Clint Eastwood basically betrayed America by making this movie. I don’t want to talk about it.
That is from a recent compilation of the worst 20 chick flicks of all time.
Unfortunately various girlfriends have dragged me along at some point to most of them. God I hate Richard Gere. Any Baldwin brother. And worst of all: Ben Affleck.
Oh who am I kidding, I scour torrent sites to find the best DVD rip of these emotionally heartening movies and watch them by myself.
Be sure to watch this funny recut of Sleepless in Seattle:
While walking through Samsung Plaza yesterday in Seohyeon, my friend and I were bothered by some theology students.
Last year I mentioned that there is a large base of evangelical christians here in Korea and that they arguably waste their English skills harassing foreigners.
While I am not promoting censorship or some kind retaliatory action against this activity, it is nothing short of annoying salesmanship — or as business guru Seth Godin calls it: interruption marketing. And the only reason it is tolerated is because it is shrouded behind a multi-billion person identity group.
For example, my British friend and I were just about the only foreigners in the modern, extremely busy courtyard and were walking to an empty table when two well-groomed Korean men with perfect English interrupted our day to sell us religion.
Here is the dialogue:
Korean man: “Hi, I am a theology student that needs help filling out a survey, could you assist me with this?”
My friend: “Not really, no.”
Korean man: “Are you a Christian?”
My friend: “No.”
Korean man: “So you don’t read the bible?”
My friend: “No.”
Korean man: “Don’t you know the bible is the word of god?”
My friend: “God does not exist.”
Korean man: “Don’t you believe human life is fragile? You could be walking across the street and get killed by a car.”
My friend: “Sure, that is a danger. But you don’t have the solution to that.”
Korean man: “What about asteroids, comets and meteorites? They can kill you at any instant. Doesn’t that worry you?”
My friend: “Not really.”
Korean man: “Don’t you know you are living in sin?”
My friend: “Good-bye.”
At that point my friend and I walked into a convenience store and bought a couple of drinks, sat down at the table and laughed about the whole incident.
I am seriously not making up the part about the seminary student asking us about cosmological phenomenon blowing us up.
This 45-second sales pitch can be summarized along the following: he was trying to reach out to real, seemingly uncontrollable fears in order to sell us phony insurance. And then guilt us for not wanting to join his club.
His insurance method is hardly new or novel. Furthermore, it is no different than the sales pitch used by countless theologians representing hundreds of religions and belief systems.
Seriously, it was no different than someone trying to peddle magnetic rocks or dowsing rods. And a question for the self-righteous members of the evangelical movement: why is this presentation and marketing strategy laudable and someone doing the same thing under a different name (e.g., Islam) wrong?
Would you not be annoyed if a group of Muslims or Pastafarians interrupted your day, without your personal permission, to tell you why you are evil and risk dying at any time? If yes, than I implore you not to financially support anyone that uses this technique to sell their wares (e.g., most missionaries, street preachers).
While I do not wish him or others like him any ill will, I think it is a complete waste to prey on the fears of the uneducated and believe it would be a better, less annoying approach to simply try to be my friend first before condemning me to hell. Perhaps that is why many Mormons are such god damn successful businessmen… because they don’t come across as assholes most of the time. But then again, they aren’t real christians, right? They’re a cult because they marry their cousins — an arrangement which went out of style centuries ago.
Remember that terribly awesome ’80s flick with John Cusack — Better Off Dead? Do you think the paper boy(s) in the film ended up as shareholders of Bear Stearns?
The image to the right is considered Korea’s top “cultural landmark.” And boy has someone redecorated it.
It went up in flames last night and arson is suspected.
