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Archive for March 2003 This thing is still wearing on me, and now that there are fresh examples of it going meta (quasi-meta, anyway), I must solve the recursive Soviet Russia cliche! Rar! I thought, "In Soviet Russia, the subject and object swap you!" but that doesn't quite capture the folded-in-on-itself-ness I must have to sate my... bones. (In Soviet Russia, "bones" thinks Kris is funny.) Let's see here. In Soviet Russia... maybe if I use the fact that it's in Soviet Russia. Wait, I know why this is so hard. I want to twist the phrase "In Soviet Russia," but it has no predicate to twist. Dammit! There has to be a copout in there somewhere. I was reading a Chick tract, and realized that you could never properly write a mystery with God as the culprit, because the pronouns end up capitalized and spoil the secret. "Why have you assembled us all here, Holmes? Have you gone mad?" "Quite the opposite, Nurse Ellie. I believe the Thief is Someone in this room!" http://www.cyberlife-research.com/contents.htm Some guy is building a learning robot, in the form of an adorable orangutan. If you consider a fright-wigged burn victim with dead, sunken eyes adorable. Next time, scientists, don't try to be cute. It usually fails. I'm going to have nightmares about that thing floating above me at night in bed. I saw The Ring recently. I actually bought it. It... wasn't scary. And I'm the type who was ready to be really scared by it. It was... okay. It's really more like an occult detective story than a horror movie. But, at least it was only $20. My chief complaint is, with their setting and all that, they had the potential to do something really disturbing and bizarrely non sequitur, with a theme slowly emerging. I think that's what they tried to do. But instead, the movie was considerably dumbed down, didn't really let the audience get it for themselves, but showed them little, completely unnecessary hints. Have you ever watched a movie where there's a throwaway line of dialogue in the first twenty minutes, but it's framed such that it seems to have some unknown weight? And then near the very end of the movie that sentiment comes back, in an unexpected way? I like that. Now have you ever watched ones where the main character looks up and remembers themselves saying that line, echoey, in flashback, to remind the audience of the line? That's not very good. Imagine that, like six or seven times throughout the movie. Anyway, what led me to write this was remembering the videotape in The Ring, and I realize it was done in much the same way as the chocolate riverboat ride in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (remember the confusing images on the wall, and then BAM! Big bugs! Or BAM! Chicken's head cut off!). Same thing. The Ring: B (mostly for cinematography) What's that technique used by sci-fi writers to imply future, or otherness, where they list famous authors or dictators or presidents and include purposely alien names? i.e. Kirk: "Surely you know of the great philosophers! Socrates... Confucius... Surac... K'th-Jyltar of the Hiderion Parallel?" Some kind of science fiction affirmative action. Suddenly I remember that song from The Music Man: "Chaucer! Rabelais! Balzac! Vedeth-Kla!" Tonight's CNN.com front page scared the bejeezus out of me. The page loads, and at the top, in a much larger typeface than should be used at a respectable news site, read 'DECAPITATION ATTACK' and all I could think of was a new bomb designed to take people's heads off without warning. Kurt, just now: "You know how in about thirty minutes, we're going to war, right? Imagine if Saddam is just waking up, in his pajamas, and he looks at the television or a clock, and says 'Whoa! That's right! I gotta get out of here!' ... write that down, I just thought of it." REMOVE THE RANDOM NUMBERS AND LETTERS FROM YOUR SUBJECT LINES. I find it so strange that Jenny, who I haven't talked to in six years, and called Jennifer, would write me with "Trying it again jyopvhwp." Because you had me going for a second! Also The Awkward Capitalization Doesn't Make It Very Convincing Either 3678  I don't know if that's happening around here. In Circuit City, maybe. Updates continue. All I'm doing is changing the colors, but I noticed a lot of stuff was off in my original design, so I'm fixing it. Last step is to do /checkerboard/, and that's gonna be kind of a pain in the ass. Actually, I just figured out a much smarter way to do what I've been doing. Stupid. Oh well, on the next redesign I'll start from scratch. Edit: okay, I fixed up CN and the whole site should be accounted for. If you run into any