I don’t know who this guy Evil Bobby is, but he has distracted me a couple of times these last few days with collections of weird Russian pop videos. Isn’t that what the internets are all about, stumbling into strange things you’d never look up yourself?
This is the week of the Stevens County Fair, right here in bucolic Morris, Minnesota. It starts on Wednesday, 9 August and runs through Sunday the 13th, so you all still have time to start heading out this way. It’s your classic rural fair: there will be accordions, deep-fried anything on a stick, pig-judging, carnies, a demolition derby, country-western music, lawn mower races, 4H kids, and tractors, snowmobiles, and ice houses for sale. You have not lived until you have experience a midwestern county fair.
(Oh, and don’t eat the food if you want to continue living. It’s like jabbing your aorta with a turkey baster clogged full of pure cholesterol.)
I think we’re planning on having our weekly Drinking Liberally session at the beer garden at the fair, so there’s another reason for coming on Thursday evening.
I’m going to be there just about every day. I volunteered to man booths at various hours for UMM, our local humane society, and the Stevens County DFL. Come on down—the fair is free, parking is free, it is the thing to do in August.
I think this is my favorite Pink Floyd song of them all:
You all remember that a program on the giant squid is on the Discovery Channel tonight, right? I’m tuned in right now.
The plot careered around like a drunken sailor, and made very little sense. The macguffin was ridiculous. Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley were bland mannequins who didn’t do much. Many of the situations were absurd—the sword fight on the water wheel, the cannibals and the pirates dashing back and forth around the island, heck, just about every time someone pulled a sword, it was for a silly reason. The primary villain, Lord Cutler Beckett, was a conniving bureaucrat who didn’t leave his office, and who was working to get a monopoly for the East India Company—did they get their plot driver from George Lucas? Also, it just sort of stops at the end, and we’re going to have to wait until next summer to find out what happens.
Still…Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest was terrific fun. It’s got pirates, a squid-man, a giant squid, a crew of undead human-sea creature hybrids, random sword fights, a giant squid crushing ships, the cutest little animated barnacles, a giant squid eating people, very poor dental hygiene, and it just never stops. I’d been warned that it was over-long, but seriously, I got to the end and thought, “It’s done? Already?”
I will warn the kiddies it does have scenes of graphic violence. People take axes and swords to the giant cephalopod’s arms, they shoot it, they fire cannons into it, and they blow things up and set fire to his arms. But don’t worry, <SPOILER ALERT!!!> the Kraken bounces right back and he’s OK, and he even gets to eat a major character. I was relieved. I still have hopes that in the sequel, the Kraken will complete its quest, achieve freedom from its servitude, eat all the wicked people, and retire to some nice abyssal current where it will lurk quietly and eat many surprised deep-diving whales.
The other hero of the movie, Davy Jones, was splendid, a magnificently handsome leading man. There were hints that he has a sad romantic history. The character of Elizabeth is showing signs of dissatisfaction with that piece of damp cardboard, Will Turner. I think you can all see where this is going: I predict that in the final movie, Elizabeth will finally meet Davy, she’ll fall in love at first sight, she’ll win his heart, and they’ll sail off into the sunset, where they’ll spawn many squidlets together. Yeah, it’s predictable, but this is the kind of movie that just has to have a happy ending.
Oh, and just to tie up all the loose ends, I think Will and Jack have to end up in a happy pirate life together, too.
Tonight is the Morris premiere of that fabulous documentary on exotic marine invertebrates and nautical history, Pirates of the Caribbean. I will be there. I will be leaving early so I can get a good seat, front and center. I shall be singing sea shanties as I walk downtown to the theater. I will be rooting for the handsome fellow with the tentacular beard. I’m certain I will have a good time.
I’ll probably also gripe heartily about the movie afterwards. We curmudgeons just aren’t truly happy unless we’ve got things to grumble about.
The SEED question of the week is this one:
What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally….
Hmmm. I know I’ve posted a few movie reviews here. Let’s see, what have I said…
I keep waiting for the padded ambulance to roll up and men in white coats to leap out, shoot these bozos with a trank gun, wrap them up in a straight jacket, and go howling off to the nearest sanitarium, but no…instead, they get invitations to appear on cable news and babble about the apocalypse. And it’s not just the airhead news media…
…Rosenberg is just one of several conservative media figures who have identified and expounded upon the purported signs of the Apocalypse to be found in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. During his appearance on Live From…, Rosenberg claimed that he had been invited to the White House, Capitol Hill, and the CIA to discuss the Rapture and the Middle East, and noted—several times—that the apocalyptic events described in his novels keep coming true.
What’s really frightening is that these people don’t exhibit an ounce of critical thinking, and these ridiculous attitudes are endemic in the people who run our country. I’m waiting for some smart, pragmatic, sensible guy in government or the press to stand up and truncate that famous quote: “You have done enough. Have you no sense?”
(via Atrios)
Oh, good. I saw this WaPo article with a morphing animation of a lemur into SJ Gould, and I was mildly appalled—it’s a very badly done gimmick that doesn’t say anything about how evolution works, and actually grossly misleads the viewer on the morphological transformations that had to have occurred. Fortunately, I don’t have to deepen my reputation as a cranky internet curmudgeon by complaining about it— Carl Zimmer has done it for me.
Transforming grid coordinates is an interesting tool in describing the transformations between forms—D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson did it well—but you need to start with forms you know are linearly related and you’ve got to define and align anatomical features very carefully. Picking random photos of various primates and blending them ain’t it.
