If You Write It

Water-Can't Live Without It

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:42:00 +0000

I did something very stupid yesterday-I didn't drink enough water. I drank a few cups of coffee and a couple of Dr Deppers, and while these drinks list water as their main ingredient-they are not, in fact, water.

I am a water drinker from a long way back-that bit about 8 glasses of water a day has never been a burden for me-except perhaps as an occasional limit. I have been known to down 8 ounce glasses of water at one go and during my cycling days I would drink a couple of oversized water bottles on my rides and stop for refills along the way.

So it was odd that I got distracted and didn't drink enough water yesterday. I paid for it this morning by feeling like death warmed over. Stiff and tired and dry eyes-not exactly stranded in the Shara dry-but for me, a bit of discomfort. I am making up for it today by sipping water whenever I get a chance.

From time to time there are stories in the news about people dying from drinking too much water-something like gallons of water at a time apparently. Now I like water, but I don't like drinking water that much. Besides, if everything is working as it should, you need to get rid of all that water every couple of hours anyway. But it does make for interesting news.

I thought about becoming a chef at one time. When to the local Culinary Academy and took a series of tests to see if I had the basic skilled needed to work in a kitchen. Could I tell the difference between sour cream and whole milk, for example-somehow I got that one wrong. But they did have a taste test that involved water with small amounts of flavoring added to it-I aced that test, to the amazement of the chefs who had tested my skills on milks and creams. It was not long before I realized that the life of Anthony Bourdain was not the life for me. But it was a fun experience.

I need to add here that I drink TAP water not spring water delivery to my door-as in the stuff that pours out of a faucet. I have drank tap water all over the country, with the occasional water cooler water tossed in for good measure. Some tap water is pretty nasty stuff, and some of it is amazingly good. I have never been a fan of bottled water, water filters, and a lot of over purification of water-though I was tempted to buy some Arctic Water that I saw one time. That kind of pure water from ice burgs that they make really good vodka from. But I never really got around to it.

So, like the advice about using sunscreen, I would advice that every should feel free to drink water.

The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:44:00 +0000

I really like this The Undomestic Goddess-though it is as predictable as it is possible for a book to be. Like a mystery or a romance, it is predictable in a good way. We start out with our hero, Samantha, not being able to sew on a button or cook anything beyond toast-and she is a bit iffy the toast.
But Samantha is a whiz bang lawyer who can do complex math problems in her head. She is about to be made Partner at Carter-Sphinx, when she finds a bit of paper buried under the mess on her desk-she has not done her job and her client is left fifty million pounds in debt.

Set in London and the English countryside, it is filled with charming and wonderful characters. Ditzy Neuvo Rich and down to earth Coutry Folk and our hero, the former lawyer, plopped down in the middle of it all when she is accidentally hired as a housekeeper. The stuff that situation comedy is made of.

There are tons of tense moments and oh I could never do that moments, and is there any doubt that Justice will be serviced? It almost feels like a screenplay-the sets and dialogue already to be reformatted and shipped off to Hollywood. The idea of London and Gloucestershire being coupled together is kind of fun.

I love the audio book version of Undomestic Goddess-I have a weakness for all those British accents and pronunciations. Simple things like a pruning shears being called secetars and more odd things like Aluminum not being pronounced a-lum-a-num, but being pronounced al-oo-MIN-ium. Kind of like calling the letter Z by a proper name-Zed. Or calling the trunk of a car the boot. All great stuff at any rate.

Katherine Kellgren does a great job of giving each character their own voice, with a vast world of British accents and dialects to delight the ear. From the strictly business London types to the country hick bartenders. There is something just fun about hearing all these odd little ticks of the English language.

Emmy Nominations 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:12:00 +0000

I watch a lot of TV, but not as much as I used to. I hear stats from time to time that people are wringing theirs hands over kids watching four or five hours of TV a day, and I think, what are these kids? Amish? The TV goes on when I wake up and goes off when I go to sleep. Well, maybe not quite as bad as that every day, I do leave the house once in a while.

But the point is, I am sort of familiar with most of the TV shows up for an Emmy this year. I like when the Emmy Nominations are announced and I can say-what? That Show? You've got to be kidding? I'm talking to you Life According to Jim. But most of the shows are the usual suspects-big budget costume drama gets the most nods-John Adams and it was good, what I watched of it.

There are too many shows for me to watch, so I tend to keep an eye on the Sci Fi and Fantasy front, there was some good news in the Emmy Nominations. The brilliant and Tim Burtoneque Pushing Daises got 12 Emmy Nominations, that's the third most. Pushing Daises is a wonderfully odd show and I hope it wins big.

The Sci Fi Channel twisted Land of Oz story, Tin Man, got 9 Emmy Nominations. I was not as impressed with Tin Man as I wanted to be, even though the cast was brilliant and the sets Divine. The story, such as it was, was pretty terrible. Still, it was one of the more serious Sci Fi Channel efforts and was very good considering it didn't have any CGI monsters eating New York, or LA, or New York and LA. The Sci Fi Channel makes so really bad movies.

The wonderful Cranford, which aired on PBS Masterpiece Theater, got 8 Emmy Nominations and I hope that it wins all of them as well. Another great costume drama with an amazing cast and wonderful setting. Though it is kind of hard to understand the world in which the people of Cranford lived, it was fun to watch.

The Andromeda Strain and LOST both got 7 Emmy Nominations, though to be honest I didn't think The Andromeda Strain was all that great. It is good than anyone makes shows from older Sci Fi works. So if The Andromeda Strain wins a couple of Emmys maybe it will inspire the making of a few more classic Sci Fi movies. LOST, well, it is not as great as it once was, but it is still the best Sci Fi on TV right now.

The other serious show on The Sci Fi Channel is Battlestar Gallatica, the warped retelling of the 1970s space opera. This updated and revved up Battlestar is a pretty good show, but the countless meanderings of the plot and the death and rebirth of just about every major character gets pretty old after a while. Battlestar has 5 Emmy Nominations and I'm sure its makers wanted more, they take this silly show way too seriously for it's own good.

Two of my current favorite Sci Fi shows are Heroes and Terminator:The Sarah Connors Chronicles-both shows got 3 Emmy Nominations. This has to be good news for Sarah Connors as it was a strike shortened series and didn't even have a full season run. Sarah Connors was a very good show with great production values and story lines. Heroes, well, the second best show of TV is still very good and getting better all the time. Heroes should have had a few more Emmy Nominations in my humble opinion.

For a complete list of the 2008 Emmy Nominations head over to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

In The Perfect Entrecard World

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:31:00 +0000

I've had the Entrecard widget on If You Write It for some time now-I go through phases where I think it is a waste of space and phases where I do a lot of dropping and hitting new blogs. I have never been big on using the Entrecard forums or reading the Entrecard blog. I tend to see what other Entrecard blogs have to says as I am dropping cards.

The original idea behind Entrecard seemed to be to allow the average blogger to advertise on high ranked blogs and like minded blogs. So that every one's goal in the early days was to get an ad on John Chow or Problogger. Failing that as the cost and wait were close to infinite you were supposed to your run ads on blogs like your own. So that a blog about knitting would run ads on other blogs about knitting, and so on.

