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From Rumsfeld’s “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” to Wolfowitz’ “For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”, a blogger reviews the administration’s shifting spin on Iraq’s WMDs .
Another good polemic from Ted Rall :
Incredibly, the next move of the man dubbed “Gore out of control” by Fox News was to declare an unprovoked war on Iraq. “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, he’s an evil dictator and he’s a threat to world peace,” Gore railed to a joint session of Congress. When the United Nations refused to support Gore’s request for an international coalition, even Congressional Democrats decided that they had had enough of their bellicose leader, and joined their counterparts across the aisle. “There’s no proof that Saddam Hussein has WMDs,” declared Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. “Until that changes, we have no grounds for a preemptive strike—an act that violates every precept of international law.” Nonetheless, Gore relied on the War Powers Act to order in the Marines.
When I saw that there was going to be a new Disney animated film about fish, I wasn’t interested. Then I looked more closely and saw that it was a Pixar animated film about fish, and suddenly I was interested again. Most of my movie-going is matinees on the weekend, but whenever I find myself considering going to a weekend matinee of what’s marketed as a kids’ film, I smack my forehead and say “What were you _thinking_?”
So I saw it last night. And it’s a sheer delight. Beautiful, funny, exciting, moving — my favorite Pixar film yet, and the best thing I’ve seen so far this year. Go see it.
Seems 3 12-year-olds took it on themselves to do a shot-by-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. 7 years later, they’d finished it. Harry Knowles’ typically breathless style works well to describe it :
in Chris Strompolis’ face he captures the magic of Harrison Ford in the film. Because – when we see him and Marion in Captain Katanga’s cabin – and Marion is kissing the spots that don’t hurt… We’re witnessing Chris Strompolis’ first kiss… ever. The moment has John Williams under it, but it’s so honest and real feeling that the scene blew the audience away as if they were seeing it again… LITERALLY FOR THE FIRST TIME. Watching the Truck scene – and seeing the fear on his face as he holds onto a falling apart grill and going under the truck… We know this isn’t Terry Leonard going under the truck being dragged… we know this video camera can’t be UNDERCRANKED… Here… We see Chris Strompolis wondering if he’s gonna die trying to be Indiana Jones and it is brilliant.
Here’s another blogger’s account
It took them 8 years and you could see them change in age from scene to scene. In one scene, Indy’s voice changes between two shots. The kids incredibly ingenious in their special effects and in substitutions and staid true to the original. It was fun waiting for the next scene and wondering how they’d do it. And they never took an easy way out.
This is one of the most beautifully geeky things I’ve ever heard of, and I’d love to see it. (At first I worried it might be an elaborate hoax, but the number of confirmations of seeing it is making that unlikely.)
Usually I’m annoyed by the idea of putting all the time and effort into remaking a perfectly good movie that could have been used in the service of creating a wholly new one (c.f. The In-Laws). But that’s when it’s done by grown-ups with a lot of money. I’ve got nothing but admiration for what these kids accomplished.
Marvel is relaunching their Epic line, and is open for submissions of wholly original premises and stories related to the Marvel universe. Writer@Large is blogging an account of his preparing a submission, and has lots o’ links about Epic and the current projects.
Time to actually write up some of my comics ideas.
(Via Neilalien )
I’m currently reading Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman, a thick tribute volume that’s exceeding all my expectations. One of my favorite parts has been the long 1997 interview with Moore by Dave Sim that concludes the book (I’ve been reading out of order.) While there’s a lot of fascinating stuff there, what I’m drawn to comment on now is this bit by Sim:
There is a persuasive argument to be made that we are on the cusp of a genuinely more Mature Age where the “no-two-snowflakes-alike” quality of individual awareness and expression is going to be seen as an unanticipated bonus of humanity having not done too bad a job of getting to 1997 more or less in one piece. If we haven’t achieved the complete eradication of War and Poverty and Disease and Famine, at least we have learned a few lessons — it would be hard to imagine anyone coming forward at this juncture and presenting themselves as the Next Nixon or an Improved Stalin or the 21st Century’s Answer to Joe McCarthy. If we can keep progressing on our present course to a place where divergent philosophies and opinions are seen to be just that — and not grounds for incarceration, oppression, or wholesale purging (or even full retail purging) — I think most of us will be pretty astonished at the general improvement that would result.
I wish, Dave. I wish. (Not meaning to just ding the man with my unfair advantage of hindsight — in 1997, I would’ve considered a resurgence of McCarthyistic fear and loathing to be excessively unlikely too.)
I’m generally a fan of This Modern World and really love the latest cartoon .
