[Vinnie] Jones, who achieved widespread fame in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels … reckons that he could have an entire aeroplane’s cabin crew bumped off for a mere £3000.  This was his claim, somewhere between Tokyo and Heathrow, sometime last May, when a member of said cabin crew attempted to remonstrate with him for slapping a fellow passenger in the face, 10 times.  And this was not a shonky, under-manned CheapyJet Air Van.  This was a Virgin Atlantic A340-600, the longest commercial aeroplane in the world, with an on-board staff of 19. That’s less than £158 each.  Cheap for a stewardess, and a downright bargain for the pilot.

                    – Hugo Rifkind, “Keeping up with the Joneses”, The Herald, 15 December 2003.

Female inmates are forced to work on a chain gang, wearing bags of rocks on their backs, if they want three meals a day.  They work digging graves and burying people: homeless, elderly, infants.  One woman had to bury her own baby.  The draconian sheriff, a self-styled Old West hero, has instituted cost-cutting measures.  Slashing inmates’ caloric intakes.  Housing them outside in tents in 125°F (52°C) weather.  Feeding them ruined batches of processed food.  And all this for mass murder?  Serial child molestation?  Genocide?  No.  Petty theft, substance abuse problems, and prostitution.

What third-world country am I talking about?  Phoenix, Arizona.

I startled myself by getting 7 out of 10 correct on The Guardian’s How much do you know about the Commonwealth? quiz, garnering a score of “impressive”.

Russia has pulled out of Kyoto talks.

Thanks, George.

In the game Magic: The Gathering, there are different types of play, which can be simplified to “you can use (almost) any of the cards you own” vs. “you can use only the cards that have been recently released.”  These are called Type I and Type II, respectively.  (Yes, I’m simplifying things a bit.)  Wizards of the Coast now appears to have completely stopped supporting Type I.  It would be easy to see this as a money-grab scheme, and I have certainly thought of it as such before, but when one really, truly thinks about it, one sees that it’s the game’s great leveler.  A short illustration of what would happen if you set out to construct decks by purchasing cards on eBay, before considering shipping charges:

The cost to assemble, today, using the cheapest editions of cards possible, the Type I deck used by former world champion Olle Rade to defeat me in 1997: $2,435.23.

The cost to assemble my non-tournament-worthy-but-lots-of-fun-to-play Type I deck: $571.49.

The cost to assemble the deck used to win the 2003 U.S. Type II Nationals: $71.89.

That being said, I still only play Type I.  Why?  Because I love the richness of the environment, giving you thousands of cards to choose from rather than hundreds.  Also, I’ve spent a lot of years and a lot of money building up my collection, and it’s a terrible shame to see it all just sit in a closet.

Composer Michael Kamen has died.

Trader Joe’s has a Saint-Vivant armagnac in an attractive crooked bottle for $21.99 right now.  I’m no armagnac expert, but this is absolutely delicious stuff.

According to Alex Kraaijeveld on MALTS-L, Tullibardine is set to reopen at the end of this month (click to find Tullibardine bottles.)

I lost my favorite scotch glass in the move this past January.  It’s not really a scotch glass.  Not designed to be, anyway.  It’s a wine tasting glass from Andrew Murray Vineyards in Santa Barbara County, California, the one that they give you as a souvenir when you pay to taste their wines.  It’s copita-shaped, much like the Riedel port glass, but with a slightly shorter, not as bulbous bowl, shorter stem, and narrower base (the big disc of the base is the ugliest thing — the only ugly thing — about the Riedel port glass.)  I know we have it somewhere, in some box I haven’t yet found.  It’s probably hiding with the two Riedel port glasses I’m still missing.

Much sadness abounds.

Scottish salmon, having a particularly hard time climbing a certain waterfall in Perthshire, were given a helping hand by conservationists: they were driven upstream in a van.

The most to-the-point article thus far on the row over Cardhu.  It’s unbelievable that Diageo are still sticking to their guns in the face of such immense industry opposition.

For my family members (who have graciously not been nagging), more baby pictures.

Terrance Cottrell was an autistic 8-year-old boy.  His mother was a member of a storefront fringe Christian church called Faith Temple Church of the Apostolic Faith.  Believing the boy to be possessed by evil spirits, the pastor of the church crushed the boy to death during an exorcism service while his mother held his legs down.  While the death was ruled a homicide, the pastor was only charged with (and convicted of) felony child abuse rather than murder, a decision made because the pastor believed he was helping the boy.

Let’s hope the producers of the “Girls Gone Wild” series
go to jail this time.

Used to spam messages claiming “A special offer just for you,” I was vaguely amused by the subject of a message trapped by my filter, namely “We are sending this hot recommendation to millions“.  At last they had the decency to come right out and admit it.

It’s bad enough that I have to be spammed constantly with offers of pharmaceuticals.  The least they could do would be to figure how to spell “prescription”.

