Monthly Archives: March 2014

What’s your favorite End-of-the-World movie?

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REM disc art.
“It’s the end of the world as we know it… and I feel fine!
I finally watched Iron Sky, which is a very silly movie about a secret colony of Nazis hidden on the dark side of the moon, that has been plotting the “liberation” of earth for 70-some years. It’s got some nice, diesel-punk (that’s like steampunk, except moved forward about 40 years) sets and devices. It has some nice homages to a couple of movies (Dr. Strangelove, Downfall, just to name two) without beating you over the head with it. It was fun.

I especially liked the song that played over the end credits, “Under the Iron Sky”—not just because its chorus line, “We will meet again, under the Iron Sky,” was a nice nod to Kubrick’s choice to play “We’ll Meet Again,” over the end credits of Dr. Strangelove. While I was checking to see if the song was available to buy online (it is, along with an entire album of music inspired by the movie released by the Finnish band, Kaiti Kink Ensemble), I got thinking about other end-of-the-world movies and why I like them.

I wound up polling my twitter followers for more suggestions of end-of-the-world movies. That spawned a side conversation about the difference between a post-apocalyptic story versus a story about an apocalypse. For me, not all post-apocalyptic stories are end-of-the-world stories. And though I’ve been thinking about it for a whole week, I still haven’t been able to clearly articulate why I think of Mad Max as an end-of-the-world story, but Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome are post-apocalyptic but not end-of-the-world in my head.

However, since I polled my twitter followers, I’m going to poll you! Note that you can choose Other and type in the name of your favorite if it isn’t listed.

Also, please feel free to add a comment with your own thoughts on the subject. I want to post a follow-up on the subject. Maybe by then I’ll have a better idea of how to explain my definition of end-of-the-world movie!

Friday Links! (Captain America, dark matter, and fake bestsellers)

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Yay!
Yay!
It’s the first Friday of March. It’s March already? Wow! Here’s a collection of news and other things that struck me as worthy of being shared:

The Shamelessness of Professor Mark Regnerus. Designed his study intent on proving that gay parents are bad. When he couldn’t find the proof, he waved his hands and said his study proved it, anyway.

Religious right’s new panic: How can we practice religion if we can’t discriminate?.

Genetic and environmental evidence indicates that after the ancestors of Native Americans left Asia, they spent 10,000 years in shrubby lowlands on a broad land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska.

Virginia Legislature Unanimously Repeals Unconstitutional Oral Sex Ban.

Senate Rejects Blocking Military Commanders From Sex Assault Cases.

Unreal sales for Driscoll’s Real Marriage. Megachurch spent $210,000 to put pastor’s book on bestseller list. How many homeless people or poor children could have been helped with that money?

The Signed Contract That Helped Get Mark Driscoll’s Real Marriage on the New York Times Best Seller List. It details the methods of how the copies would be ordered, how fake gift messages are generated on the Amazon orders, many payment types used to disguise the bundled sales…

If only GnuTLS had been open source! Wait..

If the moon were only 1 pixel. A fun, interactive toy. Go try it. Scroll. Click on things. It’s pretty awesome!

It’s “Embarrassing That The United States Has To Thumb Rides From The Russians”.

Dark matter looks more and more likely after new gamma-ray analysis.

Why Can’t Hollywood Get Computers Right?.

The Captain America sequel is looking very good:

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The song is beautiful, and just released on iTunes. I’d heard the audio and liked the song before I saw the video, which is quite a downer:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Steve Grand does wistful well:

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This year’s entry for Eurovision from Lithuania is a fun number:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Though Finland’s entry is a bit more my thing:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

If the Captain America trailer above isn’t enough for you, here’s a longer scene:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Why I hate hay fever reason #5867

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Cat needs to sneeze meme.
I hate that feeling!
I had a very different post queued up for today. But between the high pollen count all week, a deluge last night, and an inexplicable heat wave inside our house, things have been weird here.

Late Wednesday afternoon at the office I was looking out the window wistfully at the rain. I’d been out earlier in the day (a small group of us walked to a nearby restaurant to have lunch with a former co-worker). It had been really pleasant. No rain, overcast enough that I didn’t need sunglasses, and not cold or breezy. The rain that was coming down later just looked nice. Yes, I like the rain, so sue me.

Continue reading Why I hate hay fever reason #5867 →

Contemplating one’s transgressions.

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Traditionally, Ash Wednesday is a day to contemplate one’s transgressions as the beginning of the 40-day observance of Lent. Except, of course, I was raised Southern Baptist, where rituals like a priest smearing ashes on one’s forehead are frowned upon. On the other hand, I’m taoist, now, and taoism is always open to the any traditions we find useful. Therefore, Ash Wednesday is a good day to post my monthly check-in on my goals/resolutions for the year!

