R.I.P. NELL CARTER
Not that I was a major
Gimme a Break! fan when I was 10 or 11, my favourite sitcoms of the pre-
ALF/
Perfect Strangers era being
Family Ties,
Mr. Belvedere, and
Diff'rent Strokes nothing else, though I did see the occassional episode of it and I watched it enough to have the theme song stuck in my head as I write this, but still I recognized the woman's talent and sincerity and it does make me sad to see her pass.
MY HIGH SCHOOL IS FALLING APART! (Not that this will be of interest to most of you.) Well, I've been out of high school for almost 11 years, but I still find this depressing. I attended Macdonald High School in Sainte Anne de Bellevue, Quebec (on the western tip of Montreal island) from 1988-1992, and it wasn't in the best condition back then, but there's an article in the "West Island" section of Thursday's (Montreal)
Gazette, by Karen Seidman, that shows how squalid things are now. There's a huge-ass pic on the front cover of the section of a girl standing next to a toilet that looks like something out of a nightmare about a Mexican prison. This article isn't on the
Montreal site on Canada.com, so I'll have to quote excerpts.
Some seats are too filthy and rotten to sit on, they reek of urine because there's no ventilation and the walls are leaking and crumbling.
Many of the bathroons at Macdonald High School in Ste. Anne de Bellevue are so disgusting, students are often forced to just hold it in for the entire school day.
Of course, I held it in all day most of the time as well, but that was because I was "pee shy" in public washrooms back then.
That's just one of many serious repair problems the 96-year-old school is facing: some classrooms have curtains that are literally shredded (they were when I was there too; there's a photo inside of the shredded curtains in one of the classrooms... they spent lots of money keeping the shredded curtains in the same condition it seems; I think it was Mr. Hanna's economics & history classroom for people from my era... I'm Steve Brandon, if you can't find my full name anywhere else in this blog); gym floors are unsafe; some lockers don't have doors and the ones that do are often missing hooks and shelves (it was like that when I was there too); pipes are exposed in some locker rooms; insulation is falling from a gym ceiling (again, if they're talking about the smaller gym in the basement, it was like that when I was there too, and I always had the suspicion that some of the "insulation" was really asbestos) and throughout the school there are decaying walls.
Snipping a little about how parents go to meetings to demand the Laster B. Pearson school board allot more money to Mac.
Grade 11 student Alexandra Holmes also refuses to use the school bathrooms. "It's terrible having to hold it in all day," she said.
Pointing to some red splotches over an exit sign, Holmes said it was Jell-O that was put there by her best friend three years ago, and still hasn't been cleaned."
Snipping some more...
Among other complaints: chairs are broken and not replaced; a student's grandmother sewed curtains for the library where movies are shown
(hmm... didn't they renovate the entire library 9 years ago when they shot scenes for the Eddie Furlong stinker
Brainscan there?)
; the threadbare carpet in the music room is more than 20 years old; repeated requests for a maintenance crew to clean ceilings and other high areas have gone unanswered.
"This school needs to be treated better," said Grade 11 student Chris V�zina. "We deserve a nicer school."
Aww... come one.... where's your "Mac Pride"? Don't you remember that
stupid encouraging school cheer we learn on orientation day (and then forget, if we don't take part in any of the team sports)?
(I may scan the full article and post it somewhere... I'll figure out where later.)
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WHAT IF SPIRITED AWAY WINS THE BEST ANIMATED FEATURE OSCAR?
I was just having a little fun in the AnimeNation.net forum. ("Joe Multiplex" and "Jane Blockbuster" are my generic American moviegoers that never see anything in limited release.)
SCENE: a couple watching the 2004 Oscars... Finding Nemo has just won "Best Animated Feature".
Jane Blockbuster: Oh look, honey, that fish movie just won the cartoon award. That was pretty funny, but it wasn't nearly as good as Shrek which won the award last year.
Joe Multiplex: No, Shrek came out in 2001... it won two years ago.
Jane Blockbuster: Well then, what won last year?
Joe Multiplex: You know, I have no idea... did they even have an award for the best animated movie last year? Hold on, I'll check the Internet Movie Database... oh, it was Spirited Away.
Jane Blockbuster: Oh yeah, I liked that one okay... with Matt Damon as the voice of the horse.
Personally, I still prefer
Lilo & Stitch, though I wouldn't be upset if
Spirited Away won. I just doubt a win for Ghibli will increase the visibility of non-kiddy "monster" video game spin-off anime in North America all that much.
Hey, I had a thought on
the "human shields" going to Iraq... since Saddam's happily whisking these people away over to spots of strategic importance as soon as they cross the border, we should stich homing devices in the clothing of the "human shields",
so the American pilots know exactly where to hit to assist the U.N. weapons inspectors.
