This thingy here created a flavor-burst on my me. It makes some suggestions as to why the new kid search engine -- so delightfully spelled Cuil and (back down to earth) so boringly pronounced "Cool" -- failed to set the internets ablaze on its loudly announced launch (seriously, my RSS feeds were inundated overnight by news of Cuil -- how did that happen?). I too have felt that odd sensation when a company spends what seems to be a ridiculous amount of money for my own meagre contribution; the difference was that instead of chanting "I'm worth it", I went around chanting "I'm actually getting away with this!"

The RUMINT on the big who-ha surrounding what Phoenix found is... aliens! An extramartian space-craft, possibly millions of years old--- maybe from Earth...? nah, it's a fossil of a multi-celled lifeform-- no, just single-celled-- nope, it's a footprint! No, it's Spock's brain! It's a pyramid! Well I for one am quite excited.

Testing Java etc on my brand new Debian Lenny / Sid frankenstein OS. Everything looks good so far except -- as usual -- the fonts. Stupid fonts!!!

My average is up! Two weeks ago I was lingering at two for eleven; today I'm at four for fourteen! Ah yes, learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

X-Files: I Want to Believe - I was quite the X-Files aficionado back in the long-long ago, which is certainly why I liked this movie (although it gives me nearly physical pain that they couldn't come up with a better subtitle). Many critics have complained that XF:IWB amounts to little more than an average two-part episode from the original series, and I agree; but it didn't matter. This was like catching up with two old friends and finding they haven't changed much. It was... comfortable. Like an old pair of shoes.

Incredible Hulk - In contrast to the X-Files, I was never much into the Incredible Hulk: I watched the tv series as a kid but remember little of it, rarely read the comic (I was more a DC kid), and find little of interest in it now (the whole thing kind of amounts to one dumb metaphor after all). So I was indifferent to this movie's story, a little annoyed by Tim Roth (who for some reason is entertaining only when Tarantino is telling him what to say), and bored by the special effects. But I did like it whenever the Hulk went ROAR!

Dark Knight - I liked this one a lot, much better than Batman Begins (although some of the problems remain: eg Gotham City looks even more like Chicago, and Batman is still not as smart as he should be, other minor complaints). All the praise heaped upon Heath Ledger is well-deserved: this is the best Joker ever created, possibly the best super-villain ever filmed (if only somebody could do for Lex Luthor what Ledger, Nolan, and Goyer did for the Joker I would be crapping happy). Harvey Dent / Two Face is also extremely well done, and it's almost unfortunate that Aaron Eckhart is overshadowed so much by Ledger; the story of Dent's transformation is told perfectly. Dark Knight does so many little things so well -- the way the music helps set the pacing, the way characters act off-camera to advance the plot -- but best of all, this movie had genuine themes; it was about something other than a dude in a cape with a fast car chasing a psychopath around.

As is typical for my me, I have arranged an August Sabbatical from all forms of professional responsibility (i.e. work). This gives me time to indulge in some of my varied and ridiculous interests including (but not limited to): tobacco (I've found I like a mild cigar in the summer; the other day I actually burned a Macanudo and enjoyed it greatly. In the meantime I've been reacquainting myself with pipe tobacco: Samuel Gawith's Full Virginia Flake has spent a particularly happy time in my new Italian pipe), Doom source ports and custom maps (I've gotten both ZDoom and Doomsday to compile and run in Linux, but the 2.6.25 kernel seems to be causing problems with Doomsday. This leaves me with ZDoom, which is a quality source port but lacks OpenGL rendering under Linux, so it doesn't look nearly as good as Doomsday. Meanwhile, I've been creating custom maps in DoomBuilder (here's a pic of one) running in a Windows XP can (or "guest") in VirtualBox. VirtualBox so far seems as good as VMWare, which is surprisingly good indeed), brewed beverages (lots of iced tea in the summer, but always coffee in the mornings; I'm gearing up to try roasting my own coffee beans soon), Linux distro shopping (I've looked at the latest releases from Mandriva, openSUSE, Gentoo, Linux Mint, Ultimate Ubuntu, and Debian, as well as the newest Ubuntu Intrepid alpha), Science Fiction novels (just done with Walter Miller's classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, and have Joe Scalzi's Old Man's War on deck), Skiffy TV reruns (I've been watching an episode or two of Star Trek: Voyager every day; I wouldn't have picked Voyager as my favorite of the Star Trek revival series but it does happen to be the one I picked to re-watch, so...), ice sculpture (I haven't actually gotten into this yet, but there is something very appealing about investing long hours of effort into chiseling out excruciatingly detailed objects in ice, then sitting back to watch the thing melt into oblivion. Take that, Ozymandias!), Single Malt Scotch (I've been trying to find a Scotch that binds well with my favorite cigars; surprisingly, the Islay malts seem to do better than the Highland or Speysides), and military history (I'm about done with Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and have been hankering for a biography of Napoleon). Happy are the dog days of August!

