BillSaysThis

Newts, toads and zebrafish do it, are humans next?

My brain is asymmetrical, is yours?

New source of electricity: water pushed through tiny holes.

Props on the redesign to TrekWeb!

My, what a shock: the Bushinistas aren’t bothering to crack down on tax cheats, especially corporate offenders and very wealthy individuals (who just happen to be the biggest donors to Bush and Republicans in general).

+1 insightful: a MetaFilterian named ed goes deep on a very real shortcoming of recent Star Trek series inside a fanfic thread.

Voyager fans with imagination only: Janeway and Seven

Congratulations to my new brother-in-law, Chris Brandenburg, on marrying into Vivian’s family via her sister-in-law Vina. The bride was beautiful, the groom was handsome and the party was above average. I took a few photos and my only complaint is that her family lives far enough away that we don’t see them often enough–that and a few of the more overused, cliched songs (*cough* Always and Forever *cough*) the otherwise decent DJ used. Have a great honeymoon in Hawaii!

“It was a rural arsenal fit for war.” Michigan police arrested a man who had a machine gun mounted in his SUV and thousands of rounds of ammunition plus many weapons in a bunker on his property. The MetaFilter discussion gets sidetracked in a bit of a morass but does the raise the important question of why the government is not really dealing with radical domestic groups. After all, these people have no need to cross a national border to unleash violence and destruction.

Our thoughts are with AnitaR as she recovers from a hysterectomy forced by ovarian cancer–the strong survive and though I’ve only known her through her writings, the feeling here is that Anita is more than strong enough to beat this. Go Girl! Remember the power of laughter!

How else do you explain legislation that benefits foreign companies at the expense of Americans but have the legislation appear otherwise?

Yes, FT is back, six full panels this week!

Happy 44th to the Dangerous Man himself, Garret (formerly lowercase) Vreeland!

Now, the bilious tone of the previous entry not withstanding, I’ve generally been fortunate enough to have quite good, and humane, managers. For the most part, that rant didn’t come from personal experience but just the absurdity of the whole celebrate your boss idea. I realize that greeting card and small gift companies just love coming up with new holidays with which to extract more and more money from our wallets but this one is simply pathetic.

Don’t forget to be especially nice to the person who torments you all year long. A card would be particularly nice if you can find one that has the correct sentiment, perhaps something along the lines of “Who the fuck do you think you are, you mean-spirited, uncouth bastard [or bitch, if your boss is female]? Don’t you understand I have a family and things to do that aren’t connected to your quarterly and annual plans? You would if you had a heart instead of that coal-stoked furnace in your chest!”

Want to stand up to the influence of the NRA? Join the NRA Blacklist today!

How sad is the state of journalism today that major publications feel the need to ‘out’ the guy who messed up at last night’s Cubs-Marlins game by interfering with a a fly ball? Okay, the guy was foolish to do this but does that mean he deserves to be subject to national ridicule? Surely having total strangers refer to him as that idiot or that moron, or similar but less family-oriented, is sufficient. I wonder if one of the late night TV idiots (yes you, Leno) will be grubby enough to use the guy’s name. From the reports I saw the man is otherwise intelligent and good-natured and doesn’t deserve the infamy. Fucking pandering journalists.

How big are your lipoproteins?

It’s Mozilla Release Day with three major projects going gold(-ish) and other services and projects announced. Though I cannot tell you why, this site looks strange viewed in Firebird, unless today’s release fixed something. I hope.

Go Taikonauts! Humanity needs to be in space.

Palestinians blow up Americans who are there to help them, crowd cheers. The Americans were in the Gaza Strip to set up Palestinian professors with academic scholarships.

Update, 30 minutes later: Installed Firebird 0.7 but there is no change in the way this site’s pages are displayed (badly). There must be something in my CSS which Firebird is unhappy with since the problem doesn’t happen in Mozilla, Internet Explorer or Opera. Uggh.

I’m watching Cheap Trick (and Fountains of Wayne) on a VH1 concert show just now. While seeing some younger people–teenagers–in the audience bopping to the tunes, I realized that I actually saw Cheap Trick in concert before these kids were born. 25 fucking years ago! That was a great concert, a double bill in Providence, RI, with Richie Blackmore’s Rainbow (Dio was a great heavy metal singer, no doubt, and Blackmore just rocks), but it was 25 YEARS AGO DAMMIT! Seriously, this is making me feel old and the lower back pain is not helping. And yes, Rick Nielson did bring out one of those four or five necked monstrous guitars to play Surrender.

