BunkBlog

So I put the Sith DVD in the computer, expecting to get the usual autorun “what do you want to do with this disk” query. Instead, it autoruns and starts playing a front-end to its own playback software (like PowerDVD isn’t good enough for George Lucas?). I kill that and look at the disk in Explorer – the DVD is named “CHARLOTTE_DISC1” – what the heck?

Apparently, they codename movies while they’re doing the DVD authoring and mastering, but forgot to change the first batch of SW3 masters to something more appropriate.

If you haven’t been following the Google Print controversy, here’s the pinnacle of absurdity so far. A children’s hospital in England has a completely unique and unprecedented perpetual copyright (in the UK) on the sales and performance of Peter Pan in the UK. They are claiming that Google Print’s service will rob them of millions of pounds of income every year. Think of the children!

I wonder why they haven’t previously gone after the public domain work? You did know that the book is actually in the public domain everywhere but the United Kingdom, didn’t you? So, exactly what does the American site Google do that the American site Gutenberg Project doesn’t already do? Is it just a question of convenience?

(Via BoingBoing)

Oh, Kit! Have you seen MYPETZOMBIES.COM yet? Seems like a Christmas present idea…

Just watched Wild Things for the first time. Two things occurred to me:

1. I really shouldn’t try to watch television with my glasses instead of contacts – the prescription is just too far off.
2. Never trust a homicidal maniac with millions of dollars.

Of course, I also realize that I don’t get to see Denise Richards’s breasts frequently enough, but that’s really not as surprising.

Harvey Danger, the band which brought you “Flagpole Sitta,” has released their third album via BitTorrent as well as in stores. If you like the download, they’ve got Paypal set up for donations.

I seriously hope this is a succesful experiment for them. Any proof that bands can make more money bypassing the plastic-based distribution system (and the RIAA) would be a very Good Thing, in my opinion.

The new Depeche Mode comes out in less than two weeks. Naturally, I’ve had a copy on my hard drive for a couple days. Since I’m a big fan of Gahan et al, I’ll be buying the CD when it hits the shelves. Just in case the RIAA is reading, now I’m covered by fair use laws, in some alternate universe where the RIAA doesn’t get to launch random lawsuits like some kind of judicial shotgun blast. Anyway, different rant.

As with a few other albums in the past, the download of the music has made me even more sure that I’ll buy the CD. This is a great album. For those who didn’t like Exciter, this is a return to the old Depeche from the Black Celebration era. Very nice, and the first single, “Precious,” is by far the standout track on the disc.

I really love the woman who is countersuing the RIAA for racketeering – I liken it to extortion, but I suppose it’s the same RICO law set.

Oh cat, my cat!
You sleep a lot, yes, good and plenty
Why can that not include
From 6 until 6:20?

Currently, there is some “Western Tradition” university show on my television. I’m not sure how that got on there. Recently, I’ve been watching the old Cosmos series (I’m up to Disc 6 of 7). I guess this proves that I’m a geek. Oh, well. I can do what I want!

Into the Blue is pretty good, for a fluffy movie. No, there’s no deep meaning involved, but it’s still entertaining. And, Jessica Alba is half-naked through most of it, with many shots of her thong-covered bum which are not remotely necessary for the plot but appreciated nonetheless. 🙂 For the other side, Paul Walker does appear to have been carved from marble by a Greek with a chisel. So, ya know, it’s not all for the men.

The insanity that afflicts this country over sports never ceases to amaze, amuse, and annoy me. Here in Varsity Blues Country, the local radio stations play high school football every Friday evening, requiring me to flip over to my personal music collection (15000 MP3 tracks as of this morning) or just listen to the air conditioning. And now, I’m ready to watch the Simpsons and King of the Hill, when what do I see? 9 minutes remaining in the fourth quarter. Knowing what little I do about football, I know that the “9 minutes” in football time equates to something like all damned night in regular clock time. Hopefully they’ll still play Family Guy anyway.

Stupid steroid-laced men in tights. Grumble grumble.

Just got back from watching Lord of War tonight. There’s a feelgood movie for the year! The opening sequence, which is the life cycle of a bullet from manufacturer to target, is a remarkable piece of cinematography that sets the tone for the movie.

Dark comedy, family drama, a touch of romance, and a heavy dose of “what the fuck” discussion of the gunrunning trade all combine to make this a very powerful film. Do not take small children to this film, under any circumstances. Unless, of course, your children have seen a lot of gunshot wounds being made in their daily lives, in which case – nothing new here for them.

