BillSaysThis

Another reason we did the right thing in Iraq: Abu Abbas was captured. Abbas was a senior leader in the terrorist Palestinean Liberation Front and responsible for the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship during which a 69 year old crippled American man, Leon Klinhoffer, was murdered. Abbas was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences in absentia for that attack and presumbly he will now serve the time. He’s been hiding and working out of Iraq for the last 17 years. Good riddance!

Continuing the story, with the gender changed to confuse everyone:

X is now completely ignoring the HOA rules and doing whatever she likes, including digging up the flowerbeds outside other people’s units and replanting them with what she wants even though what she’s doing is potentially harmful (could bring snails and termites). This has brought in complaints and I thought one way to get her to stop her latest antics would be a personal conversation. I walked over to her home, only a few units away from mine, once or twice a day all week but her car was never there.

I finally went over at a time when X was home. This is very funny. As I was walking up her driveway, her patio gate was open and I could see her standing there working on some potted plants. I called out “X” so she wouldn’t be startled to see me standing there suddenly and instead of acknowledging me, she ran into her house.

I waited but she didn’t come back out. I went around her car and knocked on the door. No answer. Waited a bit and knocked again, still no answer. I walked around the driveway–I decided that just walking through her open gate might be a poor choice–and I could see her living room light on and the patio door open. I called her name a couple more times but she never answered.

Last night was our bi-monthly board meeting. The board decided to take more serious measures to end her bothersome actions.

Just the other day I commented on astrophysicist Paul Davies and his religion-driven attack on this scientific concept. So what do I find today on /. but a link to Scientific American’s current issue cover story, Parallel Universes.

Author Max Tegmark: “One of the many implications of recent cosmological observations is that the concept of parallel universes is no mere metaphor. Space appears to be infinite in size. If so, then somewhere out there, everything that is possible becomes real, no matter how improbable it is. Beyond the range of our telescopes are other regions of space that are identical to ours. Those regions are a type of parallel universe. Scientists can even calculate how distant these universes are, on average.”

Tegmark’s credentials: professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, an expert in analyzing the cosmic microwave background and galaxy clustering, and much of his work bears on the concept of parallel universes. So when you hear someone babbling on about “Intelligent Design”, just say no.

Sex in an MRI machine: do I really need to say more? Warning: no pictures and via MetaFilter.

Today, being Tax Day, reminds me to ask: where is my (pittance of a) refund already? You’d think having next to no income last year but having some large deductible expenses, primarily the mortgage on Casa Lazar, I’d get a decent refund, maybe a couple of thousand dollars. But no, the Feds will only give you back what you actually paid, not more, and then self-employment taxes (from the two months with Pyra) don’t seem to figure in as refundable, cutting my payout further. Isn’t six or seven weeks long enough for them to send me that itty bitty check?

iBeans are coming!

Some people are very fortunate and have close, loving relationships with their families. I’ve been around people who don’t and that simply makes me sad, even if the people involved accept it and don’t let it get them down. I’m really happy that I do have such wonderful people in my family, such a terrific benefit in many different ways. And today my sister Joanne celebrates her birthday and I want to tell her: I love you and I’m grateful to have your love and friendship.

When did Dennis Miller turn into a fullblown Rush and Cheney lover and official stand up comedian of the Republican party? I kept watching his new special tonight, waiting for him to crack up with laughter and explain that his jokes were just, well, a put on and that he’d get on to the real stuff. But. But he never did! I realize the last couple of years have affected some people more than others but this was over the edge. And just not funny.

In A Brief History of the Multiverse, astrophysicist Paul Davies attempts to debunk the Multiverse paradigm on the New York Times OpEd page. Certainly Davies is better educated in these matters than I but his argument seems to boil down to “Gee this is an extemely complex way to explain what we see and therefore must be wrong.” He does point to certain implications of the theory that are certainly difficult to believe.

A little Googling into who Paul Davies is, though, turns his credibility straight upside down. Dr. Davies has spent much of the past 20 years researching and evangelizing the Intelligent Design crapola mascarading as science. Enough so that Wired recently called him The Pope’s Astrophysicist and that he won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1995, only two years after Watergate burglar Charles Colsen got it.

