Month: April 2005

First the good news: Apparently there’s been talk of a live-action Transformers movie for some time now, though I hadn’t heard of it until today. The technology is certainly up to it; you’ve all seen the Citroën C4 ad [4.7MB MPEG]. Unfortunately the director may not be as good as you would hope. You see the bad news is that Michael Bay is being considered. In the words of Trey Parker, "why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?"

The even worse news is the sudden demise of Optimus Prime to prostate cancer. So Optimus, what I’m trying to say is Pearl Harbor sucked, and I miss you.

When I see something on the Web that I want to blog about I bookmark it in a folder which I named, in a fit of creative inspiration, “to blog”. As a means of keeping note of what I want to talk about this is both simple and inadequate (much like some current world leaders). I know most if not all widely-used blogging systems have the facility to save drafts. It’s only recently that I’ve started to think of that as a feature I’d use. My project’s deadline has been extended until next Wednesday; after that I’m going into Scatterbrain with a large axe to give it a reprogramming it’ll never forget.

I suffered quite a scare at the doctor’s office this morning. Thankfully it wasn’t of the "will I ever walk or play the piano anymore?" or the "how long have I got?" variety. It was more of the "I really wish I hadn’t seen that in print" variety. Stress and nervous tension are major social problems and it is in order that this situation should not in any way be exacerbated that the following fact will now be revealed in advance: everything worked out in the end and I will, to the best of my knowledge, live happily ever after.

I’m not a frequent patron of my local GP but I seem to recall that there’s rarely anything of interest to read in the waiting room. I’m usually stuck with a cover-less 1980s edition of Vogue, reading about the most popular shoulder pads and leg-warmers and the next season’s promised slap bracelets. You can understand my mini leap of glee when I spotted the trademark yellow border of a National Geographic in the far corner, part covered by a collection of Mr Mens. Walking over to pick it up I experienced a moment not dissimilar to discovering that the ship about to rescue you from the deadly ocean has just hoisted a jolly roger. The headline of the cover story read “Was Darwin Wrong?”

Blink. Uh, no. I couldn’t just let it slide, let a popular science-oriented magazine (one that my family subscribed to for nearly twenty years at that) print such a story. Were they giving in to the same journalistic principle of "balance" in the face of reason that plagues much of the popular press (and presumably the unpopular press, but I don’t read that)? After fumbling through the pages for longer than should be necessary—they don’t print page numbers on the advertising pages, nor do they count them when numbering the other pages, so I eventually found page two on around the fourtieth page—I found the beginning of the article. In my rage I didn’t even look at the accompanying photography. A two-page spread carried just the title of the article, “Was Darwin Wrong?”. "No!" I thought to myself again. I turned the page. The next page was taken up a single word printed in the largest type that would fit on the page:

No.

The article itself continued in the same style that that first word had established. It was really quite standard as that type of "face it; it’s a fact" article goes, but it really dragged me in with that big bold "No". The lesson, if one feels the need to draw a moral out of a blog post, is of course not to judge a magazine by its cover. Alternatively the lesson may be that it’s simpler and all-around less emotionally troublesome to stick to the Mr Men books.

Every time I play a The Simpsons DVD I’m first forced to sit through an ad telling me I’m probably a thief. There’s this long video of people stealing cars and CDs with captions indicating that stealing someone’s car is no different from downloading a video you didn’t pay for. I imagine they think this ad will be copied along with the DVD; that’s the only possible eplanation for forcing it on exactly the wrong group of people (ie. those of us who paid for the DVD). If I was interested only in the episodes and not the commentary tracks and other goodies I’d download the rest of the series as payment for my wasted time after being forced to sit through that shit. Next Fox movie I want, I’m getting it the cheap and easy way. They’ve lost my goodwill.

It seems the new Pope has been chosen. Get the whole story from Pope Matthew I.

Two brief notes:

• Slashdot’s tradition of reporting all of the April Fools jokes they can find leads to an interesting type of comment thread. All you see are people with user IDs in the high 700000s and above complaining about how all of the stories are fake. Anyone who’s been around for more than a year just ignores the site all day. Next year the low cutoff will be about 880000.

• I had hoped to mention a new project I started today, but considering its level of development so far I think it’s best to wait until I’ve put a tiny bit more development time into it before I announce it. I’ll just say that it’s simple in conception, straightforward enough in implementation, and so potentially useful that I’m afraid to look into the possibility that someone thought of it before me.

Damn scientists can’t stop meddling with the natural order of things. The recently engineered blue rose has just ruined a perfectly good Valentine’s Day poem. On the plus side they look incredible.