BunkBlog

I owned the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame, when I was young. I remember the black holes were used to sneak behind your enemies and shoot them with your tiny plastic Viper fighters.

I also remember having a Viper toy that shot a plastic dart out of its nose.

So, with that in mind, is it any wonder that I’m really digging the remake? Yes, I am a big geek.

Here’s a touching story….
CNN.com – Police: Girl died after mother forced her to drink bleach – Jan 14, 2005

The 12-year-old girl had sex, so mom forced her to drink bleach then held her down until she died. Go mom! That’ll teach her to not have sex.

The brain comes up with some really strange stuff as you awake or fall asleep; the transition must do something interesting with electrochemical balances I’d guess.

This morning the name of a new canine hip-hop group came to me unbidden: Barky Bark and the Stinky Bunch.

Making your morning slightly more surreal….

Most recently finished book – L.E. Modesitt’s The Ethos Effect.

Although I usually like Modesitt’s science fiction, this one was written a bit differently. I guess I’m just noticing the Tom Swifties too much or something.

Anyway, throwing out the sometimes leaden dialog, the ideas of this Parafaith War sequel are interesting. One of the things SF excels at is showing us extremes of contemporary situations so we can see them from a different viewpoint. Things in this one that you may have heard about in recent years in real life: racial profiling, incarceration without trial or charges, religious fundamentalists driving bad government decisions, and military actions with no apparent logic behind them.

Don’t eat processed meats – it’ll kill ya.

Olive oil is good for you. Like you didn’t know that, right?

Good thing we use lots of olive oil in our cooking already. Like in the frittata and foccacia we made for dinner last night. 🙂

Fullerton is installing free wifi in the downtown area.

One thing in the article which trips me out is that Fullerton is handing laptop computers to every student in 3rd through 8th grades. I don’t understand the rationale behind that. In that age group, one would hope the schools would be more interested in the “Three Rs” than in broadband wireless access. No matter how much of a technophile I am, I still think the basics are important to build on.

According to Om Malik, Six Apart to buy Live Journal…

So, I can’t escape Movable Type, can I? I changed my site to use WordPress because I didn’t like the way MT was moving (Pay up, bitches!). I keep my LJ paid up even though I use my site to post mirrored items to it. Why do I do such a bizarre thing? Because LJ has features nobody else does. LJ has threaded comments and userpics and mood icons and all that jazz, but most importantly – Livejournal has Friends Pages. Having a single-stop place to look at an aggregated list of posters you like to read is a Good Thing, and not one that Typepad has any interest in implementing. Also fairly important – LJ has no ads and lower fees for paid accounts. TypePad does not have a free user level, so I can only imagine what they’ll do with the five million free LJ accounts. If they’re doing this to gain users, they pretty much have to let the leeches hang on.

If SixApart buys LJ, I hope they leave it alone as a wholly-owned subsidiary, rather than merging it into the Typepad mess.

Just a few thoughts bouncing around my noggin:

• People in San Angelo accelerate like sailboats.
• We finally got MTV2 on our local cable and they seem to have stopped showing videos. WTF?
• Why in the world am I tired? I’ve only been up 13.5 hours, I have no business being tired.

Cya

Disseminated by superflow

A few months ago, I had a dream in which LiveJournal and everyone on it went completely nuts for a day. The entire world had turned upside-down and inside-out and nobody was their normal self anymore. And it was such a good read, that I think it should happen for real.

January 27th is the birthday of Lewis Carroll, author of ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. Alice fell down a rabbit hole into a place where everything had changed and none of the rules could be counted on to apply anymore. I say, let’s do the same: January 27th, 2005 should be the First Annual LiveJournal Rabbit Hole Day. When you post on that Thursday, instead of the normal daily life and work and news and politics, write about the strange new world you have found yourself in for the day, with its strange new life and work and news and politics. Are your pets talking back at you now? Has your child suddenly grown to full adulthood? Does everyone at work think you’re someone else now? Did Bush step down from the White House to become a pro-circuit tap-dancer? Did Zoroastrian missionaries show up on your doorstep with literature in 3-D? Have you been placed under house arrest by bizarre insectoid women wielding clubs made of lunchmeat?

Let’s have a day where nobody’s life makes sense anymore, where any random LJ you click on will bring you some strange new tale. Let’s all fall down the Rabbit Hole for 24 hours and see what’s there. It will be beautiful.

For consideration: this only works if you spread the word, of course, but three and a half weeks is forever in LJ Meme Time.

Reuters has a wire story about a proposed final solution to the terrorist detention problem.

The Defense Department, which holds 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, plans to ask the U.S. Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for lack of evidence.

Um, if they’re never going to trial, doesn’t that mean they’re … presumed innocent? I guess that pesky Constitution has been thrown out permanently. Another part of this proposal is to give the prisoners to Afghanistan and other “partner” countries, which all seem to have a distressingly poor record of human rights abuse. Go, USA!

Code 46 was the movie of the evening last night. I’m a pretty fair afficionado of future tales, and this one was not so good. I think the director was trying too hard to make the movie look like Bladerunner, and the writer was trying too hard to change the language of the future to some Spanarabichinglish goulash. When you notice the Spanish and Arabic and Chinese words too much, they aren’t really natural, are they?

Anyway, the story was decent, but Tim Robbins was doing his best Keanu Reeves impression throughout the film. I know he can emote better than that. What was really entertaining was watching the “making of” featurette and hearing them talk about how Robbins and Samantha Morton had such great chemistry together. Apparently they watched a different movie than I did. For an “idea” story, pretty good; for an engaging piece of cinema, mediocre.