FIFTH COLUMN UPDATE Right-Thinking.com has
pictures of signs from Saturday's protest in San Francisco with amusing commentary, and, yes, pro-
Mumia paraphenalia was spotted.
So, the Commie kook website
Democratic Underground linked to the article, and I'd say they're going apeshit over it, but there's only 4 responses. I'm sure someone posted the article and the pics over at
Nazimedia (a.k.a. Indymedia) and got a shitload of responses, but I'm not in the mood to go scouring Nazimedia today.
This one response is just funny.
Now there are forced to confront the fact that they are totally out-numbered.
These are the same people who have been talking about a "Bush mandate" .. so its crushing to them to have to face the fact that the other side is not just the majority..
its a HUGE majority.
After living in a fantasy world for so long, its very hard for the media to face reality, especially when reality shows up with hundreds of thousand of Americans!
Who is it living in a "fantasy world" here? Maybe, and I'm being very generous, one million Americans were marching n the streets last weekend... doesn't that mean
289 Million Americans stayed home or did other things. Since when is 1 million bigger than 289 million, or since when did just a little over 1/3rd of 1% count as a "majority"? Is this "creative math" (from the people that brought you "creative spelling")? "Yip-yip-yip yahoo", as Rush Limbaugh would put it! Several times more people saw the presumably terrible
Kangaroo Jack! Is it a "HUGE majority" because the number of protestors at the anti-war rallies outnumbered those at the pro-war rallies? Well, those of us on the "right" side of most issues don't go to protests... we
write 'blogs.
Rush Limbaugh agrees with me that the
"Planetary Death Machine" quote is just too fricking funny.
THE CLONED BABY: IS IT FAKE OR IS IT RAEL? (bad pun) Now Claude Vorhilon, a.k.a.
Rael, is admitting
Clonaid's claims that they have cloned several babies
may be a hoax.
"If it's not true, she's also making history with one of the biggest hoaxes in history," Vorilhon said, "so in both ways it's wonderful. Because, thanks to what she is doing now, the whole world knows about the Raelian movement. I am very happy with that."
According to Vorilhon, the Raelian movement numbers 60,000 worldwide.
"A media analyst said the Raelian movement got about $500 million worth of media coverage across the world and I think it is true, and it is not finished," the Associated Press quotes him as telling his followers. "This event saved me 20 years of work."
I had been discussing this on the most obvious of places to have a serious discussion on cloning,
the AnimeNation.net forum (in the "Serious Discussions & Debate" sub-forum).
First, on December 28th, I discussed the
real reason why they want to clone people.
I live in Montreal, which is "ground zero" of the Raelian Movement, and I have no difficulty in saying that I think the Raelians are "koo-koo for Cocoa Puffs". I think Claude Vorhilon made it all up for his financial gain and to sleep around and laughs at his followers behind their backs. The back story of the cloning is that this is their form of "eternal life" and that they believe that the clones will have the exact same memories as the original person. 5 years ago, I took a class on cults at Dawson College in Montreal and asked a Raelian representative how a clone would have all the memories of the "parent" and they told me that memories are stored in DNA... well, it goes against everything about the brain that I learned in psychology classes, but I can't prove empirically that that is "Barbra Streisand" (B.S.). Still, my fairly fearless prediction is that 4 or 5 years down the road, even if there's nothing physically wrong with this child, they'll still be mighty disappointed as the clone will just be an identical twin of the parent but with a distinct personality and no memories of her mother's life.
A couple of days later, they admitted in the media that this was part of their form of "eternal life", though they seemed to have abandoned the wacko belief that memories are stored in D.N.A. and instead started discussing transferring memories and souls, � la
Being John Malkovitch.
Here, I discuss the feasability of their cloning experiments.
The Raelians have a few rich supporters, and, I've read estimates of somewhere between 50 000 to 100 000 adherents worldwide, mainly here in Quebec, so I don't have any doubts they could afford to do this if they wanted to. I don't know if this has been reported much outside of Quebec, but they gave some other press conference today wherein they fully admitted that this is their first step to develop immortality, as I said the other day, and the next step will be to transfer the conciousness and memories into the baby, so I guess even they've abandoned the wacko premise that DNA carries memories. Cloning is the easy part... I don't know if transferring conciousness and memories is remotely feasible short of them doing a live brain transplant.
As more and more people in the media started coming to the conclusion that they had been taken for a ride, part of me still
believed it couldn't be a hoax just for publicity.
Though, even though a lot of news media outlets seem to be dismissing this as a hoax, part of me is still doubtful that even the publicity-schmoozing Raelians would attempt this lame a hoax just for publicity. Sure, they don't seem to give a hoot what the local Montreal media says about them when they do one of their publicity stunts, like giving out condoms at *elementary* schools, but risking global ridicule with a bogus controversial scientific announcement?
