yet. Check out this month’s article about how Wal-Mart decides what games you get to play.

HowStuffWorks offers a look at How the One Man Star Wars Trilogy Works. (I’ve yakked a lot about OMSW previously...)

Bill O’Reilly wanted a War on Easter, and now he’s got it: Documentary filmmaker and atheist provacteur Brian Flemming and the Rational Response Squad have teamed up to create the official evil heathen goin'-straight-to-hell War on Easter, a project to secretly put 666 copies of Flemming's ain't-no-Jesus doc The God Who Wasn't There in churches all across this great free-speech-allowing, freedom-of-religion-lovin' land of ours. The WoE blog has pix and stories from the front from the volunteer atheists doing the clandestine distributing.

(You may remember Flemming as the guy who made the strangely intriguing -- and deeply culturally aware -- mockumentary Nothing So Strange, about the assassination of Bill Gates and the ensuing coverup and conspiracy theories; I reviewed the film a while back. And I'll review the God film soon.)

Sci Fi Wire has the scoop on the new season of Doctor Who, the first with the new Doctor played by David Tennant, which debuts in England on April 15, and the gods know when in the U.S.:

[I]n episode three, "School Reunion," fans will see the return of Sarah Jane Smith and K-9, characters from previous incarnations of the show....

[Writer/producer Russell Davies:]. "Episodes five and six are the return of the Cybermen in 'The Rise of the Cybermen' (what a marvelous title!)..."

May I be the first to say, "Woo-hoo!"?

Sam contemplates a plate of smoked salmon.

(Yes, I gave him some.)

Congratulate me -- I'm an aunt (again). My new nephew, Conor Patrick, was born this morning (he joins his sister, Victoria Rose, who'll be three next month). And congrats to my brother Ray and his wife, Joanie, and their new bundle of baby.

To celebrate, here are the Gerber Baby, Stewie, and Baby Herman.

Looks like I’m not the only one pissed off at Dave Itzkoff, the new SF reviewer at The New York Times Book Review. Looks like I’ll be reciprocating SF writer John Scalzi’s secret crush on me: he’s got this to say this week about Itzkoff:

I've sat out the Itzkoff thing because I think Itzkoff asked the wrong question, so answering the question would simply result in further error. The question is not why science fiction is so geeky -- really, that's like asking why romance novels are so kissy -- but why SF does only a so-so job at best at trying to convince people who have the equivalent of Star Trek communicators and 17 jukeboxes in their pockets via their cell phones and iPods that science fiction can speak to them. Anders is exactly correct that SF has no need to apologize for being what it is, but it wouldn't hurt for SF from time to time to explain itself a little better to the unintiated, or more accurately, to the people who think they're the uninitiated, even as they live in a science fictional world.

The Anders he refers to is Lou Anders, editorial director of SF imprint Pyr, who said this:

Two grandmothers from Yorkshire face up to a year in prison after becoming the first people to be arrested under the Government's latest anti-terror legislation.

Helen John, 68, and Sylvia Boyes, 62, both veterans of the Greenham Common protests 25 years ago, were arrested on Saturday after deliberately setting out to highlight a change in the law which civil liberties groups say will criminalise free speech and further undermine the right to peaceful demonstration.

Under the little-noticed legislation, which came into effect last week, protesters who breach any one of 10 military bases across Britain will be treated as potential terrorists and face up to a year in jail or £5,000 fine. The protests are curtailed under the Home Secretary's Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.

Campaigners expressed their outrage yesterday at Charles Clarke's new law, which they say is yet another draconian attempt to crack down on legitimate protest under the guise of the war on terror....

Mrs John and Mrs Boyes, who have 10 grandchildren between them, were held by Ministry of Defence police after walking 15ft across the sentry line at the United States military base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. They were held for 12 hours before being released on police bail. They will learn whether they are to face prosecution when they return to Harrogate police station on 15 April.

