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OBEY
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: WTF
- Hits: 415
An absolutely terrible book from the "Standin' Tall with Obedience" series by Janeen Brady. Link courtesy of Popkin, Via Boing Boing.
Now, I actually gave this a listen - far more than I should have - and I can't help but think that Ms. Brady's next series should have been titled "Can you keep a secret?", I mean, this is exactly the sort of drivel that you would expect a ambitious church leader would indoctrinate his flock with...
It might not be so bad (it would, who am I kidding?) if it followed on the heels of "Reasonable Boundaries" or "Please don't touch me there...", but it doesn't...
Who thought this was a good idea to publish? And - really - it's one thing to look at it and cringe, quite another to think children might watch and take it seriously. Or adults might make them watch it, and I would be soooo mistrustful of any family or church that had this on the shelf...
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAMhzwaskuo&list=OLAK5uy_lt5NEDkB0xlV6rI_qjIa07bRJN_Ad4p_0
I've been Scooped!!
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 720
Plagiarized! Copyright Infringement!
So, random thoughts, googled "Six-Pack of Gerbils". Which is my phrase, I've used it for years, and then posted it on my blog here http://rodboyle.com/index.php/78-creative/3137-a-six-pack-of-gerbils to ensure that it was correctly attributed to myself.
Before posting I of course - like a lot of ideas - searched google for. And it didn't exist.
Now, googling it I find it has a full 7 results - AND NONE OF THEM ARE MINE!!!
Bloody hell.
Makes me wonder how much else has been lifted here...All that struggle for original expression, scraped to bulk up some other websites content and search results.
Well, at least it's not being used by Pet-Smart, which would lead to a long and costly litigation...
Geostorm
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 512
Now, I mean, really, how to review this? I knew damn well what I was getting into, wanted something stupid and sat down and watched something stupid.
So no complaining. Instead I'm going to go on about the rabbit hole of fucking "Facebook Watch", which is collection of clips of highly-pitched squeaky voiced actors in largely B movies - clips with titles like "You don't bully this man/'s kid, wife, brother, sister..." etc. Dumb highlight reels from dumb movies, but - if you edit it right you can take a two-minute clip of any film and make it appear interesting. Clint Eastwood AND Burt Reynolds in a cop-buddy movie? I have to see THAT!
So, wasting time on Facebook and I find this disaster movie clip - it opens with UN people in blue vests coming upon a flash-frozen Afghan village - where the occupants have been frozen solid where they stand - a man breaks an arm off of one and recoils in horror. Cut to a giant tidal wave bearing down on a crowded beach that freezes midway while the beachgoers flee in terror - only to be frozen as well. More scenes like this. And the clip is framed with all this Vietnamese writing so I'm curious - a good foreign disaster/apocalyptic film, why not, and I begin to search for it. Start with the comments, only - they're all in Vietnamese, so on Bumblefuck Laptop I'm trying to get a title from google translate only it takes forever and 2.5 million comments is roughly 2.499.999 more comments than my cruddy memory will hold, but I'm getting there, I'm a proper internet sleuth...
The question - in Vietnamese - that prompts the comments - is "What would you do if the end of the world..." or something like that, and all the comments translate to something like "I would cuddle my family/dog" or "Humanity deserves this for the way we've treated mother earth" and all sorts of other dross. A lot of dross. So I keep scrolling, and I find a few possible titles like "Mega-Earth-Storm", and search for that, to no avail, and then again "Magnetic-Earth-Catastrophe" and I search that, nothing, and I keep searching and finding dumb-ass end of the world movies but not this one...
The rarity of this foreign cinematic gem is making it all the more precious, god-damn I need to see it!!!
By this point it's obvious my curiosity has gotten the better of me, I know damn well from the clip it's a dumb-ass movie, but I want to know what it is Goddamnit!!!!
Eventually - some 45 minutes later - I find it. Not a dumb-ass foreign disaster film, but a perfectly dumb ass American one that somehow I'd never heard of. For good reason.
But - 45 minutes in I'm doubling down on my stupidity and now I have to watch it. And - I can assure you - absolutely no plot twists or surprises. Blessedly vacuous.
I really have to quit Facebook...
The Luminiferous Aether
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 569
Largely (but - not necessarily "Entirely") disproven by the Michelson-Morley experiment, the Luminiferous Aether was postulated to be the medium that permeated space and allowed electromagnetic waves and light to propagate across a vacuum.
Now - while we of course reject the earlier theories that - for example - the stars and planets are candles or lights hung up in crystalline spheres - we might have been I think a little hasty getting rid of this one. Call it intuition.
Links:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether
While light can explain it's propagation by being both a particle and a wave - and electro-magnetic waves are explained away using "fields", it does seem that we have replaced the Aether with the term "Space", invented dark matter and a variety of other constants and equations to explain away - never satisfactorily - our relation to both space and neighboring celestial bodies. While the theory of relativity has held up for this long - the presence of an Aether, or medium - which slowed it down, or capped it's speed, would go a long ways towards overcoming it. Certainly the abundance of other planets, stars, celestial bodies in general suggests there must be some reasonable means for us to communicate - or traverse the voids - to them. Accepting the speed of light as an upper bound to the speed of our travels is not a particularly attractive option.
Anyways, the things that get me thinking far too early and never with enough coffee...
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