Dazed and Bemused

Drunken recollections, boring anecdotes, and obscure references

Monday, December 12, 2005

Be kind to our web-footed friends

When I'm not scaling the outside of luxury high-rises by night, I work in a small office building. As I've shared before, this building has communal restroom facilities. Today as I was finishing my raccoon-like ablutions, a gentlemen came in and entered one of the stalls. Nothing unusual so far, but within a few seconds of the stall door closing, the thrilling (if somewhat tinny) sounds of John Phillip Souza's "The Washington Post" came from behind the door. I had never considered the possibility of a soundtrack to accompany the lowering of my trousers, but I'm sorely tempted now. More along the lines of "Danger! High Voltage", though.

Alan wants to know about those kids starting fires

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Saturday, December 10, 2005

Do people have a tendency to dump on you?

Speaking of bad science fiction dialog.

"Run an immediate check on channels 100 to infinity!" (emphasis mine)

Nothing like making with the rocking and the rolling and the drinking, then getting up with a little bit of a buzz left and watching 60s tv shows.

Alan is going to hurry up and order one

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Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Half of what I say is meaningless

I'm tempted to call my new band Vance Vince and the Violents, but I don't think many people would get the joke, and of those that did, not many would be interested in any kind of music I'd be interested in doing.

There's something that really bugged me when I first saw Alien vs. Predator, and continues to bug me as I watch snippets on cable for background while I work on the computer. At one point the archaeologist fellow says that the ancient whatevers used a 10-based clock, so the pyramid should shift every ten minutes. Only problem is, a minute is a fairly arbitrary unit of measure. Even assuming the ancient whatevers used the same standard for seconds (also fairly arbitrary), 600 of them makes no sense as a common unit in a 10-based system. Now I don't mean to go off on a rant here, but one of the things that makes the difference between good science fiction and bad is getting the little details right. How hard would it have been to have the character just say "I'm checking my watch, so I can figure out if there's a common interval between the shifts". Doesn't add to the image of the character as ultra-smart, which I think is what they were going for, but doesn't make him look like a dumbass, which is what the original line really does.

Alan is saying it just to please you

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