Impersonations

Kevin Spacey impersonating lots of people in a "Inside the Actor's Studio" interview.

Millionaire heiress one day, overexposed ho the next

Did Conrad "Barron" Hilton cut his heirs out of his will? I haven't seen many mainstream reports regarding it, but gossip news outlets from Australia and UK are claiming so.

This is kinda what I wanted Wang Lung to do, but I guess he didn't have a charitable foundation in his name.

Edit, 7/31: The tabloids, shockingly, may not be correct 100% of the time.

It ain't over until Greedo's gun is cold.

George Lucas has been caught wearing a "Han Shot First" T-shirt. I can't even tell based on the photo the bloggers are showing, but I will accept their fanatical attention to detail as authority for the claim. Still, unless and until Georget Lucas changes it back in a sure-to-be-released Super Authoritative Ultimately Remastered and Digitally Enhanced HD (not a whoring of your childhood memories) Version (TM) of Star Wars(TM), my flayed fondness for Lucas's work will continue to be a pulsating sore.

Shaken, not stirred

Here's an article that examines James Bond's Goldfinger and concludes that 007 is a moron.

I'm so there

I just saw the trailer for a movie coming this fall, Elizabeth: The Golden Age. It's a sequel to one of my favorite movies, Elizabeth, which covered the early years of Queen Elizabeth's life. Of course, it's not a historical documentary or anything like that so it's full of inaccuracies and artistic license, but it's so very interesting to see how a great person faced the enormous pressures of her station and managed to come out on top.

I was so enormously disappointed when it lost to the corny and saccharin Shakespeare in Love in the 1999 Oscars. I saw that movie and wanted my 10 bucks and 2 hours back; imagine my dismay when it won all those Oscars.

The new film should have some exciting action scenes with the English taking on the famed Spanish Armada. Take a look at the trailer ~~ how can this not be an awesome movie? I pray I don't find out.

Click on the video links to the right for some vids, or check out the international trailer or the longer U.S. trailer.

P.S. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!!

Colbert Photoshop Phun

Heavens to murgatroyd. The Fark.com Photoshop assignment today is a riot. Take Stephen Colbert and place him in religious/cultural settings.

It's smaller than I thought...

That's what she said! Baddum-ching!

Germans say that the Earth is actually 5 mm smaller in diameter than previously thought. I want to know what kind of sig-figs they're working with when they're talking about measuring distances using radio-lag. They say they can measure distances to "the preciseness of two millimetres per 1,000 kilometres (0.07 inches per 621 miles)." I guess that's pretty precise.... But if they measured the diameter of the Earth to be 12,756.274 km using a network of 70 radio satellites, it seems like that's a lot of +/- 2mm errors to account for....

Transformers possibly not horrible?

With the Independence Day weekend (huzzah, America!) upon us, I've been reading reviews for movies on the off chance that a movie might be the escape-tool of choice for my friends and family. I've never been a fan of the idea of a live-action Transformers movie; there's no way you can top the Transformers movie from 1984 (or wutever) in my mind. [music] You've got the TOUCH! You've got the POWER!!! [/music]

But I'm reading the reviews anyway because some of my friends have expressed interest in it. I normally like Roger Ebert's reviews a lot because he writes about movies very well and generally has valid points even if I don't agree with his overall review. Often he cues me in to some movie arcania. For instance, in the Transformer's review, he says, "... Megatron crash-landed near the North Pole a century ago and possesses the Allspark, which is the key to something, I'm not sure what, but since it's basically an alien MacGuffin it doesn't much matter. (Note to fanboys about to send me an e-mail explaining the Allspark: Look up "MacGuffin" in Wikipedia.)"

Now, I have no idea what the "Allspark" is. It sounds like some baking ingredient, but for semiconductor doping or something. But looking up MacGuffin in wikipedia shows that the users have already added Ebert's reference as an example. Hehe. Cute.

Arrr, hands off me booty!!

Ouch! Veggie Booty, manufactured by Robert's American Gourmet (which makes my favorite "Pirate's Booty" as well, not affected by the recall) is being recalled due to possible salmonella contamination.

Alas, poor Booty; I knew it, dear reader: a snack of infinite blandness, of most excellent guiltlessness: it hath borne me through document reviews countless times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rims at it. Here hung those cheese powders that I have savored I know not how oft. Where be your puffs now? your extruded knots? your dessication? your packing-peanut imitations, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own pirate-themed marketing? quite safety-recalled? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her eat many low-fat snack foods, to this favour her snacks must come; make her drool at that.

what's pink and buoyant and slimy all over?

Hahahaha. Poor catfish tried to swallow a basketball.

Pretty graphics of ignorance

Fark linked a Wired Article on Survey of current events. Now it only had 5 questions, but the demographics they were studying included the difference between Fox News and other media outlets. There are so many confounding variables, but the results are that Fox News watchers got more questions wrong than people who claimed to use other news outlets.

Expensive Coast will empty by 2100 oh noes!!1!