Two words: Campaign Cash

Another study: Low-carb diet works – of course it does. If only more researchers would actually do validated studies, we might get past the AMA-elitist attitudes that are holding back more people from using this strategy to get healthy.

Some new products I expect to sample in the coming days: Soy Slender, sugar free Soy milk that comes in vanilla and chocolate, is low carb and sweetened with Sucralose. Chef’s Choice Lo-Carb Bowls are a line of prepared meals that leave out the portion of starch (rice, pasta or potato) that ruin the typical frozen meals for Atkins adherents.

Rod Stewart’s old tune The First Cut is the Deepest ran through my mind when I took a break in the middle of watching The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest this morning, which shows how odd our minds work since I don’t think I’ve heard the song since it was a minor hit back in the late ’70s. But it does sort of fit in with the movie, so fair enough.

The First $20 Million is based on a hilarious novel by Po Bronson, has a pretty decent director in Mick Jackson (Steve Martin’s LA Story and the original, BBC TV version of Traffic), and a good screenwriter in Jon Favreau (Swingers). So why the film never got a theatrical release and went direct to DVD/cable is something I don’t understand, though perhaps Norm Schrager’s review on FilmCritic.com is a clue to studio executive thinking on the matter.

Schrage doesn’t seem to have read the book and, while reading his review, I thought that was possibly a problem for him. But films have to stand on their own and by the time this one came out, the boom Dot Com times it depicts had ended, probably souring the tastes of most for a humorous look at the good times. I seem to have an odd ability to ignore such things.

So I laughed quite heartily at the adventures of Andy Casper and cohorts. I thought Favreau and Jackson did a good job of picking the right 100 minutes from the novel on which to focus the film. The meat of the story is an adventure in creating a small company in a garage and they wisely ran quickly through the lead up to get us there. Good comedies usually benefit from a non-comic subplot that provides breaks in the storyline and, while it was done better in the novel, the romance is a good layoff and also contributes to the denouement.

Adam Garcia really does the lead character of Andy Casper–I know a bunch of guys who wish they were just like him from tech company marketing departments, trust me. The other three PC99 team members are a bit more stereotyped, though Jake Busey actually is just right for his demented engineer role as opposed to usually just being a jerk. Rosario Dawson is sweet as the sculptor and Garcia’s love interest while Chandra West (familiar from NYPD Blue where she’s Mark Paul Gosselar’s current love interest Dr. Devlin) is the beautiful bitch with a terrific blow off line about her tits.

Recommended

Nextel TV commercials, sucking the life out 30 seconds at a time.

Difficult to imagine a movie that’s more of a contrast to the afternoon’s fare than writer/director Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, a highly stylized marital melodrama set in 1957. Julieanne Moore, Oscar-nominated for her performance, plays the wife in an odd triangle with husband Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert (yes, 24’s President).

Haynes, an idiosyncratic Art House filmmaker, takes all the elements of a classic ’50 melodrama–an IMDB reviewer suggests Douglas Sirk and his Magnificent Obsession as the model–and pours in plot elements that could never have been used in that time: homosexuality and interracial romance. The dialog, the sets and clothing, the imagery and coloring are used to emulate a bygone era in a way that simple historical films don’t even attempt to match; if anything, most filmmakers consciously avoid this and aim a modern eye at the past.

Moore, blonde wig and perfect flowing dresses, is the image of a ’50s high society wife, so much so that the local newspaper’s society writer and photographer show up at her home in the opening act to document home and lifestyle. The article, by noting her “kindness to negroes,” provides the opening notes of that plot conflict; eventually, her friendship with Haysbert becomes the primary gossip in their town. Quaid’s journey of self-discovery begins in the opening scene after he’s arrested for DUI but his self-described sickness does not have the same devestating impact. Possibly this is because Haynes is homosexual and not black but I suppose his desire to contrast private and public shame required one or the other to be treated as he did.

Recommended

From the desk of the Big E: the Periodic Table Table, winner of the 2002 IgNoble Prize. Very cool and nerdy, from a co-founder of Wolfram Research and PopSci columnist.