Movies
The Return of
the King
Fri Dec 19, 2003 - I saw it Monday Dec 22 --
"No worms were harmed in the production of this motion picture"!
Official site: http://www.lordoftherings.net
-- tLotR ("The Lord of the Rings") -- see "<Books"
below
X2, or "Honey, there's a hairy,
smelly little man in the
kitchen drinking our beer!"
I just went to see "X2: X-Men United" on Friday (May 9, 2003). It was
great! It made the first movie, as good as it was, look like
a basic introduction. I have some discussion that gives the
ending away, so click here* for
that
if you've already seen it or don't mind learning the ending. I thought
Halle Berry looked great with shoulder-length hair; they've improved
the white wig since the first movie. She's a top of the line actor
(along with Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Anna Paquin, Hugh Jackman
(Wolverine) etc.) and has the star-quality smile in the promotional
posters. She has said that she's
a confirmed short-hair person. Oh, well. Here's Halle Berry's official
website: http://www.hallewood.com.
Wolverine is supposed to be quite short, and heavily muscled -- he's
referred to as "the midget psycho" by his enemies, although he's not
quite a midget (and he's earned a hard-won self-control) -- but Hugh
Jackman is 6'2" and fairly lean, although he's obviously toned up a bit
for the movie.
I also read the
Mad Magazine spoof, which had some pretty good zingers, such as in the
camping scene where they're building a fire; Berry and Paquin take out
their Oscars and say "Here, throw these on -- after this trash,
nobody's going to ever remember that
we used to do quality work". In another scene, it was asked how they
could park the jet so close to a suburban house: "The Prof's got
handicap plates!". Magneto's plastic prison was portrayed in one panel
as a giant tupperware container with label: "Contents: 1 evil genius".
For another zinger that sort of gives the story away, click
on this same link*.
But seriously, the size of Halle Berry's smile in the promo posters
is about the size of the smile the producers are putting on the fans'
faces (mine, for sure) with these movies.
The official website is http://www.x2-movie.com.
It's a flashy site that runs best if you have fast www access,
requires the latest plugins, and has comparatively little
content, but it's worth a look, and didn't take prohibitively
long to load stuff with my net 44,000 bps of throughput that
I generally achieve with my dialup connection (it helps if
you have a novel to read while surfing the web, sometimes). I've also
located some more info about the movie at http://romanticmovies.about.com/cs/xmen2/index.htm.
*-updated June 2, 2003
Magazines - commentary
Analog SF/SF (http://www.analogsf.com)
"The First Martian" in the Sept 2004 issue is amusing; reminds me of
more
than
one person whom I know.
One of two of the fact articles in the July/Aug 2004 issue is about the
Open-Source software phenomenon. The author, Eric S. Raymond (editor of
The New Hacker's Dictionary) gives a lot of lip-service to
property rights but doesn't tackle head-on the issue of how the
creators of open-source software are going to be paid. The movement
depends on people deciding to be self-sacrificing and producing goods
for free, hardly a solid foundation on which to base an economy. They
do get paid in the coin of fame and
honor, but they should also get paid in the type of coin that lets them
buy nice houses and private airplanes. Moreover, Bill Gates should also
go down in history as a saint, not as a greedy robber-baron. Raymond
may
be living in the past by complaining of how flaky is Windows; I've
heard
that XP is quite solid. What people were willing to pay for was
high-res
graphics when Windows first came along. Now the demand is for
stability.
Bill Gates and Microsoft should not be demonized for providing what the
market wants, when it wants it.
The fact article in the October 2003 issue is again on
counteracting global warming.
The authors states that global warming is a fact, but "some
debate still lingers" as to whether it is man-caused. I'll say.
Given that global temperatures rose early in the 20th century, but then
declined following the 1970s at a time when man's output
of carbon dioxide was increasing greatly in a steepening curve,
what evidence is there for man-caused global warming? The NASA GISS
graph (published in many schoolbooks) shows this, but then erroneously
shows a rapid increase of global temperatures in the 1990s. This
increase was not observed by radio satellites or radiosonde balloons,
but only by earth stations which were subject to the urban heat island
effect - as urban sprawl progressed around the monitoring stations, the
temperatures they recorded rose. I wrote a letter to the editor
on the subject in May 2000 and on June 16, 2003. We are warming up from
the "Little ice age" of the 1500s, and global temperatures may
soon turn around and go back down if the historical 500-year
temperature (half)-cycle continues.
*As Arthur C. Clarke wrote in his book, Astounding Days, Astounding/Analog
certainly seems to enjoy giving librarians and indexers headaches!
The book review column is posted on the website, and the
covers of the books are shown (which is a feature that the paper
magazine doesn't have).
Posted Feb 26, 2006