NEWS - PETA, hamburgers, and a barbecue.

Just when you think PETA can't possibly do anything even more idiotic than they already have, they always come up with a new way to surprise you. Today in fact, we have two. First up, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk has drawn up a will stating a list of abominable and atrocious acts that are to be committed with her remains upon her death. These feats of idiocy include barbecuing her flesh, using her skin to make leather products, turning her feet into umbrella stands, and as a personal request she wants her heart buried near the Ferrari pits at the Hockenheim Formula One racing circuit in Germany. Oh, she says it's not totally selfish, because Michael Schumacher once actually signed a letter for PETA against experiments on monkeys, right, of course. I'm sure he really wants your heart in his Ferrari pit as a thank you memento. Anyway my question is, what exactly does she hope to accomplish with all this? The only thing I can think of is publicity for PETA. I cannot see my life being strongly affected by some nutcase having some bizarre instructions carried out with her carcass. In fact, these acts are so outlandish they only distract from the message they are attempting to convey. "We hope it will start a trend," Newkirk said. Sure, I'll hop on the bandwagon. I'm going to write in my will that when I die, my ass is to be mounted on a plaque and delivered to PETA's headquarters, with an engraving reading "May the moon forever shine upon all your endeavors." Oooh, I feel so trendy.
As long as we're on the topic of PETA and barbecuing, they have also approached the city of Hamburg, NY with the request to rename their town to Veggieburg. The offer was immediately declined, in spite of PETA's "generous" offer to donate $15,000 worth of veggieburgers to the city's schools. I'm sure the kiddies would have loved that. This is not the first time PETA has sought for a New York town to change it's name and forsake it's history and heritage for the ridiculous purpose of a avoiding conjuring up images of animal abuse at their mention. Before confronting the birthplace of the hamburger, it was Fishkill in 1996, a town of Dutch heritage, where "kill" is the Dutch word for "stream". Again, instead of walking away wanting a veggieburger as PETA would hope, I instead come out of this story with a new appreciation for Hamburg's heritage, and craving a nice big juicy cheeseburger. Looks like you botched up another one, PETA.
When will PETA learn that negative attention does not equate to good attention?

NEWS - A tribute to Florida schools

A Florida high school teacher failed the math portion of the state teacher's certification six times. Not like she can count that high anyway. They're threatening to take her job away if she can't manage to pass it on the seventh try. Thinking like a Floridiot, I can see where they would say, hey, what's it matter? She's an English teacher. But you'd think even a Floridiot would appoint someone else who can perhaps count as the secretary-treasurer of their Teacher's Association...

COMMENTARY - MMORPG's: The final nail in the Geek's social coffin

FACT: Geeks usually suffer from a serious lack of a social life. FICTION: Playing games online is the best way for geeks to correct this inadequacy. For those not familiar with the lingo, MMORPG stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. It's a perpetual online fantasy world, a game that never ends. These games are beginning to come in a variety of flavors, from fantasy to sci-fi to reality based worlds, from role playing to first person shooter styles. It is my belief that games of this nature will single-handedly destroy the geek's hope of ever becoming accepted in the real world. To the geek, it seems like the perfect solution. A way to interact and have fun with members of the outside world, without having to go to the trouble of leaving their house. Wrong. All you are in fact doing is socializing with other geeks who also think this is the perfect solution to their social shortcomings. Like lobsters in a tank, they only keep pulling each other back to the bottom. Then the addiction sets in. Soon this fantasy world becomes more real to them than the real world. They play the game with every spare moment of their life, and when they're not actually playing it, they talk about playing it. They start speaking a different language, using some absurd vernacular that has evolved out of their fantasy world. They then cease to socialize with what friends they had in the real world that don't play the game as well, as they are incapable of communicating with them in this new dialect which has become their common tongue. Now not only have their chance at gaining a social life diminished, but they are also destroying what connections they had with the real world to begin with. Then there's the money sinkhole. This is assuming you haven't quit your job or even had one to begin with, of course. You are shelling out a monthly fee to play these games. Not too big of a deal if you have a decent job, but if you're already working for low pay or not working at all, this is the difference between your own studio apartment and moving back into your parent's basement. It's kinda hard to get a date when you don't have any money to pay for dinner, not to mention it's difficult to seat two on your bicycle, and you can't exactly take her back to your place and expect any privacy with your parents there. Let's recap. MMORPG's take up all of your free time, limit your social interactions to only those that are also familiar with it, and rob you of all your money. So there you have it. MMORPG's have all of the effects of a woman on a man, without any of the real benefits. Do yourself a favor. Ditch the game, get out into the real world, and find yourself a girlfriend. While you'll be in the same predicament, at least you'll be getting more out of it in return.

NEWS - Now back to monkey business

Now that all this backend work with the site is done, we can get back to important current events in the news. Yesterday, being Earth Day, Jane Goodall spoke against deforestation at the State Department. "Whoo whoo whoo oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh ooh ooh oooh oooh," Goodall stated before the crowd. Well met, Jane, couldn't have said better myself.

NEWS - More Site Updates

Syn is in, Hot or Not is out. You may have noticed my site loading insanely slowly over the past week or so. Apparently Blog Hot or Not is out cold. You may remember I had that little script linked from their site showing my current rating on their service. Since their site apparently no longer exists, the script obviously wouldn't load, thus causing the whole table it was in to stall until the script timed out before displaying anything, hence my ridiculous load time. I don't know if or when it's coming back, and frankly I don't care. It's gone now. While I was at it, I also reversed the order in which my page loads, so my content on the right should appear first, followed by the links on the left. You may have also noticed my new XML button as well. That's right, I now have my own RSS feed. Maintained the good old fashioned way, entirely by hand. It's hard to automate RSS generation on a free service like Blogger, and even if I could I think I'd still favor the anal retentive level of control provided by writing it by hand anyways. Anyways, that's it for site updates. I think things are looking pretty good now. Time to focus on actually posting again. In other good news, the last missing parts to my PC are shipping and should be here by tomorrow. I may be able to post from home as early as this weekend. Of course I'll probably be too busy playing Tribes again, but that's beside the point...

