You just know the site admins will be scanning the IP logs for whoever buys a bunch of grow lights (probably the most common item up for sale) from Property Room Police Auctions Online. Run by an outfit called Property Bureau, it's a pretty clever idea: giving police auctions (a longstanding procedure for disposing of seized property and stolen goods that could not be returned to the rightful owners) a wider "customer base" than their reach normally allows by selling larcened and licentious loot on the Internet (they should have named it "pdBay" :-P). Going by the info posted on the site, it looks like helping police and sheriff departments clean out their property rooms this way plays an adjunct role to Property Bureau's other purpose: being an online database of the goods with the items' serial numbers and any other pertinent information, thus letting owners of stolen property easily search and potentially recover it. Yeah, it's all real clever... but somehow I don't think titling an auction as "Look Here NintendoDS - HOT ITEM!" is going to really differentiate it from other auctions by very much ;-) Anyways, I just found the site a little while ago and it's loads of fun looking at the kinds of gadgets that today's crooks are both stealing and using. Check it out!
Friday, January 07, 2005
For the record: I NEVER said that I wanted to kill Pat Robertson
A few days ago I posted "Haul Pat Robertson's butt out of Virginia Beach... AND STONE HIM TO DEATH!!". It was in response to Robertson's annual penchant for claiming that God was speaking through him about the coming year. And it elicited some ... interesting... feedback.
Some got it and some didn't. A few were downright horrified. One guy wrote me that initially he thought I was a few cards short of a full deck to have the gall to publish something like that. But after reading the entire thing he said "that's was an f'ing work of genius!"
If all you saw was the headline - either here or elsewhere on the 'net where this was referenced - I strongly urge you to read it. ALL of it. And think about the REAL point that I was making with this. I do not want to see Pat Robertson stoned to death: unlike some Christians, I do strive to believe that every man (and woman) can grow and change and become more Christ-like so long as there's breath in his lungs. Having weaknesses of character - including such glaring weaknesses as Robertson illustrates - are no grounds for wanting to see someone dead. Neither are such things as differences of political or spiritual belief. And if you've taken the time to read the entire essay, you will realize fully well that I never did anything other than try to lead people to think about what it is we have to be... if we really want to wear the label "Christian" before the world.
Now, Pat Robertson and countless like him advocate the death and destruction of those not like them every day of their lives. And they are gosh-darned serious about wanting to see them dead. And nobody takes them to task on it: more often than not it's met with little more than a shrug, as if to acknowledge that "that's just the way things are."
Well, I refuse to accept the cruelties of this world as "just the way things are" without doing something about it.
My essay merely reflected back toward them the evil that Pat Robertson and those like him relish committing in the name of God. And if some people didn't like that, well, it's as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg put it:
"A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out."
YES YES YES YES YES!!! "The Tripods" will tower on the big screen soon!
This generation of kids needs a movie like Red Dawn: you know that flick twenty-odd years ago where Patrick Swayze and his high-school chums waged guerilla warfare on the Soviet swine that had taken over their Colorado hometown and the rest of America. It's so dated now as to be laughable (though for awhile it held the Guinness record for being "most violent movie ever") but the core idea is the same: young people fighting for real freedom, instead of sitting around in their Birkenstocks signing pointless petitions and otherwise complaining against "evil white men" or whatever. Director John Milius had a clear notion in mind that America was a great land because her children could fast learn their way around an AK-47... and ya know, he's right. But that ain't the point of this post.
Lots of places have the news but I found it first on ComingSoon.net that John Christopher's Tripods Trilogy is being adapted into a feature-length film series: presumably one film for each book (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire). Haven't heard anything on whether the prequel novel When the Tripods Came is part of the deal but that alone would be hella lotta fun to see as a two-hour movie.
Now if Disney (which'll be producing and distributing it) does it right, this will potentially be a very cool thing to behold: right up there with Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and the Wachowski Brothers' Matrix saga. I don't wanna spoil any of the really good details but this'll give you an inkling: it's an unspecified time (centuries from now?) in Earth's future and everything's gone back to medieval days. You can live free as a bird and do whatever you want... until your fourteenth birthday. At which time the Tripod comes to your village and grabs you with a tentacle and draws you into itself. That's when you get "capped". And after that you never need to fear having to think for yourself again for the rest of your life. Everyone in one village of the land once called England accepts this ritual without question. Everyone, except for one boy approaching his fourteenth birthday. And then one day a "vagrant" comes to the village...