mistake I made (the most common being me leaving a black title bar on some page instead of the new ugly turquoise one), let me know. Thanks. File-Sharing Sites Allow Trading of Porn: http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/03/14/downloading.porn/index.html Pipes Meant For Water Can Also Carry Other Liquids Subset of Set is a Subset of the Set Kind of an offensive image Wow, I was wondering if I should buy an X10 camera, but now -- dogs having sex! I can't believe I've been missing it! I'll take ten! Doing some work around the site, trying a different color scheme. That'll take some time to adjust. I put together a simple, different color scheme for nightlightpress.net, and then realized I liked it much better than the black top bar and kind of generic navy blue background I've had for two years. I will probably be moving Electrologica to nightlightpress.net, since it only takes up space here, and hardly gets hit anyway. (Not that it'll matter; that kind of move should be relatively transparent to everyone.) But seriously, folks. Here's a cute chain letter. === Inspection Teams.... Have you noticed anything fishy about the inspection teams who have arrived in Iraq? They're all men! How in the name of the United Nations does anyone expect men to find Saddam's stash? We all know that men have a blind spot when it comes to finding things. For crying' out loud! Men can't find the dirty clothes hamper. Men can't find the jar of jelly until it falls out of the cupboard and splatters on the floor.... and these are the people we have sent into Iraq to search for hidden weapons of mass destruction? I keep wondering why groups of mothers weren't sent in. Mothers can sniff out secrets quicker than a drug dog can find a gram of dope. Mothers can find gin bottles that dads have stashed in the attic beneath the rafters. They can sniff out a diary two rooms and one floor away. They can tell when the lid of a cookie jar has been disturbed and notice when a quarter inch slice has been shaved off a chocolate cake. A mother can smell alcohol on your breath before you get your key in the front door and can smell cigarette smoke from a block away. By examining laundry, a mother knows more about their kids than Sherlock Holmes. And if a mother wants an answer to a question, she can read an offender's eyes quicker than a homicide detective. So... considering the value a mother could bring to an inspection team, why are we sending a bunch of old men who will rely on electronic equipment to scout out hidden threats? My mother would walk in with a wooden soup spoon in one hand, grab Saddam by the ear, give it a good twist and snap, "Young man, do you have any weapons of mass destruction?" And God help him if he tried to lie to her. She'd march him down the street to some secret bunker and shove his nose into a nuclear bomb and say, "Uh, huh, and what do you call this, mister?" Whap! Thump! Whap! Whap! Whap! And she'd lay some stripes across his bare bottom with that soup spoon, then march him home in front of the whole of Baghdad. He'd not only come clean and apologize for lying about it, he'd cut every lawn in Baghdad for free for the whole damn summer. Inspectors my ass... You want the job done? Call my mother. === I have also received the chain e-mail going around containing "pictures" of the Columbia exploding as captured by "an Israeli satellite." They're screen caps from Armageddon. You can see the meteor streaks, and the Bruckheimer Blue (tm) flames. I'm surprised there isn't a frame of Buscemi riding the bomb tossed in ("spy photo from Iraq!!!!") Edit: apparently they have this at Snopes already. http://www.msnbc.com/local/WNYT/M276307.asp?cp1=1 Where's my telescreen? Oops, now people are looking at me funny! Unpopular opinion is the same as hardcore activism! Better watch Checkerboard Nightmare for secret deviant pervert anti-government propaganda! The short of the story is, a father and son had shirts made that said "Give peace a chance" and "Let inspections work." They wore them as they were shopping at a mall. They weren't handing out leaflets, they weren't shouting "Bush is a nazi," they weren't being disruptive. They were shopping. Still, it's private property, so security told them to take those shirts off. They refused, so they got arrested. "It's like nailing the coffin shut, using a smaller coffin to pound in tiny nail-shaped coffins." "i have a 98 civic, and the stereo is like two tin cans emitting the sound of tin cans giving birth to smaller tin cans" "It was like lightning... with... smaller lightnings alongside of it that were going much faster." 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