Shopping advice

This is for the benefit of anyone who's ever used a supermarket. Friendly advice, even, inspired by the behaviour of an entire extended family operating in some kind of evil alliance at checkout number six this evening. WHEN YOU REACH THE CHECKOUT, STOP SHOPPING.

The usual strategy when shopping for groceries is to enter the store, obtain either a trolley (cart) or a basket, put stuff you want in it, then proceed to a checkout and pay for it.

The family I encountered this evening had a different tack. FAMILY MEMBER ONE, who I shall call MRS. SHOPPERNAZI proceeded immediately to checkout six with her innocuous two items of purchase, trailed haphazardly behind by her small herd of children, brothers, sisters, grandparents and other bewildered brainwashees. I step into line. Gosh! thought I! A short queue! I can leave the supermarket in blistering time!

Nein.

Mrs. Shoppernazi then proceeds to COMPLETELY OCCUPY the checkout, while her HORDES OF MINIONS are scurried about the place collecting foodstuffs she requests and depositing them on the conveyor. All the while I'm stood back a good six paces behind the checkout to allow room for the fucking armies to mass in and out of the space between the checkout and the barrier thing that's designed to provide room for only one person-width to leave the store through that thoroughfare.

Which leaves me in the awkward position of NOT LOOKING LIKE I'M ACTUALLY IN LINE. So while Mrs. Shoppernazi is waging war on the supermarket with her evil squadron of MiniShoppernazis, I'm fending off a border assault from assorted scalliwags who've concluded that since I'm stood back a distance from the checkout, I'm not really waiting to be served.

AND, the great wonderous being that Mrs. Shoppernazi gloriously presumes to be somehow manages to only purchase items that have no shelf price, which forms a third onslaught of troops on the checkout as various store officials pander back and forth relaying prices for the absurd shit this woman apparently cannot live without.

If her teller card hadn't worked, I'd have killed her.

League of Extraordinary Guff

I wanted to like this movie. Seriously. However, the following things prevented me from doing so. Stupid-looking explosion.

Kenya. Connery and British Dude stand around while, quite obviously, the director yells "bang" in place of a craptacular special effect. Connery and British Dude pivot around unremarkably to see the building behind them burst ineffectually into RED FLAMES that look like they were tooled on with Paint Shop Pro. BRILLIANT START TO THE FILM.

Hyde.

Having watched the DVD special features and what-have-you, I'm willing to marvel at the technological wizardry involved in creating the Hyde suit. However, as great as it is, it still looks like Mr. Flemyng is wearing half a Silly Sumo suit.

The car.

I'll grant you, for entertainment purposes, for the sake of suspension-of-belief, that an internal combustion engine could have been invented in 1899. Also, I'll even go as far as to say it's not totally ridiculous that it could have been put into a four wheeled vehicle. Sure. Why not.

However, having spent a moment contemplating the Nemomobile, one cannot help but realise that on top of the internal combustion engine -- a supercharged V-8 engine, no less -- Nemo and his cronies also somehow managed to invent (and apparently perfect) the building of a chassis, suspension systems, steering -- four wheel, no less, more on this shortly -- a gearing system, air-filled rubber tyres, an ignition system presumably utilising a startermotor and alternator which then powers the lights (which if I recall correctly wasn't invented til near half-way through the next century, as almost all early cars had crank-starts) AND obviously, as Sawyer crashed the thing and survived, some kind of safety systems such as crumple zones and presumably some kind of laminated glass in the windows. Which, apparently, were rigged with winding mechanisms just like 20th century cars.

ALSO, as the producers pointed out in the special features, it'd be completely and utterly impossible to make a four-wheel-steer car complete a 180-degree turn, or, indeed, negotiate the narrow streets and cornering of Venice. ON COBBLED STREETS.

AND FURTHERMORE, Mr. Sawyer executes this maneuvre after approximately four seconds of experience driving the vehicle. Which doesn't sound so bad now, but hey. He wouldn't have even known the thing on the floor is what makes it go faster.

GPS tracking from a submarine!

And what's more, Nemo's ridiculous submarine can apparently track the position of the car in question! With what? GPS? Radar? Yay!

Sean Connery's Titanium Feet.

Connery leaps from the car, moving at about..oh..a hundred miles an hour, onto cobblestones, flat-footed, and walks away. Okay, then.

3D Dominos!

Venice is collapsing, so Nemo -- wisest of the wise -- suggests destroying an upcoming link, a building, in the chain of collapsing buildings to save the city. Which would work wonderfully IF THE CITY WAS ONE STRAIGHT LINE OF BUILDINGS. But it's not, obviously. In order for this to work, one would need to destroy an entire RING of buildings around the epicentre of the collapse. Yes.

