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February 28, 2004
Today's bon mot is a bon phrase
Pyrrhic Victory
In 281 B.C., King Pyrrhus of Epirus landed on the southern Italian shore with 20 elephants and 25,000-30,000 men to defend his fellow Greek speakers (in Tarentum of Magna Graecia) against Roman domination. While Pyrrhus won the first battle, he lost half his men (and ultimately, the war).
Example: I'll bet you can't kick at me and miss.
The term pyrrhic victory comes to mind from the "lawsuit of the week". One night in a bar, Michael Ilaszczat bet a couple of soldiers $100 that one of them couldn't high-kick over his head without touching him. It was a pyhhric victory for Ilaszczat because, although he won the bet, he was kicked to the floor and injured his hip. He insisted that his employer should pay disability benefits which included the cost of hip surgery because, in stationing him on Johnston Atoll, a two-mile-long island 700 miles west of Hawaii, he was put in the position of having to find his fun where he could -- even if it involved alcohol-inspired stupidity.
Bill Bickle does an interesting column on lawsuits that pose dilemmas, and then asks you to vote. It's amazing how often the general public votes in a manner that I would characterize as conservative, and the court verdict winds up being liberal. Why is that?
Posted by John at 11:56 PM | Comments (1)
February 27, 2004
Well, that didn't take long!
Apparently, the reaction of the Internet community to the Mario Bros. II movie linked below was sufficiently positive that the author/artist went ahead and made Mario Bro. III available! [Click on the screenshot on the left.]
Posted by John at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)
February 26, 2004
Mario Brothers - The Epic Battle
The sheer volume of material out there on the Internet is staggering, and the most fascinating are the magnificent obsessions. I have a tendency to disparage them with comments like "way too much time on his hands", but when a lot of time meets a lot of talent, magic can happen.
Such is the case with this Flash animation of a new Mario Brothers adventure. There are only two parts so far, and it's like watching The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers... you can't wait to see the the third one (which is already done, to be released simultaneously with Part 4)! Especially when you haven't already read the book, so you don't know how it's going to turn out.
Part 2 is very, very impressive, but I recommend you watch them in order. I love the soundtrack on Part 2, as well. Part 1. Part 2.
Kudos to the creator, Mr. Alex Leon, a 19-year old from New Jersey who wants to go to art school. Go, boy, go. Do not delay.
Posted by John at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)
Roger Ebert on The Passion
Roger Ebert likes The Passion of the Christ, and does a remarkably good job explaining why. It's not a movie that attempts to preach the message of Jesus, it's purely about the ordeal he endured, the sacrifice he made. It is, Ebert says repeatedly, "the most violent film I have ever seen."
How violent, you ask? Well, let's put it this way: don't let it scare you to death.
Want a quick temperature reading? Check the pull-quotes from dozens of reviewers at rottentomatoes.com.
Posted by John at 07:38 AM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2004
And God said...
I've always like Andy Rooney, as noted here before, and although I missed him on Sunday, that's what the Internet is for, right? Pat Robertson and Mel Gibson get the classic Rooney skewer in this little diatribe.
We're pretty active in our church, and so get involved in a lot of discussions about religious and spiritual matters, particularly where they intersect with public awareness and major media outlets. Last week, in fact, we talked about Gibson's movie (which opens tomorrow) and the book The DaVinci Code.
Andy pushes the envelope here in this piece, bordering on sacreligious, but he certainly gets his points across, and as usual, they're good ones.
BTW, if you're interesting in brushing up your religious arguments about Mel's movie, you can check out some of the pros and cons:
Posted by John at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)
Streetsigns on the Road to Hell #4
Les Moonves, the genius behind the controversial Reagan TV miniseries and the mastermind behind the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" has another brain fart. Since he's also the chairman of CBS, he might even get his way. He's proposing a reality series where they dump Amish teenagers in Beverly Hills, and, undoubtedly, seedier L.A. locales as well.
While the Amish generally eschew technology, making their own clothes and growing their own crops, when they turn 16 they are given a period of time to "experiment" -- getting a taste of the outside world and making sure that they know what they are giving up before committing to a low-tech lifestyle by baptism.
