Dr. Horrible!

Watch it.

Geeking out on the work of pre-theoretical knuckle-draggers

I started reading Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash this weekend and finished it earlier this afternoon. Part of what I enjoyed about it was that it played around in the territory of genres like cyberpunk without setting down its roots in them.

Because of that interesting feature of the novel, I was all the more intrigued when I came across a post on Boing Boing with this video of a recent lecture by Stephenson on the topic of literary genres.

Learning from movies

This afternoon I went to see WALL-E, and I was quite pleased that it managed to live up to the elevated expectations that I had as result of all the good reviews and positive word of mouth. To make a movie about a trash robot, and to do it without any dialogue for 90% of the movie is an unimaginably bold move for a Hollywood film of any sort, but Pixar has proven their brilliance once again by crafting a touching and thoughtful film that is a stellar example craftsmanship in cinema.

It's not giving anything away to say that it has a surprisingly subversive message about how our wasteful consumer culture is destroying both the planet and the human race. The movie makes its point seamlessly, without any blunt didacticism, and it's hard to imagine a more compelling way to communicate concepts of conservation and good stewardship of the Earth. Unfortunately, the power of the film's impact on me made it that much more depressing to see that it did not penetrate the minds of my fellow movie patrons, who engaged in the typical movie theater behavior of leaving all of their scattered trash behind for someone else to clean up. If a film like WALL-E couldn't get people to change their behavior, it leaves me with little hope that we'll be able to achieve a happy ending of our own.

Speaking more than one language? How un-American!

In an especially idiotic expression of xenophobia, a school-board member in Louisiana objected to the use of a few sentences of Vietnamese directed towards their parents by the co-valedictorians in their graduation speech. He has also put forward a policy proposal to forbid the use of any language other than English in graduation speeches.

That sort of foolishness is appalling no matter where it comes from, but it's especially ridiculous when it comes from a part of the country that was originally settled by French-speakers. But wait, there's more! Not only does the location have French roots, but the school-board member in question has that decidedly non-English last name of Pitre (for extra bonus fun, look up what that translates to in English).

There is one possible bright side to such a policy, as it would save audiences from any more commencement addresses peppered with little bits of Latin. Anyway, who would ever want to graduate Magna Cum Laude when you could graduate Mega Super Awesome instead?

The world is bit less awesome

RIP George Carlin

Can't Anybody Tackle Bo Jackson?!?

The unstoppable force that was Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl has already been written about, but now he lives again!

I upgraded to Firefox 3.0 today, and I discovered a truly magnificent add-on. FireNes lets you play all of the games from the original NES system, including Tecmo Bowl and all of the other classics of my childhood.

Needless to say, I've been busy making sure that not even super-human Bo Jackson can defeat my beloved Broncos. Bo knows... defeat: 42-27!

Words are pretty

Kudos to Jess for introducing me to Visuwords, a graphical dictionary/thesaurus. I found it very relaxing to type in the first word that came to mind and then free associate based on the results to find new words that might yield interesting results.

These words gave my favorite results so far:
Character
Jerk
Heart
Bust