Plus, in the next post in the thread, I gave a useful link.
Here's an article about the Raelians, written by Susan Palmer, who was my teacher for the class on cults at Dawson College in Montreal and who is rather fond of the Raelians, at least as people. Possibly about the most positive article about the cult you'll find written by a non-Raelian. (I still thought they were "koo koo for Cocoa Puffs" after taking her class.)
But now I'm pretty much convinced it was indeed all a hoax after all, like the "alien autopsy" (oh wait... I still have yet to be convinced that
that was a hoax).
AUTO FOCUS Tuesday, I finally saw
Auto Focus, Paul Schrader's film about the downfall of
Hogan's Heroes star
Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) through his obsession with videotaping and making love to ladies in all sorts of configurations along with video equipment supplier John Carpenter (
not the director!; played by the creepy William Dafoe), who got him hooked on making and editing videos (according to the film) and who may have been the one who murdered Crane in a motel in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1978. (Carpenter was formally charged with the murder in 1992, but was acquitted.) I found it to be a cautionary tale against the pursuit of sexual excess that's actually
very conservative and, ultimately, pro-family (in terms of what
not to do) in its overall message, to the point of portraying Crane's (alleged) churchgoing as a positive thing and having a (really rare for Hollywood) friendly, non-hypocritical minister attempt to steer Crane onto the right path at the beginning of the film. But, Crane's estranged (from each other) sons are highly critical of the film, with
Crane's first son claiming it was his 2nd wife Patricia that had incentive to murder him to profit from the videos. Crane's other son
savages the film on the "official" Bob Crane site and says that Crane never was a churchgoer, nor was he close to any ministers, and his womanizing and filming his womanizing started long before he was a star and before he met Carpenter, and, while he
admits Carpenter is the most likely suspect, also points out that he had made many a mobster angry through screwing their wives.
A couple of personal thoughts: I didn't know
Bruno Gerussi, of
Beachcombers fame, had a celebrity cooking show (where Crane's appearance was so much of a disaster from his lewd comments towards women in the crowd that the episode never aired)!
this blog discusses that scene a bit. Also, I couldn't help but be distracted that Werner Klemperer/Colonel Klink was played by
Benjamin's assistant "Russell" from the first Wayne's World movie, though that's not Kurt Fuller's fault that I only associate him with that one specific role.
As a film, I'd give it ***1/2/*****... I'd upgrade it to ****/***** if the film's more accurate than his sons claim, but there's no way I could verify that one way or the other.
FIFTH COLUMN UPDATES The list of U.S. Military interventions on
A.N.S.W.E.R.'s "fact" page is ripe for Fisk-ing, but I'm too lazy to do a proper job of it myself. It's completely devoid of any historical context, as though the Soviets were never really a threat to the Western Hemisphere, and it passes off enemy propaganda as facts, because, obviously, we can trust Castro, Arafat, Saddam and the like much more than we can trust Americans.
This one's too easy, though:
WORLD WAR II, 1941-45/ Naval,troops, bombing, nuclear/ Fought Axis for 3 years; 1st nuclear war.
Also Americans (and Canadians and the British) liberated (and rebuilt) Europe and East Asia, but that's obviously a minor little niggling detail too picayune for them to mention.
I don't personally even have any particular problem with the CIA knocking off little Soviet satellite puppet regimes in Central America during the Cold War, because I've never had any particular problem with the vailidity of the much reviled (by college professors and Hollywood) "Domino Theory", but that's another topic for another time.
The A.N.S.W.E.R. is... you're all Communists.
Also, David Frum mentions
Indymedia.org, affectionately known as "Nazimedia" amongst the warblog community, in
his latest diary entry at NRO... Dave, why give them any glory?
Someone at the RottenTomatoes.com forum posted a fairly generic list of his Top 10 anime films, and I say "generic" not to denegrate his tastes in anime but only because it's the movies you find listed the most often on these lists, save for maybe
Vampire Hunter D which would probably be replaced with
Ninja Scroll if you were doing the most generic list possible, and his choices are absoultely fine if he really likes those films best, no arguments there. There's nothing inherently "better" about posting a list of more obscure anime films just so you don't have a list that's like "everyone else's". I bring it up only so I can
link to my own ratings of these films I posted in response.
