Category: words mean things (Page 194 of 223)

As an ex-journalist and a fan of the First Amendment, most of the time I don’t want the government to limit what people can write or what you can read. But I’ve come to realize that certain books should be prohibited by law:

-Jane Seymour talking about having twins;
-Marie Osmond talking about post-partum depression, especially with a title like “Behind the Smile”;
-teenage opera singer Charlotte Church writing her autobiography.

Sadly, the laws of the land did not move fast enough to prohibit any of the above from reaching bookstores. Sometimes democracy can be just a little to slow on the uptake.

This page reminds me of when the first Macs came out, and someone on campus had one, and we used to amuse ourselves by writing sentences and changing them to wacky giant fonts. Only in reverse. Sort of. (by way of Lines & Splines, a cool weblog about typography)

Tuesday has written a great post about revealing (or not revealing) yourself through your weblog.

In a seemingly related but actually unrelated bit of business, I’ve added some new details to my exhaustive (exhausting?) about page.

Joke for you:
Two elephants are standing in a jungle clearing, both wearing party hats. Around them is strewn the remnants of birthday party decorations – horns, banners, confetti, etc.

ELEPHANT #1: “Wow, that was great. I can’t remember when I had a better time. Of course, that’s just a figure of speech.”

In surfing around among the sites in the “A.I.” online game (see yesterday’s entry), I’ve become fascinated with the idea of androids. There have been a lot of predictions of future societies and what they would look like, and most of the time we laugh at the “Logan’s Run” vision of the future. But just imagine if you could buy an android, outwardly indistinguishable from a human being, for, say, the price of a Lexus? It could be any race, sex, size, etc. that you wanted, and it would behave in exactly the way you specified to the manufacturer. The societal, ethical, legal and economic implications would be truly mindboggling. You would own a thing, an object, a possession that could look, act and feel just like a human being. Since it’s technically an object, you could use it for any purpose you wanted. No one would have to know that this was an android – even maybe the android itself. This stuff makes cloning seem easy and clearcut.

I can only hope that the movie deals with at least a few of these concepts. We’ll see.

Kevin should submit his new word to the pseudodictionary.

Well, it appears that my prediction from a month ago most likely won’t come true. If Colby wins the final immunity, he will most likely pick Keith for the final two, as he’s an easier win than Tina. If Tina wins the immunity (unlikely), she will probably pick Keith as well. And if Keith wins, well, my prediction is shot definitely. Still, I was pretty damn close.

Things are pretty clear-cut for the Colbster. Win the immunity, and he wins the million. Lose, and he comes in third.

If only Michael hadn’t fallen in that fire… I miss Alicia.

“The Blair Witch Project” had an innovative online advertising campaign that spun out the film’s mythology into a web site filled with fake backstory details. Now, Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.” has an even more immersive online game component, with faxes, phone numbers, emails and interrelated web sites about the mysterious death of Evan Chan. Write the Web has an interesting article about it. If you want to play the game yourself, start by searching for “Jeanine Salla” on Google – she’s listed as “Sentient Machine Therapist” on the film’s posters.

“Touched by an Angel” has truly reached epic proportions of stupidity. Tonight’s morality play from Hell had Anabella Sciorra as a scientist who hatches a plan to clone Albert Einstein and implant the embryo in her very own uterus. Of course, anyone who follows “Touched” should know by now that if someone is a scientist, they must be stopped from whatever hellish Godless pursuit they are embroiled in. Along the way, we are treated to comparing cloning to the atomic bomb, blaming Einstein himself for Hiroshima, Harold Gould in an Einstein fright wig, and the creation of new angel Valerie Bertinelli (!) from cherry blossoms.

It’s the pop culture equivalent of a massive car crash – I shouldn’t look, but I can’t help myself. Where did I leave that Tarot deck?