Their DJs encourage motorists to hit cyclists (registration may be required–log in as plastic/plastic).
October, 2003 Monthly archive
I’m developing a website (don’t look yetok, you can look now) for my sister. She took some product shots, and asked how she should send them to me. I told her to get a Photo CD made from the negatives.
Now, Photo CD is a specific, high-quality format for storing photos digitally; it’s not just a CD with photos on it. She goes to Ritz Camera, gives them the film and asks for a Photo CD. Yes, by name. But apparently the Ritz halfwits knew better, and (as near as I can tell) scanned her prints on a dusty scanner that blew out all the highlights, and burned that onto a CD along with all kinds of Windows cruft. Ceçi n’est ce pas une Photo CD.
I’ve just received the Not-Photo CD. Her website is supposed to go live in two days. There’s obviously not enough time to redo it. The scans I’ve got are usable, but much lower quality than they would have been if I had gotten what I wanted.
In a mostly empty Alamo Drafthouse, I saw Candy Von Dewd last night, a movie made by my high-school friend Jacques.
The movie can be aptly described using one of the better lines in the movie:
Wow, he’s really fucking that plant!
The movie is trippy and pretty non-linear, with obvious references to Barbarella and perhaps-unintended references to Babylon 5: Crusade, among other things. Jacques himself mentioned to me “I’d
like to encourage people to see it the way 2001 was marketed, that is to say, see it high.”
Jacques was making amateur movies back in high school. He finished one project that was very gritty and down to earth–more like the 400 Blows than anything else. But he started on another (which I helped on, in a very minimal way) that had a lot in common with this. I got the impression that with Candy Von Dewd, he was sort of wrapping up something that had been in the back of his mind for half his life. Gwen got some ideas for her Halloween costume.
Bonus! Candy Von Dewd trading cards
Tomorrow night at 9:45, Alamo Drafthouse will be showing Candy Von Dewd, an underground science-fiction movie made by a good friend of mine from high school, Jacques Boyreau.
Be there.
A politically active religious zealot has publicly and repeatedly advocated the use of nuclear weapons against the U.S. government. Interestingly, he did so within American borders, and continues to walk around a free man.
One might expect him to be hustled off to Gitmo where he’d be fitted for an orange jumpsuit, but because this particular advocate of terrorism happens to be Pat Robertson, it’s not likely to happen.
Tim Bray comes up with a plan for spam that is similar to my previous idea–paying to send e-mail–but doesn’t require any architectural changes to the Internet.
His idea can be taken a step further: once you’ve established friendly communications with someone, you could set up your mail filters to accept unpaid e-mail from that person.
I’ve figured it out: Bill O’Reilly is Coach McGuirk.
A recent discussion on the Honyaku list about the reaction of Westerners to Japanese food led to some interesting observations that the trouble Westerners have with Japanese food is often just in the minds of Japanese, who accept as conventional wisdom that their cuisine is too unusual for outsiders to appreciate.
And it occurred to me: part of the “uniquely unique” self-image of Japan is alarmingly close to the “inscrutable Asian” stereotype outside of Japan. Some Japanese people just don’t realize how exposed Japan is to the rest of the world.
- Every few years, a particularly tactless Japanese politicians will say something outrageous, and then be bewildered when it generates an international shitstorm.
- In another life, when I was an English teacher in 長野県, I had adult students who were amazed to learn that Sony is known outside Japan, let alone being one of the best-known companies in the world.
Perhaps an aspect of being uniquely unique is being persistently provincial.