Personally, I'm more of a series fan than a movie fan when it comes to anime, and I watch anime more for enjoyment than "art", so my own list would be quite different, it's true. Also, I pretty much only have a top 3 for anime films... everything else in the top 10 really depends on my mood at the time I compile it as well as what I've seen recently and what I forget. Also, I'm not too fond of ranking anything because I'm usually too much of a wuss to compare apples and oranges
My top 3 are:
1)
Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer
2)
Tenchi Muyo in Love
3)
Kiki's Delivery Service
The other films that appear, on a somewhat rotating basis on my list, in alphabetical order only,
Akira (for the animation only... I don't recall ever seeing another hand-drawn cartoon, Japanese or otherwise, that quite compares in terms of both fluidity and detail),
Millenium Actress (maybe... I'd have to see it again),
My Neighbour Totoro, both
Patlabor films,
Project A-ko, both
Silent M�bius films,
Tenchi Forever (sometimes... I'm of two minds on that one),
Urusei Yatsura: Only You (the first film, with "Elle"), and
Whisper of the Heart, and perhaps more that don't come to mind right now. One that may soon appear on the list,
Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven's Door, but I probably won't see it until April since I haven't downloaded it at all.
PLANETARY DEATH MACHINES KICK ASS! Dan Flynn, writing in
National Review Online, gives a much more
accurate account on exactly who the protestors are, and who they are not.
News reports of the event described the participants as a cross-section of America. A CNN report on the eve of the protest maintained, "throughout the ranks, today's peace activists are growing grayer and more moderate." In case you didn't get the message, an on-screen headline reading "not the usual suspects" accompanied a later CNN report on the demonstrators on Aaron Brown's NewsNight. After noting the radical presence at the demonstration, the Boston Globe reported, "a wide array of first-time protesters suggested that the antiwar movement is drawing from a broader base." Thanassis Cambanis, the writer of the piece, observed "quiet knots of families and older people" at the protest.
While a small number of families, political moderates, and senior citizens salted the ranks of Saturday's march, a much-larger contingent escaped the notice of most journalists. Waving inflammatory signs, wearing scary costumes, and partaking in street theatre, the anti-American extremists who dominated the event were hard to miss. Yet, they were somehow overlooked in most of the press accounts of the protest.
I particularly like the quotes Flynn elicited from this protestor:
Bush "definitely knew in advance," remarked John Bostrom, who traveled to the march from Staten Island. "It was like when Hitler burned down the Reichstag." Why would the Bush administration refuse to act on its prior knowledge of the terrorist attacks? "What they want to do, basically, is build a worldwide planetary death machine that's technology driven, computer run, and hooked up to satellites that cover every square inch of the globe, and allows them to target and eliminate anything they want to wherever they want to," maintained Bostrom. "This is their plan. It's black and white. That's what they've been calling for. That's their strategy and they're obsessed by it."
I'm surprised Flynn got through an entire article about the "anti-everything" protestors without mentioning
Mumia, though.
Woo hoo!
X Entertainment is featuring
fifty commercials from kids' TV in the 1980s!
But they've forgotten the best commercial
the Colgate Pump commercial with the kids in detective suits and the girl dressed up like Uncle Sam singing a song about the Colgate Pump to the tune of Maddness' "Baggy Trousers". It's a .mov from a defunct commercial site, but I saved it as a .zip file.
Ebert & Roeper's "Worst of 1992"
CATEGORY: Big Stars in Big Bombs
Ebert:
Life or Something Like It (didn't see)
Bad Company (didn't see)
Roeper:
Enough (didn't see)
The Sweetest Thing (didn't see)
CATEGORY: Bad Bonding (buddy action comedies, or at least that's how they describe it)
Roeper:
Half Past Dead (didn't see)
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (didn't see)
Ebert:
The Tuxedo (didn't see)
CATEGORY: They're a Drag
Ebert:
Sorority Boys (I saw it! But it was at the beginning of last year and I really don't remember much... just the Chewbacca impression and the ending with the girls eating each other in the life raft. Was there a pot smoking scene? Completely forgettable, though, I think my brother Nick liked it somewhat.)
The Hot Chick (didn't see... but I liked
Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo although
The Animal left me lukewarm)
Roeper:
Juwana Mann (lord no, I didn't see it!)
CATEGORY: Cast Away (wastes of great casts)
Roeper:
Full Frontal (didn't see)
Just a Kiss (didn't see)
Ebert:
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (didn't see; couldn't get past the words "Ya-Ya Sisterhood"... enough of a warning for me to stay away, far, far away)
Waking Up in Reno (didn't see)
CATEGORY: No More McMovies (franchises that have lost steam)
Ebert:
Men In Black II (didn't see; I thought the original was pretty good, though much less filling than
Ghostbusters, and I even have the LaserDisc of it plus a pair of
Men In Black Ray-Bans, but I was warned not to see this one by my brothers, and I was quite busy last July anyhow.)
Roeper:
Friday After Next (didn't see, and, somehow, I didn't see the previous two either... I wonder why?)
