Dear asshole that made "Quarantine"--thank you for making yet another shitty movie with the shaky hand-held camera recovered footage approach that made "Cloverfield" suck too.  I'd like that 90 minutes of my life back please.

Oh.  And you suck.  In case I didn't say that earlier.

Here's a funny animation I caught on Pharyngula, the excellent science blog by P.Z. Myers.  The audio is German, but there are subtitles.  I got a kick out of it, perhaps you will too?

Das Rad

Watch out!  It's time for 10 images worth of Name That Movie goodness!  First image is up now, next one at 9 AM.  Last one (the gimme) at 3:30 in the afternoon.  Get cracking folks...

Below is an image from a movie.  If you can guess the movie via that one image, do so, if not, links to further images will be posted throughout the day.  The second image should be more obvious, and the third image even moreso, and so on.  Please try not to read the comments before you guess!

NTM is JavaScript driven and will automagically make the images available at the listed times. Once you've got the page open, you can refresh the image links just by clicking the refresh button below, this will check the clock and enable further images as appropriate. Times displayed should be in your local timezone. (Yes, obviously you can cheat either by viewing the source, or simply changing the time on your clock.)

The image links will replace the primary displayed image when you mouse over them.  This way you can view the images right in the article without having to open up new windows.  You may have to wait a second or two for the new image to download before it will replace the primary image.  The original primary image will return when you mouse off of the image link.

I will, as time permits, also post the image links in comments for those of you whom cannot run javascript.

That said, here's the first image...

GOOD LUCK!!!

Watch out!  It's time for 10 images worth of Name That Movie goodness!  First image is up now, next one at 9 AM.  Last one (the gimme) at 3:30 in the afternoon.  Get cracking folks...

Below is an image from a movie.  If you can guess the movie via that one image, do so, if not, links to further images will be posted throughout the day.  The second image should be more obvious, and the third image even moreso, and so on.  Please try not to read the comments before you guess!

NTM is JavaScript driven and will automagically make the images available at the listed times. Once you've got the page open, you can refresh the image links just by clicking the refresh button below, this will check the clock and enable further images as appropriate. Times displayed should be in your local timezone. (Yes, obviously you can cheat either by viewing the source, or simply changing the time on your clock.)

The image links will replace the primary displayed image when you mouse over them.  This way you can view the images right in the article without having to open up new windows.  You may have to wait a second or two for the new image to download before it will replace the primary image.  The original primary image will return when you mouse off of the image link.

I will, as time permits, also post the image links in comments for those of you whom cannot run javascript.

That said, here's the first image...

GOOD LUCK!!!

Life has been a little hectic for me, and while I've had time to take part in interesting discussions on articles I posted over a year ago (weird) I haven't had much time to post any new articles.  So here's what's goin' on, reduced to a bullet list, just so I can get the shite out there:

• Went to see the oral surgeon on Tuesday, no real surprises there, it was just a consult, they wanted me to know what to expect and to talk to me.  Had to read some scary consent forms where they tell you everything that could possibly go wrong during your procedure... we might break your jaw, we might puncture your sinuses, we might damage teeth you were planning on keeping, you might have a heart attack from the anaesthesia, you  might die, the world might end.  Great stuff to read if you are a person with an anxiety disorder triggered by medical situations.  Thanks guys.
   
• I go in for my impressions at the dentist this afternoon.  Probably have to have the surgery in about 3 weeks.
   
• Celebrated Easter with Patty's family on Saturday, and with my family on Sunday.  Plus we had a little egg hunt for Lynnea at our house Sunday morning.  Total of 3 egg hunts, and I hid somewhere between 85 and 145 eggs over the weekend (I had help on the last hunt.)
   
• Atheist's don't believe in jinxes, but lately it's hard to shake the idea of misfortune following me around.  During Saturday's get together, I noticed that the dog of one of my sisters-in-law, who had been brought to the gathering, was acting funny--labored breathing, strange movements.  I told my sister-in-law about it, and she took the dog to a vet during the celebration and was informed that the animal needed to be put to sleep.  Happy Easter kids, the dog is dying.  They had the dog put down that same day and a lot of the kids were crying about it.
   
• Continuing the jinx thread, I was on the phone with a friend yesterday afternoon and we were discussing all the things that had been going on in my life when suddenly I heard a loud bang on my cellphone.  My friend had been rear ended by another driver and terminated the conversation with "my back is hurting, I can't talk now".  Later in the evening I heard back that after a trip to the hospital my friend was okay, but he didn't yet know how bad the damage to his car is.  We joked that I should try to capitalize on this Hurleyesque bad luck of mine, have people pay me to stay away from them, or pay me to hang around with folks they don't like until the meteorite hits them.
   
