fling93 loves fishies

Busy, Busy, Busy

Okay, maybe I was wrong about last week being unusual. I think my general lack of free time may be an ongoing theme for a while, so posting may get a little more erratic. If you’re not yet reading this site using an RSS feed news aggregator, I’d highly recommend it. I was hoping to blog on that sometime, but in short, it saves you the trouble of browsing to websites to see if they’re updated. Instead, when the site has a new post, the aggregator grabs it for you to read. This is real handy if you follow a lot of blogs and websites and news sources, especially if some of them update irregularly.

I still hope to post at least a once a week, but let me tell you what’s been going on so you’ll understand if I don’t.

An Olympic Rant

Well, I haven’t been watching the Olympics at all. I’m not even sure if they’re still going or not, that’s how much I haven’t been paying attention. With my luck (and my tendency to procrastinate), they’re long since over, and this rant’s way too late to stop anybody from watching them (not that any of you should ever listen to me tell you what to do anyway), but I want to get it off my chest now. I can always link to this every four years anyway.

And unlike my other so-called rant, this will actually be a real rant, and just so that you can tell, I will use the f-word very frequently. So if that offends you — well, duh! That’s the whole point! That’s why they call it a rant and not a frickin’ lullaby.

Review: The Brown Bunny

Well, I went into The Brown Bunny having absolutely no idea about the controversy at Cannes or the very public feud between writer/director Vincent Gallo and Roger Ebert (which I’ll talk about later). Instead, the only reason I watched this movie was because the wife heard there was an explicit scene of Chloe Sevigny performing oral sex, and who am I to say no to that? Seriously! My wife prides herself as being a pro-porn feminist.

Unfortunately, porn would have been much more entertaining. This was almost a complete waste of our time. I even flipped out my new Palm handheld half-way through the film to read a book, occasionally looking up from time to time to see if we’d gotten to the sex scene (and if you’re really set on seeing that scene, go ahead and grab dinner during the first hour or so, and you should be back in plenty of time to see it).

At its heart, The Brown Bunny is one of those slow, pretentious films that cares more about how it looks than what it says. It reminded me of the worst-ever film I ever saw at Cinequest, Ripples (Sazanami), which consisted of static wide shots showing a character, in a painfully tedious manner, making their way from one side of the screen to the other. Well this film’s pretty much the same thing, as it’s about Gallo driving cross-country in his van, so you’re subjected to long, monotonous shots of the back of his head and a dirty windshield as he drives on the freeway. Sheesh, it doesn’t take a 90-minute film to show that a road trip is long, lonely, and boring. We already know that. And realize, I am not easily bored. I am one of the most easily amused people you’ll ever meet. And I’ve liked other films that moved slowly, like Lost in Translation and The Station Agent. But those were character-driven films which had… well… interesting characters.

North Korea or: Why Seven Nukes Are Worse Than One

There has been some disturbing news from North Korea:

A massive explosion on North Korea’s northern border with China generated an expansive mushroom cloud on an important commemorative anniversary of the Pyongyang government on Sept. 9. The blast came as concerns have been recently mounting in U.S. intelligence circles that North Korea was about to conduct a nuclear test.

Details of the blast remained sketchy, but the date of the blast — taking place on a day commemorating the 1948 founding of North Korea — had U.S., South Korea and Japanese officials scrambling to study satellite images of a clear picture of what might have caused the massive blast. North Korea is known to put great importance on historic dates, using such days to conduct high-profile military exercises and parades. On Sunday, U.S. officials would not rule out a potential nuclear test, but officials at Seoul’s Unification Ministry — its government agency that deals directly with the North Koreans — said the blast appeared to be “non-nuclear” in nature.

Colin Powell has since stated that the blast was not likely to be nuclear, but I don’t know how he could know either way, and it sounds to me like he’s merely trying to downplay the matter. Certainly, it’s way too early to jump to conclusions either way1, so go don’t go running to the store to buy duct tape or anything (Update 9/15/04: North Korea has now said that it wasn’t nuclear, and since it’s not like them to downplay this sorta thing, I see no reason not to believe them). But in the meantime, I’d like to reiterate a few points I made last year on the old Motley Fool Current Events board2.

Cato... for Kerry?!?

Just a short tidbit today. Via Dan Drezner and The Shrill Blog (which, by the way, was co-founded by a former SFBayBlogger, Faisal Jawdat), Clay Risen of The New Republic writes on how the Cato Institute, a prominent libertarian think tank, hates what Dubya has done to the country (subscription required):

Cato is on the outs with the administration. From its deficit spending to its regulatory record to the Iraq war, the Institute charges that the administration has betrayed conservative values, bankrupted the government, expanded federal programs, and made the world less safe. … In fact, Cato staffers and scholars are so fed up with Bush that many say they will sit out the election — or even vote for John Kerry. “Most people at the Institute have no plans to vote for the president this time,” said one member of the Cato policy staff who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “There will be some votes for Kerry inside the Cato Institute this year.”

