Posting will be sparse for the rest of the weekend (like that's unusual) because we're going with our friend Onye to the St. James Court Art Show in Louisville.
This is good news! A new bill, the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, has been introduced by Representatives Rick Boucher, D-Va., and John Doolittle, R-Calif. The propsed law (PDF file) would repeal key sections of the odious 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), allowing consumers to bypass copy-protection schemes for legitimate purposes. According to the CNet story, the bill "represents the boldest counterattack yet on recent expansions of copyright law that have been driven by entertainment industry firms worried about Internet piracy."
ZombieGirls.net is a horror film review site that, as you might guess, is written by a trio of women. It sports reviews and commentary on a wide variety of horror movies--not just zombie flicks--sorted alphabetically and by category. The site sports lots of images, wallpaper, and more. ZombieGirls also hosts detailed sites devoted to such horror topics as the excellent zombie movie The Dead Hate the Living and the PlayStation creepfest Silent Hill.
In what may be the Internet's first attempt at a public suicide, a young Indiana man posted his efforts to kill himself with drugs on a Web discussion board, sparking a flurry of sympathy and taunts before he was located and saved by police.
The teen survived after a Seattle woman reading the discussion board intervened and alerted authorities.
Here's an interesting site that analyzes the images of the future portrayed in a variety of movies. It rates films on the coherence of its vision of the future, how plausible that vision is and how entertaining the film is. Not surpringly, Blade Runner holds the top spot in the combined rankings.
...the killer is wanting to disrupt a familiar place, that means something to him, like a mass murderer. He is spacing his killings like a spree killer, but the killings seem to be without any kind of purpose related either to the victims or the specific locations (except the community as a whole). The victims are chosen opportunistically, like a mass murderer, but are picked off one at a time without harm to others nearby, like a serial killer.
Nevertheless, she offers the following profile of the shooter (she doubts there's more than one):
Here is my guess, some of it based on the statistical probabilities for this type of killer: I think it’s a man, between 25 and 40, most likely over 30, who is white and has military or paramilitary training. He is very intelligent but likely holds a blue-collar or trade kind of job, where he is accustomed to engaging things physically. He is something of a loner, but relatively functional socially – he may be married, or have a girlfriend, but it won’t be a warm relationship. He feels cheated by society in some way – either by a specific thing that triggered his action, or more generally feeling that he hasn’t gotten “his”. I think there has been a triggering event – lost his job, his girl, something. The manner of his killing seems to be designed to send a message. The question is, to whom?
Bill's Content has some harsh words for the critic of a 1978 Chicago Sun-Times project in which reporters and photographers ran a bar and documented a parade of government workers seeking bribes. (This book review has a summary.)
A newspaper's only responsibility is to the reader, not the government or corrupt government workers. Newspapers are supposed to sniff out the truth. Yes, it deceived the scumbag inspectors who would let a firetrap continue to conduct business and put customers at risk. Miner would have preferred things remain the way they were. "The ends do not justify the means." That's the mantra of those who critique, not those who do real journalism. Yeah, some evil people got lied to. Sometimes the ends DO justify the means.
I found something else interesting in the critical article, though, and it's a sad reflection about the statoe of journalism today and the kinds of stories that newspapers might not be doing.
...projects such as the Mirage were enormously expensive and time-consuming, and if they weren't going to stock the trophy case they weren't worth doing. Besides, TV's hidden cameras could spy more spectacularly.
I definitely think that exposing corruption in local government is one of the responsibilities a city's newspaper has to its readers and the town's citizens. Such investigations are indeed time- and resource-intensive, true. But while TV news can show an incriminating incident--with varying degrees of effectiveness--an investigative series can reveal an undeniable pattern of corruption and abuse with an overwhelming volume of information and lead to reform, as the Mirage investigation did. Mr. Dennis makes a strong case that such investigations are ehtical, but given the increasing corporatization of newsrooms, I fear that it's bottom-line concerns, not doubts about ethics, that are the real obstacles to investigative journalism.
As I mentioned in my review of the recent Resident Evil movie, zombie fans were disappointed when horrormeister George Romero's involvement with the project didn't pan out. But you might not know that it wasn't the first time Romero has been involved in a Resident Evil project: he directed a commerical for Japanese TV for the release of sequel Biohazard 2 (known here in the States as Resident Evil 2). Although the commercial was never broadcast Stateside, it is available on the Internet. Although it's only 30 seconds, you can see that Romero still knows how to make a zombie picture work.