The Cute Lepers, PartMan PartHorse, Reverend Beat-Man, Teengenerate, The Oatmeal Conspiracy, The Airborne Toxic Event, Meanest Man Contest, The Bodies Obtained, Simian Mobile Disco

People keep asking me, "Dark Lord, how do you like your iced tea, so that we may better serve you?" And I tell them, "The iced tea is fine the way it is. No sugar, no lemon, no gay british cream. Just the tea and the water and a few chunks of ice. Now leave us."

I have become captive to the Beijing 2008 Olympics! I am able to do nothing all day but sit on my couch and watch people olympicate together; I feel so dirty! I find I enjoy the weird backwater sports more than the main events (during the last Winter Olympics I bet I watched twenty hours of curling), the ones they stuff onto the off-channels or http-streams.

• Badminton: Almost a satire of tennis, this one is fun to watch when it gets all intense and the players strain to slam that little shuttlecock around -- SWAT! -- and it responds so disproportionately to the power of the stroke -- like trying to slam a revolving door.
• Women's Weight Lifting: Ye gods, a parade of the ugliest women ever invented, each compelled to step up to an iron bar and grunt while straining to hold it in the air. Eeegh. It's like stumbling upon some bizarre contest of gnomes deep beneath the Misty Mountains.
• Beach Volleyball: The women look better here, no doubt, but I keep thinking what a waste of time and effort it must have been to move all that sand to the venue for such a trivial, marginal sport. I feel certain some Chinese laborer is frowning right now as he anticipates cleaning it all up.
• Equestrian: Similarly, and since I don't have a clue what they're doing here, I'm all about logistics when I watch this: how do they get the horses to the other side of the world? Do they rent a big-ass C-5A to fly them, or do they load them onto a ship (images of snorting horses craned into the air from harbor docks). Why is this a sport? They're cancelling baseball and softball from the next games, but Equestrian will still be around. Seriously, why is this an OLYMPIC sport?
• Women's Shooting: Ah, this is more like it! What's hotter than a woman who knows her way around a rifle? It's like some atavistic mating impulse kicks in when I see this. But air rifle? After the initial hell yeah, this becomes surprisingly boring.

This here makes even me look classy.

This year's Bulwer-Lytton winners have been announced! This is the annual contest where entrants submit terrible opening sentences to fake novels. Every year I read some of these and think I would love to read the entire novels -- and then I think maybe not -- and then I think maybe I already have read some. The Science Fiction winner is my favorite this year partly because I do read a lot of military SF novels that aren't all that different from this:

This is how idiotic our political campaign system has become: today both the geezer and the goofball are going to appear at some mega-church, each to individually answer questions posed by the mega-church mega-pastor, some weirdo. Oboomba will go first while McCrane waits in a soundproof room (can't let him steal any of Oboomba's answers) -- then the two will pass one another on the stage: how ya doin' nice ta meetcha some weather we're havin' -- then it's the other's turn to stand for the Miss America quiz in front of the mega-flock. But noooooo actual debating will take place today, no sir, that would be ridiculous. Sure, both candidates are in the same city on the same stage at the same time, but why should they actually debate one another, what good would that do? (Nothing beats italics for indicating an ironic voice you betcha.) What we all really want to hear is another pair of carefully composed speeches disguised as quiz answers, yes indeed my fellow mega-church-mega-goers, just like a pair of home-town mega-church sermons is what we're all after! Phleghhm!

