I've seen a few episodes of "Monster House". The concept is similar to "Monster Garage". A small team redecorates a perfectly good house into some sort of theme dwelling.

I'm curious if I'm the only one that feels a little uncomfortable watching this show. A family has signed away control of all aspects of the design and decoration. I'm sure they're expecting some sort of "Trading Spaces". A new rug and a paint job. What they get is bizarre. Huge motorized iron sculptures reminiscent of the Burning Man festival. Giant flame-throwing plaster idols that wouldn't be out of place in Disneyland.

Seriously. They cut huge holes in exterior walls and block them with sliding artwork. Have they never heard of wind or rain? I even saw one where they appeared to remove structural members from the roof while converting a house into something straight out of a Haiti-inspired acid trip.

What do these families get for their "15 minutes of fame"? As far as I can tell; a huge reduction in property values.

This is cool. There must be some kind of advertising thing going on in the neighbourhood. The doorbell keeps ringing. Every time I answer the door, some kid is offering me a big bag of candy. I think they must win something for giving the candy away, too. When I take it, they're so happy they walk away with tears in their eyes.

The Simpsons has officially run out of ideas. I just watched an episode that had no redeaming features. You could tell that they were struggling to come up with anything to animate.

One thing's for sure: I'm glad I don't like the Simpsons as much as Futurama. If I did, I'd have to buy the DVDs. There must be hundreds of them by now. That would get very expensive.

Hmm. The Simpsons was a little less lame than this post, though.

I can just imagine the conversation at Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe.

"There are these new things on the internet. They're called blogs."
"Interesting! Can we sue them for money? Oh, and what are they?"

So, in the interest of not being sued or fired because of something that shows up in my blog, I give you this (in all seriousness):

This blog site is a combination of fiction, speculation, satirical humour, and other forms of speech. Any similarity between the entries in this blog and any particular event, place, person or corporation is either because it is presented completely as satire, humour, or is purely coincidental and unintentional.

Any violations of copyright are also unintentional. Please contact the author if you feel such a violation has occurred.

All content (including but not limited to text, images, and sounds) is Copyright©2003,2004 Al Hunt, All Rights Reserved unless covered by other copyrights. Comments left in response to individual "blog" entries remain the property of the person who left them.

Questions about this copyright, permission to reproduce portions of the blog, or the blog in general can be sent directly to the author:



And now, back to our regularly scheduled fiction, speculation, and satirical humour.

I'm standing at the bus-stop today and I see a car pull into the drive-through lane of a nearby donut store. The car has one of those magnetic signs stuck to its door. The sign reads: Astronomically Clean!

Huh? What the hell is that supposed to mean? When you arrive at a house, you bring 2.5 billion helpers? Oh, oh... I know... you exclusively use Comet™ cleansers!

Here's a suggestion to potential small-business owners: if the English language is not your forte, look in a dictionary before you have your signs printed.

There you are standing out in the back yard and you happen to look up. You see an insignificant glow in the sky and think, "hmm". You then get back to whatever you happened to be doing.

What you just blew off as insignificant is that you happened to glance in the direction of M31 Andromeda. Some poor photon has been screaming across the universe at 670,616,629 miles per hour for the last 2,200,000 years and what do you do? You go and annihilate it by sticking your fucking eyeball in the way.

Bastard.

Q: Why do most elevators have a complete set of buttons on both sides of the door?

A: This ensures that no matter which direction the guy running for the same elevator is coming from... you are able to hide, push your floor, and push the close button without him knowing for-sure if you actually saw him or not.

Have you ever had one of those days where you wonder if you are the only person in the world that has a clue? A day where you stop wondering why the Draino™ people have to put "Not To Be Taken Internally" on the can. A day where you wonder if the aliens pushed the anal probe into the wrong end when they abducted the people on the other end of the phone. A day when you can feel the I.Q. being sucked from you just by standing next to someone you're trying very hard to tolerate. A day when you can't figure out what schools are used for any more, since they're obviously not educating the dipshits sitting behind you on the bus?

