good idea stuck at the half way point

Yahoo has a nifty feature that will recommend movies to you based on how your ratings of movies compare to other user's rating. It's not perfect, recommending some movies I would never want to see and ignoring movies I would love, but it's interesting. I am less interesting in the theatrical recommendations than the movies on TV recommendations. I don't see that many movies, and since when I do go I go with Debbie it's not just about what I would like.

Unfortunately, Yahoo's TV recommendations system is a mess, and it doesn't look like they have any intention of fixing it, since early on I sent them a lot of feedback (they have a link for feedback in a prominent position, so apparently they want it) and nothing has changed. First off, while it recommends movies I would like, it always is 3 hours off on the time the movie starts, even though it has in its records that my zip code is 10009 and I use Time Warner cable.

Reasons to like Tori Spelling

It has always been chic to look down on Tori Spelling, and even before I had ever seen her I had a negative impression. But the first time I saw her it was in a small part in the Parker Posey movie House of Yes and she was actually pretty good. So I've been pretty open to the possibility that she's actually a decent actress, rather than just a talentless creation of her father.

I was also prepared to like her personally after watching the brilliant, short-lived TV series Grosse Point, a parody of Beverly Hills 90..whatever-the-other-numbers-are in which the character of Marcy was presumably patterned after Tori. Marcy was sweet and insecure, so I thought, maybe Tori is the same.

Now Tori has gone the way of Kirstie Alley in Fat Actress, playing herself in So NoTorious on VH1. On the show, Tori is sweet and insecure, and even her best friends think she's talentless and owes her career to her rich daddy, who speaks to her through an intercom in his mansion, greeting her with "Hello angel" (he produced Charlie's Angels).

So far, So NoTorious is very funny. I say so far, because the first few episodes of Fat Actress were also very funny, and the last few were pretty horrible. But the three I've seen were all very good. And Tori is very good playing herself.

It's hard to know how she feels about the merciless fun her own show makes about her. There's a difference between letting writers make fun of you and actually having a sense of humor about yourself; Michael Jackson made a video that made fun of all his eccentricities but I don't think he thinks he's weird. It's brave to play yourself as an idiot or a weirdo, as proved by Jon Lovitz and David Duchovny on The Larry Sanders show, but it's also good business; William Shatner revived his career by acknowledging his own pompousness.

All of this has me pondering why Tori has always been such an object of ridicule. I never saw the Beverly Hills show, so perhaps she wasn't very good on it, but she probably wasn't worse than any of the others on that show; bad acting is often a feature of Aaron Spelling productions.

The hostility seems to come from the fact that she has a daddy who can give her a career (in So NoTorious she is seen giving a wretched ten-second audition at the end of which her dad shouts out, "you're hired!"). People feel it's not fair. And of course, it's not fair, but it's interesting that people seem far less hostile to a talentless actress whose career is entirely due to her looks. Raquel Welch is one of the worst actresses to ever star in a movie, and owes much of her looks to plastic surgery, but I don't think she was ever despised as much as Tori is. Now, getting a career because you had a good plastic surgeon, or just because you are born good looking, isn't any fairer than getting a job because your daddy owns the company, but it seems to rankle people more. Sure, Tori was born with a silver spoon in her mouth and got chances most people don't get, but then, Christina Aguilera was born with an amazing voice (they blocked her from high school talent shows because it was so incredible), Liza Minelli got breaks because her mom was famous (Judy Garland) and most people in Hollywood wouldn't have their jobs if they weren't born better looking than the rest of us.

So while I certainly envy Tori's good fortune, at the moment I do basically like her, and I hope her show continues to be funny and she winds up besting the naysayers and getting herself a respectable career.

Always get a second opinion

Recently my retina tore. No reason, it just tore. My vision went blurry and I saw what I thought was a large floater but turned out to be blood. Yeah, ick. This was four days before my health insurance kicked in, so I was pretty much fucked up the ass by the hand of God on that one.

I wound up going to the emergency room at Manhattan Eye [plus a couple of other organs] where a doctor told me he would try and surround the tear with laser rivets. The idea was this would keep the tear from getting bigger and keep my retina from falling off. He had trouble seeing through all the blood (this was not blood you could see in my eye without fancy equipment, and the tear itself is also invisible to the naked eye, but it apparently looks really grim to an opthamologist), so he lasered some that night, some the next day and some after that. But he couldn't laser one part of the tear, where he thought fluids are formed, and said I would need surgery, a truly horrible sounding thing that had a 15 to 20 percent chance of going wrong.