To no great surprise, Finding Nemo plays fast and loose with marine life. But I was surprised to find that clownfish really do live in anemones . Cooler yet, they’ve a symbiotic relationship.
I’ve been a somewhat absentee blogger this past month. Among the many things distracting me: Pocahontas and I have been house-shopping.
Shopping for a home in the Bay Area is the opposite of buying a computer — you always wish you’d bought a year ago. Houses have been appreciating that fast, little slowed by the Tech Bubble bursting or even rampant unemployment.
When I finally graduated college, after a long and complicated career as a student, I was $25,000 in debt. I immediately bought a car, and became $10,000 further in debt. This seemed at the time like a daunting, crushing obligation. Like I would never be free of it.
It was several years ago now that I paid off the last of my student loans. I’ve been debt-free for years, having never carried credit-card debt. It’s felt good.
I’ve always associated mortgages with being shackled to a desk. With giving up on bohemian artistic dreams and resigning myself to being a dull salaryman, with my life defined by money: working for someone else to pay off my debts.
It’s not like I lead an especially bohemian lifestyle. But I could. I could quit my job, sell my possessions, and move to Arizona. Or Hawaii. Or Colorado. I could take off across the country by bike. I could move someplace cheap and rent a squalid artist’s garret and write a novel. And, embarrassing as it is, at some level that fantasy has been important to me.
No, that’s not right. It’s my self-identity as a writer and artist that’s important to me. The embarrassing part is that I’ve spent so much time pretending there’s some black and white dichotomy between a life that includes a day job and a romanticized impoverished artist’s life. That at some level I’ve clung to the idea that pursuing one of those fantasies is The Way to lead a fulfilling life. And that a fulfilling life is something exclusive with a life resembling the one that I do.
And meanwhile I spend a fortune in rent without any equity to show for it, and don’t get much writing done.
Pocahontas and I made an offer on a house this morning. It’s gorgeous: an 1898 house with nearly everything recently re-done, including seismic retrofitting. Three bedrooms, two baths. A back yard. A lovely kitchen with a gas stove with a fan over it, and a double-sink. Beautiful hardwood floors. Good light: lots of big windows. A large tub with a whirlpool bath.
And it’s right by downtown. I timed it tonight: literally a five minute walk to the Y. Which also means a short walk to the library, movies, bookstores, cafes, theatres, restaurants, the Sunday farmers’ market, the BART, and, generally, all the things I live in a city for. And that’s also its only downside. There’ll be street noise. Not too bad, we hope. And Pocahontas’ kitties will have to stay indoors, but it’s a big enough indoors for two cats to run around.
No other place we looked at has been nearly so nice. No locations we were really enthusiastic about. Everything else has been a little too small, and required extensive modifications before we could be happy with it. And still cost a fortune. Pocahontas was expecting that we’d have to settle for a “starter house” to begin accruing equity and sell it after a few years for something we’d really like. I really hate moving and had little enthusiasm for this idea, but was beginning to become resigned to it.
But this place is nearly perfect as is. The rear deck and stairs have dry rot and need replacing some time soon. And that’s it, unless the seller’s thorough documentation deliberately misrepresents something. And unless we learn we can’t live with the street noise, we see no reason now we couldn’t still be happy there indefinitely.
We saw it Sunday, acted quickly, and, this morning we signed papers toward becoming a half million dollars in debt.
We’ve asked for a response to our offer within 24 hours. Since the seller isn’t in the area and at best would have gotten it at the end of today, it’s probably most realistic not to expect a response before Thursday.
Until then, we wait.
And I remind myself that salaryman or bohemian, the important thing has always been sitting down with pen and paper and doing the writing.
Poe's "The Raven" re-worked as pi mnemonic (count the letters in each word.)
Poe, E.
Near a RavenMidnights so dreary, tired and weary.
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap - the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor.
"This", I whispered quietly, "I ignore".Perfectly, the intellect remembers: the ghostly fires, a glittering ember.
Inflamed by lightning's outbursts, windows cast penumbras upon this floor.
Sorrowful, as one mistreated, unhappy thoughts I heeded:
That inimitable lesson in elegance - Lenore -
Is delighting, exciting...nevermore.
For 740 digits.
I’ve been meaning posting something debunking the popular vegetarian-bashing calumny that Hitler was a vegetarian, but I hadn’t found an on-line source persuasive enough in terms of citing sources until now .
Robert Payne, whose biography of Hitler, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, has been called definitive, scotches the rumor that Hitler might have been a vegetarian. According to Payne, Hitler’s vegetarianism was a fiction made up by his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to give him the aura of a revolutionary ascetic, a Fascistic Gandhi, if you will. It is worth quoting from Payne’s biography directly: “Hitler’s asceticism played an important part in the image he projected over Germany. According to the widely believed legend, he neither smoked nor drank, nor did he eat meat or have anything to do with women. Only the first was true.”