Good. I'd hate to think I was the only one who had days like that.

I just read this on the Winamp news site:

• Oct 22: Indie rocker Elliott Smith was found dead today by an apparently self-inflicted stab wound to the chest.

Now, ok, so I have no idea who Elliott Smith was but holy shit. Any guy that stabs himself in the chest seriously wants to shuffle off this mortal coil! Intense. I wonder who his so called friends were that they could let a guy get that far gone and not notice something was up.

Search Google News for Elliott Smith.

I had a strange dream last night. What it was about isn't of much interest, but it did remind me of a theory I have about sleep and dreaming.

I've always felt that sleep was required to lay down memories, and dreaming was a side effect of that process. During our waking hours I think that memories and experiences are stored in temporary memory (perhaps chemically). Without sleep, those memories and experiences are simply lost. We must sleep to allow a sort of image compression to take place.

When we sleep, our brain searches long term memory for similarities to what it finds in its "temporary memory". We experience this searching process as dreams. I feel this is why dreams usually have odd but recognizable ties to recent events. If the brain can find an existing long term memory that is a close match to one of the "temporary memories" it must store, it can expend far less energy simply by creating a link to an existing memory without laying down brand new long term storage. Of course, the link doesn't have to be to a complete memory. It could be a link to a feeling, emotion, smell or sound. By itself the link would be meaningless, but when grouped with all the others of the day, the new memory can be recalled as a complete impression.

This theory seems to be supported by a lot of observable evidence. For example, babies sleep far longer than adults. Babies must spend much more time laying down memories. They simply have no foundation of long-term memories to link to early in their lives. Elderly people often sleep less. Fewer experiences are new for them. Combine that with what is probably a reducing capacity to store links and memories and you end up with a memory compression process that takes far less time.

Memories certainly seem to be tightly linked. Recalling one even inevitably leads to recollection of others with some similarity. Memories are not played back as movies, but more like a collection of impressions, emotions and imagery with various levels of clarity.

Other experiences I've had personally also seem to fit. I knocked myself unconscious a few years ago while riding my mountain bike. I remember riding to the hospital, but I don't remember leaving the house to go riding in the first place. Also, from my school years I can also testify to the fact that sleep deprivation results in reduced performance and poor memories, as does an alcohol-induced stupor. All these things would seem to either erase the temporary memory directly (a concussion), interfere with the compression process (lack of sleep), or both (alcohol).

Why evolve the need to need sleep? I'm really treading theoretical waters now. I'm guessing that by the time we evolved to the point where complex memories were becoming beneficial, the general architecture of the brain was already in place. As our storage space increased, it was "too late" to simply evolve a set of separate and isolated memory storing capabilities (not to mention that our brains were no-doubt approaching the maximum size allowed by the birth canal). We had to make do with what we had. The same circuitry used to retrieve and process these memories during consciousness must be used to search and compress them during in sleep. If this process was to occur while we were awake our lives would be an insane jumble of the present and the past. Everything we experienced would result in a bewildering flood of old memories.

Just reading that last paragraph makes me wander if things like autism aren't a breakdown of exactly that process. There is some evidence that autism relates to an inability to properly process or filter the senses. Imagine trying to function if every touch, smell, and sound resulted in a rush of every other experience you'd ever had that was similar.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep.
And miles to go before I sleep.

-Robert Frost

Since I didn't have anything to say today, I spent a little time playing with Paint Shop Pro 8 instead. I added, to my eye at least, a little class in the shape of blog-entry icons. I have also added mini-icons that represent hyperlinks to off-site pictures () and audio ().

Blogger.com has a great deal of flexibility. If blogging holds my interest, I might even consider paying to upgrade so I can store my images on their server. The problem with the server I'm using for images is that it's from Shaw who, in my opinion, couldn't keep a web server running to save their life. The level of incompetence they show with their web servers is only exceeded by the lack of skill they show with their mail servers.

Oh. I guess I did have something to say today, after all.

