Films I've Seen Recently

Mini-reviews:

• Iron Man: Awesome!
• In Bruges: Amazing film – best I've seen in a while. Deeply dark, deeply moving, deeply funny. Not one for the kids.
• Indiana Jones and the Overly Silly Plot: Kinda silly. Enjoyable in the same kind of way as Pirates of the Caribbean 3 was – lots of over the top action sequences, not a lot else.
• War Inc.: I had high hopes for this one; and while there are some excellent moments of satire, it doesn't really work. There'll be an overly clever moment followed by an unexplainable slapstick moment. Not really clear what's going on half the time. Quite hard to watch all the way through (although it proves once again that John Cusack makes a great assassin, see the excellent Grosse Point Blanke – similar plot area and cast make this seem almost like a sequel).

Trailer for the Dark Knight is out too. Looks awesome!

The Way Back Machine

I used the Way Back Machine to look at one of my websites from the early noughties (BlueMind.co.uk). I think I was funnier back then, or at least weirder. Here's a snippet from the 'News' section (complete with bad grammar and random capitalisation &ndash I was only 17):

Evil Monkey's Plan Stopped
An Evil Monkey planning on taking over the world using mutant bananas was today arrested for being weird. It was discovered to be a reincarnated version of French musician (ha) Jean Michelle Jarr. This is even more confusing as Jarr is still alive. The Evil Monkeys plans were stopped when a greengrocer became suspicious of an evil looking talking monkey asking if they supplied Evil Mutant Bananas. The grocer quickly phoned the police who arrested the monkey on a charge of weirdness and looking evil. The Evil Monkey pleaded innocence at his court hearing but has been sent to prison for a silly amount of time, by a judge with a, no doubt, very silly name.

Food Glorious Food

Here's an interesting talk about how what we eat can effect the environment as well as our health. Brief summary: eat less junk food, eat less meat, eat more plants.

It has to be said that I've been eating a lot less meat since in the last few years: largely because it's cheaper. I could still cut it down though.

Doing What You Planned

So the plan this term was to get my act together and start my essays early on and to do all the reading for all the courses. Yet, in the end, I wrote all three of my essays in the last week and by the end of term I was skipping most of the reading.

Oh, and I bought an Xbox 360, which should arrive tomorrow, just in time for revision week.

Natural Selection

Yet again there is controversy over the teaching of evolution in America. It's not something I'll ever understand: evolution and religion do not contradict each other unless you take the bible totally literally. Which, of course, many people do. But then the majority of Americans cannot name the first book of the Bible or name the gospels. So statistically some of them have to be taking a book they know nothing about literally. Excellent.

But what interests me is the refusal of natural selection. It seems to me like natural selection is something like a necessary truth. It states that (glossing over any details) those animals that are best at surviving are more likely to survive (and hence go on to reproduce and pass on the genes for surviving). How can that be controversial?

Spam

I applaud the creator of this bit of spam (all done in text):

It shows creative effort (or the ability to use an ASCII image generator, but still...).

Word Limits

Most people don't like word limits on essays. But I find that most people don't like them because they tend to go over the world limit and then have to cut it down. I seem to be the opposite though: I struggle to hit the word limit. In one of the essays I'm handing in on Friday the only reason I hit the 3,000 word minimum is because I include footnotes in the count.

Does anyone else tend to go under word limits?

Best News Story Ever!

See here.

A man says that he gained an Australian accent after being raped by a wombat. Found guilty of wasting police time.

Worrying

My recent interest in the 2008 Presidential Election combined with my new found obsession with Yahoo! Answers has brought with it some worrying revelations. Maybe it says something about the politically sheltered life that I have led, but I'm really quite shocked about the amount of people living in the US who seem to think that there's nothing wrong with their country (and before I get accused of hypocrisy I realise that the UK ain't so great either – when the current government loses 50% of its seats in local elections something ain't right).

There are people who get upset when someone says that the acts of 9/11 may have been fostered by American Foreign Policy. There are people who don't see a problem with spending $22 billion a month on a war that was started under false pretences. There are people who don't seem worried by the fact that the country is in trillion dollar debt (the national debt is currently at about about $9,000,000,000,000 or $30,761 per person in the US) – that's an unfathomably ridiculous amount of money that the American public has to pay for at some point. The debt shot up with Bush senior, went down again with Clinton, and then shot back up with Bush junior. Notice a pattern? That's what tax cuts for the rich and pointless wars do. I've not even mentioned biofuels and the rest of the economy.

The war in Iraq is my favourite topic. A lot of people in America seem to think that not only was it a just war, but that it is still a good idea! It was originally started because of the threat of weapons of mass destruction from Iraq. Which were never found. Nothing even close. Possibly a camel with a grenade launcher. But of course, by the time this was discovered Iraq was already a mess.

The war was over after about 30 days. America is good at winning wars. But it sucks at peace. It's the peace that's been the problem in the last 5 years: when you invade a country you piss off a lot of people in that country. There was an arrogance in assuming that once they'd won the war America could put a democratic system in place and move on to North Korea.

And then today someone made the absurd claim that the US soldiers in Iraq are fighting for their country. This is only true in the most literal sense: they get told what to do by America. But they're not fighting for the American way. They're not fighting to save America from an immanent threat: you could pull all the troops out of Iraq tomorrow and America would be just as safe. They're fighting because America has the moral obligation to sort out the mess it made. But still some people think that the war was a good move and that it is still a good idea.

I think when you can say that a country was better off under the rule of the morally reprehensible Saddam Hussein than it is given America's actions – and I think you can say that – something has gone wrong.

This is my worry: John McCain has a "nothing's wrong" kind of view. This will appeal to those people who cannot face that fact that America is a very messed up country at the moment. But if America carries on down the road it's going it's not just going to affect Americans, it's going to affect the whole world. Worrying.

Not once in my life have I cared about the result of an election. But the US elections have changed that.

Real Life Dilbert

Someone asked this on Yahoo! Answers:

"If I have a multi-function printer, would copying papers be more ink-efficient than printing multiple copies?"

Made me chuckle.