I was watching me some Olympics over the weekend (head deep into the couch pillows, slack jaw smeared with chocolate frosting) and thought I really found the funny while rooting for the US vs. Croatia in Water Polo (it was mainly the hats, how they all looked like bonnets tied with ribbons to every water bobbing head, and also that one Croatian who could barely fit inside his speedo) but then the trampoline competition came on, and I sort of spaced off into a fuzzy zen of silliness. Ah the trampoline, the silliness! I almost want to find out just how mesmerizing this stuff is under the influence of non-approved substances. It must be extremely debilitating; I can barely get outside now as it is.

My new annoyance is these dudes on message boards or forums or whatever who respond to a simple honest question with something close to: Try Google! Look it up! or the always welcome: Google is your friend! To which I must loudly reply, "Dude, how do you think I got here...?" Dillbottles.

Last night a number of humans played the men's Olympic Beach Volleyball final in China. What a mess! The place was bursting with loud Brazilian volleyball hooligans who crammed into the stands dressed in yellow and green ghillie suits and filled the place with relentless idiotic Olay Olay Olay songs, the babbling morons. Recently it became clear to me that spectators at futball matches sing those awful songs all the time because those matches are so damned boring that the audience must invent some way of entertaining itself. But this Beach Volleyball final was actually pretty exciting (to the extent Beach Volleyball can be exciting), so why all the noise noise noise? I suspect it has something to do with culture. Blech.

Obama Biden
Osama BinLaden...

Luckily they've given us these clues....

If male cats had big manes like their lion cousins?

If all the flowers were a thousand feet tall?

Ah, the end of August always leaves me a little weepy: the places we went! the things we saw! the times we had!.

Tobacco: It turns out I'm less interested in pipes that I expected I would be; but my love for cigars remains strong (bothersome though how that love must insist almost daily upon more expensive concoctions -- ah love!). Somewhere in the many idle hours of August I broke out the IDE and wrote a program to scrape CigarBid.com for current auctions featuring my favorite brands. My cigar of the month is the Graycliff 1666 Pirate.

Doom: I made some Doom 2 maps with Doom Builder and ran them on Doomsday and ZDoom, and there was great rejoicing, and a great pile of Imp corpses. I do not believe I will ever tire of this game. The problems with Doomsday were unrelated to the Linux 2.6.25 kernel; I still have not solved the issue.

Brewed Beverages: There was copious consumption of iced tea and coffee. The tea was mainly Lipton Orange Pekoe, available in most food stores. The coffee was a rotation of Starbucks Africa Kitamu (less burnt and more flavorful than most of Starbucks' "bold" coffees), Illy Espresso, and Kona from Maui Coffee Co.. I have not yet fulfilled my ambition to roast my own coffee beans.

Linux: I am back to Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) after failing to perfect the font rendering in Debian. Sigh.

Science Fiction novels: I read John Scalzi's Old Man's War and its sequel The Ghost Brigades (they were both fun light reads that suffered from poor detail (I still don't know what any of the aliens were supposed to look like, but maybe he wanted to leave that up to the reader's imagination?) and some illogical character behavior, but I can recommend them to fans of the Starship Troopers SF sub-genre (although I'd sooner recommend Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empires Fall trilogy).

Skiffy TV reruns: Unfortunately the Olympics and the DNC convention put a crimp on my plan for an episode of Skiffy TV every day. Perhaps next August.

Ice Sculpture: I wasn't really going to do this.

Single Malt Scotch: I like Laphroaig with a cigar (especially an Indonesian wrapper, the flavor of which I still don't fully comprehend alas), or the old reliable Macallan with just about anything that can't be used for breakfast.

Military History: I didn't get to the bio of Napoleon, but dug into John Keegan's Second World War instead. This book is one of those big-ass floppy things that never quite feels comfortable in the hands. Hopefully there will be a Kindle version eventually. Hopefully I'll get me a Kindle eventually.

All in all, quite satisfying. Happy were the days of August! Now back to work....

The two major candidates for King of America took rather different approaches in selecting their running mates: Oboomba the Goofy asked his bosses who to pick, they called up the Senate, and the Senate sent down one of its gibbering gargoyles. McCain the Wrinkly meanwhile opened up the phone book to a random page, ran his finger down one of the columns, and landed on a Janeway. (Palin reminds me of Capt. Janeway: she's confident, somewhat older but not unattractive, and knows how to shoot a rifle. Chicks with guns, I'm telling you, I'm starting to turn Republican here...) The differences between the two selections are obvious, but the main one is neither gender nor political affiliation -- it's hair style. Indeed!