Month: July 2005

Dear friends,

Due to rampant abuse of my server by non-friends (over 1700 comments in two days, that I had to delete one-by-one), I hereby curtail your freedom of speech here at barnson.org. The following phrases are now on the “forbidden topics” list, and including them in a comment will result in your comment being deleted without anyone ever reading them:

• “texas hold em”
• “texas holdem”
• “poker”
• “blackjack”

Sorry, guys, but this means that comments about last night’s poker game will also be off-limits. Legitimate posters have used these words, erm, let me count… ZERO times since the dawn of the web site 🙂 With the exception of “blackjack”, which I’ve used precisely once.

Ways you could get around this ban and still talk about the forbidden topics:

• “texas hold men”
• “texas cold phlegm”
• “poke her”
• “black jack”

You be creative 😉

Note that this only applies to comments. If you wish to start a thread, since only people I’ve promoted to “honorary Barnson” are allowed to post front-page news, you’re welcome to use those terms.

Of course, that may prove very frustrating to anybody who replies to you!

It was either this or forbid anonymous posting entirely, and I find anonymous posters entirely too entertaining to want to do that…

I’m trying to figure out a better way to handle them, but as of the moment I’m writing this, they are pushing about one spam every single second all through the night. There’s no way I can keep up with their swarm of thousands of automated robot-posting poorly-maintained-and-exploited Windows boxes without doing something drastic.

I realize this is probably really old news, but I just discovered Dilbert’s Automated Mission Statement Generator. What a hoot!

My favorite so far:

It is our mission to quickly disseminate enterprise-wide information in order that we may collaboratively initiate high standards in intellectual capital to stay competitive in tomorrow’s world.

That sounds exactly like something I’d expect to hear from one of my company’s execs or commitees.

Slashdot recently featured a story about an interview regarding Corporate Weasel Words that’s kind of in this same vein. I love the final Q&A in the interview:

Why should we be vigilant about language?

When you turn language into an assembly line, you take all the potential out of it. You can’t write a poem in this language. You can’t tell a joke, you can’t convey feeling. You can’t discover new meanings. This writing is incapable of taking you anywhere. It’s deliberately circumscribed. It’s almost an abuse of human rights.

How does one go about recording .ram or .wam streams onto one’s hard drive?

Several months ago, I bought myself an XM Radio. Since then, I have listened a great deal. I have a sad, sad admission to make…

I like big-hair bands. I really do. The glitz, the glam, the reverb cranked to 11, the blazingly mindless wannabe-Eddie-Van-Halen guitar solos, the dual-guitar-alternating-hook screeches, the boy-toy lead singers that sing higher than any male should be allowed to, flangers in weird places, double-distortion, stereo chorus, songs written in E Minor to try to sound serious… I just dig it all.

That’s my secret musical obsession.

For this week.

XM Radio has fed my obsession with a few other genres to date, so I don’t know who it will be next week 🙂 Techno’s out, and I got a little bored with Talk Radio…

I also loved listening to Madonna in high school. I’d buy her albums at Waxie-Maxies, stuffing them underneath my jean-jacket until I arrived at the counter, covering everything but the UPC code on the off-chance someone would see me buying the album. I’d tape the CD, and then label the tape something more socially acceptable, like “Megadeth remixes”, “Hardcore radio mix”, or “Depeche Mode Live!”. I’d quickly eject the tape when I came to intersections, afraid that my friends would hear me listening to the Diva.

What’s your secret musical obsession?

So overnight tonight, I watched “Scream” and “The Ring”. I found “The Ring” moderately creepy and disturbing, but “Scream”, well, not in the least bit frightening. Spoiler warning: these are old movies, but I may spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it.

When I was a kid, scary movies really scared me. I’m talking, nightmares-for-weeks scared. I haven’t watched a really scary movie since I was maybe seventeen. So tonight, I prepared by turning on all the lights on the floor of the house where I was, grabbing a nice cold drink, a ready hand on the “pause” button so that I could take unnecessary bathroom breaks, and all that.

What, you mean I really should watch freak-me-out movies late at night with the lights all off, windows opened, sound turned way up with compression off so the louds are really loud and the quiets really quiet, and then come back and tell you whether I thought the movie was scary or not? No way, Jose. I know how jumpy I am in real life, I feel no need to exacerbate it.

