Bush has promised to double aid to Africa over the next five years. Having spent a month living in rural Tanzania, seeing Africa’s poverty and its peoples’ immense beauty with my own eyes, I can only welcome this news with open arms. In similar news, Nigeria has been granted $18bn in debt relief, something I’m sure will go quite a ways toward helping them. Really, I’m rather shocked to see how well Live8’s efforts prior to the G8 summit are going. Now I just hope that these governments hold to their pledges. This is the real way to fight a war on terrorism. This is the real way to spread freedom and peace.
Archive for June, 2005
Having done a few college visits, I think I can say with certainty that visiting a place for one day, especially if you’re in the company of people trying to make it look good, doesn’t give you an idea of what conditions at the place are truly like. Nevertheless, this technique is good enough for Congressional representatives on a “fact-finding mission” to Guantanamo Bay. I could get all political, but I won’t. Because the BBC has provided something better.
They watched the interrogation of three suspects, including one in which a detainee was read a Harry Potter book aloud for hours until he turned his back and put his hands over his ears.
Who knew that terrorists had feelings similar to Christian fundamentalists?
The Guardian has gone and started the dangerous game of questioning pop lyrics:
Is there any point trying to get meaning from the wishy-washy lyrics of bands such as Coldplay, Keane and Snow Patrol? Or have musicians just run out of things to say?
One does have to ask if pop music ever said much of anything comprehensible. I think of classic songs like Don McLean’s “American Pie” or the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and they come across as pretty non-sensical, too. Or how about Pink Floyd and “Dark Side of the Moon”? This shouldn’t be taken as a defense of Coldplay, mind you. I do enjoy listening to Coldplay, but it’s certainly not for their lyrical genius or inventive melodies. I make no mistakes about “Speed of Sound” making any more sense or sounding much different from “Clocks”. Hell, I’m an aerospace engineer, so I study things that happen at the speed of sound, and that song… well, it certainly doesn’t represent it with “birds go flying at the speed of sound / to show you how it all began”. But I’m not convinced that popular songs from years past were much better off.
What really interested me about this article is the fact that it more or less ignores artists who actually have lyrics that make sense. Or lyrics that make sense but are difficult to decipher (Alanis Morissette, anyone?). Their examples of better crafted modern lyrics come from the likes of Franz Ferdinand, another group I listen to, but really more for the sound. I mean, “I am the new Scottish gentry / anglofied vowels, sub-London thoughts” repeated over and over isn’t exactly high on the poetry scale, either.
Where are the singer/songwriters of today in this? Where’s Rufus Wainwright (or his sister Martha, for that matter)? Damien Rice? John Ondrasik? Sarah McLachlan? Sheryl Crow? I’d say Mic Christopher, but I don’t think anyone outside of Europe has heard of him except for me.
Maybe the Guardian is stuck up on popular British artists with lyrics that make sense. If so, Travis is a good sight better than Coldplay, and they’ve got a card of widespread popularity that my favorite band has yet to receive.
Ah well… at least I’ve got my playlists well in hand.
be my muse, hypotenuse, twice the one i am
divide by nothing to give me everything
break the code or split the atom
we extricate, extrapolate,
prove ourselves together
Since I wrote my Batman Begins review yesterday, I thought I’d make icons today. And I threw a wallpaper in there, too. All in all, I added 15 icons and that wallpaper in all six sizes tonight. I’ve also made a few changes on the blog, many of which are clearest on the front page. Among other things, I now have two co-bloggers, Lindsey and Bandladesh. This means that the level of insanity on this blog has at least tripled. Watch out, world!
ETA: If anyone wants to subscribe specifically to posts that are replacing my icon journal, they can through this RSS feed.
I’ve been requested by Gnome to draft a test post. Which presents me with the usual problem of whether to be deadly serious, intolerably pretentious or incredibly witty. As it’s after 10.00pm, I really don’t think I can be serious. Hell, I’m not even sure I can be original, never mind pretentious.
