A carnival of technology

The party is nonstop

Rated R for strong sexual content, language and some drug use.

Starring Snoop Dogg as the only rapper we all recognized.

Viewed 2005-04-26 by Mike Imamura, David Shea, and David Cantrell

Soul Plane is a rare gem on the Bottom 100 list, a small respite on the great journey. Soul Plane is something that is exactly what it set out to be. It’s a sort of modern blaxploitation version of Airplane, and it consists mostly of racial stereotypes and an unending string of dick and fart jokes. I don’t want to sound like that guy on IMdb who opens the discussion of a horrible movie with a “I don’t understand why no one likes this movie??!” comment, but I enjoyed it. I can see why people would hate the movie, since it’s raunchy and dumb, but it kept me laughing, which is exactly what a comedy is supposed to do. This movie is a fine thing amongst its company.

I listen to a lot of college and public radio, so this means that my commercials come from the Ad Council instead of The Shane Company or Bill Heard Chevrolet. There are a variety of issues that our country’s hard-working propaganda business tackles today, educating me daily on the dangers of childhood diseases, teenage pregnancy, and filing my taxes through paper and post. Although none of their active campaigns seem to be as memorable or capable of taking a permanent place in the American consciousness as ones like Rosie the Riveter, Smokey the Bear, or that crying Indian dude, there are a couple of ad series that stick in my mind. One is the Energy Hog ads, a series reminiscent of a Rayovac commercial, advising kids to quit wasting so much energy, lest a hog come and eat their radio. They’re kind of amusing. Far more amusing, though, was an ad I heard on WRAS this morning. It consisted of a twangy, catchy country band singing about breastfeeding. That’s right, radio took an abrupt turn from some mumbling guitarist with bad hair straight to Nashville to tell me the importance of breastfeeding. It was a very touching song. “She gave from her heart, or somewhere nearsby.” I wonder if there’s a television campaign around this, too.

Five thoughts that came to mind while watching this movie:

• Weren’t they in Enemy Mine together?
• Sharks cannot back up.
• Let me know if you see some foreshadowing.
• Wait, I thought the shark was the protagonist.
• Hey look, there’s that grenade again.

Jaws 3-D was Joe Alves’ first and last time as director. I wonder if this movie was like Deep Blue Sea where Renny Harlin filmed a lot of plot elements and character development and they got cut when the studio said, “nope, gotta have more shark on screen.”

I give this movie 4/10 because it wasn’t so terrible that you couldn’t watch it. And if you watched it thinking it was sort of a satire, it’s not so bad.

Five thoughts that came to mind while watching this movie:

• Bad.
• Tired.
• Sleepy.
• Exhausting.
• I need a thneed.

I had high hopes for this movie. I liked Dr. Seuss books when I was a kid and thought this would be an enjoyable movie. It might have been if they didn’t get Mike Myers. Basically everything that Shea said above I agree with. This movie sucked. A lot. My favorite Seuss book is The Lorax.

I give this movie 0/10 because it was so terrible I had to force myself to sit there and watch it. Had we viewed this movie at my place, I would have probably gotten up to go to my computer.

Don’t mess with the hat

Rated PG for mild crude humor and some double-entendres.
Rated A-II by the USCCB (link)
Given a final score of 68 with an influence density of 0.57 by CAPAlert (link)

Starring Mike Myers, Alec Baldwin, and zombie Dr. Suess.

Viewed 2005-04-19 by David Cantrell, Mike Imamura, and David Shea

This is the kind of experience I associate with a bad movie: an hour and a half that lasts forever and leaves me feeling physically and emotionally drained. Unlike Earthquake, which left me with a similar feeling, The Cat in the Hat lacked several key elements, like a plot, character development, and an inexplicable cameo by Walter Matthau.

A kid’s movie that’s watchable by adults is an uncommon thing, but I don’t see how children could enjoy this movie, either. Its outlandish colors aren’t nearly enough to overcome the flat acting and utter lack of whimsy. The most tedious portions are those when Mike Myers isn’t on the screen, like the first twenty minutes of the film where the setting is built by the conversations of child actors and clichéd threats of military school, but even when he is on screen, the cat just isn’t very interesting. The problem is compounded by the cat not being particularly annoying, either. He’s just there, occasionally doing something zany or amusing, but otherwise he’s just filling space and yelling “Oh, Yeah!”, as if he were some sort of less-fun cousin of the Kool-Aid man.

