To the programmers in charge of the “bowling hint” computer program at the local bowling alley:
For the detailed information you provide about how to line up my shot, or the speed at which the ball should be rolled in order to pick up a spare… Thank you very much.
For describing the difficulty of picking up each spare as EASY… Piss. Off.
I mean really: if it were that easy, I wouldn’t need the frickin’ hint each frame, would I?
It’s impossible to drive around the midwest and not see the Ichthys on the sides of businesses and the backs of cars, especially Fords and Chevys, usually next the gun rack and the Re-Elect Cheney bumper sticker. And by Ichthys, I mean the so-called Jesus fish:
I’ve always liked the fish as symbol of Christianity, because of its geometric simplicity (a symmetric intersection of two circular arcs) and because I always assumed the fish represented one of the uplifting aspects of the religion, like Jesus’ call to make his apostles “fishers of men,” or the miracle of the fish and loaves.* (In contrast, I’ve always though the crucifix is a ghastly symbol. Out of all the aspects of a faith about everlasting life on which to focus, prophetic-cause-of-death seems like an odd choice.)
* In fact, apparently the seafood symbol was chosen not for the spiritual reasons I’d always assumed, but rather because the phrase Jesus Christ, God’s son and savior, when written in ancient Greek (the language of the New Testament) is Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ ͑Υιός, Σωτήρ, which if written as an acronym is IΧΘΥΣ… which is the Greek word for fish. So it’s kind of like a theologically blessed version of SCUBA.
When I was in college, I picked up a Darwin Ichthys and slapped it on the back of my Honda Accord. I loved it from a graphic design perspective: it cleverly converted a recognizable symbol often linked with anti-evolutionary thought by modifying it with the addition of some small perfunctory legs into a textbook transitional form illustrating the evolutionary process. Plus it irritated the hell (literally!) out of Bible-thumpers, which was always amusing.
Ever since then, there’s been an influx of Ichthys knock-offs, each promoting a different worldview. For example, for believers in ancient astronauts (that is, that modern man is the result of ancient man learning from extraterrestrial beings), we’ve got the Alien Ichthys:
Believers of the Church of Roddenbury, also known as Trekkies, have the similarly themed Trek Ichthys:
Even goths have a fish:
That’s why I was so greatly amused to see this on the back of a car the other day. Behold the Flying Spaghetti Monster Ichthys:
As the Pastafarians would say, “R’Amen, brother. R’Amen.”
On a complete unrelated note, Saturday was my birthday. For those komplexify readers who belatedly feel guilty about not noticing, an FSM Ichthys would make up for that quite excellently.
On a tangentially related note, I’ve never quite understood the Christian response to the Darwin Ichthys, which usually runs as some variant of this:
My difficulty is two-fold. First, while I suppose the point is to show that TRUTH will triumph over DARWIN, wouldn’t that have been better displayed by, say, having the Truth Fish overshadowing the Darwin fish, or smacking about the Darwin fish, or crushing the Darwin fish, or in fact pretty much anything besides eating the Darwin fish? Because having TRUTH eat DARWIN in such a nasty cannibalistic fashion, in addition to being a particularly non-turn-the-other-cheek response, in fact suggests that TRUTH is all about the survival of the fittest… which is Darwin’s idea to begin with.
Second, and more to the point, the Darwinist response will totally kick ass… all they have to do is evolve:
Sigh. One of my favorite web comics, Brown Sharpie, is at an end. After three-plus years, toonist Courtney has decided to cap those noxious fumes and focus on newer and more exciting things (like grad research! and beer! and kittens!). We’ll miss you over here at komplexify!
See you in the funny papers, Courtney.
However, in a comical application of Newton’s Third Law, as Brown Sharpie is leaving I’ve been introduced to a new web comic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. It’s a bit less “classy” than BS, but no less funny.
Happy giggling.
Today is my birthday.
Being a mathematician, I noted that if I add to my current age half my age again, then resulting sum, rounded up and read in reverse, is my age again. Neat.
How old am I?
Of course we didn’t watch Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 last week. We instead made it through some of our Netflix queue instead.
