Archive for the ‘Entertainment’ Category
Alicia Keys: “I am an anarchist”
Saturday, February 27th, 2010Alicia Keys classifies herself as an anarchist. I'm not sure I agree with her conspiracy-like theories and certainly not her donation to the Democratic Party, but for someone famous and unexpected to call herself an anarchist and appear to actually know what it means is pretty cool. Maybe she's considered ...
David Henderson: in defense of Avatar
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010If you haven't seen Avatar yet, you should; the plot might be incredibly predictable and, actually, almost identical to that of Poul Anderson's novella Call Me Joe or Robert F. Young's novella To Fell a Tree, but what you get out of it is the best visual, graphical, cinematic experience ...
Quote of the day
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009The law? Commander, laws change depending on who's making them. Cardassians one day, Federation the next. But justice is justice. —Odo, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "A Man Alone"
Star Trek can’t calculate
Monday, May 11th, 2009I like Star Trek a lot despite its absurdly unrealistic vision of the future of humanity. In what is probably the funniest drama ever made, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Admiral Kirk goes out to lunch with a woman in 20th-century San Francisco, and when the waiter brings the ...
Libertarian lyrics 4
Sunday, March 8th, 2009"My Prerogative" by Bobby Brown. Yeah, I went there. Everybody's talking all this stuff about me Why don't they just let me live? I don't need permission Make my own decisions That's my prerogative They say I'm crazy I really don't care That's my prerogative They say I'm nasty But I don't give a damn Gettin girls is how I live Some ...
Keynesianism in The Fifth Element
Saturday, March 7th, 2009Zorg: "Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder, and chaos. Now, take this empty glass. Here it is, peaceful, serene, boring. But if it is [knocks glass off table] destroyed... [robots come to clean it up] Look at all these little things! So busy now! Notice how ...
Libertarian lyrics 3
Monday, January 26th, 2009"Industrial Disease" by Mark Knopfler: Warning lights are flashing down at quality control Somebody threw a spanner and they threw him in the hole There's rumors in the loading bay and anger in the town Somebody blew the whistle and the walls came down There's a meeting in the boardroom, they're trying to trace the ...
Carl Sagan reads from Pale Blue Dot
Sunday, November 16th, 2008I'm pretty sure this is the best video on the entire internets:
South Park on drug prohibition
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008"Whatevah! You don't know me! It's my body; I'll do what I want!"
Cap’n Mal on elections
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008I think a lot about my friends' perceptions of my somewhat-anti-voting and voting for "nobody" mentality. I don't talk about it much because, in all honesty, from what I've observed of their discussions amongst themselves, the extent of their understanding of political philosophy is "anti-Democrat = neocon Republican." So I ...
Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony
Sunday, September 21st, 2008I recently went to a concert that opened with Beethoven's 7th symphony. It was the whole reason I went, and it surpassed even my expectations. It has long been my second- or third-favorite symphony of all time, behind his 5th and perhaps Dvořák's Symphony From the New World. Interestingly, the ...
Libertarian lyrics 2
Sunday, September 14th, 2008All we have to see is that I don't belong to you and you don't belong to me. —George Michael, "Freedom"
Artificial intelligence is dangerous in State, not private, hands
Monday, July 7th, 2008I was reading about the Three Laws of Robotics at Wikipedia, and for anyone who hasn't read any Isaac Asimov, I highly encourage you to start with I, Robot and go all the way through Foundation and Earth. That's 12 books altogether: five robot novels and seven Foundation novels, which ...
Funny, scathing review of Love Guru
Thursday, June 19th, 2008Dana Stevens of Slate magazine pans Mike Myers's latest movie. It sounds like the movie was about as funny as we all expected it to be. This review is probably much funnier than the movie. It's kind of funny: the funnier the review, the worse the movie probably is.
Tyrannicide
Saturday, May 17th, 2008Last night I finished watching the first season of the HBO historical drama Rome, on DVD. It was absolutely fantastic and I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. The DVD set is worth almost any price they are likely to charge. They only made two seasons and won't make ...
Libertarian lyrics
Saturday, May 10th, 2008I think the Eagles, like most music artists, and particularly their main songwriters, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, have the reputation of being quite liberal. For instance, Don Henley founded the Walden Woods Project, a non-profit effort to buy land in and around Walden Pond to preserve it from development. ...
TANSTAAFSTVARS
Friday, May 9th, 2008BBC News claims, "A free satellite television and radio service backed by the BBC and ITV launches across the UK." I hope even my non-libertarian friends aren't fooled by any government's claim that something is "free"; obviously it is funded by money that was taken at the point of a ...
Even Cartoons Get It
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008Why are you looking at me like that? You act like you haven't seen me in a while or something. This past Sunday, lacking anything to entertain myself, I tuned into an episode of King of the Hill. The fates must have been smiling upon me that day because it turned ...
R.I.P., Arthur C. Clarke
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008The author of Rendezvous With Rama, Childhood's End, The Fountains of Paradise, and 2001: A Space Odyssey and one of the "big three" Grand Masters of science-fiction (Heinlein, Asimov) has died at the age of 90.
Dilbert on nonvoting
Monday, March 10th, 2008I was perusing Francois Tremblay's blag and was delighted to find this post, consisting entirely of a Dilbert comic on nonvoting that Wally Conger posted. (By the way, at first I assumed that whoever first uploaded this comic got it from February 16 (my birthday) of the 2008 Dilbert page-a-day ...
Overlapping fan bases
Monday, January 21st, 2008When I was at the aforementioned midnight showing of Serenity, I couldn't help but think, somewhat smugly but most likely correctly, that there has never been a political cause and a movie or TV show that had fan bases that overlapped as extensively as those of Ron Paul and Firefly. ...
The philosophy of Firefly
Monday, January 21st, 2008The State Theatre in Ann Arbor did a midnight showing of Serenity on Saturday night, so, naturally, I was extremely excited about it and was looking forward to it for two weeks. I went with my girlfriend and several other friends, most of whom are huge Firefly fans. I pick ...