Anyway, consider this to be my test post. Believe me when I promise you that you’ll be sick of the sight of me before too long. I tend to waffle and ramble interminably about a wide range of things that interest, amuse or irritate me.
I have been Lindsey and you have been wonderful readers. Thank you! I’ll be here all week. Year. Whatever.
I have to admit that, when I first saw a trailer for Batman Begins, I thought to myself, “Dear God, why are they beating a dead franchise again?” Yes, I grew up watching re-runs of the Adam West Batman series (BANG! Zap!), and I’ve derived a lot of entertainment from the 1966 Batman movie. I thought the 1989 Batman from Tim Burton was good, but, by the time we made it to Batman and Robin things were getting pretty ridiculous. So I was understandly nonplussed at the idea of yet another Batman movie. I mean, how many more comic book villains did he possibly have left to go through?
But, no, this time they managed it. With an all-star cast and a plot that managed to explain several of the questions I’d always had about superheroes in general and Batman in particular. (”Just how do these guys get all this equipment without anyone noticing?”) This is not to say that there weren’t problems with the film. This brings me to spoilers, which I will be disguising below. If you’d like to read them, highlight what appears to be empty space and my thoughts will appear through the magic of CSS. Except when I haven’t bothered to transfer that CSS over into a new theme.
The biggest issue I had with the film–and, for the most part, it was a non-issue–was the microwave emitter. I watched the scene with the two thugs who sneak onboard the ship, thinking to myself, “Man, that job’s got to suck. They’re going to turn it on and get fried.” But this did not happen. Because in Gotham, microwaves only affect water that’s not part of a human being. If the movie weren’t so good in other respects, I wouldn’t have been able to get past that. But since this movie managed to delve into the actual character of Batman and turn him into a three-dimensional being, I can forgive them.
As with most comic-book movies, the acting was not exceptional, but it was respectable. Michael Caine made a wonderful Alfred; Christian Bale looked good in the mask; and Cillian Murphy was really quite creepy as Dr. Crane/Scarecrow–I think it’s in the eyes.
The absolutely most important thing, though? It made me want a Batmobile. And I can’t even drive stick.
The EU is getting ridiculous with its complaints about various companies and their “unfair monopolies”. Today they announced a deal with the Coca-Cola company that requires, among other things, that Coke-branded fridges at retailers be at least 20% stocked with products from a different company. Earlier this year, a deal with Microsoft, in which the software giant would market a version of its Windows XP operating system without Windows Media Player under the dubious title of “Windows XP Home Edition N”, was announced. Perhaps I’m being overly generous to the average consumer, but both these deals seem like an insult to the average consumer–not to mention an excellent source of confusion.
What’s the EU planning to do for companies whose drinks are placed in Coke-branded fridges when consumers start thinking that Seven-Up is a Coke product? Or how about someone who gets a brand new computer, signs on to their favorite news site, and finds that, no matter how many times they click for the newest video feed, it refuses to come up?
The XP article notes that Real Networks’ RealPlayer and Apple Quicktime are the main competitors for Windows Media Player. Guess what? I have all three. My primary music/video player, however, is Winamp. What I really love, though, is the fact that Quicktime doesn’t even have the same capabilities as WMP, but it’s still a competitor. You’d have to use iTunes and Quicktime to get the playback options of either WMP or RealPlayer, but… obviously matters like this are not a concern for the EU.
Just got done making the rounds after adding 82 icons to Gnomicons (subjects: The Hours, Kingdom of Heaven, The Lion in Winter, and Mozilla Firefox) and my wrists feel like they’re going to disconnect from my forearms at any second. Damn my tendonitis.