I was pretty freaked out but was going along with it all. While you always hear you should get a second opinion, when you're scared your going blind in one eye you start just wanting someone to tell you what to do. Fortunately, my friend Jessica insisted I call my regular opthomologist and ask him to recommend a retina specialist. After the first three all couldn't see me before my scheduled surgery and my regular opthamologist hadn't gotten back to me with more names (he's terrible at returning phone calls) Jessica even called my opthamologist and talked to his office manager and pleaded my case so well that he called almost immediately after. He gave me one more name, a doctor who works two blocks from my house and agreed to squeeze me in for a looksee before his vacation started.

He looked at my eye, said he didn't think it looked all that bad, lasered the rest of the tear in about three minutes and said that barring something crazy happening I wouldn't need surgery.

I'm not out of the woods yet. His associate, who is seeing me while the other one is on vacation, wants me to get surgery, because he feels even though the tear is lasered there is still a risk it could tear through. He's young, and younger doctors tend to be very end to preventative surgery, so I'm hoping when the other one comes back he will stand by his diagnosis and say I still don't need surgery.

So I can't yet say getting a second opinion saved me from surgery, but it did give me a chance, and it's important to note that the second doctor easily lasered a tear the first doctor couldn't manage, which leads me to agree with Jessica that you should never make the guy on call for emergencies your main doctor. She actually had many stories of people she knew who were incorrectly diagnosed or treated in emergency rooms.

So always, always, always, no matter how freaked out you are, go see another doctor.

In a supporting example, my friend Sharon owns a house upstate she rents out, and there is a problem with the septic tank. The first company she contacted her said she would need a huge amount of work to get it working which would cost $25,000, a lot for a house worth maybe $60,000. The second contractor, a family business that's been around from the 50s, said they could fix it for about $2000.

Always get a second opinion.

Cheney is given the bird

It's interesting to discover when Cheney shot a lawyer he mistook for a bird that he is as incompetent in his personal life as he is in his job. After I heard about this on the Daily Show (I hadn't checked the news for a couple of days) I searched around for the inevitable Cheney bird jokes. Here's an article with a bunch of them.

King spins into her grave

Normally one expects a little rest between the time you day and the time something happens so terrible that you find yourself spinning in your grave. Such is not the case for Coretta Scott King, who died just hours before Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court, hereafter to be known as The Court of Shame and Infamy, marked the end of any progress in human rights in this country for the foreseable future. And thus King started spinning before she even made it to the coffin.

the good, the bad and the icy

While I don't care for macho sports like football or boxing, I have developed a fondness for the more elegant sports, notably figure skating. In the same week I saw the best and worst figure skating television broadcasts I have ever seen.

The worst was on ABC. It was just listed in the TV guide as "figure skating," and listed as a sports show, so one would expect your basic skating competition. But instead there was some bizarre artsy pseudo documentary whatsit. Rather than just showing the event, they tried to make it into some sort of story. They would show chopped up routines, sometimes most of a routine, sometimes just a few seconds, and often the skater would be shot in a closeup that prevented you from seeing what she was doing, or they would use some weird filter or make the screen glisten. This was intercut with backstage moments in which skaters and their coaches and families were talking (at one point you only see a routine on the TV another skater is watching), and then there's a narrator filling in the gaps and trying to make it dramatic (apparently ABC doesn't see a skating competition as inherently dramatic).

It was the sort of special someone would create in a sitcom. You know, some kooky character - Diane from Cheers, Kramer from Seinfeld, Jack from Will and Grace - in some fluke lands a job directing sports, and says, "people don't want to see the same old thing, they want it jazzed up and made into art." And then they make some crazy bit of nonsense and get fired.

A day later, I saw Hilton Skating And Gymnastics Spectacular. I missed the first half hour (I just tuned into it accidentally), but I see Bravo is reshowing it (it was originally broadcast on NBC).

A combination of the two best Olympic sports, this was an all-star lineup of Olympic medalists getting together for a flashy exhibition. For the most part gymnastics and figure skating alternated, but in some cases they would perform synchronized routines. The gymnastics was not so much Olympic routines as Ed Sullivan show routines, with all sorts of crazy leaps and spins and gymnasts tossing other gymnasts in the air. The most memorable figure skating routine involved a giant cube as a prop, and must be seen.

The only weird thing was the final number, sung by some American Idol loser (excuse me, runner-up). Even though it was an international collection of skaters, the final song was America the Beautiful, as though the Hilton's wanted to say; you foreigners are great, but we're still going to whip your ass in the next Olympics. But all in all this was everything I want in skating and gymnastics. And there wasn't a single weird filter or artsy edit in the whole thing.

