Ben Forta Love for Me
I got credit on a Ben Forta Blog post. That's pretty cool. I wish I had been smart enough to link back here. Oh well.
Yes, only the web geeks out there will be impressed by this.
March 2005 Archives
Dockenwamp !!
I'm not sure what a "dockenwamp" is, but it brought me hours of enjoyment this weekend.If anyone out there knows what it actually is, please let me know.
Alternatively, if you wish to speculate, do that as well.
UPDATE:
Ryan has provided some anagrams for the dockenwamp:
- camped know
- camped wonk
- decamp know
- decamp wonk
- dow packmen
- know camped
- know decamp
- mawn pocked
- mock pawned
- mocked pawn
- mown packed
- packed mown
- packmen dow
- pawn mocked
- pawned mock
- pocked mawn
- wonk camped
- wonk decamp
Wonder Woman Movie
Wonder Woman is coming to the big screen with Joss Whedon in the director's chair. Now, who is going to play Wonder Woman. My vote is for Lauren Graham but looking at her IMDB bio, she might be too old for the role. Not that it's fair, but Hollywood likes their women young. But maybe someone will make the same mistake I did, and assume she couldn't possible be past her mid 30's.
Imagine that combo, Joss Whedon, who got most of his popular cach� from Buffy, a strong female role model, paired up with Lauren Graham, who plays such a strong female character on Gilmore Girls. It would be magical.
More Intervention Goodness
I'm watching the Gambler and the Shopper epidode of Intervention. My jury is still out. They did a better job of giving us a more sympathetic view of the addicts.
The actress Vanessa was extremely sympathetic. I think they did a really good job of showing her agorabphobia, which drives her addiction. Additionally the self awareness she had was a little heartbraking. Her psychologist seemed to just prescribe drugs and do nothing else. Agoraphobia is usually comorbid or even caused by G.A.D which responds very well to Cognitive Therapy. Quack.
She seems to take the intervention very well.
Gabe, Gabe, Gabe. I had high hopes for him, he was the reason I was here. His sound bite replayed during reruns of Crossing Jordan compelled me to watch. However, his lack of self awareness and addiction-driven selfishless makes him very unlikable. He says things like "I think when you have kids you're responsible for them for the rest of your life... You sell your house if you have to..." Which his parents did.
I felt bad for borrowing money from my parents to buy my house. I did not gamble away $80,000 of their money. Puts my Catholic guilt in perspective.
His intervention was rough. He subltly implies "I will kill myself because of this intervention." His interventioner was awesome. "I will call 911 if you are serious. Are you serious?" Suicide talk ended. Finally, Gabe said his money line:
"You're forcing me to get on a plane tonight when I don't even have all my stuff packed, and I don't have any control over anything...
They made me wait for it. But it was worth it. His intervention is very dramatic, no wonder he was the sound bite guy. He teeters but he finally goes. This episode had me.
But then they blew it. They had a 5 second post mortum on them. And they made it pretty clear that they were unsucessful.
I came for Gabe, I stayed for Vanessa. I fear neither will have a happy ending.
I will say this much more clearly then the last time. (As if the producers are reading...) Rework this show. Interventions are not good ending beats cause they leave the more uregent question in the audience's mind - Will they recover? - unanswered. Cut it back to one person per episode, make me root for the person, then show me what happens to them. The intervention should be the climax, but we need a longer denouement.
USANext
A couple weeks ago an ad was running on a couple conservative blogs that basically said AARP supports Gay Marriage and is against the troops. The group was an attack on AARP from USANext a conservative group that defines itself on it's new member page as :
USA is a nonprofit nonpartisan organization under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. Because USA lobbies Congress on behalf of seniors, contributions are not tax deductible for tax purposes.
Additionally there's a lot of connections between the legendary Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and USANext.
Well the liberal blogging community went nuts and started digging, and protesting and angry.
The CEO of USANext defended his ad saying:
I wanted to test to see how long it would take for the liberal blogs in this country to go berserk over a single image.
It could have ended there, but instead of posing a fake gay couple for the ad, they just lifted a picture of a real gay couple, who being liberal bloggers themselves, noticed it, and tried to figure out how they got the picture.
Someone must have gotten in touch with them and told them they had some legal recourse against USANext, and decided to sue for $25 million dollars. The judge in the case ordered a temporary restraining order preventing USANext from using the picture, and gave some indication that the plaintiff's case had real merit.
So the liberal over-reaction to the ad was a $25 million dollar lawsuit, that has a good chance of succeeding. Congratulations, USANext, perhaps next time you will settle for a focus group.
Intervention
I finally watched my Tivo'ed copy of Intervention, the new reality show from A&E. I have to say I'm disappointed. The last 20 minutes or so focus on the intervention. The rest of the show was focused on setting up the "why" of the intervention - "Why was the intervention needed?"
I think where they failed here is that they did a good job of showing why they needed the intervention, but they did a less good job of telling me why I should care about these people. Granted, this is going to show the worst of the people off, but I think they need to focus more on making us root for the people. There seems to be a token effort to point out what these people were before they were addicts, but it seems to revel more in their downfall. All in all this is just another exploitative reality show with little social merit. Nothing wrong with that, except, there are other reality shows that are just as exploitative, but don't hide behind a veneer of "helping people."
Having said all this, until I see the one with my boy, Gabe the Gambler, my jury is still out.
Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum
In short, Santorum who has shirt-sleeves made of Catholicism, seems to love that Protestant work ethic. I can't reconcile his support of sweatshop labor practices, and his Catholicism. He must be a hypocrite... a cock-punch deserving hypocrite.
Timecode Application
I've been ossilating between high on pain meds and in fiery pain when the wear off. To keep my mind busy I wrote a PHP and MySQL based timecode application. As my first full application that uses MySQL and PHP, I have to say I much prefer Cold Fusion and MS SQL. There are a couple things that are just much easier to do in Cold Fusion, namely debugging, performance testing, database management, and session management.
All in all though I'm glad I did it. I'm sure that I didn't get everything right, and that there was some ineffciency. Check it out:
Citizen Wumpus - Production Tools.
Wisdom Teeth
I had my wisdom teeth taken out today. I got to keep one. Look at that thing. It's huge, and there was four of them in there. Jesus, no wonder why they hurt. On a scary note, I woke up during the procedure. I heard the doctor ask for a chisel, and felt him whacking it into my jaw. I didn't feel a thing though, gotta love modern medicine.
In that same vein, I've been prescribed oxycodone. I can't believe the difference it makes. I go from having my jaw on fire, to being extremely comfortable. I can see why people get addicted to the stuff, I can't imagine what it would feel like it to take it without a hole in my jaw.
I promise to not go all Rush Limbaugh on it.