I mentioned Red Dawn earlier 'cuz that's what this book series always reminds me of: it's like Red Dawn meets Independence Day crossed with Stand By Me. And for a book series aimed at young teens there's an awful lot of core values that the saga emphasizes: I'd even say the trilogy is "traditional conservative science-fiction". There's a box set of all four books at Amazon and since it's long been considered a classic book for young people you should have no trouble finding it in the preteen's fiction section of your bookstore.
Can't wait to see the movie. I'm praying that it'll do justice to the books. In the meantime, if any suggestions can be made I can't think of anyone better to play the role of Julius than either Sean Connery or Ian McKellan.
(And if you REALLY want a treat in the meantime, hunt out the comic-style serial that Boys Life magazine did of the trilogy back in the early 1980s: a terrific adaptation that deserves getting republished for mass consumption!)
Thursday, January 06, 2005
UPDATED: Blog now viewable with IE! Was: Technical difficulties, please stand by (or make the switch to Mozilla!)
UPDATE 01:27 AM EST 01-07-2004: Worked from 4-something yesterday afternoon 'til a little after midnight. The problem apparently lay in some things that weren't XHTML 1.0 Strict. Most of the work was just turning upper-cased tags (an old habit) into lower-case for XHTML and cleaning up probably two minor gaffes in the code. However it happened, this blog is now perfectly readable in Microsoft Internet Explorer so ummmm... enjoy! :-)
Original Post:
If you're visiting this blog from a Mozilla or Firefox browser, you probably don't notice anything. If you're using Internet Explorer, you will be straining your eyes to read some impossibly large fonts right now.
I finally started overhauling the look of this blog and something, somewhere, in the CSS went a little funny in the head. I'm still very much old-school HTMLer (can type it out in Notepad much faster than if I were to use Dreamweaver or some other web editor) and CSS is something I haven't been working with for very long. But it looks like it might be a messy conflict involving IE and Movable Type (which my blog doesn't have... don't think so anyway) and how the template should be coded to accommodate it.
So right now "Weird" Ed and I are going over the template to try and find what's wrong. We should have it fixed before too late this evening. In the meantime if you still want to enjoy the site and have been using IE, now's as good a time as any to Mozilla or Firefox. They're faster, more reliable and have the benefit of being open-source so you can go through it and make sure the browser ain't doing something it should be doing.
And if you are using a Mozilla or some other browser, hope you enjoy the new look of the place :-) Tried to make it mirror my personality a bit. Got a few more things to add in but the CSS problem comes first.
Horatio Bunce's smackdown on President Bush: "Where do you find any authority...?"
Somebody please explain to me how it is that a millionaire tycoon can give away $20 million of the people's hard-earned money to a terrorist front, can raid the public treasury for $200 billion to spend on wars with no defined goals or even strategy, and who is now now appropriating $350 million - also from public funds - toward recovery efforts from the Southeast Asian tsunami can have no qualms about spending other people's money like a drunken sailor... but only finds enough charity in his own heart to write tsunami victims a check for the paltry sum of $10,000.
What President Bush does with his own money is of no concern to me: if he wanted to write a check for five bucks, he's got a right to do that. But when it comes to our money and my own "contribution" (read as: pay taxes smile and ignore the big gun we've aimed at your head)... well, that does concern me. It should concern everyone. That money that Bush is giving away so freely - regardless of good intention - isn't his money to give away at all!
I could say more, but it was already said long ago and with far more eloquence than I can muster on the subject. You'll have to do a Google search for Horatio Bunce and how he figures into American history, but here's his sage wisdom that slaps just about every politician in Washington hard in the face...
"...Where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity? ...There are plenty of wealthy men in and around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life. The congressmen chose to keep their own money, which, if reports be true, some of them spend not very creditably; and the people about Washington, no doubt, applauded you for relieving them from the necessity of giving by giving what was not yours to give. The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution."Bunce did persuade at least one American politician with his take on things... but like I said, you're going to have to do a search on it yourself. You'll thank me later for the extra work 'cuz you'll come to appreciate it all the more :-)
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
This is why American efforts in Iraq will fail
From the Associated Press via Yahoo!...
25 Killed in Car-Bomb Attacks in IraqWe should pull out all our troops. Now. We should never have gone into Iraq. Ever.
Wed Jan 5, 4:12 PM ET
By DUSAN STOJANOVIC, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide attacker blew up an explosives-laden car outside a police academy south of Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 20 people, and another car bomb left five Iraqi policemen dead. Despite the surge of violence aimed at derailing this month's elections, Iraq (news - web sites)'s interim leader again insisted the ballot would go ahead as planned.
