October, 2003 · TangleBones

Showing what you’ve got in 30 seconds

As seen on Yosha’s site, there’s a new cre­ative con­test on the web. Instead of slog­ging away at a whole fea­ture film, why not take a crack at a com­mer­cial? Con­ser­v­a­tives need not apply for: Bush in 30 Sec­onds. Any­body wanna loan me a camera?

Where have all the fun artists gone?

UK Graf­fiti dar­ling Banksy decided that having his art selected by a cura­tor would prob­a­bly be boring. So, he cut out the middle man to get his work hang­ing in the Tate. Nice. For those that don’t like graf­fiti, lighten up - it’s just paint.

Closer to home

Jared

Kellie and I went to Jared’s school last Tues­day to dis­cuss his IEP. We met with his reg­u­lar teacher, the speech ther­a­pist, the vice prin­ci­pal, the in-​home coor­di­na­tor, and some other woman that I wasn’t intro­duced to.

On the one hand, it was absolutely depress­ing to real­ize that your three-year-old’s goals for the next year are saying “bye-bye” and learn­ing to hang up his coat.

On the other, it was incred­i­bly encour­ag­ing. All of his teach­ers love him. All of his teach­ers are amazed by his progress. In fact, his main teacher said that she didn’t think he’d need any med­ica­tion to stay on task. Six months ago she was telling us that we had to get him to a psy­chi­a­trist as soon as pos­si­ble. His vocab­u­lary is sky-​rocketing, and he’s going from one-​word state­ments with empha­sis (”Cat.” “Cat?” “CAT!”) to seman­tic phras­ings (”Daddy’s shoes”).

So I guess it was a mixed bag. I’m trying to stay upbeat about the whole thing, but it’s hard. If Jared weren’t such an incred­i­ble boy, I don’t think I could stand it.

Bob

We got rid of our cat the other day. The con­flict between Jared and Bob had been esca­lat­ing for a few weeks and even though it doesn’t seem to bother either of them, we decided that:

• we couldn’t send Jared to school with any more scratches, and
• if Jared gets any heav­ier or stronger, he’ll kill Bob.

You see, Bob isn’t a mean cat. He’s sweet and loving and, evi­dently, a great step­ping stool for those hard-​to-​reach light switches. But like any cat, you can only kick him out of your way, knock him off of a table and step on his belly so many times before you get scratched. And since I couldn’t teach Jared that Bob had feel­ings (or his sister, for that matter), I couldn’t get him to leave Bob alone.

So Bob is at the Annapo­lis SPCA. If you’re in the area and look­ing for a talk­a­tive, active, beau­ti­ful cat, ask for Bob. He was neutered when he got there, so don’t let them charge you for that.

It looks like I’m not getting that sports car after all

The Beeb reports that there is ‘no health benefit’ from prayer. This would explain a lot of things about my life:

1. Dri­ving a mini-​van instead of a sports car
2. No visits to mars
3. No flying car
4. Angelina mar­ried twice, but never to me
5. Still no job at ILM
6. My con­tin­ued lack of telekinesis

A solution to Comment Spam

I haven’t tried James Seng’s Bayesian filter for MT yet, but it looks like a winner. Hope­fully this will solve all of our prob­lems and put to rest any fears that com­ment spam is unblockable.

For those not clued in to Bayesian Fil­ter­ing yet, it’s an old (as in 1764 old) math­e­mat­i­cal tech­nique that rose to pop­u­lar­ity as a way of deal­ing with spam in the last year or so. It’s now a part of most of the spam block­ing tools out there, and of course Mozilla Thun­der­bird does it. Why should you care? Because it learns what you think is spam and deletes it for you. Not too shabby.

I haven’t installed MT-​Bayesian yet, as I’ve only gotten two com­ment spams, and the com­ments around here aren’t 2 fast or 2 furi­ous. That and I can never tell if a given com­ment might just be my wife giving me a very per­sonal hint.

