A carnival of technology

I thought Soul Plane was funny. It reminded me of Airplane! Leslie Neilsen movies, which I also enjoy. The prop jokes were endless and it’s the kind of movie that you could watch again and still find funny (again, a lot like Airplane!). I particularly enjoyed the low class section of the plane. It’s called low class instead of coach. The overhead storage bins are like bus station lockers that you put a quarter in to get the key out. There are Colt 45 ads lining the wall just under the lockers. At the very back of the plane they don’t even have seats, just subway-style overhead hand holds.

A movie like this isn’t complete without dick and fart jokes. There are plenty of those. In fact, the key plot element that gets the movie going involves the protagonist getting his ass stuck in an airplane toilet.

This movie definitely has a target audience. People that enjoy slapstick will find this movie enjoyable. It’s too bad that it made it on the bottom 100 list. There are plenty of worse movies.

I give this movie 7/10 because it could do with a bit less sex humor and drug humor. But that’s just me. It’s still a funny movie.

Prepare for battle

Rated PG-13 for intense sci-fi action.
Rated A-III by the USCCB (link)
Given a final score of 62 with an influence density of 1.16 by CAPAlert (link)

Staring that guy from Grease, that religious dude in Saving Private Ryan, and the black guy in Bloodsport (the guy chasing Van Damme, not the other one).

Viewed 2005-05-05 by dshea, dcantrell, mike, and susi.

Battlefield Earth feels like a high-budget film produced by a high school drama class. It has big characters, big, important ideas, big acting and big screen wipes at the end of every single scene. Seriously, it’s like they put the film together using the video editor in a library. The plot is horrible, and the only reason this forgotten dime-store science fiction novel was ever made into a movie is because the author founded a financially successful religion. I don’t really care about whatever Scientologist undertones may or may not exist in this movie—one of the great things about this country is that everyone is free to believe any damn fool thing they want—but the story is really just dumb.

I’ve never read anything by L. Ron Hubbard, but I suspect that his writing is a lot like that of Kilgore Trout, the writer of pulp science fiction in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. Large aliens with inconsistent, vaguely British accents have taken over Earth on behalf of the big evil alien corporation, enslaved the remnants of humanity, and are in the process of mining Earth for its gold. The symbolism in the movie hits you like a punch to the gut all the way up to the heart-stirring climax where the humans prevail through the use of mathematics, the founding ideals of America, and a bunch of Army equipment that somehow still works after 1000 years and that they were able to learn to use in about a week. I’m not sure if the aliens’ dreadlocks were meant to be symbolic, but it’s a lot more funny if you think that they are. The oddly crooked camera angles may have meant something, too, but I couldn’t figure out what. Ultimately, though, it’s the scene wipes that drive the movie. Fade out sound, still frame, wipe from center into moving scene. Every single time.

My favorite coffee shop is going out of business. Apparently my couple of bucks a day just isn’t quite cutting it.

I found out Monday when Jake, one of the two guys there in the mornings, handed me my coffee and nonchalantly said, “Oh, yeah, we’re going out of business on Friday.” The big rush to get rid of everything started today, and my breakfast sandwich, coffee, bag of beans, and car-friendly insulated travel cup were run through some bizarre series of discounts that came out to like six bucks. I’ll really miss this place. One of the things that I enjoyed about Port City is that they were able to perfectly convey that sense that they care about you. They weren’t just another faceless Starbucks, pulling overroasted coffee out of regions unknown; in fact, the Port City Java logo even includes “roastery” next to the name. There’s always a variety of roasts and blends, and most of them are organically grown or fair trade or something like that. It’s same kind of goofy crap that convinces me that those Natural Cheetos are better than the regular ones. They make themselves unique: we’re thinking about the quality of our coffee, about how it affects the world, and about you. See, customer? You’re special. And that keeps me paying $1.87 every morning. That and the fact that they’re close to the office and that I hate Starbucks.

All three of the shops in the area are closing, so the options are becoming somewhat limited. I’ll have to try to change my route to pass by the Caribou on Holcomb Bridge on Monday. Or maybe I’ll just start going to Racetrack.

Happy May Day, everyone. I don’t even know what that means. I think it has something to do with a bunch of white-robed virgins dancing around a giant phallic symbol, and it seems hard to go wrong with that.

Anyhow, this weekend I decided to celebrate my slightly better-paying position with the same company by acquiring some new credit card debt. Saturday I went to Best Buy and bought a camera. I enjoy photography as a hobby, and I finally got over my urge to go with film and fill up my bathtub with nasty chemicals. I may still do that somewhere down the road, but for now I bought a Canon A520 digital camera. It’s one of the of the Canon models that doesn’t come in a blister pack and that doesn’t cost four digits. It seems like a nice option for where I’m at, which is that I don’t want to spend a whole lot, but I’d still like a tool that lets me pretend that I kind of know what I’m doing. It has all kinds of overrides for shutter speeds and focusing and things like that, and, if I decide to spend entirely too much on fancy lenses, it lets me use those, too. Today’s weather was beautiful, so I spent it walking all up and down creation, filling up most of a 256MB SD card, hopefully learning what this thing can do. I took some pictures on the Big Creek Greenway in Alpharetta and some assorted sights within walking distance of my apartment, which included the ruins of the Hargrove House on Windy Hill, a billboard on Cobb Parkway advising everyone to remain afraid and listen to news radio, some guy driving a Corvette Stingray, and a big inflatable shark.

Photo browsers seem to be a very personal thing, best used with a “not invented here” attitude, so I’ll probably be slapping one of those together sometime soon. To start out, I just want something to display the pictures that are in a directory, perhaps with some EXIF tag information, but it’ll probably go well beyond that into something that includes a message board, search engine, IRC client, web browser, and so much more. So, be patient, fair reader; I’ll have more ways to waste your bandwidth soon.