CATEGORY: Retro Disasters
Roeper:
I Spy (didn't see, even though I'm a fan of Owen Wilson, I was just too busy in November. Roeper also mentions
Showtime and
The Adventures of Pluto Nash in terms of Eddie Murphy's disasterous 2002. I didn't see either one of those either, though very few other people did.)
Scooby Doo (didn't see... the CG dog just looked ugly.)
CATEGORY: Wretched Remakes
Ebert:
Mr. Deeds (didn't see, though I like Adam Sandler and some people said this was pretty good)
Rollerball (didn't see; along with
Pluto Nash,
Feardotcom and
Abandon it's been a terrible, terrible year for Montreal-shot movies, though
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which opens in Montreal on Friday, may buck the trend.)
CATEGORY: The Absolute Worst Movies of 2002
Roeper:
Swept Away (didn't see; and this is the Guy Ritchie shipwreck movie starring Madonna, absolutely not to be confused with the mostly wonderful
Spirited Away, the anime film from Hayao Miyazaki.)
Ebert:
Death to Smoochy (didn't see; though I think one of my 2 brothers enjoyed it, and not all the reviews for this one have been bad)
Hmm... I really didn't see too many bad movies last year, though I went to at least 40 different movies.
I'd say the worst movie I saw this year was
Abandon (here's
my thoughts on the film, as "Kiyone", on the AnimeNation.net forum) though even that started off okay (I liked it when the Katie Holmes character actually had a different opinion from the earnest young activist on "globalization", where opposing it is like opposing breathing), it was the second half of the film that sucked everything up. Another disappointment for me was
Slacker which was a total waste of Jason Schwartzmann, whom I really love from
Rushmore, with the only memoriable scene being the one where he made the sock puppet talk using his penis... how did he do that? Does he have some sort of special muscle in his foreskin that I don't have? With a name like "Schwartzmann", I'd have assumed he'd be circumcised.
Two anime films I found disappointing were
Metropolis (click for my thoughts on the AnimeNewsNetwork.com forum, where I'm "Tenchi") and
Jin-Roh (which just left me unmoved for some reason... I didn't care for the story nor did I care for the characters nor did I care for what happened for the characters, I'm not even sure why. it's not that I don't like languid-paced stories... if I did, then
Yokohama Shopping Log. I left this opinion on the AnimeNewsNetwork.com forum:
HMV's selling it for $115.99 Canadian; I bought the entire first season Rayearth
box set for not that much more there (around $140)! I don't know, for that amount of coin, I'd want, at the very least, commentary tracks by Mamoru Oshii and Hiroyuki Okiura, because I find most other DVD extras in expensive Speical Edition boxes to be peripheral eye candy that I tend to watch just once or twice. But I love listening to commentary tracks over and over. Fortunately for me (and I know this is the minority opinion here), I was left completely unmoved by this film, so I have no need to make any tough decisions about which version of the DVD I want to buy. I don't know what's wrong with me; I liked both Patlabor
films, directed by Oshii (though I love the more lighthearted tone of the TV series & OVAs more) and Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer
, also directed by Oshii, has got to be one of my top 3 favourite anime films (and probably in my top 10 films overall); not just that, but I also like counterfactual "alternate reality" science fiction, so I was expecting to love this film, especially after everything I'd heard about it, but, while quite gorgeous to look at, it did nothing for me. Maybe it's because you didn't get to see an awful lot of the German hegemony in Japan, other than the design of the military uniforms and all the Volkswagens. But it's not just that; I just never really got to care about the characters on either side. Also, the ending was just anti-climactic. But, as Royal Tenenbaum puts it, this is just one man's opinion. (I didn't care that much more for Metropolis
either, for what it's worth.)
It could just be that I didn't think either film nearly lived up to the hype, as, of course, in anime-fandom-land, any anime that makes it to North American cinemas (excluding
Pok�mon and its clones) is automatically "art" on the scale of
Citizen Kane or
2001 and the mainstream audiences stay away becuase of the great corporate conspiracy to keep anime down.
Yep, I knew it, you can't have a protest these days without the "Black Block" types
smashing shit up.
The angry demonstration began about 4:40 p.m. when a group of demonstrators beating drums and waving black-and-red flags blocked traffic at Fifth and Mission streets.
The mostly young activists, some with handkerchiefs covering their mouths and noses, turned onto Market Street, followed by police on bicycles.
The protest escalated to vandalism as the group turned up Sansome Street, spray-painting anti-war messages on the Citicorp Building.
Demonstrators used news racks and iron bars to smash a glass door at the Immigration and Naturalization Service building. As police rushed forward to protect the entry, the march turned south on Battery, smashing a window in a Starbucks coffee shop.