Roberts - the new Scalia?

It is disturbing that in the Supreme Court's ruling that the federal government can't prevent states from permitting assisted suicide that the court's two most conservative members were joined in the dissent by new Chief Justice Roberts. The hope was Roberts would not just be another Scalia, especially since likely current nominee for the court Alito almost certainly is, but hope is fading. If Roberts is, as it now looks, a third Scalia (following longtime Scalia wannabe Clarence Thomas), then we will have four Scalias on the court, which is four more than should be on any court. Be afraid, be very afraid. And for god's sake call your congressmen and tell him to block Alito.

Justice Alito: say goodbye to your freedoms and rights

The New York Times has a good editorial on supreme court nominee Alito, pointing out that his testimony, often referred to in the press as cautious and non-controversial, is actually pretty worrisome. I'm really pretty scared of this guy. I feel the US. is on a precipice, ready to plunge into something between a 1950s-style America of repression, blacklists and a clamping down on free expression and liberties,and the version of this country portrayed in The Handmaid's Tale. Unfortunately the Republicans are so powerful that they can really rewrite this country now, twisting it to their will. I think the only chance we have to retain any true semblance of American freedom and Democracy is to get the Republicans out in the next election, but I have no confidence in spite of all the Republican corruption scandals that the Democrats are prepared to make a strong enough case to the American people to convince them there is a viable alternative to Republican sleaze. With Alito on the court and Republians probably still in charge for the next decade I think you can expect this country to be completely trashed, a resort island for the rich in a sea of poverty, misery and oppression. And I hope I'm wrong, but that's the way we're heading.

New TV series, final verdicts on 2005

This fall has been notable for all the pretty good but not great series that I felt borderline about. The Night Stalker started well but jumped the shark in the forth episode. I kept giving it a chance for a few more episodes based on its early promise, but finally decided to give up when episode 7 seemed, while not as bad as the last couple, just dull. But it turned out to be the first of a two-parter, so I thought, well, I'll watch one more and then stop. Then ABC canceled it. That's right, they showed part 1 and then canceled it before airing part 2. Pretty obnoxious, huh?

Last I heard, the networks had only canceled two shows, Night Stalker and Threshold. I'm a little sad about Threshold, because it had good characters, but I'm not brokenhearted by any means. Threshold wasn't a must-see show, but I did like it, and it was certainly better than the non-cancelled Supernatural, which I remain borderline about. For me, character is important in a show, and Supernatural's generic pretty boys just don't do it for me; the show feels like it was designed in committee. It's watchable, but I'm just not excited about it.

Of the dramas, the one that turned out best was Bones, which gets by on its interesting characters, most notably Dr. Temperance Brennan. My first take on Temperance was she was a hot chick version of Dr. House, but as I continued to watch I thought that with her amusing confusion regarding popular culture and her distanced yet sincere approach to people she's really more like a hot chick version of Data from Star Trek: Next Generations. She's funny, she's likable and she has good chemistry with the FBI guy. And the stories are getting a little more interesting. Still a little contrived and obvious, but at this point the drama I would most miss.

I also took a quick look at Ghost Whisperer. It was critically panned but is a big hit so I thought I'd take a look. It's blank, soft-headed and soft-hearted and quite tedious, at least from the half of an episode I saw; more Touched by an Angel than Medium.

The most notable shows this year are both comedies, My Name is Earl, which I think is the funniest show of the season, and Everybody Hates Chris, which runs a close second. It took me a while to see Chris, because there were shows I liked opposite it, but now I can finally write my mini-review of it, along with a couple of the new replacement shows.

Everybody Hates Chris

Premise: Everybody hates Chris, obviously.

Review: It's tempting to compare this show with Wonder Years, since they're both about young boys who grew up in previous decades and both narrated by the adult versions of those boys, but Chris is a much less sentimental, nostalgic show with more edge to it. I would say they're probably equally good, although I might like Wonder Years better simply because I grew up at the same time in the same sort of suburbs. But Chris is very funny. I've never cared much for its overrated creator Chris Rock - I don't think he's that funny and he strikes me as awfully misogynistic - but the young Chris hasn't acquired that disturbing anger that defines the older Chris, making him much easier to relate to. Perhaps as the show goes on we'll see him become a bitter, successful comic.

InJustice

Premise: Sometimes innocent people actually go to jail. Someone should try and get them out!

