Work Work Work
Work work work work work.
God Shot
“My God Shots are coming more and more often”: the God Shot, the Holy Grail of espresso geeks. (via adampsyche)
zoe, newsmonster
Geekin’: Poached from this comment and deserving of further attention are zoe, an attempt to make the Google of email; and newsmonster, apparently a mozilla-integrated aggregator with reputation-economy features. I haven’t gotten the latter working, which is too bad, but the former is equal parts confusion and oh-my-fucking-lord-that’s-cool future-tech impressiveness. There’s no documentation, which is itself kind of cool, but definitely adds to the confusion for someone like me. I’m not sure – I’m confused – but I think it makes almost everything in emails a hyperlink, it archives, you seem to be able to post to a weblog through mail.app, you can effectively thread email conversations, oh man… Unfortunately both apps are web interfaces, but fortunately both are cross-platform. Apparently zoe can integrate with mail.app and even NetNewsWire, but I haven’t really figured it out…
Pakistan, Columbia
Seymour Hersh interview about the trouble in Pakistan; US considers intervention in Columbia.
Coalition of the Filling
I have recently finished testing a new sandwich. Peameal bacon plus brie. Complete the taste sensation with tomatoes and mayo. It’s a model of Franco-Canuck collaboration, it’s a shining example to the rest of the world of what food groups can do when they act as a team.
My 12 Kicks
skop.com I Know Where Bruce Lee Lives: “interactive kung-fu remixer.” Kung fu, hiphop, & editing… like peanut butter, chocolate, and … deep, fruitless think
While I’m at it, possible follow-up songs to one-hit wonders. Both links pilfered from no-sword.
downshift
shift goes under. Hopefully not for the last time. What a shame.
Unmanned
Note that DARPA’s strategic plan calls for “filling the battlespace with unmanned systems that are networked with manned systems. The idea is not simply to replace people with machines, but to team people with robots.” DARPA would not comment on whether any of these machines would be made of liquid metal, or played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. (via the Reg)
Jazz Cuts
Nestled deep in an obscure part of Toronto’s “China-town” district is a salon entitled Jazz Cuts Hair Salon. What’s a jazz cut, you might ask? The Commitments sprang to mind, with the character who goes all jazz and wigs out everyone else — wigs, that was unintentioned — but is that the only possible jazz haircut? Could I go in and ask for Marsalis in the front, free jazz in the back? Internet, of course, has its own answer: “JAZZ has solved the top four concerns of hair replacement clients” which, I’ll take a guess, are: 1. I would like an unintelligible melody. 2. Please make me not bald any more. 3. Give me a history lesson in the co-optation of black popular music by paunchy middle-aged white elitists. 4. Please, please, give me hair, give me sweet, sweet, jazzy hair.
RIP Skeleton Warrior
Everyone’s mourning the passing of Skeleton Warrior, and you may be wondering why I have yet to mention it. Truth be told, my memories of the bastard are far from fond. Some of you may know I was once Head of Development for Disney, even though it’s not true. So I guess you could say his lesser-known “Disney years” colour my thoughts about him. Sort of a pukish green colour.
By the late 80s we all knew Skeleton Warrior was a ticking time bomb of drugs, booze, and spontaneous stabbings, but hell, so was Alan Menken, right? SW was still a box office dynamo, so we wanted him bad, but the only way we could get him was a 3 picture deal. So we pencilled him in to appear in The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and a little picture that never got released: Skeletons in the Closet.
SW nearly wrecked The Little Mermaid in more ways than one. I convinced Clements and Musker to write a part in for him, and they were gracious enough to oblige. He played a sunken corpse named Barry who befriends the ‘maid and provides some much-needed comic relief. I don’t think we was sober once during the whole shoot, but the bigger problem was that he couldn’t stay out of the mermaid’s trailer. The last thing we needed was our prize fish-girl snorting blow off SW’s yellowed sternum, so we fired him and wrote him out of the movie.
We took him off that picture so quickly, in fact, that we never discovered he couldn’t sing. Of course he and his shithead agent would have you believe he taught Pavarotti everything he knows, but boy was that a heap of bull. I guess the lack of larynx and vocal cords don’t do anything for the voice. Sounded like one thousand gale-force hell-winds squeezing through a Smurf’s asshole. So that pretty much wrecked Aladdin, and we had to replace Warrior with Robin Williams. (I hear this happened with Good Morning Vietnam, too, but that’s none of my business.)
I still thought we could get a film out of him, and I knew he’d be perfect as the lead in a great little picture I was shepherding: Skeletons in the Closet. It was a tragicomedy about dead gay skeletons — wait, I guess that’s redundant — not to say that all skeletons are gay — or gays are dead — oh never mind — gay skeletons living in Batman’s closet. Obvious, sure, but hey, this is Disney. We had a copro deal with Warner, we had Jerry Garcia doing the score, we had Walken as the other skeleton, we had Spiderman playing Batman — the real Spiderman! — and more important than anything, we had a heaping helping of all the box office food groups. The theatres would be packed with kids, gays, hippies, and skeletons. But thinking outside the box office, even: the picture was about something.. Not more junk about mermaids and genies, this was a picture about real people. Well, real skeletons. Okay, fake skeletons. but you get the idea.