You you ads with Entrecard credits which you earn, in part, from dropping cards on other blogs. The daily limit was set at 300 and soon there were a lot of people hitting the limit everyday. Now the question has to be, how much does a blog benefit from hundreds of random people stopping by for ten seconds to drop a card? Well, not much.

I have found a few blogs that I like with Entrecard and have started to leave comments on a few of them. I have also put my Entrecard ad on a lot more sites. All of this is kind of fun, in a jeez this taking longer than thought it would, sort of way.

The Perfect Entrecard World would have everyone who drops a card take a few more seconds and Digg, Stumble, Bookmark, Technorati Favorite, and Leave a Comment. Ok, maybe more than a few seconds-but the Technorati Fave would only need to be done once. Of course, there would need to be some limit-I've seen plenty of blogs with fifty icons at the end of each post-maybe three or four would be better. Something that a card dropping mad blogger might take an extra minute to do. And Entrecard is trying to improve that whole commenting thing as well.

But really, zipping through sites and dropping cards is pretty much what Entrecard is designed to do. Is this really good blog promotion? I get hits and a few comments and I have found blogs I would never have otherwise seen. I don't really expect Entrecard users to do anything other drop cards-there are plenty of blogs where that is all I do.

So thanks for stopping by-oh, they're gone already.

Geoff Dyer-Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:28:00 +0000

One of the stores in Geoff Dyer's Yoga for people who can't be bothered to do it is about a trip to Cambodia. I have read this story several times, and yet, each time I read it, it is shocking in its details and how pointless it all seems. Geoff Dyer is a dead brilliant writer-reading him makes me both want to write, and to give up writing as I will never be as good at it as he is. He sprinkles his writing with quotations and speaks as if he was there when Auden decided to say that Sunsets are only good for about thirty minutes.

The Cambodia piece is a kind of anti-travel article, where as a normal travel article makes you want to go somewhere-Geoff Dyer makes you want to nuke it off the face of the earth just to put it out of its misery. I've had this feeling before, when I read The Sex Lives of Cannibals-a really wonderful anti-travel book. Reading about Cambodia brings out The Imperialist in me, I want to go there and build roads and Wal-Marts and Starbucks and Universities and put an internet connection in every house-but I would have to go and build the houses first. Of course, Imperialism is what did them in to start with.

Cambodia, as described by Geoff Dyer, is one of those Hell on Earth kind of places.

But he does find his way to Angkor Wat and the other ancient temples, which are pretty much the only reason anyone one would ever venture into Cambodia. My favorite anit-traveler is Anthony Bourdain-he went to Cambodia and stayed in a room with blood stains on the walls. Oh and the food was horrid as well. And the roads were terrible. And there was just the slightest possibility of being killed at any moment.

The Geoff Dyer story ends with our hero buying a Coke from a legless boy who looks to be twelve, but is in fact, seventeen. There is a titanic battle of wills as he refuses to buy a Coke form a girl-who feels greatly cheated that he bought a Coke from the legless boy instead of her. There is talk about how the boy lost his legs to a landmine, as so many people in that part of the world do.

Reading Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It is kind of like listening to Howard Stern-it is sort of interesting, but you get the feeling that anyone-and I mean anyone, could be doing it. Geoff Dyer tells about traveling to amazing places and doing mundane things. Just as we all do-I went to London and visited Thrift stores-but I never got around to writing an article about it. Geoff Dyer would have, and he would have managed to fill it with quotes and a seeming great import. There is a feeling that something is about to happen in these little stories-but somehow it never does.

In novels and movies-everything has to be relevant. If it is mentioned in passing that a character is a wiz at math, you can bet the farm that a math problem will need to be solved to save their lives. In Geoff Dyer's little tales-he just thought you might like to know someone was good at math and never mentions it again.

So there is a refreshing lack of structure to these essays-mundane events are given the weight and feel of great doings. Each story leads toward a great revelation-but then there is no revelation. Another part of Geoff's style is to bombard with irrelevant and pointless information-like this place reminds me of that place where we met this guy before heading to some other place with some other guy. There are lot of sentences which feature the names of people and places in rapid fire confusion.

And yet these odd little snippets of pointlessness are fun to read. If there is humor here, it is of the British sort and I am not stiff upper lipped enough to get the jokes. Odd things happen amid the boring everyday things-but the mundane always wins out. And I think that is the point. Here is a fellow traveling to the literal ends of the earth, doing things that most of can only dream about-and he is telling us it is all totally boring.

Part of the charm of these essays is that Geoff is not afraid to use a lot of words. Most people in America have been brainwashed by Strunk and White:we are to omit needless words-and let's be honest, in more cases, they are all needless. So we read our sentences and think, oh my, that is way too long, and we cut the length and the meaning into smaller and smaller bites that we hope the reading public can understand. Oddly, the reading public is perhaps the only place where long and complex sentences are understood. So Geoff's rambling sentences and confusing bits of irrelevant information are a joy to read.

He also wants you to go out and but a pair of Tevas.

There is a bit of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in Yoga for people who can't be bothered to do it-but again, it is all boring sex, drugs, and rock and roll-so normal and common place that you think oh, everyone is like that. But really, Geoff Dyer is a one of a kind. This is a great little book.

Journey to The Center of The Earth in 3D

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:10:00 +0000

The problem with 3D movies is that they are made for 3D. Not that there's really anything wrong with that. After a couple of hours you get used to tree limbs in the corners and the occasional thing jumping out of the screen. It's all in fun after all. And Journey to the Center of The Earth in 3D was fun.

What was a bit of a surprise was the fact that it cost an extra two dollars to see it-I suppose this is to cover the cost of the snazzy 3D glasses they hand you with your ticket. They are marked- not sung lasses-clearly they don't do a lot of proofing in China. The movie was worth an extra couple of bucks, but it would have been nice to see that on the webpage before heading down there.

There were a couple of Previews of other 3D movies-the one that looked the most impressive was a computer cartoon called Fly Me To The Moon about three flies that want to go to the moon during the Apollo years. The space shots were so cool in 3D that I want them to make a real movie and forget this crap about flies. I may have to go and see that one.

Ok, Journey to The Center of The Earth in 3D was a pretty good movie. Since it stars Brendan Frasier it's not like your expecting Citizen Kane or The Godfather anyway. It's a fairly predictable story about our hero and his sappy nephew and a hot Icelandic chick they pick up along the way who seems to channel Laura Croft on command. There are all kinds of nifty 3D things happening in the film, antennae pop forward, fish fly by, Brendan spits into the screen, and just about everything that can be given depth, is given depth. Fog and water and dust and birds and fish and leafs and plants and well, everything is given the 3D treatment. Part of the effect of all of this is that you are a bit wobbly after the film is over and you stagger out of the theater.

