the corner office

I forgot to note that I watched "In the line of fire" on eTV on Thursday night. I remember seeing this on the big screen as well. Clint Eastwood does a good job of carrying off the grouchy old Secret Service agent who froze when JFK took a bullet, and can now redeem himself by protecting the incumbent $GENERIC_TWAT from the evil John Malkovich who's an ex-CIA agent with a serious chip and all that, but I thought that the whole romance thing with Rene Russo was a bit unlikely. I mean, ole Klunt, cool as he is, musta been like 105 when he made that movie. The romance is sweet and engaging but ultimately I sat there thinking "this dude'll be impotent and drooling on his bib by the time they get back from honeymoon." Really.

The movie also got me to thinking... if you had a poll along the lines of "modern US presidents most likely to get whacked," you'd have to consider that the current incumbent is high up on that list. Rich...! joked about it after the election, but I have to imagine that Bush, or at the least the people appointed to keep him from pulling a Kennedy who don't share his own convictions of Divine Appointment, don't sleep too easily at night.

Blocks A and B are actually the same colour. (Fire up an image editor and you'll see they're both #6B6B6B.) (via vowe.net, who links to the original site.)

We spent the day watching DVDs... finally got to see The Day After Tomorrow. Now I see what people meant when they said the movie was a big "Cheney is a ****" statement. A little heavy on the evil mean fossil fuels schpiel and as was debated, the physics is utterly implausible, and the story a little anticlimactic, really, but still a worthwhile watch, especially for the special effects. Disaster movies rock, and this one doesn't disappoint, but it's always depressing that half the people in disaster movies get snuffed.

Speaking of snuffed, we watched Troy as well. Honour in battle my ass. If I was Hector I'd have told Achilles to shove his revenge where the sun don't shine and told my archers to rain down seven kinds of misery on Achilles while he was poncing about in front of the city gates. There was one downside to an otherwise intriguing plot: since everybody knows the story, you spend the first half of the movie thinking "so when they gonna build the horse, dammit," and when they finally do, it's also a bit anticlimactic. But, a good story, and much helped by the running commentary of a fiance who's been studying this stuff the whole year.

I was just watching the music video for Madness' "One Step Beyond" and thinking that the song must be one of the definitive songs of the 80s. Doing a little homework, I discovered that technically, it wasn't actually an 80's song at all. It was released in October 1979.

Which means that the song is now 25 years, a quarter of a century old. Sheesh!

(and I learned that in all that time I've always misheard the opening line...;-)

Artificial Intelligence wasn't that great, but thankfully it's over. Not the way I'd have liked to have ended off this year's exam session, but fuggit. I'm free!

Resolution refutation Predicate Calculus pff *** kiss my *** Skolem functions prenex form PROLOG pshhhh.

Stack overflow. Error loading reality.sys. Load alternate universe? (y/n)

I don't get it. Over millions of years of evolution our body came up with a defense for burns and irritations: the blister. I don't understand how blisters work, but my innate faith in the wonders of human physiology means that they've got to be a wonderful things. Near miraculous, these little gloops of liquid forming a buffer between the damaged skin and the new layers being primed underneath.

Why is it then that when afflicted by something (like, say, being stupid with a match... hypothetically speaking, of course), and when our bodies go "here, have a blister" in response, us humans have a nearly unbeatable compulsion to pop 'em?

I heard this on the radio this morning, and I just saw Cherryflava blog about it too: a 6 metre Great White shark attacked an old lady at Fish Hoek in the Cape this morning. "All that was left was a little red bathing cap."

If this poor lady had been killed by muggers on the beach, it'd barely have gotten a mention in the local newspapers.

This kind of stuff freaks us out because we have a primal response to the thought of being devoured by huge monstrous creatures so it makes good news, and there's bound to be Jaws paranoia and radio and TV coverage and all sorts of sensationalisation going on. Yet hundreds of thousands of people still regularly go sploshing around in shark-infested waters each year. Shark attacks are so statistically negligible that people don't regard them as a real danger, but when the inevitable happens, then everyone's talking about it. Even me.

That's a bloody big shark, though.

Computer Theory this morning, and it didn't go too badly. Here's hoping for a decent mark. One exam left, time to knuckle down!

Neuticles... artificial uh, implants for neutered pets:

Neuticles allowing your pet to retain his natural look, self esteem and aids in the trauma associated with neutering.

With Neuticles- It's like nothing ever changed!

Well, why not, I suppose?

I can't look at the Sizing Chart and Pricing without cracking up.

(via Radley Balko)