mykrocosm

Ever wondered why there were no new Superman movies? Well apart from the sad loss of Christopher Reeves, that is. Get ready for an astounding new low in Hollywood incompetence…

http://www.agonybooth.com/forum/topic2730.htm (via slashdot)

It’s hard to pick my favourite bungle in this litany of script-rewriting destruction, but I really liked this one :

“Superman’s costume is a living entity housed in a can, and it climbs onto him when he needs it. He first discovers it in a closet when he’s 14 (Jor-El visited Earth and picked the Kents out to be Kal-El’s new parents, leaving them his picture, some S-shield metal pieces signifying the virtues Kal-El must represent, and the costume), and the costume rips his clothes off and stuffs him into itself. So teen Clark is flying around in a suit that’s way too big for him.”

Transplants are so common these days. When organ donors die their organs are harvested and redistributed to those who need them. It’s crucial for doctors to know the age and health of these organs. Obviously the age of the organs is the age of the deceased person, and the health closely parallels that person’s general lifestyle.

But I wonder, what happens when the recipients die in turn? How do the organ harvesters know whether their organs are originals or transplants? Can they rely on medical records or the testimony of family to confirm that the patient still has all his original organs?

Flip.

Caveman Ugh-lympics.

Flip.

F-15 Strike Eagle II. F-19 Stealth Fighter.

Flip.

King’s Quest II.

Flip.

Starflight 2.

Flip.

I sat on my lounge room floor flicking through them, one after another. These 5.25″ floppy disks were more than fifteen years old, but the childhood memories of the hours I spent on these games came flooding back.

My caveman raising his head comically to suck in a huge gulp of air before blowing on the sputtering sparks, trying to coax forth fire. He blows too hard and makes himself dizzy, collapsing as the stars spin around his head.

The tension in the cockpit as I lowered the flaps and throttle, carefully easing around a pyramid-shaped mountain towards an unsuspecting SAM site as the enemy fighters criss-crossed the skies above.

Coming up with ideas at school for how to get past the snake behind door number two and counting the minutes till I could get home and try them.

The hours into the night I spent methodically charting each mysterious new planet, meeting exotic, ideosyncratic alien races, and trading and fighting my swashbuckling way to the furthest reaches of the galaxy.

I’d moved these games, and so many more, from house to house to garage to house, all safely contained in lockable disk boxes, for those were the days when 360 kilobytes of data was rare and valuable. But as the years passed and dusty old computers gave way to shiny new ones, bringing with them a dazzling array of compact discs boasting vivid graphics, colour and sound, these old black floppies remained packed away, and fifteen years later had all but faded from memory.

Suddenly my eyes were misty. I touched each black disk in its white sleeve. Here was one containing all those GWBASIC programs I’d written, another with the database I’d created in dBase III+ to catalog all these disks. Games, programs, applications, a formative part of my lifelong fascination with computers. With heavy heart I said goodbye as I closed the disk boxes and placed them in the spring-cleaning pile, along with the old machines, mice and cables… ancient computer history.

At the last minute, I ran back and grabbed something. One to show the grandkids, I told myself.

The C.S.I.R.O abandoned a 10-year GM crop experiment when they found that the lab mice were getting sick. Story here

Very commendable indeed, but you’d expect no less from an institution funded by the Australian government. The question is — how many GM trials in other countries are being pushed through without the same cautious agenda, so they can sell us their genetically enhanced crops?

I wanted to find out the age of a venerable dignitary visiting our city, and once again Google just knew : “Donald Rumsfeld’s age”

How cool is that??

I bet it won’t be long before Google knows all the deeper darker secrets…

I hadn’t done anything for Halloween in years, so it was kind of fun to let my inner Jamaican Zombie out.

Stuffed with spider cake and warmed up with spicy mead we took the dog for a midnight walk through Tangari Regional Park and sat in the pale moonlight telling ghost stories. A pair of cops on patrol saw us from the road and pulled over to investigate. Fortunately they accepted our story that the undead don’t have too many calendars (Halloween was two weeks ago). One of them took several snaps of us with his digital camera but the flash wouldn’t fire. When we got up and lumbered towards them inviting them to join our gathering they scampered for their lives! (or maybe it was the dog chasing them)

Dad took us and Nana to the Lakeside Bistro, at the Lakes Resort Hotel down at West Lakes. Most of us had the atlantic salmon, which was nice and succulent and not too dry. The selection of vegetables at the buffet was excellent, though the salads (as is common in most hotels these days) seemed a bit bland and not as fresh as they could be.

Beautiful setting. They’ve recently renovated it upmarket - the diners are now closer to the water view, and they have a pianist tinkling on a baby grand. However this combined with the background chatter and poor acoustics made noise levels uncomfortable for some people. (Not for me, of course!)

This restaurant was a family favourite when it was simpler and the meals were cheaper, but I’m sure we’ll continue to eat there now and again.

Struck with a bit of grammar uncertainty after the last post, I asked Google.

Results 1 - 10 of about 13,900,000 for it’s tongue. (0.21 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 22,100,000 for its tongue. (0.29 seconds)

And Google is right… according to :

http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000227.htm

You’ve got to wonder why the results are so close though. I mean, even if you strike out all the sentences of the form “what’s for dinner Mum? It’s tongue!” there’s still a good ten million mistakes out there. Ugh.

People - just ask Google, and stop polluting its results!

Allergic to your cat? Cut off its tongue.

http://ask.yahoo.com/20051102.html