Two words that belong together, Don't you think?

I AM LEGEND:

Failure. No stars at all. I was pleased by the promise of zombies and mad riotous fun. Instead I got an incredibly expensive-looking imitation of 28 days' cinematography, Will Smith with ever-more-apparent PTSD and developing schizophrenia, and the death of the dog. NO intriguing themes of humanity were explored, the violence was inadequate to justify the lack of any other redeeming features, and the flashbacks were not engaging enough to counterpoint the present-time reality and justify the amount of time you spent watching them.

Even the alternate ending on the DVD was just a sucker punch.

What The Fuck.
I was so mad.
This was supposed to be awesome :(

Some more gripes:( Read more... )
Anyhow, irate tirade about the movie at an end now.
No matter about my blustering, you know the biggest reason I am so mad is the fact that they killed the dog.

Anticlimactic and somewhat akin to having never interrupted my employment with six weeks of near-total misery, I was pleased to return to the realm of functioning adulthood yesterday. While I will miss the pseudo-freedom that allowed me to play with my dog, make hot pockets, and waste copious amounts of time on WoW, I cannot say I am displeased overmuch by the prospect of some time, a month from now or more, beginning to once again receive dollars with which to fund my nefarious schemes.

I have returned to a six-day work schedule again, but it is less arduous than some previous incarnations of that setup, since my Saturday will be a more slacker-compatible task than before, and two of my weekdays appear to be 3 hours long, and in the afternoon, meaning I don't even have to get up in the morning more than half of the time, a previously unknown delight in my working career.

Cheers

But I totally do anyway.

Our delightful Hillary made a bit of a boner, as well, when describing a visit she made to Bosnia in 1996.

The BBC article says...

She said: "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

The video clip played by CBS on Monday shows Mrs Clinton and Chelsea walking across the tarmac smiling and waving before stopping to shake hands with Bosnia's acting president and meet an eight-year-old girl.

Apparently the actual circumstances were that sniper fire on a nearby hill caused persons concerned with the safety of the entire group to cut the ceremonies a bit short, which is what she usually says about it.

Camp Hillary says: She misspoke ONE TIME about THAT ONE INCIDENT - oops!

Camp Obama says: Oh gee, exaggerating.. who'd have thought?

From The Washington Post comes this delightful tidbit:

"The U.S. Air Force mistakenly shipped fuses that are used in nuclear weapons to Taiwan in 2006, believing the crates contained helicopter batteries, officials at the Pentagon announced this morning.

The error -- undetected by the United States until last week, despite repeated inquiries by Taiwan -- raises questions about how carefully the Pentagon safeguards its weapons systems..."

The article goes on to explain exactly what parts were shipped to Taiwain, and how they were surplus nose-cone pieces for a 40 year old missile system and wouldn't work on anything else anyway, etc. Also, "The nose cones... were declared excess in March 2005 and shipped to a warehouse on an Air Force base in Wyoming, officials said. It is unclear whether they were placed in a classified storage area or how they were eventually mistaken for crates of batteries."

A probe is going to investigate why it took until THIS WEEK... for us to identify what Taiwan told us the minute they got the crates 2 years ago... "Hey, this aint what we ordered."

Facepalm, anyone?

from "WE THE ROBOTS"

hahah...ahhahhhaha..

(for more info read the corresponding newspost)

From the Washington Post comes a nice summary of criticisms about the resignation of poor Admiral Fallon.

The president claims to listen to his commanders, but apparently only if they agree with him. Bravo.

If this means we're going to wind up embroiled in Iran before the end of 2008, I have only two things to say:

WITH WHAT ARMY!?!
and
Fuckin A.

Here I am! Home from the Hospital after 11 days of blech and bother. Had to come home on oxygen, at least for now, as I have a partially collapsed lung still...

For those who didn't get the brief bulletins my 14 year old sister was supposed to hand out, I had surgical complications and have been having a tough time, but I'm home now! So horray!

typing is hard with on-screen keyboard... so no real commentary, just my plug.



More on the online Poker Cats Contest

Today my 17 pound cat-zilla (Teddy) tried to convince me he was starving.

He did this by bringing a 2 lb bag of rice to me, from the kitchen. In order to show it to me, he got it off the kitchen counter without making noise, drug it through 3 rooms of the house, and then sat down in the exact middle of the office with it and began to gnaw a hole in the bag.

After puncturing the bag, which I was laughing to hard to take away from him, he realized that rice is not delicious, and went back to bed.

Ra Ra Giants!

"The Road" by Cormac McCarthy:

A Pulitzer was awarded very badly in this case. McCarthy is trying so incredibly hard to be prize-worthy that he creates a monotonous gray-scale world with no depth or even the possibility of immersion or suspension of disbelief, tortures his nameless characters for a little while in endlessly repetitive vignettes of suffering, and then has the crassness to end on an inexcusable high note.

In the realm of post-apocalyptic fiction, this has to be one of the least inspiring or pleasing stabs at the subject I have ever encountered, and I am convinced it only won the prize because the committee mistakenly assumes that if they cannot fathom any rhyme or reason to a work, then it must be somehow their own inadequacy and not that of the story. Or the writing. Or everything about the characters, setting, and plot. All of which was completely, dreadfully blase.

The world has been destroyed, probably by nuclear bombs. This appears to have led to a nuclear winter, as well as the widespread burning up of essentially everything. All of humanity has sunk to the depths of horror and cannibalism, with the rare exceptions completely isolated, paranoid, and starving.

A man and his son, born in the wake of the initial disaster, attempt to journey southward to the coast, in search of some indefinable relief which they have absolutely no reason to expect finding. The story appears to be about the power of love between father and son. I think. Each is the others only reason for living.