3D is not really good on fast cuts, as the eye takes a moment to catch up with what is going on and it is a jarring feeling that is used to good effect a couple of times for haunted house type shocks and frights. The 3D effects were pretty good for the most part-with the weak link being, as in so many films these days, the horrid CGI. Fake looking computer fish and fake looking computer sea monsters and a fake looking T-Rex all detracted from the 3D effects. The CGI Venus Flytraps looked pretty damned good though-so it was not a total wash. And of course, the entire Center of the Earth was CGI.

It was silly and fun and the opening and closing credits had the best 3D effects in Journey to The Center of The Earth 3D-the Disney logo was awesome in 3D.

Sinister Rabbit liked the 1959 version with James Mason, and really, so did I. Of course, the Jules Verne book is pretty good, if you haven't had a chance to read it you really should.

New Yorker Magazine Obama Cover

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:52:00 +0000

“The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree,” Barack Obama’s campaign spokesman Bill Burton

Barrack Obama is the whitest black man this side of Colin Powell-and Powell flatly refused to run for President. So it's hard to whip out normal racial stereotypes on this pale thin dude who wants to be President. The New Yorker magazine cover shows Barack Obama and his wife Michelle dressed as terrorists who pulled the wool over every one's eyes and made it to the White House.

Americans love people we know nothing about. We don't want to see them on the cover of New Yorker magazine, we don't want know what they think. If a total unknown could get on the ticket a couple of hours before the General Election, they would win by a landslide. As it is, we have to spend months learning all this stuff about the people running for President that we don't want to hear.

There is a photo of Barrack Obama dressed in bizzaro world clothes when he was a child that made the rounds a while back. Yes, it is normal clothes for the Muslim world, but Barack Obama keeps telling us he is not Muslim-he's good old fashioned I Hate Whitie Christian. Oh, wait, he said he quit that church-and never really listened to the Preacher while he was there for twenty years anyway. I guess the New Yorker Magazine artist didn't want to crowd the image with a portrait of Reverend Wright.

I especially like the touch of the American Flag burning in the fireplace under a portrait of Osama bin Laden-well, Barrack's middle name is Osama, isn't it? Need we way more?

The Barrack Obama New Yorker cover is surely meant to be a joke-this just raises the question: what's funny about it? Well, not much. The Editors at The New Yorker said it was clearly a joke and that all it's reader would get the many inside jabs about how wrongly Barack Obama has been portrayed in the media. Really? It looks more like The New Yorker Magazine is endorsing those view of Barrack Obama.

Political Cartoons are usually meant to show the Real World that we poor readers are too dumb to see and understand. This cartoon clearly states that Barack Obama really is a terrorist waiting to overthrow the American Way of Life. I'm sure he is against Truth and Justice as well.

The New Yorker Magazine has been on the downhill slide for a while now-long gone are the days when it was a shame not to read every word of every article. This is clearly an attempt to get some much needed attention for this sinking ship. And that, at least, The New Yorker has succeeded in doing.

Hellboy II Rocks

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:25:00 +0000

Putting Ron Perlman in a red costume was about a million times better than having some programmer whip up a CGI Hulk. There was a ton of far out, incredible, unbelievable stuff in Hellboy II and every damned frame of this film looked great. The gang from the first Hellboy looks like they never stopped filming. There are a few silly things, like Hellboy and Liz having an argument that destroys a hallway and Abe suffering from love at first sight-but it all makes perfect sense in the greater scheme of things.

As with all movies these days, lots of things in Hellboy II reminded me of other films. Several scenes were almost taken verbatim from a Harry Potter movie-the Tooth Faires were a lot like the Pixies, only much meaner, and the hidden Marketplace was a more rough and tumble Diagon Alley. And like the Harry Potter sets, there was a feeling of it's odd, but it might be fun to pop in for a minute.

Two other scenes were clones-one had a giant CGI monster tearing up New York City and the mystery tentacles reminded of the beastie from Cloverfield-but it was not quite as tough as the unknown whatsit from Cloverfield. Or maybe JJ Abrams should just put in a call for Hellboy. Then there was a scene from The Matrix, with a slight twist, that was very good near the end.

In short, a lot happens in Hellboy II and almost all of it is good. The fights are fun, the villains are way cool looking, there is a cameo from a Beauty and the Beast star, and people cheered as the credits started to roll. Hellboy II was fast paced and loads of fun.

How Did You Find Me?

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:35:00 +0000

There are a few people who blog and and make a living at it-John Chow, Dosh Dosh, Pro Blogger, a number of geeky tech blogs that I never go anywhere near and likely a few hundred other good people that I don't read. Other people, well, I am not sure what their reasons for blogging are. I started If You Write It with the goal of making $300 a day, and have come as close to that goal as making four or five dollars a day.

I had A Plan, but found it to be too much like, oh, what do you call it?-work.

So I tend to tool around the net looking at blogs and playing with social networks and just seeing what people are blogging about. If I find something interesting, say someone wrote a review of a book on tying knots, I might leave a comment that says-Hey, you know I like tying knots ;). And maybe a few other readers would say other silly things. All fun and silliness. If I were in the library and noticed someone reading a book on knots and walked up and said-Hi, you know I like tying knots. They'd call security and reach for their can of mace.

Curiously, something like that happens in cyberspace once in a while. I'll leave a comment on a blog post that I found interesting and the blogger will respond in shocked horror-HOW DID YOU FIND MY BLOG?????? I used a computer.

I had a very similar encounter on Plurk the other day. I tend to go to the Plurk front page-well, they call it the Interesting Plurkers page-and look at the plurks-then go to some Timeline I find worth commenting on and leave a comment, or plurk, my own in response. This is how I have gathered my small army of friends on Plurk. I plurked someone the other day and they came and demanded to know who I was and why I was plurking on their Timeline. Hmm, social network on the world wide web that anyone with a computer can access-well, how dare I invade their space?

They seemed to be of the opinion that their personal plurks were somehow a private chat network that only they could see. Well, you can set plurk up that way, but this intrepid plurker had not done so. His plurks were set to Visible to the Whole World. He seemed genuinely upset about this, at least briefly-as he and his friends liked to Plurk about personal stuff.

Of course, Plurkers and Bloggers are not the only people who have an odd idea of privacy on the web. I'm reminded of all the countless numbskulls on Myspace who think posting pictures of themselves with their dildo collection is funny-until everyone they know finds the pictures and they are humiliated. The most extreme case of Myspace Madness of course was that psycho bitch who caused a girl to kill herself and then had the balls to blame the girl. Social networks can be really, really unsocial.

For the most part I like Plurk better than any of the other sites I have used. I have like zero Karma on Reddit, I got kicked off of Newsvine, the most Diggs I ever had is about 7 or 8, and I don't seem to get a lot of Stumbles either. Facebook is a myster to me and there are just too many other places to bother with. I do get a few hits from these sites though, so I keep trying. Plurk however, has something going for it that none of these other Social Networks do-it's fun.

I hit the front page of FARK one time and got about eight thousand hits in one day. Got a few comments as well-on FARK itself there were something like a hundred comments-almost all of them were negative. Not that this bothered me all that much, but it just seemed a bit odd. Of course, I seldom write glowing movie reviews myself, so I can understand that it is easier criticize than praise. Still, it was my goal to be seen and get hits, so it worked out fine.