Anyway, I think part of the problem with “Scream” was that I recalled watching it at some point in the past, so I kind of knew the punchline. Maybe that was all it was that I didn’t get really creeped by the movie. Well, that and the fact that I’m familiar enough with voice modulation technology to know that you wouldn’t come up with the same distinctive man’s voice by using a vocoder-type box. I guess I get hung up on the little things, there, too. Like you can’t normally see the safety clearly when staring down the barrel of a gun to know if it’s on or off. Or that garage door openers have automated cutoff switches for over twenty years to prevent accidents — both when raising and lowering.

Or the whole “picturing Courteney Cox with David Arquette” thing. To think, they tied the knot just before filming this movie. To be honest, that creeped me out more than the rest of “Scream”. He’s the “floating outside the window” dude from the original “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and she’s Monica from Friends. Yeah, I know, that’s not their real-life personas, but it still seems weird to my TV-burned brain.

One thing I noticed about “The Ring” is that there seems to be… I don’t know how to put it. Maybe “supernatural melodic progressions”, or something. There’s a style, a phrasing, a way of orchestrating things which seems to say “otherworldly”, or “ethereal”, which is abused by supernaturalistic scare movies, and another way which screams “scary man with big knife” that I’d like to figure out.

If I remember correctly, “The Forgotten” abused the “supernatural scare tactic” style of music, too. I’ll have to rent that one again (we watched it in the theater originally) just to listen to the music. I recall one really haunting melody that stuck with me for several days afterward.

One thing that “The Ring” seemed to do really well was communicate an intensely nervous feeling through the use of music and brief stills of disturbing things. The little girl with the large vein in her forehead and black shadows around her eyes. A haunting melody for the segues, and dissonant strings for the moments of tension. I don’t know that I’m a big fan of the “loud noise and fast cut to a dead body” approach to startling people, though. I mean, it works to make people jump, which is part of the goal of keeping your audience off-balance I suppose, but I liked the “buildup of suspense” aspect of the soundtrack much better. The build-up to the “mounting dread” is part of what makes the soundtracks sweet.

I like great movie music. When I think of the original “Star Wars”, the soundtrack is largely what leaps foremost into my mind. I mean, what if, say, Barry Manilow composed the score? I’m fairly certain it wouldn’t have done nearly so well with bland tunage. The score really carried that movie, and I’m fairly sure “Copa Cabana” wouldn’t have been nearly so powerful as a theme song.

What would you recommend as a really moody, atmospheric, scary movie where the soundtrack really seems to carry and enhance the picture?

So it’s been a rough week for a lot of my friends… well, truly a rough week for the world in general. We’ve once again been given ample evidence that people have a profound capacity to suck. We’ve once again received proof that, almighty heavenly overseer or not, sometimes you just wake up one morning and are dead before nightfall through no particular fault of your own. And in the end, there’s not a ton we can do about it. Such has been the way of things for as long as anyone can remember.

But I couldn’t let the week come to a close without referencing a few quotes that popped into my head. Most of these are probably paraphrased, but no matter. Perhaps a bit idealistic, but I guess that’s just me…

“There are two kinds of people in this world, Abigail: those who have commitment, and those who require the commitment of others.” John Adams

“We’re gunslingers; we protect people who can’t do it themselves.” Roland of Gilead

“What is the use of wizardry, if it cannot save a unicorn?” “That’s what heroes are for.” Molly Grue and Schmendrick the Magician

“I realized… in the end, it’s hopeless. We fight, and we die, and the great machine keeps going, cranking out evil into the world. But that was my epiphany… that when nothing that you do matters, then all that matters is what you do.” Angel

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things — trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose this black pit of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which can lick your real world hollow. So I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia…” Puddleglum

During morning rush hour, 6 nearly simultaneous large bomb blasts rocked London. (This number has since been downgraded to 3 blasts, then 4, then 3 again.) There are two (as of 12:51 GMT, twelve) confirmed fatalities, and a government official noted there are probably closer to 20 dead, with at least 160 injuries, and that number is expected to go up.Initial reports indicated the blasts were a result of a power surge, but the power company quickly laid that government-sponsored rumor to rest.

Six explosions occured in the packed underground rail system. As police and emergency personnel evacuated the Tube, another explosion ripped open a double-decker bus filled with evacuees from the subway.