"We will not allow the terrorists to stop the political process in Iraq," Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said as the death toll from insurgent attacks topped 90 over four days this week. "The elections process is the basis for the deepening of the national unity in Iraq."
You cannot "give" a people their democracy. And the authority for self-rule was never ours to grant anybody, at all. That authority can only come from the Establisher of ALL authority: namely, God. And if we haven't learned how to manage our own authority that He gave to us, how dare we tell another nation how to manage its own... much less be so haughty as to believe that we can give it to them of our own sense of ego.
If the people of Iraq desired enough that they be rid of Saddam Hussein, then they should have risen up against him. On their own. And they could have done so, if they had mustered the will and the drive and the courage to overcome Saddam and his minions. But apart from some pockets of resistance they were too timid to reach out and grasp that freedom on their own.
We are making a terrible, terrible mistake in Iraq, now almost two years into this venture and at the cost of 1300-some American lives. And no amount of spin or platitude from this government can deny this fact: those young men and women who sprang from our own soil died for nothing. Nothing at all. They perished for something absent of any sense or rationale except for the empty rhetoric that "it's for our country" or "we're keeping our families free"... when freedom here vanishes with each new day.
How then can we expect to give freedom to a people who have never even known it to begin with?
Freedom must be earned. It can never be bestowed. At least by any man.
And that lack of humility is why we fail in Iraq, and will always fail.
AMC right now is showing Dune: the finest homo-erotic glorious heap of a sci-fi epic that 1984 had to offer!
Alfred Hitchcock once said that Smokey and the Bandit was his "favorite guilty pleasure" of a movie. And that's pretty much what David Lynch's adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel Dune is for me.
The short version (the one that Lynch allowed his name on, and not the "Alan Smithee" extra-long version that has much more cool stuff in) is on AMC right now and I swear they've messed with it more... as if it wasn't messed-up enough already. For one thing at the beginning of this one I noticed that the Guild Navigator's voice was different, somehow. It didn't sound as menacing as I remember it. Come to think of it, it was different: it's definitely not the same voice as is the Navigator's in the longer version (which was the same voice as the short version). Maybe AMC decided to make it sound clearer to the audience or something.
Geez, I've always been conflicted about this movie. I read the novel Dune in September 1990, when I was a junior in high school and... yeah, it was definitely one of the book that most changed my life. So much metaphor in it about religion, and economics and addiction and the costs that come with "playing it safe". The stagnation of cultures and how it is more often than not countered by the outbreak of crusades (or jihads)... Dune the novel was the *perfect* nutshell education about the pattern of history. And when David Lynch got his hands on the film rights he almost pulled off a perfect adaptation.
EXCEPT for all the unnecessary bizarro crap that he just couldn't resist "being David Lynch" about and had to throw in. I mean, "weirding modules"...?!? Where da heck did THAT crap come from?! The Navigators need the prescience they gain from the spice to guide the ships through space and that's from the novel but when it comes to guiding those ships with their anuses ummmm... no. I don't wanna touch what Lynch did with the Harkonnens but since we're on the subject: what was the man thinking?! Sure they were a decadent lot in the novel, but not this bad: that scene where Baron Harkonnen pulls the "heart plug" on the nubile young boy slave with the flowers that he kisses and molests as the kid is bleeding from his aorta and dying as the life seeps from his eyes (oh yeah the naked kid is wearing a giant transparent Glad-Bag, parse that as you will) is just... wrong, dude.
The only time I've been this confused about an item of pop culture came a few years later when I listened to Richard Harris singing "MacArthur Park":
MacArthur Park is melting in the darkI say again: "whu honey?" Go back to teaching at Hogwarts, Dumbledore: this croon's shining moment only came when "Weird Al" Yankovic turned it into "Jurassic Park".
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!
I spent months after reading the original novel trying to find Lynch's film version on video. It finally came on a local teevee station on Easter Sunday in 1991... on my 17th birthday as it happened. I watched a bit at home then went over to my grandmother's house for Easter dinner. She let me watch the rest of it there and when the Reverend Mother appeared with those messed-up teeth Granny asked me what I was watching and I told her "It's the movie version of Dune" she looked back at the screen then me and said "whatever it is, it looks weeeiiird." Was really sweet, seeing my 84-year old grandmother laugh at a crazy sci-fi movie like that. But then, she was one of the few members of my family that ever "got" my whole Star Wars craze, too. The day after the Episode I toys went on sale I had to watch the local news at her house, 'cuz I was first in line for the 12:01 AM opening at Toys R Us to get the new Star Wars toys. And I was trying to explain how "we would be the first to set our eyes on a virgin pile of unsoiled mounds of Star Wars merchandise." And then a few days later when I camped out for Episode I tickets. She never ceased thinking that it was really cute that her 25-year old grandson could still be this big a kid.
