"Daveigh Chase will reprise her role from the original, now the titular character."

Huh. Well, if she's got tits then I'm in.

I think I've seen DD more than I've seen any other movie -- not because it's great cinema, but because circumstances worked out that way. The first viewing was just curiosity based on the general buzz. The second time was to clarify all the "WTF" moments from the first viewing. There it might have ended, except that, years later, a local theater company did a stage production. My wife took me to see it for my birthday, so we first watched the movie again for perspective. Then, more years later, another local theater company did another production, to which I took my wife for her birthday. It turned out that the first play was a rough draft staged by this company's farm team; the second play was their polished version with the A-list actors. A visiting friend who had never seen the movie came to the play with us. As you can imagine, the stage version had more "WTF?" moments than the movie did...so we ended up watching it again with him.

There probably aren't even half a dozen movies that I've seen four times, and certainly none of which I've seen two stage versions. So even though I'm not rabid about DD, I do feel oddly proprietary toward it. I can imagine someone doing another film based on the same premises. A true "sequel" is more of a stretch. I wonder if Maggie Gyllenhaal will be on board.

I'm presently undecided between Obama and McCain. I'd consider Hillary a minor negative for Obama, but not enough to make much difference -- they are substantively the same, and I don't buy the whole "change" schtick. 

This is not going well at all

YANGON, Myanmar - A Red Cross boat carrying rice and drinking water for cyclone victims sank Sunday, while the death toll jumped to more than 28,000 and aid groups warned of a humanitarian catastrophe.

The boat was carrying supplies for more than 1,000 people and was the first Red Cross shipment to the disaster area, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said. All four relief workers on board were safe, it said.

(...)

The country's main airport in Yangon is also incapable of handling more than five flights a day, when it should be taking in at least one every hour, said PLAN, a London-based children's aid group.

"Logistically, the situation looks bleak," it said in a statement. "In short, they have one congested airport, ill equipped to deal with the influx of cargo, no port, restricted fuel and no trucks."

Add an obstructionist government, and the slow-motion catastrophe continues.

Phillips screw heads were designed to slip more easily than a straight screwdriver. Early machines often overtightened straight-head screws. Ah, here we go -- from Wiki:

"The Phillips screw drive has slightly rounded corners in the tool recess, and was designed so the driver will slip out, or cam out, under high torque to prevent over-tightening. The Phillips Screw Company was founded in Oregon in 1933 by Henry F. Phillips, who bought the design from J. P. Thompson. Phillips was unable to manufacture the design, so he passed the patent to the American Screw Company, who was the first to manufacture it."

And yet, in the same breath, Wiki also says:

"Slot head has a single slot, and is driven by a flat-bladed screwdriver. The slotted screw is common in woodworking applications, but is not often seen in applications where a power driver would be used, due to the tendency of a power driver to slip out of the head and potentially damage the surrounding material."

So which one is it, Wiki? Which screw slips more easily?

Now that I'm in my 50s, and seeing some of my older friends fall by the wayside, I occasionally wish that I had adult children to help me out from time to time. That feeling will probably strengthen as I myself lose vigor. There's no guarantee that your children will care for you in your dotage, and it was not worth the 20+ years of deprivation required to get there. I never wanted to live the responsible parental lifestyle and would have been miserable doing it. (By "parental lifestyle" I mean holding a secure, high-paying job, owning a too-big house and driving too-big cars, worrying about the school system, scheduling my days around childhood activities, having to vacation in child-friendly places -- all the normal stuff that most people seem contented with, or at least resigned to.)   

or in my case, the stuff that I found made life worthwhile and meaningful.

Because I did it for someone else other than myself. That has always brought me the greatest satisfaction in life. Its when I was single and selfish that I was also the most loneliest.

To each his own.

Yes, it's purely a matter of opinion. I knew very early on that I did not want to live that life -- whenever anyone would say "...when you have children of your own..." I always answered "I'm not going to have children." I didn't even like children when I was one. Maybe that's genetic. I'm descended from a long line of people who didn't have children. 

