Take a look at
this picture, and read the description on the page...
... then come back here and scroll down this page....
What's more amazing?
A. Nighttime in mainland Europe whilst it's daylight in the UK
.................................or................................
B. There's no cloud over the UK
????
Flyguy, Tanya: take note...
If you're a fan of the new Battlestar, you might be interested in the following:
- Sci-Fi.com are offering the full episode of "33" (the "33 minutes over and over" episode) online, for free (OK, you need Real Player. Bad choice).
- There's a blog with RSS feed by Ron Moore (not sure who he is. Director or producer I guess), on series 2 of Battlestar
- There's also one by Richard Hatch, but I can't find the URL... I'll keep looking
- And Sci-fi.com say that the entire cast of Galactica will return, "... including Edward James Olmos, etc etc..."
So that answers THAT little question then!
... there's a
population explosion amongst Peacocks!
If you know how I am, you'll know why I found this funny. If you've somehow found my site via the web, then this won't make any sense at all...
BitTorrent, as many of my esteemed readers know, is a peer-to-peer technology for making downloads easier. Instead of downloading the whole file from one person, you download bits of the file, in random order, from multiple people.
A
new technology based on this means that you can download the bits in sequence, making it useful for streaming video/audio where the order of the bits is essential.
It'll be a while before it hits mainstream - there's a license fee to include the technology in other people's applications, but some hack will just reverse engineer it and make it available to illegitemate (sp?) peer-to-peer apps.
Of course, all this assumes you're not on crappy NTL and can therefore get more than 2 snail paces a week of BitTorrent download.
I'm still plowing my way through the extras on the boxed set of LOTR extended edition DVDs, but there seems to be some
extra material that can be unlocked. I'm not sure whether this only applies to the stand-alone third set, or whether it was included in the boxed set as well.
The good old Beeb have put
some pictures online, before and after, demonstrating the effects of global warming. Now, I'm a bit cynical about some of them - 1976 was a boom time for summer droughts and winter blizzards in the south of England. 1977 wasn't. That's not epochal weather changes, it's just random, and normal fluctuations year on year. So some of these pics are a bit debatable. But the first one is quite impressive - there's a little too much difference for it to be due to seasonal fluctuations, methinks.
And I'm still open on whether this type of thing is due to man-made greenhouse gasses, or natural variations.
Remember "that" scene in Miss Congeniality, where Sandra Bullock first walks out of the aircraft hangar, hips swaying....
.... oooooohhhhh....
... well, they're making a sequel!!!
Do you reckon there'll be a similar bootylicious scene?
"I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me."
Fred Allen
Just been doing some surfing round snopes.com - a site that specialises in proving or disproving various urban myth stories/photos.
Some of the photos are pretty gruesome, but they give a warning when appropriate. But here are some highlights of the non-gruesome ones:
Some utterly fantastic pavement chalk paintingsGod's looking down on us from aboveShelob (the big spider from Lord of the Rings) is
real and living in the desert (arachnophobes, don't click this - I shat myself when I saw it!)
An
interesting variation of the "I'm dirty, clean me!" lame-ass comments on dirty cars
One of the bastards at work sent me this recently.
Very funny!
Me four months ago
Just for the record, he's only jealous because in 5 months time (oh god help me!) my taxes will be supporting MY kid, and not HIS.
Sucker!
Just got a new film from ScreenSelect.
Timeline.
A group of archeology students somehow end up back in medieval France. Get into trouble. Get back to the US. That's the plot. The trailer looked OK.
The trailer missed the plot holes...
Where shall I begin?
Rule #1 of time travel: Don't take anything back into the past from the modern era.So why did the two goons, sent back with the archie-types by the corporation that discovered time travel, have grenades on them??