Really Obvious Bombs.

Wouldn't some overzealous little crewmember aboard the Nautilus have perhaps spotted a dozen SUITCASE-SIZED bombs with AUDIBLY TICKING TIMERS on them? Particularly when they're just "hidden" along walls and behind occasional pipes?

Oh, dear.

Hardcore.

Core, blimey. The Core is the exact polar opposite of Reign Of Fire. Reign Of Fire was a brilliant concept which was turned into a steaming bucket of snot by astoundingly bad filmmaking. The Core is a mind-numbingly stupid concept incredibly well produced, directed, written and acted.

The story, such as it is, is this:

The Earth's core has stopped rotating. This is bad. Due to the no-longer-rotating core, pigeons cannot fly straight (also bad, apparently, particularly when one of them is actually a trout), Rome collapses (bad too, apparently), the Golden Gate Bridge bursts into flames (bad) and, if left untended, the world will end in about three months.

So, Dr. "I'm Not Seann William Scott, Honest" (update, 2013: Dr. "I'm Not Seann William Scott, Honest" is now more properly known as Dr. Harvey Dent) teams up with Hilary "I'm Not A Man, Honest" Swank, Delroy Lindo, Stanley Tucci and GENERIC FRENCH ACTOR to ride a giant dildo into the heart of infernum. I swear to Christ I'm not making this up.

Oh, and it uses magic lasers that can cut through rock. Except, inexplicably, on the way back up again, when the lasers cease to work and the awkwardly shaped submarine miraculously pops up out of a volcano to the dulcet tones of "WHY  DIDN'T YOU JUST GO DOWN A VOLCANO IN THE FIRST PLACE".

Anyhow.

This movie really shouldn't exist. I love it, largely because it takes the genre of ludicrous disaster movies and turns it on its ear, giving us a thoroughly enjoyable disaster movie that isn't based on an environmental awareness platitude or a thinly veiled opinion vis-à-vis climate change. Absolutely no reason is given for the Earth's core having stopped rotating, it has simply happened. The entire film is based upon the adventures of the crew of the phallic torpedo and their changing goals as the mission becomes more and more perilous.

I adore how the story takes itself utterly seriously, but the production doesn't. This is evident in the naming of the mineral from which Virgil (the submarine) is constructed: unobtainium. A whole six years before James Cameron's Avatar, The Core used this Hollywood placeholder name for an impossible substance in the right way.

The Core. It's awesome. And I need to upgrade my DVD version to Blu-ray, post haste.

Finding true love --

-- with the by-line, "Give Up Now". Last night, I was thinking about the popular ideal (or once popular idea, it seems to have gone the way of the dodo of late) that each person has but one true love, and the amazing probability mechanics inherant thereto.

The most basic equasion is thus: The world has a population of 6.3 billion people. Therefore, you've got a: one in 6.3 billion

..chance of meeting your true love.

This figure assumes the most arrogant assumption possible: That your true love exists. Y'know, we could really screw with the arithmetic and include the possibility of life on other planets, or interspecies love. I hear some people go for that kind of thing.

Might as well give up now, eh? Nah, let's be optimistic. Let's throw a few probability curveballs:

Gender.

For the sake of argument, we'll assume you're looking for someone of the opposite gender. Heck, considering roughly half the population is of either gender, we can safely say that you can pursue people of your own gender and have the same odds. If you're bisexual, you can skip the rest of today's lesson and quit looking entirely.

Our odds are now: one in 3.15 billion

Obviously, this figure omits hermaphrodites and people born with ambiguous genitalia. Sting, for example. It also doesn't take into account the celibate, the sexually inert, the post-menopausal, etc.

Age.

We'll assume you're looking for someone within your own age group, or within an age group you see preferrable. In the roughest maths ever, lets divide the population by eight to come up with eight 10-year age blocks, thus:

Our odds are now: one in 394 million

This barbarically assumes everyone lives precisely 80 years, and drops off the twig on their 81st birthday. It also assumes no one dies prior to that. It also assumes you're not a pedophile, in which case you're probably not looking for your true love anyway, which makes the argument moot. And disgusting.

Location, and chances of meeting.

Say you meet 20 new people every day. I'll define "meet" as "make eye contact with, and be able to recognise at a later time". This could be walking down the street, in a supermarket, etc. Leaving aside the issue of forgetting who you've met, and forgetting about the existance or non-existance of love at first sight, we're left with the following mess of mathematics:

20 people per day, for

365 days, for

80 years, or

584,000 people.

