Salad Fingers

My middle son scares me sometimes. For example, he recently introduced me to his favorite interweb video, Salad Fingers, which is an episodic cartoon produced by David Firth. It's dark, disturbing, and not for everyone.

I experienced uneasy pride as I thoroughly enjoyed episode 4. He wanted me to watch this one first, because he thought it would speak to me. He was right. I found it to be creepy yet hilarious. The main character is a green, three-fingered being with bad teeth. He enjoys role playing, rusty metal and blood. Why, it practically writes itself!

Mr Firth is a genius. And for that, I'll gladly purchase some of his apparel.

Digital Video Sucks Ass

An open letter to the digital video/codec industry:

Dear Assclowns:

May you all burn in eternal hellfire.

Sincerely,

JC Mann

I borrowed a digital video camera so that I could record my son's talent show act. It was a cheap, $100, no-name device, but it was better than nothing at all. I recorded the act without any problems. I brought the camera home and plugged it into my computer using the "specially designed" USB cable (Yes, you special-cable-connector-designin'-assclowns are next).

I opened the .mov file to view my masterpiece. QuickTime started playing the video immediately...sans video. While I listened to the audio, QuickTime presented me with a window containing a completely white canvas. Thanks QT. Good work. Onto other players. MPlayer? Same thing. I tried VLC, and it worked...but not without spewing tons of warning messages about the codec! Grinning like an idiot, I watched my son's act in all its splendor, rendered in grainy low-resolution video accompanied by tinny mono audio. What an age we live in.



It's hard to imagine what goes on at these big technology companies that produce our wonderful consumer electronics.

tech-lead:	“OK people, how are we gonna store the video for our new camcorder? We need ideas.”
new guy:	“We could use MPEG. It's used in tons of places: DVDs, HD transmission, HD-DVDs, and Blue Ray. It's kind of become the de facto standard, so the chip sets for encoding and decoding have become a commodity.”
awkward glances
tech-lead:	“OK, we need ideas people.”
engineer 1:	“I've just finished developing my own codec.”
tech-lead:	“Fantastic. License?”
engineer 1:	“Oh, it's all our intellectual property.”
engineer 2:	“How well does it compress?”
engineer 1:	“Sometimes a little better than MPEG. I pretty much took the MPEG algorithm and tweaked it.”
tech-lead:	“Software compatibility?”
engineer 1:	“I've written a plug-in for Windows Media Player.”
tech-lead:	“So, it will only work with Windows?”
engineer 1:	“Well, if they're running Vista with the latest OS patches.”
tech-lead:	“Wait, what about other OS's?”
engineer 2:	“What other OS's?!”
laughter
engineer 1:	“I guess it could be reverse engineered, but by the time it is, we'll be using a different codec.”
tech-lead:	“Right. Of course. It's always worked for us in the past.”
engineer 2:	“Is the plug-in secure?”
engineer 1:	“Well, not really. It could allow a hacker to execute arbitrary code.”
tech-lead:	“Whoa-whoa. That sounds bad.”
engineer 1:	“I'm thinkin', when was the last time a hacker was able compromise a plug-in for Windows Media Player?”
tech-lead:	“Good point.”

Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction is comedy-drama about an IRS auditor played by Will Ferrell who realizes that he's protagonist of a novel. Unfortunately, the author of this unfinished work is known for her talent for penning tragedies. Or hero, Harold Crick, sets out to change his fate and drama and comedy ensues. His love interest, Ana Pascal, is played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who I find myself attracted too even though she could be the spokesperson for the National Scoliosis Foundation. If you are the type of person that pays to see and movie and then refuses to suspend your belief, this isn't the movie for you. As the title implies, it's weirder than fiction.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this movie because it's very close to being a romantic comedy (even though is doesn't star Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks) and it's devoid the typical Will Ferrell physical humor.

It's a Literary Reference

The movie is entertaining on many levels, but the most obvious was literary. Authors and avid readers probably glean more from this film than I could ever hope.

