July 2006 Archives
The Ant Bully has arrived (click here for my review), and so bugs, in all their buggishness: Charlotte the spider, the very hungry catepillar, and Brundlfly.
I look back at the appallingly low number of postings here lately and all I can think is, Ugh. But marketing guru Eric Kintz suggests that maybe I’ve been ugh-ing needlessly. Maybe it’s not so bad if I’m not posting daily, as I’d like to be:
"Thou shall post every day” is the most fundamental and most well known principle of blogging....Every new blogger is warned about “the” ultimate rule and is confronted with the pressure of a day going by with no new post. Every one has in mind the examples of successful bloggers, like Robert Scoble at Microsoft, who post several times a day. Daily posting shows that you are serious about blogging, generates traffic and drives reader loyalty, as readers come back daily to check your new posts. You cannot be successful if you do not go by the rule, right? RIGHT?
Wrong. Daily posts are a legacy of a Web 1.0 mindset and early Web 2.0 days (meaning 12 months ago!). The pressure around posting frequency will ultimately become a significant barrier to the maturity of blogging. Here are 10 reasons why.
Oh, but when you read his 10 reasons, a whole bunch of them turn out to be variations on “You shouldn’t post stuff just for the sake of posting, cuz it’ll be crap.” Unfortunately, I’ve got lots of really deep and meaningful things to say -- I just don’t have time to say them. If only I could be one of Nancy Kress’s Sleepless, I’d get so much more done...
Seriously. Geek Philosophy (and FlickFilosopher.com), as well as my email, were down for much of the day on Saturday because the extraordinary heat wave in California, where my Web host is located, caused power outages, which sent my host to backup generators, which obviously could not provide enough power to keep all its servers up and running.
Here I am in New York, where we finally got a break from the heat (but not the humidity -- ugh) over the last few days (though some folks here in NYC are still without power for a week after weather-related outages), and the weather in California is tripping me up.
It's a circle-of-life, fundamental-interconnectedness-of-all-things thing.
What do you call a whole bunch of cacti? A cacophony of cacti? A catastrophe of cacti? I need a word, cuz that’s what I’m dealing with all of a sudden. My friend Brian (the now sadly departed feline Leonard’s person) was given all these tiny, prickly things a while back as a gift, and he was tending them in his office. But it turns out that the windows in his high-tech Manhattan office building are too high-tech: they filter out some kind of UV light that the cacti need, and they were starting to get sickly. And his new cats, Leonard’s understudies, won’t tolerate plants in the house. So here they are, in a room with absolutely no UV shielding at all. I already have a bunch of cacti, so they should be right at home.
Dunno why I love cacti so much. Could be it’s that they feel no need to show off, like so many plants do, with their shiny leaves and their colorful flowers. There’s no “Ooo, look at me with my pretty blossoms!” with cacti. No, they are what they are, and you can just buzz off if you don’t like it.
Big jump in gas prices in my neighborhood: I snapped the image on the left on Thursday morning.
When I got home less than twelve hours later, the price had jumped again.
And I thought these prices were obscene last summer...
I'm so sick of hearing the argument that, Oh, we shouldn't complain, look what they're paying Europe for gas! Yeah, they pay more for gas in Europe than we do in the United States... but the bulk of what they pay -- as much as 75 percent -- is taxes that go back into maintaining the infrastructure that drivers use. In the U.S., the prices we're paying at the pump are only about 12.5 percent taxes, which means that all the extra dough we've all been pouring into our cars is going to record profits for the oil companies.
How long can this go on before something snaps?
(Technorati tags: gas prices, record oil profits)
In honor of my self-declared Bruce Campbell Week, going on all week at my FlickFilosopher.com, here is the man in all his geekish/dorkish/nerdish glory: as Brisco County Jr., always on the lookout for the “coming thing”; as Elvis Presley in Bubba Ho-Tep; as Coach Boomer in Sky High.
Of course, Bruce as himself is nothing but geek/geek/geek.
(Technorati tags: geek, dork, nerd, Bruce Campbell)
It’s just been one of those days -- one of those weeks -- in which it seems the world is going to hell. It’s 92 degrees at 9:53pm in New York City, in the greenest part of the Bronx where it’s always at least 5 degrees cooler than it is in Manhattan. I’ve been kept superbusy -- kept from the important work of blogging, that is -- by a freelance gig at a fashion magazine where the biggest worry is whether the photos of the $20,000 diamond wedding rings are big enough. But at least I was in out of the heat all day -- my apartment, where I usually work, is not air-conditioned; who can afford it, when my Con Ed bill is running 100 bucks a month without an AC, or a hair dryer, or a washing machine, or any major appliance apart from a fridge that is notorious for sucking up power? But then again, Con Ed (that’s the local power utility) was calling for major corps around Manhattan to reduce their power usage this afternoon in an attempt to avoid having to go to rolling blackouts in the extraordinary heat, which meant that the major-corporate-owned mag I was working at turned off some of the elevators and most of the lights and lowered the AC. Which was fine, actually, cuz it’s always too bright and way too cold there.