It pains me to say it but SW turned in a mindblowing performance. We’re talking Oscar, babe. Move over, Brando. Move over, Olivier. Once we got him to lay off the swears, that sack of bones could act! This was a great actor in his greatest part yet.
But it was not to be. Little did I know it, but I was on the outs with the Mouse. They had had enough with the last two SW cockups (and that crime-solving animal porn I tried to make on their dime, but that’s another story) and they knew the picture was a throwaway before the cameras started to roll. It’s in a vault somewhere, somewhere deep in the secret Disney subterranean lair, underneath the Disney slave labour pens and the cloning vats and Eisner’s mind-control machinery. It’s there, a lost gem. Skeleton Warrior never recovered. All the worst stories happened after this, the drunken death racing, the streaking. And I’ve always associated him with that failure. Even though the failure, truly, was my own.
Firebrand
Senator rails against “administration”: Reckless Administration May Reap Disastrous Consequences. When I saw this on Blogdex (eep! culling links from blogdex, what a shithead!) I assumed it was about some geeked up Microsoft server hole, but how wrong I was. Maybe the mind-control rays are wearing off and the Dems are waking up. (He must be a Dem, right?)
Collective Detective
Collective Detective – “Home of the smartest, most adaptable puzzle solving, code cracking, heuristic thinking system on the planet.” Article about them. Fuck a puzzle: who’s up for forming a secretive online cabal of braniacs hellbent on world domination?
Oscars
Fly Ride Parable
So I’m all up in dude’s car and he’s like, “damn! my ride is dope!” Fo shizzy, I say, so open it up. He’s all like “hot shit this is the dopest ride! This shit is fucking new-school, I’m waaay up in this shit!” Spot on, I say, so let’s go. “Welcome to my world, bitch! You on the avant-garde now, sucka! You rollin’ with that new shit! Look what I can do! Look at me, mothafucka! Look at me mothafuckin’ go in my way-out new school ride!” That’s great, I say. We’re sitting in fucking park here, dude. Shuts up, already!
Thus those of us with weblogs should refrain from addressing their majesty too frequently.
Tap That Ass
The course of our lovemaking
Does not depend
On the decisions of
Others
So I shall
Tap, Tap
Tap that ass
– State of the Union-inspired erotic poetry.
I'm starving
From kuro5hin: everything you ever wanted to know about poutine.
See Right Through Me
Oh My Gentle Jesus
Like Milli Vanilli, something one’s mind should never be exposed to: the most disgustingest story ever told. Seriously, don’t read this. (via Brittney)
Zoooooom
Macro-micro, man! All the way in – all the way out!
I Cast Thee Out!
“So what are you doing back?”
“Well, I set back and thought about the days we used to do.
It really mean a lot to me, you mean a lot to me.”
“I really mean that much to you?”
“Girl, you know it’s true.”
25th Hour
Maybe this is the crazy talking but I’m going out on a limb and saying 25th Hour is one of the best films of the year. People are sleeping on Spike’s latest, possibly because some of its experimental passages have a polarizing effect and led to mixed reviews, possibly because none of its characters fights evil in tights.
Important point about it: first film to deal explicitly with the WTC attacks. One of the characters has a condo that overlooks Ground Zero and one scene plays out with the ruins in the background. But Lee makes the sadness and anger that accompanies the main character’s last day of freedom that of the US at large. Noticing that “fuck you” is written on a bathroom mirror, Monty’s reflection launches into a tirade of fuck yous, directed at every ethnicity and class in the microcosm of New York.
Another point: the utter lack of cliche. Summer of Sam was strong like that, too. In 25th Hour only the Russian mob characters remotely approach Hollywood convention – every other character has some idiosyncrasy that makes him unique. Monty especially is an atypical drug dealer to say the least.
Final point: the ending sequence. Some find it stupid, I found it devastating, and wondered why have I never seen anything like it before?
Dream Review #3
Ken Kutaragi, it turns out, fancies himself a director. He’s made a series of short films, and the might of Sony is behind him: they’ll be released as a feature-length group, worldwide, thousands of screens. He’s asked me for help with the scripts, which I can’t figure out. The films have already been shot, edited. They’re terrible. Most of them are mundane and slow-paced. Plus, they’re dubbed. One is called “The Baron and the Sausage”, but it’s an cheesy, uneventful portrait of a loving young couple… As I’m struggling with this assignment, I find myself in Google: the Building. The concept is clear, but the dream has trouble representing the specifics of such a thing: apparently a “search” for any physical thing reveals rooms filled with similar things, in different contexts. I stride purposefully through this architectural miracle, and then wake up.
This is one of the best dreams I’ve had in recent memory, even better than the one about the nuke going off. Two thumbs up! What it lacks in unity it makes up in depth and inventiveness. A man who has achieved great things, yet longs to make his name in another field, yet sucks in that field… Delicious tragedy. Thematically the dream is strong, it challenges me to find its meaning. Like Kutaragi’s films, the dream is finished but it is I who must find the story within it. What is the story behind Google: The Building, o great dream? Ah yes. I must search for it myself.
I give this dream four stars.
Ear Candling
at 0format: “Now that Im a professional ear candler, I have plenty of extra money to devote to my other interests, like leeches and sorcery.”
Woo Woo
Awesome thread from MeFi about annoying car whistles, featuring colourful spokesman Bubb Rubb.