God Bless That Man

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Ebert on Transformers 2 is a wonderful thing. He opens with:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

More:

The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.

Things that SUCK

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Ordinarily, if a Houstonian goes someplace in the summertime, he gets better weather. Unfortunately, it is presently hotter in Overland Park, Kansas, than it is at home:

houston-overland.png

Dept. of Much Slower Cars

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Jeremy Clarkson testing the Fiesta in a shopping mall: “I’ve got 120 horsepower . . . you don’t want any more than that on marble.” Stay with it until about 4:15, and then continue until you get to the part about the beach assault.

If that’s not enough fun, then how about “It’s like listening to the Cirque du Soleil being chopped up by their own chainsaws,” which is what Clarkson has to say about the Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder.

Dept. of Absurdly Fast Cars

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The folks at 9ff have created a hotrodded version of Porsche’s 911 GT2, because apparently the 520 horse, 3.8 sec 0-60 stock version was too slow.

The Widowmaker turns 850 horses, gets to 60 in three flat, and tops out at 240 mph. And it has a 1,120 horsepower big brother in the works.

Price isn’t listed. I’m assuming it’s just as absurd as the whole notion of 1,000 horsepower.

Microsoft hates its employees

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Or something, since it’s now refusing to reimburse its workers for data plans on non-Windows Mobile devices regardless of how much they’re used for work.

There’s drinking the kool-aid, and then there’s really drinking the kool-aid. This is just silly and wrongheaded. That they’re couching it as a “cost cutting measure” instead of blatant logrolling is even cheesier; nobody thinks Windows Mobile is a viable platform.

Coolest. President. EVAR.

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President Obama wrote a note for a 10-year-old who skipped (the last day of) school to attend a town-hall appearance.

GREEN BAY, Wis. – Ten-year-old Kennedy Corpus has a rock-solid excuse for missing the last day of school: a personal note to her teacher from President Barack Obama.

Her father, John Corpus of Green Bay, stood to ask Obama about health care during the president’s town hall-style meeting at Southwest High School on Thursday. He told Obama that his daughter was missing school to attend the event and that he hoped she didn’t get in trouble.

“Do you need me to write a note?” Obama asked. The crowd laughed, but the president was serious.

On a piece of paper, he wrote: “To Kennedy’s teacher: Please excuse Kennedy’s absence. She’s with me. Barack Obama.” He stepped off the stage to hand-deliver the note — to Kennedy’s surprise.

(Updated: Link fixed.)

All German, all the time

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Mrs Heathen just this moment signed the papers making this delightful vehicle an official member of the Heathen Motorpool. The Hyundai received a diagnosis that proved financially terminal, and we thought we’d shop longer, but the deal on this little wagon — a 2005 C240 — was too good to pass up. Reached for comment, the existing German portion of our motorpool was cautiously – Teutonically, even – optimistic.

(Even after factoring in the warranty and total payments over 3 years, it’ll still cost less than the new cars we were looking at. Score!)

This is huge

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In addition to the fancy new iPhone 3GS and related announcements (and don’t dismiss the $99 3G move; Apple’s now positioned for an even larger piece of the smartphone market), we also got a peek at Snow Leopard. The new rev of the Mac OS is a refinement release, not a major feature-laden milestone, but it does include one very significant new capability:

The other major demo was of the Microsoft Exchange support baked right in to Mail, Address Book, and iCal. “The Mac has Office, integrates with Windows IT services, but what’s missing is Exchange,” said Serlet. Apple licensed Exchange compatibility directly from Microsoft, so now it’s a snap to set up integration with Exchange Server 2007 or newer. It includes server auto-discovery support in Mail, integrated view of Exchange and personal calendars in iCal, support for scheduling meetings, accepting invitations, drag-and-drop contact integration, and more. This support should make it far easier to use Macs in most corporate environments.

Windows doesn’t come with Exchange support. You’ve gotta buy Outlook for that. Something tells me that Snow Leopard’s implementation here will be smarter than Outlook’s, too.

Oh, and the price? $29. That is not a typo.

Rob Enderle Remains A Clueless Hack

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Via DaringFireball, here’s Enderle’s predictions for WWDC this year:

“The question is whether they will use it for product launches,” said Rob Enderle, president of the Enderle Analyst Group. “It appears the answer is no since they are signaling that not only will Jobs not be there, neither will the new phones.” From the standpoint of consumers and even investors, he said, the developers conference isn’t nearly as important as Macworld.

Jesus, is this guy EVER right? He’s like tech’s own Bill Kristol. What a useless gasbag.

Snapshot: Eleven Years ago, Driskill Hotel, Austin, TX

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Followup, as promised. From the archives, before Heathen existed as a web site and I was forced to share my wit and wisdom via the mailing list named below. Arrant Knaves, represent!

From: chet@netexplorer.com Sun Jul 26 22:36:12 1998
To: “Some Arrant Knaves I Know”
Subject: David Fucking Carradine

So I’m sitting in the bar in the Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin, right? Not at some nebulous point in the past; right the fuck NOW. Jan Watson and I are over here for some client meetings, and rather than zoom over at some godawful hour of the morning, we came over on Sunday night.