Mrs. Kennedy simply adores my friend Meaghan. Meaghan got up from the couch, leaving her bag and her cat-attracting pheremones all over the furniture, and Mrs. Kennedy wasted no time in hopping into Meaghan’s seat and rubbing herself wild all over whatever it was that was so damn alluring. I’ve never seen a cat react to a person the way Mrs. Kennedy does to Meaghan -- it’s almost erotic, on the cat's part, I mean.
And then there’s these two lumps. A rare photograph of an atypical moment in which any two of my cats are within close proximity -- they just don’t like one another very much at all. But in this weather, all hot and sticky and too disgusting to move, it’s more bother than it’s worth to get all bothered about someone lying within your personal space when he shouldn’t be.
(Yes, those are Star Trek VHSes in the shelves above Sam's head. You know that bit in Pirates of the Caribbean when Johnny Depp is all, "Pirate!" as if you'd have to be an idiot to expect him to behave in any way other than piratey. Well, imagine me going, "Geek!")
(Technorati tags: catblogging, cats)
• All your ringtones are belong to Verizon.
Killer quote:
Earlier this week, he showed me how the RAZR he bought from Verizon last month blocks your ability to transfer files into its Audio folder, in an apparent brazen attempt to force users to buy ringtones rather than creating their own tones from CDs or from scratch.
Killer quote:
A RUSSIAN rocket has launched carrying an experimental inflatable spacecraft for a US entrepreneur who dreams of building a commercial space station.
Julie Kavner, the voice of Marge Simpson; West Coast Julie Brown, cuz she’s a blond; and Julie Andrews, mostly cuz she is -- honest to god -- currently “Official Ambassador of the Happiest Homecoming on Earth” for Disneyland's 50th Anniversary Celebration. *shudder*
(Technorati tags: geek, dork, nerd, Julie Kavner, West Coast Julie Brown, Julie Andrews, Disneyland)
My July essay is up over at The Internet Review of Science Fiction -- this month I ponder whether the world is truly ready for a film really based on the work of Philip K. Dick. (That would be A Scanner Darkly, which I’ve already reviewed at FlickFilosopher.com.)
Free registration is required to read the content at IROSF.
(Technorati tags: Philip K. Dick, Scanner Darkly)
• Houston: What would MacGyver do?
Killer quote:
Even in space, a little duct tape may work wonders.Astronaut Piers Sellers suggested using some multipurpose sticky material to fix a safety-jet backpack used during spacewalks after it almost came loose from him while he repaired the international space station.
• Accidental genetic engineering in your own backyard!
Killer quote:
Cucumbers and cantaloupes are closely related enough to swap genes, Joffrion said. He'd never seen anything like the Dusenberys' whatever."In the first generation, they'll cross and you'll get an unusual fruit," Joffrion said.
The firm flesh inside is yellow and somewhat sweet but has a flavor more like cucumber than cantaloupe, Tim Dusenbery said.
Men and women are different. No, really.
Killer quote:
"We saw striking and measurable differences in more than half of the genes' expression patterns between males and females," said co-investigator Thomas Drake, M.D., a UCLA professor of pathology. "We didn't expect that. No one has previously demonstrated this genetic gender gap at such high levels."
Religion and the paranormal: two great tastes that go great together.
Killer quote:
I’ve been looking for more info on all this Farrakhan/Nation of Islam UFO stuff, and it appears to actually be legitimate. Um, legitimate insofaras they actually seem to teach it as part of their religion, that is. I guess I’m just surprised by all this because Farrakhan was so prominent in the news in the 90’s (Million Man March, anyone?) that you’d think all this fucking UFO stuff would have really haunted him. I guess in the end though the racism was probably a more hot-button issue even than UFO’s.
I think it’s probably safe to say that Kev may have some geekish tendencies...
Courtesy of my buddy Gail of A Million Things That Bug Me.
(Technorati tags: Kevin Spacey, Christopher Walken, Han Solo, Star Wars, audition)
This is, in fact, my friend Sheila’s dog Skip. He’s a rat terrier, and he likes to have his belly rubbed, yes he does, who’s a gooboy? who’s a gooboy? Skip’s a gooboy, yes he is.