I've had a bit of fun with Entrecard, shocked by both how many bad blogs there are out there and how many pretty goods there are as well. There are a few of the big name bloggers there, but mostly the big names on Entrecard are unheard of outside of Entrecard. To honest, I never heard of John Chow until I found him on Entrecard.

Recently I found a post that said you should bookmark 300 Entrecard sites, them open them all in Tabs and zip right through your card drops. Easy for him to say-my machine chugs to a halt if I open twenty tabs. But I did try bookmarking a few blogs-I have been a bit shocked that in less than a week several of the sites are already gone, or have removed their Entrecard widget. Oh well.

One of the fun things about Plurk is that you can sort of talk to a couple of the Big Bloggers-both Dosh Dosh and Problogger are active on Plurk and you can Plurk them and they might even respond to what you say. I know, you can leave comments on their blogs, along with a few hundred other people-Plurks are a bit more direct than the mob comment.

This is sort of like being in a chat room with Britney Spears and Brad Pitt, well, the blogsphere equivalent anyway. When I first started blogging I did a bit of celebrity blogging and found Perez Hilton. I blogged about Perez and he paid my humble blog a visit-I guess he wasn't too impressed, but it was kind of cool that he stopped by.

Now I wonder if Kevin Bacon is on Plurk? Are there six degrees of separation in the Plurkverse?

Jury Duty Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:19:00 +0000

People who work for The Government are, by and large, evil bastards. This is common knowledge I know, but I still feel it is worth mentioning. The Government lives to waste your time, and wants to put you in jail and waste a lot more of your time if you make too much of a fuss about how much of your time they normally waste.

The people who work in the Courts where they have Jury Duty are a bored and boring lot. They find it downright hilarious if you ask how long it will take or tell them you don't want to be on a jury. Clearly no one, and I mean, no one, wants to be on a jury. Anyone who has gone through the mind deadening process of jury selection knows exactly why the O.J.Simpson Trail ended in record time-and in fact I am surprised it took them as long as it did. Jury Duty is a living Hell.

Now it is possible that this is a slight exaggeration. My own humble Jury Duty experiences were of the minor waste of time variety and not the weeks on end who-gives-a-damn type that show up on Court TV all the time. But still, I did manage to fall asleep while in the Jury Box. This was the most god damned boring shit in the history of the universe. This was-yes, I'd rather watch Paint Dry or NASCAR, than this. The general theme followed the O.J. pattern, tell us something, repeat what you just said, say it again, and repeat the whole process seven or eight times for every sentence you say. The other side stands up and does the same thing. I was honestly baffled that a couple of the people in my Jury actually seemed to care about the case-which involved how much Commission an Affiliate should be paid-the Affiliate wanted more, the Main Company wanted to pay less. Shocking I know.

After three days of napping in the Jury Box and getting paid two dollars a day, or was it five? The parties met and agreed on a Settlement-Hosanna! We the Jury never found out, nor really cared, what this settlement was-we were just glad it was over.

Another case I was a lucky Jury member on involved a woman who was crazy-or so some Doctor or another said. We had one piece of evidence-a signed affidavit-or some other legalize document that says-THIS PERSON IS NUTS. We didn't see the woman in question, nor did we see the Doctor. Our job was to say that yes, this paper says the woman is crazy-put her in Hospital, or no this document doesn't say she is crazy-don't put her in Hospital. But since our only option was, Yes She's Nuts-it seemed a pretty open and shut matter to me. Not so to the other, much more serious members of our little jury. They debated on whether or not we, who have never seen the woman, should be judging if she is mentally unstable and a danger to herself or others. So we requested our one piece of evidence and our duly elected Foreman read it. What should have taken ten minutes took two hours.

I haven't been called up for Jury Duty since the case where I fell asleep, which I suppose might have been contempt of court-but it is hard not to have contempt for Court. The idea that the most important events of your life are decided by people who really, really don't care-well, it's a bit scary, isn't it?

Of course, I think most people care, at least during the start of a trail, before they are swamped by the totally trivial nature of a trail. We are fooled by Perry Mason and Law and Order into thinking our legal system works-at least once in a while. But the more we use DNA, the more people are set free after being wrongly imprisoned for the better parts of their lives.

There should be Professional Jurors and they should leave the rest of us alone.

Dress Like a Cow-Get A Free Chick-Fil-A

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:48:00 +0000

Now I have been known to enter the odd costume contest from time to time. I won a trip to London by dressing up like Arthur Dent from Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy. But that was for a Trip to London-not a free Chick-fil-a combo meal. But hey, free food is free food. Getting through the crowds is the real challenge.

Still, it does sound sort of fun to dress like a cow from head to hoof for Chick-fil-A's 4th annual Cow Appreciation Day (July 11) and get a complimentary combo meal (breakfast, lunch or dinner) from Chick-fil-A. A free Chick-fil-a combo meal for dressing up like a cow-is this a great country or what?

Don't feel like doing the full cow look? Partial cow attire will still get you a complimentary entrée. Request a tall, cool Dr Pepper with your Chick-fil-A and complete your meal.

Make it a group event, send this email to your friends and come dressed as an entire herd - Chick-fil-A for everyone! Cow up and get free Chick-fil-A on July 11th. Need tips on how to dress like a cow? Check out Cow Tipping. Find a Chick-fil-a near you.

Chick-fil-a is one of my favorite fast food places, the food is good and I like the silly calendars. But the coupons in the Chick-fil-a calendars are not as good as they used to be. Whataburger had calendars at one time, but they stopped making them pretty quick. Same with Arby's-too bad as about the only time I went to Arby's was when I had a calendar coupon. Still, you just have ask yourself, if is it worth it dress like a cow and get a free meal?

Well, duh.

Coupons, Coupons, Coupons

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:17:00 +0000

Once again the Today Show has given its blessing to a coupon site, this time the lucky provider of internet coupons and coupons discounts is Coupons.com. You can enter you zip code to get discount coupons near where you live. These seem to be printable coupons, which are always nice to have.

I have been using coupon books for years, though the businesses often go out of business before I get to use my coupon deals. Sites like coupons.dom can be a bit more up to date than book coupons. I use a lot of coupon deals, for everything from breakfast cereal coupons to Bath and Body Works coupons. Coupons make my world go around.

Coupons com has the usual assortment of coupons, food coupons, entertainment coupons, household coupons, pet coupons, photography coupons-coupon deals for all kinds of stuff. You can find coupons with a click. I don't see any coupon codes, but then, I have never been able to figure out how to use coupon codes anyway.

The best coupons and the free coupons that you will actually use. My problem with the free coupons in the newspaper is that they are often for stuff I don't want. But get coupons for items you are going to buy anyway-that's a good coupon. Printable coupons make the process pretty easy-get your promotional coupons right before you head out the door.

You can get good savings with coupons-the Wife has save well over a hundred dollars with shopping coupons-but that was in the good old triple coupon days. We don't use the store coupons as much as we used to-but it seems they still have some good sales once in a while. A sale and a coupon, what more could you want from life?