Rule #2 of time travel: The gadgets they use to come back to the modern era need 40 feet of clearance to operate.So why did the first of those two goons, after being shot by bow and arrow twice (just like Boromir in Lord of the Rings, but with less class), pull his grenade pin, trigger the gadget, and travel back to the modern era WITHOUT LETTING GO OF THE GRENADE, thus destroying the travellers' route back home (and adding the necessary suspense to this sorry tale), in the middle of a french wood, and with men on horseback nearby.
Rule #1 of film making: Don't pick on the obvious suspect without good reason.6 people from modern-day US. 5 american, one french or canadian. All get captured by the English baron who is currently encamped in medieval france. One speaks up for his team, in American English. The afore-mentioned baron suddenly asks the guy next to him what his name is, and lo and behold, it's the french guy. Francois.
Cue: one dead french spy.
But why stop at him? Why not ask the next four people what their names are? I'm sure they were Double Entendre, Je Ne Sais Quoi, Croissant, and Avant Garde.
(If you've not seen Top Secret, then A. you've no idea what I'm talking about, and B. you need to get a life!)
Rule #2 of film-making: Don't invent paradoxes if you're doing time travel.A girl in modern times wonders why a medieval fresco has been demolished. That same girl goes back to medieval times and wonders why someone would demolish that fresco. Of course, it was her! So she demolishes it, and the wall collapses to reveal a hidden tunnel. Which she wouldn't have found if the modern girl hadn't noticed the damage. Which wouldn't have happened if the she'd not damaged it. Which wouldn't have happened if the modern girl hadn't noticed....
...
... sorry.
Anyone notice the flaw here?
Rule #1 of archeology: Learn some of the language that you're digging up."Il est mon pere". It's not difficult. I learned that much in 2 years at school, and you're doing doctorates in medieval french history! Get a grip! Those four words would have saved a lot of bother and several lives....
Thank god I also got "I, Robot" today as well. At least I know that was a good film!
Thanks to a note from MadJock about
faulty Xbox cables burning people's houses down, I came across this about a
Fiat Xbox special edition.
"Ooooh", I thought.
"What make's it a special edition?", I pondered.
"A sticker on the back", Fiat answered.
"What? A sticker? Is that it?", I ranted.
"Oh aye", Fiat mumbled....
That's it. Nothing extra. Nada, zip, null, zilch.
Niiiice....
Have I posted this before, or not? Can't remember.
But it's worth posting again.
JMS, the guy behind the superlative Babylon 5 (no, I'm not going to write his name - can't even say it properly!) has
posited a new Star Trek series.
Damn. JMS has retracted his interest in running a Star Trek series after A) Paramount has decided to give the Star Trek franchise a rest for a while, and B) JMS has been offered another series to run. Thanks to
Sci-Fi.com.
If only the UK Sci-Fi channel was as good as the US one...
This time, it's High Fidelity. I thought I'd seen this, but when I read the review, I suddenly realised I hadn't. And when I watched the film, I realised that music's not big enough in my life now, compared to my peers when the film first came out. Don't get me wrong, it's a good film. Just not a great film. Acting was OK, script was kind of OK. Nice supporting roles by Jack Black and A.N. Other who plays a guy working in the shop. But nothing overly special. Bit of a let down after the superb films I've seen the last few days (not counting Secret Window).
First film of the day: the excellent The Station Agent. If you loved Garden State and similar films where there's no real plot, just people getting to know each other, then you'll love this.
Finbar lives in New York, and with his friend, runs a train hobbyists shop. The friend dies, and leaves Fin a small, closed-down train station in Hicksville, New Jersey. Fin, taciturn and semi-reclusive due to being a dwarf and fed up with stares, jokes, etc, moves to the station to live. There, he meets Olivia (woman going through a seperation, still missing her husband, son died 2 years ago), and Joe (looking after his dad's mobile catering unit, or ice cream van in real terms, whilst his dad is unwell). The three of them slowly start to get on, encouraged by Joe's manhattan cheekiness. Throw in a young librarian who fancies Finbar (they share a tender kiss eventually), and a schoolgirl who plays in the trains which have been dumped at the station, and you have a set of characters who grow on you, and provide some gentle humour. Peter Dinklage (who plays Fin) has a fantastic "why does this always happen to me?" look that he gets the chance to perfect in several comedic moments.
