BillSaysThis

And the answer is yes. In “The Dell Dude Graduates” (my title) Steven uses slides of himself posing as a moron giving what seems to be the valedictory address. With any luck this graduation means the end of the ad series but somehow I doubt it. Sad how advertising execs come up with something funny and then abuse it into the ground.

Back in 1979, when Apocalypse Now first came out, I saw it and loved it. Francis Ford Coppola made a masterpiece, simple as that. Saw it once straight and once, right in the front row, stoned out of our gourds. The beads of sweat standing out on Martin Sheen’s forehead in the cheap Hanoi hotel room. Robert Duvall walking on the beach without blinking while bullets and mortars whiz past. Laurence Fishburne, incredibly young, dancing on the patrol boat. Cynthia Wood, Colleen Camp, and Linda Carpenter as Playmates engulfed by the horny crowd.

The new version, retitled Apocalypse Now Redux, with an extra 50 minutes edited in started playing on Showtime so we watched it last night. Or tried to but fell asleep. The extra scenes were alright in themselves but they did nothing for the movie. Just stretched out Sheen’s river trip and delayed the riveting encounter with Brando. Why do directors always think longer is better?

Well this is counterproductive since Universities produce so many of the violently disaffected.

Big Networks Afraid

For all you out there that still have your mom, make sure you love her and let her know, no matter what. Not just on Mother’s Day but all the time. Whether you get along with her or not. Tell her!

Mom, I love you!

Harlan’s new novel Gone for Good makes a strong start at number 12 in its first week on the NY Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List.

Friedman: Global Village Idiocy – a new virus, spread through satellite TV and the Internet, gaining momentum every week.

Ugly car – Lexus IS 300 SportCross, a strange way to spend over $30,000.

Would a spy pee himself?

The Washington Times is reporting that the families of 11 dead illegals to sue U.S.. That is, 11 people who died while attempting to illegally enter the United States from Mexico, across the desert in Arizona, and their families are now suing our government. The families claim that a failure to put fresh water stores out in the desert, where tighter controls were forcing the migrants, contribued to their deaths.

I say, so what if it did? Not to be heartless but why is our government financially liable when people from another country choose to violate our laws and are then killed or injured in the attempt? And how did the attorneys come up with the number of $3.75 million per person anyway? In any event, the attorneys are stretching facts to meet their needs–what a shock–so I wonder if this will end us anything more than another publicity stunt to help people who break our laws.

This is a serious pushbutton issue for me, as I’ve written before more than once. This is America, we welcome many immigrants with open arms, but only if you come on our terms.

A Man Who Would Shake Up Science – the new Wolfram book looks like an absolute must read, wonder if it will scale the bestseller lists…

Charleton Heston is Michaelangelo, Rex Harrison is Pope Julius II. Watch them go from fierce antagonists to squabbling brothers while Julius takes up the sword (and some magnificent armor) to fight off the French and German invaders. What is The Agony and the Ecstasy? It is the love of God, the love of something greater than a man and a woman. Or so then sort of hottie Diane Cilento finds out as her lifelong love for the painter goes unrequited.

This film is reasonably typical of the biblical/religious epics of the late ’50s and ’60s. Hell, it starts off with some kind of battle scene where there is no identification of who is fighting, or why, and we barely recognize that Heston is trying to carry a block of marble back to Rome for a Vatican statue. The politics exposed are farcical and bare only the slightest connection to what really happened in those years. Not to mention we are suppose to believe that a warrior pope would take the time to personally oversee a troublesome artist. Still, if you like your films on this kind of old-time larger than life scale, you might enjoy it.

Woody Allen is once again a comic god. Hollywood Ending is funnier than anything he’s made in years. The script is sophisticated, well-plotted but Allen has still found ways to positively stuff the dialog with jokes and use the hysterical blindness for some terrific physical humor as well. Plus he drapes the sets with some incredibly luscious women who are also fine actors–Tea Leoni, Tiffany Thiessen, Debra Messing, and Jodie Markell not counting the unnamed extras.

The interplay between Allen and the Chinese translator (Barney Cheng) is priceless. The translator, a local business student, has no future film interest so he says things that no one concerned with repercussions would. Likewise, the scene where Allen attempts to make up with his estranged punk rock musician son ScumbagX (nee Tony), as he stutters and blusters his way past the green spiked hair, the many piercings, and the rat eating that’s part of ScumbagX’s stage act. Mark Rydell, who’s usually on the other side of the camera as the director (On Golden Pond, The Rose), is a natural playing Woody’s agent.