Architecture

I love architecture. The film was shot in Chicago, a city with many beautiful and modern locations. I felt like the director wanted the spaces to be another character in the movie. As I listened to the dialog, I found myself admiring the rest of the scene. Most of the one-on-one interior scenes were not framed tight on the actors' faces. Instead, the director chose a wider shot that incorporated more of the surroundings. Warm lighting played off of the clean, contemporary architectural features. The Professor's office provided one of my favorite backdrops, polished stone walls segmented by tall slot-like tinted windows.

Watch

Another unexpected character in the movie was Harold's watch. Strange, but it worked. The watch took on its own personality as it attempted to stir his owner toward a different fate. The style of the watch, like the entire film, was clean and modern.

Augmented Reality

Ever since I watched the first Terminator movie, I've dreamed of a device (glasses, contact lens, retinal implants, ...) that would create annotated versions of what the wearer sees. For Mr. Crick, his obsessive and mathematical mind constructed graphs and annotations for the world around him. The facts and figures in his mind were displayed as 3D graphics attached to his head. You know the “I'm thinkin' Arby's” commercials, where the Arby's logo floats above the character's head and tracks his movements? Well, imagine that style of animation, but with a stream of words, numbers, and graphs rendered with clean white lines.

Math

All of the characters in the movie where named after famous mathematicians. I'm embarrassed that I didn't catch this, even with names like Hilbert, Pascal, and Mercator.

Loose Theory

I recently watched Loose Change...all 90 minutes of it. Loose Change is a movie that presents an alternative interpretation of the events that happened on September 11th, 2001. I wasn't able to view the whole movie in one sitting, because I found it difficult to watch. It has an overload of information, a low-budget production quality, and immature/unprofessional narration.

Am I conspiracy freak? Well, yeah, but this movie doesn't do it for me.

There are few things that the movie presents that are hard to refute:

• The evidence at the Pentagon crash site doesn't support the official interpretation.


• Steel frame buildings don't collapse when they burn.


• The large amount of assets moved around before the event.

But at the same time, this alternative theory has just as many holes as the official news story:

• "The passengers of flight 93 were flown to an airport in Cleveland and debriefed." Huh? Who are these people and where are they now?


• I don't see how a government that can't get adequate supplies to the troops in Iraq could possibly organize something this vast and complicated.


• What's the motivation?

Even if you don't agree with the what the movie is trying to convey, it's still worth a watch. Near the end of the film there is a clip from Fox News that's hilarious (well, sad). If millions of people didn't take the reporting from Fox News as gospel, I'd watch for the entertainment quality. They are truly delusional.

Snakes on a Blog

Yes, I spent $8 to see Snakes on a Plane in the theater. I've paid to see worse. Blade II comes to mind.

It was a typical horror/thriller with lots of unlikable characters serving as fodder for the villain/snakes. The only fun I had was trying to predict who was going to die and in what order.

The couple that couldn't keep their hands off of each other died predictably in the bathroom doin' the mile-high thing. The girl got hers on her incredibly large breast. Gross. Breasts should never be that large.

The Paris Hilton character with her pampered pooch-in-a-purse -- I think Sweet Tea said, "I'll enjoy watching the dog die. I'll also enjoy not blogging about this movie."

"He's the toughest guy you'll ever meet," said Mr. Jackson's character, talking about his FBI partner -- He dies. The twist? He has a debilitating fear of snakes. Shocking.

The best kill for me was when the 300-pound python devours a full-grown man. This person was the prick that pitched Paris's pooch at the preying python presumably to protect himself...which didn't work... Yes, a 30 foot long snake was smuggled onto a plane. No problems there.

The movie has a future on TV. I'm sure it will air on a three-day holiday weekend as part of a Terror in the Skies movie marathon. The only thing the TV audience will miss watching the censored version, and perhaps the only reason to see the movie, is the scene in which the chick gets bit on the breast, and the other part when Samuel L. Jackson utters the catch phrase that will not die:

"Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!"