And it ends with the three of them sat side by side overlooking the water:
Finbar: When were blimps invented?
Olivia: No idea.
Joe: Maybe you could go down the library and ask that little hotty.
Olivia: She IS cute.
Joe: It's the librarian thing. Glasses off, hair down, books flying
Finbar: She doesn't wear glasses
Olivia: Buy her some, it'll be worth it
Magic. Sheer magic.
And I've just seen my first film of the day:
20 Million Miles To Earth (1957)
A spacecraft crash lands in Italy, and a strange gelatinous life-form appears and begins to wreak havoc.
Quality!!
Was off work yesterday and today, and had a cold for the last few days, so since Friday night through till the moment I write this, I've watched:
Mystic RiverWell acted, good script, quite dark. However, when I saw the title, I was thinking of A River Runs Through It, which is an entirely different type of film.
The Horse WhispererBeautifully shot, acting OK, Kristin Scott Thomas is always easy on the eye. And man, could I retire to Montana - what a lovely piece of the world.
Breakin' All The RulesComedy with Jamie Foxx (how old is that guy? Here he's pretending to be 25, and in Collateral he seemed a lot older). Pretty funny, battle of the sexes with Jamie having been dumped by his girlfriend so he writes a book on how to have the perfect break-up without creating a stalker. Then he falls for his cousin's girl, and his cousin meets this golddigger who's aiming for Jamie's boss, who ... and so on, and so on. Had a good few laughs, but not an outright laughfest.
Frasier Series 2Finally watched the last few episodes, after I had a glut of watching it when I first bought the DVD series. Excellent timing, never-fails-comedy. Series 3 is sat there waiting for me ;-)
Secret WindowMr Cheekbones himself has continually impressed me each time I see his films, but this one let me down. I knew the plot already, as I'd read the short story by Stephen King which this is based on. Depp played an OK role, but somehow the film never quite hung together very well. How is that the of all the Stephen King-based films, the only ones that have ever worked well have not had a hint of supernutual or crazy-psycho-killer content? Dolores Clairborne, Stand By Me, Misery (OK, she was psycho, but believably so), The Shawshank Redemption. Compare those to Carrie, Dreamweaver, or the atrocious Children of the Corn films. OK, there are a couple of supernatural/psycho films that worked: The Shining, Hearts In Atlantis, The Green Mile, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. And yet his novellettes (kind of long short stories) are superb, no matter what theme they're on. Ah well...
InstinctAnthony Hopkins plays an anthropologist who has been missing for 2 years in Africa, and is found after killing several game keepers. He's extradited back to the US, and you see that he's basically become a gorilla - shuffling, not speaking, panicked by shrill alarms, strong, etc - then thrown into a hard-core prison for nuts, and Cuba Gooding Junior is the psychologist assigned to get him to talk and do his psychological assessment for the courts. What ensues is that Hopkins sees something in CG Jr, and opens up, developing the film into an interesting insight about freedom, control, and the prisons that we build for ourselves. Their's a scene where you see Hopkins being accepted by the gorillas which is just superb, and which then turns into shock as one of them is shot right in front of his eyes by the game keeper/poacher. This shocked me - it's a well shot, touching, and painful view of man's gradual and horrific eradication of an intelligent, family-based, gentle species. With all the people I've seen shot in films over the years, nothing has affected me like this....
