"Bubsy's world looks like it was built out of old milk cartons by a group of first graders from a country that had never seen milk cartons before. And did I mention that they didn't have scissors, glue, or hands and had to put them together while they were covered in bees? I should have, because this goddamn game looks like ass." Seanbaby reviews the 20 worst video games of all time.
|W|P|83842648|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"See, we love—we love freedom. That's what they didn't understand. They hate things; we love things. They act out of hatred; we don't seek revenge, we seek justice out of love."—George W. Bush, Oklahoma City, Aug. 29, 2002
|W|P|83787318|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comNow you can go trick-or-treating as a disgraced CEO: Forbes has created Halloween masks of Bernard Ebbers (WorldCom), Kenneth Lay (Enron), Dennis Kozlowski (Tyco), Samuel Waksal (ImClone), and Martha Stewart.
|W|P|83775078|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe tragic downside of prominent license-plate design elements:
Last night I saw the second half (or so) of The Blair Witch Project, finally. After hearing so much criticism about it, I was surprised to find I liked it. I was flipping around among that, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and one of the Halloween sequels ('tis the season), and Blair was by far the scariest of the three.
I think the point is that it's not supposed to make sense. The film scores its points through atmosphere and the actors' reactions. I think the ending is far more effective because it doesn't make sense. If the actual witch appeared and there were some climactic struggle I think it would look silly, especially with a $22,000 budget. (Note: imdb says that each of those budget dollars earned $10,000 in revenue, which placed the film in the Guinness Book of World Records for a time.)
One other note: Roger Ebert, who liked the movie, mentioned that Heather's self-filmed apology near the end reminded him of Robert Scott's notebooks. I hadn't read those, so I looked them up this morning. They're tragic and scary in themselves.
|W|P|83714073|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comNow that the Disney-owned Anaheim Angels have won the World Series, they're going to Disney World ... where Disney will charge admission to the victory parade.
Writes one commenter: "Why do North American sports franchises seem to regard their fans as nothing more than wallets with legs and gigantic foam fingers?"
Good question. One more reason I don't understand sports.
|W|P|83680816|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us."—Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922)
I'd heard this attributed to Helen Keller ...
|W|P|83671443|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI couldn't find a stronger opponent this week, so I played a somewhat weaker one. I won in 35 moves, and my only significant errors were in overlooking the opponent's blunders when we were both in time trouble at the end. My instincts seem pretty accurate now, even when maneuvering and changing plans when there are no outright tactics.
|W|P|83601374|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSomeone has created a pretty good game wherein a wrathful God smites His creatures (including some cows) for no good reason. Kind of makes religion seem even more pointless than usual.
|W|P|83589138|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comToken kitty link. I love this song�"Outtathaway" by The Vines.
|W|P|83558715|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."—Bertrand Russell
|W|P|83551782|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA creepy marketing service describes my current zip code this way:
- Demographics: Medium-low income families, age 22-29, with a relatively large number of children
- Lifestyle & Retail: Eat at fast food chicken restaurants, and shop at Lady Foot Locker
- Communications & Technology: Have call blocking, call tracing, call forwarding, and three-way calling custom calling features
- Financial: Have a loan against an insurance policy, have credit life insurance, own mortgage life insurance
- Media: Watch All My Children and premium cable channels, read Ebony and Jet magazines, and listen to jazz format radio
- Geography: Urban areas, very high concentration in the Southeast
... which actually sounds pretty accurate. They describe my new one like this:
- Demographics: Slightly higher than average income singles, one to four people
- Lifestyle & Retail: Dine at fast food Asian and Mexican restaurants, shop at 7-Eleven, and lease their car
- Communications & Technology: Own a paging device, use the Internet at home for more than five hours per week, and use the home PC to do work from the office
- Financial: Obtain account balance through automated response phone system, purchase goods and services with ATM/debit card, and have an auto loan from a credit union
- Media: Watch Friends & the MTV Music Video Awards, read Glamour magazine, and listen to contemporary hits radio format
- Geography: Suburban and urban areas, concentrated along the two coasts, especially in Boston, Miami, California and Seattle
By changing one digit in my zip code, I'm moving from "City Ties" to "Great Beginnings." That's fine with me. I hope it's true ...