Is Your Son The Anti-Christ

I went to see The Omen with Deppen the other night.

It was very educational.

Here are 6 (Get it --- 6?) signs that your child may be the son of devil:

1. He never smiles, unless someone is dying.


2. His classmates are afraid of him.


3. The animals go crazy when he visits the zoo.


4. He never gets sick.


5. He refuses to go into a church. When you force the issue, he goes into convulsions.


6. When his mother is about to fall to her death, he doesn't help or get upset.

It's best if you ignore these signs until it's too late.

Seriously, the movie was laughable. While Deppen was in the fetal position rocking back and forth, I was struggling to regain my composure.

The Da Vinci Code

Executive Summary: I didn't like it.

Note: For the six or seven people who haven't yet read this book, this post may spoil it for you.

I just finished reading The Da Vinci Code. Usually I like verisimilar¹ books, as long as I can easily distinguish the facts from the fiction. My lack of knowledge of religious history made this difficult for me. I eventually gave up. Once I assumed it was all fiction, the book was much easier to read.

I didn't care for the characters. OK, that's not true. I did care about Sophie. Probably because whenever I was imagining Sophie, I was really thinking of Audrey Tautou...hubba hubba. She can seek my Holy Grail anytime.

I feel like Dan Brown overly manipulates the reader. A good plot doesn't need repeated use of cliff-hangers to keep the reader engaged. Every chapter in his book ends with a cliff-hanger. I found myself rolling my eyes as I read the last three sentences of a chapter.

Near the end of the book I wasn't feeling excitement. I really wanted the story to end. Why did I keep reading? I wanted to be able to answer "yes" to the picnic/party conversation starter: "Did you read The Da Vinci Code?"

The upside is I've saved myself from spending $7.50 and two hours of my time by not going to see the movie.

I know that I'm not in a position to say this...but I'll say it anyway. I don't see why the Catholic church and Opus Dei are upset. Dan Brown exonerates both groups (page 428, 2nd paragraph) by saying that the villains were acting as individuals and that neither organization would condone such activities. I wouldn't be surprised if the protesters at the movie premiere were hired by the Sony Corporation.

¹Sherry here's your spoon-fed definition:

veri-sim-i-lar
adjective
Etymology: Latin verisimilis
1 : having the appearance of truth : PROBABLE
2 : depicting realism (as in art or literature)
- veri-sim-i-lar-ly adverb

Doom

I went to see Doom the other night with Sweet Tea and Deppen. We went into the movie with really low expectations. It exceeded our expectation by a narrow margin.

It had the look of Doom 3, which I thought was interesting. But that also meant that most of the action was in the shadows. I thought the monsters, when you could see them, were well done.

It moved slowly, with the real action starting in the last third of the movie. The BFG made a showing, but was only fired three times — twice on camera. For me the most disappointing part of the movie were the weapons. They mostly used a standard machine gun or handgun, and the BFG. Nary a Rocket Launcher, Railgun, Lightninggun, Plasmagun, or Grenade Launcher. The anemic gun selection meant that there were no interesting combos. I really wanted to see a monster tossed in the air with a Rocket Launcher and then sniped with a Railgun.

They used typical horror movie tactics, slowly building tension with music and weird camera angles. Then they shocked you with something benign: a rat, or a dog (what's a dog doing on Mars?). They falsely let the tension die only to really shock you with real monster. OMG! You got me again! You crazy horror movie director.

There was a 5 or 10 minute sequence that was filmed in the FPS style. That was fun to watch.

me: It was better than I thought it would be.
Sweet Tea: Yeah, I enjoyed it. Whadda ya say, Deppen?
Deppen: .....[Crickets].....
Sweet Tea: That's what I thought.
me: Hey, good talkin' to ya Deppen.

The best part was seeing the trailer for Underworld: Evolution. I'll be watching that movie with bottle of hand cream and roll of paper towels. Who's with me?

We Dogs

You know it's hard out there for a pimp
When you're trying to get money for the rent.