The other day Bart sent me a link to the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics site. I had actually seen that site many years ago, but I’m happy to see that they’ve added some new reviews. Including Star Wars Episode III. Clouds of chaff-like black smoke in outer space! Missiles that turn into little chewy bitey robots! Healthy young (non-smoking, non-drinking) women who die in the delivery room of… a broken heart! What’s not to like?

Anyway it was really thoughtful of Bart to point me to that site, but don’t worry, I’m not running out of things to post about. There’s always something. For example — lunch! See, the other day I got a plate of Mexican food at the cafeteria, and I carefully arranged all the different foods around the plate: rice, beans, chicken, salsa, guacamole, etc. Now obviously you want to eat them all together, so why not mix them all together at the start? Rookie move! What you should do is keep all the items separate so that you can mix them in the center as needed. This keeps the cool and hot items from mixing too early, plus if you get the proportions slightly off (too much sour cream? not enough rice?) you can easily correct that in the next mouthful.

As you can see, I am pretty awesome at lunch. With practice, you can be too.

Next week, pictures of my cats!**

** I don’t actually own any cats.

I had a cold well over a week ago. The cold is gone, but I still have this lingering tickle in my throat. It’s making me cough constantly — the kind of cough that if I were in a movie or play would mean that I would be totally dead by Act 5. It does have a sort of cool death-rattle quality that’s good for freaking out my coworkers, at least. But I wish it would stop now.

Gotta say, between this cough and catching the flu earlier this winter (for the first time in over a decade), my immune system is really falling down on the job. This worries me a bit, since a kick-ass immune system is part of my genetic heritage. Honestly, I figure it’s pretty much all the Prehistoric Goers had going for us. Obviously we weren’t particularly big or strong or fierce, so we couldn’t bash Ogg’s head in with a club and carry off Ogg’s wife. But we could wait for Ogg to drop dead from disease! Woo-hoo!

Anyway, while I’m calculating how much cheap knock-off Benedryl to take so that I can actually get an hour or two consecutive hours of sleep, here are a few quick links for your reading pleasure:

• Robert J. Sawyer is interviewed on Ficlets. He sure has won a lot of awards!

• It’s Raining Evans: Seriously, first there’s Evan Almighty starring a self-righteous Congressman named Evan. Then there’s Superbad starring the awesomely talented Michael Cera as a hopeless nerd named Evan. And if that’s not enough, Sam managed to find this D&D themed webcomic. Hmmm. I’d like to think that “Evan” is going to be the hip new baby name someday, but I don’t think this is our year.

• Finally, Matt Feeney of Slate Magazine asks, “If you like ‘300’, are you gay?” The answer, Mr. Feeney, is yes. This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Silly Questions.

Remember those giant communist spiders I was worried about? Okay, I haven’t, like, done a scientific study or anything… but it seems to me that as the summer draws to a close, there are definitely fewer communist spiders, but the ones that remain are larger and fatter and just plain wickeder than ever.

Nature frightens me.

In other, related scary Nature news, my cousin Auros points out this NY Times article about arthropod sexual cannibalism. As my cousin put it, “Well, when het marriage involves having your innards literally liquified and sucked out of your body, the gay agenda starts to sound rather appealing.” Hmmm. Somewhere there’s an old-school vaudeville-style joke about alimony or something in there… but I’m just not in touch enough with my inner Shecky Greene to make it happen. Hey, look, I’m a lamp! Take my wife, please! Eh.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fancy-schmancy audiophile by any means. But I have concluded that even for my very very low standards for casual office music listening, $4.99 headphones do not cut the mustard.

Of course, once you get above the $15 range, headphones come with a dizzying array of specifications for impedance, noise cancellation, frequency response, you name it. I thought I left all that nonsense behind when I took my last systems engineering class.^[1] Cutting through all the technobabble, the only real question about headphones is: do I want to look like a refugee from the 70s, or do I want to jam small plastic objects deep into my ear canal? Choices, choices.

BONUS Lesson Learned: Just because a book has time travel, and dinosaurs, and interplanetary warfare, and Martians does not mean that it will end up being any good.^[3] My friend told me this before I borrowed the book, but I ignored his warning. Serves me right.

1. In retrospect, my parting words to the fine, hard working members of the Engineering department were ill-advised. Of course, I wasn’t serious; I mean, I don’t even have the power to damn someone’s progeny unto the seventh generation^[2], and even if I did, it all seems excessive. Nowadays I’d say, second generation at best.

2. That authority rests with Pat Robertson.

3. Of course I’m sure there are people out there thinking, “A book with time travel, dinosaurs, interplanetary warfare, and Martians — that sounds like the dictionary definition of a horrible book!” Just another painful reminder to the rest of us: if you are in fact dead inside, you really can’t be helped.