I saw Kill Bill: Vol. 1 today.  I loved it.  Adored it.  A phenomenal film.  I gave it ten stars at IMDB.  I’ve only done this a couple of times before.  Schindler’s List.  The director’s cut of Das Boot.  You get the idea.

You can learn all sorts of interesting information from the IMDB page.  (Including that Chiaki Kuriyama is not really seventeen.  She’s legal.  Even when the film was made.  Barely.  Helps assuage some guilt feelings.  What a difference a year makes.  Anyway.^*)  The trivia page is especially fun, and while it doesn’t actually tell you the name, it tells you where and how The Bride’s name can be found in the film.  (Lazy?  Do a Google search.  Or look here.)

But the most interesting thing comes on the goofs page.  Under “Incorrectly regarded as goofs”, we find the following:

The many continuity lapses and other apparent technical errors are a matter of deliberate stylistic choice in this pastiche of 1970s “B” action movies.

Which is groovy and everything.  Really.  But isn’t it just a bit too convenient?  I mean, don’t you think every film director would like to have this notation in his or her film’s goofs page?  Or just shorten it to “The mistakes are intentional, deal with it?”  The Big Stuff: I’m with you on that.  Nobody bleeding on the snow, for instance, even when sporting massive gaping wounds.  But the tiny stuff, like the mascara smudge under Go Go’s left eye disappearing during the fight scene.  Are Tarantino worshippers really going to tell me that the makeup artist went in and painted a smudge just so we can have a continuity lapse to marvel at?

One thing especially unusual about this film is how quickly time seemed to pass.  The movie was scheduled to start at 2:30, but I had forgotten to reset my watch for the return to PST.  So as the previews started, I reset my watch from 3:30 to 2:30.  Then, at a certain point in the film I glanced down at my watch to gauge where we were, and it read 4:30.  But by this point I had forgotten I had fixed my watch (following this still?)  So I thought, “Oh good, there’s an hour left.”  Then the film cut to credits.  No idea what happened to that extra hour.

If you haven’t seen this film, have a strong stomach when it comes to amputations, and trust my opinions at all: go see it.  It’s fantastic.

(Note added 29 October 2003: “To my credit,” I told my wife, “I think I was supposed to find her sexy, and I think I was supposed to be uncomfortable about it.”  “I’m sure,” she responded.  “Ninety percent of a Tarantino film is making the viewer feel uncomfortable.”)

According to Oregon Peaceworks, the following signs were seen at various war protests:

1. Don’t blame me, I voted with the majority
2. Don’t do it, George, Dad will still love you
3. The last time we listened to a Bush, we wandered in the desert for 40 years

I found these on my own, screwing around, but it seems other people have found them too:
tinyurl.com/dick takes you to the White House homepage of Dick Cheney, and tinyurl.com/cunt takes you to the page of his wife.  (Yes, it’s somewhat embarrassing that I found these.)

My Google search, run after I had found these sure-to-be Easter eggs, found Evan Hunt’s blog, where he points out these as well as three more that are probably just accidents: tinyurl.com/lazy takes you to an Amazon page for the book How To Make Money In Stocks, tinyurl.com/dork takes you to a job posting for a Quality Assurance Engineer, and tinyurl.com/head takes you to a picture of bright red hair.  And while nowhere good as most of these, tinyurl.com/acts takes you to a news story entitled “U.S. moves for single Iraq resolution”.

Can you find any more?  Before you try it, ‘fuck’ is empty.

I watched a movie on Mystery Science Theater 3000 the other day: 1993′s Quest of the Delta Knights (see a preview here, if you don’t mind every important plot element being revealed.)  It’s currently rated 1.8 out of 10 at IMDB: when it gets 200 more votes it will, if the score stays the same, qualify for their list of Bottom 100 Films, and will come in somewhere between position 7 and 10.  A score of 1.8 will tie it with Hobgoblins, and will leave it just slightly higher than Gigli and Manos.

Thing is, I liked it.  Not “It’s so bad it’s good.”  Not “It was an unintentional comedy that had me cracking up.”  Not “It’s great for the cheese factor alone.”  I liked it.  It was just fine for what it was, an ultra low-budget adventure story filmed with various Renn Faires as backdrops.  It starred Emmy-winner David Warner and Golden Globe-winner Olivia Hussey, and they and the young Corbin Allred gave perfectly respectable performances.  I’ve saved the episode on the TiVo, as I intend to subject someone to it to gauge another viewer’s reaction.  I just don’t think it’s that bad.  Anyone else willing to fess up to liking this movie?

One of the bits of fluff TV I like to watch is the BBC’s program Cash in the Attic.  If you’ve never seen it, the concept is simple.  A couple or family will want to raise some money for a particular project, so they call in an expert appraiser and a bubbly, good-looking host to rummage through their oldest and dearest possessions in cellar, closet, lounge, and the namesake attic, and quote a ballpark value for them.  Then two weeks later said possessions are shipped off to auction where the host, expert, and participants watch with glee (or horror) as strangers battle (or not) to acquire these goods.  The producers then append a 30 second segment on what the family has done with the money.

