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.

I Hate People: part 4, The Trash Fairies Get Creative

Why does this keep happening to me?

There haven't been any notable trash events on the sidewalk in front of our house in recent weeks.

Maybe that's because the Trash Fairies moved their base of operations to the alley behind our house.

What is their motivation?

Why do they need to lynch a bag of trash?

Why do they do this stuff near me?

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.”

Conservation of Knowledge

Our oldest son must make a documentary film for a school project. The title of his film? "How Cars Work." No surprise there. Shooting hasn't started yet, but he wrote a draft of the script, which he gave to me to proofread.

son:	“I don't need you to fix any spelling or grammar. I just need to know if it's right on a technical level.”
me (head):	“That's code for -- 'Dad, you're a functional illiterate, but you're the only person in the family who knows more about cars than I do.'”

The script was well written and nicely organized. He covered the major components in a logical succession, starting with the engine and ending with the brakes. That's when I got to this part:

"The brakes are responsible for converting the kinetic energy of the car into heat energy, so they need to be well ventilated."

Wow! He actually listened when I taught him about conservation of energy. Cool.

My chest swelled with geek-pride.

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.

The GOD Delusion

After a grueling three month long endeavor, I finished reading The GOD Delusion. It is a logical and scientific dissection of religion by Richard Dawkins. An evolutionary biologist and Oxford professor, Dawkins is a champion of Darwinian theory.

The book was both interesting and exhausting to read. I found that I could only read 3 to 5 pages at a time. After just a few pages, my head was swimming with words, scientific facts, and historical events that I was eager to learn more about.

Here are a few things I learned:

• Albert Einstein was an atheist. I never would have guessed that with quotes like "God doesn't roll dice," and "God is subtle but he is not malicious."


• The Bible has tons of hilarious stories. How anyone can take it seriously is beyond my comprehension.


• Moses was one mean genocidal jackass.


• My relationship with my father is paradise compared to what Abraham and Isaac had.


• In 1969, the city of Montréal completely fell apart when the police went on strike.


• Pascal's Wager is great...as long as you pray to the correct god. If you get it wrong, a modern-day Moses might kill you, your wife, your farm animals, and your pets.


• The amazing history of Cargo Cults.


• A Letter To A Christian Nation seems like a much more entertaining book.


• If you're British, the word percent can be written as "per cent" and it's not a typo.

Dawkins has a very wordy writing style. Maybe it's a British thing. For example, on page 170 he writes:

A partisan in the controversy, I must beware of riding off on my pet steed Tangent, far from the main track of this book.

I think he means, "I don't want to talk about this right now."

Update (2007.04.17):
A friend of mine was unsure if I was recommending this book or not. Sorry about that. It's a qualified "yes". Although it was a difficult read, I still feel like it was worth it. The knowledge I gained was more valuable than the effort I exerted reading it.

Purrfect Cook

Sherry is a fantastic cook. This is the only thing she makes that turns my stomach.

Yes, it's edible. I guess real kitty litter is edible too, but I'm sure this dish tastes much better. I know it has melted tootsie rolls, pudding, crumbled cookies, and green food coloring.

The poo slung over the side and the real kitty litter scoop are great features of the presentation.