So we’re all checked in, and have retired to the aforementioned bar for an aperitif whilst we revisit the documents for Monday’s meeting. It’s a quiet night at the Driskill; we’ve got the bar to ourselves. The bartender’s a chatty kid who’s quick to refill our Shiners, and we’re actually getting some work done.

A guy wanders through and asks the bartender if it’s a nonsmoking bar. Of course not, says the bartender. So the new guy leaves, only to return moments later to sit down behind the grand piano and begin tickling the ivories. At this point, Watson and I notice something unusual about the impromptu pianist. He is, as it were, David Carradine. David “Snatch the Ivories From My Hand, Grasshopper” Carradine. He of a thousand episodes of two (count ’em) Kung Fu serieses. He of (no doubt) an eminently forgettable series of movies running on USA even as we speak. A genuine B-Movie Icon. Playing occasionally bad jazz piano in the Driskill Hotel bar at 10:30 on a Sunday night, apropos of nothing.

I love Texas.

Godspeed, Grasshopper.

Dept. of Things The Right Will Miss

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In their rush to condemn President Obama’s trip to the mideast as “pandering” and “appeasing,” they’ll completely fail to realize the difference having people actually like us will make when it comes to terrorism.

An American president getting a standing ovation from a Cairo crowd is kind of a big deal. He didn’t say anything earthshaking, or that most Americans wouldn’t agree with immediately. It’s not controversial (among rational people, at least) to point out that we are not in fact at war with Islam, or that Islamic people have rights, or that we understand that not all Muslims are terrorists (just as not all evangelicals are murdering jackasses).

Saying this in public — and saying this in public in the mideast in particular — is an excellent step towards mending fences. Mending fences with the Muslim world is a good idea, since it’s misdirected rage that leads disaffected and directionless types into the thrall of men like Bin Laden. Bombing more isn’t going to help. Talking, though, may just.

I’d say ATDT, but as he points out, it predates the Hayes command set.

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This video demo of a 1964 acoustic modem — at 300 baud — is pretty fantastic. It was all over the net last week; I’m just getting to it.

Some fun bits:

  • It’s acoustic, obviously; there was no way to plug a phone line in otherwise.
  • It has no digital circuitry at all — there’s no microcontroller, and no real command set.
  • It does, however, still work — though loading Wikipedia over 300 baud is an exercise best left to museums.

300 baud predates me, but I did start at 1200. The jump to 2400 was enormous, and the jump to 9600 was even better — though it was a plateau, too, since the terminal controllers for the University mainframe ran at that speed, so here was no reason to go any higher until dial-up ISPs started happening.

Of course they’re fucking you. That they’re consumer friendly just means they do it less often.

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I didn’t notice, but last fall Continental revised its carryon limits from 51 linear inches (L + W + H) to 45 — at just about the same time they added a fee for the first checked bag for everyone except Elite fliers.

Like I said, I didn’t notice, despite flying weekly since March, which means they haven’t been enforcing the new rule. Until this week.

Now they’ve got some fucking beancounter weasel at the check-in line with a tape measure, which means my year-old suitcase (an Eagle Creek Velocity) is suddenly useless. Moreover, the 45-inch rule means that many bags still advertised as “regulation” size aren’t, and that road warriors like me will have to buy a new bag to avoid trusting baggage handlers on short trips.

Continental’s reasoning is that many of their partners — customer hostile organizations, I assume — were already at 45″, so they just wanted to be uniform. Bullshit. It’s a creepy and disingenuous money grab, plain and simple.

Fuck you, Continental. Fuck you twice. Oh, and by the way: Southwest still allows a 50″ carryon, and they go nearly all the places I need to go.

Ah, Logic

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Granted, we can’t expect the Right to actually honor it, steeped as they are in the politics of fear and bigotry, but take a look at this analysis of their opposition to same-sex marriage. Hint: it’s got no rational legs.

The anti-gay-marriage soundbite, by contrast, makes no attempt at persuasion. It’s like saying you oppose the Bush tax cuts because “I believe the top tax rate should be 39.6 percent.” You believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman? Okay! But why?

The ubiquity of this hollow formulation tells us something about the state of anti-gay-marriage thought. It’s a body of opinion held largely by people who either don’t know why they oppose gay marriage or don’t feel comfortable explicating their case.

In a liberal society, consenting adults are presumed to be able to do as they like, and it is incumbent upon opponents of any such freedom to demonstrate some wider harm. The National Organization for Marriage, on its website, instructs its activists to answer the who-gets-harmed query like so: “Who gets harmed? The people of this state who lose our right to define marriage as the union of husband and wife, that’s who.” Former GOP Senator Rick Santorum, arguing along similar lines, has said, “[I]f anybody can get married for any reason, then it loses its special place.”€

Both these arguments rest upon simple tautologies. Expanding a right to a new group deprives the rest of us of our right to deny that right to others. If making a right less exclusive devalues it, then any extension of rights is an imposition upon those who were not previously excluded — i.e., women’€™s suffrage makes voting less special for men.

