Dogs: 1, Sparrow: 0

A couple of nights ago on our walk Saratoga ran to the edge of one of the condo buildings and I could see a dark shape up against the wall, it was probably a little smaller than a baseball. She turned around and I see the feet & head of a small sparrow sticking out of her mouth as she held the body gently. I told her to drop it and put a little pressure on her jaws to help out. I saw the legs twitch but I don’t know if it was just a nervous system reaction or if it was still alive.

Sara was a good girl and released the bird but as it fell out of her mouth Jackson came running in and grabbed it by the tailfeathers and swung it into his mouth! He has a big problem dropping anything remotely edible and has very strong jaws so I had to just let him keep it. He took a few chomps & gulps and then the sparrow was gone. So far we haven’t seen any ill effects but I’m wondering if the beak & feet will digest enough before they come out. (Ewww.)

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Fun with RiffTrax

I ran across RiffTrax from a banner ad on Something Awful of all places. It’s Mike Nelson from MST3K who has recorded MP3 commentaries (lots of them with Kevin Murphy aka Tom Servo and Bill Corbett aka Crow). You buy the MP3 for about three or four bucks and listen to it while watching the DVD of the movie so it’s just like MST3K but without the robot silhouettes at the bottom.

It looks like he has over 40 titles already, some of them good SciFi (Fellowship of the Ring, The Matrix, The Grudge etc.) and some real stinkers (Point Break, Cocktail, Glitter). I think I may have to try one this weekend. The only drawback is that the truly funny ones are usually the crappiest movies and I hate to spend money on even renting them; I should try to find some crappy used copies on Half.com or something.

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NASA Photos

A friend at work sent me this link to some nice NASA photos from the shuttle Endeavour, no idea what the source is though. I swear the third one looks like a model though.

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Churchill dropped from English curriculum

Not Their Finest Hour is an interesting read on the state of education in England, albeit with a conservative American bias. I stumbled across the article while doing a search for the etymology of the phrase “can’t win for losing” (don’t ask, Google sometimes takes you on weird tangents). I guess the bias is expected when the site is named The American Spectator.

Basically dropping Winston Churchill from the list of required historical figures to study in middle school is but one of many radical changes made recently. The source article is from the Daily Mail in the UK and is a more informative read I think. Below is the opening paragraph which hints at how far-reaching the changes are.

Secondary schools will strip back the traditional curriculum in favour of lessons on debt management, the environment and healthy eating, ministers revealed.

The original site where I found a link to the AS story was at LisaFab. The two articles that I happened to click on (the other was here about the new Pope’s writings about Jesus) are just links to American Spectator stories. In the spirit of researching before making a statement I clicked on several other links and all five were pointed at AS articles. I figured that this was either a shill site run by AS to direct more traffic to their site or Lisa is a hard-core right-wing conservative. A quick read of her bio page shows that must be the latter:

Lisa Fabrizio is a freelance writer who lives in the People’s Republic of Connecticut. She is a proud conservative whose aim is to recapture the public from the all-consuming fog of liberalism which seizes them early in school and pervades almost all aspects of their lives.

Now I know I link to lots of stories from here but they are from all over the place, not just a single site. I also try to provide at least a modicum of my own thoughts into my posts (although this one has more than other recent posts have).

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So long, and thanks for all the Fish(man)

Hal Fishman passed away at age 75 today, just one week after being diagnosed with colon cancer. While I didn’t watch him all that often I always stopped channel surfing if he came on. I knew he was the model for Kent Brockman on the Simpsons but didn’t realize that he had also done several movies. He even has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He even played himself in half a dozen films (sadly there were choice picks like Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles and Joe Dirt).

Article from the LA Times: KTLA anchor Hal Fishman was old school, in a good way

Hal Fishman

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Terry Jones’ take on the Scooter Libby sentence

This was a great satirical article by Terry Jones (yes, from Python) about Bush commuting Scooter Libby’s sentence.

Article here on the Guardian Unlimited
.

Here’s a nice quote from the middle of the article:

Mind you, Bush’s softening of heart can only have happened in very recent days. A couple of weeks ago, in an eerily similar case, Victor Rita was, like Libby, convicted of perjury, making false statements to federal agents, and obstruction of justice. Like Scooter, Rita has an unblemished record of public service – 25 years in the armed forces with 35 commendations, awards and medals – and yet he was handed a 33-month jail sentence without even a message of condolence from the president.