Well, it’s been a couple of weeks since my last post. What have I missed?

• Bulwer-Lytton 2004 is out. Get it while it’s hot.

• Anne van Kesteren is back from vacation, and he is on fire. What’s the deal with XHTML? Does XHTML really save bandwidth over HTML? Day by day, bit by little bit, we all edge closer to markup sanity.

• Meanwhile, Jacques is back too, and he seems rather underwhelmed by all the hype over the Stephen Hawking’s now famous black hole information loss wager. After all, as Jacques reminds us, “Anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the past 6 years knows that quantum gravity in asymptotically anti-de Sitter space has unitary time evolution.” Actually, what I find even more interesting is the fact that Jacques’s post is titled, “No Information Lost Here!”, and is sitting at the URL http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000404.html. Coincidence?? I think no– oh, heck, it’s probably a coincidence.

• The World of Warcraft Beta developers are hard at work, furiously redesigning the in-game auction houses. Seems like they’re spending a lot of time on this, particularly since someone else has already done most of the design grunt work for them.

• In other MMORPG news, City of Heroes has implemented capes. What I really like about this is that they tried to fold this into the story. It’s not that the developers didn’t quite get capes working in time for the release — no, no, no, it’s because all the heroes had been in mourning over one of their fallen comrades. Nicely done! Although come to think of it, why didn’t Sony ever try this with Everquest? For example, rangers sucked for the first three-and-a-half years of the game not because of a development problem, but because they were all in mourning. They were all holding back, see?

• Well, forget all these fancy-schmantzy MMORPGs. I’m holding out for Peasant’s Quest.

• Finally, via Russ, I found out that fellow ’97 HMC alum Joe Beda is a development lead on Microsoft’s Avalon team. Right on, Joe! For the record, I’m not even a little bit jealous of Joe’s incredibly important and prestigious job. Although that’s probably because I can take comfort in the fact that I still have all my hair.

• There sure are a lot of good-looking girls at the beach in LA. Hey, I’m just sayin’.

• More fun than a rampaging pack of Zebranskys! The best game ever packed into 11 megabytes is now available as a free download for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Cinematics are broken, pretty much everything else works great. God bless open source.^[1]

• Rummaging through the iTunes Music store is just way too much fun. Anyone remember Shriekback? I do.

  Just don’t browse iTunes while tipsy, or you might end up buying more cheesy music than is safe for human consumption. Ah-WHOA! I just died in your arms tonight! Damnit.

• Dynegy crook treated unfairly! Actually, the article is really about the unfairness of minimum mandatory sentencing. Still, it is puzzling that the crook in question is described as a “middle-level manager” (he was a VP) who “did not personally profit from his crime” (umm, no).

  You know… I like to think that Evil is nuanced. Real villains aren’t cartoon characters. A book that has the bad guys sitting around and cackling about how evil they are can be immediately discounted as hokey and unrealistic. Right? So why can’t real-life bad guys live up to literary standards?

• It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. Words to live by, especially when your company softball team is coming off a season-opening 17-1 loss.^[2]

1. For more time-wasting pleasure, there’s a remake of the classic Avalon Hill boardgame Titan. God bless open source and Java.

2. Unfortunately we can’t use “Wait ’till next year!” for at least a couple of months.

I predict that come this Fall, Madison Square Garden will be completely submerged in gooey “Win one for the Gipper” syrup.

Also, there will be clog-dancing.

I don’t think I’ll ever grow up.

• The World’s Only Ass-Kicking Machine. From the technical discussion: “At this throughput, it could be possible to kick the ass of everyone in the United States of America in 34 days, 17 hours, 40 minutes.” Bear in mind, that’s something of a theoretical estimate.

• So what else kicks ass? Well, Military jokes kick ass. At least they kick more ass than technical writer jokes, which are few and far between.

• Which song kicks the most ass? Nick, a GUY WHO LIKES MUSIC, has a complete list of music that kicks ass. Personally, my vote goes to Moxy Früvous’s^[1] “Kick in the Ass“, but hey, I’m partial to fruity music like that.

• Okay, but on the whole, who really kicks ass? Microsoft says… Kelly Osbourne kicks ass. Ehhh. Teoma says ninjas kick ass. Yahoo says the ass-kicking machine kicks ass. And Google? Google says that Canada kicks ass (!!) That’s the last straw, Google. Never darken my door again.

1. Note bene: bands with umlauts in their names kick, on average, 38% more ass than bands without umlauts.

Just a little flotsam and jetsam from my /tmp bookmarks folder. Some of this stuff has been sitting around for months. Phew.