Moonves apparently thinks it would be entertaining to dump them all in front of the "Live Nude Nudes" place on Century Blvd by the airport with a fistful of dollars. "Roll tape!"
Apparently, this proposal is (finally) egregious enough that the US Congress is getting involved. Rep. Joe Pitts, whose Pennsylvania constituency includes many Amish, has rallied 51 members of Congress who want Les Moonves to call off this UPN "reality" series.
Moonves insisted, "It will not be denigrating to the Amish."
Posted by John at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2004
Global warming warning
Global warming is one of those scientific issues that elicits strong opinions on both sides of the argument, but where the evidence is difficult to interpret because it accrues slowly - over years and decades and centuries. The myriad interpretations of the data further cloud the issue for the layperson, and the - usually obvious - personal agendas of the proponents of either argument detract from their ability to deliver convicting scenarios. Do you believe it's a threat, or not?
All that may be about to change.
Pentagon defense adviser Andrew Marshall has apparently commissioned a study of the impact of global warming, and the results were so ... dramatic ... that the Pentagon has kept the report quiet for the past four months. The issue, of course, given the Pentagon's agenda, is whether global warming could have an impact on our national defense. The results were, I'm willing to bet, unexpected.
While I don't consider this report to necessarily be any more or less accurate than the thousands of research projects and articles that have preceded it, it is probably more important than any other, because it is arising from within the Bush administration's stronghold, the Pentagon. I don't think he can ignore it, and with an election coming up, it's certain that his opponents will not let him brush it off.
Whenever I see a report (or, more commonly an article about a report) like this, I look for the hedges. Yes, IF global warming occurs at the high end of the various spectrums that are forecast by various scientists and study groups, we COULD have a major problem. But this report is more concrete, more alarming. A few select quotes:
"As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions."I'd love to see the report; I hope a media outlet gets their hands on it soon. Meanwhile, you have to make do with the article."By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war."
"...major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world."
Posted by John at 07:06 AM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2004
World's Cutest Animal
Aw.
How cute.
We're voting for Asia's cutest animal right now and voting for N. America starts March 1, so check them out!
Awww.
Posted by John at 10:49 PM | Comments (0)
Jurassic Park - for real?
Ignoring all the science fiction horror movies that have amply characterized the stupidity of reviving primitive life forms, scientists at the University of Otago (New Zealand) revive 8-million-year-old bacteria recovered from Antarctica. Then, not content with exposing the New Zealanders, they shipped the specimens to the United States and Russia.
"The colony was not active, but they may have just been shut down waiting for conditions to come right again," he said.Isn't that the opening line from the movie Aliens?
Posted by John at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)
Stephen Wolfram's New Science
A year-and-a-half ago, Stephen Wolfram rattled the cages of the scientific community with his bold proclamation of "a new kind of science", as documented in his 1197-page treatise of the same name. Now available online, in its entirety.
Wolfram's thesis is simple and bold, focused on the behavior of cellular automata. (Think of simple rules-driven systems like the old "Life" programs showing virus propogation, or black/white systems where a rules causes each square to change color based on the color of its neighbor.) He effectively shows that simple rules can give rise to complex patterns, sometimes surprisingly complex and unpredictable.
Personally, I think he overreachs in evaluating the impact of this phenomenon as an explanatory force for the diversity and complexity we encounter in our natural world. There is, for example, no attempt to classify degrees of complexity, and no mechanism whereby these spontaneously arising complex patterns can continue or extend their "intelligence". I can see the link to patterns in the clouds or sand on the beach, but I don't think this explains human intelligence.
Now, with the whole document online, you can judge for yourself.
Posted by John at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)
Penguin Baseball II
Here's another version of Penguin Baseball where the Yeti hits harder, so you can get more distance.
Posted by John at 05:46 PM | Comments (1)
The Mystery Club of Luna Drive
Kudos to the Maricopa County Library District in Arizona, a group that really "gets it" where building community on the web is concerned. Not only do they have a great website, but they also have a serialized mystery novel for kids, written by James M. Deem. Surprisingly good, and updated every month with a new chapter. Five chapters are already up, so you can catch up quickly!
February is Library Lovers Month, so check out this page at librarysupport.net for tons of interesting ideas on how you can help out your local library.