[from the Independent]

Monty Python foresaw the coming of Hell's Grannies:

“We are conducting an ongoing, uncontrolled experiment on this generation in terms of media exposure and potential future behavioral and physical consequences, and it seems unopposed by the media industry and most parents.” — Donald Shifrin, American Academy of Pediatrics

The Kansas City Star yesterday ran a fearmongering article about how the kids today are going to hell in a handbasket because of TV, video games, music, magazines, and other media, mentioning “a stack of studies linking TV and video games to a host of modern ills among America’s youth, including obesity, sexual activity, consumerism, and antisocial behavior.”

Forget the fact that we are all responsible for our own behavior, and that parents are responsible for their children. Put aside the fact that the hypocritical -- nay, schizophrenic -- attitudes about sex and consumerism reflected in our pop culture merely reflect our own conflicted feelings about these matters, that if we genuinely cared about not sending ourselves into debt buying useless crap and about a healthy, playful sexuality, those are the attitudes we would see reflected.

The really salient fact to remember is that people have been making wild claims about the dangers of pop culture since there has been a pop culture. A few intriguing examples:

Let's pretend that Typepad clocked the time down to the second in the timestamps it slaps on posts. Cuz that would make it, at this very moment, precisely 01:02:03 04/05/06 on the East Coast of the United States.

"Nobody likes a math geek, Scully."--Agent Mulder

It’s happening on a daily basis, if you watch the media news: Big corporations are flailing around trying to figure out what to do about the Internet.

The telecom and cable companies that built the infrastructure over which we little people access the Net are screaming that their infrastructure is being unfairly abused, even though in most places cable companies are granted monopolies by local municipalities, even though telecom and cable infrastructure is built with taxpayer participation while also allowing private companies to benefit from public rights-of-way. (Some groups are fighting these corps.)

Meanwhile, content providers -- TV networks, movie studios, book publishers -- are trying to figure out what it means now that, as Forbes.com says:

Media content is increasingly becoming "unbundled" from its physical distribution medium, such as CDs. This "disruptive" technology has led to different pricing models and lowered barriers to entry for content authors, creating a challenging business environment for publishers and media companies.

In other words, music is no longer necessarily “CDs,” TV is no longer necessarily “Monday night at 8pm,” movies are no longer necessarily “multiplex” or “DVD,” and fiction is no longer necessarily “books.” Which isn’t news to anyone who’s spent any time online in the last few years, but it’s fairly amusing to see the globocorps trying to play catch-up.

As in: AOL’s In2TV is letting TV nuts watch -- for free -- a ton of classic TV including geek favorites like Scarecrow and Mrs. King, V, Freakazoid, Babylon 5, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., and more. CBS let sports fans watch March Madness basketball games for free. British publisher Bloomsbury, the U.K. home of Harry Potter, is now offering digital downloads, for a fee. Brokeback Mountain today becomes the first major film to be available for legal, paid download on the same day the DVD goes on sale. (Good luck watching any TV or films online if you’re not using Windows XP, though.)

It surprises me that that Forbes piece has the grace to put quotation marks around that “disruptive,” because of course it’s only the big corporations to whom the Net is a problem. Independent musicians, writers, and artists aren’t finding it disruptive at all, unless being free from the shackles of corporate overlording is somehow a hardship.

Gary Larson was right:

Dinosaur Tumor Studied for Human Cancer Clues

Cancer in dinosaurs and illnesses in other animals are being studied in a groundbreaking new program that combines medical school with the study of natural history.

Educators hope the effort will produce doctors with a better understanding of why we get sick.

Despite being millions of years removed from our time and our own species, illnesses in animals like the dinosaurs can shed light on the evolution of human disease, says Christopher Beard, curator and specialist in vertebrate paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

"Some diseases that afflict humans today, such as malaria, gout, and cancer, are truly ancient and were handed down to us from our distant ancestors," Beard told LiveScience. "By studying the distribution of these diseases in other living and fossil organisms, we can gain insights into the nature of these diseases."

[from LiveScience.com via Yahoo! News]

Jurassic Park Medical School and Cancer Research Center, anyone?

Sky has the newsflash!

Women with boob jobs may be banned from Virgin's space flights. Bosses fear the implants may expand and burst due to cabin pressure, according to The Sun...