Now that I'm in my 50s, and seeing some of my older friends fall by the wayside, I occasionally wish that I had adult children to help me out from time to time. That feeling will probably strengthen as I myself lose vigor. There's no guarantee that your children will care for you in your dotage, and it was not worth the 20+ years of deprivation required to get there. I never wanted to live the responsible parental lifestyle and would have been miserable doing it. (By "parental lifestyle" I mean holding a secure, high-paying job, owning a too-big house and driving too-big cars, worrying about the school system, scheduling my days around childhood activities, having to vacation in child-friendly places -- all the normal stuff that most people seem contented with, or at least resigned to.)   

The male biological clock does not have an alarm. Or if it does, it's got a good snooze alarm. Maybe you can trade in your 40-year-old gf for two 20s. 

http://members.aon.at/rialskaedda.html/gimproulette.swf

Fun. Sort of.

I played it 4 times and every time the gimp shot himself right away.  Is there actually more to it than that?

I only played it once. I lost after 14 rounds.

Congratulations on getting that out in the open. Either she will choose to go on under those terms, or she will not, but a serious incompatibility will be resolved one way or the other.

I was lucky to find a non-breeding girl while I was still in my early 20s. Such women are exceedingly rare, and even her resolved faltered a couple of times over the decades -- that biological imperative is not easily denied. But 30 years later we are still together, and -- against all the pressures to the contrary -- we remained happily child-free.

loved this review:

Shapes hurtle toward you, then recede abruptly, each bearing some fragment of narrative information that has now passed you by forever. Nausea and anxiety begin to wash over you in overlapping waves.

From the Boston Globe's review:

Watching "Speed Racer," the new summer lollapalooza from the Wachowski brothers, is like being force-fed a Costco-size bag of your favorite candy. For half an hour, taste buds you didn't know you had are firing in delirium, stoked by the movie's outrageous visual razzle-dazzle. Then you hit that spot in the bag where you know you should stop, but the movie keeps going. You feel more and more bloated; the movie keeps going. At a certain point, you may wonder if the movie's eating you. It doesn't end so much as vomit the audience out.

I don't like candy. I'll pass.

Going by what my 11 year old son and his friends say about Obama, he'd certainly win their demographic if he was running for election in Canada. According to my son he's the greatest thing since sliced bread and will stop war, poverty, heel the sick and resolve just about every problem facing humanity.
Whether you agree with his policies or not you can't deny he has a JFK like effect amongst young people.

Their ideals will be crushed in due time. It's always a little sad to watch that happen.

http://members.aon.at/rialskaedda.html/gimproulette.swf

Fun. Sort of.

We got it, but we only got $1088.  That doesn't make much sense to me. 

Maybe they took taxes out of it.

They work if you are diligent about entering your data. My wife bought a copy of Quicken a couple of years ago and made only the weakest stab at ever using it. It ended up just being another wasted expense. 

I'll probably use mine to buy my wife a present for her 25th wedding anniversary in August. Or maybe I'll replace my five-year-old PC. Six hundred bucks doesn't go as far as I'd like. My wife had better use her $600 to pay down debt.

Interesting...Zarakaria and Friedman are on the same trail.

Interesting read, but their perspectives are different. Zarakaria contends that the US is not in decline so much as the rest of the world is ascendant -- thanks, in large part, to the triumph of American-style capitalism. He also believes (as do I) that our openness gives us an inherent long-term competitive advantage over more rigid and collectivist societies. Without minimizing the challenges we face, Zarakaria is nonetheless optimistic about American prospects in the emerging multipolar world. 

I don't think Friedman shares that optimism. He believes that America is declining -- not just relative to the rest of the world, as Zarakaria might agree, but in the absolute sense.

Shocking. "The ruling junta is suspicious of any U.S. military presence it sees as potentially aimed at unseating the government, a prospect the Bush Administration has repeatedly denied."

Once this crisis is over, maybe we ought to put unseating this government on our to-do list.

Fareed Zarakaria nails it again

The setup:

Americans are glum at the moment. No, I mean really glum. In April, a new poll revealed that 81 percent of the American people believe that the country is on the "wrong track." In the 25 years that pollsters have asked this question, last month's response was by far the most negative. Other polls, asking similar questions, found levels of gloom that were even more alarming, often at 30- and 40-year highs. There are reasons to be pessimistic—a financial panic and looming recession, a seemingly endless war in Iraq, and the ongoing threat of terrorism. But the facts on the ground—unemployment numbers, foreclosure rates, deaths from terror attacks—are simply not dire enough to explain the present atmosphere of malaise.