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MS throws a billion dollars at the 360

This story at Financial Times says that Microsoft will write off $1 billion on extending the warranty to three years due to hardware errors on the XBox 360.

The estimated pre-tax charge of between $1.05bn-$1.15bn would cover extended warranties for 11.6m machines that have already been sold, as well as nearly 2m more that have been made but not yet sold, the company said.

I thought this was an interesting note as well:

The charge will add to sizeable losses that Microsoft has suffered in its efforts to break into the video game business. Its digital entertainment division, which is based largely on the Xbox business, has registered losses of more than $4bn since the first version of the games console was launched.

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Robot Chicken: Star Wars

As if Robot Chicken weren’t funny enough already there’s a 22 minute Star Wars homage up on Super Deluxe.

Here’s the RC:SW page with a link to the full video and extra stuff like wallpaper.

You can find the video here on Super Deluxe also.

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Damn you Desktop Tower Defense!

Somebody recently turned me on to Desktop Tower Defense at Hand Drawn Games and now I’m addicted. It’s one of those “simple enough to learn but hard to master” games. It’s one of the best Flash-based games I’ve played and it allows you to submit your scores and has a team feature so I can track myself against my buddies. I’m actually playing this more than I’m playing my store-bought games right now.

DTD is a puzzle/strategy game where you add defense pieces (guns) to the board to ward off waves of attackers. You start off with a small amount of money and gain more as you kill off attackers. They come in one side of the board and try to exit the other side. Your goal is to create a maze for them to follow so they’re exposed to your guns for as long as possible. You can also spend money to upgrade your guns.

Desktop Tower Defense sample board

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Pessimists

A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists

That was Don Marquis’ response to the classic half full/half empty glass description of optimists and pessimists.

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Historical quote of the day: Taxation

From the Old Farmer’s Almanac:

If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation.

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Terry’s quote of the day: Proactive

Here’s Terry’s memorable (if obvious) quote of the day:

Proactive is proactive until it is reactive.

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Holy download speed!

It’s been a while since I did a speed test at DSL Reports and I was happy to see just over 6Mb to Los Angeles but surprised to see this to Palo Alto:

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And another thing: stealing Asian movies & TV

I almost forgot, why do American studios have to rip off good Asian material? For instance, we recently saw The Eye in its original Mandarin with subtitles and it was great! Now I hear that someone in the States is going to remake it, probably so that they can put some cute blonde in the main role (like they did with The Grudge). If you don’t like subtitles, get over it. There’s a lot of creative people out there in non-English speaking parts of the world.

Another thing that chaps my hide is the crappy American college kid episode of MXC that was made a couple of years ago. MXC is basically the 80’s Japanese game show Takeshi’s Castle overdubbed with hilarious English dialog. Great show, I love watching it. However some studio genius figured that they could make money by filming dumb college kids doing the same events but with McDonald’s logos on all their helmets. Man, that was one piss poor episode.

This reminds me of the fact that I loved watching shows like Speed Racer, Starblazers, Battle of the Planets and the one where there were five teenage characters that wore bird-shaped helmets (and for the life of me I can’t remember the title right now) when I was a kid. At the time I could tell that the characters’ mouths weren’t quite in sync with the English dialog but that didn’t bother me at all. It wasn’t until long after that I found out they were actually Japanese cartoons with English overdubs. While that worked great for cartoons it wouldn’t work for live-action and I’m sure I would have hated subtitles at that age.

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Yeah, well why don’t you come up with an original movie idea?

After reading my previous post some folks might say to me “Yeah, well why don’t you come up with an original movie idea?” Guess what, I can’t! That’s right, I really don’t have a creative bone in my body. I can’t draw for crap, I can’t write fiction (unless you count the sorry little two-page D&D based wizard story I wrote in 7th grade). Hell, I can’t even do anything in Photoshop, a registered trademark of Adobe (I don’t want to get sued you know) except retouch photos and make crappy image macros to post on message boards.

Does any of that really matter though? Of course not. I know what I like and I sure as shit know what I don’t like and I don’t like the movies I ripped on earlier. I wish we got the some of those obscure cable movie channels like the Independent Film Channel or the Sundance Channel so I could see movie that aren’t mainstream without having to wade through the video store aisles or browse Netflix.

Of  course I don’t want to have to mess with my easy cable-into-ReplayTV setup that I have now by getting digital cable, and I’m cheap. I really don’t want to have to mess with my channels going through a set-top box before they get to my ReplayTV but if we ever go to HD (and I know we will eventually) I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

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