Month: March 2004

British actor Sir Peter Ustinov has died.

I’ll bet there are some amazing productions of Hamlet in Heaven these days.

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A common criticism of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ is that, if the film itself is not anti-Semitic, it might well provide fuel for anti-Semites who want to believe that “the Jews” were primarily responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. I’m not sure how fair a criticism this is — I’m generally wary of blaming art for the actions of people who view it — but I do note at least one instance of it happening. It seems that a Shi’ite cleric in Kuwait wants the film to be exhibited, over that country’s ban on films that depict prophets (Muslims hold Jesus to be a prophet), because it exposes “the role of the Jews, the killers of prophets”.

Gibson has insisted that he intended no anti-Semitism in making this film, so I hope he condemns this blatant attempt by some to graft anti-Semitism onto his effort.

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PZ Myers offers up a charming story from his own life about how a single professor tormented him in his grad school days. I sometimes regret that I didn’t go to grad school…but not often. This kind of thing is the reason why; and since my father and sister are both in academia, I’ve heard many a story of this sort. I suspect that the combination of difficulty of subject matter — one has to be very smart to master enough of a subject to earn a doctorate — and tenure makes mean people delight in their freedom to be mean.

I’m reminded of a quote from an essay by philosopher Paul Feyerabend that I once read in which he bluntly stated that “Never before has the field of philosophy of science been dominated by so many creeps and incompetents”. (Not exact wording, but I don’t feel like digging for the exact quote.)

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OK folks, I’m providing the answers to the two book quizzes (here and here) in comments to this post. Feel free to peruse the quizzes, those who might have missed them. And the winning entry for the Grand Prize, the 2004 Humvee with gasoline provided for life, has sadly been disqualified because in each case the entrant gave twenty answers to quizzes that only had fifteen questions. Sad, really….

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Has anyone written anything, maybe a book or at least an article or two, about how Star Trek has shaped the course of technological development over the last few decades? I’m thinking of things like this:

:: We all remember the communicators from the original series, which Kirk and company would flip open and hold to their faces, walkie-talkie style. Current cell-phone design seems directly inspired by this, no? Will future iterations of cellular technology bring little badges you wear on your chest, Next Generation style?

:: On Star Trek, everyone would read things via computer pads. Today, Angie McKaig points out the parallel to reading on today’s PDAs and tablet PCs.

:: Finally, I’m wondering if people don’t expect the Net in general to function the way the library computer does on the Enterprise, in which crewmembers can apparently request nearly any work ever created. Remember the Next Generation episode in which Ryker, Worf and Data get stuck in a simulacrum of a ritzy hotel, created by aliens for a human astronaut who had crashed on their planet? (The guy was reading a copy of some really bad novel set in a ritzy hotel at the time of his crash, and the aliens took that novel as a guide for what human life was really like.)

Anyway, according to the episode, that novel was written three centuries before the adventures of the Enterprise-D, and it deservedly slipped into complete obscurity, but Captain Picard is able to call up its text on the Enterprise computer almost instantly. And that’s just one example; there were numerous other instances in The Next Generation when someone would take advantage of Data’s staggering reading speed and give him an order like, “Data, search through the entire Federation database for any mentions of one-eyed purple people-eaters”. And ten minutes later, he’d report back: “One hundred years ago, there was a single incident recorded on the planet MumboJumbo III….”

What I’m wondering is if we’ve come to expect the Net to be our version of Star Trek‘s library computer, and if some of the current copyright debate springs from the clash between what we want the Net to be versus what the Net really is, at least right now.

(Yes, this is just half-baked speculation. In fact, it’s not even half-baked — the oven’s not even done preheating.)

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I’m flummoxed by a couple of search engine queries that have recently steered a bit of traffic here. First — and I’m pretty sure I’ve commented on this before, and I have no idea why it’s happening again — are searches for people evidently wondering if the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Kevin McClatchy, is gay. Well, as a Pirates fan, I’m more interested in just when he’s planning to end the streak of consecutive losing seasons (currently 11, nearly certain to be 12 after this year) in which the Bucs are mired.

Second, in the last twenty-four hours I’m seeing a bunch of hits from people looking for info on the 9-11-01 Memorial Edition of that “Jenga” game. Lord, I hope such a thing does not exist. Not even my sense of humor, which is pretty dark at times, finds much to laugh about there.

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President Bush calls for “universal broadband” by 2007.

Of course, he doesn’t offer Suggestion One as exactly how to do this in just three years, but hey, he’s a “big picture” kind of guy. No doubt I’ll be able to use my spiffy new broadband connection in 2007 to keep up with all the activity in his “Colonize Mars” program.

(Hey, here’s a question. Why doesn’t he propose “Universal Employment” by 2007? Actually, I’m not sure I want an answer to that.)

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Jan Berry, of surf-music duo Jan & Dean fame, has died. The surfer stuff isn’t really my cup of tea — a little Beach Boys goes a long, long way, for me — but that’s still sad.

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Eight years after a contentious departure/firing, Sammy Hagar has rejoined Van Halen for an upcoming tour and possible recording. I’m not sure how much, if any, interesting new stuff Van Halen can bring to the table (especially after that album with Gary Cherone — yeeccchhh!), and I’m really not sure if Hagar’s voice these days is capable of producing the kinds of high notes that the best songs from his Van Halen output require, but I always liked the Sammy Hagar phase of the band’s history. (The David Lee Roth era was great, too; I tend to like both equally.)

I remember an interview with Hagar after his departure in 1998 in which he sadly noted that “I’ll never make music again as good as I did with those guys”, which seemed to me a refreshing bit of honesty, especially after David Lee Roth’s “Who needs them? I’ll be bigger than Jesus!” attitude after his original exit. I also thought it a good illustration of the idea that “Living well is the best revenge” when I saw Sammy on, of all things, an episode of Emeril Live! on the Food Network a few years later, in which he reported that since leaving the band he got a place in Mexico, on the beach, where he makes his own tequila.

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I’m not sure if this works, but I saw it over on Nathan Newman‘s blog, and I figured if I can help it along by linking it, why not. It’s a site that is nothing more than a gigantic collection of bogus e-mail addresses, intended to gum up spambots. Spam hasn’t been that big of an issue for me, especially since I switched to EarthLink as my primary ISP, but it’s still annoying.

(I do, though, have to grudgingly admit a bit of admiration for whoever generated one spam message that showed up in my Hotmail inbox yesterday. Like everyone else, I’ve watched as spammers come up with nifty spellings of sexual organs in order to get past the filters, such as “Ma.ke yer pen.!s b!ggur!” Anyway, as a lover of words, I have to be honest and admit that “Bulkify your member!” is a pretty clever construction.)

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