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April 26, 2006
Lucky Number Slevin
In keeping with my desire to not work insane hours for a while, I went out to see a movie tonight and had a thoroughly good time. The movie was Lucky Number Slevin, and I went to see it purely on the basis of its starting time, its cast, and a vague description about a New York mob war. It was definitely a lucky pick.
Our protagonist Slevin is having a bad run of luck. He got fired, learned his apartment had been condemned, and then walked in on his girlfriend having sex with another man. His good friend Nick invited him to New York for a week of debauchery to make him forget what’s-her-name. Unfortunately, Slevin’s bad luck seems to follow him. He gets mugged on his way from the airport, and once he gets to Nick’s apartment, he can’t even find Nick.
Then it gets messy. It turns out Nick is in pretty heavy debt to two different mobsters, and not just any two, but two who are in the midst of a ruthless war with each other. Why is this Slevin’s problem? Well, he looks a little like Nick, he’s in Nick’s apartment, and he has no ID since the mugging, but don’t worry. He can make it all go away by doing his little part in the war against the rival mob, right? Against both? By this point, of course, the police are starting to take note of Slevin and want a piece of him for themselves.
After that... well, then it gets complicated, and I’ll leave that for the movie itself. It has a wonderful cast of Ben Kingsley, Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis, Lucy Liu, and Josh Hartnett as Slevin. Hartnett was the unknown for me in that lineup, but he delivered a wonderful performance as he moved through the insanity with a relaxed air reminiscent of Mel Gibson in Payback. It was also one of those satisfying movies where everyone got what they deserved.
I give it four and a half clean kills. Check it out.
Reviews by Dan | Permalink | Comments (1)
The Euston Manifesto
I ran across an interesting political platform today called The Euston Manifesto. It proclaims itself to be a "fresh political alignment" for democrats and progressives, and frankly, it is one the sanest pieces of political commentary I've seen coming out of the left side of the blogosphere in years. (But then, I tend to read Daily Kos and Salon, which can both be rather froth-friendly.)
It is a statement of principals for an enlightened, democratic world with no tolerance for tyrants or their apologists and makes the same assertion I have often made that the war against radical terrorism will be won when there are liberal democracies from Morocco to Indonesia. I also found this particular elaboration on the Iraq war to be very telling:
The founding supporters of this statement took different views on the military intervention in Iraq, both for and against. We recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention, the manner in which it was carried through, the planning (or lack of it) for the aftermath, and the prospects for the successful implementation of democratic change. We are, however, united in our view about the reactionary, semi-fascist and murderous character of the Baathist regime in Iraq, and we recognize its overthrow as a liberation of the Iraqi people. We are also united in the view that, since the day on which this occurred, the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the country's infrastructure, to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a life for Iraqis which those living in democratic countries take for granted — rather than picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention.
I found points to quibble over on Principles 4 (Equality) and 15 (Open Source), but on the whole I thought it to be a remarkable document and so unlike much of the rabid Left I often see. Ironically, I did not find out about it from one of the lefty sites I read but from the rather conservative Austin Bay blog.
Give it a look.
Politics by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 24, 2006
Battlestar Galactica Quiz
MAW took this test after we watched an episode of the new Battlestar Galactica last night. My results suprised her somewhat:
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| You scored as CPO Galen Tyrol. You never wanted to be a glamorous Viper pilot. You are happy knowing that without you to fix their birds, they cannot fly. You fell in love with the wrong girl, but is that so wrong? Maybe, but you don't really care. |
What New Battlestar Galactica character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com
It didn't surprise me. In fact, after seeing the result, I realized I'd taken the quiz before and gotten the same result. Remember, we have all taken this quiz before, and we shall all take it again.
Meme by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 21, 2006
F Club
I’m a big fan of Fight Club, both of the movie and of the original novel form. Recently, however, I came to the following modification. Maybe it was just one too many jokes of replacing "the Force" with "my pants" in Star Wars – I don’t know. I’m not even sure if I thought of this myself or just read it somewhere, but the rules work remarkably well with only trivial edits. So well, in fact, that I just had to share them, though I suppose I’m breaking the first two rules by doing so.
Fuck Club
The first rule of Fuck Club is - you do not talk about Fuck Club.
The second rule of Fuck Club is - you DO NOT talk about Fuck Club.
Third rule of Fuck Club, someone yells Stop!, goes limp, taps out, the fuck is over.
Fourth rule, only two people to a fuck.
Fifth rule, one fuck at a time, folks.
Sixth rule, no shirt, no shoes.
Seventh rule, fucks will go on as long as they have to.
And the eighth and final rule, if this is your first night at Fuck Club, you have to fuck.
I think number seven is my favorite.
I started to wonder if this would work for other F-words. I got as far as "fart" and nearly passed out.
Tinfoil Beanie by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)
Yet Another Boring Pin-Up
I do all of my rendering in a package called Poser. While it can render anything you can get triangles for, it's really geared towards rendering people. Those people tend to come naked, just like we do, and if you want to add to that look, you have to add clothes.
