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We have only been waiting like 8 years for this, but tomorrow “Christmas on Mars” is finally coming out (on DVD/CD). This marks the end of some extreme waiting that I’ve been doing lately. Later on in the week, on Thursday, we will get to read the NTSB’s cover up about the 35W bridge collapse. What we wont read is about how the construction crew caused the bridge to fall down, but if you were driving over it that month it would be pretty clear that that was the problem… Here’s to waiting!
It looks like HD-DVD vs Blue Ray battle is pretty much over. A crack has been released that can decrypt HD-DVD movies. As long as Blue-Ray stays secure for a few more months HD-DVD will go the way of the Dreamcast. Once a format is “insecure” studios will see fit to put all their eggs in the other basket, and HD-DVD should die like beta-max. The only thing that could fix this problem is finding a flaw in Blue-Ray. I wonder how much money Sony and Microsoft have invested in a strategy to break the security of the opposing format. If they haven’t, they are fools, being the secure format is a sure fire way to win the latest format battle. Apparently the crack isn’t complete, it lacks the code to extract the keys from memory, so I guess we will have to wait until January 2nd to find out the rest of the story, will HD-DVD movies be posted to the internet, and whether a Play Station 3 is a good investment…
A friend of mine, who is a new mother, has decided not to lie to her daughter about the existence of a certain red fur with white trim-wearing fictional character. I often wonder about how new parents, shaping the minds of their tiny children, decide what lies are worth passing on to the next generation. It is amazing the size and veracity of this particular conspiracy, and amazing how much money and energy have been spent on keeping this lie, more than any other “secular” lie. [I say secular because it seems to me the origins of Christmas are more pagan and commercial then Christian] I remember my discovery that it was all bull shit. It was a late night weather report of Christmas eve, you know the one, where they show a cartoon Santa flying around the world on his reindeer driven sleigh. I think it was the candor of the weather reporter that tipped me off, I am not sure, but I remember that cementing the fact that this was all a lie. Why do we do this to ourselves and what would the world look like if we stopped trying to sell our kids secular ideas like this, and even more dangerous ideas with a truly religious basis… Should we tell our children Jesus was real? Probably, should we let them buy into religious thinking at a very young age before they are ready for critical thought? I don’t think so. When did you learn it was all a lie and how did it make you feel… What would the world be like without all these lies? Imagine listening to a little John Lennon later tonight, and not thinking it is so crazy to live in a world of honesty and critical thought even for the youngest members of our society.
Abstract: Evaluations of cheap beer for value and flavor are limited on the Internet. Often endorsements come from sites with corporate backers and rarely has a controlled experiment been performed to decide what is the best cheap beer. This post chronicles the results of a blind taste test of 13 brands of beer available in the Twin Cities area.
Experimental Setup: Thirteen varieties of cheap beer poured into plastic cups labeled A through M. Knowledge of the contents of each cup are kept secret and only known to the test proctor. Each volunteer is asked to rank the overall enjoyability of the beer by assigning each a value one through thirteen. There were nine volunteers in our sample, seven men and two women, all of which Midwesterners.
Primary Data: The scores (only cumulative scores are shown to protect the identity of volunteers):
| Brand Name | Cumulative Score |
| Busch | 94 |
| Ice House* | 86 |
| Bud Light | 78 |
| Milwaukee’s Best Ice | 77 |
| Coors Light | 77 |
| Pabst Blue Ribbon | 73 |
| Hamm’s | 72 |
| Miller Light | 72 |
| Miller High Life | 68 |
| Old Style | 64 |
| Black Label | 60 |
| Budwieser | 52 |
| Grain Belt Premium | 43 |
Analysis: The top three beers are Premium, Bud and Black Label. The bottom three were Busch, Ice House, Bud Light. One hypothesis was that light beer would fare worse then full flavor beer, which turned out to be true but not statistically significant.
I often hear people complain that this war hasn’t been “felt” by the American people at the level of past wars. We have a volunteer military, no government-imposed rationing, and our comic books don’t have ads for war bonds. Apparently, it doesn’t take a draft for a war to become wildly unpopular. And if a war is already wildly unpopular then what’s to stop us from upping our level of engagement? If we are planning to fix Iraq and remake it in our own image, we will need more troops on the ground, and a whole lot more then McCain’s current proposal to add another 10,000. If we really believe that it is in our country’s best interest to force the problem nations of the world to have elected leadership, then we may have to consider a draft. If McCain runs on a platform of increased troop presence (of course, this a year or so off), and wins, the number of Americans in Iraq is likely to grow–forcing the issue of a draft, if only to clean up Bush’s mess.