American anxiety springs from something much deeper, a sense that large and disruptive forces are coursing through the world. In almost every industry, in every aspect of life, it feels like the patterns of the past are being scrambled. "Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus," wrote Aristophanes 2,400 years ago. And—for the first time in living memory—the United States does not seem to be leading the charge. Americans see that a new world is coming into being, but fear it is one being shaped in distant lands and by foreign people.

Look around. The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.

These factoids reflect a seismic shift in power and attitudes. It is one that I sense when I travel around the world. In America, we are still debating the nature and extent of anti-Americanism. One side says that the problem is real and worrying and that we must woo the world back. The other says this is the inevitable price of power and that many of these countries are envious—and vaguely French—so we can safely ignore their griping. But while we argue over why they hate us, "they" have moved on, and are now far more interested in other, more dynamic parts of the globe. The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.

The payoff:

Americans—particularly the American government—have not really understood the rise of the rest. This is one of the most thrilling stories in history. Billions of people are escaping from abject poverty. The world will be enriched and ennobled as they become consumers, producers, inventors, thinkers, dreamers, and doers. This is all happening because of American ideas and actions. For 60 years, the United States has pushed countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. American diplomats, businessmen, and intellectuals have urged people in distant lands to be unafraid of change, to join the advanced world, to learn the secrets of our success. Yet just as they are beginning to do so, we are losing faith in such ideas. We have become suspicious of trade, openness, immigration, and investment because now it's not Americans going abroad but foreigners coming to America. Just as the world is opening up, we are closing down.

There is a lot of good reasoning in between. I have often thought that we are victims of our own success -- the global marketplace come back to bite us -- and Fareed really nails it. This is what happens when you win a Cold War.

With his devastating use of the large font, Mr. Fed trumps Semaj. My pissing on the Calder is not worthy.

A couple of times a year I just open the doors and blast our hardwood floors with a leaf blower. Housework isn't a priority in Chez Ironrod. I vacuum when we start having trouble telling our cat from the fur drifts.

well poo the huw 

Heh.  You wouldn't miss me anyway, since I never participated in the off-topic areas.  Hell, I had well over 1,000 posts but I bet nobody even knew who I was.

Don't feel bad I had like 6000 posts and nobody knows who I am.   

The 230th emperor of Rome. Duh.

Semaj wins the thread. I guess I won't tell my story about pissing on the Calder stabile in downtown Grand Rapids.

All of my stupid drinking stories happened between the ages of 15 and 19. By the time I was 20 I had learned my limits and outgrown the urge to exceed them.

The ease of price comparison is the hardest thing about selling online. If you're selling something popular, it's widespread by definition. 90% of the time shoppers will go with the cheapest price, and there always seems to be some bottom-feeder with an eBay store selling stuff barely over your cost. If you try to sell niche merchandise instead, it's less popular by definition -- you will sell an occasional piece at a healthy price, but it's going to move very slowly. Finding something that's both unusual and popular is always a moving target.

You can try to add value -- maybe that means customer service, or a discussion board, or organizing game tournaments. Or you can try to dominate a small sub-genre, like board games with electronic components. Or target a specific customer base (e.g., Civil War gamers), tailor your selection to them, and advertise to them.

A cautionary note on your intended wares.  Online boardgame sales are a deep discount item.  Hop over and look at Boardgamegeek.com to scope out ads for more than a half dozen players in that field.  I'm not saying to give it up, I would just suggest figure out how to compete with these established players offering 20-35% off MSRPs before you bet the farm.  It will take some homework to crack that tough nut.

You can only make money on discounted items if you sell very large quantities, or if you are buying them for less than their nominal cost (buying closeouts or getting volume discounts). Curio City was going to be a game and hobby store in one early iteration, but I abandoned that because neither the volume nor the markup made sense. Boardgamers are a niche market that's already well served.

But that's not the kind of feedback you asked for -- maybe you've got an angle in mind. To get the best possible price, you usually need to buy manufacturer-direct. That often means committing to more inventory than you would like, but it can give you an edge over the eBay hobbyists who are buying small quantities from wholesalers, and living on small markups. Those guys can undercut you every time.

