At least it wasn’t a tractor.
Month: July 2001 (Page 3 of 5)
Continuing in my zeal to throw stuff away that began with the new bookcases, I went through a box of old letters, postcards and other documents from when I was in college and slightly after. I was amazed at the amount of paper correspondence I wrote and received in that time. I love e-mail, but it was really fun to read the words of all these people, some of whom I’d just about forgotten before I read the letter.
Imagine how many friends we’d have if we stayed in touch with all the people throughout our lives we once considered good friends.
Two discs in the Unbreakable DVD set, and no second audio commentary? What is the world coming to?
My birthday was this past week, and Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game has grown to be one of my favorite songs. The link not only has the lyrics, but also a link to listen to the song. Give it a chance and let me know what you think.
And they tell him, take your time, it won’t be long now
‘Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down.
Melissa says her favorite weblog tagline was my long-standing one from Fight Club, “How’s that working out for you – being clever?” Her praise fills me with happiness.
I was actually thinking of making that my permanent tagline. But I really enjoy changing them. Anybody recognize where the current one comes from? (It’s pretty obscure.)
Just got back from Final Fantasy, an amazing cavalcade of sights and sounds with very little story or characters to intrude. I guess this is to be expected in such an ambitious first effort of this kind; new technologies in entertainment often overshadow the more human aspects. Still, it’s wonderful entertainment for the geek side of us all – “How did they get her hair to move like that?” and etc. Worth seeing, if only for it being the first step on a really interesting road.
What occurred to me is how the human voices (Ming-Na, Alec Baldwin, Donald Sutherland, and a funny Steve Buscemi, among others) took us so far into accepting these pixels as humans. Computers can do (relatively) convincing skin, eyes, and hair, but they’re nowhere near ready to simulate a human voice that would fool anybody. Imagine how the impact of HAL in 2001 would have been blunted without Douglas Rain’s soothing, creepy voice. And what if Spielberg’s “mechas” in A.I. had standard, “computer generated” voices? Maybe the human voice is the real final frontier in computer simulation.
Ever since my mildly-successful venture into creating a meme with the Top 10 movies, I’ve been thinking of all the other great, great movies that didn’t make my list, but are so fantastic they have to be mentioned:
My Dinner with Andre, Once Around, Clockwatchers, The Truman Show, The Matrix, The Straight Story, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Aliens, Babette’s Feast, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Series 7, Broadcast News, Limbo, The Abyss.
As per Melissa, movie I hated that everyone else in the civilized world loved: Field of Dreams. What a load of bunk.
Here are three nicknames I was once called, and one fake one:
1. Howdy Doody
2. Mr. Potato Head
3. Dondi
4. Odie
Can you guess which is the fake one?
My friend Kevin likes to watch squirrels. I was on my daily constitutional this morning, and passed over a sort of double driveway shared by two adjacent houses. There were about 10 enormous squirrels rushing hither and yon around the driveway, and chattering in that unnerving chirping noise they have when they are, I suppose, talking to each other. I was momentarily spooked. And it occurred to me, a squirrel is pretty much a rat with a big fuzzy tail. That big fuzzy tail gets them thought of as “cute,” rather than the rat’s “disgusting, gross, scary” rep. If the driveway had been filled up with rats, I think I (and many other sane people) would have at least crossed the street. That fuzzy tail has gotten the squirrel pretty far.