Click and Clack Cartoon

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:22:00 +0000

"Retire? Why would we retire? We only work two hours a week as it is." Ray, or is Tom?

Click and Clack the Tappit Brothers have been on Public Radio pretty much forever. These are a couple of Boston auto mechanics who answer questions about cars, car repair, and pretty much whatever they feel like talking about. The show is hilarious the first time you hear it-it's all about the brothers quick wits and snappy come backs and the way they insult each other. It's a fun show.

But there is something about the voices of these two yuks that make the show is funny-their books are stupid and boring. Like many great comedians, Tom and Ray have found that it is easy to be witty, but pretty damned hard to be funny. Tom and Ray are masters of snappy repartee-and they have to have a live one to be really funny. Some of the calls are from people with real car troubles and there is nothing at all funny about Tom and Ray telling them what is wrong and how it will cost them five hundred dollars-and that's just for the part.

Car Talk is one of a handful of PBS shows that are Great Shows-Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Prairie Home Companion, and The Infinite Mind are a few others. Too many PBS stations play nothing but classical music all day and it is baffling that they manage to stay on the air at all. So there has been this trend of late to try and capitalize on the popularity of the handful of shows that are popular. This American Life was made into an oddly depressing Showtime series. Listening to these odd tales is fascinating, watching them is next to impossible.

Which brings me to Click and Clack As The Wrench Turns.

Just watching the little preview tell you this is not going to be pretty. The animation is the kind of stuff that you get from a Chinese workshop for pennies on the dollar. In short, it sucks. Ok, so I don't exactly expect Click and Clack-As The Wrench Turns to look like Shreik or Finding Nemo, but it could at least look as good as most Saturaday Morning Cartoons. This is supposed to be a Prime Time Cartoon show for adults-think of The Simpsons and Family Guy and The Flintstones. Maybe they were trying to bring back that feeling of the horrid cartoon shows we grew up watching in 1970s. The animation on the I'm Only a Bill looked better than Click and Clack.

Well, it could be worst, they could have made a movie out of Click and Clack as they did with Prarie Home Compaion. Maybe next year.

An Open Letter to The Wachowski Brothers

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:13:00 +0000

Dear Andy and Larry,

I know that you must be basking in the warm glow of all those positive reviews for Speed Racer-they both had nice things to say. I realize that Speed Racer was just following in the footsteps of Dick Tracy-a film that pretty much ended the actor careers of Madonna and Warren Baetty, though to be honest, I haven't missed either one of them. So I am not even going to ask why you thought making a movie out of a forty year old cartoon was a good idea, or why anyone would have given you the money to make it.

We all know why you were given the money to make it-The Matrix.

I would like to thank you, Wachowski Brothers, for making The Matrix-in my humble opinion the Best Movie Ever. I would then like to ask you a favor-please make a sequel to The Matrix.

The other day I went to see Hancock-not a bad movie, just not a great one. One of the Trailers had Keanu Reeves and was kind of dark and had a feel of computers and the end of the world. For just a moment-it looked like a sequel to The Matrix and there was a sudden holding of breath in the theater. Then it turned out to be The Day The Earth Stood Still and everyone said-Oh, right. Just what we need-one crappy remake.

Now I know that you made two more movie set, more or less, in the Matrix universe. A lot less than more. At the end of The Matrix, as I'm sure you are well aware, Neo became a God. He could kill Agents, crash the Matrix when it tried to run a search on him, and he could fly. The flying was the least important aspect of Neo's new powers-Neo was The One-who could REMAKE the Matrix as he saw fit.

Now I understand that having Neo become a God limited your story options a bit. There can't be a totally pointless car chases-which you seemed proud of being the most expense car chase EVER(also the most boring car chase EVER)-as Neo would not be restricted by the laws of time and space that govern the Matrix. At least you were able to use the boring car tricks in Speed Racer to make it shockingly boring as well. Neo wouldn't even need the doors that the bad guys use in the other Matrix movies, he would just be wherever he wanted to be.

So you choose to forget the last ten minutes of The Martix-fine, you can do that and never explain why. Then you did it again with Reloaded-you skipped the last ten minutes where the world should have ended and Neo had Real Power in the Real World. Easier to forget about it than to try and make sense of it-or even mention it in Revolutions. So in effect what we had with Reloaded and Revolutions were two alternate Universes where the Neo we meet in The Matrix never existed.

I want to see a movie with the Neo from the last ten minutes of The Matrix as the main character. And I think I am not alone in this. If they can reboot The Hulk, then by God, You Can ReBoot The Matrix. Really, we'll all forget that those other two movies ever happened. I have already mostly forgotten them.

The Matrix was a near perfect film-Orson Wells never made a sequel to Citizen Kane and Margaret Mitchell never wrote a sequel to Gone With The Wind. We never found out what happened to Rick after the credits rololed on Casablanca. Speileberg wanted to make a sequel to Close Encounters, but ended up with ET instead.

If your other Matrix movies had been other stories set in the Matrix Universe, it might have been alright. But you had to murder Neo and Trinity and turn Morpheus into a coward hiding in the basement. This is totally unacceptable. Make a sequel to The Matrix. Bring back the original Agents as well, forget all that bullshit with Agent Smith and the Upgrades. Forget the cast of a thousand Programs and tell the story of THE PEOPLE trapped in The Matrix.

I didn't need to see Zion and didn't like it when I did see it. The story was changed from Freeing Humanity, to saving Zion-complete with the pointless bickering of politicians over exactly how to save Zion. Billions of slaves or a handful of jerks? Let's save the handful of jerks and forget we ever mentioned the Billions of Slaves. I want the Wachowski Brotherss to make a sequel that faces the real issues raised in the Matrix-death for the machines, means death for humanity-but it would be a good death.

We all want a new Matrix Movie-please give it a try.

Jesse's Girl Deanna

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:37:00 +0000

This won't come as a surprise to anyone. Yet another nice guy(Jason) finishes last, while the bad-boy snowboarder(Jesse) gets the girl(DeAnna).

The Bachelorette Deanna choose pro snowboarder Jesse. DeAnna Pappas and Jesse Csincsak are the happy couple on season 4 of ABC's The Bachelorette. This is a shock as all the fans wanted Jason to be the winner, since he is a nice guy and all.

Ok, that's all I know about Jesse and Deanna, or Deanna and Jesse as the case may be.

I have been a fan of a lot of reality shows-I have even watched a few reality shows that didn't make it all the way through their season-one had lovers stranded on an island and one was about a pirate ship-I really liked the one about the pirates. I wonder how Deanna and Jesse would have fared as pirates?

And I watched the first season of The Bachelor, but found that I wasn't that found of the premise. Stabbing other people in the back for a million dollars makes perfect sense and is fun to watch, stabbing people in the back to marry someone, well-not so much fun to me.

Reality shows just aren't what they used to be, with the exception of the other major reality show I don't watch-American Idol, they all seem to have gone downhill. Maybe it's just that we have seen it all before. Maybe it's all starting to feel like Jerry Springer, the original reality show, where clearly nothing is real.