|W|P|83473692|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I got some extra information just last night on things that are happening in South America. It puts me in a situation where the political part of my brain is looking at the world and saying, 'I see trends developing and they're really horrible,' and the musician part of my brain says, 'I would really like to be just sitting in that room in there working on the Synclavier, because that's more fun than anything else.' And I spend my day trying to put these two parts of my brain together, and usually what happens is that at the end of the work period there will be a product that comes out that is a combination of those two parts of my brain: what I know about what's going on in the world, plus what I like to do with music." -- The Best Frank Zappa Interview Ever
|W|P|83422652|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comVoice of America reports that Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose reassured illegal immigrants that their status would not be an issue if they want to come forward with info about the D.C. sniper.
Presumably he had to say this because they started deportation proceedings against those two guys in the van.
Also: "Maryland Governor Parris Glendening said the state would consider posting National Guard troops at polling places if the sniper is not caught by the time general elections are held on November 5."
Man, I hadn't even thought about that.
|W|P|83421646|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comGleeeaahh. Since Bush rejected the Kyoto global-warming accord, this month's 10-day conference in New Delhi is pretty much a waste of time.
Instead of discussing how to reduce greenhouse gases, the U.N. says attendees will discuss how to prepare for "worsening droughts, floods, storms, health emergencies, and other expected impacts," especially in developing countries.
|W|P|83407990|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI finally figured it out this morning. The New Yorker with Newsweek's cover. That's National Public Radio.
I was standing there in the shower and Ketzel Levine was describing, in considerable detail, how she got off a tour bus in South Africa, walked some distance, saw a gladiolus that reminded her of a Robert Burns poem, and got back on the bus. That was her report. It's journalism by introverted nerds. "If I write real purty, maybe no one will notice that I haven't interviewed anyone."
By the way, the gladiolus poem ("To see a world in a grain of sand ...") is by Blake, not Burns. Even her erudition is phony.
|W|P|83402785|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHere's a functional Mac classic retrofitted to be driven by a 1923 Underwood manual typewriter.
|W|P|83347092|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAn article in Counterpunch suggests that George W. Bush may be a "dry drunk"—"a slang term used by members and supporters of Alcoholics Anonymous and substance abuse counselors to describe the recovering alcoholic who is no longer drinking, one who is dry, but whose thinking is clouded." Distinguishing traits:
- Exaggerated self-importance and pomposity
- Grandiose behavior
- A rigid, judgmental outlook
- Impatience
- Childish behavior
- Irresponsible behavior
- Irrational rationalization
- Projection
- Overreaction
The author, Katherine van Wormer, concludes that "his behavior is consistent with barely noticeable but meaningful brain damage brought on by years of heavy drinking and possible cocaine use."
|W|P|83315202|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"If you want to understand intelligence, the game of Go is much more demanding [than chess]," says Jonathan Schaeffer of the University of Alberta Department of Computer Science's Games Group (in Wired). "It doesn't have the silver bullet: deep search. Chess has somewhat outlived its usefulness. It turned out to be easier than we thought."
|W|P|83297066|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThis week's game was a G/30 loss to a 1602 on FICS. He seemed to play weakly in the beginning, attacking too soon, and in the endgame, where he blundered away a queen, but in the middle game he was incredibly strong, taking only a second or so per move.
At the end I had 4:41 remaining, to his 22:15, but he had 11 red flags to my five, and overlooked mate on the move four times. I'm not sure why his endgame was so weak, or why he didn't slow down at that point. My play was fairly clean compared to last week�one oversight decided the game�and it took him 50 moves after that to mate me, so I feel okay about it.
|W|P|83261171|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Boston Globe reports on a Harvard psychology professor who seems to have disproved free will:
What Libet did was to measure electrical changes in people's brains as they flicked their wrists. And what he found was that a subject's ''readiness potential''—the brain signal that precedes voluntary actions—showed up about one-third of a second before the subject felt the conscious urge to act. The result was so surprising that it still had the power to elicit an exclamation point from him in a 1999 paper: ''The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act!''|W|P|83210208|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Then the experimenters would use magnetic stimulation in certain parts of the brain just at the moment when the subject was prompted to make the choice. They found that the magnets, which influence electrical activity in the brain, had an enormous effect: On average, subjects whose brains were stimulated on their right-hand side started choosing their left hands 80 percent of the time. And, in the spookiest aspect of the experiment, the subjects still felt as if they were choosing freely.