The article does itself a disservice, though, by diluting its good points, which are more than enough it make its case, with conjectures of the form: “And if Hitler were a vegetarian, then surely he’d have done so-and-so, and since he didn’t, we can conclude he wasn’t” including one in which “done so-and-so” was “enjoyed better health.”
I’m sure you were all on tenterhooks about my house offer. Well, they accepted. If the inspection goes well, there’s not some wholly unforeseen catastrophe with our financing, and the creek don’t rise, I’ll have a house.
I’ve been in my current apartment for 4 3/4 years, since I got home from Clarion in ‘98. It’s been easy to acquire a lot of stuff, especially books, in that time. I’ve got a lot of cleaning, sorting, organizing, purging and packing to do.
Platypus Jones , the comedy improv troupe formerly known as SF Improv, returns to Cafe Eclectica in Albany, California this Saturday night at 8. I’m not going to be in the July show (due to Readercon ) and probably not the August show (due to missing practices to pack and move) so it’s the last chance to see me for a while.
I’ve been grudgingly concluding over the past few weeks of just planning to buy a house that it’s a bad time to spend hundreds of dollars to attend TorCon , the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto coming up at the end of August. So I’m finally biting the bullet: my membership is for sale for $125 U.S. (the current price is $205). But I want to vite for the Hugos and the 2006 Worldcon — I’ll transfer the membership after that. Mail me via the contact form if you’re interested.
I’ll even transfer to you my reservation at the Fairmont Royal York (the main convention center hotel) if you like.
Sorry David, Zvi, and all the assembled masses of people I was looking forward to seeing, not to mention Herman and other Toronto bloggers I was hoping I might make the chance to meet.
I will still be attending Readercon , for which I already have not only a membership, but plane tickets and a free room courtesy of two friends who live nearby — say hi if you’ll be there.
=v= No doubt Blogland is already saturated with links to the photo of President Ford — er, I mean, Resident Bush — falling off one of those whiz-bang "intuition"-controlled self-balancing Segway gizmos. No doubt there’s already a hundred sites making pithy comments about an imbalance of power or neurotransmitters. Here at MMG, though, we have respect for our heritage, so our link to the photo has a caption that informs us that W. "looses [sic] his balance," thereby conforming to customary Internet spelling standards.
Good, snarky tutorial on infinity :
This article hopes to clear up some common confusions and misconceptions surrounding “infinity” which may have led the less mathematically-inclined to think that math is contradictory and confusing. Hopefully, it will also introduce a bit of what infinity is, so that normal people can understand it without their brains turning into a pretzel.
I recently read the recently reprinted Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics . It was really interesting to get a glimpse into how Moore thinks about creating. He wrote it about 15 years ago, and there’s a short afterword written recently, which concludes:
The basic message is “Ignore everything I said in the previous section of the book. I was young, confused, and nowhere near old or mad enough.” Just be advised that I’ll probably be writing a postscript to this essay around 2020 that will say just the same things about the advice I’m dishing out to you here. Beyond that, you’re on your own, pal.
Someone out there managed to get a pre-release copy of Harry Potter 5, but he had to steal a truck to do it .
A man with the front cab of the lorry turned up at the trading estate and presented himself as legitimate and was able to get away with the trailer full of goods. […] The lorry cab was stolen from St Helens, Merseyside, on Sunday afternoon, police added. […] After initial confusion over the number of books stolen, Merseyside Police and publishers Bloomsbury confirmed the haul comprised 7,680 books.
Moderate exercise might not prolong your life .
New research labels as an “illusion” a major study’s conclusion that couch potatoes who take up at least moderate regular exercise can reduce their risk of dying early. The apparent benefit “can be entirely attributed to measurement error,” said researcher Paul T. Williams.
Of course, even if the original study was flawed, that doesn’t mean its conclusions were necessarily wrong. But I’d like to recommend regular vigorous exercise anyway.
(Via Follow Me Here )
Robots Without a Cause complains about technology for its own sake.
We used to invent things not to satisfy idle whims, but to change our world. The wheel, powered flight, the telephone - these were important developments about which one could get excited. Slippers with headlights (as featured in the doomed Innovations catalogue) and a remote control-operated sliding door for the new Peugeot 807 GLX 2.2 people carrier are not. Yes, you say, but what am I going to do with a kid in one hand and a tray of skinny lattes in the other? How am I going to get into my Peugeot then? And then: how did I manage before? So the fatuous becomes the essential, and we become more decadent, more hungry for diversion and suckered into buying things that will improve our lives negligibly, if at all.
