Peanuts as Watchmen

Posting a link to a Kotaku article, not because of the story, but because of the accompanying art. Who in the heck thought of making various Peanuts characters into various Watchmen characters? They deserve a medal of some sort, or at least a hearty handclasp. I particularly like Linus as the Comedian, and of course Snoopy as Rorschach.

EDIT: Sorry Kotaku, found the original link, I think.

Better Evan than Odd: Three Artists Walk into a Bar...

Noted political pundit on McCain

David Letterman, of all people, had a common-sense response to McCain's suspending his campaign and flying back to Washington (and leaving him without a guest as well). In a nutshell, he said "You don't suspend your campaign. You keep your campaign going and have your vice-presidential candidate step in and take over for you. Why isn't that happening? Is there a problem with that?"

Wow. Nail, here's the hammer, right on your head. If Palin can't be considered capable for running the campaign while McCain goes back to do whatever it is he thinks he's going to do about this crisis, how in the hell can anyone believe they consider her capable to RUN THE DAMN COUNTRY in case something happens to a 72-year-old veteran!

Mildred Pierce and Stop-Loss

Two quickie movie reviews. Maria had gotten Mildred Pierce from the library so we watched it one evening. A good movie, not fantastic, but good. Lots of snappy dialog like they had back in the day. Joan Crawford looked like someone in the movie but we couldn't quite place who... she was still kind of good looking in a harsh angular way at this point. Today it'd make an excellent training video for sexual harassment. Anyhow, I'd always meant to watch it, and now I have. Check.

A while back I watched Stop-Loss on the treadmill. Directed by Kimberly Pierce (sp?), who also did Boys Don't Cry, it was again another well-done film, not spectacular, but solid. The opening gunfight was as tense as they come and was very well edited. The rest of the film kind of came down from that, but of course it wasn't meant to be an action film. It was good to see them avoid what a clichéd Hollywood film would have done at certain key points, specifically the avoidance of a bedroom scene that seemed destined to happen, and particularly the ending, which was more depressing than most endings I could think of. A little too obvious in its political leanings, but hey, since I lean that way, I didn't mind it. Good film.

Coming to a spam filter near you:

Saw this via Daily Kos via BoingBoing. Hilarious!

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. 

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you. 

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe. 

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred. 

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds. 

Yours Faithfully 

Minister of Treasury Paulson

The Nation: Bailout Satire

Videogame sound quality beats CD

At least as far as Metallica's new album "Death Magnetic" is concerned, that is. There'd been some comments recently that the audio quality on the CD was overly compressed, and that in fact the audio quality of the songs in Guitar Hero (where the tracks were released day-and-date alongside the album) was considerably better.

Now there appears to be some objective data backing up those claims. Kotaku linked to an article claiming that the sound engineer has disavowed the mastering on the CD. The same article links to a YouTube video where someone had ripped the CD and compared it to the Guitar Hero audio. Looks pretty clear that the CD is waaaaay overcompressed (as in dynamic range, not as in MP3 compression). The waveforms look like the ones I end up with, but I work with science lectures and no one cares if there's no dynamic range.

Should be interesting how Metallica responds to this. And no, I'm not a big metalhead... in fact, it was Metallica's damned "Enter Sandman" that kept me from getting to the last group of songs in Rock Band/Guitar/Hard difficulty.


Engineer Disowns Metallica's "Death Magnetic"

Random Fringe thoughts

I've still only gotten through about half of the new Fox series Fringe on the ol' MythTV box--I got delayed due to finishing up Stop-Loss (review to come one of these years). Here are some initial thoughts:

• From the outset it was too reminiscent of too many other things, mainly Lost (plane crash) and X-Files (title sequence, gore factor, hot FBI agent).
• I thought that landing a plane via auto-pilot was straining credulity. Then I saw any number of other things that strained it worse. You think Harvard would have that much space unused for 20 years? Puh-leeze! There are other credulity-strainers that I'm leaving out... and I'm only half-way through the show!
• I like the attempts at comedy but the rest of the writing is pretty lame.
• I despise the location titles! I guess they couldn't overlay it in the corner of the frame, because that would be even more reminiscent of X-Files. But having them as gigantic floating extruded 3D letters? I'm tired of them... and I'm only half-way through the show!