Here are my guesses as to the cause:
- a group of very drunk ajossi (salarymen) thought it would be a good idea to celebrate the Lunar New Year by lighting a bunch of fireworks inside the tinderbox
- the image is actually a tweaked screenshot from the upcoming Starcraft II game Korean’s are salivating over
- it is from a deleted scene from D-War
- it is a re-enactment of the LA Riots in which Korean shop owners banded together with shotguns and kept the rioters from looting their stores
- it is from the trailer of the live-action He-Man movie starring Dolph Lundgren or any Jean Claude Van Damme movie that they show on the SuperAction station (channel 26)
Over the past few years I have discussed the half-truths that proponents of publicly-financed stadiums promote in their press releases. [See: 123]
I currently live in a city of 1.5 million that is set to host the World Games next year. The various sporting events are sanctioned by the official Olympic committee as it is used as a proving ground for new Olympic events in the future.
While one of the stipulations of hosting the World Games involves not constructing new stadiums (the facilities already have to exist), somehow that message was mistranslated to the politicos here.
A couple blocks away from my school I can see the construction crews walk around on the scaffolding of a new taxpayer-financed stadium. While the ballyhooed Solar Stadium is relatively “green,” I can think of a million other useful things that could be done with that money, including: give it back to the taxpayer.
Yesterday, in an op-ed with The Philadelphia Inquirer professor Rick Eckstein makes the case for why building stadiums never generates the revenue promised by its proponents:
There’s only one problem with this scenario. It’s not true. Never has been. They do come, but cities are not saved. Over the past two decades, academic research has generated literally hundreds of articles and books empirically challenging the alleged economic wonders of new stadiums, even when they’re part of larger development schemes. I have been studying and writing about publicly financed stadiums for more than 10 years and cannot name a single stadium project that has delivered on its original grandiose economic promises, although they do bring benefits to team owners, sports leagues and sometimes players.
There are many reasons why this same song and dance plays out. Arguably the number one reason is that only privately financed endeavors have the incentive to design and develop an enterprise that is profitable.
On the other hand, government construction projects do not have to be effecient or even profitable because they are financed by faceless taxpayers who are typically disenfranchised and unable to reverse the political tide.
For the record, while I enjoy watching and participating in athletic events, I don’t think it is fair to use taxpayer funds for - anything in general - let alone entertainment purposes.
If the political class is going to dole out the dishonest revenues on public projects, how about filling in the potholes on Fumin, Yucheng, Mingcheng or Boai? Or investing in dust-blocking barriers that can be placed around construction zones? Or actually completing the metro? What point is there of hosting tens of thousands of tourists and athletes when the surrounding infrastructure falls apart under the current load?
For more on sport subsidies, see the following Cato publications: 123 (all in pdf).
Due to the relative anonymity of the internets, some participants in flame wars act like they have 12″ steel cocks.
I know that sounds crude, but if you have ever spent even a short amount of time on a forum or USENET group, you will invariably come across the various archetypes illustrated in Flame Warriors.
In reality, despite the plethora of material available online, arguing in these venues is generally a waste of time. For instance, even if you believe your argument is cogent, kosher and filled with sexiness, at the end of the day your enemy is probably a 14 year old kid that plays on the Xbox all day in his parents basement. And thus, you will be griefed, trolled, and Godwinedad nauseum. Or as the eponymous site is called: SomethingAwful will undoubtedly occur.
In fact, I think the JRR Special Olympics photo sums up just about every debate that has traveled through the series of tubes.
With that said, let us turn to an odd brouhaha: John Romero versus Mike Wilson both of ION Storm fame (not to be confused with id).
I’m not going to really discuss the debate because (1) it is now over, (2) the colorful commentators in the various comments sections have much better one-liners than I can find from bathroom walls and (3) it is a fight between two video game developers. Lame.
Setting the stage
For some good background on what the two guys are bickering about I recommend perusing the book Masters of Doom and an older article from the Dallas Observer appropriately titled Stormy Weather.
I should also mention that two of my high school friends used to visit the ION offices back in the day and even played against the developers; let’s call them W&TT. They are brothers about the same age as my older brother and I. And based on their own observations and experiences, the info gleaned from the article and subsequent book are dead on. Mismanagement, egos, and shoddy work ethic was more abundant than an STD at Planned Parenthood.
