You can find several loving closeups of Davy Jones at this site—there’s also some text, but it’s all High Geek as near as I can tell.
They seem to sneak past the alarms that my bluntness usually sets off. Mike Dunford has a nice quote from that subversive radical, Terry Pratchett:
“Look at it this way, then,” she said, and took a deep mental breath. “Wherever people are obtuse and absurd . . . and wherever they have, by even the most generous standards, the attention span of a small chicken in a hurricane and the investigative ability of a one-legged cockroach . . . and wherever people are inanely credulous, pathetically attached to the certainties of the nursery and, in general, have as much grasp of the realities of the physical universe as an oyster has of mountaineering . . . yes, Twyla: there is a Hogfather.”
(For those not familiar with the backstory, the Hogfather is the Santa Claus equivalent in his fantasy stories.)
Well, if we can’t find the new Architeuthis video, we can at least enjoy a little Cephalopodmas carol, Squid and Whale.
If you’d like something more traditional, here are the lyrics for the Twelve Days of Cephalopodmas. You already know the music.
Lastly, should you really want to get into the festive spirit of the holiday, here are some photos of a whale necropsy. Warning: there is blood, there are guts. How much? Well, they used a large backhoe as a retractor.
Revel in the crankiness: Charlie Brown Must Die. (If that link doesn’t work for you, here’s a direct link to the Quicktime movie)
P.S. I do not endorse incinerating blockheaded kids. After all, I’m one of those Christmas atheists.
I finally saw Borat last night, and I’m afraid I was unimpressed. There were a few funny moments, there were a few horrifying moments where he raised a mirror to our culture to make us squirm (the cheerfully eliminationist cowboy at the rodeo, for instance, or those appallingly stupid frat boys), but mostly it was incoherent, weird, and rude for rude’s sake. There was a scene with two naked men wrestling in a hotel that was nothing but vulgar slapstick, and while I’ve got nothing against a little slapstick now and then, it just didn’t advance the film anywhere.
I think Sacha Baron Cohen is capable of flashes of brilliant satire, but he lacks the chops to assemble them into a coherent movie.
We have a splendid double feature weekend of liberal extremism here at the Morris Theater: Borat and Happy Feet. This is going to be one of those events where I’ll see all these people I know from the university lining up for the show, and the only community people will be the fervent DFL contingent…oh, and swarms of kids for the early penguin cartoon, whose parents don’t realize it’s going to brainwash them into being tap-dancing gay godless communists.
(Yes, I know, everyone has already seen these movies ages ago, but this is Morris. At least I’ll get to see it in a real old-fashioned art-deco single screen theater for less than $6.)
Medgadget had a Sci Fi contest, and they’ve just posted the winning entries. The results are your usual mixed bag of amateur SF, but since it is a medical gadget site, one of the interesting outcomes is that all of them are focused on science and engineering and medicine, and not so much that other literary stuff. There’s a whiff of nostalgia there—they read like 1940s scientifiction, before that scary contentious New Wave stuff came along.
Anyway, it’s fun writing about science ideas—just don’t go in expecting much in the way of character development or mood.
If you’ve been wondering how it would turn out, the first review of the Left Behind video game is online. It doesn’t get any thumbs up.
Don’t mock Left Behind: Eternal Forces because it’s a Christian game. Mock it because it’s a very bad game. The real-time strategy/adventure game from Left Behind Games based on the best-selling series of novels from Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins will even let down born-again types who expect the Rapture to beam them up to heaven any day now. Nobody has enough faith to endure a game with such a hokey story, terrible mission design, serious problems with the interface and graphics, and loads of crippling bugs.
Now you see, this is what happens when you hire exorcists instead of programmers to do your debugging.
(via The Atheist Experience)
It’s our very own Thanksgiving carol: Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant.
The BBC is going to be showing a program with images of developing embryos (there are some galleries online) generated from ultrasound, cameras inserted into the uterus, and largely, computer-generated graphics. It’s all very pretty, and I hope it will also be shown in my country, but…these pictures violate all the rules of scientific imaging. The images are clearly generated by imposing artistic decisions derived from the conventions of computer animation work onto the data that was collected—I can’t tell what details in these embryos were actually imaged, and which were added by the CGI guy.
I can tell you that the way they’re rendered as free-floating individuals suspended in great airy spaces lit by a glow through distant membranes like stained glass windows is complete hokum, and the textures just look all wrong. They ought to be slimy, wrapped in membranes, and enveloped closely in maternal tissues. I hope the program includes some honest description of the process of making the images, with before and after photos, so viewers can see how much of the work is interpolated and artificially added.