"I've never seen a fire truck that needed to be shaved."
|W|P|83178428|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThis is in terrible taste, considering how many people I know in D.C.
|W|P|83185426|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The Census Bureau reports that noise is Americans' top complaint about their neighborhoods, and the major reason for wanting to move.
|W|P|83181416|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe National Organization to Shoot Bill O'Reilly Into the Sun has set a fundraising goal of $2 billion. Total so far: $145.
|W|P|83134719|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe ontological argument for the existence of God, as given on kuro5hin.org (and elsewhere):
- Define X as the greatest being imaginable: than which no greater can be imagined.
- Consider for a moment that this being does not exist in reality, it's just an idea in the mind.
- D'oh! Then a greater being can be imagined: one that does exist in reality after all. The concept that X doesn't exist in reality leads to a contradiction.
- Therefore, X exists in reality.
- Let X=God.
Why is an existing being more perfect than a nonexisting one? Surely Plato would disagree. A "perfect" circle can't exist in reality. If God exists, in any form, surely we could imagine ways to make him more perfect.
Apparently Kant refuted the ontological argument by saying that "existence is not a predicate," meaning (as I understand it) that existence inheres in a being—it isn't added "afterward." I'm smarter than I thought!
|W|P|83026210|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFortune.com quantifies the downfall of Generation X:
Yes, yes, yes, we know what you're thinking. The free-spending slackers have only themselves to blame, since the dot-com boom should have made them rich for life. On the surface that's true. A 30-year-old today is 50% more likely to have a bachelor's degree than his counterpart in 1974 and earns $5,000 more a year, adjusted for inflation. But that's where the good news stops. He also has more in student loans and credit card debt, is less likely to own a home, and is just as likely to be unemployed. His salary probably topped out during the boom, whereas his predecessor's rose throughout his career. Social Security will start to evaporate as he turns 50—or before, if the lockbox gets raided—so he'll have to depend almost completely on his own savings for retirement. The comparison with a 30-year-old in 1984 isn't any rosier.|W|P|82977330|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I used to read a lot of science fiction, but not so much anymore. Last night I think I figured out why:
The lining of my coat was stuffed with crisp Reagan $1000 bills.That's a line from a short story by Bruce Sterling. The context doesn't matter. Here's what's wrong with it: It lacks narrative discipline. The author has identified a clear voice for the narrator, but he hasn't come to terms with who the narrator is addressing.
If he's addressing someone of his own time, he wouldn't bother to specify that Reagan's likeness appears on a $1,000 bill, unless that were remarkable somehow (it's not).
If he's addressing someone from a different time or place, he'd be explicit about that. He might say, "$1,000 bills at this time bore a likeness of Ronald Reagan. The lining of my coat was stuffed with them." He probably wouldn't even say this much, though, because the Reagan part isn't relevant to the plot.
Bottom line: The author thought having Reagan on a bill was a neat idea, and valued the neatness more than he valued the integrity of his characters or narrative voice.
Science fiction and fantasy are shot through with this kind of thing. I read another story, by Michael Swanwick, in which the protagonist notes the doubled shadows cast by the rising moons. Yes, double moons are a striking idea, if you live on Earth. But the narrator is ostensibly writing from her own point of view, and she wouldn't find them noteworthy. The fact that she does note them shakes my faith in her, and makes it hard to believe the story.
