My first post on my friend Rory's blog went up today/last night. Rory briefly went to Reed and now works for Microsoft. He asked me to write some periodic posts for him about web-related things from a non-technical perspective. His blog is quite entertaining even (especially) when I'm not writing on it.

Errol Morris' Reexaminations

I don't know why, but I really liked the following: from Errol Morris' website, under the heading "Reexaminations:

"Why It Makes Sense to Bite the Hand that Feeds You.

1. Preventive bite. Hand is bound to betray you eventually. Get it before it gets you. Remember, every hand is capable of naked aggression.
2. Preemptive bite. Hand is ready to do something. Just look at it. You've got to protect yourself, don't you?
3. Keeps gums healthy.
4. Hand less likely poisoned than food.
5. Tastes good.
6. Why not...?"

Video for "Hell Yes" from new Beck album. Looks a lot like that Junior Senior video (and, you Portlanders, that YACHT video we saw). This is the second track I've heard from this record (the other one was the title track) and it seems like he's gone back to Mellow Gold-style, but via early '00s beepy music. (link is for Real Player video)

Good news regarding Airplane food. D'lish is a new website (still in alpha) that provides personalized meal options on flights. So far they have only two airlines available, but a ton of meals. Including some good looking vegetarian options.

Aw, fudge

Procter & Gamble is buying Gillette. Looks like I'll be switching to this dumbass piece of shit.

For all of you who like The Office and love seeing things you like destroyed, check out the NBC Pilot.

Hadn't posted this yet here and don't know why. Best/worst thing ever:

What is it? is Crispin Glover's feature film. We've been hearing about this for a while. Finally, here's the preview.

List of the top 50 Movie Soundtracks according to Mojo. Some weird choices (Help!, but not A Hard Days Night?).

Ender's Game

Holy fucking shit is Ender's Game good. I finally understand what you guys were talking about, ye Ender's Game cadre who have been tirelessy extolling the virtues of that book since we were 12. I burned through it this past week, honestly expecting nothing beyond compelling pulp at the outset, and my God, it's so much more. I'm just over the moon about it.

Also, it's been optioned for a movie. I'm at a loss to understand how this is going to work, but O.S.C. wrote the screenplay himself, apparently, and Wolfgang Petersen has already been announced as the commissioned director. It seems to me that it would absolutely have to be a cartoon in order to be faithful to the story (how can you really get child actors to convincingly portray these super-children?), but as it appears to be a live-action project, I'm guessing they're bumping the characters up into the next age bracket. Which is unfortunate; it's not really the same story if the kids are thirteen going in instead of six.

Anyways, how do y'all feel about the Oscar noms? I think overlooking the glaring oversight of Paul Giamatti, it's not at all bad. I now have to rush out and see Finding Neverland, Hotel Rwanda and Vera Drake while I have a chance. And Jamie Foxx was doubly nominated! Good for him! Collateral sucked, but he was great in it.

Hobbies

So I noticed the other day that a lot of the professors in my department have terribly erudite hobbies. For example, Mariusz, Count Wodzicki, enjoys translating cuneiform inscriptions. Therefore, I thought I should come up with a suitable obtusely dignified hobby of my own, just to fit in. I'm working with "I enjoy studying the early Neoplatonic thinkers" for the time being. Thoughts? I read Plotinus in college and some Origen, so I should be, like, half way there, right?

On this road, I started with wikipedia, and found the following, which I thought was amusing in a pomopous sort of way:
"Platonism is an ancient school of philosophy, founded by Plato; this school had an actual, physical existence at a site just outside the walls of Athens..."

The Institute for War and Peace Reporting has some of the best international reporting I've ever seen. Actual in depth stories on the conflict-torn places reported with strong local detail. No hotel-based-translator-reliant-bullet-proof-vest-wearing stuff here.

Remote Control Shark.: "Remote control shark. No mention of attaching lasers. Yet."

(Via MetaFilter.)

V-prime

This may one of my all-time most favoritest quotes:
"Vernacular prime is simply one's native tongue in which all use of all tenses of the verb 'to be' is omitted in accordance with quantum metaphysics."

(This appears in an explanation of the eightfold division of magic, which is similar to the"fourfold division of matter into the space, time, mass, energy tautology.")

Also, there are people who claim to be unicorns. Beat that Gia!

Pretty Neat

Pretty neat, huh! You can give the posts titles and text content by including a subject for the email and additional text within the message. I didn't bother doing those things for that picture. If you have a camera phone, you can just save the email address in your phone and then send things here whenever you think to. Come on now, there's got to be some fun things this group of people can think of to do with this! How long has it been since some of us have seen each other?

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about go down and read the post below the picture for instructions).

New Thing You Can Do!

Hey guys --

I added some new functionality to our blog! For a little while, I've been using Flickr to run this blog I've been trying to get off the ground of cell phone images of the Portland art world, and it occurred to me, why not use the same setup to let all of us post images to this blog. So, I set up a new Blogger account and a new Flickr account both of which have the Username FPS Images (the blogger account is actually without the space because Blogger doesn't let your usernames have spaces). I configured the Flickr account so that it will automatically post any photo emailed to it to this blog.

So, the upshot is that all you have to do to send an image to this blog is to send an email to: involve98you2blog@photos.flickr.com. I know, its a stupid address, but they're automatically generated by Flickr. Hang on, I'm going to try it and see if it works.

Scrupulosity

Tonight I heard an authoress on Fresh Air who wrote a memoir about her adolescent bout with Scrupulosity. First of all, isn't that just the best disease name, ever? She said it was coined by the Catholic Church. Apparently, Martin Luther had it. What it is: a version of OCD where the compulsions are associated with religious practice, i.e the need to wash comes from the imagined presence of sin and the practice of the compulsions is a form of observance.

Some of you may recognize this real disease as strikingly similar to, and probably the basis of, one of the plot's of Orson Scott Card's Xenocide.

Listen to the Fresh Air interview here.

USA Today

Once again USAToday.com comes through as the single shittiest major news source:
Top news story
"Revised food pyramid to emphasize calories, exercise."

Keep in mind that the original food pyramid was a marketing ploy.

Two links

John Malkovich starring in movie about the life of Gustav Klimt

First look at some images from the Linklater rotoscoped version of A Scanner Darkly

(you probably saw this second one if you read boingboing.net)