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Friday, August 12, 2005
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The Aristocrats: I blogged about it a couple weeks ago, and it sounds like it must be seen.
6:42:56 PM 
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These guys sound almost as bad as Scientologists! Christians:
The living word tabernacle in Waverly, Ohio, terminated the membership of Loretta Davis recently, according to a July report by WCMH-TV in Columbus, because she had stopped paying her tithe. Davis' contributions ended in January after she was hospitalized the first of 15 times this year for congestive heart failure. The church's founder said non-member Davis could still attend, but Davis' daughter said, "in the time of (her) need, (the church) should be caring, supporting, asking what she needs, help her if she needed help." (When healthier, Davis was donating $60 a month out of her $592 social security check.)
Scientologists:
CHRISTMAN: In Scientology, you have to pay for just about everything. They have a few free things to try to rope people in, but basically you pay for everything. It starts very inexpensive and builds rapidly into thousands, hundreds-of-thousands of dollars.
COOPER: Michael, you say you've spent, what? How much money?
PATTINSON: Approximately half-a-million dollars.
CHRISTMAN: Well, I know -- Yes, I would say $200,000, at least, was our inheritance we spent and more.
(Via Trish Wilson's Blog.)
6:23:04 PM
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Boston Globe
(Via Fark.)
5:48:55 PM
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Herald-Leader
(Via Fark.)
5:47:26 PM
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Interesting article at Livescience.com that covers a survey that shows science and religion are compatible.
Here are some of the more fascinating results of the survey:
38% of natural scientists (those in chemistry, physics and biology) say they do not believe in God. 41% of biologists don't believe 27% of political scientists don't believe
In a separate survey at the University of Chicago, 76% of doctors said they believe in God and 59% believe in an afterlife.
(Via The Greatest Stories Never Told.)
5:46:48 PM
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I saw The Island (or as the sign in the multiplex had it, "Island - The"). I enjoyed the movie, though it was largely a missed opportunity on the part of the filmmakers. They took an interesting concept, populated it with good actors all he way around, and pretty much ignored it by turning the movie into a chase story.
Warning, spoilers coming.
Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are members of what looks to be a sort of standard-issue utopia or distopia. They live in a pretty sterile environment, do sort of meaningless work (at least they don't know its meaning), and have all their needs taken care of for them, and are protected from the "contaimated" world outside. A daily lottery runs, and selected members are sent to The Island in order to populate a new world.
The day that Johansson is chosen to go The Island, McGregor learns that it's a cruel hoax: they are actually clones, grown in plastic wombs as sources of body parts for rich people who live in the (uncontaminated) world outside. He rescues her just as she is about to go off to the island, they find a way out, and the chase begins. Though in some ways the chase is integrated into the story -- MacGregor's owner is a race-car driver -- it just goes on too long, and is too miraculous (one nice line in the movie comments on this). There are some nice moments in the outside world -- where Johansson sees a huge poster of herself (her owner is a model), and as McGregor mocks his owners accent. And there's a nice, nearly-Dickian moment where the two McGregors accuse each other of being the clones.
But, all in all, a wasted opportunity. The chase scenes could easily have been a third as long as they were and maintained their impact and character points. A nice little performance by Steve Buscemi is largely wasted, and we get only hints of what could have been a nice story. Finally, the stated date of the movie -- 2019 -- is far too close to our own time, not for the the technology necessarily, but for the dramatic, large structures that look like they've been around longer than 15 years.
Too bad, the two stars are easy on the eyes, and the premise was fun and interesting and timely. Still, as I do, I found it entertaining. Not worth the $9.00, maybe, but maybe for a bargain matinee. (Do they still have them?)
4:42:50 PM
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A federal appeals court Thursday revived the government's online eavesdropping prosecution against an executive of a company that offered e-mail service and surreptitiously tracked its subscribers' messages.
The case, closely watched by Internet privacy groups, had been dismissed in 2003 by a judge who found it was acceptable for the company — an online literary clearinghouse — to make copies of the e-mails so it could peruse messages sent to its subscribers by rival Amazon.com Inc.
According to the indictment, Councilman directed employees in 1998 to write computer code to intercept and copy all incoming e-mails from Amazon.com to Interloc's subscribers, who were dealers seeking buyers for rare and out-of-print books. Amazon.com did not then offer used books, but offered customers help in tracking down rare books.
Ouch!
2:53:33 PM
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CSICOP reports in an email the deaths of Philip Klass and Robert Baker, two voices of sanity in a crazy world. Klass' New York Times obit is here. He made his name as a debunker of silly UFO claims, and the often harmful effects of those who choose to explain sometimes strange reality in terms that cripple instead of enlighten:
Mr. Klass applied careful, reasoned analysis to what is often a very emotional topic, as he repeatedly found explanations for saucer sightings in natural phenomena and manmade objects. He used details like the typefaces on documents to question the veracity of what some contended were deliberately covered-up government documents.
At a time when the cohort of people who have reported being kidnapped by aliens is growing, Mr. Klass suggested that improper use of hypnosis might be a good explanation. In his 1989 book, "UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game," he lamented that some people "will needlessly bear mental scars for the rest of their lives" because, he said, they have succumbed to "fantasies" of alien abduction.
I'm a longtime reader of his, and his clarity of thinking and sanity will be missed.
Robert Baker was a ghost buster, who frequently published, with Klass in The Skeptical Enquirer. It's phenomenal (pun intended) that the services of a ghost buster are required in the 21st century, but that's only one of the hallmarks of this so-far disappointing century.
"One of his cases involved a woman who was ... seeing a little ghost girl," Nickell said. "Bob went and very carefully interviewed her and her husband and neighbors, and found that only the woman would see the ghost. He found that she wanted very much to have a child of her own and could not. Bob steered the conversation away from the ghost and counseled the couple to adopt a child. When they did, the little ghost girl went away forever."
10:05:35 AM
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Publishers are issuing new paperbacks in a bigger size for baby boomers who are finding it harder to read small type.
(Via The New York Times > Media and Advertising.)
Good news! I don't know how many times I've been at the bookstore or library, looked at the cover of a book and thought it would be a good read, only to have my heart sink when I opened its pages and realized I would never actually read it because the print was too small.
9:11:03 AM
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Review of Dylan's "Eat the Document"(UkInd). One of Bob's daffy masterpieces.
There is no narrative, and scenes are cut and scrambled to the point where the cut-up ideas of William Burroughs seem to be creeping into the mix. It's as if Dylan is intent on disappearing into his own picture, cutting into the iconography, Burroughs-style, even as it was taking hold. And yet amid the clatter of trains, buses, taxis, hotels and crowded, unresolved scenes, there are fascinating, fleetingly intimate vignettes - of Johnny Cash and Dylan duetting over an upright piano, or Dylan with Neuwirth in a Glasgow hotel room, previewing two beautiful, tender Blonde on Blonde-era songs that have never been released or entered any songbook. You feel that you're a witness to some unsolvable mystery in the making.
(Via robot wisdom weblog.)
8:56:59 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel.
Last update: 9/2/2005; 10:18:55 AM.
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Flying Spaghetti Monsterism has officially hit the bigtime. See “