Review: This has potential. While every other crime show is about a brilliant investigator bringing down a criminal, this is about a brilliant lawyer freeing the unjustly incarcerated. An organization lead by a flamboyant corporate lawyer (with perfect flamboyant, successful lawyer hair) played with gusto by Kyle MacLachlan investigates cases where the wrong person may be behind bars. I've only seen one episode, but it was pretty interesting. It's a very television view of law, in which you prove someone is innocent by finding the real culprit, and the first episode gets a little too fancy in the reason the injustice happens (apparently over-eagre DAs aren't enough), but it's got a lot of the fun investigation quality of the Law and Order shows. I also like it's rather progressive nature and suspicion of power and authority, so I hope they keep doing a good job and have some success. Anyway, I always like Kyle so it's nice to have something to watch him in.

The Book of Daniel

Premise: Jesus thinks you should stop taking tranquilizers.

Review: I was so looking forward to this based on the commercials. It looked like a sort of Desperate Housewives soapy comedy about a priest who deals with a bunch of crazies and has face to face talks with a witty, irreverent Jesus Christ. It's a shame the person who put together the ads didn't put together the actual show, which is one of these sincere, Everwoodish dramas. Even Jesus isn't really that witty; the ads edited his dialog for more punch, but the conversations themselves are genial and sometimes light-hearted but not especially funny. I got bored and stopped watching about a third of the way through the two-hour premiere.

Four Kings

Premise: Four guys hang out and hope their show doesn't get canceled?

Review: I only watched about five or ten minutes of this, it struck me as another of the bland, generic, unfunny comedies that are flooding our airwaves. I couldn't be bothered.

Outlook 2002 vs. Thunderbird 1.5

I have just tried my most complete dalliance with Thunderbird, the free open source mail reader by the same organization that brought you my favorite browser,

I had looked at Thunderbird before, but had decided not to use it because it has no calender. This was especially important in therms of my PDA, which I would sync up with Outlook. There is a calendar extension for Thunderbird that is quite popular, although at the moment on the Thunderbird site it has a low user rating because so many people are angry that it hasn't been upgraded to be compatible with the latest versions of Thunderbird. But it wasn't a complete solution ayway.

I decided to give Thunderbird a try after my PC died and I went to a backup. While I was using a different hard drive and thus didn't have all my saved mail, and since I have taken to carrying a Nintendo DS instead of a PDA, I figured what the hell. When I got my old hard drive (in my backup PC) I started using Outlook again, but at some point when checking memory usage with the task manager it looked as though Thunderbird used less memory, and since I only have 256 MB in my backup PC memory is at a premium. So I actually imported all my mail from Outlook into Thunderbird and used it for several days.

This comparison is between Outlook 2002, because I don't have 2003, versus Thunderbird 1.5, which is actually not quite released. If you go to the website you will see they only have an earlier version. I can't recall where I found 1.5, they don't make it that easy to find but I found it somewhere, probably through google. There's actually a 1.6 Alpha version floating around now that I haven't tried.

Memory Usage

First off, I was wrong about the memory. Both programs are constantly taking memory and giving it back. When I first had them running I saw Thunderbird at about 20,000 KB and Outlook at 40,000, plus I had a program called K9 running to deal with spam in Outlook, and that was another 9,000. But as I kept testing I found that both programs would, depending on what they were doing, go up to around 40,000, and while Thunderbird would drop down to 15,000 from time to time, Outlook would, when minimized and not doing anything, drop down below 10,000. The memory issue became even less significant when I decided to see what other people thought of Outlook versus Thunderbird and found a very good rundown that mentioned an anti-spam add-in for Outlook called SpamBayes that can be installed into Outlook. This meant I no longer had to run K9.

Spam Filtering

Thunderbird has good internal spam filtering, which now also includes support for SpamAssasin, which helps evaluate spam somehow. Outlook 2002 has some simple junk filtering but it's not good for much, but with the discovery of the free add-on SpamBayes I now have integrated spam filtering in Outlook. I just started using SpamBayes, so I can't say how good it is, but it seems promising so far. Unfortunately it lacks support for anything like SpamAssasin and also lacks DNS blackhole list support (these are lists of known spamming domains). (Thunderbird also doesn't support the DNS lists.)

Stability

In terms of stability, Thunderbird wins hands down. Outlook has always tended to freeze and crash on me. To make matters worse, any time it crashes, the next time you start it there's a diagnostic process that, with all the mail I have, takes several minutes, during which time I can't use Outlook. This is typical of Microsoft products, which always approach any system crash by doing something annoying that takes a long time. It often does this recover thing even though it was closed normally; sometimes Outlook just gets into a state where it always feels it crashed and starts up with the recovery thing every damn time. Thunderbird is less prone to crashes and freezes and if it does crash it doesn't take extra time to restart.