…its antipathy is indicative of a growing belief among the GOP’s fiscally conservative constituencies — not just libertarian ideologues, but big-business executives, small-business owners, virtually any voting bloc concerned with fiscal restraint — that Bush has been an abject failure. And, in a close election, that could make a difference.

I actually predicted this. Well, somewhat.

Master List of My Movie Ratings

Okay, I lied about that last post being the last blog post until next Saturday. I don’t actually fly out until tonight, but because of my class Wednesday night and having to pack last night, I didn’t think I’d get one up before I left. But then I heard from Elke about how Rich Thomas showed everybody his top 100 movies from around 1998 at the last meetup (Update 10/5/04: Rich now has an updated list).

Since I’m both a movie-buff and an obsessive type, I actually have a list of my movie ratings on my Palm ready to copy and paste (indeed, it’s so long that I have to split it between two memos). I’ve long thought about creating a dynamic web page of the list which you can sort by rating or alphabetically and search, but that would take an inordinate amount of time.

It’s already one of those things that I can spend oodles of time sorting and adjusting if I’m not careful, so I don’t mess with it very often. So this list is probably not even close to being up-to-date with my current views, and also doesn’t yet contain all the films I’ve seen. Also note that many of these films I’ve only seen once, and a lot of those I didn’t rate until long after the fact.

So it’s pretty rough (and I may modify this a lot later), but it might help give you some points of reference when I review a film. So here’s my list. The ones that I’ve reviewed will have links to the review (Update 10/5/04: my cousin Andy went through the whole list and provided his own ratings of them).

Texas Hold 'Em Poker

Update 11/17/04: Added the bit on side pots and alternative ways to handle the case when the dealer forgets to burn a card. Plus other minor edits.

Well, I’m back from the wedding and family reunion. It was most notable for the godawful service we got from the Radisson Hotel Santa Barbara. Still, it’s always cool to hang with all of the cousins, so it was a lot of fun.

Especially since we played plenty of Texas Hold ’Em Poker (and since I knew the rules this time, I did a little better than last time). I’m not really much of a poker player and don’t have a regular game, so I’m sure people like Courtney would crush me like an insignificant bug. Plus, those who know me very well know that I am very expressive and emotional, which aren’t exactly strengths when it comes to poker (I have a tendency to jump up and down with a goofy grin on my face when I get pocket aces — or when I get cookies, for that matter). But I just can’t deny the appeal. The wife is hooked, too, and was planning on setting up a weekly game among her feminist friends, so we had grabbed some inexpensive poker chips from Toys “R” Us.

It’s pretty amazing how poker has just taken off. My wife often remarks how we’re seeing it pass the Tipping Point. It seems like most everybody’s at least heard of the game, if they haven’t yet watched Bravo’s highly entertaining Celebrity Poker Showdown or ESPN’s World Series of Poker (which I haven’t yet seen). So not surprisingly, we had plenty of takers when I sent out an e-mail to the cousins, inquiring if we should bring our chips to the reunion.

One cousin asked to be reminded of the rules to refresh his memory, and as I am often wont to do, I wrote up a long-ass e-mail. In hindsight, I think he was joking about needing his memory refreshed, and the e-mail was so long that nobody even bothered reading it. So I figure I’d slap it up here, so I’d at least get a blog post out of the damn thing. And maybe there’s a small chance that there’s somebody out there not yet familiar with the game and wants to learn more. Plus, it can kinda be a companion piece to my How to Play Craps post.

Anyway, I’ve often heard it’s simple to learn, difficult to master. So far, I have to agree. Here are the rules:

Open Source Journalism

I know I’ve already said a lot about blogging and journalism, but in light of Ra^thergate (the spectacular implosion of Dan Rather and CBS over the forged memos regarding Dubya’s National Guard service) and an interesting discussion at Asymmetrical Information, I had one more quick thought to add, albeit not the most original one in the world: blogging as “Open Source Journalism.”

Andy's Response to My Movie Ratings

My cousin Andy e-mails me his own ratings of the movies on my ranked list, and they provide an interesting contrast with mine. These are listed in the order I presented, with his rating next to the film name. Films that I rated that he hadn’t seen are omitted. He also has a movie list up at Amazon, which has a few films not on this list.