• While you were sitting around eating nachos and scouring the web for Return of the King spoilers,^[1] Jacques Distler has been busy exporting his 21st-century, MathML-enabled, bulletproof XHTML weblog to his academic colleagues. My goodness, I think someone’s going to find a real honest-to-God use for this XHTML stuff one of these days.

• The fabulous brunching.com is dead, but at least the Self-Made Critic lives on. It’s not every movie critic who has to deal with flame emails on web standards… fortunately, he’s hired a cranky Russian named Boris to handle his Inbox.

  [Reader Jonathan]: So, Boris, tell me: is the horrible scroll bar an evil Communist plot to annoy the hell out of SMC readers or what? Are our capitalist browser scroll bars not good enough for you people over at selfmadecritic.com, to make you implement your own mouse-over-driven scroll bar? For God’s sake, at least make it trigger on mouse click instead of mouse over so we don’t have to do a little cursor dance over the button.

  BORIS: Quiet, Dog! Or I unleash BLINK tag!

  Ah, Boris. A man after my own heart.

• I’ve managed to bully Dave Shea into providing a (temporary?) RSS feed for “The Dailies”, http://www.mezzoblue.com/rss/2.0/dailies/. Sweet. Between Siliconvalley.com, Dave’s “The Dailies” and Mark’s b-links, I’ve got all the tech/geek info a growing boy needs.

• Having problems with your cable service? Fuzzy TV signal? Cable modem losing sync? Well, don’t just stand there cursing your own rotten luck… you might actually be the victim of a conspiracy. A crude, bumbling, beer-soaked conspiracy, but a conspiracy nonetheless:

  Take that, nitwit neighbor fratboys. The lesson, I think, is that you’re less likely to be caught hijacking cable service using high-quality parts.

• Let’s not forget Silence of the Lambs, The Musical! If you can’t empathize with poor, lonely Buffalo Bill as he sings about how hard it is to find that special someone (“I want a girl who will fit me to a T / a woman who’ll look good on meee…”), then I say you’ve got a heart of stone.

• Finally, because it’s there: The Runcible Spoon Society.

1. Gollum bites off Frodo’s finger, falls into lake of fire with the ring, The End. Oh, and Dernhelm is a chick!

Today’s linkdump is brought to you by Simon Willison. Simon, now my list of links links to your list of lists of links.

• Wilcox High School sacrifices its football season on principle. “He said, flat out, a rule was broken and even though it’s not our fault we’d have to pay the consequences,” senior captain Anthony Reyes said of [Coach] Freitas’ address to the team. “It broke my heart. I’ve been waiting for this for four years. We were on top of everything, and it all got swept away.”

  I agree, it truly is heartbreaking. But at the end of the day, this is a time to be more proud of our alma mater than ever.

• History of FrameMaker. I had no idea that Sun Microsystems had such a significant role in FrameMaker’s early history. Incidentally, reliable sources report that Sun has dropped internal support for FrameMaker on Solaris and is forcing its tech writers to move to StarOffice. Speaking for all my fellow tech writers, I think this is a fabulous idea. Now Sun will need twice the number of writers to accomplish the same amount of work. Ladies and gentlemen, send in those resumes!

• The Wingnut Debate Dictionary. Cute, but I like the Devil’s Dictionary 2.0 a bit better.

• The RCA SelectaVision VideoDisc Web Site. My family rarely makes good technology choices. Case in point: the RCA VideoDisc player. Back in the day, you had two choices for watching movies at home: videotapes, and videodiscs (not to be confused with another dead technology, laser discs). Videodiscs had a number of disadvantages. They were far bulkier than tapes. You couldn’t record on them. They held less than an hour of material per side, which meant that halfway through the movie, you’d have to get up and flip the disk.^[1](This was back before the days of the remote control, so we didn’t mind so much.) The VideoDisc player’s main advantage was that it cost about a third of what a video tape player did. Unfortunately that cost advantage evaporated in a few short years, and with it, the VideoDisk player market. I should note that my family did clean up when all the video stores started dumping their discs for $1-2 a piece. My folks still have the player, and for all I know it still works. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad investment after all.

• Analysis of the Voyager Record (hat tip: my second cousin Andrew). How do you convince an alien race that they’re holding an artifact produced by another intelligent species? That Carl Sagan was one smart cookie. Plus he looked sharp in a turtleneck.

1. I remember that when I watched the Count of Monte Cristo, I accidentally started the movie on side 2 of disc 1. I spent most of the movie wondering, “Who is this mysterious Count of Monte Cristo? And why is he so pissed off?” I had completely skipped the whole Chateau D’If / Edmund Dantes part. Come to think of it, this might be the preferred way to see the Count of Monte Cristo.