LA ConfidentialAgain, it's my old syndrome of "I don't like films about cops and robbers (or gangstas), but OK, I'll watch this one... oh, it's not as bad as I thought... what an excellent film". I've almost watched this one loads of times, and eventually thought I should bite the bullet. And what a great film. Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, and Guy Pearce (yes, from Neighbours!), play 3 cops in 1950s LA, caught up in a hotbed of corruption within the police force. Although I started out not liking all three of them, eventually you see other aspects to them and I started to sympathise with them. Supported by James Cromwell, Kim Basinger, and Danny De Vito, it's a good solid cast with an also solid script. Although how Kim got an oscar for it, I'll never know. She plays an OK part, but it's nothing to write home about. And Russell Crowe, who I normally can't watch, played as good a role as he did in The Insider.
Cinema ParadisoPure class. A coming of age film about a boy in a small town in Sicily who befriends a projectionist, his father figure in the absence of his father. The boy grows up, falls in love, and leaves town when his girlfriend's parents forbid her to get involved with him. Not much really happens beyond that. It's just a fantastic little film about life in a different era - no swearing, no violence, no nothing apart from people doing the things that every day people do. Excellent, excellent film. It seemed to go on along time, although I never felt bored.
Whew...
What shall I do today, I wonder?
Remember me writing about "
No more T'Pol".
Well, I felt very strongly about this, so I
took some action.
'Nuff said.
Lovely quote from an obviously intelligent and tasteful Daily Mail reader, who.... hold on a second... the Daily Mail....?
No, I'm not taking to reading that esteemed mag. It's a quote found on a site about the original source of particular words or phrases:
The women, the Daily Mail wrote recently in a characteristic burst of maidenly distaste, “pull their shoddily dyed hair back in that ultra-tight bun known as a ‘council-house facelift’, wear skirts too short for their mottled blue thighs, and expose too much of their distressingly flabby midriffs”.
The quote is from
WorldWideWords entry for ... you guessed it ... "ned". Well, actually, their English relative, "chav".
The article gives a few other words from various part of the UK, the best of which has gotta be " kappa slappers".
Pure class man!
And even better is this logo which
Chavscum.co.uk will put onto a t-shirt for you next time you go into that nightclub/bar in East Kilbride that the usual suspects walked past on the way back from breakfast on New Year's Day:
Another find today,
20 questions. That old game where you think of an object, and someone gets 20 questions to guess what it is.
I thought of "guitar", and it got to "sitar" with the 20 questions. Pretty good for a computer...
I've never seen The Truman Show, but after seeing
this photo, I so want to see Seaside, Florida. Which, for the ignorami out there, is where the film was... well... filmed.
Of course, as my nearest and dearest know, the odds of me making Florida this year with the gang are diddly-squat.
I'm sure they'll laugh their collective arses off when they read this.
Just found
this fabulous site. Totally non-PC. But superb never-the-less.
It's about foreigners (mainly Japanese) writing English warnings, instructions, directions, etc. And
this one caught by eye!
The above warning was found on ...
... wait for it ...
... a baby stroller (obviously an American one, since we call them pushchairs, but what the hey?)
This and other such dumb-ass warnings can be found
here.
You know those Hollywood movies where there's a sandstorm coming, and it look like a wall of sand moving across the desert, miles hight.
It's all made up, right?
Wrong.
Just came across
Blogskins last night. Some great skins, just haven't found one that's really me.
And before AndiD or Flyguy hop in, yes I did try searching for the following terms with no results:
"B5"
"Babylon"
"Bad haircut"
"Men with names like biscuits"
"Big pile of shite"
And all the other relevant terms
Plenty of pink and shiny skins for T though!
Not the masters Calvin and Hobbes, but equally relevant...
... particularly the picture, I feel.
Check out
this site with cards for EX-valentines:
Roses are red,
they come by the trainful.
I hope your death
is slow and painful.
And this one:
My lawyers are vicious,
I'll get more than I'm due.
And for once, I'll enjoy myself
while screwing you.
And there are some that are designed more for the pre-T "Flyguy on the pull" days. Such as this one:
Roses are red,
Politicians are sleazy.
Will you be mine?
(I hear that you're easy.)
And this one:
Your assests are delightful.