• I've been seeing my Mom each weekend and helping her to get things taken care of now that Dad is gone.  Mom runs a small business out of her house and depends entirely on an ancient Windows-98 box to do her work, and the box is acting pretty spotty lately.  A few weeks before Dad passed away he had purchased a new computer, and so now I am trying to repurpose that box so that when my Mom is ready, she can switch to the new box and run her business on that.  Unfortunately the new box comes with Vista which my Dad hated, and after spending a couple of hours trying to use the box I can see why.  Microsoft completely changed the standard windows interface, all the control keys are different, and no functions are where they used to be.  They also decided (apparently) that menus are overrated, so the standard office suite doesn't have menus anymore... yeah you heard that right.  Everything is now reorganized on a new fat toolbar with tabs on it so that you can switch between toolbars.  Microsoft calls it "the ribbon", I call it "thumbing your nose at everybody who already learned how to use your shitty applications".  Vista does not come with a "classic mode" option like XP did... they really expect you to relearn where everything is.  I refuse to subject my 68-year-old mother to this nonsense.  So I backed up Dad's files, packed up his computer and all his peripherals and disks, brought it to a computer shop and told them to wipe it, and then install XP home edition and Office 2000, and get all the drivers to make sure the peripherals work.  In the end, my Mom will be happier for it.  And having a chance to check out Vista I am now quite certain that I won't be upgrading to it.
   
• Had a little birthday party for Pat at home last week, a little cake and song, and a couple gifts (taking our economic situation into consideration of course).  Pat got the movie "Eragon" which was -eh-.  It's basically Star Wars... AGAIN, and progresses far too quickly.  I kept saying "these guys forgot the montages" while watching it.  But the dragon was pretty, and it was still fun to watch.
   
• Oh, and I am saddened to report that Kurt Vonnegut passed away.  Thanks for the stories Kurt, we'll miss you.

Guess that's about it.  Gotta get to work!  See ya later.

I'm sorry I haven't been able to blog in awhile... there's just been so much going on my life.  I've got a lot of things I'd like to talk about, but any one of them would be a full blog article I don't have time to write.  So here's the "Cliff Notes"...

My Health
I visited the doctor about 2 weeks ago.  My TB test came back negative, as expected.  I woke up with the area around the injection on my arm completely flat and showing no reaction other than a slight redness.  I could tell it was a negative result, but still I had to get to the doctor and have a nurse stare at my arm for two seconds and say "yep, negative."  Did I mention it was snowing?  A lot?  The doc informed me that the plan at that point was to let the antibiotics run out, and then monitor myself very carefully, watching for fevers.  I was to take it easy and not exert myself once off the antibiotics.  I took my last pill the day my Dad had his aneurism.  So I was getting almost no sleep, no regular intake of food, a high amount of exertion and stress, exactly at the time we were hoping my body would be able to cope with the remaining infection.  By March 7th I was having fevers and my doctor extended the antibiotic.  By March 8th the fevers had reached 102, and I was having painful chills in the night.  On March 9th the fevers subsided and I haven't had any since.  I had another visit with the doc today and she began to speak very frankly about having a surgeon go in and "break up" the scar tissue, or using a needle to drain out the infected area so it could heal.  I spoke very frankly about how disturbing those prospects were to me, and if sixty days of antibiotics would solve the problem, I'd rather go that route.  For now, we are on a middle ground.  The doc has given me a script for 10 more days of the antibiotic, but I am to repeat the "wait and see" experiment when the current batch runs out (Sunday).  If the fevers return I can start the next script.  Next week I will have another CAT Scan, and then based on the results we will make a decision.  The doctor said I could come in and speak with the pulmonologist at that time if I liked.  At this point I'm beginning to feel resigned that a surgical solution is going to be necessary.

Mr. Deity
If you haven't seen the "Mr. Deity" videos yet, check them out, they are hilarious.  A warning to my theist readers, these movies are created by humanists, and are therefore pretty irreverent.  Don't check them out if that is going to bug you.

RSS & YouTube
Why doesn't YouTube support RSS in any obvious fashion that I can detect?  Why do I have to go to my subscription page on YouTube to see what is new.  If they are tracking what is new, then they have the information necessary to provide an RSS feed.  Bloglines tries to "fake it" for you, building an RSS feed out of a YouTube search, but that doesn't work well.  Partly because old videos keep popping up on it, and because jerks post movies on YouTube with the usernames of popular YouTubers in their keywords simply to bring in viewers.  The only YouTubers I subscribe to are ImpyTheRap (i.e. Nobody's Watching) and SuttSteve.  Yet my Bloglines is constantly telling me they have new videos when they don't, simply because the RSS feed is built from a keyword search, and some people are not capable of getting viewers on their own talent.  Does anyone have a good way to get a YouTube subscription as an RSS feed?  It's really bugging me.  I had to discontinue my YouTube "feeds" in Bloglines because it was a waste of time.