(Technorati tags: dogblogging, dogs)
Killer quote:
The trove will be sold for dollars. Not Federation credits.
Oh, har.
• Street gangs go geek, go online; cops follow.
Killer quote:
Some of the country's most notorious street gangs have gotten Web-savvy, showcasing illegal exploits, making threats, and honoring killed and jailed members on digital turf. Crips, Bloods, MS-13, 18th Street and others have staked claims on various corners of cyberspace. "Web bangers" are posting potentially incriminating photos of members holding guns, messages taunting other gangs and boasts of illegal exploits on personal Web sites and social networking sites.
In honor of the return of Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, herewith pirates: Errol Flynn in Captain Blood, which anyone who loves POTC must see; Alan Tudyk’s Steve the Pirate from Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story; and Captain Morgan, rum mascot.
(Technorati tags: geek, dork, nerd, pirates, Jack Sparrow, Captain Blood, Errol Flynn, Steve the Pirate, Alan Tudyk, Captain Morgan)
• William Shatner will record your answering machine message (if you win).
Killer quote (from the press release, which isn’t online):
Whoever wins this contest is going to have an interesting time deciding what message they would like recorded on their machine. After all, even the simplest of messages would be noteworthy once it was “Shatner-ized” with a series of unusual pauses and emphases. Some fans might prefer a famous quote from Star Trek, personalized for their household or even a more recent quote from Boston Legal. Other fans might opt for a message identifying the speaker: “This is William Shatner, and you’ve reached the Burns residence.” There are a lot of interesting choices, but the winner needs to be careful – pick something too interesting and the winner may suddenly need a new, unlisted number.
• Experts say everyone should be using Macs.
Killer quote:
In contrast to the vast drop in worms and viruses, the overall level of malware continues to rise - indicating that spyware, Trojan horses and phishing are now the more favoured methods of attack for cyber criminals. In June 2005, the number of different pieces of malware protected against by Sophos stood at 140,118. A year later, by June 2006, Sophos was identifying and protecting against 180,292 different viruses, spyware, worms, Trojan horses and other malware, as well as adware and other potentially unwanted applications (PUAs). The vast majority of malware continues to be written for Windows, and while the first malware for Mac OS X was seen in February 2006, it has not spread in the wild and has not heralded an avalanche of malicious code aimed at Macs.
NOW CLOSED. WINNER: Jeffrey. Click through for Jeffrey's winning caption and five runners-up.
NEW PRIZE ADDED: Wordplay: The Official Companion Book!
In honor of the documentary Wordplay, about the hegemony of the New York Times crossword, Times crossword editor Will Shortz, and crossword geeks in general, I’ve got a copy of the book Crossworld: One Man’s Journey into America’s Crossword Obsession, by Marc Romano, to give away, PLUS a copy of Wordplay: The Official Companion Book.
Click through for rules and details.
And for all you crossword geeks, I’m giving away an exclusive crossword puzzle -- courtesy of Will Shortz and IFC Films, which is releasing Wordplay on June 16th -- over at FlickFilosopher.com. It’s a crossword you won’t find anywhere online or in print except at FlickFilosopher.com.
• Scientists like Gore’s science movie.
Killer quote:
The former vice president's movie — replete with the prospect of a flooded New York City, an inundated Florida, more and nastier hurricanes, worsening droughts, retreating glaciers and disappearing ice sheets — mostly got the science right, said all 19 climate scientists who had seen the movie or read the book and answered questions from The Associated Press.
Cool! A reader pointed this out: it’s a clip from a charity thing from British TV that introduces the new Doctor, David Tennant, bridging the final Christopher Eccleston episode with the Christmas special, “The Christmas Invasion,” that was Tennant’s first official appearance. It’s a quickie seven-minute “episode”...
Awesome. Now, that’s the way a companion should react to a regeneration: by freaking out.
I like Tennant already. He’s funny. Funny is good.
(Technorati tags: Doctor Who, David Tennant, Children in Need)
A commenter to my most recent Doctor Who blogging, a newcomer to the show, asked for recommendations of classic episodes to check out, of those that are available on DVD. Rather than letting my recommendations get lost in the comments thread, I figured I’d throw ‘em up as a post. So here ya go:
I am not, frankly, much of a fan of the first two Doctors, played by William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton -- nothing against the actors, it’s just that their stories tend to be simplistic, slow-moving, and far more juvenile than those of the later Doctors. The show didn’t begin to move even a little beyond its roots as a kiddie show till the third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, came along. So while some of Hartnell’s and Troughton’s episodes are available on DVD, I can’t wholeheartedly endorse them. But if you want a taste of what their Doctors were like, check out “The Three Doctors” (all links go to the episode’s Amazon.com page), the series’ tenth anniversary show, which finagled the spacetime continuum in order to get all three incarnations of the Doctor to that point into one story.