A night out with a pretty girl and a fat guy

My wife and I went out Friday night to Johns Hopkins’ Shriver Hall to hear polit­i­cal activist, doc­u­men­tary film­maker and best-​selling author, Michael Moore. About 5,000 people showed up which is 4,000 more than the little audi­to­rium could hold, so Michael spent the first half hour talk­ing to folks out on the lawn while the early arrivers like us sat watch­ing clips from TV Nation and The Awful Truth.

When Mike finally came out, he gave a pretty good pre­sen­ta­tion: a read­ing from his book, a test to see whether Amer­i­cans knew who the prime min­is­ter of Canada is (not Jean Pou­tine), and some Q&A. Kellie and I bought a copy of his latest book, Dude, Where’s My Coun­try but the line to get auto­graphs was really long, so we went home. A pretty good night, all things con­sid­ered, and com­pletely free since we neglected to stop for dinner.

Rush to seek help

Well, I’m sure you’ve all heard the news: Lim­baugh con­fessed. I wouldn’t even blog about it since it’s such and obvi­ous thing for me to do. I mean, you’re all think­ing to your­selves, “Of course Jemal has to jump on Rush for his hypocrisy and weakness.” But the truth is that I feel com­pelled to say that I really hope he recovers.

Oh, not from the drug addic­tion. I hope he goes to his grave a crazy, deaf, crack­head. I just want him to recover from his addic­tions to lying and bul­ly­ing. I mean, you get what you deserve. And now, a musi­cal interlude:

Instant Karma’s gonna get you
Gonna look you right in the face
You better get your­self together darlin’
Join the human race

Brad doesn’t suck

You know all those small time artists the inter­net is sup­posed to be inspir­ing to release their own music? You know how it’s going to change the way music is pro­duced and put the evil record com­pa­nies out of busi­ness? You know how that’s all start­ing to seem like a pipe dream? Well put down the pipe and down­load a couple tracks of Brad Sucks. You’ll thank me for it.

Hat tip to A Whole Lotta Noth­ing for the scoop.

Action Transvestite Time Lord

BBC NEWS | Enter­tain­ment | Comic Izzard tipped as new Dr Who

Cross-​dressing come­dian Eddie Izzard is to be the new Dr Who, accord­ing to a former star of the sci-​fi series.

I’m too con­fused to know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Go ask the guys at SlashDot.

Maybe they should ask Uday and Qusay - oh wait, never mind

Mother Jones has a good piece on the hunt for WMD in Iraq cob­bled together from the wire ser­vices. It seems that while David Kay and his 1,200 inspec­tors haven’t actu­ally found any­thing incrim­i­nat­ing, they want another $600 mil­lion to look for it. Am I the only one who would rather see that money going to restore power in Bagh­dad or fight malaria or something?

[The better ques­tion is what I'm doing read­ing such an incred­i­bly lib­eral rag. Well, I fig­ured I should check up on my old favorite mag­a­zine, since I'm read­ing Eric Alterman's What Lib­eral Media? The Truth about BIAS and the News, gen­er­ously loaned to me by my loving father. I'm, of course, in total agree­ment with Eric, but then again, much like some moronic ditto-​head read­ing Lim­baugh's latest Vicodin-​inspired rant, I'm pre­dis­posed to do so. I bought a copy of MoJo the other night and started check­ing their web page, only to find out that my par­ents are giving me a sub­scrip­tion to Newsweek, or as my idiot co-​worker says, "New-​Speak ha ha ha". Did I men­tion that my parent's are generous?]

Per­son­ally, I’ve really been hoping that they’d find some banned weapons in Iraq. Call me naive, but I really like to have faith in my lead­ers, even when they’re weasels. Call me crazy, but I like to look for the best in Shrub­bery. Err, people. I sup­pose Saddam’s sons would have known where some of that stuff was, but with the guns blaz­ing, “bring ‘em on” men­tal­ity of the pres­i­dent, there’s no point in asking them anymore.

What do you all think? Are there hidden weapons? Will we ever find them? And if you’ve got a Ouija board, ask the Hus­sein boys for me.