February 2007 Archives

Just to end the day, here are a couple of things that made me say, "coooooo-uhllll," like Bart Simpson when I saw them:

Courtesy of the Sinister Scalzi, it's my Monster Name!

Get Your Monster Name

Ogre of Nihilism... I like that. Can an honorary Unitarian be a nihilist, though?

The Digital Bits is reporting that the rumored 30th Anniversary Ultimate Star Wars Saga box set that was supposed to come out this year may get pushed back because the suits at Lucasfilm were disappointed by the poor sales of last year's original trilogy release. You know, the one whose only real selling point was the inclusion of the unaltered theatrical cuts, which, to no one's surprise, turned out to be of less-than-stellar quality. Hey, Uncle George, here's a tip: those who are interested in owning your revisionist CGI'd Special Edition versions already do, probably two or three times over. You want to make a few more bucks off your fan base? Then reconsider your attitude about those theatrical cuts and give us what we really want: the unf***ed-with editions in clean, anamorphic transfers that will look good on our new-fangled HDTVs. It really is that easy. Just give us these movies the way they were when we fell in love with them. Don't worry about impressing today's FX-jaded kids; don't worry about trying to make them match up with the prequel trilogy. Just give a little gift to those of us who've been there for you since the beginning. We'll be happy to open our wallets again for a product we actually want.

Hmmmm... this is unexpected: according to the Belief-o-Matic™ over at BeliefNet, the religion that most closely matches my personal beliefs (at least as interpreted by an online multiple-choice-style quiz) is Unitarian Universalism, with Liberal Quakerism and secular humanism tied for second place. Mormonism, the dominant faith of my home state and the one with which I have the most personal experience and knowledge of, came in at number 24 out of 27 possible matches. That's lower than Islam, Hinduism, and even Scientology.

I usually self-identify as an agnostic -- I'm not comfortable flat-out denying the possibility of the divine, but I have a lot of doubts, and religion simply doesn't play any role in my day-to-day existence, except for those moments when living in Utah inevitably demands one to deal with it -- so I expected this thing to tell me I was a big ol' secular humanist. The Unitarian and Quaker results genuinely surprised me. And to be honest, it also surprised me that Mormonism ranked so low. After all, I was raised here, immersed in that faith, even if I wasn't practicing it; most of my family and friends are LDS, and I really don't think of myself as hostile to Mormonism, at least no more so than I am to any other religion. (By which I mean that I object to those of any faith who would tell me how to live my life or that I'm not a moral person because I don't do all the things they do, but I really don't care what people do or do not believe themselves.) You'd think that a lot of Mormon ideas would be present in my belief system simply by default.

I'm probably making too much of this -- after all, Internet quizzes have also told me that I'm Arthur C. Clarke and Spider-Man, and I should know to take them all with an iceberg-sized grain of salt. Still, it's food for thought, isn't it?

If you're interested, the complete breakdown of my results is below the fold:

Via Boing Boing, evidence that we have become a hopelessly decadent society:

...a restaurant in Atlantic City has come up with a $1,000 brownie... Brûlee’s "Brownie Extradordinaire with Saint Louis" is a chocolate brownie made with Italian hazelnuts, dusted with edible gold powder and served with a very rare port. After each bite, the dessert captain squirts a mist of the vintage port on your tongue with a $750 atomizer, which incidentally is yours to keep.

The online menu for this place can be found here, if you want to see how the better one percent lives.

I can't begin to describe how offensively vulgar I find this. I am utterly disgusted by the thought of rich, spoiled bastards with more money than sense ($1K is equal to four payments on my Mustang!) eating a precious-metal-encrusted brownie while a lackey (no doubt dressed in velvets with a powdered wig, just like they did in the good old days before the guillotine spoiled the party) silently stands by to squirt wine into their lazy mouths because they can't be troubled to soil their fingers by lifting a frakking glass. I wonder if the restaurant also offers to complete the whole experience by sending a perfumed peasant home with the diner to wipe their tushy with a napkin of fine Egyptian linen? I imagine the gold powder does improve the aesthetics of the inevitable conclusion, at least.

It's been a while since I posted any examples of especially bad prose encountered during my day job as a mild-mannered proofreader at a major metropolitan corporation. I was beginning to think that I'd never again find anything dunderheaded enough to bother sharing with my Three Loyal Readers.

I was wrong. Check this out:

A period is defined as the amount of day’s/weeks it takes...

It's not Egregious Corporate Speak in the sense of being a conglomeration of marketing buzzwords and other jargon, but it definitely appears to have been deliberately designed to give me a headache. The thing I don't get is why more than one day requires the apostrophe while more than one week does not. Does someone think there are different pluralization rules for different time periods?

Oy.

I don't find a lot of memes out there on the 'net anymore -- apparently they were just a fad that's now on the wane -- but every once in a while, I still run across one that grabs my fancy. Here, courtesy of Tosy and Cosh, is one that grabbed my fancy this morning. It's one of those list-style memes that asks how many Oscar-winning films -- i.e., winners in the category of Best Motion Picture of their respective years -- I have seen.

I didn't watch much of the Oscars telecast last night. To be honest, I only caught about the last 20 minutes or so, with a gap in between as I drove home from The Girlfriend's house -- it's hard to muster a lot of enthusiasm for a four-hour awards show when you haven't seen most of the nominees. (In the Best Picture category, I've seen only The Departed; in Best Animated Film, only Cars; none of the foreign films or documentaries; and pretty much none of the flicks from which the various acting nominees were drawn.) Also, it was obvious two weeks ago that this would likely be one of those suspense-free years when there's an overwhelming sense of inertia leading toward the coronation of particular nominees. Honestly, did anyone not believe that Scorsese was finally going to get his statuette? Especially when the presenters for the Best Director award were revealed to be his three most pre-eminent contemporaries and friends (Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas)?

Sunday morning. I'm at The Girlfriend's apartment, waiting for her to finish getting ready so we can go to brunch, our usual Sabbath-day routine. Suddenly, I realize her poodle is staring at me with deep, imploring eyes... he needs to go outside and do his dirty, sinful business. Being the great guy that I am, I put on his leash and take him outside.

Through the open patio door at my back, I can hear brief snatches of unrelated sound: a TV chef blathering about oysters, a cacophony of cheering at a sporting event, gunshots, country music. The Girlfriend is channel-surfing. The disconnected rapid-fire audio stops, and there's now a familiar, urgent melody playing.

"Sounds like you found some classic Trek," I say over my shoulder.

"Bet you can't tell me which episode," she calls back.

I listen for a moment. I can't hear it terribly well...

"What is that, 'Amok Time'?" I ask. She doesn't answer me. Puzzled, I turn to look back through the door. She's sitting on the couch with the TV remote dangling loosely from one hand and a stunned look on her face.

"What?" I say, even though I already know.

"How do you do that?"

I shrug and wait for the dog to finish relieving himself while Spock, deep in the throes of pon farr, fights his captain and friend to the death for the sake of a woman...

Speaking of Britney Spears (well, I did mention her yesterday), I've been thinking about her head-shaving escapade last weekend and the way the media has reacted to it.

I know, I know... it's a lame non-story that everyone is sick of, and I imagine at least one of my celebrity-contemptuous Loyal Readers just rolled his eyes and clicked off to some other site. Still, I just keep coming back to the subject in my mind, like a loose tooth that I feel compelled to wiggle with my tongue. The truth is, as ridiculous and messed-up a person as she seems to be, I really do care about what's happening to her, at least in as much as I care about any human being who's obviously in a whole world of confusion and hurt. I feel sorry for the girl. And I feel genuinely angry at the way the entertainment "news" media -- i.e., all the television tabloid and gossip shows -- are exploiting her and that other hapless train wreck of a human being, Anna Nicole Smith, for the sake of sensationalistic headlines and, presumably, higher ratings.

The death of Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears' decision to emulate Sinead O'Connor's coiffure (or lack thereof) have pushed whacko astronaut Lisa Nowak out of the media spotlight, so I thought I'd pass along the word that she has entered a plea of "not guilty" to the charge of attempted murder.

Just doing my part to help out those poor, overworked tabloid writers...

[Update: In a related story, it seems that NASA has contigency plans for what to do if an astronaut wigs out while in space. It's pretty interesting... it involves duct tape, bungee cords, and forced administration of drugs. Just as I've always imagined. Oh, all right, I've always imagined that you'd just stun the nutbar with a phaser, but since NASA doesn't have phasers...]

I've worn a beard for about 17 years now, not counting one horrible week following a misguided attempt to "update my look," only to discover that I'd, ahem, put on a few pounds since I was last bare-faced. Let me tell you, I wasted no time at all re-growing my time-tested fuzzy accoutrement. I probably would've grown it back anyway, though, even if I didn't need the camoflage for my unfortunate double chin, because I just plain like it. I think it lends my face some character, and, in my mind at least, it signifies both my masculinity and my individuality. And it doesn't hurt that The Girlfriend likes it, too.

However, it hasn't always been easy to be bearded here in arch-conservative Utah, where the preferred look of the predominant cultural group (that would be the Mormons, kids) is decidedly unfuzzy. Before I made a love connection with the current Girlfriend, I heard from more than one young lady that I was not suitable dating material because of the beard, and I also know that I've lost a few job opportunities because I refused to shave it off. Some would call my defiance of the local norms foolish vanity, but I've never understood why, if you keep it clean and trimmed short (as I do), so many straight-laced people find facial hair repellant. (Incidentally, I really dislike the term "clean-cut," because it suggests that its opposite -- i.e., bearded or otherwise hirsute -- is unclean, complete with all the moral intimations that word carries.) And so I have soldiered on through the years, convinced of my own righteousness and determined not to let The Man force me into drab conformity. I've persevered long enough that the beard has largely ceased to be an issue for me -- I've finally found success in love and work without having to compromise my self-image -- but it would've been so much easier if I'd had some kind of support group. Perhaps even an entire web site dedicated to the proposition that beards are cool. But surely there couldn't really be such a thing out there on the vast, vast Internet... could there?

Well, duh...

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the title of this entry comes from an old George Carlin routine called "The Hair Piece." It's reproduced for your amusement below the fold...

I normally reject the idea of literary manifestos as pretentious ego self-stroking (on the part of whomever writes the manifesto) that treads on my anti-authoritarian "do whatever the hell I like" nature, but here is one I can get behind wholeheartedly, John C. Wright's NEW SPACE PRINCESS MOVEMENT:

The literary movement will follow two basic principles: first, science fiction stories should have space-princesses in them who are absurdly good looking. Second, the space princesses must be half-clad (if you are a pessimist. The optimist sees the space princess as half-naked). Third, dinosaurs are also way cool, as are ninjas. Dinosaur ninjas are best of all.

...The second thing to remember: bare midriffs. This is what science fiction is actually all about. Let no one tell you differently.

Oh, yeah. That's the stuff, baby. Thanks to Scalzi for cluing me onto this.

In a somewhat-related note, I've just learned from SF Signal that you can get science fiction and fantasy stories from this site -- for FREE! Just in case you really don't feel like working today...

At first glance, this story looks pretty funny, just the sort of weird news item I chuckle over a dozen times a day: a would-be Good Samaritan, hearing sounds that he thought came from a woman being raped, armed himself with an antique sword and burst through the door of a neighbor's apartment ready to face an attacker, only to find that there was no woman. The only occupant of the place was another guy watching a porno DVD all by himself at a ridiculously high volume.

Big laughs, right? So it would seem...

Then I read the coda: the not-quite-a-hero is being charged with three criminal counts, and his sword -- a family heirloom, no less -- has been confiscated by the police. I can't believe this situation, an obvious (and funny) misunderstanding, couldn't have been resolved during a 10-minute conversation between the two men and a cop as intermediary. Instead, it'll now be dragged through the already-clogged legal system and a guy who was only trying to do the right thing faces jail time. Yeah, the screaming turned out to be nothing, but maybe next time it'll be the real thing and passersby will choose to ignore it instead of risking this guy's fate.

Everybody in this country needs to take a deep breath and chill the hell out...

Ever wonder what the "E" in "Wile E. Coyote" stands for? Yeah, me, neither, but Mark Evanier has an interesting answer nonetheless.

I think I've mentioned before that I didn't really care for the Matrix films. I didn't hate them or anything -- I found the first one sufficiently entertaining to warrant seeing the sequels -- but I sure didn't understand why everyone and their dogs made such a big fuss over them. They really weren't all that smart, or they weren't even all that crowd-pleasing, when you think about it. But my lukewarm resistance to the bullet-time bandwagon is nothing compared to the feelings of some folks out there in InternetLand. Courtesy of Byzantium's Shores, here are 50 Reasons to Reject The Matrix. The list presupposes that you actually remember the details of the three films, which, I must admit, I do not -- I couldn't tell you who the Seraph is if you paid me -- but I did recall the subjects of this priceless passage:

Reloaded Ridiculousness, 2

The machines added two new enemies for Neo in Reloaded, called the Twins. Their first priority is to blend discreetly into the simulated world of the Matrix, to walk among the people unnoticed. So of course the Matrix made them huge albino men with bleach-white dreadlocks who occasionally transform into shrieking wraiths.

"What's that, honey?"

"Oh, nothing. It just looks like a simple Kung-Fu Swedish Rastafarian Helldemon. I'm sure there's no need to question our fragile, sheltered grasp of 'reality' as we know it."

Today, the photoblogger Telstar Logistics shares with us pictures from his ride aboard the B-17 Nine o' Nine, a 60-year-old bomber aircraft operated by the Collings Foundation out of Stow, Massachusetts. You may recall that I took a ride aboard another Collings aircraft, a B-24 called -- at that time, anyway -- the Dragon and His Tail, and I absolutely concur with Telstar's assertion that one of these flights is worth every penny of the $400 charge. It's an amazing thrill, and the closest thing to actual time travel I've ever experienced.

Telstar's complete photo set is here; photos of my ride on the Dragon are here (just for comparison's sake, of course!)

I don't follow basketball and I wouldn't know Tim Hardaway from Tim Conway, but apparently he is taking some heat for bluntly admitting in a radio interview last week that he has a problem with gay people. That's not an unusual attitude in our society, of course, and you can even make an argument that Hardaway is to be commended for his honesty. I, for one, would certainly defend his right to say whatever's on his mind no matter how ignorant. But he should be prepared for the consequences:

Sulu rocks...

Someday, somebody is going to do a master's thesis about Internet content in the early 21st century and attempt to explain how and why so much of it was regurgitated nuggets of 1970s and '80s pop culture. Not that that's a bad thing, of course:

No particular comment here, just sharing a nifty passage from the novel I'm currently enjoying. I especially like the image at the end. The characters are shy young Quakers who are beginning to discover that they have a thing for each other; the setting is New York in the year 1778, during the American Revolution:

Rob was enthused about the scientist William Herschel.With his improved telescopes, Rob said, Herschel had discovered nebulae and galaxies strewn across the heavens as a farmer could scatter flaxseed. ...The night had grown cold, and they blew on their fingers and stamped their feet as they stared up at the spangle of stars. The arm of Rob's coat brushed Kate's cape and she saw tiny sparks dance in the wool.

--From Shadow Patriots: A Novel of the Revolution by Lucia St. Clair Robson

A month ago, it was so cold you couldn't even breathe and the city was shrouded in murky, filthy "haze" (i.e., air pollution thick enough that it recalled stories of Jack the Ripper stalking Victorian fogbanks). Then about two weeks ago the air finally cleared out and temperatures rose to the relatively comfortable range they're supposed to occupy in the winter months, between the high 30s and low 40s. The past two days have been spring-like, with temps in the high 50s and beautiful crystalline skies.

I woke up this morning to about five inches of snow.

I love Utah...

As long as I'm talking about painters whose craft I've admired since childhood, I ought to put in a shout-out to Don Davis. His imaginative renderings of what it would look like inside Gerard O'Neill's proposed space colonies -- essentially giant cylinders that would spin to simulate gravity -- seemed to be on every third magazine cover when I was an impressionable kid in the 1970s. Don's got his own web site, naturally enough, and it turns out that he's offering a number of those iconic images up to the public domain, for folks to do with as they please. I remember this one (or one very like it) in particular. Go have a look, and see if you remember any of these yourself...

(My thanks to the Paleo-Future blog for mentioning this.)

I just learned of the death of a Hollywood great you've probably never heard of, but whose contribution to classic cinema cannot be underestimated. Peter Ellenshaw was a special-effects master whose specialty was a now-defunct art called "matte painting."

I don't want to dwell too much further on the Trolley Square shootings. Not to sound insensitive or cold-hearted, because I'm absolutely not, but I find all the public wailing and gnashing of teeth after these random acts of violence overblown, and all the new-agey, namby-pamby talk of "healing" especially annoys me for some reason (I guess I'm a "climb back on the horse and keep riding" kind of guy). Nevertheless, there are a couple of articles in the Trib that I think are worth passing along.

Man, I live for headlines like this: Batman Sighting Puts Schools on Lockdown.

The short version: a middle-school student in Pheonix, Arizona, saw someone in a Batman costume running across his campus, and authorities responded by locking down three nearby schools for 45 minutes. A reasonable precaution, I'd imagine, since there was probably a lunatic clown in a purple suit somewhere in the area, too...

Another entry in the "People Suck" category: The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Maltese Falcon has been stolen.

More specifically, an authorized reproduction of the prop from the 1941 film classic The Maltese Falcon, one which was used for publicity stills for the movie and which was signed by actor Elisha Cook, Jr., was taken from a locked cabinet in John's Grill, a well-known San Francisco bar where Falcon author Dashiell Hammett and his fictional alter ego Sam Spade used to hang. Several vintage and signed Hammett books were taken as well.

A reward of $25,000 has been offered, but I have a hunch the owner of John's will never see the Black Bird again. Bastards.

Why don't we take a break from all the doom and gloom of the Trolley Square thing and enjoy a little music video by The Phantom Surfers, inspired by the strange story of astronaut Lisa Nowak:

The gunman has been identified as Sulejmen Talovic, an 18-year-old who lived with his mother in Salt Lake. No word yet as to motive, and it appears he was working entirely on his own.

Holly Mullen, a former columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune and newly minted blogger, attended the noon-time press conference I mentioned earlier and has a full report on everything that was said, including a detailed rundown of how last night's events unfolded. I see little reason for me to summarize or rewrite what she's posted, so go have a look if you're curious.

I will, however, note for the record the names of the victims. First, the dead:

• Teresa Ellis, 29
• Brad Frantz, 24
• Kirsten Hinckley, 15
• Vanessa Quinn, 29
• Jeffery Walker, 52

And here are the injured and/or hospitalized:

• Stacy Hansen, 53
• Shawn Munns, 34
• Carolyn Tufts, 44
• Jeffery Allen Walker, 16

I feel kind of cold for what I'm about to say, but I'm very thankful that I didn't know any of them...

The Trib also has a brief history of Trolley Square, if you're interested. Here's the even-briefer version:

The area served as territorial and state fairgrounds until 1908 when Union Pacific Railroad magnate E.H. Harriman made it the site for an innovative trolley car system. At one time, more than 144 trolleys operated from mission-style car barns erected at the site. They served the area until the line was discontinued in 1945.

For years, Trolley persisted as a decaying garage for Utah Transit Authority buses and Utah Power maintenance vehicles and the historic block was littered with junk vehicles, old tires and trash contained within barbed wire. Then, in 1972, developers dedicated to historic restoration renovated the old barns, which were painted yellow at the time, into a collection of boutiques and trendy restaurants.

There has been talk lately of a new owner planning to do some major renovations on Trolley. I've been concerned that these plans (which of course have not been revealed to the public) will change the quirky Trolley characteristics that I described last night and personally like, namely the maze-like layout and dimly lighted corners. I suspect that the shootings will now make such changes inevitable regardless of whatever the earlier plans were, and all in the name of our singular modern concern, "security."

The Trib is reporting that the gunman in last night's madness at Trolley Square was an 18-year-old kid. He had no accomplice, as some early rumors suggested, but he was stopped by an off-duty Ogden police officer with the help of several Salt Lake officers. So I guess there was something to that Die Hard story I mocked in last night's entry. No motive has been discovered.

Police are still withholding the names of the dead, but we've got their ages and genders: two 28-year-old women, a 52-year-old man, a 24-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl. Three of them died in a card store, one in Pottery Barn Kids, and another outside of Bath and Body Works. I can't think of anything more sad, more miserably mundane, than to be shot in front of freaking Bath and Body Works, with a bottle of pearberry shampoo in your hand. God...

There's a press conference scheduled for noon Salt Lake time, at which the authorities are promising names and more details...

About four hours ago, a man walked into Trolley Square, a quaint, relatively tiny Salt Lake City mall, and opened fire with a shotgun. The details are still sketchy, but, as of this writing, six people are confirmed dead, including the gunman, and an unknown number of injured people are in nearby hospitals. The victims have not yet been identified, and authorities have not even specified their genders or ages.

So, Anna Nicole.

I must confess, I wasn't a fan. I thought she was a bimbo, actually, a grotesque and idiotic caricature of feminity, and an example of everything that's wrong with the American worship of fame for fame's sake.

Nevertheless, I find that I actually feel bad about her sudden death. She always seemed like such a helpless creature, and she has had a heavy ration of crap handed to her recently: the death of her 20-year-old son, the paternity battle over her infant son daughter, the on-going inheritance battle, and a newly minted class-action suit that named her, specifically, as a co-defendant. I have a hunch we're going to find out she died of an overdose, either accidental or deliberate. I find it very easy to imagine her washing down pills with a glass of vodka while blubbering that we wouldn't have Anna Nicole to kick around anymore. That's a terribly sad ending for any human being, even one whose only apparent goal in life was to "be famous."

I guess she managed that, though, didn't she? She'll now be enshrined alongside all those other starlets who met untimely and pathetic ends. Maybe that's what she's really wanted all the way along...

Via SF Signal, a link to Dwight Silverman's 15 Geek Movies to See Before You Die. Silverman is the Tech Blogger for the Houston Chronicle; see his original entry for explanations on why these particular films made the list. As usual, my own comments follow:

A friend of mine just sent me a link to an eBay auction that ought to have plenty of crossover appeal for both the geek and motorhead demographics: somebody is selling was selling one of the three Lexus concept cars built for the movie Minority Report.

[Update: The eBay listing has been removed since this morning. Interesting. Oh, well, the rest of the entry still stands. I've added a link below so you can see what the Lexus looks like.]

As much as I love science fiction flicks, I've got to be honest: most futuristic movie cars leave me cold. They're inevitably just bubbles or boxes on wheels, without any attempt to make them look "real-world." This Lexus, though, impressed me in the movie as something that (a) might actually evolve from current automotive design, and (b) would be a design that people might actually want to own. I know I would. The opening bid on this one is a perfectly reasonable $88,000. Mere pocket change. I ought to have enough left over to pick up a Blade Runner spinner, too.

Oh, and speaking of flying cars (which the spinner is, if you don't know), it seems they might not be so far off after all: according to this article, an Israeli engineer is working on a flying utility vehicle that he hopes to have on the market by 2010. Rafi Yoeli's X-Hawk is designed to perform like a helicopter but without a chopper's big exposed rotor blades that get in the way of snuggling up alongside a cliff or a building. The X-Hawk would instead have two enclosed fans at the front and rear with a cockpit and modular cabin that could be swapped out for different missions. It'll supposedly be quieter than a chopper, too, which has obvious advantages for the military and, I suppose, for anyone bothered by that "whop-whop" sound. (Personally, I've always rather liked the sound of choppers; I was bummed when the Army stopped using Hueys, because I grew up hearing them off in the distance every day in the summertime.)

Yoeli has gotten a prototype to lift off (a mere three feet, but still, it did take off), and it looks much more practical to my admittedly ignorant eyes than a lot of the flying car designs I've seen. I'll be watching further developments on this project closely.

If you're interested, too, here's Yoeli's company web site, which includes conceptual information and a decent technical overview.

I haven't mentioned it for a while, but I've been continuing to add to my LibraryThing catalog over the past several months. In case you're curious, I'm now up to 1,245 (holy crap!) books entered, which comprises the bulk of my personal library. All I have left to do is a couple boxes of collectible books (the ones which live inside archival plastic sleeves and Aren't For Reading) and a stack of children's and young-adult books I found inside my old toy box. Obviously, this little data entry project has been a god-awful amount of work, but I don't regret it one bit. For one thing, it's been gratifying to get a handle on what exactly I own (when you have over 1,000 books, it's easy to forget that you've got any one particular title) and fun to share that information with my Three Loyal Readers (there goes my exhibitionistic streak again!). But it's also useful, I've decided, to have an inventory list stored somewhere other than in the same place where I actually keep my stuff. What good does a local inventory stored on my home PC accomplish if the house burns down and I lose everything? With LibraryThing, I have a list that I can access from anywhere and show to my insurance company in the event of a disaster.

That logic started me thinking that I really ought to set up something similar for my other valuable collections, especially my movies. A lot of googling led me DVDSpot.com, which is essentially the same thing as LibraryThing only specialized for those shiny silver discs we all love so much. I don't like its interface quite as well as LibraryThing's, and some of the community features that I enjoy on LT are lacking. Also, I would've liked to have some capability for cataloging VHS movies as well, since I still have a lot of those. But it does the DVD job well enough, and I didn't find any online service that considered VHS. I guess a media format is well and truly dead when you can't even find a way to inventory your legacy titles.

Anyway, cataloging my DVDs didn't take nearly as long as my books, so without further fanfare, I now present to you Bennion's DVDSpot catalog. I'll put a link in the sidebar as well. Happy browsing!

Further evidence that we're now living in the future: a Canadian company called XYZ RGB (even the company's name is futuristic!) has created what it calls the "next-generation movie poster":

Hey, all the cool kids are doing it:

Create your own visitor map!

Theoretically, every visitor to my humble little blog from this point forward will be represented by a red diamond on that map, showing where he or she is located...

As long as we're thinking about astronauts today, Wired.com reminds us that the first extra-terrestrial round of golf was played on this date back in 1971 by Alan Shepard of Apollo 14. So-so quality YouTube video of the event below the fold:

When you live in Utah, you get used to hearing weird news stories that have some kind of local connection. From Howard Hughes' "Mormon Mafia" and the tale of Melvin Dummar in the '70s to the White Salamander bombings and cold fusion kerfuffle in the '80s to anything related to the polygamist colonies of the Four Corners area in the last ten years, the more bizarre the story, the more likely it either happened here or has some kind of link to my home state.

Today's weirdest news story is no exception to the rule, but it is really a wild tale: astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak is being charged with attempted murder after she drove 900 miles from Houston to Orlando while wearing a diaper (so she wouldn't have to stop for potty breaks), intending to kidnap or otherwise harm a rival for a fellow astronaut's affections. Nowak, who is a married mother of three and who flew on shuttle Discovery last summer, accosted Colleen Shipman in an airport parking lot while disguised in a wig and trench coat and carrying pepper spray, a mallet, a BB gun, gloves, a folding knife, rubber tubing, and trash bags. She later told police she only wanted to "scare Ms. Shipman into talking with her." Um, yeah... you always go loaded for bear when you just want to talk.

According to the Orlando Sentinal, these are likely "the first-ever felony charges filed on an active-duty astronaut."

Weird indeed. But what's the Utah connection, you're wondering? Well, as it happens, Nowak is a cousin of Tony Caputo, the owner of one of Salt Lake's most popular eateries and a bit of a local celebrity in his own right. I imagine he's screening his phone calls today...

You know, this whole blogging thing really amazes me sometimes. I've got no illusions about the size of my audience here; I'm an absolute small-timer writing only for friends and family, and I'm not entirely kidding when I talk about having only three Loyal Readers. Still, I've got a presence out there in the world because of this silly blog, and connections are being made because of it, tiny audience or no.

For example, a few weeks ago I was contacted by a total stranger named Anna Biller . She's an LA filmmaker who had a movie that was going to be running here in The SLC as part of TromaDance, one of several renegade film festivals that run concurrently with Robert Redford's big Sundance event. Anna was looking for information about Brewvies, the venue where her film would be playing, and Simple Tricks popped up in her googling because I've mentioned the place in a couple of entries. We ended up having quite a nice conversation via e-mail; regretfully, I wasn't able to take her up on her invitation to meet her in person. But still, a connection was made that never would've happened only a few years ago, before this technology and this blogging phenemenon came along.

And then there's the strange story of Chenopup and Brian Greenberg. You may recall that these two guys, regular commenters here on Simple Tricks, got into a debate over whether a local Salt Lake pizzeria could produce a pie that would be equal to what you find in New York. The Great Simple Tricks Pizza Challenge never did materialize, but Cheno was in New York on business recently, and, well... I'll let Brian tell tell the rest.

Simple Tricks and Nonsense... it's both a blog, and a social networking tool! Next up, I'll be introducing floor-wax functionality, too...

I've just been reading about a massive new development project that's planned for Lehi, Utah, a town just south of where I grew up, in the next valley over. Up until a few years ago, Lehi was a bucolic farming community where the largest structure of any kind was the old roller mill where Kevin Bacon and his friends staged their high-school dance in the movie Footloose. I used to love driving down that way in my big Ford Galaxie, past the sweet-smelling fields along narrow two-lane (and in some cases, one-lane) roads that were so infrequently travelled that no one had bothered to maintain the lane stripes.

As with so many of the places I knew as a teenager and young adult, however, that Lehi is gone forever. Nowadays Lehi is another anonymous suburban wasteland with some of the most congested traffic conditions along the Wasatch Front (the result of a whole bunch of new residents trying to get to work along those narrow old roads), and it's about to get worse. The planned development is described as an "85-acre 'high-adventure' residential and retail development" that will include the tallest building in Utah, a 450-foot, five-star hotel and convention center. I have no idea what a "high-adventure" residential and retail development is supposed to be, and I can't imagine a less likely place to plant a skyscraper than the wind-swept bluff that divides the Salt Lake Valley from Utah Valley, but here's the really agonizing part: this entire project is being designed by none other than Frank Gehry.

If you've been hanging around this place for any length of time, you've probably got a pretty good handle on my tastes in entertainment. I like pulp adventures, science fiction movies, superhero comics, horror novels, and British comedy. In the simplest possible terms, I'm a geek. But aside from the social stigma of daring to like such things, what is the connection between them? Why is the core appeal of all these various genres?

A blogger named John Seavey has a pretty good idea:

Ah, man, here's another one: the writer Sidney Sheldon died Tuesday, aged 89. I've never read any of his novels, but I Dream of Jeannie, the ridiculous sitcom he created back in the 1965, has always been a favorite of mine. Growing up, it was part of my afternoon block of "must-see" syndicated re-runs, which also included (on a rotating basis over the years) Gilligan's Island, The Brady Bunch, Hogan's Heroes, Bewitched (that other sitcom about a hot blonde with magical powers), Get Smart, Laugh In, and, of course, Star Trek. As a little kid, I grooved on the slapstick of whatever trouble Majors Nelson and Healey got themselves into. When I got a little older, my interest in Jeannie became a little more, ahem, adult in nature. Let's just say that, If nothing else, Sheldon deserves our respect for bringing us the sight of Barbara Eden in diaphanous pants.

Ah, the glories of a misspent youth...

Here's a joke I just received from The Girlfriend's dad that I thought was pretty funnny:

I just learned from Scalzi that the columnist Molly Ivins has died. According to her obit, it was breast cancer and she was 62, about the same age as my mom.

This is really shaping up to be a crappy day.

I've just been reading about the guerilla marketing campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force that went horribly wrong yesterday, and I honestly can't decide who is more foolish: the marketers who didn't stop to consider the ultra-paranoid times in which we live before they started planting mysterious devices all over urban settings, or the ultra-paranoid public who apparently believe that al-Qaeda has started decorating its bombs with blinking LED cartoon characters.

I really hate the 21st Century sometimes...