Wired magazine has a pretty interesting article about the Passion of the Flying Spaghetti Monster online right now, it mentions the upcoming Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster book (expected in March) and has a

short interview with Bobby Henderson wherein he mentions that proceeds from the book and Venganza website are funding the construction of a pirate ship!

I want to take a vacation on the Pastafarian Pirate Ship! Ahoy me lasses, would you like to storm the tropics with me?

Random web surfing last night led me to the Studio Ghibli website, and it looks to me like they may be working on an Anime version of Ursula K. LeGuin's wonderful Earthsea Trilogy, or parts of it (my Japanese is rusty). The author has nothing about Ghibli on her website as of this writing, but this could be really, really cool. The Sci-Fi channel's miniseries on Earthsea was horrible, but Miyazaki's crew at Ghibli might be able to do this story some justice.



The flash based background on their website certainly looks promising! At first I asked myself why they'd use Flash for a simple background, but resizing the browser window makes the reason obvious, very cool.

Does anyone know more about a potential Anime version of Earthsea? I can read that something is happening in July of 2006, but not a lot more.

Update: Twitchfilm.net has a discussion about the Ghibli project, it is apparently Hayao Miyazaki's son Goro who is pushing the project, and it is probably going to be interesting, but may get mangled too. Reading a bit deeper on Ursula LeGuin's website, it appears she may no longer have control over the film rights to Earthsea, which would be very sad.

There has been a lot of hoopla raised by the usual goof-ball rabble rousers (mostly that coward Bill O'Reilly over at Faux-News and the so-called American Family Association) about some supposed war on Christmas. At first I thought this was some sort of joke, and that the goof-balls were just ranting out of sheer spite, but I see Neely Tucker has an excellent article about this in the Washington Post. Be sure to read it to the end, it is very interesting.

Basically I think Neely has this pegged on the nose:

1. many Americans are concerned about the over commercialization of Christmas
   
2. most Americans are not concerned about wether a store has "Happy Holidays" or "Merry Christmas" on their posters
   
3. most healthy Christians are not offended by the phrase "Happy Holidays"
   
4. most non-Christians are not offended by the phrase "Merry Christmas"
   
5. the few people who are concerned, are really more concerned that they no longer control the public holiday, the family, the social compact, and the center stage than they are about the true meaning of Christmas
   
6. the last week of December is probably not the anniversary of the birth of Jesus, that is more likely to be sometime in September, though we probably will never know
   
7. the last week of December is the proper time to celebrate many holidays, but especially Yule and Saturnalia, so let the parties begin!

The date many Americans celebrate as Christmas was first set in 395 by an early Christian Church that desperately wanted more converts. They figured that by setting a major Christian holiday amid the widely popular pagan celebration of Saturnalia, conversion would be easier for them to attract converts. It also coincided with the traditional Northern European celebration of Yule, which has to do more with the darkest days following winter solstice. Puritans did not celebrate Christmas because they were horrified by the free use of clearly pagan symbols (holly, drinking heavily, gift exchange).

Saturday sutragirl and I went to three holiday parties. We started at Bruce and Beth Roemmelt's Holiday/post-Campaign party where we ran into a lot of the Prince William County Democrats and had a great time. One of the strange and interesting surprises was the number of politically active Democratic organizers who are, or used to be, in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) or who were otherwise interested in living history.

We ran into most of La Belle Company and many more active and former SCA members at yorkshirelad and melaniesuzanne's party. Ran into kfitzwarin for the first time in years (I have always had a crush on her), and her new (to me) and very cool husband. The hosts for this party have a fabulous apartment, and it was decorated beautifully. Sadly, we did not stay long enough because we wanted to spend some time at sutragirl's work party.

We finished Saturday evening at the Marine Scene party over at Tom and Tina's beautiful place, where their neighbors had re-positioned their decorative deer. Fajitas were awesome and much tequila was enjoyed, and the folks at Marine Scene play a pretty cut-throat white elephant gift exchange where a bottle of Patron was stolen 4 times after it was opened!

Sunday we had the monthly La Belle Company meeting and maille tailoring workshop. Tom showed off his fabulous new Landgraf long sword from Albion. After the meeting, a few of us stopped by Steve and Nadyne's annual holiday gathering where we got to see how much Katherine, Helen, and Gordon have grown! Yet more current and former SCA friends (there is a bit of a theme here, but I have not figured it out yet). Insert usual medieval martial arts discussion and study of fight books (Fiore, Talhoffer, etc.) as you will.

A few months ago I volunteered 2 hours of my time as a computer geek to a charity auction, and lovely L.G. won the auction. So Saturday morning found me helping her with her IBM Thinkpad A20m (P3 @700MHz, 256MB, 40GB, XGA, Win2000 Pro). I found myself impressed with the hardware, that this laptop made in 2000 was still running strong and quite useable after 5 years of use and abuse. That is remarkable for a Wintel box. While I am still using my 9 year old SGI O2, and 7 year old Macs, typically a Wintel clone is useless after 3 years. So this old A20m is remarkable, for it's hardware.



Windows 2000 Professional is another story. As usual with Windows(tm), there is no security at all, so L.G.'s browser (MS Internet Explorer) had been completely hijacked by some weather toolbar that kept over-writing her registry. McAfee, Ad-Aware, and Spybot S&D were all finding this annoying application and deleting it, but it kept re-appearing through IE every time we rebooted. I suspect we'll have to back up her data, re-install Windows, then restore only certain files. It is incomprehensible that people are not taking legal action against the companies that make this software that effectively steals their computer.