I know that folks are working on getting things back together, but don't know any details about what things will look like on the other side, and am pretty sure there isn't an ETA at this time.  I feel confident that the process isn't 99% done and OO is nearly about to go back live, and it's not my place to conjecture its current status.  I wouldn't even conjecture whether or not it eventually will come back up, but I know that there are folks interested in and working on making that happen.

Why not just move forward and create a new OO?

-Hrnac

The main reason for OO's resuscitation is the huge database of posts made over the years. Although I mostly just toss out one-liners, even I feel proprietary about a few threads...so I can imagine how some of the posters who really put time and effort into their arguments feel about it. Without that history, there would be virtually nothing to draw anyone into a new OO.

When a rabid animal is found in our town, it makes the local newspaper. Rabies just isn't very common, particularly in domesticated animals.

We had two cats who were inseparable buddies, closer than any two animals I'd ever known. But whenever Iggy came back from the vet, Webster would treat him like a pariah for a couple of days. He must have brought back the vet scent that Webster hated so much. Could Tymora have acquired a weird scent anywhere?

I was very disappointed with the content of this thread.

+1

I concur.

Especially when posted by someone with the name "Ironrod".  Sorry, I just noticed this glitch in the Matrix.

"Freezing Fido" and "Pooch Pops" were boring. I rejected "Frigid Pussy" just because. Ordinarily I suck at thread titles, but I'm feeling smug about this one...even though taxidermy was only mentioned in passing.

I know people have different ways of dealing with grief, but seeing those dead pets gives me the creeps.  I can only imagine that being my dog.  Damn, that's creepy.

You've seen those plush animals with moving ribs that make them look like they're breathing? I can't help but imagine them doing that with these pupsicles. Now that's creepy.

"We've secretly replaced Gigi with freeze-dried folgers flakes... let's see if the children notice the difference"

 

I know that many people dote on their pets like family members, and spend ridiculous sums on veterinary bills. What was once eccentric is now normal. I have lived with at least one cat at all times since 1975, so I can at least understand how that attitude developed, although I don't share it. Even though I think pet burials/cremations are a little excessive, I can understand why some people need that. 

This, though, is twisted. (SFW)

Click the links in my sig. Feel free to PM me if you have specific questions.

8 years of Reagan (R)- split Congress - record debs.
4 years of Bush (R) - Democratic Congress - record debs.
8 years of Clinton (D) - Democratic/Republican Congress - dramatically reduced debts.
8 years of Bush (R) - Republican/Democratic Congress - record debts.

Maybe this says more about undertaxing than overspending. A graph of federal spending in constant dollars rises at a pretty steady pace throughout the 20th century, with a couple of war-related blips. Deficits show that there is a party of tax-and-spend, and a party of undertax-and-spend. 

WMD and teh terrorists were a justification for invading Iraq. It went over very well.

The reasons for invading Iraq involve neoconservative geopolitics (especially containing Iran) and oil. Stationing most of our military on either side of Iran must've looked like a smart move. I supported the invasion because I thought it would work out. With all that Iraqi oil revenue going to US contractors for reconstruction, it should've been a straightforward transfer of taxpayer and consumer wealth to Haliburton and their ilk. The Bushies win!   

We need a strong, secular, pro-Western state in the vacuum that we created when we killed Saddam. A puppet democracy is not likely to deliver that, ever. Ultimately we're going to need a Saddam II to forestall the rise of an ayatollah. Or we can occupy the country for the next 100 years. Or we can abandon it to Islamic fundamentalists. 

No TV news at all. I'm old enough to wax sentimental about Walter Cronkite delivering real news on CBS many years ago. Now? Why no, I don't care how many cops escorted Britney Spears to the psyche ward, or about teens "sexting" on their cell phones. Thanks anyway.

+1. I almost never watch TV, so I almost never see TV news, even accidentally, even though I'm still something of a news junkie.

My primary news source is the morning Boston Globe -- yes, I still like newspapers (see "I'm old"). Secondary is the local all-news AM radio station. I read Newsweek every week for more in-depth coverage and opinions, and Science News for, well, science news. Other than that, I check headlines on the Internet. In extremely rare circumstances, such as during the 9/11 attacks or some other major disaster, I will turn on CNN or New England Cable News...but those get so repetitious so fast that I don't last long.

