After Fritz's Last Post...

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!!!!!

The meme that will never die.

Back to the Caber Toss for ESPN?

When ESPN first came on the air I was a young and naive to the subtleties of "World Sport." Thankfully ESPN was there to give me my first taste of Australian Rules Football, Curling, Logging Competitions, and the awe-inspiring Caber Toss. That changed over time and now ESPN is "the sports channel of record" with a family of channels so massive that the movie Dodgeball parodied them by having a channel called ESPN 8 -- The Ocho! Funny thing was "8" wasn't that far from the truth.

But recent changes might mean a return to obscurity for ESPN. Sure they have rights to Monday Night Football in the near future, but in the aftermath of a successful broadcast of the Tour d'France Comcast's OLN is stepping into the ring of major sports broadcasting. Their first acquisition was rights to NHL games, a relatively easy task with the success of NHL on TV being what it is. Now it looks like OLN has their sights on the cable rights to MLB as well.

Personally, I see this as a winning situation for me in that I hope that OLN will hire better commentators than ESPN when covering baseball. Just because a player is in the Hall of Fame doesn't mean he can talk about baseball.

Who knows...maybe I will learn the mysteries of County Cricket on ESPN. At minimum I expect and expansion of their ESPN manufactured X-Sports.

Life and Death Behind Bars

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has posted a report on Suicide and Homicide in State Prisons and Local Jails. Some of the key facts regarding this topic can be seen here. The overall homicide rate can be seen here for comparison. The suicide rate information, for the United States in General, can be found at the WHO site. The WHO site only list 1999 and doesn't do comparisons, but you can compare the rate to 1999 in prisons and jails.

Needless to say, suicide rates are higher in jails than in the general populace.

Huffington Post Reporting April's News In August

Back on April 28th, I posted Rethinking My Shatner Fetish in response to comments made by Canadian law enforcement officers and their observations that child molesters seem to be Star Trek fans.

Not wanting to miss out on this wonderfully topical discussion, Ellen Ladowsky posted her observations at the Huffington Post on August 18th. To be fair Ladowsky goes into far more detail than my earlier, pithy, post. She has obviously gone back and watched all of the original series episodes, but given her "keen" observations one would have been willing to wait longer so she could incorporate references from Next Generation, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, or even Enterprise.

It really is too bad that she rushed this article to the presses to meet deadlines.

Thanks extended to Mickey Kaus for the heads up.

Google Tools

I am a big google fan and thought that I would share some of the new "offerings" from google.

First, there is what I call Google Who Needs Stinkin' Peer Review When Random Idiot on the Internet Can Evaluate Your Scholarship

Second, is what I like to call Google Copyright Violation

These are extraorninarily useful tools. The scholar tool collects academic papers, but without the aid of informed editorial selection. The "print" tool provides full text scans of books. You know ones that came out last week.

Want to read On Tyranny by Leo Strauss? You could before a recent law suit. There are currently restricted pages, but google is fighting that. All from your computer screen. Sure printing is irritating, but possible.

Oh, and if you want a gmail account...let me know in the comments section.

There's a whole new world out there...Food Blogging.

Since I know Caryn and since all of the photographs on her sight make me feel like I am starving to death (even though I just ate), I present without further ado...

Delicious! Delicious!

Neil Gaiman and Beowulf

Famed was this Beowulf far flew the boast of him,
son of Scyld, in the Scandian lands.

So goes part of the description of Beowulf in the Prologue to the famous poem, one of the great fantasy epics of all time. But an epic which has had many adaptations.

From the much lauded Grendel which views the myth through the eyes of a Nihilistic "monster" (it also represents Beowulf as a crazed figure, see the comments adapted from Scruton regarding Superheroes below), to the much anticipated (at least by me) boardgame there have been worthy adaptations. But there have also been less successful ones. While I enjoyed The Thirteenth Warrior (and the book version Eaters of the Dead), most critics and audiences found it disappointing, but it was nowhere near as disappointing as the Christopher Lambert version. Come to think of it...not much that Christopher Lambert has been in is worth watching (excepting of course Highlander the first one, and Greystoke). Especially horrifying were Gunmen and Highlander II (even the "Renegade Edition"). Planet Zeist? Pfewy!

Robert Zemeckis, director of the Back to the Future films and Castaway, is working on a new adaptation of the film and according to ICV2 and Variety the screenplay by Neil Gaiman has been Greenlighted (greenlit?).

I have two central concerns with the project.

Unlocked Wordhoard and The Lemmings Were Pushed share one of my concerns. DKP at Lemmings is concerned with how the "motion capture" will look, and Wordhoard thought it was enough of a concern to link it. I too share in this concern. Motion capture can work well, like Gollum in LotR, but it can also really freak you out, like it did in Zemeckis' own Polar Express. But I have high hopes for this one in regards to special EFX.

My second concern is with the use of Neil Gaiman as a writer. I like Gaiman, I own a lot of Sandman comics to prove it, but he can be a little pretentious at times. Let me rephrase that. He can be way too pretentious some times. No...wait. He IS extraordinarily pretentious. Did you read American Gods? Give me Manly Wade Wellman anyday! (Though to be honest I did like American Gods, but only the really pretentious part of me.) So I worry that the film, if Gaiman had creative control, might not be accessible to large audiences, but that worry is largely diminished because Zemeckis (the director of Used Cars and Romancing the Stone) is the opposite of pretentious. But then again...there is that Polar Express thing. But then he did come up with the story for Bordello of Blood, so who am I to say who is pretentious?