My Battlestar Galactica DVDs have arrived. I've only watched the first DVD, but so-far-so-good.

The series consists of all 24 episodes of the original series on 6 double-sided DVDs. The DVDs are contained in one of those fold-flat cases like the Lord of the Rings or the Black Adder series comes in. That case is then stored in a bigger foam-filled box that has a 3D Silver Plastic Cylon head embossed on the front. Well, not exactly embossed. It goes further than that. It's more like a Halloween mask in size, but stamped from much thicker chromed plastic. It's actually pretty decent. Here, why don't I just post a quick photo of it.

If the first DVD is any indication, the transfer quality is very good and the sound is not bad at all. They have expanded the sound as best they can. It's definately contains more depth than the TV show. It's no Die Another Day, though (I found the sound in that incredible). They seem to have worked pretty hard to fill the DVD, too. There are plenty of extra scenes and a lot of different "Making of" segments and commentary voice-overs including many of the original cast.

Any Galactica fan would be happy with this.

I've also finished watching the rest of the Indiana Jones DVDs. I'm really happy with them. It was fun to see those movies again. The fourth disk contains the old "Making of..." featurettes that were released at about the same time as the original movies. They also have some interesting recent interviews with most of the primary cast and core crew.

Today has been a rotten day. It has also been the pinnacle of a rotten week. At least I hope it's the pinnacle. If the pinnacle is yet to come... No. I can't ponder that. I don't get paid enough for this. I'm sitting here at work loading and processing data. I'm doing this manually. I wouldn't be doing it at all if some other in-duh-viduals had completed their part of the bargain. It's supposed to be completely automatic.

I rant and feel better for having thusly ranted. Thank-you. Thank-you very much.

And now for something completely different. A man with three buttocks. No, wait. That's not it. It is, instead, a few links gleaned from the back of a recent copy of eWeek magazine:

• www.slashnot.com - A slashdot parody (of course)
• www.beam.to/fullofshat - The temple of all things William Fucking Shatner
• Dilbert - Just because I got to use the term in-duh-vidual in context
• WilWheaton.net - Just because I got to use the name William Fucking Shatner in context

At least you can do something fun, even if I can't. Well, I guess doing a blog entry is sort of fun, but let's say it's not so I can still charge overtime.

Edit: It's now 9:25 PM and I'm still here... but there is one small up note. This guy made it on this list just as I'd hoped in an earlier blog entry!

My Indiana Jones DVDs arrived yesterday. I've only watched the first one so far, but I'm very pleased. I'm no DVD connoisseur, but to me the sound is excellent and the transfer quality is as good or better than my other DVDs.

I was a little worried that they would digitally enhance molest them a bit. There are some scenes in them that would simply be digitally corrected today. Temple of Doom fans will remember the truck that rolls over and clearly shows the wooden post used to flip it, or the scene near the end where Belloq eats a fly that lands on his lip. I remember those little flaws with nostalgia and am glad to see they're still there.

When I read of the changes they made to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (they digitally replaced the guns with flashlights), it struck me as a little too Orwellian for my taste. Don't get me wrong, though. I love good CGI and all the extras they put on DVDs. I just think you can go too far. Adding new scenes to better illustrate the director's vision (a la Star Wars) can be good. Changing a movie to suit the morals of the time (a la E.T.) will always be bad.

Flipping through channels while fighting insomnia, I happened across a biography of an artist called Vik Muniz. He's apparently very well known (though, obviously, not to me). Some of the things he said struck my tired mind as very profound so I'll paraphrase them as best I can from memory.

• I love books. Here's one from 1632. This book was written before people could read.
• Then there are these plantation kids that pick the beans. So, I'm sitting in Jamaica drinking coffee and I think, "I'm drinking these kids' childhood."
• I used chocolate as a painting medium for a while. Hershey's is terrible. It's too runny. Bosco. It's like they designed it for artists. You have to use Bosco.
• Yes, I think this is where I used to live. Pretty sure. They've changed it. My memory of it is gone and now the original is different, so it doesn't exist any more.
• So I painted the portraits the way they do in magazines. You know: with different size dots. Then I blew them up so they were huge. If you were close you couldn't tell what they were. I like the thought that people were running back away from the paintings in order to get closer to them.