Today's wallpaper is inspired not by a movie but by a classic survival horror video game--Biohazard, the Japanese name for Resident Evil. Dr. Freex at The Bad Movie Report calls Resident Evil "the bad movie you play." It creates a wonderfully creepy atmosphere by providing a sure-fire forumla for dread: lots of zombies, and little ammo. Dr. Freex sums it up:
Resident Evil is a fairly standard adventure game: find keys, open doors, solve puzzles, try not to die. It's the desperate gunning down of beasties that make you feel like you're immersed in a George Romero movie, angrily cursing every missed shot, because each bullet is precious. Only a soundtrack by Goblin would have improved the overall feel.
By the way, Capcom's official Resident Evil site has a fairly pointless Shockwave game that lets you try out the various weapons in RE: Code Veronica X at a pop-up zombie target.
Dwight Meredith at the P.L.A. Weblog has one of the best examinations I've seen yet of the Administration's shifting pretexts rationales for the invasion of Iraq. He examines a set of foreign policy goals and notes that two of the principal rationales--cited at various times by members of the Administration--are "regime change" and "disarmament." Meredith reaches this initial conclusion:
The upside of a policy of invasion is, therefore, that it addresses each of the foreign policy goals and provides the surest method of achieving each one.
But wait--he isn't done. He goes further, actually examining some of the potential downsides of an invasion, including the should-be-obvious point that a heretofore deterred Saddam might well unleash what WMD capability he has if he perceives he has nothing to lose. His conclusion:
We favor a policy of disarmament with the enforcement mechanism described above for four reasons:
1) We consider the goals of the destruction of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and the removal of the capability to acquire WMD to be essential and the other goals to be of secondary importance;
2) We consider the risks of a unilateral invasion (including the cost in lives, the possibility of harming the campaign against terrorism, the possibility of creating a new wave of terrorist attacks and the chance of a widening conflagration) to be substantial;
3) We believe that a disarmament policy with an enforcement mechanism will work at least with regard to nuclear technology, and that the inspection regimen will halt any progress towards the development of nuclear weapons technology; and
4) A disarmament policy does not foreclose the option to invade if we are wrong.
This last point is why I favor a more limited Congressional resolution on Iraq. (I haven't looked at the current proposal too closely yet.) Linking military action ot UN approval, for example, would motivate the Bush administration to seek allies; should the French or Russians prove truly recalcitrant, another resolution could always take its place. But carte blance, once issued, is awfully hard to revoke.
New ClearChannel Radio CEO John Hogan says "we’re not ruining radio, we’re reinventing radio." I'm glad he cleared that up. He also mentioned that radio consolidation is "a long, long way from completion," so we can look for more *cough*improvements*cough* in the future, I'm sure.
c00L! Evolution Robotics is selling a kit that'll turn any 500-MHz Pentium III laptop into a spiffy wi-fi robot. What would you do with such a thing, you say? Glad you asked...
ZombieKeeper--"Horror movie reviews from people who watch horror movies"--is an excellent movie review site. Of course it concentrates on horror movies, especially those in the zombie genre. It is a great resource for information on low-budget and shot-on-video zombie flicks. It Best in Horror selection is also pretty solid, IMO.
According to CNN, the world's funniest joke has been selected, and gosh darn if it doesn't resonate this Halloween season:
Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy takes out his phone and calls the emergency services.
He gasps: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says: "Calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: "OK, now what?"
The Bull Moose is calling it quits. This is a sad event, as I've enjoyed The Moose's opinions even when I've disagreed with them. I wish the Moose well in all his moosely activities.
SAN MATEO -- Police came to San Mateo High School Tuesday prepared to deal with a rally of parents protesting the school's backing of a club based on Satanism.
But the officers milling around the school's performing arts center were left with nothing to do.
While the new club called The Satanic Thought Society has received attention nationwide, there's been little brouhaha locally over the group started by two 10th-graders who just wanted to stir up controversy and study an alternative religion.
..."They (club members) say they're not practicing rituals. Not yet," [a parent who organized the abortive protest] said. "When you start choosing to worship darkness, there's something wrong there."
But San Mateo Union High School District superintendent Tom Mohr as well as the club's founders have said it is not about devil worship.
"I wanted to make it clear that these kids are being supervised properly and they have an outstanding adviser," Mohr said.
