The Clone Wars Must Be Dumb.

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Everyone who knows me well knows that I've been a Star Wars fan for most of my life. I'm even one of those dorks that dresses up for new Star Wars movies. I was Qui-gon Jinn for Episode I, Anakin for Episode II, and finally Darth Vader for III. Too bad those movies (well, at least II and III....still kind of like I) all sucked!

You can't imagine how annoying it is for a long time fan like myself to see his beloved franchise disintegrate to dust before his eyes as the creator takes a large buzz saw, and chops it into tiny pieces. It's horrid. Of course, he couldn't just leave it there!

Now, he's go this new movie out called "Star Wars: The Clone Wars". I haven't seen it. It's got a horrible ranking on Rotten Tomatoes. Something like a 20 or some such. I have no plans to see it either. Today though, something brutally got in my way. I was reading a comic Rob sent me, and it linked to a comic that reviewed the movie (mostly saying it sucked). What really got me though was the dialog in the second pane....

"Some people might be bothered that Luke randomly comes across a droid his father built 40 years earlier or that the woman that kills Jabba the Hutt is the daughter of the Jedi that rescued his missing son before she was born..."

- Digital Pimp Online - Joe Loves Crappy Movies (a webcomic)

Now, to those who may not know... the last time I checked, Leia killed Jabba the Hutt. Leia is, of course, Luke's sister. Now, I'm confused.

What kind of horrible movie is this that threatens my knowledge of Star Wars canon!!!! How can he get away with this? You know, as soon as we get done fixing some of the major problems in our government (i.e. patent and copyright reform, foolish wars, government spying, breach of privacy and civil liberties, total lack of necessary restrictions and oversight on corporations, etc.), we need to pass a bill to protect Star Wars from George Lucas. I know, that's absurd! But, we live in a democracy. Why the heck can't we vote to take out of his hands control and ownership of something that was once great, but is now so totally mismanaged!!! It makes me angry. I hope I don't end up having to watch this crappy movie just to keep up with Star Wars canon. I think, at this point, I would just surrender, and walk away. Grrr....

"They have billed Star Wars: The Clone Wars as the untold story. If only the untelling of the told could now be done."

- Jeff Bayer - The Scorecard Review (taken from RottenTomatoes.com)

The Cold War Continues... Was it Ever Really Over?

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By now, assuming you have been paying any attention at all to the news for the last several days, you should have heard about Russia's rapidly escalating invasion of Georgia. They're pretty much after a regime change because Georgia's president happens to want to join NATO. Ole' Mother Russia can't have that, so she's bombing a tiny country. So far, up until today, I have only been hearing the rest of the world's opinion on this. Today, thanks to digg.com, I have now "seen the light" of the other perspective. And, here it is, in all of its Cold War sounding propagandist flavor, Russia, Again Savior of Peace and Life from the Russian news organization: Pravda. (note: this Pravda is apparently, according to Wikipedia, an "unrelated" newspaper run by former Pravda employees...)

It features such amazingly insightful quotes as:

"After having offered a cease fire in hostilities, the back stabbing Georgians immediately violated the cease fire, invading South Ossetia and causing massive destruction and death among innocent civilians, among peacekeepers and also destroying a hospital."

"Georgian troops attempted to storm the city much as Hitler‘s Panzer divisions blazed through Europe. Also noteworthy is the fact that Georgian tanks and infantry were being aided by Israeli advisors, a true indicator that this conflict was instigated by outside forces."

"Meanwhile, the western corporate media was maintaining a blackout of “the grand silence” on the aggression of Georgia. When they did finally report on it, they were as usual telling the story backwards with headlines such as “Russian Jets Attack Georgia” and “They Have Declared War Against Us” as though Georgia had not done anything wrong."

- Russia, Again Savior of Peace and Life

It's pretty ridiculous. Meanwhile, according to the Los Angeles Times: "Russian soldiers open second front in Georgia", Russia has been expanding the frontlines, further confirming the "rapidly escalating invasion" bit I wrote above.