Texas and the HPV Vaccine
The Republican Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has mandated that all girls entering the sixth grade in Texas schools must receive the HPV vaccine Gardasil, produced by Merck.  HPV, or Human papillomavirus, is a virus that can be carried by both men and women, but some strains of which are shown to cause cervical cancer in some women.  It is primarily transmitted sexually, but can be contracted in other ways (skin on skin contact, or being born from an infected mother).  Under Perry's plan, parents could choose to refuse the vaccine for their child, but it is not clear if the child would then be allowed to enter the public school system (any more than they would be allowed to refuse, say, Mumps and Rubella vaccines and still put their kids in school.)  The Texas legislature voted 118-23 to basically overturn this order.  The primary complaints were that (a) there are questionable connections between Perry and Merck, (b) parents should have the right to choose whether their daughters will be vaccinated, (c) the drug is new and needs to be further tested, and (d) Perry circumvented the legislative process.  On (a) and (d) I can't really comment, on (c)... well the FDA has approved it, so it has to have undergone some testing at this point, and on (b) I'm just mystified.  The mandate clearly has an opt-out clause... so what's the diff?  The thing I can't shake is that the early complaints about the possibility of making this drug mandatory that came out of Fundie USA was that it would encourage young women to have sex.  Which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.  But I can't help feeling that because those who said it are realizing how stupid that sounds, we are now getting other excuses like a through d above.  I find myself wondering if HPV was transmitted in a nonsexual manner, would there be any outcry at all?

These are the Same People Who Said...
Tell me you haven't heard this one before: confronted with the latest news from climate scientists about global warming, a politically motivated skeptic will claim "These are the same people who said the world was headed for another ice age back in the 1970's... why should we believe them now?"  Like so much politically motivated rhetoric, there's little merit in it.  Between the 40's and the 70's a cooling trend was noted in the data available at that time.  Scientific journals noted that although such a trend could be the precursor of the cyclic ice ages that our planet goes through, there was not enough data or understanding of the climate to accurately predict when the next ice age would come.  The popular press on the other hand (i.e. those journals which are not peer reviewed) took the story and made a sensation out of it.  The scientific community never said another ice age was imminent, period.  Needless to say I hate hearing this stupid argument, especially when it is delivered by people who unfortunately are accorded undue credibility... like Michael Crichton for instance.  But if you want details refuting this particular bit of rhetoric, check "The Global Cooling Myth" on Real Climate.

Guess that's all I have for now.  Hope everyone else is well and happy...

Wow.  You've probably heard about this since it is all over the internet, but people are just going nuts about the movie "Hounddog" which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.  I've heard both good and bad reviews about the quality of the picture itself, but there is an explosion of outrage over the fact that the film portrays the child-star, Dakota Fanning, being raped.

On multiple occasions financial backers have pulled out of the production, and the film has no buyer presently.  What it does have is hordes of people calling for the head's of the director Deborah Kampmeier, Fanning's agent Cindy Osbrook, and her mother Joy.  There's even online petition demanding their arrest and some are going further than that, as this excerpt from a CNN article notes:

...Even before the first screening of "Hounddog" at the Sundance Film Festival this week, a Christian film critic, citing Fanning's age, decried the movie as child abuse, and Roman Catholic activist Bill Donohue called for a federal investigation...

...Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission and publisher of the Web site movieguide.org, claims "Hounddog" breaks federal child-pornography law. He said the law covers material that "appears" to show minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

"Even if they're not actually performing the explicit act, we are dealing with a legal issue here," he said.

Baehr said Fanning is being exploited in the film, and that it should be considered an outrage.

"Children at 12 do not have the ability to make the types of decisions that we're talking about here," he said. "If we're offended by some comedian's racial slur, why aren't we offended by somebody taking advantage of a 12-year-old child?"

Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said he has asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate whether anti-pornography laws have been broken...

It's not hard to understand why people would be upset by a film showing a 12 year old girl being raped, even if it isn't real.  It's an upsetting concept.  That it happens in the real world is tragic and brutal and awful. If it did not happen in the real world, a film like this would likely never have been made.

And there is the fear (which Bill Donahue mentioned in an interview) that sick perverts will see the film and be inspired to act out their twisted fantasies.