Nicolas Cage, as always, is great. Ethan Hawke doesn’t chew the scenery, but he doesn’t quite make me believe his character is as boy scout as he is supposed to be. The rest of the cast is really peripheral, with the exception of Eamonn Walker’s thinly-veiled Charles Taylor fictionalization. Most of the screen time is devoted to Cage and his narrations, which really make the tone. His deadpan patter throughout the most insane gunfights and family dramas caused me to think of his character, Yuri Orlov, as an amoral near-affectless person.

Great movie, and I expect a cinematography award at the next Oscar ceremony – the camera work is good, but the long cut scenes are fantastic.

Remember that New Design I posted two weeks ago? One of my coworkers is proud of her “Blame Me – I voted for the moron” button. She feels that he’s not a moron, but she considers it a “buck stops here” statement. Although she and I have vastly different views on the proper role of government, we do agree on one thing – there’s been a whole lot of stupid to spread around on all layers of government lately.

By the way, the buttons don’t refer to any particular political candidate or official, so you can give them to anyone who you think has voted badly, for any race. Cheers.

and I have a problem. I’m compelled to collect as much music as I can. In the past few weeks, I’ve acquired Death Cab for Cutie, Aerosmith, DJ Rap, Alicia Keys, and Bach. The Bach is perhaps the strangest. A 17 CD set of Bach’s organ music. Seventeen disks. Let that sink in a few more minutes. I have 20 hours of Bach organ music. What party will that work for?

I discovered that Death Cab for Cutie, contrary to its name, is not some sort of death metal, poseur punk band, but more like Lifehouse with less attitude. Proves that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (or a band by its name).

In my email today:

————

hi dear,
how are you and how is your work going ?hopr its going smoothly?you know i promised to email you from our chat and right now i just wanna try to describe myself .
i think im gonna start from here cuz i dont really know how to do this ok but ill try .

Here goes my story ok.im 26/yrs old and im carol simson im white,guess you saw that in my profile huh.im 5″7 feets tall and i love guyz who are willing to show me care and love.hope you are the one im looking for?im kinda shy at first to talk to guyz and i have a set of good eyes a dark hair too.
im not an upgraed member of the yahoo personals ok.cuz ive been kinde busy with some stuffs which i believe are more important .
im a christian and i love kids alot .my parents area aloso christians and thay also love kids ,but it took them over 10 yrsbefore they had me as their only child .when i was about 5 years old ,my father died cuz he had asthma and i could remember i wept in that day .it was a tragic day i guess .
actually, my father is an american and mty mom is an african ,precisely a nigerian .after my fathers death, my mom took up the responsibility and she fedme ,cloth me and also paid my school fees .as time went on ,my mom had some problems with the US government and this made my mom leave the US for her country ,which made my mom laeve me with my paps sister in illinois.she caredabout me and really loved me soo much which was about 10 years ago .theni moved to texas about 5 months ago and i tried to get a home of my own which i got the money from my aunty and ive not finishedpaying the bills .
Some weeks later ,i got a message that my aunt was dead .then i felt it was over.
Recently i got a call from nigeria that my mom fell from the staircase and also broke her spinal cord.i had to rush down to nigeria with the little money i had left to get a ticket and flew down to africa.ok
when i got to nigeria .i gotto know that my mom had already been rushedto the hospitasl ok.i got to the doctor he explained everything to me and told me that my mom needed the attention of an orthopedist.which will cost about $500 and right now ive spent the only $200 i had to get some medication for her an dthe doctor says if shes not operated she will soon have to be on a wheelchair .and i felt it was over and not until i met you ,youve given my world a turnaround ,youve given me hope .thanks for this ok.]
i really would appreciate it if you could get me out of this mess so that we could start a new life together and live as man and wifeok cuz shes the only one i have left .im leaning on you for refuge ok. please dont let me dowm.
I wish to know more about you and would have preffered it if we could chat together but im kinda trying to treat my mom with the little i have left.
i really hope to hear from you soon and hope you are for real.
Must confess you are cool and i think we could work things out .bye love.
carol cares and will always love you

—————

Gotta love it. I’ve never chatted with you, and I don’t think I’m ready to “live as man and wifeok” right now, but thanks for the offer.

I watched the Video Music Awards (OK, they were on while I was blasting aliens nearby) the other day. Several times during the broadcast, MTV played commercials which claimed that the recurring meme that “MTV Doesn’t Play Music” is actually a falsehood, an urban legend. Glancing at their schedule on Zap2It this morning, I find that MTV does play music videos. At 5 am. Twice per week. For an hour. That can’t be right, I thought. Maybe some of these other shows with hip and happenin’ names are actually music videos.

Turns out, MTV After Hours plays videos, from 2am to 5am each weekday. And MTV Video Wakeup plays videos from 5am to 8am each weekday. And we can’t forget TRL, which plays about one video per 15 minutes of mindless yammering, and only one hour per day anyway.