It may be unconscionable to cut and run, but really, are the other options any more palatable? McCain feels that sending more troops is the moral thing to do–and he may be right. Leaving now would probably destabilize the region, and letting the current situation languish with 165,000 soldiers is completely unsafe. Is anyone for a constitutional amendment against starting preemptive wars? I think it would be right to make sure future generations can’t get into this situation.
I just thought I would write down another take on the recent story from WCCO and others about the Klobuchar campaign. Apparently a local blogger found a yet unreleased ad from the Kennedy campaign and sent a link to his favorite campaign to ruminate over before it went live. The Klobuchar campaign thanked him by turning him in to the FBI and made false statements to the local media, about having circumvented passwords. This kind of computer phobia makes me really upset, don’t put data out on a public network if you don’t want people to see it, copy it, and talk about it. I think its time to consider alternatives for November.
Looks like former President Al Gore told reporters in Sydney Austraila that he hasn’t ruled out another run. I would probably vote for him…
Does anyone else find this lonelygirl15 thing outrageously “neat”? My ability to suspend my disbelief is severely limited and as a result I’ve had trouble really enjoying the latest crop of horror movies. I like “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and other classics but I find the last few years worth of suspense or horror movies to be really lacking. But this daily video diary on YouTube is different, mostly because the context is different. It starts out as just a web diary, with daily entries by a very cute sixteen year old girl, who we find out is home schooled by very religious parents and who has a close friend who is a bit of a nerd and helps her edit and post her videos. It is all very reasonable, and I had taken these video logs at face value. My theory was that these videos were popular because there was a cute girl in them. But there is more going on, and it took a entertainment news report on NPR to make me see it (in fact there has been a lot of press coverage), this is actually a horror movie unfolding very slowly in three minute web logs, with subtle but scary details… Here is a run down of what viewers have figured out so far:
lonelygirl15 is a trademark, and the website www.lonelygirl15.com was registered before the first videos were added to YouTube
lonelygirl15 is member of a strict religion (Mormonism?) and is home schooled
Her bedroom is very sparsely decorated but in one video you get a close up of a candelabra with a picture of Aleister Crowley above it
In one video she rates cookies, on a one to ten scale, the three cookies she tries are rated “10″, “12″ and “06″. Aleister Crowley’s birthday is 10/12/06.
In the latest video she explains that she has been asked to take part in a special religious ceremony…
I just think it is really creepy, and the fact that it seems “real”, and seems like “found” art, makes it a lot more enjoyable then most of the horror that Hollywood is currently crafting.
I am only posting this because of deep seeded advertising induced anger… I didn’t drop a bunch of money on my DVR/TV to watch ads, but some are better then others. Here is my list of most annoying commercials:
6. Citi Bank identity theft commercials (where old people have the voice of rednecks, or other over the top annoing voices)
5. Hotel Commercials (Hampton Inn/La Quinta have commercials that make me vomit into my mouth)
4. Relators (Locally produced and crappy!)
3. Bank of America (Wow, isn’t it amazing that we can process a lot of mail… wait that isn’t amazing at all… that is retarded…)
2. Green car/Green Oil company (Mostly just those BP commercials where they interview “real” people, who stammer out some nonsense about ethanol)
1. Local furniture commercials (Strikingly unattractive local actors groove to strikingly bad locally produced R&B)
Anyone feeling as messed up about this as me?
USA Today keeps tabs on the happenings on Lost, including a detailed accounting of the clues gleamed from the black light map that Locke sees on the bulk head door. I decided to take a closer look, and it seems there is some information that they didn’t pick up, thank god for Digital Video Recorders and HDTV with 32x zoom. The image is a map with about seven hatch like structures all leading to a big question mark in the center, each vault appears to lead to the center but each path is crossed out. Several of the vaults have pictures and labels such as “The Swan”, and there is a lot of illegible text (one thing I could read says “possible CVII — inactive since accident”). I believe that I can clearly read two numbers side by side -10800 and 81500. After carefully adding decimal places I cam up with this location. I wish I could generate a better image from my TV but this is the best I can do.
Girl Talk. Download - pay what you can. - #
Phish reunites to tour in 2009. - #
Here's a helpful and depressing tutorial on the current financial crapstorm, in cartoon form. I'm having a hard time figuring out who did the video, but it was linked to on Cosmic Variance. - #
MoveOn.org is giving away free Obama buttons. Almost 2 million ordered so far. - #
If I had married Tea Leoni and starred in film and TV with Gillian Anderson, I would have the exact same problem. How many love children do you have David? - #