(Via JeffreyP.)

Updated: Link fixed; high-order characters removed from quote.

Dept. of New Music You’ll Have to Download Illegally

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So, DangerMouse has teamed with Sparklehorse to produce a new record, intended to be sold with a book of photographs by David Lynch, all under the title Dark Night of the Soul. Each track has a different singer, and the rogues’ gallery is impressive; from the NPR story:

In addition to Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse (Mark Linkous), other artists appearing on Dark Night of the Soul include James Mercer of The Shins, The Flaming Lips, Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, Jason Lytle of Grandaddy, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, Frank Black of the Pixies, Iggy Pop, Nina Persson of The Cardigans, Suzanne Vega, Vic Chesnutt, David Lynch, and Scott Spillane of Neutral Milk Hotel and The Gerbils.

For reasons passing understanding, though, EMI has apparently gotten all douchey over the CD itself, so the book will be released with a blank CD-R instead, with the clear implication being that would-be listeners should feel free to download the leaked record instead to get the whole experience. EMI is silent on their attempts to quash the record, but it doesn’t take much work to imagine it’s just another stupid move by a record label. (More at Rolling Stone.)

You can listen to the record at NPR, to see if you like it; you can also sign up for updates at the official Dark Night Of The Soul website, and hope that EMI comes to its senses and releases the CD eventually. And, of course, it’s trivial to download the disk from the darknets. Do what thou wilt, Heathen Nation. But check this stuff out; it’s strong.

Anybody need a cat?

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Some dear friends’ child has just become very allergic to their cat, so the poor girl has to go.

I mean the cat. Obviously. ;)

Anybody want a purebred, housebroken pixiebob? She’s a delightful and personable cat, and they’re just heartbroken about this. Inquiries to chet@nogators.com.

ps: Also, polydactyl.

Things we can’t figure out, shipping division

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Last week, I ordered a book from Amazon with my One-click settings. It arrived three times this week, since UPS refused to leave the slim, obviously-printed-matter package on our doorstep without a signature despite having done exactly that literally hundreds of time previously. UPS could not explain the sudden change in behavior, but the bonehead CSR did try several ideas on for size in an attempt, sadly unsuccessful, to explain the sudden change in behavior.

Two weeks ago, I ordered $5,000 worth of fancy laptops for two of my co-workers, which had to be delivered to my house for anti-fraud reasons (i.e., the billing address of the card in question; I’ll have to ship them myself to the employees in question). This time, UPS helpfully left both very portable boxes on our doorstep without a signature at 1:30 this afternoon, where they sat for more than 2 hours before I discovered delivery had been made and arranged for a neighbor to rescue them.

Sigh.

Dept. of People Who Rant Better Than We Do

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Bynkii, under the heading “Some People Shouldn’t See Movies That Aren’t Documentaries,” discusses Star Trek fan neepery:

Now people are bitching about the size and kind of CANYON that a young Jim Kirk drives a late-60s Corvette off of.

Stop watching Science Fiction.

Not only is it just a little too hard for you, but you completely overlook the real crime of the scene:

THE LITTLE BASTARD LIVED AFTER TRASHING A GORGEOUS CAR LIKE THAT.

Shit…”where to you find canyons like that in Iowa”. Fuck, what’s next “You can’t go faster than the speed of light, and transporters are bullshit”. Thats just trying to find shit to not like about a movie. I bet most of these fuckers are “Lost” fans too. Note: “Lost” fans cannot, under any circumstances complain about continuity, reality, or logic errors. They have no moral highground whatsoever.

Spare us all. Just stop seeing anything that isn’t “The Bridges of Madison County” or gay cowboys eating pudding.

(Emphasis added.)

Not quite a reboot, but…

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Astute Heathen know of HeathenCentral’s longtime affection for Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels. They’re hyperliterate for genre, well constructed and plotted, and make for excellent diversionary reading; not everything we consume has to be Infinite Jest, after all.

Anyway, there’s been a sort of almost Bondian problem creeping into the Spenser continuum for a while now, namely that the detective in question debuted as a 37-year-old Korean War vet in 1973’s The Godwulf Manuscript, and even at the charitable 2-for-1 aging math suggested by fansite Bullets and Beer would have to be 50 by now. Parker has already subtly retconn’d some aspects of Spenser’s backstory, such as his military history — obviously a 50-year-old in 2009 wasn’t even in Vietnam, let alone Korea — but that’s a band-aid on a problem that’s only getting bigger.

So what’s a guy to do? The novels are still fun, but he’s running out of runway, so to speak. Turns out the answer is the same one Eon Productions found for Bond back in 2005, kinda: Parker has released a “young Spenser” novel called Chasing the Bear set prior to his Bostonian adventures. The Boston PI’s been without a backstory, really, for even longer than Wolverine; “young adult” pitch or not, it’s probably a fun read. (Fortunately, Parker’s not giving up on modern Spenser, either; a new contemporary work comes out in October.)