Posted by John at 05:38 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2004
Windows Media Player Codec for DIVX
Windows Media Player 9 has a number of features that make it a worthwhile upgrade, but one significant shortfall that I've found. Namely, no support for DIVX, which is the AVI movie file format most commonly used for movies over the Internet. Problem is, there are multiple DIVX codecs, and when you go to search for DIVX codecs you wind up hitting every pR0n site under the sun. So to save you the trouble, and to remind me to download this to my home PCs, here's one that works.
Posted by John at 08:07 AM | Comments (1)
February 14, 2004
Rickie Lee Jones
For a Valentine's Day gift, I took Julie out to see Rickie Lee Jones in concert here in Marin. Mistake. At least I also got her a box of chocolates.
Posted by John at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)
Two in a row!
I'm liking these Yeti games. Today's is written in some foreign language I can't decipher, so we'll just call it Penguin Baseball. Basically, you're the Yeti, and you're waiting at the bottom of a cliff. When the penguins jump off, you swing your club and go for distance. As you'll know if you've ever spent any time clubbing penguins, snow introduces a lot of resistance, so the penguins fly farther if you give them a little altitude. So far my best is 321 yards. And they say penguins can't fly!
Posted by John at 12:28 AM | Comments (0)
February 12, 2004
Orca Slap
Orca Slap went right to the "Keelhauling Games Hall of Fame". This great looking little game positions you, as the Yeti, on an iceberg with penguins frolicking in the water nearby. When they flip up into the air with their annoying little aerial acrobatics, you nail them with a snowball, driving them beak-first into the side of an iceberg -- that conveniently has a target painted on it! I like the way their little flippers wiggle as they are stuck head-first in the ice.
Posted by John at 05:52 PM | Comments (2)
better him than me
Remember our hero, Erik the Red? Well, all I can say is, if you're not cut out for it, don't try wrestling the shark. Or you might wind up like Luke Tresoglavic, a.k.a. "Luke the Red Legged". Swim 300 meters and then drive to the local surf club with a shark attached to your leg? I'd rather be, well... keelhauled.
Posted by John at 01:09 AM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2004
flying the friendly skies
Well, nobody needs another airline customer service horror story, but when you're riding the Ramada Inn shuttle bus through Chicago because your 40 minute layover turned into a 4 hour wait at the airport before they finally wound up cancelling your flight to Montreal at 11:55pm so you're stuck there overnight and being comped to the cheapest room in town, the last thing in the world you want to see is a billboard proclaiming:
United - Plan your day around your schedule, not ours.That is all.
Posted by John at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2004
Patrick Stewart
Formerly actor extraordinaire who brought to life the wonderful and inspiring character of Jean Luc Picard, a bastion of refined civilization, intellect and passion standing against the bitter cold of interstellar space, the implacable and relentless Borg, the hostile and conniving Klingons. Turncoat. Traitor. Worthless Shakespeare-festival theatrical dillitante. Short-sighted right-wing self-absorbed cueball. Dishonored son of a Rigellian spice merchant. Filthy patahk!
Posted by John at 06:13 PM | Comments (3)
February 05, 2004
How can you know and not know?
A friend sent me a link to this WaPo article "Auschwitz Under Our Noses". With a title like that, I was expecting another Chicken Little right-wing diatribe against the Bush administration for ignoring human rights, or raping our privacy rights under the guise of the PATRIOT Act.
It wasn't that at all.
What this article says is important, the questions that it raises are fundamental. As often happens, a good writer clarifies vague thoughts and impressions, imposes a structure and an order to vague concerns and discontents, and boils it down to some hard questions.
Later -- in 10 years, or in 60 -- it will surely turn out that quite a lot was known in 2004 about the camps of North Korea. It will turn out that information collected by various human rights groups, South Korean churches, oddball journalists and spies added up to a damning and largely accurate picture of an evil regime. It will also turn out that there were things that could have been done...I watched West Wing last night with Julie, and was impressed with the way Martin Sheen delivered the message about the new doctrine. I can't quote him exactly, but basically what he said was "Never before has there been an American administration willing to commit military forces in support of basic human rights. That changes today." That episode was a nice encapsulation of the message that Bush has been trying to communicate, but he doesn't enjoy the privilege of a tightly scripted 45 minutes of network time per week. The real world intrudes.