For a bit more depth on the whole Bachelorette Deanna and Jesse story, check out Stupid Celebrities Gossip.

Bulbous Bouffant

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:43:00 +0000

While killing time on Plurk yesterday, I was thinking about good old Dr Demento and one of my Plurk Buddies-Myriam-said Bulbous Bouffant. I recall a number of bad songs from Dr Demento, My Name is Larry was a bad one. The Smoke Off seemed to make the Funny Five a lot. Wierd Al was always on the list when I listened.

Ok, Blubous Buffant is a classic, right up there with Wet Dreams and Pencil Necked Geek. Hmm, those were the good old days. . .

The Pink Carnation, The Black Tulip, and The Crimson Rose

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:09:00 +0000

The Wife is a die hard Science Fiction fan, well, more of a Sci Fi fan than an SF fan. I have found that most people are like The Wife, in that they find one genre they love and they stick to it. The Wife makes the occasional foray into Vampire novels, but she wouldn't read something like, say, a spy/romance novel set in the Napoleonic Wars.

I however, would.

The Seduction of the Crimson Rose is the 4th book in the Pink Carnation Series. More tales of daring does and battles for justice. The reviews on Amazon don't seem too impressed with The Crimson Rose, the problem being a common one-the author has set the bar high in her past books and anything less than a gold medal performance is seen as a disappointment. To me the Pink Carnation books are fun and often silly, even if there is the occasional near death experience and it is a bother that Women's Lib is still some time off in the future.

One of the standard devices of historical fiction is to have a present day researcher find a long lost notebook, suitcase, steamer trunk-or what have you, which contains the Secret Writings of some unknown person who managed to alter history without anyone every finding out who they were. Our present day foil is Eloise Kelly, who started out just looking for some material for her dissertation and ended up in a modern day romance, of sorts, herself. For me the problem with this type of story is that I completely forget the modern world and can't remember who or what is going on once we are zapped back to the future.

Events in the Past are the great stuff in the Pink Carnation books. These books are slightly updated additions to the tales of the Scarlet Pimpernel-seems that's some sort of a flower. Who knew? And so all of our spies, heroes, and villains get to be named after slightly more common flowers. Well, there is that Purple Gentian-another flower that I am not at all familiar with. Well, I never claimed to be a botanist, did I?

The heroes in the Pink Carnation books all seem to be women and married couples, with the occasional man trying to be a hero and finding himself in need of being rescued-who marries one of the heroines. Well, they are romances after all. But there is a lot of fun stuff, lots of sword fights and name calling and skulking around at night and blowing things up. I could see Johnny Depp starring in a movie made from one of the Pink Carnation Books, and Angelia Jolie would be a good swash buckling hero.

In the meantime, the books are a good read. I like the audio books-and Kate Reading does a fine job of narration on these titles, though her men do tend to sound a bit foppish, even when they are not meant to. It is just hard for women to talk like men and men to talk like women while narrating an audio book. Kate Reading does a wonderful job with the many odd accents and old style sentence that make up novels set a couple of hundred years ago.

The Pink Carnation books are fun and I look forward to many more in the future.

Abi Titmuss and Naked Poker

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:49:00 +0000

Abigail Evelyn Titmuss, best known as Abi Titmuss, (born 8 February 1976 in Ruskington, Lincolnshire) is an English glamour model turned television personality and Actress.-Wikipedia

One of the tricks of getting blog hits is to use the word naked, as in a naked Abi Titmuss likes to practice poker on her personal computer. I haven't done the whole naked picture bit for a while, so I thought Abi Titmuss naked with some popcorn might be a good chance to get back into the naked game.

"I've spend hours in front of the computer in my bed clothes, or even naked, trying to perfect my technique." Abi Titmuss said. If she played naked poker maybe she would win more.

Of course, Abi Titmuss naked is not exactly shocking news, as a quick Google finds all kinds of naked pictures of Abi Titmuss. Maybe a naked Abi Titmuss was practicing poker at one of her photo shoots.

"I'm not like those glamour girls who say: 'I'm really dirty, I'm really bad', then just pose around. I really am dirty and bad - I love sex. I've always been really good with my tongue and it's very long, girls love it as well!" At least Abi Titmuss is being true to her naked calling. Now if Abi Titmuss wasn't naked while she practiced poker-that might have been news.

Ah to be young and naked. Abi Titmuss naked books, Abi Titmuss naked posters, and there is an Abi Titmuss sex video floating around out there. The naked Abi Titmuss is the Famous Abi Titmuss-getting naked is the key to fame and fortune these days.

Good times to be alive, eh?

Stargate Continuum

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:57:00 +0000

"If you ever travel back in time, don't step on anything-because even the tiniest change can alter the future in ways you can't imagine."
Abe Simpson

Stargate Continuum is about a hundred times better than Stargate The Ark of Truth. But this may have something to do with my love of all things Time Travel and a very literal take on the Grandfather Paradox in Stargate Continuum. It is also worth noting that Stargate Continuum is the first Stargate to be released on Blu-ray.

The old gang is here, watching as Baal-or one of his many clones-has his symbiont removed. Baal stops them and says-I am not the Last of the System Lords-Muhahaha-as members of SG-1 start to vanish into thin air.

Baal has gone back in time and erased the timeline where he is defeated. Our heroes, well, three of them anyway, manage to jump through the Gate back to Earth just as the Universe is realigning itself.

As with Star Trek movies, all the fans really want is a long episode, and that is what we have with Stargate Continuum. Sure the world as we know it is destroyed, but it's not like that hasn't happened before. SG-1 is always saving the world, or destroying the world, or trapped in some other timeline where things have gone a bit wrong. Baal is a fun bad guy, as he is more of a rouge and a scoundrel than a blood thirsty bastard like Apophis-who makes a brief cameo appearance in Stargate Contiuum. Of course, Baal is still a bad guy.

Stargate Continuum is like all time travel shows, the main characters are killed off-the world is destroyed-everything goes wrong. But you have a time machine-so no worries. The fun, of course, is seeing how they save the day.

There is a stretch in the story where our heroes have a year to kill and aren't allowed to do anything with each other. As a fan of SG-1 for lo these many years however, I couldn't help but wonder why they didn't seek out some of the many aliens living on Earth. It could have helped to pass the time while they were waiting around for Baal to come and kill them. Of course, the whole point of Stargate Continuum is that this is not their world-but wouldn't one or two of the aliens be here anyway?

Stargate Continuum was a lot of fun, lots of stuff blowing up, lots of wise cracking, lots of neat sound effects. But like Biff in Back to The Future II, even knowing what is going to happen is not enough for the Baal-he really was too nice a guy to be a System Lord.

Stargate Continuum was so good I am actually look forward to next Stargate Movie.

Best 4th of July-Blowing Up an Anvil

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:07:00 +0000

"Oh, we didn't want that Continent anyway." Patrick Stewart on how Brits feel about the 4th of July.