One of its examples is the robot vacuum.
The people at Electrolux have spent the best part of a decade devising the Trilobite, the world’s first automatic vacuum cleaner, packing into it all kinds of ingenuity. […] But why did the clever people at Electrolux spend so much time and brainpower on the Trilobite? “Our intention is to make life easier for people,” says Michael Treschow, Electrolux’s president. “And what could possibly be easier than an automatic vacuum cleaner?”
But they seem to be providing the unexpected benefit of companionship .
More than half the owners of iRobot’s Roomba name their device, claims the Burlington, Massachussetts, company. Owners often talk to their machines, and many treat them as though they were alive, or semi-sentient, anyway. Some even take them on holiday, unwilling to leave them at home alone. “We have people who actually consider them their companion, even though it’s just vacuuming their floor,” said iRobot spokeswoman Nancy Dussault. “People get attached to them and think of them as part of their family. It’s almost a pet. It makes them feel like they’re not alone.”
Well, not unexpected by Peter Rojas of Gizmodo in this article from last September :
It’s easy to say that a robot that cleans is just another appliance, but it’s a mistake to underestimate the emotional attachment that can be made to an animate object.
Now if only there were a machine that could appreciate and care for our robot companions for us…
Phil Foglio is writing and drawing Sluggy Freelance this week, starting last Sunday . You really need to have read Sluggy to follow it, but it’s worth it.
At Asimov’s , Analog , F&SF and FictionWise , you can read all the 2003 Hugo nominated short fiction for free except for Coraline . Even if you’re not planning to vote, it’s a chance to read some of the best speculative fiction of last year.
Caveat Emptor — it seems USB 2.0’s defining difference from USB 1.1 is a different signaling protocol, not speed. So lots of machines are being marketed as supporting USB 2.0 when they can’t go any faster than USB 1.1’s top speed of 12 MB/s. In wonderfully stupid marketing-ese, USB 2.0 at 12 MB/s is “full speed” and USB 2.0 at 480 MB/s is “high speed”. Well, that’s obvious.
Badger Bag has an interesting take on X2: Wolverine’s Search for Male Identity
An industrial artist is working to modify a Trabant to transform into an El Camino low-rider at the flip of a switch. What I find much more interesting is that she’s also transforming herself toward a related goal: “to be the first woman ever to have a car and a bikini-clad body, both of her own creation, on a low-rider magazine cover.”
So last Thursday Pocahontas and I were at our would-be new house to meet the inspector. He introduced himself with: “They call me The DreamSlayer.” (I’m not making this up.) He then proceeded to demonstrate why.
The foundation’s girders should be 4”x6“‘s and should have a 4”x4” support beam every 8’. There were 3 or 4 spans without adequate support beams, one of which went 18’ across most of the middle of the house. And instead of a 4”x6” it was a 2”x4”. And it had a big notch missing in the middle of it from a knot-hole. The DreamSlayer was chuckling about how he’d be telling stories about that one.
And most of the 4”x4” support beams weren’t of wood whose carrying capacity was rated. They were scavenged from shipping crates. Probably not actually unsafe of themselves, as there were more than necessary in most places. But not anything that meets code either.
I could go on about the wholly not-up-to-code electric system, and that the heat just plain doesn’t work, and the smaller things, but they pale in comparison to the foundation problems.
Pocahontas commented that night that it was like a break-up: sure, it’s upsetting in the moment, but we have to get right out there and keep looking. I commented that it was like a break-up in that we were eating a lot of chocolate.
So I left messages with our buyer’s agent and mortgage broker that the deal was off. And they both called back the next day talking about how we could negotiate some substantial amount to be left in the escrow account for our use in fixing the problems. So the buying price would stay the same (mostly a feature as the repair money would be coming out of our mortgage whereas after buying the house we wouldn’t have the money in pocket to do the repairs) and we could control the work.
We were pretty much over it by then, so it was like the ex showing up on your doorstep saying “We can work this out. It’ll be different this time. I can change.”
We don’t know whether or not to believe it.
If you’re like me (and I know I am) then you’re very pale. For me, getting caught outside without a hat during a clear summer mid-day is a minor catastrophe: I will burn. So I’d like to plug a simple product that has made my life more comfortable — the hat in a bag — an effective sun hat that folds down to nothing so is easy to always carry. They’ll never look as good as the pictures — the crown’ll become a wrinkled mess; the brim will have waves as the wire bends over time. But they really will prevent sunburn and fold easily.