Divided into our previous total, gives us a necessary:

674 LIFETIMES required to lay our eyes on all of the potential candidates.

Obviously, as touched on in the next paragraph, you're not likely to meet your true love if she lives in Siberia and you're in Sydney. Additionally, there's the NASA-equivalent math involved in calculating your chances of meeting if they too are looking for you at the same time, and the possibility that they're not looking at all. Maybe they're a hermit.

Which brings me to another issue: What are you doing right now? Go ahead, triple the figure we just came up with. Sitting at a computer will not find you love. Despite what the banner ads tell you.

Furthermore, this equasion doesn't take into account the fact you'd need to cross continents and literally visit every corner of the planet (all the while still accomplishing your 'glimpse 20 people every day' goal) in order to even stand a chance. This is mostly because all of this is statistical crap and I couldn't be buggered researching the populations for all of the continents and applying the required math. It's too late at night.

The whole thing gets even more complicated once you take into account that in order for the whole ordeal to be worthwhile, not only do you need to find your one true love, but they need to find theirs -- in you. At which point the odds go from infinitesimal to astronomically infinitesimal, and you should concede that you've got no hope and go home and wank or something.

Anyhow, happy loving.

Christmas. Impending.

I hate Christmas. That in itself isn't so strange. What really makes me think is that I've always hated Christmas. Even when I was a kid. I'm tremendously annoyed by the overt commercialism of the whole thing. I want to know at which point someone decided "THE ALLEGED BIRTH OF THE SON OF GOD MEANS WE SHOULD ALL BUY EACH OTHER EXPENSIVE THINGS AND LINE THE POCKETS OF THE LEADERS OF THIS COMMERCIALIST EMPIRE WE CALL THE FINANCIAL WORLD". Somehow, I doubt it's what the Virgin Mary had in mind while the Almighty was fiddling with her loins. "Hey," she thought. "I could make money out of this."

It also irks me immensely that very few Christmas "traditions" have any basis in, well, anything. Like the Christmas Tree. As far as I can research, the entire reason we even have Christmas trees is because - get this - Christmas occurs in winter. Although there's a kind of pleasant detachment to this; at least one key part of what we now consider Christmas isn't in any real way connected with the religious significance of the event.

I guess this kind of divides the Christmas crowds. On one (fairly small, I'd wager) side, you have the religious Christmas folk, believing in angels and the son of God and mangers and hippies in Jerusalem. On the other side, you've got the commercialist Christmas people, believing in dollar signs, plastic trees and K-Mart dockets. This division's kind of relieving, but it still doesn't give any apology or reason for the centuries we've utterly retarded the original "spirit of Christmas".

Being from the southern hemisphere myself, I have to say that the "Christmas trees are because it's winter" ideal doesn't hold a lot of water. Our Christmas is usually around 109°F, humid, and spent sitting as close as possible to an air conditioning unit in a crass attempt at at least spending Christmas a degree or so below body temperature. Somehow, having a lump of slowly melting plastic disguised as a tree, coated with white shit out of a can disguised as snow and draped in ten-year-old balding tinsel is a fairly poor impersonation of winter. But hey, who am I to disagree with "tradition".

I don't believe in a whole lot about Christianity. Or any religion, for that matter. The limit of my involvement with religion is "It helps people get through their lives, then good for them". Which I think is fair enough, and you're welcome to it. However, I'm constantly stuck with this slightly comedic vision of Jesus returning - as he's so eloquently promised - only to be handed a red and white candied cane and a gift-wrapped toy with a large "MACY'S" tag on, and a crowd of gaping Christians waiting for him to be impressed.

Close the Gate: Enemy at the Gates review

I have three quibbles with this film. 1. One day Hollywood will realise that a war movie is interesting in its own right, and doesn't need to be combined with a sappy love story to appeal to audiences.

2. The music sounds like it's been stolen directly from the score from Schindler's List.

3. The lanuguage issue. This is often a problem with war movies, but Enemy At The Gates is the worst example I've seen. In the case of a war movie, you invariably have people speaking different languages. In order to combat (heh) this, there are a few techniques used in filmmaking. The first is to simply have each person speaking the language naturally. This is fine, so long as the viewer can understand Russian, German, French and English to a great degree. The next option is to add subtitles, which most people agree detracts from the film, because most of your time is spent reading and little time spent watching. The remaining obvious option, and the one usually preferred by most modern war films is to have all of the characters speaking English with heavily applied accents from their countries of origin. Enemy At The Gates, however, has taken a completely annoying and haphazard approach. To wit, we have -- just in the Russian characters alone -- Russians speaking with British, Russian and German accents. The German characters speak with a mix of German and British accents. The only way to tell which country the characters are fighting for is to recognise their uniforms, which is great if you're a war buff, but a bit difficult for your average Joe. Particularly considering all of the uniforms in the film are grey-green and all of the characters are coated in mud, blood and bits of their comrades.