Filtering
Outlook by a mile. Outlook supports very elaborate filters. For example, I belong to a Freecyle New York Yahoo group from which people can offer stuff they're throwing out. I have a filter in Outlook which looks for freecyle emails with offer in the subect (you can also post "wanted" requests, which I filter out and which also has one of a number of items I'm specifically looking for (a receiver, a disk of Outlook 2003, etc.). This can't be done in Firefox, which has a much less sophisticated filtering system. The best I could do was create a folder for all freecyle mail (with wanted filtered out) and then create a search folder that searched for items I want. A search folder is a neat thing where you can create a virtual folder that looks for specific things, for example, a search folder that shows all your unread mail. Back when I used to use Entourage, Microsoft's vastly superior mail reader for the Macintosh (for some reason Microsoft's Mac division makes better software than their PC division, at least in terms of Microsoft Office), I could see all my unread mail or flagged mail at a glance, but in Outlook 2002 there's no way to do that. On the other hand, I just learned that Outlook 2003 has their own search folders, which is why I'm hoping someone will give away an unwanted disk of it on freecycle. Thunderbird's search folders are imperfectly implemented so I'd be curious to see how Outlook does it.

Datebook integration

Outlook has really good datebook integration. You can actually drag an email into the calendar folder and it will pop up with an appointment with the email in the body, which I thought was incredibly neat when I stumbled across it. The Calendar is really good, you can easily drag appointments to different dates and other good things. For Thunderbird 1.5 all there is now is ReminderFox, a very basic extension that keeps track of appointments. It's an admirable attempt but rather clunky.

Address book
I like the way you can create and manage multiple address books in Thunderbird. I could make a friends address book, a business address book, etc. and populate them from my main address book. This was useful because I could then have a friends mail folder and just say, any mail from this address book should go to that folder. You can create multiple address books in Outlook 2002 too, but it's a pain and you can't work with multiple address books at once, so there's no way to divvy my existing addresses into new address books. So while if I had a populate friends address book I could indeed use it to send friends emails to a specific folder, it would be hard to set up (right now I just filter for individual senders). On the other hand, Outlook has categories, which is handy. If I could filter for email from people in specific categories I'd be all set, but I can't.

Thunderbird also doesn't have a built-in way to add addresses to an address book. There is an extension that does it, but it doesn't seem to be good at recognizing when you're putting in a duplicate, although I only tested it a little so perhaps it's better than it seemed. It's also not been upgraded for 1.5, but another extension called MR Tech allows you to force install extensions, and doing that I found the add contacts extension works well except for the duplicate thing. But Outlook does a better job of adding contacts.

Security

People claim Thunderbird is more secure, and I have no idea but I thought I'd just mention that. I have Outlook set to be careful about attachments and not run anything when I open an email, so I haven't had any security problems, and I suspect the people concerned about security are as careful as me and aren't really having problems with Outlook either.

Conclusion

As much as I would like the free, open source Thunderbird to be better, it is trounced by the corporate giant. I don't know how it compares with Microsoft's free Outlook Express though, so perhaps for those who don't want to pay extra for a mail reader it's a good bet.

I suspect someday Thunderbird will surpass Outlook, but it will take a while. Firefox is so good because so many people are coding for it, taking on additions and creating extensions to allow you to do an incredible number of things. Extensions are a main selling point, something Microsoft has never really understood. Even when I tried looking around for an integrated anti-spam filter for Outlook I couldn't find one until yesterday, because Microsoft doesn't offer a central location for that sort of information. This is very stupid of them; if they embraced the amateur coder community they could have much more useful and powerful products, but Microsoft is a control freak and seems to hate encouraging outside code. Anytime Windows Media Player 10 crashes, perhaps just because the PC crashed, when you restart the player it turns off all your plugins. Microsoft's disdain for add-ons is, IMO, a major failing that will become more and more of a hindrance if they don't rethink things.

Right now there aren't nearly as many extensions for Thunderbird, and I think that's simply because not as many people are interested in using it, so there are less people working on improving and modifying it. But as Thunderbird improves, more people will use it, and more stuff will be created for it. Once there's an integrated calendar that syncs with the popular PDAs, which is being worked on, a lot of people will make the jump. Eventually there will be a tipping point in which Thunderbird is so close to Outlook that open source fans will start jumping over in droves and there will be a huge increase in extensions and improvements, and then Thunderbird will start pulling away from Outlook. But from what I see I don't expect for that to happen for at least another year. But someday, I suspect, I will come back to Thunderbird.