Paranormal Activity is about a haunting in a typical suburban home, whose paranormal activities seemed to be targeted towards a girl; in an effort to document it, they decide to record the increasingly spooky supernatural circumstances themselves with video. So, essentially,
I don’t know how spooky this would have been in a ginormous, state-of-the-art stadium-seating uber-theater, but this movie about the ghostly goings-on in a suburban home is perfectly suited for viewing at midnight in the basement of your own suburban home. In many ways Paranormal Activity is what the Blair Witch Project was shooting for — an uncomfortably first-person narrative with its scares grounded in “reality,” fueled not by the horrible things you do see but by the horrible things you imagine happening in the places you can’t see — without all the nauseas-inducing jerky camera work.
The Queen B and I found ourselves hooked after the first “event,” and jumped appropriately as the haunting became progressively worse, all the way up through the movie’s scary and unexpectedly violent climax. In fact, my only gripe with the movie is its very last second. (Spoiler alert!) Why did they feel the need to cheapen the movie at the very last moment with Katie’s crappy CGI spooky face? Wouldn’t it have been just better to let her crawl back in bed as if nothing happened, after which having the camera mysteriously cuts out? Ah well.
A distressed widower discovers a supernatural means to predict upcoming disasters, although this doesn’t necessarily mean an ability to stop them; however, as the situation becomes more dire and his family becomes more threatened by a shadowy collection of other-worldy figures, the supernatural events lead him to regain is lost faith in a higher meaning of the universe. So, in a nutshell,
I always like the movie’s directed by Alex Proya (think The Crow, or Dark City), and Knowing is no different. It’s certainly not as moody or cerebral as those other two movies, but it moves at a good pace and maintains a moody of general uneasiness, occasionally punctuated by top-notch action sequences. (The crash landing of the plane is an excellent example — it’s possibly my second favorite single-take cluster-f*ck action sequence, trailing the forest-ambush-sequence in Children of Men.) And you’ve got to be impressed with a movie that ends with the hero complete unable to prevent the cataclysmic, fiery death of every living person on the entire planet, save two. Spoiler alert, by the way.
As a side note, it also features what might be the funniest bit of dialogue concerning the modern scientific method, which goes something like this.
Scientist 1: Hey, you remember that girl I tried to hook you up with? Ph double-Ds?
Scientist 2: Is it even ethical to talk about your sister-in-law like that?
Scientist 1: What? It’s been independently verified and peer reviewed.
In the new Star Trek reboot, a ragtag team of rebels (including the disreputable hunky one, the young one verses in an ancient alien tradition, and a hot chick) team up to stop a group of intergalactic baddies who, armed with a massive spacecraft capable of blowing up entire planets… particularly those populated by peaceful peoples. That is,
It’s clearly not your father’s Star Trek: Kirk and Spock hate each others’ guts, the planet Vulcan gets obliterated halfway through it, Starfleet officers are trained to shoot first and pontificate on the issues of freedom and equality later, Spock’s mom is Winona Ryder, and so forth. That being said it’s still a fun popcorn flick, and it’s peppered with a couple of nods to old-school Trek fans, including a gleefully nasty fate for the red-uniformed dude on the away team, or the fact that Leonard Nimoy actually appears as the Spock from the original — i.e. your father’s! — Star Trek universe.
In the Spanish movie Fermat’s Room, four mathematicians (well, three mathematicians and an engineer) are invited to a secret meeting to discuss the “greatest enigma of all time.” Instead, they find themselves stuck taking an IQ test in a room tht starts to shrink when the questions aren’t answered quickly enough. That is,
The movie does a decent job generating tension by combining the twin fears of claustrophobia and word problems, although it’s primary mystery — who arranged for the four to meet in the slow death trap, and why — is a little hokey. That being said, any movie in which a proposed proof of the Goldbach Conjecture plays a fundamental plot point is definitely worth taking a look at.
It also offers this final bit of advice, which coming from a foreign movie I found altogether more amusing:
Engineer: Pressure is unpredicatble. It can turn coal into dust or a diamond.
Mathematician: Was that Archimedes?
Engineer: No. MacGuyver.