When I set my goals for the year, I tried to set very concrete steps for achieving them. I tried to model the tasks on the notion how one trains a pet: if a dog shows a penchant for chewing up shoes, it isn’t enough to scold the dog and try to keep the shoes out of reach; you must give the dog an acceptable chew toy. In other words, replace a bad habit with a better one.

Goal: Reduce the outrage.

Step: Listen to the Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me podcast once a week, limit the amount of time I read news during work breaks.

Progress: I keep getting interrupted while listening to Wait! Wait!…, but I am still spending less time reading serious/upsetting news throughout the day.

Goal: Write more regularly.

Step: Spend the reclaimed break time writing. Find other ways to motivate myself to write rather than twiddle the keys.

Progress: I’m still only doing so-so with this. I still spend more time typing potential posts than working on my fiction, for instance.

Goal: See friends for fun more, as opposed to all of my social interactions being driven by various projects.

Step: I still haven’t thought of a good concrete step for that.

Progress: We were sick slightly less often during February. I did make it to a friend’s birthday get together in the middle of the month, but we’ve missed other social events we’d planned to go to because one or the other of us was sick.

We have failed to get the weekly get-together going again. Illness takes a lot of blame for that. There’s at least one vicious circle of related difficulty. If people are coming over, we need to clean up the house. If we’ve both been so rundown or tired after workdays that we don’t do minimal cleanup, there is so much to do before people come over (and just to be clear, here, since folks are always saying, “Oh, we’ll understand a little mess!” it isn’t just dealing with clutter. It had gotten a lot worse than clutter.), that trying to do it in just a few evenings after work left us both so exhausted, we needed to sleep through the period that friends would have been here.

Goal: Paint, draw, and make music.

Step: I was counting on the monthly Drink ‘n’ Draw gathers to help with this.

Progress: We were actually well enough that we could have attended, if half the region hadn’t gotten snowed in that day.

March Fourth!

life,

http://icanhas.cheezburger.com
Since cats are notoriously hard to herd, what makes you think they can march?
I’ve written before about an acquaintance in college who was shocked that I’d never heard the pun about this day: March Forth! It’s a date and a command! Turns out some party poopers people have adopted March Fourth as a day to set goals to help you realize your dreams, and promise a bunch of people to get back together next March Fourth to check in. Hello? Have these people never heard about New Year’s Resolutions? We don’t need to do it twice a year. Really.

Much more amusing, there’s a musical group out there called the MarchFourth Marching Band (slogan: “A date. A command. A band!”) that appears to be a lot of fun.

However, last year, because of an article I read just before March 4 about homeless veterans, I decided to start my own March Forth tradition. So, I urge you all on this March Forth, to go please donate to The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

March forth, and spread the word.

Thank you.

Confessions of an absent-minded whatchamacallit

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What?
What?
I lose my keys, all the time.

Not just my keys. I regularly misplace my wallet, my phone, my glasses, my hat… Almost every time I prepare to leave the house, I spend a few minutes trying to figure out where something that I need to take with me is. Several times every week my poor, long-suffering husband has to help me figure out where I left something.

And I hate it!

I have tried to fix this for pretty much my entire life. My mom used to tell the story of the day she found me wandering the house in tears, looking under papers, inside drawers, under the furniture, and so on, because I couldn’t find my glasses. I was seven or eight years old at the time. I told her I had looked everywhere. I was angry at myself for misplacing the glasses. I was afraid of what punishment my dad might mete out if they were broken or lost permanently. I was nearly hysterical. Continue reading Confessions of an absent-minded whatchamacallit →

Confessions of a white homo devil

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Church sign in Harlem, Sun Feb 23
This is an actual church sign, not a Photoshop job.
The pastor of a church in Harlem put up a warning on his church sign last weekend, “Obama Has Released The Homo Demons On The Black Man. Look Out Black Woman. A White Homo May Take Your Man.” Some of the church’s neighbors aren’t terribly happy with the sign. And more than a few people have asked what Obama has to do with homosexuality. Of course, the same pastor caused some controversy in his neighborhood a few years ago with a series of anti-Obama signs, so we shouldn’t really be surprised.

As a 53-year-old white homo who has lived in liberal city for nearly thirty years, I will confess that I’ve dated a couple of black men. Neither of them were married to women, black or otherwise. And, thinking back on it, both of them pursued me, not the other way around. Of course, I dated the one guy in the late 80s, and the other in the early 90s, back when Reagan and the elder Bush were still in office… Continue reading Confessions of a white homo devil →