A friend is playing a strange new online game, “TaxCut Free File.” I’ve only observed for few minutes, but it doesn’t actually look like he’s having much fun. The rules seem to be incredibly complicated, and it’s not clear how the player can win. There’s been a lot of swearing at it, [...]

Richard and I went to see Stones in His Pockets, presented at the Hult Center Soreng Theater in Eugene, Oregon by the Willamette Repertory Theatre.  Actors Jeff Pierce and Darragh Kennan play fifteen roles in the Irish dark comedy writtten by Marie Jones.  It’s an engaging play about a small Irish town overrun by a [...]

In a forum I read, someone posted a link to the song Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton.  He makes his works available under a Creative Commons license, so you can legally share them.  I liked this song, so I purchased it, and I’m going to try some of his others.

People do crazy things for love, and apparently NASA astronauts are no exception. On a mailing list, a friend wrote “We’ll never get to Mars at this rate.”
Actually I think we can fund the Mars mission(s) via advertising by making it a “reality” TV show, as well as by government-run gambling.

Phase 1: Lottery [...]

As I drove home late last night (actually early this morning), there was some annoying advertisement on KUFX, so I switched to KFOG.  KFOG plays some stuff I like, but they play an excess of new “whiny rock”.  I caught the second half of a song I hadn’t heard before, John Mayer’s “Waiting on the [...]

Tonight’s film, Rabbit-Proof Fence, was about children who in the 1930s were forcibly taken away from their aborigine mothers under Australia’s half-caste “education” program. Two sisters their cousin, ages 8-14, were taken to a boarding school 1200 miles away from their home. Despite seeing firsthand the cruel punishment meted out to captured runaways, [...]

R.I.P. Syd Barrett, 6 January 1946 — 7 July 2006
Shine on, you crazy diamond!

Seen on a mailing list:
I’m sure I’m not the only one to have observed that the new nominee for DCI shares a branch of service (USAF) and a surname (Hayden) with the actor who played the nutjob general who first launches the bombers in Dr. Strangelove. (USAF Gen. “Jack D. Ripper” was played by Sterling [...]

Everyone knows that sequels are rarely as good as the original, but I think Ice Age 2 is nearly as good as Ice Age was. It certainly kept me laughing. There were good gags, plenty of action and adventure, and though some plot elements were a bit predictable, it generally held my interest [...]

I strongly recommend against seeing “Ultraviolet“. It’s supposed to be a science fiction live action comic-book style vampire movie. They got the “comic” part right, though not intentionally. It’s like a bad mashup of The Matrix, Kill Bill, and Blade. I think it’s the first vampire movie I’ve seen in which [...]