One thing I did find interesting about this movie was its departure from the the traditional movie family structure. The two kids in the movie are being raised by a single, working, mostly absent mother who’s dating some slob next door (played by Alec Baldwin). I’m sure that the CAPAlert guy had a field day with that one. This unusual tidbit makes better material for a paper in an English class than it does for a good movie, though. In the end, this movie needs to be driven by zaniness, and in that it falls flat. Several attempts at this, like the Cat in the Hat rave party, are confusing instead of surreal, and the cartoonish physics of the kids and the cat jumping appear almost grotesque outside of a cartoon.

Despite its position at the top of the list, The Cat in the Hat’s numbers belie its true awfulness. Jaws III was a much better movie.

I had no idea that a $7 burger could be so bland. There’s a restaurant somewhere in the entwined borders between Roswell and Alpharetta called Miller’s Ale House, and I ended up eating there yesterday with a group on the last minute recommendataion of one of the members. It’s a Florida-based chain of restauarants, and the one in Alpharetta is the only one outside of Florida. The food we ordered were fairly simple dishes with resaonable expectations of deliciousness: a meatloaf, a bowl of jambalaya, and a cheeseburger. It might as well have been three blocks of tofu. My burger just didn’t taste like anything. Somehow they found a way to cook a cheeseburger so that the tomato slice managed to overpower the taste of both the meat and the cheese. The jamabalaya, which was described as some yellow rice, sausage, and undercooked bell pepper, was drowned in Tabasco (we had to request actual tabasco sauce, too, since the stuff on the table was some kind of toned-down chipotle-based product line extension) before being made edible, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone apply ketchup to their meatloaf, after the first bite, with quite such force. The person who suggested the place had some sort of Mahi-Mahi salad, which was apparently alright.

The third dimension is terror

Rated PG.
Rated A-III by the USCCB (link)

Starring a fake-looking shark and a couple of cute dolphins.

Viewed 2005-04-12 by David Shea, David Cantrell, and Mike Imamura

Even in the trailer, Jaws 3 knew that it wouldn’t be a good film. The trailer that was avialable on the DVD consisted mostly of movie-trailer-voice man reminding the viewer of how much they enjoyed the first two films. In synopsis, “Jaws was really awesome. Jaws II was ok. And look, this one’s in 3-D!” That’s about the movie went, as well.

Lacking an Arrivision projector or those 3-D glasses, we were left with the two dimensional representation of the movie, which removed a rather crucial aspect of the original. Although the three-dimensional effects were used only for emphasis, to amaze the audience during action sequences—and the opening credits—the special effects depended on things popping out of the screen. The effects looked very fake and cheap, as if they were mostly made of hand-drawn images stiffly superimposed onto the film, so I would at least hope that the three dimensional aspect helped things a bit in the theater.

The movie has a fairly simple setup: we meet the now-grown Brody kids, learn of their current lives and conflicts and how the shark attacks of their youth influence them today, and then the shark shows up and messes up Seaworld. That’s really about it. Where the first two movies had well-developed characters, internal conflicts exacerbated by the external conflict of the shark, and breathtaking cinematography, this movie had flat reminders of the Brody children, a boring hard-ass park owner, and a pair of dolphins that occaisionally flipped around or ate some fish. The fake-looking shark was occasionally replaced with an even worse 3-D image of a shark. In all, Jaws 3-D was just a dull action movie, driven by a gimmick that has since become obsolete.

Some recent incidents with bizarre, inflammatory comments over at burdell.org have made me think about the visibility of web pages. Google has made great strides in reducing the toil of sifting through piles of irrelevant web pages in an effort to find what you want, but the ambiguity of language and the imperfections inherent in making a computer think mean that there will always be some element of a surreal experience in which the Web leads you down a path you never imagined when all you wanted was to learn how to typeset a document. The comments at burdell.org appeared to have been made by people searching for something not all related to blogs or whatever else David does, but certain posts were found that either complained about something out in that wide world of ours, and, with the recent addition of comment capabilities to posts, people have arrived and scribbled their angry thoughts wherever a surface was to be found. I am no stranger to angry or offensive journal entries, but I have neither the desire nor ability to add inline comments to these posts, and, though this glog is clearly linked from a web page that can easily found by mistake from searches for web design help or mac and cheese recipes, the glog itself—hosted, as it is, on obsolete technology—is not indexed by google or other major search engines. By deciding to take no more of markup languages, I’ve effectively hidden myself from the world.