Russia is becoming a big western problem. We could be seeing another Cold War beginning. About a month or so ago, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had a rather old skool idea: Putin says Russia needs to go back to Cuba: media At about the same time, this story came out:
Newspaper Hints at Return of Russian Bombers to Cuba You can also read it in Newsweek here: Russian Moves in the Americas

That story has, since then, been vigorously denied. You can read about that here: 'Cuba bomber plan' denied by Moscow But, don't be surprised if it happens anyways. I won't be. Angry, yes. Surprised, no.

It seemed that an impertinent fellow had dressed himself up as a preposterous parody of myself. I had drunk more champagne than was good for me, and in a flash of folly I decided to see the situation through. Consequently it was to meet the glare of the company and my own lifted eyebrows and freezing eyes that the real Professor came into the room.

"I need hardly say there was a collision. The pessimists all round me looked anxiously from one Professor to the other Professor to see which was really the more feeble. But I won. An old man in poor health, like my rival, could not be expected to be so impressively feeble as a young actor in the prime of life. You see, he really had paralysis, and working within this definite limitation, he couldn't be so jolly paralytic as I was. Then he tried to blast my claims intellectually. I countered that by a very simple dodge. Whenever he said something that nobody but he could understand, I replied with something which I could not even understand myself. 'I don't fancy,' he said, 'that you could have worked out the principle that evolution is only negation, since there inheres in it the introduction of lacuna, which are an essential of differentiation.' I replied quite scornfully, 'You read all that up in Pinckwerts; the notion that involution functioned eugenically was exposed long ago by Glumpe.' It is unnecessary for me to say that there never were such people as Pinckwerts and Glumpe. But the people all round (rather to my surprise) seemed to remember them quite well, and the Professor, finding that the learned and mysterious method left him rather at the mercy of an enemy slightly deficient in scruples, fell back upon a more popular form of wit. 'I see,' he sneered, 'you prevail like the false pig in Aesop.' 'And you fail,' I answered, smiling, 'like the hedgehog in Montaigne.' Need I say that there is no hedgehog in Montaigne? 'Your claptrap comes off,' he said; 'so would your beard.' I had no intelligent answer to this, which was quite true and rather witty. But I laughed heartily, answered, 'Like the Pantheist's boots,' at random, and turned on my heel with all the honours of victory. The real Professor was thrown out, but not with violence, though one man tried very patiently to pull off his nose. He is now, I believe, received everywhere in Europe as a delightful impostor. His apparent earnestness and anger, you see, make him all the more entertaining."

- The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

The Closing of a Cool Blog

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Sometime in the last couple of weeks, I stumbled across an interesting article about jokes and copyright (link points to Google cache, so it may expire...the page itself was deleted) over on The Patry Copyright Blog. Now, I am sad to say, it seems the blog has been shut down. :-(

If you follow the link to the blog, he seems to have deleted all but the most current "shutdown" post, but, even there, he provides what I see as a valuable assessment of the current state of copyright law from someone who has been working in the for 26 or more years. (someone who is also knowledgeable enough to have been hired by Google...)

All that being said, and while trying to remain sensitive to his reasons for shutting it down, I have decided to post the following quote from his final post:

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

- William Patry - The Patry Copyright Blog

6.6 Degrees of Separation

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Ever heard of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game? According to this article, Microsoft conducted a study on it's MSN Messenger network and concluded that we are all, in fact, only 6.6 degrees separated from each other. It's an interesting example of your hard earned cash (attributed to Microsoft via advertising and, more commonly, Windows money) funneling odd corporate investigations. I'm willing to bet they're already salivating over ideas on how to put this new data to use. At any rate, the results of the investigation are also interesting to the average user I suppose. I guess I'm only 6.6 (although, they decided to round it up to 7) degrees away from Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.... I shudder to think about how close that puts me to George W. Bush...

"This is the first time a planetary-scale social network has been available to validate the well-known 'six-degrees of separation finding,'"

- Eric Horvitz of Microsoft and Jure Leskovec of Carnegie Mellon University, in a paper that was presented earlier this year at the WWW 2008 conference in Beijing. - quote taken from the above linked article: Everyone Really Is Just Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon, Microsoft Says by: Paul McDougall on InformationWeek