So of course he has a need to show that any new theory in physics has to either be proven wrong or shown as another path to God. Even fellow non-doctorates Penn & Teller were able to debunk Intelligent Design in a recent episode of Bullshit. ID is the current smoke and mirrors conservative Christians use to put a scientific sheen on their completely non-scientific belief in God.

Religion, by definition, is a belief system, one taken on faith in the absence of tangible proof, so the whole idea of formulating a scientific explanation seems weird, like just another marketing ploy. And it doesn’t discredit a truly scientific, if young and not yet mature, theory such as the Multiverse. Sorry Paul.

Honda UK has put up a smashing page for the new Accord, truly taking advantage of Flash, which includes one of the most striking car commercials I’ve ever had the pleasure of viewing, The Cog. A Rube Goldbergian, Euro modern version of dominos falling; I wonder if they used every single part that goes into the car.

When most of us think of the ’60s and the hippies these days, we remember San Francisco’s Summer of Love, the scene in Greenwich Village, or the Mods in London but not too much about the little pockets that surfaced all around the country. Like one that just happened to root for awhile in Stockbridge, Masachuesetts. Ray and Alice Brock, who’d taught some exceptional students at a nearby school, bought Trinity Church there in 1964 and made it into a place where their friends and former students could hang out and explore themselves.

So when Arlo Guthrie, son of famed folksinger Woody, found himself booted from college and at loose ends the next year, he hitched rides and made his way there. Alice also opened her restaurant in town and Arlo recorded a quick ditty for a radio commercial; that later became the chorus of his most famous song:

You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.
You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.
Walk right in it’s around the back.
Just a half a mile from the railroad track.
You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.

But then came the infamous Thanksgiving dinner that ended up causing so much hullabaloo. As depicted in the film, the dozens in attendance had a wild, wonderful time, full of love and happiness, with Vietnam and the world’s other troubles far, far away. Really, the problems were all afterwards, when Arlo and a friend packed up all the garbage they’d made into his VW Microbus and went looking for a place to dump it. Then, thanks to Offier Obie, a blind judge, and a building full of military madmen Guthrie encountered during his draft physical, he was able to turn it all into a classic folk story song, perhaps the greatest of that decade and surely better than any I’ve heard since.

Hollywood, of course, couldn’t resist such an obvious low hanging fruit. They made a deal to have Arlo star as himself, brought in a name director (Arthur Penn), and threw something together fast, clearly made in a haze of sweet smoke. A movie so bad it was almost good but, to be honest, not really. Yet still enjoyable if you can ignore the soap opera subplot and focus on Arlo’s antics and the inserted for the movie scenes with his dying dad. Woody (played by a semi-anonymous actor) lays flat out on a hospital bed and never moves, he’s too far gone with Huntington’s Chorea. James Broderick, Matthew’s dad and the only well-known actor in the cast, plays Ray; his professionalism shows and stands out almost as an oddity in this bunch of amateurs.

The efforts of Arthur Penn, a director generally held in high regard and coming off his Oscar nomination for Bonnie and Clyde, are barely noticeable throughout the film. As Charles Tatum, writing on the eFilmCritic site, says, there are really only two scenes where Penn seems to be actually working sober: the very last shot, of Alice standing in front of the church with a sad look on her face watching Arlo drive off as the camera swings around the yard, the trees occasionally cutting in front of her and Shelley’s funeral, featuring only an extremely young Joni Mitchell standing among the mourners, playing her guitar and singing her Song of the Aging Children.

Here you go, the lyrics and tab. Arlo’s semi-official website used to have the full 30+ minute performance for free download but not any more. I looked through Google but couldn’t find any free sites that have the whole song. Which is too bad because it’s a lot of fun to hear and it really isn’t in the movie.

Worth watching, a semi-authentic look at ’60s hippy life.

tetrapyloctomy!

Here’s an amusing bit of speculation: why not take over Genuity (GENUQ.OB)? Sure, the company’s in bankruptcy and in such bad shape that the homepage doesn’t even load, but the market cap, at today’s closing of eight cents per share (up one!), is only $912,000.