The U.S. Military: sneaky or just plain dumb?

The question raised by the military's new set of classified interrogation techniques is, did the army know what they were doing and think they could get away with it or were they just being dumb. At a time when congress has passed John McCain's anti-torture legislation that the white house seems unable to stop, the army created a ten-page classified addendum to the Army Field Manual that is used to determine what is cruel and inhumane treatment. This looks like an attempt to make an end run about the proposed law. It's hard to say if that's true, because it's hard to believe the military would be dumb enough to think that wouldn't piss off congress. On the other hand, since they weren't aware that adding a secret addendum right now was going to create some controversy it seems that whoever was in charge of this project wasn't thinking straight, so perhaps they really were hoping to screw with the intent of McCain's law. It's one of those things we'll probably never know for sure, but in the white hot glare of publicity I think the field Manual isn't going to be claiming that cattle prods aren't really inhumane.

LOL

A man enters a bar and orders a drink. The bar has a robot bartender. The robot serves him a perfectly prepared cocktail, and then asks him, "What's your IQ?"

The man replies "150" and the robot proceeds to make conversation about global warming factors, quantum physics and spirituallity, biomimicry, environmental interconnectedness, string theory, nano-technology, and sexual proclivities.

The customer is very impressed and thinks, "This is really cool." He decides to test the robot. He walks out of the bar, turns around, and comes back in for another drink. Again, the robot serves him the perfectlty prepared drink and asks him, "What's your IQ?"

The man responds, "about a 100."

Immediately the robot starts talking, but this time, about football, NASCAR, baseball, supermodels, favorite fast foods, guns, and women's breasts.

Really impressed, the man leaves the bar and decides to give the robot one more test. He heads out and returns, the robot serves him and asks, "What'syour IQ?" The man replies, "Er, 50, I think."

And the robot says... real slowly,

"So.... ya gonna vote for Bush again?

answer the damn question!

I appreciate the reasons the Democrats are playing the Replican game of hammering on talking points while ignoring substantive debate or real discussion, but it disgusts me regardless of which side is doing it. Last night I watched congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, on the Daily Show slip and slide through Jon Stewart's softball questions. Her big point was to mention John Murtha in every sentence. (Murtha, if you don't know, is the hawk turned dove congressman who recently came out in favor of getting out of Iraq as soon as possible.

Murtha was Pelosi's answer to everything. The question of why the Democrats choose the ever drab John Kerry to rebut Bush's latest delusional Iraq speech was answered by noting what a great thing Murtha did. Pretty much every question had a similar answer.

Pelosi is always pretty slippery. Perhaps she's afraid of getting caught with her foot in her mouth Howard Dean style, but I don't see how Democrats can insist that they are the answer when they won't answer any questions.

Eating the decorations

I find it interesting that, outside of myself, no one I know seems to have
ever thought to eat the colorful ears of corn used in Thanksgiving
decorations. They're really very good. I much prefer them to yellow corn,
which I have never especially liked. The colored kind is nutty and chew and
a very different thing altogether. It also takes forever to cook; I'm not
exactly sure how long, as I just put it in boiling water and check it
occasionally until it's edible, but I'd say at least 1/2 an hour.

the unfamous humorist

When going through a box of junk from my high school days, I came across a comedic final exam, written by Kelly Gorton, whoever that is. It's so funny I hated to toss it, so i thought to see if I could find the same thing online. It turns out to have been a
popular email item - some versions include items not from the original column, although these aren't nearly as funny) so I bookmarked it and tossed the original. Then I looked up Kelly Gorton and found no information at all. From my original clipping I know Kelly wrote the column in 1970 for Media/Scope, but the writer is ungoogleable. Such is the nature of brilliant comedic writing; the words can far eclipse the fame of the writer.

Did Kelly write anything else of note, that perhaps is also floating around in emails? Who knows.

UPDATE: Kelly Gorton came across this post and said he did not, in fact, write the column. This apparently was something that floated around from office to office, copied on ditto machines, and Kelly's name somehow got attached to it. So basically this is one of those brilliantly funny things whose source will be forever shrouded in mystery. It's interesting that even before the Internet, humor was diseminated and its origins lost. In fact it seems possible, since it was passed around, that this is the work of multiple people. But who knows.

games that didn't make the cut

This week I reviewed The Movies (the first tycoon game I ever really liked, in which you run a movie studio and can also make your own cool movies (check out this brilliant satire of intelligent design), Karaoke Revolution Party (which I like for the mode in which you both sing and dance, although a lot of critics seemed to have trouble with this one), Dance praise (Christian Dance Pad game, perfect when you want to kill time waiting for The Rapture) and Guitar Hero (played with a guitar peripheral - loads of fun).