Your beauty's not debatable.
But what I like about you best,
is that you're not inflatable
And finally one about me:
I promise to be good to you,
and never treat you wrongly.
(Besides, I'll make you scream in bed --
I'm hung quite like a donkey!)
OK, I've read
this about 4 times, and I still don't think it's worth it. But I thought I'd share it, as IE is the only browser that does NOT have this bug!
I love Calvin and Hobbes. And I'm going to love it even more when I get to do things like his Dad does. I'll share them here...
I'm SO looking forward to this!
As the saintly Beeb have
commented, Spring is coming early.
There are a couple of cherry or apple blossoms just opposite our work front door, down a dingy alley, stuck in the 3 inch square bit of spare ground of a nearby office. And even they've just started to bloom.
It's fecking February....
So, we went to see Meet the Fockers. Very funny. Especially for Andi D sitting next to me, who wet himself at some points of the film. Such as when he saw Di Nero wearing the one rubber breast for milking, and thought it would be very droll to get me one when the wain is due.
Fun-ny.
With Sony announcing the chip underlying the forthcoming PS3, the Beeb have
an article about Cell process - the technology which the chip uses.
And I quote:
Each Cell will be linked to the others, creating a vast home network of computing power. Resources of the Cells across the house can be pooled to provide more power, and the links can also be used to enable devices to talk to each other, so that you can programme your microwave from your TV, for example.
Isn't that what 'they' said about...
.. XML ...
... Java ...
... Home wireless networking ...
.... and Bluetooth ??
With the boom in DVD posted rental things (such as ScreenSelect - pay £15 a month, and get as many DVDs as you like, but only 3 at any one time), I can see a boom in this sort of thing in different markets.
Such as
this one....
Go for it, boys!
This cover only came in at number two of the top 10 worst album covers, but I reckon there's been a sting operation going on, as there's no way
this could have been anything other than #1.
And OMG, I've just realised it's by one of the Jackon's as well. What a family...
No, I'm not talking about me this time.
It's
GoDaddy.com's commercial - well worth a look boys.
According to
Lockergnome, there's a company in the US offering a reward for people with a perfect credit rating.
How long till some hacker pulls all those customer details out for a little ID theft?
Bioware (creators of some pretty awesome games in my opinion) ... (three of which I've not finished cause they go on too long!)... are now
apparently auditioning for roles in their future games.
Remember to enunciate to the back row, darling!
Good god. I'd forgotten about
this ground-breaking game from my murky past.
A superb new advert for the Golf GTi is doing the rounds on TV at the moment.
Check it out.
Here's a watch for total techies who want to show off their geekdom. And who have plenty of time to work out what the feck it's saying...
Some guy is already in the line for the new Star Wars film.
Here's the
link...
And here's a quote:
His friends bring him changes of clothes, snacks and their company. Nearby businesses offer a bathroom, a shower or a warm cup of coffee. Passersby might laugh in amusement, shake their heads in wonder or strike up a conversation, the newspaper reported.
That's obviously from his personal life BEFORE he started the queue...
OK, things are quiet here in DilbertDom...
Here's one for the Star Wars fans.
Link
And here's one for the ladies in the Star Wars fans' lives...
Link
Star Trek: Enterprise, the latest TV incarnation of the sci-fi saga, is being axed by broadcaster UPN.
Damn. I'll have to buy the DVDs and cut out all the non-T'Pol shots.
Link
In a take on the infamous book/film,
here's an discussion with another sort of vampire, praying on the poor innocent souls (ie, like me) who run their own blogs. I get about 20 posts a day to the "comments" box on other blogs I run, all advertising the usual male endowment growth, betting, and male performance ads.
And this bastard is making $10K-$20K extra PER MONTH from it.
OK, OK, we all hate Comic Sans (Andi D not withstanding), so here's a tip (for non-IE users) on how to get rid of it in your browser.
Permanently.
Link