The article makes me wonder why we - as a country - don't explore these charges of gross human rights violations... well, let's call it what it is. Murder. Or are we investigating, but the efforts get no press? Is our research necessarily secret? Great article, tough questions.
Posted by John at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)
February 04, 2004
Ta da dum.. dum.. dum..
... another one bites the dust, ta da dum.. dum.. dum..
Hi,Thank you for your support of InfoMinder. We will be discontinuing the support for the free version of InfoMinder Basic. You can upgrade to InfoMinder Professional by following this link.
http://www.infominder.com/webminder/IMProductDetails.jsp
Darn! Another useful free service, down the tubes. I wonder what their conversion rate to the pay service will be. I'll bet they will be shocked at how low it is. Infominder is a useful little web site monitoring tool that alerts you to changes via email, but it just isn't going to make economic sense to pay for it unless your job is competitive intelligence.
Posted by John at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)
February 03, 2004
Boogle it!
OK, I know it's a ripoff, and I know it's just wrong, and I know that the Google brand name can't be abused this way, and I'm sure they have the cease-and-desist letter in hand by now, and Google is probably eyeing that public offering and wanting to see every ounce of intellectual property value squeezed out of their facility as the world's leading Internet search engine, and having somebody put a wrapper on their content and their functionality, and then to add insult to injury bastardize their name is just over the tippy top... and sure I'll miss the Google doodles, like today's Julia fractals link (that crashed the targeted server, of course) in celebration of the birthday of Gaston Julia, the father of the graphic representations of the set J(f) of those z in C for which the nth iterate fn(z) stays bounded as n tends to infinity, otherwise known as fractal geometry, an allusion which undoubtedly escaped 99% of Google users, but hey, you read Keelhauling, so now you know.
But anyway, about the other site, I like the pictures.
And the quotes, which aren't as good as our slogans, but better than most.
It's relaxing somehow.
It feels like good karma, and I need all of that I can get.
And how the hell do they afford the bandwidth from all the traffic this will bring, because it sure doesn't look like they're making any money from it?
Posted by John at 11:17 PM | Comments (0)
Principalities and Powers 0000001
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Ephesians 6:12During the Dark Ages in Europe, men fired cannon shots into the air to chase away the demons that were believed to cause the bubonic plague that killed millions. Just a few centuries ago, university surgeons would go to the mortuary to do autopsies of those who had just died and then go straight into the operating-rooms, without washing their hands, to do surgery. Today, some Asian hill-tribes still avoid going close to water because they believe that the "water-spirits" cause sickness (malaria - a mosquito-borne disease).
After the advent of the microscope, a whole new world was revealed, previously invisible, but nevertheless very real world that co-existed with the known physical world. Since that time, the discovery of antibiotics has helped mankind to fight infection, disease and other afflictions arising from the microscopic world.
Today we suffer from a similar kind of blindness.
Before the microsope, we filtered and analyzed every datum and factoid through our knowledge, which was restricted to macro events and physical objects. In our modern scientific age, we still filter and evaluate everything in terms of understandable physical factors, we just know more now than we did in times past. The more we understand about nature and our world, we think, the closer we come to complete understanding.
But we continue to fail to factor in the vital spiritual element. We humans are a spiritual people, and there's a reason for that, and as Shakespear wrote: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Bad news, friends, there is evil in the world. I don't care what your vision of art might be - this isn't art. This is E-V-I-L using our collective public tendency -- to err on the side of extraordinary leniency and permissiveness when the spectre of censorship is awakened -- against us.
Principalities and powers indeed. Here at Keelhauling, we'll try and let you know when we spot them.
Posted by John at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)
February 02, 2004
Clever doesn't last
Jon Blake Cusack and his wife Jamie had a baby. Jon Cusack 2.0. That's going to be funny for the first week of his life...
Posted by John at 05:49 PM | Comments (0)
Superbowl Commercials
iFilm posts the Superbowl commercials online again this year. Overall a pretty disappointing crop in my opinion. The best is the Jimi Hendrix Purple Haze Pepsi vs. Coke commercial.
Posted by John at 01:27 PM | Comments (0)