The author of the Forbes article, "Ghost Cities of 2100," is careful to caveat her article with disclaimers that whether her fantastic predictions occur is "an open question," and "hard to predict." She also describes certain urban centers that are already experiencing population decline to suppport her conjectures. But I'm not writing about the effect of a major earthquake on San Francisco, rising ocean levels, or the hollowing of heartland America.

I'm writing because the editor of FORBES should have caught the irony of claiming in a "financial" magazine that the decline in San Francisco's population because of rising housing prices could lead it to "disappear entirely." It would seem that the author of the article does not understand the bedrock economic notion of the tie between demand and price. While the population size may be in decline, there can be no possible argument that the decline is due to a general lack of desire to live in San Francisco. On the contrary, the decline is due to the lack of capacity of lower-income (and generally higher density) populations to compete for limited supply of land.

GG Forbes editor. The only purpose of simplistic population-decline-equals-city-death causation analysis is to irritate readers and get them to blog their annoyance.

Haha. Lolcat youtube compilation!

Stuffed animals

I was recently in the market for stuffed animals for my sister's newborn twins. I decided not to go with the standard teddy bear / rabbit banality. Instead I'm looking for some alternative animals. I ultimately decided to get a plush platypus and a plush red panda.

My main concern is that millions of babies can't really be that wrong when it comes to bears and rabbits. Perhaps a platypus and a red panda won't be as cute as the paragons of pedestrian playthings. But I have faith that as long as they're cushy, they can at least serve as brownish pillows and sponges for baby-spit.

6 acres of land on the San Francisco Bay

Some guy is selling 6 acres of land on the San Francisco bay for $10 million. Difficulty: it really is ON the bay ~ as in an island. Apparently it's the last privately owned island in the Bay. According to this article, the guy bought it for $49,500 in 1964 and hasn't managed to develop it or anything.

I wonder if this unnamed island in Google Maps is the island for sale...

Nessun dorma when the cell phone rings

Oh man, you've gotta check this out. I generally despise American Idol and the initial rounds of American Idol in particular as shameless exercises in schadenfreude, but this Welsh "Britain's Got Talent" cell-phone salesdude was pretty cool. Watch the vid.

Keyboard fauna

My computer and keyboard are getting a little long in the tooth, and recently I've been thanking the stars for the manufacturers' foresight in making most keyboards black now so the built up grime is less visible. I remember my old beige, or whatever-color, keyboard used to have almost-visible circles on some of the commonly used keys. Yuck.

But here's a fun article on keeping your keyboard so clean you could eat off of it!

Geriatric monitoring!

Wow. Embedded in this boring article about Japan using older workers and abolishing mandatory retirement is mention of a water heater/kettle that pages a person when it's used and summarizes its use in an electronic message daily. If the person receiving the messages recognizes a change in routine, they can contact the old person to see why the pattern has changed.

Recognition of virtual property rights

I just read an interesting article on the status of a lawsuit between a "Second Life" user and the operators. I've never really understood the purpose of mundane virtual worlds for entertainment value. Fantastic worlds or worlds with conflict are interesting to me, but a world where I can build a house or dress up in socially questionable ways, but are otherwise similar to real life, seems kind of silly to me. Diff'rent Strokes for different folks I guess. Perhaps the schism, in the parlance of Ward and Beaver, is the same as between wanting to play "House" and wanting to play "Cowboys and Indians." Perhaps the nexus is wanting to play "Doctor."

But I digress. The article is very interesting to me because (1) it's a glimpse at where the virtual property world is going, and (2) it describes an online contract where a judge gives the hapless user an escape from the "I ACCEPT" button.

1. Recently, there have been some articles where reporters have suggested that the IRS may TAX virtual income as real income. In most virtual worlds, taxing virtual income seems a little silly. Is the acquisition of items like the "Uber Sword of Uberness" income? How do you quantify its value? If I can't trade the item, and don't plan to sell my avatar, then when is the income recognized? For items I can trade, what determines the proper exchange rate? However, from what I understand of "Second Life," some of the questions are easier to answer. The article describes a system where real money and virtual money are exchanged via an official system (as opposed to the notoriously reviled "gold sellers" in more fantastical virtual worlds). It will be interesting to see how this case turns out, whether the confiscation of virtual property amounts to an actionable conversion.

2. When I click on "I have read and understand the terms and conditions for use of this software and accept them in their entirety," I think about how I probably haven't read and don't understand them. I just want to use the da** software! Well, rejoice fellow victims of contracts of adhesion, in this particular case, the judge said the terms don't necessarily bind the user. Interesting.

Lost in Time... Like Tears in Rain...

Rutger Hauer, once a mere figment from my nightmares, has written a memoir called "All Those Moments." The title of the memoir is from perhaps his best known and definitely his favorite (as he confirms) role as Roy Batty in the classic Blade Runner. I didn't know, however, that he turned down a role in another epic movie Das Boot (perhaps Jürgen Prochnow's role?? zomg) so he could play Roy Batty.