Count bastion of Bill-O'Reilly-Wannabeism Sean Hannity among the offended, who interviewed a conservative child advocate who had seen the film, and was sadly shocked when she informed him that the various claims about the rape scene were not factual.

As for what I think about Hounddog?  Well, I don't like the idea, and I have no desire to see the film.  I don't think I could watch that.  Especially since Dakota Fanning is such an amazing actress, doubtless she would be able to convince me that it was really happening and I don't think I could bear it.

But then, not having seen the film, I'm not about to make a snap judgement as many others seem prepared to do.  If you haven't seen the film, then you really can't comment on whether or not Dakota was in some way injured during the production.

As far as what I have heard from people who have actually seen the film, the scene is disturbing but tastefully done (inasmuch as it is possible to do so).  There's no nudity or skin-on-skin contact.  Basically the rape is implied by carefully editting together various disparate clips shot at different times.  You see Dakota shout "No!", you see a man unzip his fly, you see a hand hit a wooden floor, etc.  Each individual component is shot separately, nobody is unzipping their pants in front of Dakota, nobody is touching her inappropriately.  The rape takes place in the mind of the viewer.

Add to this the fact that Dakota's mother and a child welfare worker were present on set during the shooting of this scene, and that really ought to allay fears, but apparently it does not.

It is disturbing to me that this level of outcry doesn't surface over movies where children are enduring violence, or abject suffering of any other sort.  Only when the subject matter is sex do folks go nuts.

I would hope that the primary reason one would be offended is if one thought Dakota was being exploited, or worse yet emotionally injured by performing in this production.  All other concerns really ought to be secondary.   But from the criticisms I'm hearing, it sounds more like people using Dakota's fame to add oomph to their particular platforms while using inflammatory terms like 'kiddie porn' to describe the film.  I find that disturbing for sure.  That is also exploitation.

Although Fanning says she has no career plan in mind other than to keep acting, I have to assume she is trying to break out of kid roles and break into more mature roles.  She will be 13 in February, and can't realistically do "Charlotte's Web" and "Cat in the Hat" films forever.  This is a trail blazed by many actresses before her who transitioned into adult roles by portraying an abused youngster, Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, Jena Malone in Bastard Out of Carolina, Dominique Swain in Lolita (1997), Linda Blair in Born Innocent, etc.

These break-out roles are very common.  The last big one to make the news was probably the announcement that Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame will be appearing nude onstage in a production of Equus, a story about a young man who is carnally obsessed with horses.  Granted, Radcliffe is 17, but the motivation is probably the same.

Some might wonder why such a film has to be made at all, even if Fanning is in no way harmed during filming.  Personally, since I will never see it because of the subject matter, I can understand that sentiment as well.  This is the second movie this director has made about a young girl who is raped, and I suspect it's because she wants to raise awareness of child abuse.  From a Reuter's article:

..."Hounddog" is based on director Deborah Kampmeier's personal history, and she called the criticism of Fanning's decision to take the role an insult to the young actress.

"She should be applauded [for] the voice she has given to so many silenced women," Kampmeier said...

Okay, I'll applaud her, but I still don't like it.  But then, I guess I'm not supposed to.  I'll close with various quotes from the precocious Dakota Fanning herself who is angry about the criticism that has erupted over Hounddog.

From Fanning tells "Hounddog" critics she is mad (Reuters):
..."When it gets to the point of attacking my mother, my agent ... my teacher, who were all on the set that day, that started to make me mad," [...] "I can let other things go, but when people start to talk about my mother, like, that's really bad in my opinion ... that's an attack, and that's not fair. They hadn't seen the movie,"...

..."I loved the Elvis Presley story line. I loved the fact she's born of hard circumstances and is trying to survive those," Fanning said. "I like so many things about it that had nothing to do with being abused, or sexually abused."...

..."I'm going to be a freshman in high school in September, and I think it would be irresponsible of my parents not to let me know of things that happen and to try not to get yourself in uncomfortable situations," [...] "It's educational."...

From Online Petition Demands Arrest of Dakota Fanning's Mother and Agent (Cinematical.com):
..."You have to prepare your children for things that happen in the world. Everything isn't rosy."...

From Dakota Fanning: 'It's called acting' (CNN):
..."It's not a rape movie," [...] "That's not even the point of the film."...

..."It's not really happening," [...] "It's a movie, and it's called acting. I'm not going through anything. Cody and Isabelle aren't going through anything, their characters are." [...] "And for me, when it's done it's done," [...] "I don't even think about it anymore."...

What do you think?