Make no mistake about it... the protestors are the "same old, same old" spoiled ne'er do wells and suburban malcontents that attended the "anti-globalization" rallies until that fad ended a year or so back. I love how the liberal media's presenting the protestors as "Republican and Democrat"... yeah, there are teeming masses of Republicans and conservatives (not counting Pat Buchanan "paleo-con" types) in the crowds.... rrrrriiiiiigggggghhhht. (Damn... wish I could watch Fox News in Canada).
As a bonus...
the straight dope on A.N.S.W.E.R., who they are and who they really support.
Hmm... I really like FBI agents because I like watching
The X-Files, so I'll put a few
words that will make them look at my page for sure...
Waihopai, INFOSEC, Information Security, Information Warfare, IW, IS, Priavacy, Information Terrorism, Terrorism Defensive Information, Defense Information Warfare, Offensive Information, Offensive Information Warfare, National Information Infrastructure, InfoSec, Reno, Compsec, Computer Terrorism, Firewalls, Secure Internet Connections, ISS, Passwords, DefCon V, Hackers, Encryption, Espionage, USDOJ, NSA, CIA, S/Key, SSL, FBI, Secert Service, USSS, Defcon, Military, White House, Undercover, NCCS, Mayfly, PGP, PEM, RSA, Perl-RSA, MSNBC, bet, AOL, AOL TOS, CIS, CBOT, AIMSX, STARLAN, 3B2, BITNET, COSMOS, DATTA, E911, FCIC, HTCIA, IACIS, UT/RUS, JANET, JICC, ReMOB, LEETAC, UTU, VNET, BRLO, BZ, CANSLO, CBNRC, CIDA, JAVA, Active X, Compsec 97, LLC, DERA, Mavricks, Meta-hackers, ^?, Steve Case, Tools, Telex, Military Intelligence, Scully, Flame, Infowar, Bubba, Freeh, Archives, Sundevil, jack, Investigation, ISACA, NCSA, spook words, Verisign, Secure, ASIO, Lebed, ICE, NRO, Lexis-Nexis, NSCT, SCIF, FLiR, Lacrosse, Flashbangs,
Should be enough to get them looking. So, FBI guys, what's your favourite episode of
The X-Files anyhow? I like:
1)
"Bad Blood" (the one about the vampire sherrif played by
Luke Wilson, one of my favourite male stars, told
Rashomon-style from Mulder and Scully's conflicting points of view).
2)
"Blood" (the one where video and electronic displays tell people who had been sprayed with an LSD-like chemical to kill)
3)
"Jose Chung's From Outer Space" (the one about aliens, hypnosis, air force guys in suits and Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek as Men In Black).
4)
"Soft Light" (the one with a fine performance from Tony Shalhoub as a scientist who, after a lab accident, has a shadow that dissolves people. One of the most creepy episodes.)
5)
"Dod Kalm" (the one where everyone ages quickly on the ghost ship).
I have the box set of the first 5 seasons, but, after the show moved from Vancouver to L.A., there weren't enough good epsiodes for me to want to own the entire seasons 6 through 9. Hopefully, they'll have the individual disks of those seasons available at some point after all the box sets are out.
I don't know... still haven't thought of a good title for this blog... "I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!" is a quote from the original
Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System, and it's my and my brother's equivalent of "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" from
Zero Wing. Incidentally, the first
Phantasy Star is now available on the Gameboy Advance as part of the
Phantasy Star Collection of the first 3 games in the series, and they kept the shoddy yet charming translation from the Master System cartridge (i.e. "First Food" instead of "Fast Food").
Today, I walked over to the main shopping centre (spelt with "re" in Canada, even in English) in Pincourt, the Faubourg de l'�le, to rent
the Hobbit from Blockbuster and then get a blank videotape from Zellers. I wanted to rent
The Hobbit because of the hilarious parody of the songs from the movie in the Lemmiwinks portion of the
South Park episode "The Death Camp of Tolerance". But the local Blockbuster didn't have it. Bastards... That reminds me, I saw
LOTR: The Two Towers two weeks ago and thought it was a marked improvement over the first in that it just seemed a lot more engaging for a non-Tolkien fan like myself, and I
liked the shield surfing and the dwarf tossing... I'm not someone that can handle a film that is 100% "gravitas", especially a fantasy film that is 3 hours long, I need a little comic relief and I don't care if it pisses off the purists. Still, I don't think I'll ever get nearly as much out of these films as the Tolkien fans do.
