Link: The Observer | UK News | Millions of children to be fingerprinted.
British children, possibly as young as six, will be subjected to compulsory fingerprinting under European Union rules being drawn up in secret. The prints will be stored on a database which could be shared with countries around the world.
MAP. Adrian White, Analytic Social Psychologist, University of Leicester.
Here on Mr. Gartner’s 200-acre farm, however, the fields are covered with 10,050 solar panels, which soak up the sunshine and convert it into electricity. The ambient hum in the air is not the sound of insects but of transformers carrying a high-voltage current to the villages nearby.
Slog: The Stranger’s Blog | Number of Embryos "Adopted" is Negligible:
So far, according to Newsweek, only 128 of 400,000 frozen embryos stored in medical facilities around the country have been “adopted,” resulting in pregnancies.
I’m going to the dentist today.
As I walked to the library the other day, trying the reach its sphere of regenerating air-con and mulling the NY Times story: Restoration of Power in Queens Remains in Doubt, I thought about how our species’ traditional view of the seasons is about to flip. Once upon a time in, North America and Europe at least, winter has been long mythologized as the season of death and sleep, while summer was the time of idylls and Shakespeare’s romantic comedies.
If those crazy crazy loons in the scientific community and Al Gore, are to be believed instead of sensible highly-informed media pundits and our forward-thinking embryonic stem cell savior of a President, then within a generate no one will think of summer as something to look forward to. Rather winter will be seen as the season of some relief, and summer the season of death.
They’ve allowed me to expand a little at TVSquad and post on some news and other interesting stuff, so those of you who stop by this page, but never watch TV, can now be spared some of my obsessions over it, and those who do share them, can start here: Exposing the Hanso Foundation, or here: Terry O’Quinn misses the old Locke too.
[Via TV Squad] found a Penn (of Penn and Teller) interview Trey Parker (of South Park), which got me thinking about the show, which I love. It made me think of the most obnoxious unfunny episode of the year — the one I found personally offensive — the hybrid car episode which portrayed all hybrid car owners as smug self-righteous weenies. I don’t have a hybrid car (I don’t have any car, but when/if the point comes that I need one, I definitely would buy one).
Uma Thurman is a superhero, so this movie gets fifteen thumbs up. And the first half hour is pretty good. Luke Wilson plays a shallow nebbish who eff’s her and can’t wait to dump her for the similarly shallow character (played by always-adorable Anna Faris) who leads him on for the hell of it, even though she has a boyfriend and just uses Luke to feed her ego. No, no, I’ve got that all wrong.
Luke Wilson is a great guy, you see, and the Anna Faris character is a great girl. These are apparently the good people. Luke has a problem. His problem is that he needs to break up with his crazy girlfriend and he doesn’t know whether to be a man and do it straight up, or try to weasel out of it. This being a light comedy and Luke such a lovable guy, he chooses to weasel out.
Now young Luke has another problem, his super ex-girlfriend is psycho and makes his life hell. He decides the only thing to do is finally sit down and tell her the truth and talk it out like adults. Oh, he doesn’t? First he decided to trap his ex and expose her to kryptonite-like stuff. He will rob her of her powers, the world of its hero, because that is what is easiest for him, you see.
He is the protagonist of the movie, and isn’t that how protagonists behave? Isn’t that what Lois Lane would do in the same situation? She wouldn’t? Hm. I don’t understand this. Is this the bizarro world? Of course! That is it. This is an avant-garde film, at last we see the superhero-motif explored at movie-length from the p.o.v. of villains.
Maybe not, maybe I am giving the filmmakers too much credit.
Whatever their intention, Reitman and friends have made what is clearly the greatest superhero film of all time.
Uma Thurman uses her x-ray powers to somehow mine a vein of humanity from within her hatefully-written character, she proves invulnerable to cynically-contrived scenarios, and every moment she is on screen she has our sympathy and our affection; she soars above this shit, and only she has the strength to protect us from the foul misbegotten ill-conceived misdirection of effort entitled My Super Ex-Girlfriend.
For her pains, the filmmakers don’t even bother to give her a name behind her super-initial. And I thought killing Bill was tough.
Uma Thurman is a superhero.
Fixed one annoying design flaw that keyboards have been plagued with for what-reason-I- cannot-fathom. I’ve now performed this simple hack on my last three computers, saving myself hours of backspacing and exasperation!
to get a lot of work done at home in the morning before even thinking about playing around, went out the window when the FedEx man arrived:
Link: Starbucks Gossip: Don’t you hate those people who sit and use your wi-fi all day?
Comment from Becca:
We have free wifi (the only Bucks in the city that does!) and we have a couple of people who use it all day, but they all buy drinks. One guy is the funniest, he just doesn’t know it. He spends all day working on his blog (how he makes a living, I have NO idea), anyways, his blog is a complete lie! He makes these posts like "I’m travelling through Spain today, and did this…" then he goes and finds pics and posts them. We always try to spend as much time as possible bussing the tables near him so that we can read his lies of the day.
Haven’t heard much about this film, which is not surprising, I guess, but finally I have seen the Phil Dick movie I’ve waited almost thirty years for: faithful to the original – not only in plot, but also in aesthetic. Finally someone had the guts to do phildickian sf the way Dick himself did. Linklater shows us no hovercraft, no leather trench coats, no cyberpunk chic, just the beat up cars, trashed yards, and lost souls of suburban California. Dick created landscapes that look like the future we have, unlike a cartoon like Bladerunner, which still looks like, well, an old movie. Keanu Reeves, for all his past portrayals of cyberpunk heroes, gets it exactly right here, playing a classic Dick character – cop investigating himself while his identity unravels – as neither Cruise nor Ford had, or perhaps even bothered to seek the awareness to do. Probably better for their matinee-idol careers that they did not try.