Here's what didn't make my column:

Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse
Okay, in idyllic civilization a zombie inexplicably appears. You are the zombie, and what you do is wander around killing people. And that's pretty much it, no motivation or anything. The game is cartoonishly bloody and lets you do things like through your intestines at people and fart, but is that enough? Also, you can eat brains, but you don't have to. Shouldn't you have to eat brains? I mean, isn't that something zombies need to do to stay alive? It seems dumb to not give you anything beyond the viscerable pleasure of carnage.

Why it didn't make it: It is beyond me why this game received such good reviews. In spite of some mildly amusing satirical elements (similar to Destroy All Humans but less pointed) this just seem like a pointless game, though a well made one.

Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green
Another zombie movie, but this one is far worse. First off, the controls suck. It just feels awkward moving around. Second, the game starts you off with zombies attacking and you have to run around and find weapons before they kill you. So if you don't find weapons in time you will be killed. You can't fight them off by hand, nor can you shove them aside and run away. I found a shotgun, but there were more zombies than bullets. Presumably I have to find the shotgun and try and run downstairs and find other weapons, only shooting when necessary. Or maybe I needed to go someplace else first. The game gives you no chance to get acclimated, I got killed over and over just trying to figure out where weapons were. Horrible, horrible game.

Why it didn't make it: That's not the question to ask here. The question to ask is, why does this game exist and how are we going to punish its designers.

Soul Calibur III
When I played Soul Calibur II I thought it was the best fighting game ever. When I played Soul calibur III I thought the same thing: Soul Calibur II is the best fighting game ever. As for III, it's quite good, but lacks a lot of the interesting touches of the first one, like fighting in high winds, and has a rather unimpressive strategy mode. It's a good game, but just a bit of a let down after the last one.


Why it didn't make it: because I want my sequels to be so much better that I have a lot to talk about or so much worse that I have so much to complain about. And because there were just other games I liked more.

Call of Duty 2


Why it didn't make it: Because the publisher didn't even send it to me until a week after it came out. Too bad, because I was really looking forward to it, but by the time it arrived my next column was filled up.

Civilization IV


This is a sad case, because it's one of the few times 2K Games was willing to send advance code. So now they'll probably think, well, that didn't work. But I just couldn't get into it. It's got interesting ideas but I just wasn't sucked in.


Why it didn't make it: Well, I can't like everything. For some reason I recall finding Civ III more to my liking, but who knows what I'd think today.

Crazy Machines


Cute little rip off of the Incredible Machine games.

Why it didn't make it: This time of year every game has to compete against the year's major games, and this one is just too little to compete. Simple as that.

Castlevania Curse of Darkness


You know, I just cannot get into the Castlevania games. The critics love them, they're hugely popular, and I just don't see what the big deal is.


Why it didn't make it: Because it's a Castlevania game, I suppose.

City of Villains


I loved City of Heroes. City of Villains is pretty much the same game, but instead of playing superheroes you play supervillans. It's fun, but it feels more like an expansion pack then a sequel. It's so much like the first one that all I need to write in a review is, "read my review of City of Heroes."


Why it didn't make it: because I could have just written "see my review of City of Heroes," and because there were just several other interesting games to talk about.

And Then There Were None


I really was interested in this, and I might have given it more of a chance if I'd gotten it earlier. For some reason the game did not arrive when it was supposed to. I had a week where I was having a terrible time; The Movies had security code that prevented the game from running, I had to download City of Villains over a week because the server was so slow, and And Then There Were None was lost in the mail. I kept asking them where the game was, and they kept saying it will arrive any day, and then they checked and someone had signed for it at my building, apparently. So I guess someone stole the game. Anyway, I played it for an hour and it didn't grab me, and by the time I got it I also had The Movies, which I was intrigued by, and finally had City of Villains running, so at that point it would have had to be far better for me to play it then if I'd got it a week earlier. It looked like a standard, okay adventure game, but it begins with a sort of wandering around rummaging through guest's rooms that just seemed pointless.


Why it didn't make it: Blame it on the post office. Or the PR people who didn't immediately overnight me another copy when they realized the first one was a few days late.

Trapt


This is a sort of interesting game. You run around a castle that you have boobytrapped, trying to lure your pursuers near the traps. I like this in theory, but in practice there's too much running around for me, and it quickly becomes repetitive. The game is also notable for long load times; sometimes there will be a cutscene broken up by long pauses while the next scene loads, which is surprising and suggests there was very little optimization in this one.