The Two Towers gets
****/***** from me.
I played around a little bit with the toys in the toy department at Zellers, but was dismayed to find that most of the big-ass Hot Wheels Ferraris I like so much had gone... I guess they were only a limited-time thing. I also checked the food section to see if they carry Nissin brand
Cup Noodles, but they just have Mr. Noodles and Campbell's. I like Nissin brand Cup Noodles because they're the only brand that still does a shrimp flavour with real, freeze-dried shrimp. Every other brand (mostly store brands) of shrimp flavoured cup ramen sold in Quebec is just nasty with artificial shrimp powder (I have to add frozen shrimp myself), and the Nissin brand has been disappearing from the shelves of most Quebec supermarkets over the past couple of years for some reason. So, I sent a form e-mail to Nissin Foods asking whether they still shipped any Cup Noodles to Quebec and got a reply saying they still have one contract, with Super C, a local discount supermarket chain, so I got about 4 there the other Friday but I was hoping that Zellers carried them since there are no Super C's anywhere particularly convenient for me. Wow! I think I'll fill my blog with exciting stories like this.
I got the videotape, so I could tape
the Simpsons,
Futurama and
King of the Hill (which is my favourite Fox cartoon), but forgot that the Golden Globes were on tonight, so Fox just showed a rerun of the
Simpsons episode from a few weeks back (the one where they're "pioneers" on a reality TV series) and then an heavily-edited version of
There's Something About Mary. But I'll tape the
Ebert & Roeper special about the worst movies of 2003 later tonight and then tell you what I think.
One other thing... either when I got kindling for the fire or when I got my beer from the downstairs fridge last night, I accidentally locked Sam, our labrador/mix dog (mostly black, but with white paws, a white patch below his chin and on his stomache, and a white top on his tail), in the garage! I guess he must have been hiding on the other side of our green Grand Am GT. We got Sam in October from the SPCA because our 14 year old dog Sledge Hammer died in April and our 5 year old golden retreiver/husky/mix Luke was getting very lonely and depressed. Sam's quieter than Luke, but he's a lot more destructive than Luke was when he was a puppy... tearing apart belts, books, cushions, CD carrying cases and even a few CDs. Fortunately, they were just the blank kind on which my brother recorded a few compilation CDs, not the store-bought kind.
Ah, one of the cool things about living in Quebec is the particularly potent beer we get from the microbreweries. I just popped open a bottle of
La Fin du Monde, which is 9% alcohol, though it still tastes smooth, unlike that nasty malt liquor stuff. It's as potent as
Carlsberg Special Brew, my drink of choice (late in the evenings) when I'm in Britain.
Also, stupid me, I forgot to say who Kiyone is... the teal tressed Galaxy Police goddess from
Tenchi Muyo, although she doesn't really appear in the original OVA (Original Video Animation = Japanese anime produced for sale on video) continuity, save for the
Mihoshi Special. The definitive version of Kiyone is the one from the
Tenchi Universe/Tenchi Muyo in Love/Tenchi Forever continuity where she's confident, strong and independent. The version of Kiyone in the
Tenchi in Tokyo continuity is a lobotomized Tenchi-chaser, just like the other girls. She's just my ideal woman... shame she doesn't exist, I know. But they made a spin-off TV series about the Galaxy Police,
Tenchi Muyo GXP, but didn't include Kiyone... the bastards. Anyhow, I included a link to the prime Kiyone site on the Web on the side of the screen, for further information.
Ahh.. converted to "Zulu Time" (a.k.a. Greenwich Mean Time). I'd have it Eastern, because I'm in Montreal, but I love aviation and
flight simming, so "Zulu Time" is cooler.
Okay, so a week or so ago, there were reports in the Montreal media about
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) targeting local
KFC outlets, or, as it's known in Quebec, PFK (Poulet Frit Kentucky), with their
"KFC Cruelty" campaign. Not much interested in exploring the (tasty, tasty) meat of their arguments against KFC, I'm just curious... where exactly are they going to protest? If you ever visit Montreal, there isn't a standalone KFC/PFK outlet anywhere downtown. All there is is a counter in the food court of the Place Ville Marie shopping concourse (which is only open during shopping hours, which sucks if you like eating dinner later in the evening), but they can't bloody well protest there (they'll be ejected rather quickly). The closest proper PFK/KFC outlet to downtown is either the one waaaay up on Parc past Mount-Royal boulevard or the one on Sherbrooke near Decarie (and that one sucks because there's no indoor seating). They can go protest those ones if they like, but they aren't going to get nearly as much attention as if they protested downtown.
I'd protest KFC too... to bring back the Zinger, because I like my chicken burgers spicy! They replaced the Zinger with the Spicy Big Crunch (at least in Canada) which is still pretty good, but, there, the spice is in the sauce they put on; the Zinger was marinated, so the entire patty was saturated with spiciness. Thank goodness Wendy's still does a proper, marinated, spicy chicken burger.