So, what do we end up with? On weekdays, there are music videos from 2 to 8 in the morning, which is convenient if you’re a vampire. And then there are videos interspersed with screaming teenaged girls at 4 each afternoon. Being as generous as humanly possible, that gives a grand total of 40 hours of music during a seven-day period that has 168 hours broadcast. Less than 25% music on Music Television.

During those hours when I could watch television, the schedule is filled with endless hours of reality shows and Laguna Beach. Yay.

For those of us who have jobs that require we work and sleep normal hours, this is very entertaining. I guess you could Tivo the videos on some sort of low priority, so if there’s nothing you want to watch on, you could zone out to videos. Otherwise, the “urban legend” is true, at least insofar as it applies to normal people who sleep when it’s dark and work during the week – MTV really doesn’t play music.

Just to add a trifle more surrealism to your websurfing experience, I’ve added a little code to my site that displays the lyrics to the most recently played song from Winamp on the sidebar (bottom of the right side). Yes, I am a geek, thanks for asking.

Blame Me – I voted for the moron (not really, but that’s the design)

Sarcasm 3 is my latest attempt at graphical humor. If you are humorless, don’t bother going there – you’ll just get mad.

Despite the things I’ve been hearing from my cow-orkers and family members, the FCC has proposed 2009 as the deadline to change from analog to digital television, and it looks like Congress is going to sign that into law. So, all of you who thought your television was going to stop working soon – don’t worry.

Here in San Angelo, the local cable company (sure, there’s theoretically more than one, but get real) has been in a pissing contest with the local CBS affiliate since the beginning of the year. This has resulted in no CBS channel available on the cable system, free rabbit-ears antennas for cable subscribers that ask for them, and a striking rise in the use of satellite television receivers.

I don’t get the satellite thing. Of course, I don’t get the fascination with digital cable either. Both of them force something on the consumer that is, in my mind, unacceptable – the adapter. This is nothing less than an external tuner, rendering the tuners in my television and VCR useless. Many people wonder why I think this is a bad thing. This can be summed up in one of the marketing points for the local Dish Network folks – they brag about allowing you to have televisions in up to five rooms in your house. Allowing you to have them, you see? Because, unlike television as broadcast over the airwaves of old, the satellite provider now controls your usage of the signal.

No longer can you watch one thing and record another – oh no, your VCR has to be connected to a second external tuner to record something that you are not watching in that room at that moment. Ah, but then the Dish folks point out they are offering a free DVR upgrade, so you can record the full digital signal of other shows directly on this magical box. Ah, but can you? When the television industry is trying to get legislation passed to allow the Broadcast Flag to rise from the dead, when Tivo now puts commercials on you recorder while you’re trying to skip commercials, when the broadcasters are coercing the DVR manufacturers to disallow permanent archiving of shows… Well, I don’t trust a DVR that I don’t control 100%, and the DVR from Dish network would be a DRMed, MPAA-friendly, unexpandable, unchangeable piece of junk to me.

I don’t understand why so many people find it acceptable to cede control of the airwaves to the content providers. There is a balance in copyright law; the citizens are assumed to have some rights too, not just the people in Hollywood.

So, until I can use a standard tuner in a standard television or DVR or computer tuner card, I’ll stick with analog, thanks.

While perusing the Something Positive Archive (great web comic), I came across a recommendation to listen to The Kimberly Trip. For those who aren’t up on things, The Kimberly Trip is a band which includes Sierra, who is one of my oldest LJ friends. She started her LJ about 4 weeks before I started mine, but she is an “Early Adopter” and I’m just some jonny-come-lately. 🙂

Anyway, this is a pretty weird web-centric small world moment. Carry on with your day.

Here’s an entertaining new publication that I saw in Utne – $pread Magazine. It’s for sex workers, by sex workers. That is to say, it’s a pro-stripper, pro-prostitute magazine.

Just making your day a tad more surreal.

From MLFoley, here is a musical meme. Go to Music Outfitters and put the year of your birth in the search engine. It’ll show you the top 100 songs of that year. Bold the ones you like.

1. Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon and Garfunkel
2. (They Long To Be) Close To You, Carpenters
3. American Woman / No Sugar Tonight, The Guess Who
4. Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head, B.J. Thomas
5. War, Edwin Starr
6. Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, Diana Ross
7. I’ll Be There, Jackson 5
8. Get Ready, Rare Earth
9. Let It Be, The Beatles
10. Band Of Gold, Freda Payne
11. Mama Told Me (Not To Come), Three Dog Night
12. Everything Is Beautiful, Ray Stevens
13. Make It With You, Bread
14. Hitchin’ A Ride, Vanity Fair
15. ABC, Jackson 5
16. The Love You Save / I Found That Girl, Jackson 5
17. Cracklin’ Rose, Neil Diamond
18. Candida, Dawn
19. Thank You (Fallettin Me Be Mice Elf Again) / Everybody Is A Star, Sly and The Family Stone
20. Spill The Wine, Eric Burdon and War
21. O-o-h Child / Dear Prudence, Five Stairsteps and Cubie
22. Spirit In The Sky, Norman Greenbaum (although the Doctor and the Medics version is my fave)
23. Lay Down (Candles In The Rain), Melanie and The Edwin Hawkins Singers
24. Ball Of Confusion (That’s What The World Is Today), Temptations
25. Love On A Two Way Street, Moments
27. Which Way You Goin’ Billy?, Poppy Family
28. All Right Now, Free
29. Julie, Do Ya Love Me, Bobby Sherman
30. Green-eyed Lady, Sugarloaf
31. Signed Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours), Stevie Wonder
32. Ride Captain Ride, Blues Image
33. Venus, Shocking Blue
34. Instant Karma (We All Shine On), John Ono Lennon
35. Patches, Clarence Carter
36. Lookin’ Out My Back Door / Long As I Can See The Light, Creedence Clearwater Revival
37. Rainy Night In Georgia, Brook Benton
38. Something’s Burning, Kenny Rogers and The First Edition
39. Give Me Just A Little More Time, Chairmen Of The Board
40. Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes), Edison Lighthouse
41. The Long And Winding Road / For You Blue, The Beatles
42. Snowbird, Anne Murray
43. Reflections Of My Life, Marmalade
44. Hey There Lonely Girl, Eddie Holman
45. The Rapper, Jaggerz
46. He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother, Hollies
47. Tighter, Tighter, Alive and Kicking
48. Come And Get It, Badfinger
49. Cecelia, Simon and Garfunkel
50. Love Land, Charles Wright and The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band
51. Turn Back The Hands Of Time, Tyrone Davis
52. Lola, Kinks
53. In The Summertime, Mungo Jerry
54. Indiana Wants Me, R. Dean Taylor
55. (I Know) I’m Losing You, Rare Earth
56. Easy Come, Easy Go, Bobby Sherman
57. Express Yourself, Charles Wright and The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band
58. Still Water (Love), Four Tops
59. Make Me Smile, Chicago
60. House Of The Rising Sun , Frijid Pink
61. 25 Or 6 To 4, Chicago
62. My Baby Loves Lovin’, White Plains
63. Love Or Let Me Be Lonely, Friends Of Distinction
64. United We Stand, Brotherhood Of Man
65. We’ve Only Just Begun, Carpenters
66. Arizona, Mark Lindsay
67. Fire And Rain, James Taylor
68. Groovy Situation, Gene Chandler
69. Evil Ways, Santana
70. No Time, The Guess Who
71. Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time), Delfonics
72. The Wonder Of You / Mama Liked The Roses, Elvis Presley
73. Up Around The Bend / Run Through The Jungle, Creedence Clearwater Revival
74. (If You Let Me Make Love To You Then) Why Can’t I Touch You, Ronnie Dyson
75. I Just Can’t Help Believing, B.J. Thomas
76. It’s A Shame, Spinners
77. For The Love Of Him, Bobbi Martin
78. Mississippi Queen, Mountain
79. I Want To Take You Higher, Ike and Tina Turner
80. The Letter, Joe Cocker
81. Ma Belle Amie, Tee Set
82. The Bells, Originals
83. Yellow River, Christie
84. Somebody’s Been Sleeping, 100 Proof and Aged In Soul
85. Vehicle, Ides Of March
86. Gimme Dat Ding, Pipkins
87. Lay A Little Lovin’ On Me, Robin Mcnamara
88. Up The Ladder To The Roof, Supremes
89. Travelin’ Band / Who’ll Stop The Rain, Creedence Clearwater Revival
90. Come Saturday Morning, Sandpipers
91. Psychedelic Shack, Temptations
92. Without Love (There Is Nothing), Tom Jones
93. Are You Ready?, Pacific Gas and Electric
94. Woodstock, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
95. I’ll Never Fall In Love Again, Dionne Warwick
96. Look What They’ve Done To My Song Ma, New Seekers
97. Walk A Mile In My Shoes, Joe South
98. The Thrill Is Gone, B.B. King
99. It’s Only Make Believe, Glen Campbell
100. Call Me, Aretha Franklin

Obviously, 1970 was not a bad year for music. Lots of Beatles and CCR in there. Sweet.