Why it didn't make it: This was sent too late for a review, I only played some of it because it sounded like an interesting idea.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth


This game came to me basically too late to consider for a review (2K games is almost never willing to send out pre-release games), but I was intrigued so I played it for a while. The first part is a sort of interesting, somewhat atmospheric adventure game in which you wander around talking to people and investigating, with a little stealth thrown in. Then the action starts with a big chase scene that I tried over and over and over again, and got killed every time. If I'd received the game earlier I would have asked the PR flack for help, but since it was too late and hadn't excited me all *that* much, I said screw it. Now there's a walkthrough for the game online and the point I got stick in is a place where you're supposed to climb a ladder; the problem is I never could get in a position where the game would let me climb the ladder, so I was never sure if that's what I was supposed to do.


Why it didn't make it: Came too late and did a dreadful job on ladder climbing.

From Russia with Love


It was an interesting idea to bring back Sean Connery for a Bond game, but Russia has a rather uninspiring first couple of hours. Not terrible, but not exceptional. It just didn't feel right, in theory there were stealth moves but I found bad guys always just saw me when I was anywhere near and I had to shoot it out. Then I got stuck in some stupid garden maze, got bored and stopped playing.


Why it didn't make it: Because wandering around aimlessly gets on my nerves.

Feel my pain

Okay, I know I can't expect a lot of sympathy when I complain that Microsoft
has sent me two Xbox 360s (three if you count the replacement for the
defective one. But hear me out.

Game reviewer deal with two sorts of disks, retail versions, which will play
on the consoles you buy in the store, and preview and review code, which
will only play on special "debug" consoles.

Sony makes special version of the Playstation 2 for game industry people
that play both review and retail code, but not Microsoft. They create two
separate machines. So for the last year I've been dealing with two Xboxes.
I have a switcher that funnels different systems to my TV, but since it only
has four inputs I simply pull out the connector for one xbox and plug it
into the other to switch between them. I also do this with the controller
and ethernet connection. I have, however, given each of them there own
power source, rather than plugging and unplugging that, but this will have
to change, because my power strip is full and I need another plug for my
Xbox 360

So that's a pain, and it's made worse by the fact that Microsoft has made
the dubious decision to only offer limited backward compatability. When the
PS2 came out it played every single original Playstation game. The Xbox 360
though will not play Xbox games unless a special so
ftware emulator has been made for it. So, since the introduction of the
360 does not mean people are going to stop making original Xbox games, this
means that right now I have to deal with four fucking Xboxes which are
creating an insane tangle of cords and using a tremendous amoutn of
electricity.

And you know what, I bet when the PS3 comes out Sony will send me one that
plays debug and retail versions of everything from the Playstation up. And
that's why they will stay on top; becaues they just aren't as annoying as
Microsoft.

Finally, the secret behind Bush's bizarre speaking skills

Here's a wildly funny little film with a brilliant explanation for Bush's bizarre incompetence when speaking. I never even heard a lot of these before; the guy's idiocy is really kind of magnificent.

It all goes round and round

One of my favorite all-time quotes is, What we learn from history is that we do not learn from history. So it's no real surprise that the FBI has gone privacy invastion crazy.
Remember the late '60s and early '70s, when the FBI was out of control and investigating everyone they could find with pretty much no limits? Remember how this caused such distrust that eventually all sorts of laws were passed to stop these abuses? Well, no one at the FBI remembers, because they're doint it all over again. So what's going to happen? Well, pretty much what happened last time. Expect serious limitations on the FBI within ten or twenty years after various shocking reports of abuses. And then expect those limitations to be gradually relaxed and then dropped altogether the next time there's some big security scare. At which point, if I'm still alive, I'll just repost this blog entry.

Petition to stop Alito

I was open minded about Roberts, and thought there was too much of a liberal knee jerk reaction against him, although I'm not that optimistic about what will happen with him. I was open minded about Miers, who was clearly an intellectual lightweight but struck me as someone who might float in the middle like O'Connor. But
Alito is dangerous. Obviously after getting beat up side the head by the right, Bush was going to try and foist a hardcore Scalia/Thomas style justice on us. I don't care if he's smart enough for the job, he is going to completely throw off the balance of the court and we can expect to see the gains of the last 50 years erode in a series of horrifying decisions. The right got to torpedo one nominee and it is up to the left to torpedo this one, forcing Bush to do what he should have done to begin with; nominate an intelligent, qualified, thoughtful, moderate justice.

I don't know how much good petitions do, but sign
this one just in case it helps.