I got through college selling blood plasma twice a week, and I'm a regular whole blood donor (closing in on my second gallon pin right now). Needles don't faze me. I don't have any really helpful advice, except that what you're really dealing with is anxiety. I've been treated with antidepressants for panic attacks (anxiety), so I have considerable experience with facing fears and suppressing them. Much of that is pure willpower -- when your subconscious cranks up your heart rate and initiates the fight-or-flight response, you can consciously will yourself to breathe regularly and calm your heart.

I learned that out of necessity, because public panic attacks can be terribly embarrassing. I don't know how you'd go about learning to control your physiological response to stress-inducers, but I do know that you can do it.

I was disappointed with her death. She had survived all those years and even man handled Syeed and yet died instantly with no fight.

I agree. Either the writer's intended it to be ironic - bang! you're dead, end of the story for you - or grimly realistic (death comes instantly and unseen) or (and I think this most likely) they'd run out of stuff for her anyway and her being dead eliminates the need for any resolution of her backstory.

Ben's vulnerabilities are all gone now. Uh-oh!

What a great ensemble cast, with really good chemistry almost right from the first episode. The writing is generally good, and even if the stories get cartoonish sometimes, they never fail to entertain. My main criticism is the heavy-handed "Wild West" angle. They could easily have done Western-type stories in space, and even used those archetypes, without turning the frontier worlds into 19th-century American Western costumes and dialect. I like both Westerns and SF, but the blend too often strays into absurdity.

It's hard to seperate the "wild west" angle from the show, given that was a lot of Whedon's inspiration.  It also had the advantage, from the network point of view, of keeping the costs of production down.

Point is, you can still have everything that matters about the wild west without buckskin, cows, and hick drawls. The cow-smuggling episode was over the top for me. 500 years from now they can't download a cow? We'll be doing that in 10 years. Western themes are timeless. The setting is not. I can forgive that indulgence most of the time, but sometimes it really feels silly.

Can we please show some love for Mal's "wife" Saffron? So. Bloody. Hot.

Okay 

I'll be in my bunk.

(I just learned last night whence comes that expression). 

And yet, somehow, 28% of those polled think he's doing a fine job. Who are these people?

Neocons? fundamentalist Christians? Wal-Mart shoppers? I dunno. It's scary though, that 28% of the country thinks he's doing a fine job. This is easily the worst president in U.S. history. The toll he will end up taking on this country cannot yet be measured.

The ones who got the big tax cuts and own all the oil stocks must make up a few of those percentage points. 

Just to run with this point a little...

Chevron records 5.1B first quarter profit

That's just one company, in just one quarter. For perspective, $5.17B is higher than the ANNUAL budgets of five US states!

Soaring oil prices provided a similar first-quarter lift to four of Chevron's biggest rivals - Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips, BP PLC and Royal Dutch Shell PLC. Collectively, Chevron and those four companies earned $36.9 billion in the first quarter, a 25 percent increase from last year.

$36.9B is higher than the annual budgets of all but 10 states, and probably an awful lot of countries as well. Yowzah. I'm sure that the nice folks behind the four biggest oil companies are very, very happy with the Bush administration.

Who should be responsible for setting the minimum wage if not the government?  If the government doesn't do it then I can only imagine that there would be NO minimum wage which would only lead to bad things.  Do you think it's wrong for poor people to make at least 7 bucks an hour?

I dont think the federal government should be setting wages for the entire country.   If a specific state wants to do that for their own state, I would still disagree with it, but at least the state has the actual authority to do so.

Well then this map should make you happy.  It shows that the states are free to set their own minimum wage laws.  There are 3 that have lower than federal and 5 that have no minimum wage at all.  Only 10 follow federal, the remaining 32 have theirs higher.

Nice theory except for this: "Note: Where Federal and state law have different minimum wage rates, the higher standard applies." So much for lower/no minimum wage.

The DVD menu is arranged such that it was difficult to be sure which episode was supposed to be first. The pilot begins right in the middle of a battle scene, compounding the feeling that you're coming in to the middle of something. So we pulled up an episode guide on the Internet, which told us that the 2-part pilot was actually episode 11, or some such nonsense. Result was that we started them out of order. We quickly figured out our mistake and corrected for it...but I can sure see how that would sink the show if it were done deliberately.

I don't suppose a resurrection is likely after six years. Pity.

In related speculation, I wonder if Summer Glau will be back as the terminatrix anytime soon. Anyone know if they pulled the plug on that one, too?