Adding clothes is non-trivial. In fact, one of the big technical advancements in Pixar's Monster's, Inc was that Boo's shirt behaved like real cloth. Yes, it's five years later, but Poser is not exactly Pixar-cutting-edge technology. It's a hassle to get the cloth to hang right, to keep body parts from poking through and so on.
The result is that a lot of Poser images are of naked women. Yes, there are male figures available, but well... it's no secret that Playboy outsells Playgirl, ok? So, all the naked chicks aren't necessarily a sign of horny men getting their jollies. It's more likely just a sign of laziness. Making the naked chicks is easier, and it's more relaxing. It's the kidn of thing you can knock off in an hour or so of actual interaction. You can make so many, that after a point, you don't even bother trying to name them.
Which is just the roundabout way for me to introduce the latest in one of my series:
Render by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 20, 2006
Alternative Medicine Manners
This morning I went to see an accountant about a tax issue – a long, unrelated story involving a mistake on my 2004 schedule D – and after getting the tax information, I was emotionally assaulted by this accountant. Perhaps "assault" is too strong of a word, but given how much it has upset me today, I can’t help but feel it’s appropriate. She certainly meant well, but she did harm, and she should have known better.
To put it in context, my father died of cancer eight months ago. I was very close to my father, and rarely does a day go by that I don’t find something that I would want to share with him. I would have to say I’m still grieving him.
So, towards the end of the session with this accountant, after I had gotten the information I needed, we fell into the chit-chat common of a service provider trying to find ways to sell more service to the customer. Bear this in mind. She was trying to drum up business, trying to be polite.
We got to talking about families and some of the money issues involved, including my mother’s health and the eventual estate issues that will result when she dies. My mother is not at death’s door or anything. It’s just every day I expect a phone call that she has died from a massive heart attack. She has all the classic warning signs but does not manage her health well.
At this point in our conversation, I said, "Dad, on the other hand, managed his health very aggressively. He had diabetes, so he really stayed on top of it. But then he got cancer and died last year."
She replied, "I had cancer four years ago, but I made it."
I nodded. "Unfortunately, they didn’t find Dad’s until it was in stage 4. They never even found the primary tumor. By the time they detected anything it had already metastasized throughout his body. Still, he lasted for two years, a lot longer than the six months they originally gave him."
She then said something about how unless our government did something, unless we "demanded" that our government do something, we were all going to die of cancer because of all the pollutants in the environment. My crackpot alarm was starting to ring, so I started trying to extricate myself, but I didn’t do it clearly enough because I didn’t want to be rude. That was my mistake. If I’d just cut her off with a "Well, perhaps, but I must be going," I would have saved myself from the resulting onslaught.
Instead, I replied with a greater level of optimism, something like, "Maybe, but I’d like to think that we’ll crack it in my lifetime."
She asked me, "What would you say if I told you there were already cures to cancer that had been shelved?"
At this point, my crackpot alarm went on full alert, and I was making for the door. "I’d want to see the data," I replied. Big mistake.
She replied with a full force lecture on the wonders of Dr. Royal Rife, of his amazing microscope, of how he could view a virus with this purely optical microscope, of how he could selectively kill viruses with his specially tuned "beam ray", and how this was so important because Rife had proven – not merely believed, but actually proven – that cancer is really just a virus. She told me how she had purchased one when she had cancer and that she was living proof of its efficacy. It would be in common use if only the government and other powers that be weren’t keeping it out of the public mindshare, if only people were not so foolishly close-minded. She told me to look it up on the internet, spelling out the name to help me get the search correct. She said more, but beyond that point it's fuzzy. I was already pretty upset.
I don’t remember what I said at that point. I know that I kept my cool and did not rip into her. Instead, I said some pleasantry and walked to the car.
For those of you curious about Dr. Rife, a Google search will turn up several pro-Rife sites such as this one, but the better information can be found at the Royal Rife Wikipedia entry which begins with:
Royal Raymond Rife (May 16, 1888 - August 11, 1971): a fraud and quack well-regarded in a small and unreliable subsection of the alternative medicine community with uncritical applause for his incredible claims for his 1933 "Universal Microscope", an optical microscope claiming an impossible resolution and cures of terminal cancer patients using his "Beam Ray" device in 1934.
Now, I’m not opposed to alternative medicine. In fact, I’m fairly open-minded to alternative approaches. Many of the remaining maladies we face are chronic and systemic, things that Western medicine’s reductionist approach often has problems with. My own experiences with massage therapy and meditation have provided me with personal anecdotal evidence that not all cures come via a pill from the doctor. However, I’m still a scientist at heart, and while I will point out shortcomings in parts of the Western approach to medicine I fully embrace its demand for results that are both reproducible and independently verifiable. Some alternative approaches have been submitted to such rigor, and those that have passed are being gradually assimilated into mainstream Western medicine.