Either acknowledge that you're writing for readers from a different time and place, or consistently pretend that you're not. To drop in these irrelevant neat-o ideas, or "As you know, Bob" dialogue, just makes for flabby, undisciplined writing. As Robert Louis Stevenson told a student, "Madam, never again dare to tell me that grass is green."
|W|P|82968121|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Gilbert White discovered the formula for complete happiness, but he died before making the announcement, leaving it for me to do so: It is to be very busy with the unimportant."—A. Edward Newton (1864-1940), This Book-Collecting Game
|W|P|82959657|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThis week's game was a horrible, icky travesty, played when I was tired, though that's no excuse. Nine major tactical errors on each side, the last few unforgivable as I overlooked two forced mates and then stumbled into one myself. I did win the exchange on move 21, and kept an edge through most of the game, but White's play was bad enough that I think I should have won easily.
Well, there should be a lot of lessons here, at least.
|W|P|82921858|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Perhaps that is what love is: the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power."—Phyllis Rose
|W|P|82917368|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"What passes for woman's intuition is often nothing more than man's transparency."—George Jean Nathan
|W|P|82917356|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October."—Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Note-Books (Oct. 7, 1841)
|W|P|82895695|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comStupendously brilliant issue today from B3ta:
- iusedtobelieve.com demonstrates that children are a bunch of idiots. I added my own confession -- I used to think elemeno was one letter -- to their database this morning.
- England's Blackpool Wax Museum is so piss-poor that you can't tell whether a given subject is meant to be Robin Williams, Madeleine Albright, or the Pope. Inevitable online quiz here.
- Mild-mannered stick figure XiaoXiao is assaulted by thugs while crossing a desktop. Can you save him?
- August Strindberg communicates his existential despair to a helium balloon.
- Someone has built a working harpsichord out of Legos.
- Do Peterson, a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington, has set his dissertation to music. "Distribution Theory for the Sibling Recurrence-Risk Ratio." It's the jaw harp that makes it so catchy.
- This last one is really indescribable. Just click.
Shrew update: We chased it down after work last night and I wrestled it into a wastebasket and took it outside. Two things occurred to me:
- It behaved exactly as I would have if I were a baby mole. (I think it was a baby mole.) It hid as much as possible, fled when exposed, and tried to explore as much as it could, while staying safe. A lot of enlightened people still think that humans are somehow more conscious or adaptive than any other species. I just don't see any evidence for that.
- I also don't see how anyone can believe in an omnibenevolent God. This mole was taken from its nest by a predatory kitty cat, batted about and left for dead. Then it was chased for hours through our apartment till I cornered it in the bathroom, where there was nowhere to hide. By the time I dumped it out back it must have been exhausted, terrified, and starving. And a crow probably found it within ten minutes. Explain that. Do moles have original sin? Do moles just not count? Even if they count only a little, then your God is not infinitely good, is he?
There is a shrew in my end table.
Typing exercise? Pick-up line? 007 password?
No. There is a shrew in my end table. One of the cats has discovered a supply of voles or mice or something in the mulch outside our apartment, and has become quite adept at capturing them alive (mostly), releasing them indoors, and then losing interest.
If I pick up the chair it runs under the couch. If I pick up the couch it runs under the chair. It's all very trying. What puzzles me is how Darwin would explain this. Cats seem to like wounding things, but not actually eating them. Maybe they are testing our capacity for some cat project when the mothership comes.
|W|P|82808509|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs."—German proverb
|W|P|82787057|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHey, for the record?
John Lennon named the Beatles as an English pun on the Crickets and Jack Kerouac.
That whole "flaming pie" thing was just made up. Lennon liked to toy with a credulous press and an idolatrous public. He liked to be deliberately obscure and then to make fun of people who didn't understand him.
Just so you know.
|W|P|82761975|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comabandoned-places.com is overdesigned but impressively photographed and undeniably creepy.