Having said all that, I'll probably finish it and watch another episode or two. But by then Dancing With The Stars will be back on and I can drop it. 

The most important movie review I will ever post here

Not really.

We re-watched Ice Age 2 over the weekend. Boy is it horrible. Here's how one should watch Ice Age 2: rip the movie to a nice editable format like DV or MJPEG. Edit out all parts of the movie that don't contain Scrat. Recompress to H.264. Watch the nice 5-10 minute Scrat short movie you've just made and laugh.

McCain comments: two political ones, one technical one

Technical comment: I noticed in one of the wide shots of McCain's speech that they had blurred the image on the video screen backdrop in only the part of the screen directly behind him, so that when they cut to his close-up, you got a nice fake depth-of-field look. Very smart. Nice move.

Political comment #1: the rampant hypocrisy present in the Republican party right now makes my brain want to explode. They're claiming that electing McCain will somehow change things. How will allowing the Rs to retain control of the White House do that, exactly? Please! McCain didn't become the Republican nominee by maintaining his maverick status, he became it by casting it aside and by embracing W, both figuratively and literally. How else does one explain McCain's being against torture (of all things) before voting for it? As always, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show did a great job of highlighting other Republican hypocrites, including, yes, Sarah Palin.

Political comment #2: criticizing Obama for being a "community organizer." Loved the one-liner sent in to Daily Kos: "Jesus was a community organizer. Pontius Pilate was a governor."

Two more beach movies

I totally forgot about two other movies we watched while vacationing.

Movie #1: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. About halfway through this movie I thought "I wonder if they're going to manage to keep Marisa Tomei naked in every single scene she's in?" Sadly, that didn't happen. It was a good, if depressing, movie about a train wreck of a family involved in a train wreck of a robbery. It's one of those non-chronological overlapping various-points-of-view films, and it's handled pretty well, although not as well as something like, say, Amores Perros or (dare I say it?) Pulp Fiction. Overall, though, definitely recommended for the performances and the dialog. And Marisa Tomei.

Movie #2: Kiki's Delivery Service. It's been a while since the kids and I have watched this all the way through. Boy, I love this film. It's just such a sweet movie, with wonderful characters, an interesting alternative universe, and of course stellar animation. I'm not sure what else to say about it other than just watch it already. Not as surreal as some of Miyazaki's other films you may have seen (Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away) but still a fantastic film.

Beach movies

Or, more correctly, movies we all watched while at the beach.

First up was Batman Begins. Maria hadn't seen it so she was curious after seeing The Dark Knight. We told the kids they could watch it but that we would warn them if anything particularly bad or scary was coming up. Language was mild, so that was good kid-wise. And it's pretty violent, but we fast-forwarded through a couple of spots, and most of the fight sequences were so chopped up that you couldn't really tell specifics on how he was trashing the bad guys. It's a good movie--might make a good Blu-Ray demo disc--but I think The Dark Knight is a better one, even if a bit too long. I think Katie Holmes made a big mistake in not signing back up for the sequel, and she probably does too. I'll ask her next time I'm hanging out with her and Tom and the family.

Next was Ella Enchanted. The kids hid WAY more at this movie than at Batman Begins. Is it because they've been desensitized to violence? No, it's because that they have ALWAYS hated movies where characters get misunderstood and then bad things happen as a result. (I remember going to see Elf with Anna when she was 6 and her being mortified that everything had gone wrong when Will Farrell was walking alone through the snow.) And misunderstanding is basically the entire deal with Ella. They liked it but could barely stand watching it in spots. I could definitely stand watching it because Anne Hathaway is drop-dead gorgeous. Other than that, it was OK but only just. The lighting and photography made it look like an ABC made-for-TV movie. It tried to be kind of Shrek-ey with its mix of fairy tales and pop-culture references, but didn't succeed as well. The soundtrack had some good tunes (particularly Queen's "Somebody to Love") but this was also a little too reminiscent of Shrek.

So, ultimately, good thing Ella had Anne Hathaway in it.