Having spent the better part of my life in Texas, a part of the country that can be a tad warm on the 4th of July, I was pleasantly surprised by the climate in Minnesota. It was, as The Wife puts it, COLD. 50 degrees at night and 70 degrees in the afternoon-on the 4th of July. The expected high in Dallas today is 97 degrees-so not as hot as usual.

On the 4th of July we made a trip to Fort Snelling, where they were proudly blowing up an anvil. It seems that anvil shooting has been around since the Civil War and was once a standard event at 4th of July celebrations. Maybe there was a high mortality rate and they decided to opt for fireworks instead. Fort Snelling was not the only place we visited that was shooting an anvil on the 4th of July, but it was the only one we were present for.

At any rate, I had never heard of the art of blowing up an anvil before I visited Fort Snelling. I like all kinds of old touristy places, and Fort Snelling has a lot of people in costumes running around happy to get an extra ration of whiskey and thrilled by the concussion from launching an avil into the air.

This is the kind of thing The Mythbusters would like-blowing up stuff for no reason at all. There is a National Anvil Shooting Contest, and the world record for blowing up an anvil seems to be just over 400 feet. For some odd reason they don't hold the contest on the 4th of July.

Blowing up an anvil is a good 4th of July activity, you don't have to wait for it to get dark, which isn't until almost ten p.m., and it is really noisy. I can only image the fun that the drunken soldiers at Fort Snelling used to have in the frontier days. I can imagine the Commander sitting down at his desk the next morning writing the I regret to inform you letters. He gave his life for his Country while engaged in fierce combat with an anvil on the 4th of July.

Will Smith's Hancock

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:32:00 +0000

I had mixed feelings about Will Smith's Hancock when I saw the first previews-it looked like a comedy about homeless superhero. And for the first part of Hancock, it is a comedy about a homeless superhero. This Will Smith movie shows us a superhero without a Fortress of Solitude-he lives in a ratty mobile home, who hates kids-he tosses one into the sky and seems to debate with whether or not he should catch him again, and no one appreciates him, being around at all-everyone in L.A. would like it if he would move to New York. This is fun stuff.

The last new Will Smith movie I watched was I Am Legend-a remake that didn't need to be remade. That was an interesting movie, but it was ruined for me by the really, really bad CGI. The CGI in Hancock is not bad until close to the end when a group of shockingly fake looking tornadoes make a thankfully brief appearance. Will Smith looks good as a drunk homeless guy, but as he said in Men in Black-he makes everything look good.

Jason Bateman is saved by Will Smith and he decides to reform the drunken superhero before he bankrupts the city with his heroics. Jason Bateman seems an odd choice for the role to me, but he does a good enough job of wandering around looking disappointed about everything that Hancock does. His hottie wife is played Charlize Theron, who seems to know a lot more about Hancock than she is letting on. In his spare PR time Jason tries to Save The World, with no success whatsoever.

There is a lot profanity, a tiny bit of nudity, and lots of CGI things blowing up here and there as Hancock accidentally destroys them. Hancock becomes a good superhero, meets another of his kind-whatever that may be, and tries his best to keep the world safe. We find out that Hancock lost his memory after watching Boris Karloff Frankenstein in it's original release-seems Hancock doesn't age either. It also seems that if it weren't for the popularity of YouTube, no one would know what a disaster area Hancock is.

Will Smith's Hancock is not a totally nice superhero like Superman, Hancock has no problems with tossing bad guys out of forty story windows or killing them with candy bars. Of course, they were all bad men.

This was a fun movie, but it could have been better-which can pretty much be said about every movie ever made. I would have liked a bit more of the drunken superhero movie and bit less of the Let's Save The World movie-ok, they could have left that would bit about saving the world out of the movie and it would have been a lot better.

Overall, I liked it.

Going Postal-Another Disc World Book

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:38:00 +0000

Terry Pratchett is a very funny writer-but to honest I like the audio book versions of his Discworld books better than the paper ones. While it is true that they both contain, more or less, the same exact words-the audio books have the considerable talents of Stephen Briggs-who does a really good job of bringing those words to life.

I am a great fan of accents-all kinds of accents-I can speak in a vast multitude of funny, odd, silly, and often totally incomprehensible voices. I have been told that I ought to have an audio edition of my blog and read each post as a slightly different person. That would be a bit of fun and good practice for my semi-goal of becoming a reader of audio books and moving to London to work for the BBC. But since many of my accents are of the British sort, there would be very little use for an America pretending to be British in Britain-though it does sound vaguely like the plot of a musical comedy.

Stephen Briggs has that job reading great books with a lot of funny, silly, and often incomprehensible accents. He does a brilliant job, as he has for many other Discworld novels over the years. There is a wonderful mixture of accents in Going Postal-English, Irish, Scottish, and at least a few others I couldn't quite identify. The voice of the Golem Mr Pump is nice a rumbly-and Ms Dearheart sounds sort of sweet, in a very dangerous way. Stephen Briggs is brilliant and his many characterizations are perfect for Terry Pratchett's Going Postal.

At any rate-Going Postal is the story of Moist von Lipwig and his struggles to run the Ankh-Morpork Post Office-another nice thing about audio books is that they pronounce all these damned silly words that Terry Pratchett is so fond of using in his stories of the great Discworld.

There is also a bit of continuity for those of us that pay attention-for example an Orangutan makes a cameo in Going Postal-this would be the Librarian of Unseen University who meet with an unfortunate accident some books ago. Death also stops by for a brief visit. I'm sure there are many other silly things going on that I am not familiar with as well.

As with all of the Discworld novels, everyone is a villain, a blackguard, and a general all around rounder. Just like our own world-except that they are purer forms of the phylum, not the mere shadowy types that we are familiar with.

Our story in Going Postal is about a con man who is rescued by a Tyrant-who doesn't like to think of himself as a Tyrant, though clearly he has some deep dungeons where very unpleasant things go on. Moist is made the Post Master who is in charge of two slightly mad men, a Gollum, and a building filled with undelivered mail. Though countless convoluted means and slightly criminal activities, he brings the Post Office back to life. It is, of course, the countless convoluted and slightly criminal activities that make up the bulk of the book.

It is fun and funny and often thought provoking-as in do monsters really fancy eating pigeons that much? What would happen if Pi was rounded down to 3? Why had no one else thought of the Stamp before Moist showed up?

And after you've finished reading any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books-when is the next Discworld book due out?

Quantum of Solace-Because The Salmon of Doubt was already taken

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:36:00 +0000

James Bond returns to saving the world in the Quantum of Solace trailer. But as Roger Ebert noted some time ago, it is rather silly that a British Secret Service Agent is still out saving the world. James Bond has been old fashioned for a long time. Many of the recent Bond films have been, well, just awful. James Bond was never real, it was always over the top, and I like the old films quite a lot. But I wouldn't pay to see one in a theater today.

The makers of the James Bond films seem to have gotten the message with Quantum of Solace-easily the weirdest title I can recall right off hand. The Salmon of Doubt was Douglas Adams unfinished last book btw. The Quantum of Solace Trailer shows us a James Bond who has a lot in common with Jason Borne, Neo, and The Terminator-with maybe a touch of Alias tossed in for good measure. This looks like a lot more of an action film than we have seen from 007 in a while. It is also good to hear the old James Bond music.