I state my openness to make it clear that the offense I took was not at being presented with information on alternative medicine. The offense was the manner and timing of that presentation. If there are any alternative medicine advocates out there who don’t yet see the problem, let me make it crystal clear:
When someone says, "My father died of cancer last year," you are supposed to say, "I’m sorry for your loss." That’s it. End of story. You are not supposed to launch into a lecture on how some other therapy that They are repressing can cure cancer. You do not talk about how everyone who tries it is still alive today. You do not imply that those who fail to embrace these therapies are close-minded fools to be pitied. You do not, under any circumstances, imply that the lost loved one would still be here today if only they hadn’t been so stupid.
This is the second time since my father died that I’ve had to endure this type of assault from an advocate of alternative medicine. Both times I have restrained myself because I felt that social custom required me to be polite. Well, fuck that. The next one who does this gets both barrels.
A taste, just to get today’s anger out of my system:
Look, lady, I’m glad you survived your cancer. I’m glad you feel that your Rife Beam Ray helped you through it. I’m really happy for you, but your poor grasp on science is rivaled only by your lack of manners and sensitivity. The data you are citing is not data at all. It’s a random collection of anecdotal evidence with no numerical backing. There was no peer-reviewed clinical trial. The supporting proof you’re claiming is nothing but pure fantasy that you’re too ignorant to recognize. Further, you don’t know anything about my father’s case. You don’t know the type of cancer. You don’t know where it was in his body. You don’t know the therapies we tried. And you don’t know the pain I felt watching a vibrant man slowly slip away over two painful years.
YOU. DON’T. KNOW. SHIT.
Now, I know that these advocates who pressed on me so during a time of grief are the exceptions. I know several such advocates, and all the others have said the appropriate things, and I have taken comfort from their condolences. I do not wish to paint them with the same brush I use for this woman. Still, I offer it as a warning to them. Never give such advice after the fact. It will go beyond adding insult to injury. Rather, it will add injury to injustice.
Sufficed to say, this accountant won't be getting my future business.
Life in General by Dan | Permalink | Comments (1)
April 13, 2006
Dictaphone
Lately I've been trying to get more organized. It's been an uphill battle, especially with various debris crashing down on me in the occasional avalanche, but I'm making some progress.
One of the things that I was battling was the "think of it in the shower" syndrome. That's when you remember something important but only at times when you can't do anything about it, i.e. remembering in the shower that you need to call Jim. (Yes, Jim, I'm thinking of you constantly in the shower -- just so you know.) The key is to capture those thoughts somewhere in a trusted system and then go over them later when you can organize them into actual actionable to-do items.
I do have a PDA, but I've found that it's not quite convenient enough. It's a little too big to carry around in my pocket, and even then, writing something down isn't always practical. I'd tried carrying around a little tape-recorder before, but it suffered from the twin problems of size and tape management. It was about as big as my PDA, and the resulting recording was a long rambling monologue that had to be played, paused, played, paused, etc. for transcription.
What I wanted was something very small, i.e. smaller than my cell phone, that could record at a touch and organize those recordings into discrete chunks that I could manage independantly of each other, preferably on my computer.
Well, it looks like I found it.
It's actually an MP3 player, but it also functions as an AM/FM receiver and a dictaphone. It remembers what mode it was last in, so I can put it into dictaphone mode and just leave it that way. It's not quite one-touch, but it's close. I have to turn it on, hit a button to start recording, hit it again to stop, and then turn the thing off. Still, it's reasonably simple to do one handed. The resulting recordings are encoded to MP3 automatically and numbered. It connects to my computer via USB, and it opens up as a file folder showing me each recording. I can play them one at a time, act on them, delete them, or copy them to my computer for archiving and/or later action. It's pretty much exactly what I wanted, and I picked it up for about $70 at Fry's Electronics.
Now, if only it was waterproof I might finally get around to calling Jim.
Technology by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 05, 2006
Showers Operational
I've mentioned that Flipside is moving to new land this year, and one of the drawbacks is that the new land has no showers. I'd tear out my hair if I went five days without a shower, so I decided to build some. I'm still sorting out some of the structural issues, but the plumbing for the first bank of showers is operational:
It's not Price Pfister, but it'll get us clean!
Burning by Dan | Permalink | Comments (1)
April 02, 2006
First sunburn... end of vacation
Well, I've apparently finished off my vacation with my first sunburn of the season. I did just a little bit of yardwork late this morning, and I did it without sunscreen. Hey, it was overcast, and I knew I'd be at it for only about 15-20 minutes, but I guess that was enough for my complexion. At least I was wearing my hat to keep it off my face.
Looking back on the vacation, it was pretty good. I got to goof off, watch movies, go on a first class trip with MAW (first class = no kids), extend the patio, relax in my new hot tub with MAW, and I even made good progress on building the my first shower unit for Flipside.
But tomorrow it will be back to the grind for real. At least this time it will be for just 40 hours instead of 70.
Life in General by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)