Heh. Leaving plenty of seats on the moon shuttle for us girl geeks, cuz, as Lisa Michaud points out in the “Guy’s Guide to Geek Girls”, girl geeks

don't dress for success. They dress for comfort, for long hours in the lab, for convenience. This is not to say that geek girls aren't capable of looking nice; they can be quite striking when the mood suits them. Most of the time, however, they are under fluorescent lighting and bent over the monitor, so makeup, suits, and high heels are utterly pointless. Not that they aren't anyway, of course

And so some visions of the future pass into the realms of fantasy:

(scroll all the way down for links to discussion of other episodes)

see my brief overview of the DVD set at FlickFilosopher.com

Damn you, Russell Davies! You've got me as seriously (re)hooked on Doctor Who as I've been on anything in all my pathetic nerdy life. I'm already dreaming up fan fiction with this delicious new Doctor, which is just sad, because I'm never going to write it -- it's just going to clutter up my head and distract me from everything else I should be writing (although, hmmm, it would be very easy to adapt one of the notions I've had so that it works as a sequel to the SF novel I'm about to start writing...).

I can't remember if it was actually mentioned in the classic series or whether it's something that we fan fiction writers made up, but the idea the TARDIS has a mind of its own and draws the Doctor deliberately into trouble is clearly something that Davies is playing with: The first time it happens, in "The Unquiet Dead", it could be a fluke, the Doctor aiming for Naples in 1860 and ending up in Cardiff in 1869, right where his particular expertise will come right in handy dealing with a trandimensional alien incursion. But then it happens again, in "Aliens of London", when the Doctor tries to take Rose home for a visit 12 hours after she left and the TARDIS lands them 12 months later... just in time for the Doctor to get caught up in another bit of alien intrigue.

8:47pm on the East Coast, and I'm settling in for SS Doomtrooper with wine and cheese and nuts, which seems like it'll be a perfectly appropriate accompaniment...

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First commercial break: Is it possible that this might not suck? I mean, holy cow, they beat us, the geeky snarky audience, to the Parker Lewis reference! Still, I predict that there will come a moment in this film during which we will learn that Parker Lewis can, indeed, lose.

Corin's "We meet at last" line to the Parker Lewis character was priceless. But its goodness is more than balanced out by the hilarious awfulness of the "American" accents on the clearly Eastern European actors. The Czech Republic: it's the new British Columbia for cheap moviemaking.

I'm working on a David Banner reference for the Hulky doomtrooper guy...
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Second commercial break: Don't listen to her, she's a Nazi!

Okay, we've reached a new low for film when the FX for a movie that's pretty much a videogame are worse than the FX in a videogame. Who are they kidding with this doomtrooper? And are we actually meant to believe that he picked up that armor when he found the secret room hidden behind the suit of armor in the castle, or what?

I hafta say, though, that the score is clearly intentionally funny. The heroic music while the fake-American Euro soldiers are running away? Someone is having a bit of fun with this, at least.

Also: How does Corin not crack up every time he has to say "Lewis"?
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Third commercial break: The commercial breaks are coming faster, aren't they?

Of course the chick that Corin's falling in love with is French -- why else would she have that outraaaageous ac-cent?

When o when is someone gonna tell Parker Lewis that he can't lose? I'm going to be very disappointed if this never happens...

Also: Nice of the Nazis to light up their secret fortress in a glowing green. Unless it's glowing because of the atomic radition they're using to create the Hulk thing...
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Okay, very tired of the big buckin' chicken, the mob guy interested in cellphones, and the Long John Silver first-dollar ad. Enough!

But please, more "Doctor Who" ads! Christopher Eccleston, yum...
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Fourth commercial break: Did that one fake English soldier guy say he wasn't feeling very soldiery? Doesn't he know that Viagra is good for curing that?

Man, this is bad. But it's nice to see that Castle Wolfenstein is picking up a few bucks for serving as a location, for the Nazi fortress, and that Chernobyl is making a comeback in the movie industry: sure, the entire cast will die of cancer in 20 years, but they'll be in good company. John Wayne died of cancer after shooting in the radioactive American Southwest, you know. But then, he never had to deal with bad WWII clichés and worse CGI...
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Fifth commercial break: Parker Lewis still can't lose.
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Sixth commercial break: Parker Lewis can't lose, but his French bakery pal clearly could.