It cannot be a social commentary because there is no society to comment on. It cannot be a warning fable about the horrors of nuclear war because that would be completely unoriginal, and the account of the aftermath is a complete waste of paper, being without any semblance of scientific follow-through (despite McCarthy's assertions in interview that he is a great lover of science.)

It's a journey. A journey where a father loves his son so deeply that... yep: he does not eat him. Also, he attempts to prevent others from eating him. Best of all, he is trying to find a way to save their lives, even though it doesn't seem likely to succeed. THAT is how much he loves his child.

At no point in the entire story does it seem as though the father figure displays anything but the most basic qualifications for parental adequacy, but the FOUR PAGES of accolades that preface the book rave on and on about how powerful a portrait of love he has painted, the deepest and most meaningful relationship he has ever written, apparently. I weep for his other works.

Last of all, the writing style is extremely obnoxious to any lover of language. McCarthy disdains sentences, and prefers to have only one or two in a paragraph if he can manage it. Instead, he puts periods at the ends of disconnected phrases. You might excuse it as writing in the voice of desperation of the weak, dying, harried, and exhausted main characters. I call it needlessly artsy-fartsy drivel created to mask the fact that if he wrote it in sentences it would have been hopelessly dull instead of just painful to read.

No stars. Very disappointing.

----------------------------------------------

"Escape" by Carlyn Jessop

Neat story about a woman's flight from the FLDS with her eight children. Straightforwardly written, literate account of the horrors of the fundamentalist polygamy sect in Colorado City, AZ. Once you start it, you can't put it down. While not what I would call a heartwarming or hugely inspiring story, it's a true one. The author does not attempt to aggrandize herself at any point, just tells it how it was, how much she hated it, and how she just barely managed to escape it.

Good read. Nice lady. Interesting for those of us who enjoy the study of modern cults, and a very nice psychological examination of the faith of true believers: how the come to believe, how they go about believing, and how they can keep believing even in the face of misery.

Three stars.

This is 34 minutes long, and takes forever to load, but I really enjoyed it.



Everything he says moves me. I think it was immediately after Bush announced the troop surge in early 07 that someone went to Obama for a response, which was aired on whatever station I was watching. I had never heard of him, had no idea who he was, but listening to him talk made me say out loud "This man needs to be president." I went and looked him up on Wikipedia as soon as he finished speaking. I read what little there was at the time, and that some folks were trying to pressure him into running for the white house. I read his policy, his older appearances, and I added my name to the petition.

It makes me crazy that I can't find the speech anywhere, because off-the-cuff, with no preparation or agenda, he made me want to be a part of this country again in just a few minutes remarks. For me this is the first candidate for anything, ever in my life, from president down to local school board, that makes me happy, proud, and motivated. He's the first I've seen get anywhere with what genuinely seems to be the motivation to do something which requires an office to accomplish, rather than the motivation to hold an office and the willingness to do what people want to get there.

This is one of my rare points of outright fanaticism. I don't even like to talk about it because I know I'm fanatic about him, and my never-ending quest to be moderate and well-reasoned makes me fear the label.

We have some strong contenders playing for president this year, and some of them really seem like they'd do a decent job.

This one is my favorite.

If you don't have the time, I have the full text of the prepared speech. It's not a transcript, and while he follows it fairly closely when he's following it, it only comprises about half of what he says in the video. You can read the prepared text ( here. )

Today I was able to sit down and watch a movie that I would never have bothered picking up, ever. This is a rare and unique opportunity for me, to watch something for which I have the absolute lowest possible expectations.

Thus, it is only natural that I should have been pleasantly surprised by a film which can actually boast some dramatic cinematography and interesting psychological portraits. The abandoned streets of London, vacant countryside, and general condition of everything seem to be well thought out, really. The "Zombies" were of course absurdly ill-conceived, but they didn't have to be particularly engaging to serve their purpose, which was to set up the psychoanalysis and human nature study played out by the uninfected cast.

A quick run-through for those who have never bothered to see the film: A mad virus makes everyone so full of rage that they go on psychotic killing sprees (apparently directly EXCLUSIVELY towards uninfected humans, and possibly small animals when hungry; no sign of them attacking one another.)

All of Britain is catastrophically infected by the rapidly spreading virus, which runs in blood and saliva, is thus mostly bite-transmissible. Within 4 weeks England is pretty much dead, and also in theory the rest of the world. A few survive, and even manage to bump into one another, then follow a faint radio signal to the promise of salvation in the north country.

Despite claiming the horror genre, "28 Days Later" manages to keep the truly awful business to a minimum, relying much more heavily on dread to make it roll. The horrors unleashed, when they happen to occur, seem secondary to the sheer weight of dread when contemplating what might occur. In the given zombie-apocalypse scenario, I find this almost artistic.

Compare it to "The Hills Have Eyes" wherein the badness is all about in-your-face horror. While you may have anxiety attacks between fits of blood and gore and grossness, your horror is developed by showing you disgusting things. In "28 Days Later" the horror is much more psychological, and thus nowhere near as repulsive as the average slasher. Also interesting is that the real depths of horror do not come from the Zombies at all, but from the uninfected.

On the whole, this was not a great movie. I will probably never watch it again, and it wasn't overly enjoyable. However, it was much better than I expected, probably as much as a 2 or even 2.5 stars, and above all - it was actually... astonishingly... Interesting.

Bulletin: 3:55 PM, Washington

Requesting people to share something pleasant or smile-inducing for the benefit of my physical and mental health.

-I- don't feel good.
-YOU- can help.