Highly recommended

Greg Bear has been one of the top science fiction authors of the last two decades, especially since the release of Eon in 1985, and this is shown in part by the fact that he is one of only two authors to win a Nebula Award in every category. Recently his novels have focused on what he terms The New Biology; I missed Darwin’s Radio but clearly I need to get a copy in hand.

Vitals does indeed focus on biology, specifically the intersection of evolution and the incorporation of parasitic intestinal bacteria and the possibility of immortality. Bear gives us antagonistic twins, Hal and Rob Cousins, both top of their game biologists who, we read, might have succeeded in their quest if only they could have put aside their lifelong sparring and shared. Instead they fall into the target sites of a separated Russian husband and wife who have pursued, with seemingly much success, the same avenues for 70 years and who are not interested in johnny-come-lately competition. Instead they send deadly agents who use engineered bacteria as often as conventional weapons.

Bear has not written a Hollywood-style thriller so don’t expect a happy ending. He has written an engaging thriller, with pacing velocity increasing as we move through the second half, and forced me to stay awake into the early morning hours to get to the end. The setting is the present day, the backdrop is believable, the characters real, the ending…unnerving. One of my favorite lines is the next to last sentence:

“History is my brother’s fist smashing into my face forever.”

Highly recommended

Reading Safire in the Times today, I saw a link to “www.edwardjayepstein.com, the Web site of my unfazed Angletonian friend.” An actual live link, which is most unusual for the NY Times, so I clicked through. Epstein’s site, although marked still under heavy construction, has quite a lot of interesting material. The man has been an investigative reporter since (at least) the mid ’60s who focuses often on the Intelligence community.

There is much material on the events of last Sep. 11, information and questions that need answers. A collection of what Epstein terms fictoids, bits of information that have somehow come to be taken for the truth even though there really is none. For example, lie detectors. Everyone “knows” that they are imperfect machines, otherwise the results would be accepted in court, but the reality is that lie detectors measure nothing in a meaningful, scientific sense. “There are still no peer- reviewed test using randomly distributed true and false answers.” Many other topics touched on and whole books by the author are posted. The site is even interactive, with contests, questions, and an Ask Ed feature.

Check it out but set aside a couple of hours for interesting exploration. Lots of material for the warblogging crowd which, except for one brief mention on Instapundit, doesn’t seem to have picked up on him.

Latest Harry Potter Novel Delayed – oh the sadness, the pain, the tears fall all over the world!

The last part of a cold, at least for me, is the weird part where I am woozy for a number of hours and there is no difference if I lie die and watch TV, sit up and read, or walk around. Of course running in tight little circles or pretending to be a figure skater by spinning in place makes the feeling worse.

Steven points out that kids are the same everywhere, protesting US policies in Saudi Arabia wearing American branded clothing or protesting globalization in Washington, D.C. wearing clothes made in Asia. Which is a handy lead-in because I was going to point out the same regarding an equally ridiculous yet completely unsurprising protest at Santa Clara University yesterday that I read about in the still unlinkable SJ Mercury news.

SCU is a private, Jesuit-run school here in the South Bay. The school’s investment policy forbids owning stock in, among other industries, companies that make weapons. One of the South Bay’s larger employers is Lockheed-Martin, one of the largest weapon manufacturers. Lockheed-Martin, which employs many engineers, recently gave the university’s engineering school a $50,000 gift. Students marched yesterday demanding the school return the gift and that it synchronize the investment and donation policies. Which leads to the simple but obvious question: How many of SCU’s engineering graduates go to work for the defense giant each year?

Who has the better arched eyebrow, The Rock or John Belushi? You forgot about Belushi, didn’t you?

Actions speak louder than words and seeing Phil Ringnalda migrate his weblog from Blogger to MoveableType is surely one that speaks loudly. Phil has been the main source of tech support for Blogger users for the past year out of the goodness of his own heart (that is, he volunteered and didn’t even get so much as a link from Blogger head Evan Williams’ own site), he’s written scripts that make a variety of archive formats simple, and he’s never taken enough credit for his work. Phil stepped in because Evan didn’t have the time to do it, we know he’s work hard to keep things working and moving to the next level, but one thinks that there had to be someway to keep Phil happy and in the camp.