I could have these pages indexed if I wanted, of course. There is an HTTP gateway that I tossed together after repeated complaints that gopher is inaccessible with modern software, and I’d only need to offer a link to this and see myself once more available to confuse others’ Internet experiences. What I wonder, though, is would this result in angry letters? In the entire history of gophernet.org, I’ve received only one complaint, from someone who shared my name, and it wasn’t so much a complaint as a half-joking plea to quit making fun of Canada so very much. One. No demands, no death threats, no livid wavers of arms. I would like to receive more angry email, since I find such things hilarious, but it would seem that the time needed to switch gears, the act of retreating to one’s own haunts and software in order to compose an email, perhaps even requiring a quick step off of the Web, is just too much. It’s a pity.

Today I learned that Andretti is way more awesome than Malibu Grand Prix. They both have goofy-looking go-carts driven by overpowered lawnmower engines, they both have goofy, meaningless arcade games, but Andretti wins for two simple reasons: they let everyone on the track at the same time, making it more like what one would expect in a race, and they have a bar. It was a pretty crappy bar, since when we were there all they had left on tap was Budweiser and Amber Bock, and they even ran out of Budweiser before we left, and though the cute girl tending the bar was pretty hot, she was also fairly bad at it and fairly married, unofficially permitting drinking and driving go-carts has to count for something.

This past week has been exciting. Autovin finally went through the process of hiring me full time after talking about it for several months, which means that I no longer have to fudge hours on timesheets, instead being able to take on the same apathy towards time held by the rest of the IT department. It also means that I get some kind of retirement fund and someone else paying for health insurance and all that, too. One of the somewhat unexpected aspects of the hiring process, though, was the drug test. I had no reason to worry about it, but for whatever I always thought of pissing in a cup as something that happened to other people. The whole process was a little weird to me. I understand that it’s a careful balance between privacy and preventing me from tampering with my urine, but certain aspects of the process, like having to wash my hands beforehand in full view of the nurse and having to wait for the sample to be signed and sealed before finishing up and flushing, struck me at the time as a bit needlessly authoritarian. The company president, apparently remembering his own college days, offered to delay this aspect of the hiring process for a couple of weeks if necessary, and mentioned drinking pickle juice as a way to dodge the bullet after I jokingly mentioned that I’d drink a bunch of cranberry juice when I got home. I can’t imagine that consuming brine is any more effective than other liquids, so how did anyone come up with that? Is this one of those things where someone thought that since it’s disgusting it must be doing something? Whatever the source, eww.

Today is April Fool’s Day, a day whose principle I abhor. The joy of a prank lies in the surprise, so to set aside a single day as the time for tomfoolery can not effectively divert the tricks and jokes that will happen throughout the year, instead turning April Fools into no more than a holiday for assholes. I suspect that the usually mischievous people at the office feel the same way, since nothing out of the ordinary has been inflicted on anyone yet today. Anyhow, know that anything I say today will be said with the same sincerity I’m able to muster on any other day.

The coffee shop I frequent keeps giving me things for free. I wonder if they’re doing enough business to stay afloat, since it seems odd that they would try to encourage a loyal $1.87 a day, especially since I usually pay with a credit card. For background, there are four coffee shops in the area: two Starbuckses, a Caribou, and a Port City Java, a smaller chain from North Carolina. I started looking for alternative coffee sources after that abominable machine was installed in the break room. I refuse to drink at Starbucks, and I don’t care one way or the other about Caribou, so I settled on Port City, the closer of the two to the office. I guess that was a couple months ago, so I’ve since become a familiar face, and the last few Fridays they’ve given me free coffee and congratulated me for coming in every day of the past week to feed my addiction. Yesterday I decided to try some of the chocolate-covered espresso beans they keep on the counter, and they gave me those for free, too. I really hope they’re not going out of business any time soon. Turning around on Holcomb Bridge to leave Caribou would be a real pain.