The one time I personally met John Romero was at a large public LAN exhibition in the Spring of 2000 in downtown Dallas. The key event at the gaming party (yea, that is very dorky sounding) was the public unveiling of the hyped action game: Daikatana. John, who still had his iconic long hair, was its lead developer and participants at the event would have a chance to play against him in a deathmatch.
A friend of mine spotted John and Stevie Case (his girlfriend at the time) and we asked him to autograph the billete program we received at the door. Also standing next to John was a fellow by the name of Angel Munoz who is the creator of the Cyberathletic Professional League which managed the whole event.
Angel quipped that John should get used to having people ask him for autographs, because to quote Ron Burgundy: he was kind of a big deal.
We all parted and seemingly enjoyed the rest of the weekend festivities. As an aside the Tribes tournament my duct-tape “clan” played in was the highlight of my weekend as we didn’t suck nearly as bad as we thought. Nor did I.
At one point I did attempt to speak with Angel about an endeavor some of my friends were working on called AdreniLAN. It was essentially a game-oriented PC Bang placed along a busy freeway in North Dallas. It received its name largely through the efforts of a Vietnamese friend of mine who had also coordinated an audacious undertaking the previous year; let us call him HN.
HN and I were part of a pilot network engineering program in high school sponsored by Cisco. We spent three semesters training and studying for the CCNA (by and large it was a waste of time). At the tail end of our scholastic tenure, HN and several of his technical-minded friends put together a large LAN party in the high school cafeteria called AdreniLAN.
They procured switches, routers, and hubs capable of hosting/transporting several hundred participants. They had a dozen or so dedicated game servers, a redundant power system and even coordinated large pizza deliveries. These were no small feats for a group of highschool seniors that were strapped for cash. They even got Tiger Distributing and a couple other sponsors to throw in prizes (like computers and various accessories).
While there were a slew of various games being played over the network, Quake 2 was the game played in the main tournament. While I considered a number of my friends fantastic at the game (primarily because they kicked my ass), everyone was bested by legendary gamer Fatal1ty who eventually won the computer and of course, all of the hot chicks.
I mention all of this because when I attempted to speak with Angel at the CPL event a year later, he shrugged me off. As a side note, he is the proprietor of an online gaming site called Adrenaline Vault (like the names?).
While I never saw the email myself, Angel apparently had contacted one of my friends about the name HN had used for the PC Bang. Apparently Angel was not too thrilled or supportive, hence his apparent annoyance of my queries. And yet another friend (mormon!) of mine had also mentioned that when soliciting support for the high school event the year before, Angel was not too happy about the original AdreniLAN either. Maybe everyone just caught him on a bad hangover day.
Postmortem
Despite the fact that 8 years have gone by and I live half-way around the world, after seeing the John and Mike debate, it is nice to see that some things never change. Quite comforting.
A quick run-down of where they all are now:
- Angel was superficially a dick, though some of my friends that still attend those CPL events say he has become less socially retarded
- Daikatana was a financial fiasco and impossible to beat without cheat codes (the game design was incomplete)
- Stevie Case jumped the shark by posing in Playboy and broke up with John
- John, has since worked for numerous companies at various technical levels, yet never achieving the fame he had a decade ago
- AdreniLAN, the PC Bang, despite becoming an official CPL test center, folded after a couple of years
- HN, an autodidact, now works as a graphic artist in California
- W&TT were smart and chose not to go to college; their geek prowess paid off and they not only live debt free but rake in a good chunk of change at a dotcom
- Only 2 of the 20 Cisco participants became CCNA certified, I was not caliente enough to be one of them. The program was scrubbed several years later.
- And most importantly, playing video games is still the leading cause of virginity. Don’t let basement virginitus happen to your friends.
I can hardly be accused of being a pinko-hippie granola crunching populist (unless you ask my older sister), yet I still enjoy Colbert much more than O’Reilly.