Sometimes the goal is admirable, like the woman who wanted to go back to see her friends in the Canadian Arctic town she left 40 years ago.  Sometimes the goal is monumentally silly, like the parents who sold all their antique family silver, which could have been divided into several tidy lots, to purchase one phenomenally ugly modern painting that, I suppose, their three children will get to slice into thirds at some point in the future.

What is most breathtaking about the show, however, is when the expert (such as the wizardly Jonty Hearndon) will spot a piece of pottery from across the room and will instantly know what it is, how many of it were made, who made it (and when), and what it’s worth.  It just doesn’t seem possible.

But then I found myself doing something similar, albeit on a smaller scale, the other day.  I was watching another of my BBC shows, MI-5.  In the background of one of the scenes, out of focus, were three bottles.  I expect most people wouldn’t have even noticed them.  “Oh,” I thought, “That’s two Glenfiddich bottles — from the coloring I think the 12 and the 18 — and a Balvenie.”  Then I immediately wondered if William Grant & Sons had paid for the placement, as the two distilleries are owned by the same company.  (Note added 25 October 2003: I think they were paid placements.  A different episode of the show featured the same three bottles in the background of a different location.)  Yes, there are far, far fewer scotch whiskies than types of pottery.  But it’s still kind of cool pattern recognition.  How about you: do you surprise yourself with bits of instant recognition?

All three Sic! entries from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words column this week are priceless.  The first had me cracking up when it arrived in my inbox at work:

From Jonathan Spencer: “Your piece on Murphy’s Law reminded this
transplanted Brit living in New York of being temporarily taken
aback by the sign on a local highway after the median had been
returfed. KEEP OFF SOD, it said”.

This note in the Daily Telegraph’s television guide last Wednesday
was presumably the result of a unconscious mental association and
not an ill-judged attempt at a joke: “With the Pope’s health fast
failing, critics argue that this is not the time for the BBC to
pontificate”.

Dermod Quirke mentioned a letter from Professor Yiannis Gabriel,
which appeared in the Guardian on 24 September (see the Web page

http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1048372,00.html):

“Why should childless parents pay taxes to fund schools?”

What, exactly, do you think research of this patent entailed?

Artificial limbs controlled by mind power: “Brain implants that could allow severely disabled people to control prosthetic limbs with their minds could be ready for use within two years, according to a team of scientists.  Their claim comes after tests with monkeys showed that the animals could control a robotic arm using just their thoughts.”

If you’re thinking of being clever and adding a few drops of essential oil to ink to make scented ink, don’t.  It doesn’t work.  And if your next question is whether I ruined $13 worth of ink with this experiment, the answer is yes.

This is a joyous post.  On Friday, 03 October 2003, our son was born.

Named Niall Henry David McGee, he came into the world with a minimum of fuss in a quick and easy delivery after only ten hours of labor.  He was an alert, curious, quiet, 7 pound 6.4 ounce baby boy.  His favorite activities at present are sucking and farting, and to his credit he is quite good at both.

On Sunday they let us go home.  We were home for ten hours before we found he was running a fever, so back to the hospital it was.  It turns out he was dehydrated, and may have had a urinary tract infection (we are waiting on the results of the urine culture.)  Both are being quickly sorted out, through antibiotics and supplementation of his feeding with formula, once we found a nipple that he liked.

Jenn and I are happy but very tired.  I will keep you posted as things develop.  In the meantime, some pictures:

Some weeks ago I received an unsolicited phone call asking me to participate in a 15 minute telephone computer-related survey.  If I participated, I was told, they would send me $50.  I agreed, and took the survey, which ended up taking 20 minutes.  I asked, “So you will send a check?”  They said yes, and I hung up.

Shortly after hanging up, I felt very foolish.  I realized they had not even asked for my address.  I felt very gullible and was sure I had been had.

Much to my surprise, the check showed up today, from Innovative Processing, Inc., a company that (according to their website) offers “Quality personalized fulfillment including Sweepstakes Management, Contests, Internet Promotions, Premium and Refund Programs” (kind of a neat market niche, I think.)  So if you get a call like this, there is at least the possibility that it is legitimate.

Been the victim of a scam?  Give these ne’er-do-wells $20 and they will tell you how to get “Rip-Off Revenge”.  “Using the Rip-Off Revenge Guide,” one satisfied “customer” writes, “in two days I got a newer car worth over $9000 more.”  This would be funny if it were not so sad.

Another cool link discovered through Random TinyURL: Rhetorical Systems’ TTS demo.  Really, try it.  [wav]

In other news, Edward Teller is dead, 60 years too late.  (Too harsh?  Hardly.)