Also, can't mention PETA without linking to
the other PETA! Mmm... tasty animals.
Oops... needed double breaks.
I think I've figured out how to add links to the template. Here are a few websites I like to get started...
Damn... I'm trying out a bunch of templates and I'm republishing everything, but when I reload the page, it's not showing the new template unless I add new text. Well, I'll figure this out sooner or later.
Another post because I'm still trying to figure out how to configure this properly!
If anyone's reading this... how do I add links to my favourite blogs and other sites at the side of the screen? (Send answer to Kiyone(at)tokyo(dot)com... thanks)
I know how to link (the (opening pointy bracket)a href="http://www.link.com/"(closing pointy bracket)Name of Link(opening pointy bracket)/a(closing pointy bracket)), but where do I plug it in to the template?
Oh well, since I don't want this post to be a waste, I sho' love dat
Orange Aero!
Cor, it really works! (When I was a kid, I heard that line in an episode of
Start Here!, a British kids' science show that they showed on TV Ontario for a time, and I still find the line amusing.)
Let's post my top 5 favourite movies of 2002, in alphabetical order only, because I'm too wussy to pick a favourite (they're all *****/*****):
About Schmidt
Adaptation
Catch Me If You Can
Lilo & Stitch
Punch-Drunk Love
I have yet to see
Auto Focus (which I was going to see Saturday, but it was just too fricking cold outside) and
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (which opens in Montreal on Friday). There isn't a single film this year that I adore above all others the way I liked
The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001, but, at the Oscars, I'll be rooting for
Lilo & Stitch over
Spirited Away for Best Animated Feature.
Spirited Away is a very good film, make no mistake about it, but I didn't find it to be quite as special as Miyazaki's
Kiki's Delivery Service,
My Neighbour Totoro or
Whisper of the Heart (another Ghibli film, but directed by the late
Yoshifumi Kondo) and it is certainly not the "be all and end all" of a) animated films, b) Japanese anime or even c) Ghibli films that some people are making it out to be. Alas,
Lilo & Stitch will probably lose at the Oscars to
Spirited Away, I fully admit, but, at the end of the day, the Best Animated Feature Oscar (or any other award) only represents the subjective opinion of the plurality of Academy voters. I also far preferred
Monsters, Inc. over
Shrek (by a much greater margin than how much I prefer
Lilo & Stitch over
Spirited Away), but
Shrek's animators walked away with the statue. On the odd chance the other films on my list will be nominated for Best Picture, I'll probably be rooting for
About Schmidt, since I think it's the one that the Academy members would be more likely to vote for.
Hmm... where do I start? I'm Steve and I'm 28 and a computer animation student and I live in Montreal, Quebec. Actually, I mainly live in Pincourt, Quebec, which is a smallish commuter suburb about 35 km southwest of downtown Montreal on the island of �le-Perrot, which is just south of the former town, now a borough, of Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue on the western tip of Montreal island (and the western tip of the City of Montreal), which is also the western terminus of the 211 bus. Yes, we don't have a bus in my town, and I don't drive quite yet (long story... I'll probably tell you at some point), so my choices if I want to take the bus are to have my mother, father (or, if they're home, one of my siblings) drive me to Sainte-Anne's, take a taxi, or walk (about an hour's walk from my house to the bus stop). We do have a commuter train that stops in Pincourt, but service on the Montreal-Dorion/Rigaud is really scattershot during off-peak hours (compared to the Deux-Montagnes line, which has one train in each direction every hour during off-peak hours). And the last train home on weekdays is at 9:15 p.m. (used to be at 10:45 p.m.), which means I can't even see an early evening showing of a movie at the Paramount or AMC Forum 22 if I'm planning on catching a train... that sucks. And there's no movie theatres in Pincourt, with the closest cinema that shows English films on a regular basis in the borough of Kirkland, which is a pain-in-the-ass to get to and from by bus. All we have in Pincourt for entertainment are the bowling alley and a Blockbuster Video.
Though, I also have an apartment in downtown Montreal (Prince-Arthur, corner Aylmer) in the Milton-Park neighbourhood (a.k.a. the McGill Ghetto) which I stay in on school nights. It is really my brother Nick's apartment, except he's mainly been at various universites pursuing post-grad studies (first in Exeter, Devonshire, England and then Toronto). It's $800 a month though, and I'll be moving out of there in the summer. Yeah, I love Montreal, but my French is crappy for someone that's lived in Montreal for most of my life, so I'll likely move somewhere else in Canada (or maybe even England) before too long. I was actually born in England (Rustington, West Sussex), but my family moved to Canada when I was 2 1/2, in 1977. I had a British accent when I was a kid... that was weird.