US security alerts stand at yellow, with New York at orange. Bomb-sniffing dogs are going through the DC Metro system. Tony Blair spoke live at 11 AM Greenwich time, says it is “reasonably clear” that these are terrorist attacks:

“It’s reasonably clear that there have been a series of terrorist attacks in London. There are obviously casualties, both people that have died and people seriously injured. Our thoughts and prayers, of course, are with the victims and their families. It’s, uh, my intention to leave the G8 within the next couple of hours and go down to London and get a report face-to-face with the police and the emergency services and the ministers that have been dealing with this, and then to return later this evening.

It is the will of all the leaders at the G8, however, that the meeting should continue in my absence, that we should continue to discuss the issues that we were going to discuss, and reach the conclusions which we were going to reach. Each of the countries around that table has some experience of the effects of terrorism, and all of the leaders, as they will indicate a little bit later, share our complete resolution to defeat this terrorism.

It’s particularly barbaric that this has happeed on a day when people are meeting to try to help the problems of poverty in Africa, and the long-term problems of climate change in the environment. Just as it is reasonably clear that this is a terrorist attack or a series of terrorist attacks, it’s also reasonably clear that it is designed and aimed to coincide with the opening of the G8.

There will be time to talk later about this. It’s important, however, that those engaged in terrorism realize that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world.

Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country, and in other civilized nations throughout the world.

Busses and trains all around London are closed.

Christopher Dickey, Newsweek Magazine Paris Bureau Chief, said on the radio that “obviously, the modus operandi points to some Al-Qaeda-type group … There’s a third possibility… Abu-Massad Al Zarqawi … even before the invasion of Iraq, was setting up networks throughout Europe … if there’s a link there, the implications … are very profound indeed.”

Eyewitness accounts indicate loud explosions, heavy smoke, complete loss of power through large sections of the rail network and downtown London.

The phone system and mobile phone networks are down. There is a rumor of a reputed suicide bomber on the bus which exploded. Rumors of suspected suicide bomber shot dead by security forces in Canary Wharf.

The G8 summit (a meeting of the top 8 industrialized nations in the world) in Scotland was apparently derailed as Tony Blair returned to London.

Many passengers are still trapped underground, with rescue efforts underway.

Explosions confirmed at Edgware Road, Russell Square, Kings Cross, Liverpool Street, Moorgate underground station, Aldgate underground station, and a double-decker bus downtown.

There was a possible 8th explosion at Brighton.

A previously unknown group, “The Secret Organization group of al-Qaeda of Jihad in Europe”, has claimed responsibility for the bombings. However, their claim is disputed.

Coverage on CNN.com and elsewhere.

All right, this is something that I’ve been wondering about for a long time, and I figured there would be nowhere I’d be more likely to find a good answer than here.

I introduce this question not as a challenge, but out of a genuine interest in learning.

Got you all curious yet? OK, here goes:

So your average evangelical or fundamentalist Christian uses the Bible as the foundation for their moral and thelogical reasoning, operating under the theorem that the Bible is the official Word of God. I would be interested in hearing how they arrive at this conclusion.

The usual answer I get is “Well, in Chapter X Verse Y, it says this…” But you can’t quote the Bible in order to prove that the Bible is the Word of God. That’s about as clearcut an example of circular reasoning as I can come up with. So are there other answers out there?

As a caveat, folks abound with reasons why the Bible is *not* the Word of God, most of which I’ve heard already. Again, I’m more interested in seeing what reasons are out there for the affirmative.

(takes his clipboard, enters the protective observatory bunker)

Recent research indicates that the long-held wisdom of slathering yourself in sunscreen before going outside may not be that smart after all. The most interesting statistic? That for every 1 death from skin cancer avoided by using sunscreen, there may be 30 deaths from other forms of cancer due to lack of Vitamin D.

Okay.. short and sweet tonight. I know Russell Crowe is a bit of a pig. I know the name is kind of dumb, but I want to tell you that I and my wife saw “Cinderella Man” tonight, and can honestly call it the best film of the year thus far.

Yes, I liked Star Wars more, much in the way I love Taco bell tacos. I need them.. they are a part of me. But a film like this is a five course first class meal at a five star cinematic restaurant, and it deserves to be doing better than it is at the box office.

Maybe it was the name, maybe the SITH took some revenge on it, either way… this film deserves to be seen, and the film company is so sure you will like it, there is a deal at many theatre chains, that if you do not, they will refund your money, no questions asked.

I’m excited about this film. I cheered, my wife cried (and actually wanted to talk about and dissect it afterwords, a rarity) – we both sat there moved and affected and, its a darn fun film a lot of the time. So, yeah.. I think you’ll like it, and if we go see movies like this, maybe they’ll make more of them.