This has been an unpaid endorsement, but I’m feeling especially well-disposed to the company because I recently lost my bag and they replaced it for just an SASE.
Remember this story about how most second-hand hard drives have recoverable files left on them, many of them containing significant personal data? I do.
Did you know that Norton Utilities’ Wipe Info has a mil-spec deletion option? I did. From the manual :
When you select Government Wipe, Wipe Info does the following:
The data is overwritten with 00s, and then overwritten with FFs.
A random value, or a value that you choose from 00 to FF, is written.
The value written is verified to ensure that it was written correctly.
The process is repeated as many times as you specify, up to 100.
Did you know that performing a Government Wipe on an 8G hard drive takes for-freakin’-ever?
I didn’t, until tonight.
In order to be a true haiku, a poem must consist of 17 syllables AND contain a kigo. A kigo is best defined as a word or phrase that hints at what season the poem takes place in. Some kigo are more obvious than others, but all must have something to do with the time of year the haiku represents. If the poem has no kigo, it is more properly called a senryu.
Dave-watch — “Monthly update on Dave Sim’s slow, sad slide into madness.”
Although the Catholic Church appears to the women and women-with-penises to be holding out against their best efforts (this can, I think, be attributed to the fact that —as was the case with colleges and universities—feminism accepts only total capitulation. Not for too little is Zero Tolerance a catchphrase of feminist origin: to women and women-with-penises there is only one way, their way and their way is absolute) the fact remain that its evisceration is far advanced. For all intents and purposes the Catholic Church is now a secular feminist social engineering bastion, like the universities and colleges.
(via LinkMachineGo )
‘Twas hell: the bawdy virile boys
Rimmed virgin lemmings in a boat:
And lethal were the red-hot toys,
As the mob buggered goats.
(Via Incoming Signals )
A Hummer owner finally lives out his fantasies .
Police say three armed suspects walked into the Mr. Insurance building in Phoenix and demanded money. […] Investigators said after the suspects left with the store’s money, the co-owner jumped into his Hummer and chased after the suspects. Police said that the man, identified only as Peter, followed the suspects through a neighborhood and eventually caught up with them. He then rolled his Hummer over their car. Two of the suspects were taken to the hospital in critical condition.
(Via Post-Atomic )
The Basque language seems to have no relatives. This has resulted in some fanciful theories as to its origins and significance. On Larry Trask’s Basque page , he generously offers to take a shot at answering people’s questions on Basque, but notes:
I do not want to hear about the following: Your latest proof that Basque is related to Iberian / Etruscan / Pictish / Sumerian / Minoan / Tibetan / Isthmus Zapotec / Martian. Your discovery that Basque is the secret key to understanding the Ogam inscriptions / the Phaistos disc / the Easter Island carvings / the Egyptian Book of the Dead / the Qabbala / the prophecies of Nostradamus / your PC manual / the movements of the New York Stock Exchange. Your belief that Basque is the ancestral language of all humankind / a remnant of the speech of lost Atlantis / the language of the vanished civilization of Antarctica / evidence of visitors from Proxima Centauri. I definitely do not want to hear about these scholarly breakthroughs.
It must get awfully lonely in that ivory tower.
My surname, Lopez, is from my Basque great-grandfather. I’ve always meant to get around to learning more about the Basque language and culture… or at least enough to write that science fiction novel with my crackpot theory of Basque’s origins and significance. But I know mine is fiction. Or at least I think it is. As Tim Powers notes regarding writing stories that suppose fanciful theories to link and explain strange facts:
Pretty soon, it becomes an exercise in resisting paranoia because you’ll find that your research genuinely does seem to support whatever goofy theory you’ve come up with.
(Larry Trask quote via this Guardian article by way of Follow Me Here )
Exciting action photos of mathematicians !
(Via Slashdot )
Male spiders are dying to have sex .
Researchers found that for male orb-weaving spiders of the species Argiope aurantia completing copulation leads to certain death. The deceased suitor’s corpse is then trapped in the female genitalia. This may be a strategy to prevent other males from subsequently mating with the female, say the scientists.
J. Michael Straczynski has been engaging in some reinvention of Spider-Man during the year or so he’s written the comic, casting Spider-Man as a spider totem. Another such spider totem points out to Spider-Man that you can tell a lot about a hero by his villans: Thor fights Loki, another God. Captain America fights the Red Skull, another patriot. And look at the menagerie Spider-Man has fought: the Vulture, the Scorpion, Doctor Octopus…
Since then, for instance, our hero has fought a spider-wasp analog.
We’re still waiting for JMS to incorporate anything about spider sexuality.