The Quantum of Solace trailer looks pretty good, car chases, boat chases, plane chases, motorcycle chases, (there may have been a bicycle chase that I missed)- a semi-nude woman, lots of guns, lots of things blowing up, did I mention the nude woman? Well, it is James Bond, but that red wig put in mind of Alias, as did the talk of some vast secret network that is everywhere.

The most striking bit of business in the Quantum of Solace Trailer is when James Bond walks over a rocky hill and raises a machine gun in one hand. This is an iconic image, an iconic image of The Terminator and Agent Smith of The Matrix. Quantum of Solace is aiming at some big targets if they want people to think of The Terminator and The Matrix when they think of a new James Bond movie. But who knows, maybe Quantum of Solace will be the James Bond for the future.

Gun Nuts Rejoice!

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:20:00 +0000

An eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth....soon the whole world will be blind and toothless.-Teyve from A Fiddler on The Roof.

For the first time ever, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment conveys an individual right to keep and bear arms.

My Father in Law was not a gun owner, but a good old fashioned law abiding citizen who believed anyone who wanted to own a gun, should be able to do so. He saw the need for firearms in our less than Civilized Society. One his favorite saying on the topic was from famed sci fi writer Robert A Heinlein -An armed society is a polite society.

Robert A Heinlein clearly never lived in a well armed society-where the average person on the street carried a handgun and used it as he saw fit. This is the stuff of fiction-Robert A Heinlein's true field of expertise. He also created a world which followed pure Biblical Law and punished every criminal act with an exact recreation of the crime-so that a hit and run drive would be run over and left in the road for the exact period to time it for his victim to receive help. There are likely many people who would think was a swell system which should be acted upon as well.

People are weak and feeble creatures for the most part-we die in all kinds of simple and meaningless way. Lots of people die all the time without the help of handguns to speed the job along. But some people just don't like to wait. And that is the trouble with handguns-if you are pissed off at someone and want to kill them, there are lots of ways to do it. Run them over with a car, beat them to death with a baseball bat, poison them, choke them, hang them, stab them, get them shipped off to a war zone-or shoot them.

What's the difference between killing someone with a gun and killing them just about any other way? Time and ease of use. Any moron can use a gun. Any 98 pound weakling can kill with a handgun-a child can do, and children do kill people with handguns on a regular basis. There is no skill or strength require. No intellegence is needed. Just a willingness to pull the trigger.

The average person has no other means to produce instant death-oh the skilled person can rig a car to blow up-if they live on a TV Show or a Movie Set. Guns are also nice and safe, a perfect coward's weapon. No risk of getting hurt yourself as with a knife, a baseball bat, a rope, or any other standard form of killing that requires getting up close and personal. Even running over someone with a car could lead to problems of running into other things beside the person you want to kill-besides, they mess up your car.

The only time you run any real danger when using a handgun is. . .when the person your shooting has a handgun as well. This is the logic behind that whole An armed socitety is a polite society bit. There is an inner logic to it, that most people would rather not get killed themselves, so they won't start shooting first. Maybe this was the case once upon a time, before crack cocaine and The Bloods and The Crips and the countless clones there of. Now people don't mind dying, hell, a good third of the world thinks it's the pathway to Heaven.

I know that I get pissed off a lot, would I kill all the bastards if it was as easy as pulling a trigger? Maybe. Would this really make the world a better place? I doubt it.

Bath and Body Works-Great Stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Descartes) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:30:00 +0000

"You smell like my wife when she steps out of the shower."-a co-worker recently told me-do I use a little too much Bath and Body Works hand lotion?

I use a lot of Bath and Body Works products-The Wife likes to buy Bath & Body products-and rather a lot of Bath and Body lotions. I have close at hand at work no less than three tubes of Bath and Body work lotion and two bottle of antibacterial gel and one little tube with a roller ball that contains a lime smelling Bath & Body Works aromatherapy oil that is supposed to revive the weary and waken the dead.

I also have a tube of lip balm in my pocket-which I hear is a bad idea as they might break and make an embarrassingly located stain. But I really can't get by without the Bath and Body works lip balm-this tube is the white one that says My Favorite Lip Balm in friendly black letters. And oddly, it is my favorite lip balm. My favorite scent at the moment is Bath & Body works Hello, Sugar.

The Bath & Body Works store is, for lack of a better term, a Woman's Store. I know, that's sexist, there are men that like the smell of Bath and Body fragrances and want kissable lips and smooth hands-but most of them like to wear women's clothing-or become Sports Announcers-or both. They may like to drink Mojitos as well, but I try not to get that close to them.

I don't see too many other men while I venture into Bath & Body Works stores with The Wife and her handful of Bath and Body works coupons for Free Lip Balm and Save Ten Dollars when you spend Twenty Dollars. The Wife always has a lot of Bath and Body Works Coupons, and it seems, so does everyone else that shops in the bath and body works store. You can get Bath and Body Works coupons by signing up for their email list, as well giving Bath and Body Work Coupons a quick Google.

Now I am all in favor of Coupons, especially Bath and Body Works coupons that get My Favorite Lip Balm for FREE. But it makes me wonder, does anyone buy Bath and Body Works products for full price? EVER?

Maybe its just that the only times the Wife drags me down to Bath and Body Works is when they have tubs of bath and body works lotion on sale and we have a bath&body coupon in our hands. She needs me to use one of the Bath and Body Works coupons-they don't want you using twenty at a time, but don't mind if you have 19 friends along at the time. Tubs full of discounted Bath and Body works shower gels that I never heard of before and a few things that I have heard of, like Bath & Body works Chocolate Amber-must not have been a big seller as they have tons of the stuff in the sales tubs.

I am not a big fan of Bath and Body works Shaving Cream or Bath and Body works Mouth Wash, and in fact, most of Bath and Body works products for Men seem to be designed to help them keep men out of the Bath and Body Works shop. Maybe the real men all shop at bathandbodyworks com. Of course, shopping at www bath & body works com means you can't try out all these neato products while your browsing. I'm also not crazy about Bath and Body work cologne, but I do like to give the new scents a test once in a while.

We have Bath and Body works Wallflowers air fresheners in every room. We use a lot Bath & Body Works antibacterial soap-The Wife likes the stuff that comes in the shape of a Pumpkin at Halloween. I also like the Bath and Body works sea salt body scrub-that's a nice manly product, right?

I have this Bath and Body works aromatherapy stuff you spray on your pillow at night that is supposed to help you sleep-and I do like the way it smells. The Wife bought me a pair of the Bath and Body works slippers that can be heated in the microwave when I have a sore foot or just want warmer feet. I really love the Bath & Body works massage ball, though it was pretty pricey at twenty dollars-well, I'm sure we had a bath & body coupon.

We use all kinds of Bath and Body Works hand lotion, bath and body works soap, bath and shower gels and I'm sure we have tried everything you can find in a Bath and Body Works store at least once. It is all great stuff.