And I barely watch Comedy Central to begin with.
That said, I managed to catch O’Reilly’s appearance on the Colbert Report last week. It wasn’t nearly as explosive as I thought it would be (see the video here).
In fact, if you want to watch these guys go toe to toe, check out the recent visit Colbert made to O’Reilly’s studio (video). O’Reilly was well, O’Reilly — spewing anger and hatred at his guest.
And while Colbert was very witty, the funniest part of the segment were the snickers you can hear from the production crew, to Colbert’s tactful comebacks.
Note: one wonders if the self-righteous Lewis Prothero (”Voice of London”) in V for Vendetta was partially inspired by O’Reilly’s pompous arrogance.
I’m not a fan of patents or NASA, so call me biased, but I just received an email regarding my recent article.
It was from an engineer/lawyer in England who pointed out the latest Audi ad campaign: to get to the A6, Audi filed 9,621 patents. In contrast, to date NASA has only filed 6,509.
But is that really a smart comparison to make?
The first problem, because it is entirely funded through public monies NASA has no financial incentive for patenting anything it does (whether it succeeds in innovating or not).
Plus, generally speaking, by law some research receiving federal funding (such as NASA) is required to release their discoveries into the public domain (various legislation proposed last year wants to place all federally funded research into the public domain).
The other problem is that NASA does not make automobiles, nor does Audi build rockets (yet) — so isn’t this just comparing apples and oranges?
Why not simply find a moribund American carmaker (like GM) and compare the fewer patents they have, and then flex and grunt to show your superiority?
Ultimately however, what do consumers care about patents? Did market research find that many people still associate space travel with “great technology”?
Of course, a true cynic would think that the A6 blows up 1-out-of-every-50 uses…
My younger brother mentioned that none of his teachers let him cite or reference the popular online encyclopedia, due to published errors in various entries. This despite the fact that peer-review journals such as Nature have independently found that Wikipedia is about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica (in at least the sciences). [Note: Britannica should have seemingly won this war years ago.]
While that is not unexpected, there are other ways to handle this conundrum.
The first, and perhaps most instructive would be to offer students extra credit to revise and correct the errors of an entry. Not only would the student learn some basic, potentially valuable web-based editing skills, but it will allow future readers to understand the material better.
In some ways, the teachers reaction to this resource and tool was similar to how many administrators reacted with MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites — by banning them and setting up strict consequences for accessing or having an account on them.
While social networking and encyclopedias are not the same thing, students can still learn valuable web-editing, time-management, and organizational skills that they can use later in life (e.g., Facebook has a very useful “Event” feature that makes it much easier to schedule specific social gatherings like service projects, reunions, and of course parties).
Embrace or ignore?
Earlier today I received a curt email from an Air Force officer with a little too many bones to pick. I had attacked his golden egg (NASA) and should among other things, give my parents a refund for the tuition and fees charged by A&M (because, you guessed it, I’m retarded).
He starts his letter by insinuating that Wikipedia was not a legitimate source for reference material:
Since you appear capable of using Wikipedia as a large source of your
learned and august “research,” I suggest you point your browser to…
He then links to a number of other online resources such as TheSpaceReview, Scientific American, and SpaceQuotes — sites that are completely foreign to me… [Note: he has since sent yet another email filled with a sundry of links proving his point: that he has a hard on for all things NASA.]
To be honest, in the past I’ve referenced journals, books, and many other professional periodicals for various projects and articles. However, for the topic at hand, the Wikipedia entries I linked to in the footnotes were not only concise and succinct, but also fairly accurate.
In addition, sprinkled throughout the footnotes were links to other mainstreampressarticles about the numerous problems, both engineering and economics-based, that the shuttle program has had and continues to have.
Completely succinct?
I received another email this morning from a different reader, who noted that the shuttle success rate should actually be even lower than the 1-in-50 that I cited.