Um, is it over yet? I know they have to kill Ben Cross, and probably blow up the secret Nazi glowing fortress, and surely Parker Lewis has to lose at some point, at which Corin will have some snarky comment to make. But is it over yet?
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Seventh commercial break: I guess Parker Lewis could lose after all. (And by this, of course, I mean the character Parker Lewis, and not Corin Nemec, who is not Parker Lewis here.) I was so expecting Parker Lewis to turn into some Captain America-type Hulk Doomtrooper thingie, and then fight the Nazi Doomtrooper to death? Wouldn't that have been awesome? I guess they ran out of budget.

Poor, poor, Corin. I mean, I guess he's paying the mortgage, and he got a free trip to the glorious mountainside vistas of the Czech Republic, but still... how did he justify that awful accent? Why must all WWII soldiers be from Brooklyn? At least it wasn't as bad as Parker Lewis's accent, which sounds like he learned it from a Bugs Bunny cartoon...

Praying for the health of strangers who have undergone heart surgery has no effect, according to the largest scientific study ever commissioned to calculate the healing power of prayer.

[from The Times (of London) Online]

In other news:
• astrology is pretty much a pile of bullshit
• voodoo dolls don’t work
• fortune cookies are a conspiracy foisted on us by Global Fortune Cookie Enterprises, Inc.
• your birthday wish will not come true if you blow out all the candles on the first try
• stepping on a crack has no affect on the state of your mother’s back health
• buildings that skip from the 12th floor to the 14th still have a 13th floor
• four-leaf clovers are no more lucky than the ordinary kind
• the man in the moon is an illusion
• the face on Mars? ditto
• the Loch Ness Monster doesn’t exist
• Bigfoot is a college prank that’s gone on way too long
• ancient astronauts did not build the pyramids
• no such thing as the Bible Code
• the Da Vinci code? not so much either
• the reptilian aliens are not out to take over the planet (the greys are)
• Bill Gates will not pay you to forward mail
• you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake

UPDATE: Check out the running list of online April Fool's hoaxes...

It's not just Google's traditional April Fool's Day prank:

Google to Organize World's Courtship Information with Google Romance Service to offer psychographic matchmaking plus free “contextual dating” option

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 1, 2006 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced the launch of Google Romance™, a new product that offers users both a psychographic matchmaking service and all-expenses-paid dates for couples who agree to experience contextually relevant advertising throughout the course of their evening.

"Our mission, as you might have heard, is to organize the world's information," said Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's senior vice president, product management. "And let's face it: in what area of life is the world's information more disorganized than romance? We thought we could use our search technology to help you find that special someone, then send you on a date and use contextual ads to help you, ya know - close the deal."

Google Romance users who find one another via Soulmate Search™ may then select the Contextual Dating option, which offers an all-expenses-paid romantic evening in exchange for viewing contextually relevant advertising throughout the course of the users' date (learn more). "Our internal projections say Contextual Dating is going to be unbelievably huge, just a total cash cow," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in prepared remarks placed into the notes section of an executive PowerPoint presentation and intended solely for internal use but promptly leaked onto the web and then roundly mocked on Digg and Slashdot. The product, a beta release currently residing on Google Labs, can be experimented with at www.google.com/romance/.

It's also a hilarious sendup of online dating services as well as the all-encompassing let's-conquer-the-world mission of Google itself:

7. Contextual Dating Advice

A timely Video Google consultation with an accredited Contextual Dating Advisor helps User B realize the bread thing was a mistake. He calls User A to offer a charmingly humble apology.

Got pressing questions about your Contextual Date? More than 500 carefully screened Contextual Dating Advisors are ready to answer your question for as little as $2.50 (per minute), usually within 24 hours and conceivably much, much sooner, depending on your levels of personal desperation and financial werewithal and the quality of your GPS signal and mobile plan.

I'm calling bullshit on Google Romance, because when I Google "man of my dreams", it oddly does not return this: