October 2003 Archives
A review of the Alien rerelease reminds me of an idiot roommate (I'll just call him IR) I had in college. At the time (late '80s), the sequel Aliens was one of my favorite movies. (As one of the finest movie sequels ever made, it's still up there.) The first time Aliens was shown on broadcast television, I was watching it in my dorm room; IR was watching, too, with his usual vacant, slack-jawed demeanor (the most bovine expression I've ever seen on a human face). Not too far into the movie, the Colonial Marines come across a live colonist trapped in alien webbing, just in time for the "chest-burster" to hatch from the colonist's body.
At this point, IR appears to wake from his customary stupor and utter, "Aww! That's just like Spaceballs!"
I don't think IR ever understood why I spent the next several minutes helpless with laughter.
As I've mentioned before, my favorite sports columnist is Gregg "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" Easterbrook. He wrote a football column, first for Slate, then for ESPN, that was entertaining and thoughtful enough to draw my attention to the strategic aspects of the game, and finally turn me into a football fan. (Go Rams!)
A couple of weeks ago, he made a self-destructively stupid post to his weblog on another site entirely, and a huge furor erupted in the media / weblog world. Despite an apology, he was summarily fired from ESPN. I was going to go off on my own rant about the matter, but I never got very far with it, and it has been discussed to death elsewhere. (I even found myself reading *shudder* punditarian sites in my attempts to follow the story. Hopefully, I'm cured of that now.) I've had at least one comment wondering about what was going to happen to the TMQ column; fortunately, Easterbrook himself has resurfaced with a few remarks on the incident and the future of TMQ.
Supposedly, Apple will announce the latest upgrades and accessories for its iPod digital music player. The new peripherals are rumored to include one add-on that might make me look at the iPod as a useful tool rather than just an overpriced toy. A flash card reader would allow digital photographers to dump their camera's cards to the ultra-portable iPod's hard drive in the field. However, it is Apple, so I won't be too surprised if their reader only supports some uncommonly-used memory chip format instead of the prevalent Compact Flash. [via Gizmodo, as usual]
Update: Looks like the iPod Media Reader will support all the usual suspects (Compact Flash, SD / MMC, Smart Media, Memory Stick) of today's digital camera market after all. At a price worthy of Steve Jobs's ego, of course.
I went to see Kill Bill this past weekend; I liked it, and you might, too, if you don't object to buckets of blood and lots of senseless violence.
What really interested me, though, was learning that an Aubrey and Maturin movie is coming out in just a month. I'd heard about Patrick O'Brian's series of novels of the British Navy for years, but I'd just started reading the first book in the series. The book is really good so far, and judging by the trailer, the movie looks pretty amazing. I'll probably wait until Thanksgiving to see it, though, since this looks like a good flick to drag my dad along to watch.
Japanese scientists have developed prototype robots capable of performing martial marts moves. All they need to do now is scale them up to fifteen meters or so...
No owrd yet on their progress on getting these robots to leap into the air and combine into a bigger robot. [via Gizmodo]Visitors to CEATEC 2003 (Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies) met Morph3, a human-like robot about 30-centimetres tall developed by researchers at the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan. It can perform back flips and karate moves thanks to 138 pressure sensors, 30 different onboard motors and 14 computer processors.
Another miniature humanoid robot on display was Fujitsu's HOAP-2. This droid has been programmed to perform moves from the Chinese martial art taijiquan, as well as Japanese Sumo wrestling stances.
From all I can tell, UPN's new series Rock Me Baby is ye another undifferentiable chunk of sitcom crap. From every single commercial I've seen, it can't possibly be any good -- we're talking fart-lighting territory, folks. However, it appears that the Violent Femmes have somehow allowed themselves to be roped into appearing on the next episode. Furthermore, they'll be playing their version of the late Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire".
On one hand: Soul- and intellect-crushing pseudo-comedy. On the other: Great band, great song.
If I TiVo it, and skip past the "funny" (by UPN standards) bits and just watch the Femmes' performance, I can't lose that many brain cells, right?
Right?