Why should that be? Why is an uninhabited place unsettling?
|W|P|82760882|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Being in this business is a lot better than working in a car factory, a lot better than working in a coal mine. What's the big deal? People who moan and bitch and complain about what they do, I just want to say, 'Then leave! Get out of it! Go do something else!' I mean, here you are, making a lot of money, with people feeding you on the set, looking after your every need. I just want to kick them in the goolies, you know? [laughs] You know when some of these people, these megaphones of Hollywood, show up on these awards shows, and just never shut the fuck up? Just keep going on about some noble cause or the other? I just want to say 'Accept your award. Say thank you and get off!' [laughs] I'm not interested in all that bullshit."—Anthony Hopkins, Venice Magazine, October 2002
|W|P|82682587|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Composers tend to think that most people really care a lot about music. Well, most people don't."—Aaron Copland
|W|P|82682556|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things."—Robert A. Heinlein
|W|P|82682565|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMan, I love Al Pacino. Sharon and I just saw Insomnia. Pacino is 62 now, and shares the screen with two other Oscar winners (Robin Williams and Hilary Swank). And he makes everyone else look like they're acting.
I can't figure this out, because he's not ostentatious or showy at all. The only young actor I can think of who disappears so completely into a role is Edward Norton. All the other great "actor's actors" of the '70s and '80s (Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson) have sold out or devolved into self-parody. I hope Pacino just keeps going till he drops.
|W|P|82610961|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other."—Paul Valery (1871-1945)
|W|P|82565150|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness."—Sophocles
|W|P|82551881|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comCan't sleep.
"Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."—Winston Churchill
|W|P|82551856|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHeard on the radio this morning:
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Gestapo.
Ges—
I'll ask the questions!
"People say, how can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil? You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you."—George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002
|W|P|82532657|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"With Snow, Spock's Beard has created one of the greatest rock albums of all time, one that completely transcends the form's mundane origins. It is art."
That's S.T. Karnick, writing in The National Review, of all places. I ordered the CD this week, and should have it in a few days. I haven't seen a bad review yet.
Karnick calls progressive rock "quite simply the most interesting and creative—and arguably the most enjoyable—music of our time."
He also says—and I could not agree more:
"The dirty little secret about contemporary music is that almost none of the industry people, broadcasters, and music critics actually know anything about music. Rock criticism has always extolled lyrics, artistic personae, emotional directness, and visual presentation because those are things a writer can observe without having studied music. This ignorance is the main reason the biggest critic-driven trends of the past four decades—folk, punk, disco, and then, simultaneously in the past decade, grunge, rap, metal, industrial, and Lilith folk—have been based on these things rather than music."
|W|P|82493581|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Three things it is best to avoid: a strange dog, a flood, and a man who thinks he is wise."—Welsh proverb
|W|P|82461675|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it."—Abraham Lincoln
|W|P|82461638|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Take advice, but not orders. Only give yourself orders. Abraham Lincoln once said, 'Since I will be no one's slave, I will be no one's master.'"—Jim Rohn
|W|P|82461621|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWoo-hoo! I just played the Larsen in a G/30, just to try it out. I won in 17 moves (14 minutes) with a queen sac against a player rated almost 200 points higher. I think I led positionally through the whole game. The moves come naturally -- it's essentially a mirror image of the English, with bishops pointed toward the kingside, so there are lots of interesting tactics.
I certainly won't be able to match this level of play always, but to do it even once, on my first try, is really encouraging.
|W|P|82439575|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Believe me, when a shoe hits you in the head it feels pretty darn big." Nardwuar the Human Serviette interviews Geddy Lee. ("Because they put on a good light show, but they weren't Max Webster, were they? I mean, Max Webster! That was the shit! They were it!")
|W|P|82411426|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHoly carumba. Conde Nast Bridal Group says the average cost of a wedding is $22,360, a 47% increase over 1990. They say it's because people are marrying later (when they have more resources), and because women apparently keep trying to outdo each other, which is something I'll never understand.
Let's say, conservatively, that the wedding plus reception total six hours, and everyone stays for that whole period. That's $3,726 per hour, or $62.11 per minute, or a little more than a dollar a second. That's like taking your house downpayment, or your kid's tuition, and handing it out to your relatives on a dance floor. I just don't get it.
|W|P|82419465|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSpotted this on rec.games.chess.analysis:
Nothing wrong with it [1. b3] at all. It's played by GMs fairly commonly. You can even use it as a universal system playing The Larsen as white, the English Defense as Black against d4 and the Owens Defense against e4. Owens Defense is kind of suspect though it does get played from time to time even at high levels.
Bwahahahaha!
|W|P|82373464|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com