It was on my 17th birthday that we watched this messed-up flick together.
It was on my 26th birthday that we had her funeral. I was one of the pallbearers. It wasn't a very happy birthday.
Dear Lord... five years later and I still miss her.
Maybe that's what keeps drawing me to David Lynch's Dune: for all the visual assault that it is, to me it represents a very tender moment that I shared with my grandmother, who remains one of the sweetest and most influential people in my life and who I will always regret never lived long enough to meet the girl who became my wife. It was the kind of moment where a kid who's a little (or a lot) more different than most realized that he was not only loved unconditionally by someone, but that person loved him enough to make an effort to appreciate what made him tick. I sure wish I could tell you what made her tick... but I can't, except to say that she simply loved everyone, whether you were family or not, or white or black or even gay or lesbian, which a few wound up coming to visit her house more than once. EVERYONE was welcome to put their feet under her dinner table (and believe you me she wasn't going to let you leave until she was sure you'd stuffed yourself with all the homecooked food you could possibly want, no matter WHO you were). She loved you whether you believed in God or not: she knew He loved them despite that, so she'd better learn to love them too.
Sheesh, never thought I could have so many thoughts and feelings associated with a David Lynch movie.
Anyhoo, I know the Sci-Fi Channel remake a few years ago kept a lot more things faithful to the book, but Lynch almost accomplished a perfect adaptation here. You can tell that he was hitting on all the right cylinders so far as Herbert's themes went... if only he hadn't mucked it up in so much other crazy imagery. For whatever reason, I'll prolly never buy the DVD but I always have to catch this whenever it's on the tube.
BTW, the Dune novels themselves - the ones that Frank Herbert wrote - are a magnificent series and prolly the most epic and thought-provoking only after Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Yeah, I appreciate most of the other science-fiction classics. I even wound up using Isaac Asimov's Foundation years ago while doing practicum as a student teacher, as a way of introducing the themes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to high school students. I've been keen on some of the more obscure ones (speaking of which, Philip Jose' Farmer's Riverworld novels are science-fiction's greatest secret and whoever did the Sci-Fi Channel adaptation should be dragged out into the street and shot) and someday I'm praying that someone like Peter Jackson will do a big screen version of Harry Harrison's West of Eden. But other than Tolkien, no other sci-fi/fantasy writer molded my thoughts on things as a teenager than did Herbert. Be warned though: the first three books in the Dune series you can coast through. It's when you get to God Emperor of Dune that you REALLY have to swim against his unrelenting torrent of philosophy and theology. And by the time you get to the last one that he did, Chapterhouse: Dune... well, let's just say that I've heard from way too many people that that novel triggered WAY premature adolescence in a lot of guys. But if you get to the very last pages of the very last novel and you're in the know on things, you'll catch the very sweet homage that Herbert makes to his beloved wife Beverly (who had just passed away from cancer). And so far as that "too many unfinished threads" thing goes, a few years ago someone found some computer disks that had Frank Herbert's notes and outlines for an ending chapter to the entire saga, and according to the official Dune website Herbert's son Brian is using that to base two forthcoming novels - Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune - that should wrap everything up. Hope they're better than the recent "Butlerian Jihad" Dune novels he did with Kevin J. Anderson... those were BIGTIME disappointment in my book.
(Okay, I better finish now, before I start ranting about how Kevin J. Anderson messed up Star Wars back in the mid-Nineties. He did write my all-time favorite Star Wars novel though: Darksaber. But I'll scream about that later.)
One thing's for sure though: I never stopped being this kind of a geek. Or ever grew out of being a kid. Not really. Granny wouldn't have wanted me to stop being like this either. And that's not what my dear wife or my closest and dear friends have ever wanted: they like the fact that, at heart, I'm still a big kid. And if I still watch weirdfest movies like the original Dune, well... what's the harm in that, eh?
Because in the end, it's what keeps me young forever. And what keeps me looking out for the simple things in life... like love and truth.
(Oh yeah, AMC is showing Mad Max with Mel Gibson later tonight. Let's see if this is the "new" version that has the original undubbed Australian accents :-P)