There is also an abort to orbit mode, which was used on STS-51-F, evidently not one of the better missions. One of the shuttle main engines failed, and the _Challenger_ was told to abort to orbit. Obviously, this failure did affect the mission, and must be included with the two catastrophic failures.
Apparently there were five other pad aborts, missions STS-41-D, STS-51-F, STS-51, STS-55, and STS-68, which cost taxpayers a bundle. So all told, between 8 or 9 partial and full failures in 117 missions — a ratio that is not yet in the Wikipedia entry. For shame.
Contrast this with Burt Rutan’s privately financed endeavor: SpaceShipOne. Because his company operates under a different business model (one not financed by taxpayers or manipulated by politicians), he has to break even or he will go bankrupt. Therefore it is in his best interest to succeed, or rather, not blow up his clients. Every time.
As a result, Rutan has had only one partial non-catastrophic failure in seventeen flights, of which sixteen were manned. And again, he had to build the engines, frame, and flight systems from scratch — on a limited budget.
Retrospecticus
This will probably not be the last time I will discuss this issue. In addition, the actual article wasn’t about comparing apples (airplanes) to oranges (shuttles) as implied by various Digg posters; it was more abstract and dealt with business models. And unfortunately, the casualities in this nationalized endeavor are the unseen opportunities stifled and prevented from ever taking place because of the mass diversion of scarce labor and capital.
In closing, there are several other references that come to somewhat similar conclusions of cancelling the shuttle project. In their words, its development is an “example of a poor quality national commitmentto a major technological undertaking” and “…even if the worst happens and the Shuttles are mothballed … the loss to science will have been negligible.”
In comedic fashion, Dave Berry wrapped up 2006 with lots of laughs and inside jokes.
Through and through, it reminded me of that old Mark Twain quote, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
Just like Chuck Norris, the A-Team is a force to be reckoned with. Here is my contribution to their infamy (special thanks to Philoi, Didymus, and Randall):
Never leave a blow torch around. They will find it and build a tank and/or cow plow before the commercial break.
Their bullets work, you always shoot blanks.
They never have to reload; you burn through magazines like a chain smoker off the patch.
Your rockets are imported from Durka Durkastan and at best, will only blow out tires.
You have a better chance of finding them than the entire Armed Forces, especially if you are disabled, a small child, or a very good looking girl.
When the theme song starts playing: stop, drop, and roll.
If you are a Colonel, a petty thief, or an ugly girl in despair: don’t quit your day job.
There’s always a white convertible corvette parked and ready if the black van isn’t fashionable enough for the occasion. And it is also weapon/rock/animal-proofed.
Don’t be surprised if you wake up groggy on a helicopter when you’ve told everyone you don’t like to fly.
If you have fears of being offended - offendiphobia - then watching Borat will probably help you get over them.
On that note, the always timely tech website DailyTech had an amusing find earlier today: the generalissimo of Kazakhastan is building a 500 foot tall tent.
The funny part is actually all of the comments beneath the article. Diogenes?
Apparently some Wikipedia editors have had enough of random article vandalizations by faceless culprits. In fact, there is now a burgeoning movement to only deface the Chicken article… because everyone knows what a chicken is.
This transfat abolition is going to be really sad and funny at the same time… I can just see SNL or The Onion doing a parody of “bootleggers” driving barrels of the illegal oil across the Brooklyn Bridge into speakeasies.
While walking through 
The image to the right is considered Korea’s top “cultural landmark.” And boy has someone 
Over the past few years I have discussed the half-truths that proponents of publicly-financed stadiums promote in their press releases. [See: 
Due to the relative anonymity of the internets, some participants in flame wars act like they have 12″ steel cocks.
I have to come clean, I sold Barry Bonds steroids.
I can hardly be accused of being a pinko-hippie granola crunching populist (unless you ask my older sister), yet I still enjoy 
I’m not a fan of 
My younger brother mentioned that none of his teachers let him cite or reference the popular online encyclopedia, due to published errors in various entries. This despite the fact that peer-review journals such as Nature have 
Just like