I mentioned that I love movies yesterday. Despite the smaller proportion of icons it got, The Lion in Winter is one of my current top-ten films, and it’s one I think everyone should watch at least once in their life. The movie chronicles the Christmas holiday in 1183 shared by Henry II of England, his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, and three of their sons (Richard (the Lionheart), Geoffrey, and (Prince) John). Though the film’s timeline is not exactly accurate, the writing and acting are brilliant. It’s sort of like Casablanca in its tendency toward brilliantly witty dialogue, but where Casablanca is humorous, The Lion in Winter tends toward scathing snarkiness. Watching this, you will be convinced that there has never been a more dysfunctional family on the face of the earth. They lie, they jab, they act, they plead–and the end result, as a viewer, is that you can never be sure which face, particularly those of Eleanor (played by Katharine Hepburn, who won an Oscar for her role), is the honest one. All in all, an excellent film.
Well, here we are: a shiny, new layout; a shiny, new URL; and a shiny, new category heading to go with it all. Sometimes I think I’m insane for trying to maintain as many sites and blogs as I do, but really, it all comes down to an obsession with control. I like control. Lots of people like control. Maybe I try to keep firm control on my online identity because I feel I have little control in my offline life, but, honestly, that sounds like literary mumbo-jumbo coming from an almost-English major, and it’s not a style I’m keen on.
The point of the exercise, of course, is to welcome you, entertain you for a few minutes, and hopefully woo you into inserting my RSS feed into your favorite news aggregator because I, like virtually every other blogger, enjoy attention. A flaw, to be sure, but hopefully not a tragic one. (I could talk about the tragic flaw(s) of Anakin Skywalker in Episode III, but that would get things off on the wrong foot, I fear.)
Instead, I suppose, I’ll indulge in some introduction, though I imagine the few people who will see this already know this as well as much else about me. I’ll try to be random, I promise.
- I am young for all I’ve done. I’ve lived in two countries and four (soon to be five) states; visited fourteen other countries; attended three primary schools, two middle schools, a junior high, and two high schools; attended one university, lived at two, and worked at an additional one; earned two diplomas with two degrees on the way and plans for earning two more; this and much else I have done without yet reaching legal drinking age in my home country. In fact, I’ll be a graduate student before I’m allowed to drink here.
- I am a writer. Or, at least, I fancy myself to be one. My first novel was written at 14, though it’s currently being rewritten from the ground-up. Two other novels are plotted out, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find a fourth one lurking in the loose-leaf pages that are strewn about my room.
- Despite what the MPAA has to say about college students and piracy, I own more than 50 DVDs and am a regular at my university’s Film Society.
- I am a fanatic when it comes to The Frames. Well over a gigabyte of my harddrive is dedicated to them, and I don’t regret it the least bit.
- Other fanaticisms worth mentioning: Mozilla Firefox, {whisperback}, Discover magazine, Google, and poking my friends.
- All but two of the photos in the blog’s banners were taken by me. Of the two I didn’t take, both were taken by my parents.
- My school district tried to force me out of kindergarten. It didn’t work. However, during the first week of class, I received a warning and did not receive a smiley face sticker when I left. I informed my mother when I got home from school that I was quitting school and joining the circus as a trapeze artist.
- That was also the week my little sister was born. Coincidence? I think not.
- When I stood at the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, I waved so that the assistant principle of the secondary school where I’d been teaching would see me from the top of the dining hall.
- After eight years as a Girl Scout, I can only remember how to tie one knot. I find this shameful.
- Although I share my religious denomination with President George W. Bush, we hardly agree on what it means to be Christian. Actually, there seems to be very little area where we agree on anything. We have both agreed that this country is called the United States of America, though he sometimes lapses into the habit of referring to it as ‘Texas’.
- When I’m in the South, I’m accused of being a Yankee. When I’m in the North, I’m accused of being a Southerner. When asked “Where are you from?”, I answer: “The U.S.”
- I think Shakespeare’s Hamlet is just as funny as it is tragic. If not more funny.
- I have enough complete strangers talking about me at my university that I may as well let a few complete strangers on the Internet join the fun.
Pull up a chair, enjoy a mug of wassail on me (because my ideal web-home is air-conditioned, even when my actual living space is not), and tell me something about yourself.
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