Total Dismay

Will Smith is quoted as saying that 98% of the stuff that Tom Cruise is telling him about scientology is the same as what he knows about the Bible. Here is the other 2% courtesy of South Park.

Will Smith has consistently denied being directly involved with this cult, saying that he stayed out of it out of respect for his devotedly Christian grandmother. Sonny Bono, who was in fact a member of CoS, always put down Roman Catholic on any form that asked about his religion.

I think courting a celebrity spokesman that won’t even admit to buying what he is selling is not a very smart move on Tom’s part, although Will’s lukewarm endorsement can probably be reheated by scientology recruiters that are trying to bring in fresh bodies and funds from previously untapped regions. scientology is 98% about lying.

MIT has shipped its course materials on hard drives to 84 sites in Africa. This is to enable institutions to store the educational material locally on their own networks. These resources are readily available online, but accessing them via the Internet would have been too much for the African schools’ networks to handle. Elite universities in the USA are going open source with a lot of course material these days and people in developing nations around the World are able to benefit from the information.

Another prestigious school, Berkeley, is putting entire course lectures on YouTube. Here is one of them, if you have 40 minutes to spare, check it out…

Source for this post: Wired News

We have a water reservoir underneath our maisonette. It has been filling with rainwater quite steadily for the past week or so. This morning my landlord called from upstairs and asked me to check to see whether is was full and to disconnect the elbow in the courtyard if it was. Once it is full, the extra water goes out an overflow pipe into his father-in-law’s field. It was full.

I am glad that it has stopped raining.

I have company for this Sunday Self Portrait. His name is Vic.

We are semi-regulars at a restaurant that almost always has VH1 playing on the big screen above the bar with the sound switched off and a stack of CDs playing randomly on the sound system. I think we are unduly mesmerized by the television because we don’t have it at home. The 80’s show is usually on when we are waiting for our meal. We had a discussion last night about what makes some videos unbelievably dated and others less so.

This is not meant to be a parody of the movie Babel. It is simply a tower of YouTube videos that replicates the effect of the movie. Juxtaposing widely divergent cultures is a very easy way to send sheltered, fearful American viewers on a head trip. I have to admit that the original movie was faithfully recreating these environments in a work of fiction, which is harder than just doing a few searches. Playing all three videos at the same time creates a pretty neat effect.

The Worst Time to Suffer From Paranoia is when people are out to get you. I spent an hour pouring over the long Vanity Fair article about the tragic last days of an artistic power couple who had fled Hollywood for New York after a weird series of events and then committed suicide in separate events. The main theme running through the story is that two people who were very much in love had both descended into mental illness. One of the main targets of Theresa Duncan’s paranoia was the church of scientology. It is unclear as to whether there was any actual threat. Any correspondence coming from anyone involved with scientology could be put in the context of justifiable denials and pushback. Given the fact that there are powerful people in Hollywood who belong to this cult, I believe that there probably was some level of malicious damage to the professional and social lives of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan. Theresa Duncan’s story about befriending Beck and offering to help him escape the cult is dubious because of Beck’s denials, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Did you know that much of the work involved in creating ManHunt2, the first mainstream gay video game, was carried out in Vienna?

The Rockstar Vienna studio was closed down and its employees did not get mentioned in the credits for this popular games. There is a rumor that the Vienna dudes put some unauthorized Easter Eggs in the game. I don’t want to spoil the surprise for any of you avid gamers, but I am going to embed a few videos that will clue you in on what passes for creativity in Vienna.

Once you find the Easter Eggs on the game, you will have the added functionality of hugging and Vienna Sausage eating.

Alien Versus Predator, AVP for short, made some money at the box office. $171,181,096 to be exact. I predict that the sequel will not do quite as well. I’m guessing that the budget might have been a little smaller for the ‘requiem’ of the original matchup to ensure a profit. AVP cost $70 Million to make.

There is actually not much that you can do to cut corners on these kind of movies. The leading roles do not require big name actors with big salaries, and lighting is cheap since they are filmed almost entirely in the dark. I have one suggestion, they can cut the CGI bill in half by using a two dimensional animated character as one of the battling creatures…

The Internet is going to be closed on Christmas Day with the exception of essential services.

This will take effect at 12:00:01 am on December 25th.

Merry Christmas Everyone

The majority of people who travel by air recognize that security measures have been stepped up and that it is their interest to try to take steps to ensure that they are not in possession of anything that will require extra scrutiny. A few years ago, I was traveling from Canada to the USA for a weekend retreat related to my job as a coffee roaster. I chose to wear steel toed boots because I would be working around machinery quite a bit. This caused some inconvenience.

I was surprised to hear that people go to the trouble of taking home baked pies onto airplanes. This article is a first person account of the airport security gauntlet with pie.

The most surprising and ridiculous part of the report is the fact that, at one airport, a large number of pies were confiscated and then served to soldiers at the USO lounge. There were no details as to how they were reclassified from suspicious to yummy during the trip from security to the lounge. I can imagine that most of the pies were given up in haste because that is the quickest way to move on when you under scrutiny and under stress at airport security.

I like to travel without checked luggage. I had been given a small tool set as a gift from a vendor at a trade show and I hadn’t really thought about whether it would be allowed in my carry on. When a security officer told me that it was not permitted, I immediately asked him to confiscate it. In this case he strongly encouraged me to go back and check my bag so that I could keep my precious free set of tools. I didn’t want to because I knew that they were crap. I think that is why he didn’t want to confiscate them. I stood my ground and he reluctantly tossed them in the bin.