Sigh.

DVD special features

These things irritate me. Why? Because they're all the same. They were fun to begin with. "Oooh! It shows how they made the boat sink!", "Oooh! An interview with the director!". But that's exactly what you get on every single DVD. I just watched The Emperor's New Groove. The movie's great. Possibly Disney's best. But the special features on the bonus DVD...stink. Sure, I'd love to see how they made the movie, and look at a bunch of preproduction designs and whatnot. It's fascinating stuff. But I don't want to see it narrated by two fecal goitres dressed in costumes rejected by The Wiggles claiming by means of subtitled nametags to be producers or directors or somesuch of the film itself. Sweet Jesus, these guys look like they'd have a hard time negotiating traffic on a one-way backstreet.

What further annoys me, particularly with the more average DVD (i.e. the ones without a bonus disc or whatever), is that the special features usually amount to being nothing more than clips from the movie interspersed with random interview dialog with the actors, telling you things you already knew. Example? Mel Gibson's Payback. Right. You've just watched the film. Unless your eyeballs are in backwards, you know fairly well by the end of it that Mr. Gibson's character is a bit of a moral enigma. He makes his own rules, and generally obeys them. He has a goal and intends to pursue it. So what do you get on the "special" features? Random out-of-time clips of Mel leaping about like a gibbon on speed with the voice-over from the interview, "My character makes his own rules, and generally obeys them. He has a goal and intends to pursue it..", et al. Give me a break.

And who ever watches the theatrical trailers? HM. THERE'S THE ENTIRE MOVIE SITTING THERE. I COULD WATCH THAT, OR I COULD WATCH THE TRAILER INSTEAD. HMMMM.

Conclusion? "Special" features are for "special" people.

Technology, communication, independence.

I yearn for the days when you could go for an evening walk without a phone in your pocket so that God only knows who can call you to tell you something that probably has no real bearing on your life. I'm sick of seeing people in supermarkets actually call home to ask if there's any Uncle Toby's Oats in the cupboard before buying a box. Sweet Jesus, there's a thing called a shopping list. I'm sick of being sat on trains with a horde of school children, all pointlessly SMS-ing each other and calling each other from feet away. I was on a train once, and bore witness to a foursome of teenage girls -marrying- their mobile phones to each other..replete with one phone regaling the other trio with a digitised desecration of the Wedding March, followed by the four phones - including the self-proclaimed minister phone - "getting it on" by means of the vibrate function. I'm not against technological dependence. I'm against communication dependence. The constant need to be in contact with people, oft cases people you don't really know to begin with. After all, that's what internet addiction really is, in most cases. I'm not addicted to surfing the 'net and staring at site after site of potentially entertaining crap (although I concede that a lot of people probably are, and I'm not talking about pr0n...much), I'm addicted to conversing with the people I've come to know through it.

Mobile telephones are for ringing up on, usually in emergencies or in cases of extreme importance. SMS is teh sux0rs and should never be used unless under duress of castration, and if you can't deal with being away from the ability to communicate with people, get a life.

I love both the irony and honesty in that last sentence.

Wordpress. It has moments of stupid.

This post exists entirely so that Wordpress's Twenty Eleven theme will display author bio details beneath posts, which it evidently doesn't like doing on a single-author blog. KLUDGE AHOY.

Back in the '90s: Kaleidoscope Schemes

This article is hideously backdated to reflect the time that it's content, the gallery below, was created. Sorry for the confusion. If you're curious, I'm writing this on June 9, 2013. This is about the oldest part of me that lives on the internet. Back in the late '90s, there was an interface enhancement for Macintosh computers called Kaleidoscope. It was essentially a version of the "themes" concept that Apple kind of introduced into their operating systems, but really didn't. You could download any number of new interface themes (or "schemes", as the creators called them) for your operating system. Some of them were pretty cool. I made a few of them. In hindsight, they don't seem to have strayed too far from the general appearance of the Mac OS (version 9, at the time). They looked like this:

All of these are still, inexplicably, available at the Kaleidoscope Scheme Archive. You can access my stuff directly here, though. If you're really excited by the potential of this awesome piece of 1990's tech, be sure to check out the "scheme spotlight" area, wherein the best of the best are framed and hung on the metaphorical wall.