Seriously, this was a once great company called Bolt, Beranek, and Newman which was a key developer of ARPANet. Which we all know was the predecessor to our wonderful and shiny Internet/WWW. The company got swallowed up in a series of acquisitions, though, and only became free again a couple of years ago when GTE and Bell Atlantic were merging to form Verizon; the government, as a condition of approving the deal, required a spinoff.

I became interested at this point because the brokerage firm I use was managing the IPO. My broker knew I’d been interested in hot offerings in those long-ago pre-Crash days and offered me a couple of hundred shares at $11. Why not, how could I do worse than triple my money? Ah, the good old days of greed backed up by money surging in and pumping the market to astronomical places! Of course, GENU, as we called it then, never actually rose above the offering price and quickly headed down. Down. DOWN.

Soon the stock was trading in a $3-4 range. The excitement I felt when it temporarily surged above $5! But it was not to be. Rumors of a spin-in to Verizon vanished in the cruel aftermath of a canceled service contract and the stock slunk lower and lower and Lower and LOWER! Fear not, because the mighty financial wizards have the answer, a reverse stock split. Give in 20 shares and get back one, but this way the stock can remain listed on NASDAQ, the exchange with silly rules about $1 per share minimums and such. Since the price was ten cents on the day of the split, that pushed us all the way back to $2, at least for a day or so. Then the long decline resumed and the stock fell to 40 cents.

Which is when my broker called and asked if I’d like to sell. Plus it was the end of the year, she’s thinking I could use the tax loss. Um, but I didn’t need it, couldn’t use it, and I would have had to pay the brokerage $1 (net) for the transaction fee. I mean, my $2200 investment had fallen to $4! Fallen. FALLEN! Thanks but no thanks, I said. Finally the genius Genuity management realized there was nothing left and they’d better grab the best deal another set of whizzes on Wall street could figure out. So they sold all the assets to Level 3 and declared bankruptcy. Leaving the stock at, as I mentioned, eight cents.

Now, for some reason unknown to me, 224,000 shares traded today. The average daily volume, according to Yahoo! Finance, is 57,000. So something must be up, but what is it? Will someone come along, find some currently unrecognized gem of an asset that will not only pull GENU out of Chapter 11 but into some new financial heaven, not heaven as in afterlife, but as in some place where my $2200 will rematerialize? Sure. Yeah right. HA HA HA HA HA!!!!

What is the measure of a man? That’s the question writer Tony Gayton asks us to consider while watching 2002’s The Salton Sea, a quote he takes from Plutarch: “The measure of a man is the way he bears up under misfortune.” Gayton gives us a single man who’s had to take on a second identity, due to misfortune, and then asks which is the true man.

Director D.J. Caruso takes this script and creates a film that attempts to infuse it with the spirit of the Beat poets of the ’50s. Characters are addicted to methamphetamine, crank or gank, and the movie tries to ride along at the rhythm of a trip that’s gone on and on, extended by snorting another line, then by shooting up, over and over. But he misses out on what any movie requires: a dramatic rope that pulls the audience along, deeper and deeper, until the climactic release.

Val Kilmer plays the central character, born Thomas Van Allen but transformed into Danny Parker a year before the events of the movie when his beloved, adored wife is murdered in front of his eyes by a crew ripping off some meth dealers. A death for which Van Allen must hold himself responsible, since they’re only at this house because he’s lost driving them somewhere unspecified and needs directions, and which he survives only by virtue of having gone to take a piss and therefore not visible to the killers.

He becomes Parker in order to take revenge on the killers. He completely changes himself to be this new identity, covering his body with outrageous tattoos, ear piercings, heavy silver rings and jewelry, sweeping his hair up into a Mohawk, and, most importantly, becoming a tweeker, an addict, to infiltrate the world and create an opportunity to have that revenge.

Caruso opens the movie at the end, Kilmer sitting in a room on fire, playing Van Allen’s trumpet, in a voiceover that asks the audience to decide which persona is real. But sequence is handled poorly throughout with few but random jumps in time. Gaydon and Caruso also insert subplots and characters that only exist to bring this Beatnik existence to the screen since it has little relation to the main story, except to sometimes help Parker advance his agenda.