We had to settle for installing Firefox and Opera, and showing L.G. how to use them instead of MSIE, then installing ZoneAlarm, Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, and updating her commercial copy of McAfee VirusScan (thanks AOL - best thing you've ever done for your members); and showing her how to boot safe mode and use McAfee, Ad-Aware, and Spybot from safe-mode. We also installed VideoLan because WMP and RealPlayer are both spyware of a sort too. I'll be investigating how to cheaply upgrade to more memory and an external backup drive for her. I am so glad I no longer waste my time with Microsoft's miserable excuse for an operating system, how frustrating. Updated (12/20) research is that she can get up to 512MB (two sticks of 256MB PC100 SODIMM 144pin) for about $96 and an external backup drive (40GB EZ Backit Pro) for $89.

Really large flakes of snow just started to fall outside my home office window here near Gilbert's corners. It is very pretty, but I supposed I'll have to drive in through this and that will be less than fun.

The Washington Post is hosting a new service online, you can now track the voting record of your elected U.S. officials (Congress and Senate) at this marvelous new site. This is awesome because it makes it trivially easy to track how effectively your elected official is actually representing you to your government. Step up to the plate, and learn how your own representative or senator is voting on your favorite issues.

Every time you hear about something the government is doing, go check to see if your representative voted the way you wanted them to. Write to them either way, with a thank you if they voted well, and with a firm statement that you don't approve if they voted for someone else's interests and not your own. Trust me, others are doing this all the time. If you don't only that rarest of politician, the honest one with integrity will actually consider the needs of all before he or she votes on a bill.

Many thanks to Brian Patton for pointing out the new web service in his excellent blog.

I am pleasantly surprised that Aeon Flux turned out to be pretty good. Pleasant, fun, and fast; a decent adaptation with surprisingly good dialogue. Marton Csokas really shines as Trevor Goodchild, and both Charlize Theron (Aeon Flux) and Sophie Okonedo (Sithandra) are very watch-able throughout the flick. Plenty of eye-candy for the tight-fitting clothing fans, and just enough special effects and stunt work (ok, perhaps a little too much), but not overwhelming.

Erci's one complaint is that it was not as dark as the MTV Anime series, and I'd have to agree. They may have put too much effort into trying to maintain the Anime feel to it (the colors lacked depth and subtlety in tones - just like a comic book, just like the MTV series). One thing I did not like about the MTV series - was how waif thin everyone was - and that mostly remains the same in the movie. The movie actually has a plot (something the series mostly didn't) and perhaps a message about nature versus human control, maybe. The real gem is Mr. Csokas' acting though - I know I have seen his face before but am having trouble placing it. Perhaps it was The Bourne Supremacy or The Fellowship of the Ring, though he was not a major character in either. Worth a matinee price.

I am not usually a big Will Ferrell fan, but his recent jabs at the current occupant of the oval office are hysterically funny and dead on the money! Check out this clip from DevilDucky.com for a really good example of why so many of us can't take the president seriously.

Normally I find myself grumpy about the rampant over commercialization of the American Christmas season. I usually resent the constant bombardment of shopping catalogs (our recycle bin has been full every week for a month), the pervasive Christmas decorations in storefronts as early as September every year (WTF?), and the dependence the retail sector of the economy has on just a few months of shopping every year.

Bah Humbug.

I usually tell people not to buy me anything, and only to give things to me that they made themselves.

This year I don't feel so grumpy about it, and I am not sure why.

I still feel that people who carry any debt at all other than a mortgage on their home and a car loan should not be buying holiday gifts for others. If you owe your bank anything each month, pay them off. Stop the blood-suckers from bleeding you dry. That comes before giving gifts in the list of priorities.

However, for those who are living debt-free, I am feeling a bit relaxed about the whole holiday gift-exchange thing. Perhaps I am inspired by the ever-lovely prehensile_wit, who suggests that we all go pre-order copies of Serenity so that Joss can make more shows like Firefly and movies like Serenity! What a brilliant idea! I've already ordered two copies - and someone will be lucky this season (or shortly after, I a such a cheapskate than I went for the free 5-9 day shipping option).

Here is my real wish list:

World Peace. I know that is a lot to ask for, but I believe we can do it one person at a time. Do something to make someone around you happy. Happy people are a huge step in the right direction, and a world full of happy people is a peaceful world. So, think a bit - and focus on helping someone who is unhappy find a little happiness this season.

That's really about it. I could list many other things, but let's focus on this one first.

Wow, what an incredible difference a lot of memory makes! Yesterday, my employer finally delivered on a request for more memory my boss and I made in June for new (in June) PowerMac dual G5 desktop, that came with only 512MB of memory.

Don't get me wrong, I am still of the opinion that 512MB is acceptable (1GB is better) for most things that most people do with computers (surf the internet, play some puzzle games, balance their checkbook, process digital photos, listen to music, write some letters or journals, play with spreadsheets, make presentations, read mail), and 512MB would have been barely enough for me at work except for an evil, but useful, Java application called Argus. It is internal to my employer, do don't bother looking it up. It is a tool we use to monitor and graph metrics on many applications. It is a bloated pig, and when I tried to run it on my 512MB machine, I could reliably count on waiting minutes between each mouse click and change on a given graph's view. Now, with 2.5GB installed - even Argus and Plucker Desktop move along at a respectable pace. The other bloatware application I used regularly was the Plucker Desktop, for fetching web content to my PalmOS handheld (kind of like Avant-Go, but open source); but I'd get around that by only running Plucker Desktop updates at night when I was not around to notice.

By the way, if you carry a small handheld around with you a lot, I recommend Plucker for PalmOS devices very highly. It enables you to snatch web content (I "pluck" BBC News and The Onion) automatically, store it on your handheld, then you can read offline whenever you have a few free moments.