REVIEW - MOVIE - "Chicago", aka "Our movie sucks! Quick, take your clothes off."

As a general rule, movies that the critics hold in high regard are the very films I absolutely despise, and the films I really love are the same movies the critics loathe. There is, however, that rare gem of a film on which we can both agree upon. This movie was not one of them. This poor excuse for a musical was really nothing more than 30 minutes of weak plot loosely tied together with the sudden and frequent interjection of similar musical numbers only roughly relating to the current scene in the sub par storyline. One should have a strong case to sue for mental whiplash after watching this film, with it's abrupt stops and starts from storyline to song number and back again. Don't get me wrong, I love a good musical. While good ones have been few and far between the past couple decades, they are still one of my favorite types of movies (behind a good bloody action film, of course). I was thrilled with Moulin Rouge, although I won't deny being skeptical to the point of completely missing the film while it was in theaters. It had been such a long, long time since Hollywood had produced a good musical, I was absolutely certain the film was going to be dreadful. Yet I was very pleasantly surprised when I finally did watch it when it came out on video. It is off the steam of its success that I even bothered to see Chicago in the theaters, to which I am now sorely disappointed that I wasted $8 and two hours of my time. Simply put, Chicago completely lacks the proper formula to even be considered a musical by my definition. A musical should have smooth transitions into and out of musical numbers, as I have already stated Chicago painfully lacks. It should seem a surreal world, where it appears perfectly natural for everyone to spontaneously bust into well choreographed song and dance for five minutes and then return to their daily lives as though this was their normal routine. Also, musicals are not solely about the big song and dance numbers. There should be some solos or duets interspersed as well, perhaps some with no dancing at all. I understand why they largely neglected to do this with Chicago however, seeing the general lack of real vocal talent in the cast. Lastly, the musical numbers in a musical should be part of the plot, not a break from it. Perhaps Chicago took too much of an influence from MTV, with the majority of it's musical numbers being nothing more than some flashy nonsense and half naked women. If it weren't for the clever camera work focusing solely on the bare parts of the female dancers through the majority of the film, the audience might have been more aware of the many, many other things the movie totally lacks. I was extremely disappointed with the casting in particular. Catherine Zeta-Jones, the only actor in the film who showed any real singing talent, was shafted with only a couple of songs to herself. Meanwhile the absolutely talentless Renee Zellweger, who ironically enough portrays a young woman who can't break into the entertainment industry because she's a crappy singer and dancer, unfortunately gets the majority of the spotlight. While I didn't think much of Richard Gere's performance either, he did at least have the two most entertaining numbers in the film, the only moments of true inspiration in the whole movie, with the marionette news reporters and the courtroom tap dance scenes. There was also a total lack of diversity in the movie's musical themes. All the songs were of nearly identical style and while musically quite good (minus Zellweger's voice), the film definitely needed a broader range of styles. All in all, this is more what I expected from Hollywood for a modern musical. A piece of crap. It's unfortunate to think that movies like Moulin Rouge will likely become the exception, not the rule, when looking at modern musicals moving forward. It simply takes too much time, money, and effort to make them, and the standard requiring all actors to be able to sing and dance no longer exists, making even finding the talent for such a film far more difficult. I should've just followed my first instinct and saw Bulletproof Monk instead...

COMMENTARY - Golf spelled backwards is Flog

I dislike sports in general. I think they're dumb. But I don't really have problems with most sports. The jocks can go about doing their athletic thing and people like myself can continue being perfectly content ignoring them. There is, however, one "sport" to which I am morally opposed. Golf. What kind of sport is golf? Any other sport can easily contain itself in it's own field or arena. But no, that's not good enough for golf. It has to span miles to be satisfied. What's more, the entirety of that massive acreage it hordes has to be green. Even if the course is in the middle of an arid desert, these idiots waste millions of gallons of water on grass so they can smack a tiny little ball as far as they can on it. To make this abominable use of property even more wasteful, only one person can actually use a specified chunk of it at any given time. Forget about teams, when someone's about to get their whack at their ball, you better leave them alone. They will tolerate other idiot golfers standing around and respectfully watching, but if you are not a member of their precious little club and they spot you on their turf sans the requisite percentage of plaid in your ensemble, you'll be in for some trouble. It's the only sport I can think of that doesn't like spectators. Also, when I think of sports, I think of physical activity. All there is to golf is swinging a club every so often. Most golfers are such lazy bastards they can't even walk to their ball after they hit it, they have to ride a damn cart. Imagine if they did that in other sports, baseball for example. The batter hits the ball out into left field, hops in his cart, and guns it for first base at 5mph. Ridiculous. A sport that involves no physical activity, no teams, no audience, and takes up miles of space. Does anybody else see something wrong with this? Of course, I have several suggestions on how to improve the sport. By combining elements of golf with football and NASCAR, we can have a sport to be enjoyed by everyone. First, start out with two teams. Large teams. They will start on opposing sides of the course. The object of the game is to get your golferbacks to the designated tee zones and hit a ball into one of the opposing team's nine holes. The first team to sink all nine opposing goals wins. The sport will involve lots of full-contact roughness, souped up golf carts going 60mph+, and haphazard projectiles. All the things that make sports entertaining. Screw this pansy golf crap.