• Nanotechnology takes a very tiny leap forward with supersmall American flag. Killer quote:
The image of the flag -- complete with all 50 stars and 13 stripes -- is 7 microns tall, compared to the 100-micron width of a human hair. It was transferred onto a silicon wafer using a machine that follows the shape of any bitmap image file. The flag and its pole were cut using an ion beam -- a microscopic version of a laser -- and lifted to a standing position by a nano manipulator.
Nano manipulator? Cool.
• Man’s severely injured brain rewires itself. Killer quote:
Doctors have their first proof that a man who was barely conscious for nearly 20 years regained speech and movement because his brain spontaneously rewired itself by growing tiny new nerve connections to replace the ones sheared apart in a car crash.
(scroll all the way down for links to discussion of other episodes)
see my brief overview of the DVD set at FlickFilosopher.com
Doctor Who lands on DVD in the U.S. tomorrow. I've had mine for a while now (one lovely benefit of being a critic), and while I can't honestly say that I'm tired of it -- that could never happen -- I am getting very ansty to see the new David Tennant episodes, which are just about to finish airing in Britain (the last one in the latest series airs on Saturday), especially because I'm getting readers emailing me from across the pond to say how freakin' awesome Tennant is. (See the official BBC Doctor Who if you want to torture yourself.)
And so I did a very frivolous and fannish thing: I ordered the first two installments of the Tennant Doctor Whos from Amazon.co.uk. I figured it was about time to put that region-free DVD player I got for Christmas two Christmases ago to good use. So very soon -- yippee! -- I'll have in my grubby little fangirl hands Doctor Who: Series 2 - Volume 1
I will, of course, report on them ASAP.
Volume 3 -- featuring Cybermen! -- will be released in the U.K. on July 10:
I might just die.
Anyway, back to Eccleston, and "The Long Game" and "Father's Day."
• The elected officials deciding net-neutrality issues are morons. Killer quote:
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
• The great-great-etc grandparent of us all may have lived as recently as 2000 years ago. Killer quote:
When you walk through an exhibit of Ancient Egyptian art from the time of the pyramids, everything there was very likely created by one of your ancestors -- every statue, every hieroglyph, every gold necklace. If there is a mummy lying in the center of the room, that person was almost certainly your ancestor, too.
• Two red-spot storms on Jupiter will converge in mid-July; visible through backyard telescopes. Killer quote:
"There won't be a head-on collision," she says. "The Great Red Spot is not going to 'eat' Oval BA or anything like that." But the storms' outer bands will pass quite close to one another—and no one knows exactly what will happen.
(Technorati tags: net neutrality, human ancestors, Jupiter storms, blood for oil)
I mentioned a while back how I was gonna start keeping an eye on the price of gas at my corner BP station, just for shits and giggles. And it just took a jump, after a dip so brief that I didn’t even get a chance to take a picture of the price board. (The cheap gas was at $3.13 for about 12 hours before it popped back up to these prices here.)
Anyway, none of it matters because a giant asteroid is gonna kill us all tonight. Or maybe not. But you can already hear the refrain from Our Glorious Leaders echoing back through time from 2026 or whenever, who will say things like, “No one could have predicted that a big rock would strike the Earth.” And then they’ll declare a Global War on Asteroids, and some people will begin to declare that “rock” music is unpatriotic, and they’ll change the name to “freedom to breath air that isn’t choked with a hundred trillion tons of pulverized cities and mountain ranges” music, and politicians will start declaring that they were for hunting down asteroids before they were against it, and...
(Technorati tags: gas prices, killer asteroids)
As Clark Kent dons the red cape again, a look at those brave enough to wear swingy, swishy capes: Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective; Jon Pertwee’s dandy Doctor (Who? yes); and Michael Palin’s Spanish Inquisitor in the classic Monty Python sketch.
(I’ve had a crazy couple of days and got seriously behind on my blogging, but now I’m catching up...)
(Technorati tags: geek, dork, nerd, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee, Spanish Inquisition, Michael Palin, Monty Python)
I'm MaryAnn Johanson, writer and editor, and this is my scratch pad, idea-jotter-downer, portfolio and resume, and general hang-out blog.
• film/TV/pop culture critic at FlickFilosopher.com
• contributor, Film.com
• member, Online Film Critics Society
• member, Alliance of Women Film Journalists
• member, International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences
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Location: New York City
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photo by David Speranza