Surprisingly, there isn't too much on the 'net about him. I couldn't find any examples of his photographs of wire sculptures (cool), or his landscape photographs made from string (even cooler).

While I'm on the subject of art; here are a few more links:

• Des Edwards - A bit biased here; he's my Uncle. I love his landscapes.
• Alex Coleville - Has always been my favourite artist. Particularly his painting "Horse and Train".
• West Coast Native Art - I grew up in Kitimat, and a love for the art of the area is one of the things I took away from there.

retroCRUSH is currently running a piece on The 100 Scariest Movie Moments of All Time. They're sure getting the list right, too. Just reading through it is making the hair on the back of my neck stand up. My vote would be for this guy (the "Zuni Fetish Doll") from Trilogy of Terror.

It's somehow reassuring to see I wasn't the only child traumatized by the Elephants on Parade scene in Dumbo. Now, if I could just stop waking up screaming about those Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp. Shudder.

Look what is finally coming out on DVD: Battlestar Galactica!

With this addition, my collection of delightfully schlocky 70's and 80's science-fiction TV serials grows ever larger. Now, if they'd only release The Six Million Dollar Man, and Buck Rogers in the Twenty-fifth Century.

Another great serial I remember from my childhood in England is The Tomorrow People. I still get vivid flashbacks when I hear the theme music. The English have a way of producing serials and soap-operas that break all the records for duration, so I wouldn't be surprised if they're still making episodes.

By your command!

I've just finished watching Alien³ again. The first time I watched it, I didn't like it. This time around, however, I really enjoyed it.

What changed? I think the first time I saw it I was disappointed that Ripley's entire struggle in Aliens was essentially invalidated. That frustrated me, and ensured that I wouldn't really give the movie a chance. This time around I didn't let the opening scenes bother me, and allowed the movie to stand on its own right.

So if like me you disliked Alien³, ignore the opening scenes and give it another chance. I found it to be an excellent character study of both Ripley and the prison inmates.

Ok. I admit it. I've been watching reality TV.

Spike TV is running a show called Joe Schmoe at the moment. The last episode is on October 28^th (I think), so I'd be willing to bet that they'll be running all of the early episodes next week. Catch them if you can.

The show groups about half-a-dozen folks into a luxurious house to experience The Lap of Luxury. The typical voting sessions whittle down the contestants until one remains. The last person standing wins USD$100,000.

The hook? All of the contestants are actors except for one... Joe Schmoe (Matt Kennedy).

The actors are brilliant (particularly Hutch), and it's very funny watching them interact with Matt. It's also funny watching Matt miss what should be very obvious clues to what is going on. As with anyone in his position, it just doesn't enter his mind that a TV show would be built around him and him alone, so all the evidence passes right by him unnoticed.

Another show I'm enjoying, despite my best efforts to the contrary, is the latest run of Survivor. It's the same as all the others, so I won't go in to detail. Sufficed to say that one team was absolutely slaughtering the other. It was hilarious to watch one team being crushed by overwhelmingly bad morale and starvation, while the other was sunning themselves as if on a Jamaican holiday.

Until recently I kept my DVD library on IMDB by using its My Movies feature. It's a great service, but it is private. You can't show someone else your DVD library since they would have to log in using your IMDB account.

Someone on the IMDB message boards recommended Guzzlefish.com and I'm hooked (no pun intended).

It's a very solid site that lets you mark your collection as public if you want others to be able to view it.

The same site allows you to catalogue your PC/console games, but I don't personally use that feature. There is also talk of new features coming down the pike such as loan tracking so you know who has your DVDs, and collection comparisons that will tell you what other users have collections similar to your own.

I highly recommend it. Be sure to check out the "Movies - UPC" entry method that allows you to add movies to your collection very rapidly by typing in the UPC codes from the DVD box!