For all that I’ve focused on the negatives, I do think Salton Sea has its positives too and is a movie worth watching. Kilmer pulls off a difficult role, Vincent D’Onofrio is too much as another dealer named Pooh-Bear, Peter Sarsgaard has a small but well done part as Kilmer’s pal, and the ever-surprising B.D. Wong is, well, too hard to explain without spoiling the ending.

An intriguing, stylish movie

must really be putting the pressure on drivers these days because I see them sprinting from truck to door and door back to truck!

[These are the lyrics to another blues tune, kind of a slow tempo Stones idea]

Turned 12 in ’69, heard Zeppelin and rocked out

Got my t-shirt, tore my jeans

But my brother’d been everywhere ‘fore I was

Had to tell me what everything means

[Chorus]

I got the younger brother blues, Five years behind the times

Yeah, those younger brother blues, Makes me jealous of you everyday

Got those younger brother blues, Watching you sex and drug and rock and roll

Gotta get rid of my younger brother blues, Blow these blues all away

Ain’t no justice’s how it looked to me

So I picked up a Telecaster

Learned how to play some wild chords

My parents screamed, yeah, master disaster

[Chorus]

Made my fingers bleed learnin’ “Stairway”

Smokin’ out made it so much easier

Got some of my boys together, had a jam

You know the girlies made it all so fine

[Chorus]

[Bridge]

I know he gave me everything he could

I know he taught me everything he could

I wanted to tell him that I understood

I wanted to show him, if only I could.

[Chorus]

Then my brother packed up for college

Left me all alone, to shine, for the very first time

No more older brother’s shadow, oh yeah, no

Finally rockin’, finally walkin’ and it’s all mine!

[Chorus]

[Chorus]

[I wrote these lyrics on Valentines Day as a present for The Sweet One]

We met so long ago, seems like yesterday

A little walk in the rain, sunshine everyday

I don’t know what came before you

I’m just glad you’re here to stay!

No shame, baby, in sayin’ I love you,

For all time, cause you’re mine

No shame at all, no no no

Cause you treat me baby oh so fine, yeah

A little confusion in our path, nothin’ enough to dissuade us

Time enough to bring our hearts together

Running hands through each other’s hair

Kissing shamelessly because we care!

No shame, baby, in sayin’ I love you,

For all time, cause you’re mine

No shame at all, no no no

Cause you treat me baby oh so fine, yeah

[bridge]

No doubt that you’ve taken my heart

No doubt that I’ll love you forever

No doubt that we are meant for each other

No doubt that we’ll be together.

No shame, baby, in sayin’ I love you,

For all time, cause you’re mine

No shame at all, no no no

Cause you treat me baby oh so fine, yeah

I love everything about you girl

The way you touch me, the wave in your hair

We can live as one for all time I know

All I need is the way you care

No shame, baby, in sayin’ I love you,

For all time, cause you’re mine

No shame at all, no no no

Cause you treat me baby oh so fine, yeah

Sure there are way too much biased to one side or the other political postings and discussions. But this post–Will we ever know what is real anymore?–about an article in the current issue of Wired–MATRIX²–not only pointed to an excellent article by MeFi’s own digaman (Steve Silberman), it also touched off a terrific discussion. Enjoy

Well shit! Anyone says we’re not getting close to the Singularity doesn’t understand the definition of the term. With pictures and Slashdot discussion.

This will cause riots and or dangerous lunatics to get out guns and use them. And not in a pretty, look at the holes I made in the piece of wood way:

“Jennifer Lopez and her fiancee Ben Affleck are talking about making a new version of the classic film, Casablanca. According to London’s Express, the celebrity couple is considering the roles played by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in the legendary 1942 movie.”

If these two stars are so amazingly arrogant to think that they can make this movie, or some greedy studio exec is able to convince them they can, Lopez and Affleck deserve to have their careers head directly to Straight to Video hell, do not pass go, do not collect $20M per flick. Damn!