It’s always been said that there are blogs about everything, every topic under the sun they say…
Probably for the first time I have come across a blog that covers a subject I had never in my wildest dreams imagined…
Month: June 2006
1,000,000th visitor
1,000,000 visits!
I know it doesn’t come from people who look at the latest entries, but the combined numbers of people who drop in somewhere on the blog, be it the latest entry, or the oldest one.
1423 days ago I started blogging, back when the blogosphere was a far different place. I never for a moment imagined that my blog would lead to so many things, meeting so many great people both in Ireland and around the world, amongst hundreds of other smaller things. Hundreds of debates, thousands of posts, thousands of links. The explosion of blogging in Ireland has been spectacular, and it was great to be there to watch it from the start.
Thanks to everyone who dropped in over the last 2,049,120 minutes! (I do love stats!)
1,000,000th visit recorded as:
Someone searching for “clipart + paris” on google.ch
From the city of Murten in Switzerland
Using Firefox on Windows 2000.
🙂
Philip Merrill does a Maxwell?
He seems to have fallen over board too:
Rescue crews searched the Chesapeake Bay for a prominent publisher and diplomat Sunday, hours after his sailboat was discovered empty in the water with the engine still running.
The Coast Guard dispatched a C-130 aircraft, a helicopter and a boat to assist in the search for 72-year-old Philip Merrill, who had been sailing alone Saturday.
Senior Chief Steve Carleton said the Coast Guard was operating under the assumption that Merrill fell overboard.
“When we found the boat, the engine was running and his wallet was found on board the vessel,” he said.
Ken Turner, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources police, said Saturday night that two boaters found Merrill’s unoccupied 41-foot sailboat.
Acquaintance
A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich and famous.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
A fix?
Yes I am watching Big Brother again.
I can’t help but think that Susie’s addition was an out-and-out fix. Most of the housemates suspect it too. BB forums are awash with speculation. Endemol have denied that it was fixed, that she was chosen entirely at random.
Susie was entirely too unsurprised and comfortable for someone who just got on Big Brother, after seven years trying to get on the show, and her husband buying thousands of Kit Kats, and eventually paying £4000 for a ticket. She seems unphased and perfectly normal. Something’s not right.
I can’t see her lasting anyways, but the big question is how long more will Grace last?
Enterprise versus Death Star
Finally the argument is settled.
And the winner is…
Ann Coulter loses the plot
I have been closely following the furore created by Coulter’s latest book, Godless. In the book she makes a rather controversial remark in relation to some 9/11 widows she dislikes, amongst many others. Click here for the video.
“These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.”
Some on the right have expressed shock at her comments, while others have sought to defend her.
Now we have the rather obligatory satirical and definately not work-safe blog about Coulter. (413 comments and counting) It’s not exactly quotable, but I did like this bit in relation to the tax-cuts. I edited it for, eh, work safety.
A stock’s value is even now only partially tied to the actual value of any publicly traded company. But who’s going to profit from inflated valuations when stock prices swell irrationally from the forced, artificial injection of capital?
…
‘You might as well shoehorn billions of dollars into the Baseball Card market. The price of a Derek Jeter rookie will be driven up to hundreds of thousands of dollars—before the bubble bursts and the whole market crashes massively.’ It was getting hard to stay on point as she tongue-fucked my shitter vigorously.
…
‘The top 1% will sell stocks at the inflated valuations to the novice investors-by-necessity, the market will swell and crash, and the same 1% will come back and re-purchase their holdings at pennies on the dollar. Meanwhile, Social Security will go bankrupt and all the novice investors will be eating catfood for the duration of their “golden years,’’ barring a massive Federal bailout several hundred times in excess of what the Savings & Loan scandal cost us.’
In relation to Coulter’s original quote about the 9/11 widows she dislikes so much, it looks to me more like jealousy. Here is her quote again:
These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.
Or you could say:
Coulter is a millionaire, lionized on TV and in Time magazine, reveling in her status as a celebrity right-wing pundit, stalked by left-wingers. She spent years working to get into that position and is jealous of women who got the spotlight by simply being widows of victims of terrorism.
Olbermann’s criticism of Coulter is well worth watching:
Vanity searching
For years now I have watched where my first name is placed on the Google index. Yes it’s vain, but it also gives me an insight into Google’s indexing methods. Earlier this year during a Google Dance, I was completely dropped from the index for 3 weeks, for no apparent reason.
It has returned, and now when searching for ‘Gavin‘ on Google.com I am placed at number three, while over on Google.ie I am now placed at number two.
At least I’m now higher than Gavin Friday. Who’d have thought that possible?
Triple suicide at Guantanamo camp
I have to say I am somewhat dismayed by the reaction of the US authorities to the suicide of three Guantanamo inmates:
Rear Adm Harris said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair.
“They are smart. They are creative, they are committed,” he said, quoted by Reuters.
“They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”
It’s very smart and creative alright. They really do have no regard for their lives? It was an act of asymmetrical warfare?
It actually reads like something from the Daily Show. Even if these guys were cold-blooded murderers, would they still commit suicide as a method of ‘asymmetrical warfare’? I could understand if they took some of the guards down with them, ala suicide bombing, but what purpose does it serve by simply taking your own life?
In fact, given that these men are incarcerated without trial, without due process, without recourse, and without the normal system open to murderers on US soil, why would they do such a thing.
I have to apply a form of Occam’s Razor (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem)to this and ask, what is more likely the simplest reason? That they commited suicide as an act of war against the US, or that they were driven to it after 4 or 5 years of internment and extreme interrogation?
You decide.
The devil is in the detail
Rating: out of 5
So I went to see the remake of the 1976 classic, The Omen. I have always liked the original, and have seen it a number of times. The remake is an almost verbatim remake, with little in the way of additions or improvements. On it’s own it may have made it, but in comparison to the original, it is a pathetic recreation. It appears much of the script was lifted directly from the original, most especially noticeable in the scene where the photographer and Mr. Thorne are in the abode of the now dead priest.
But my venom is not mainly for the production of a remake, or of the quality of the remake. It is the laziness of the post-production. Did anyone, at all, involved in the making of the film, not actually watch it once if was finished?
You may not believe me, but the gobshites who made this film managed to produce it in a way that meant the microphones are visible in the early scenes. And no, they are not actually meant to be there, they are actually part of the making of the film. At first I thought it was a brief mistake, then it kept happening, until at one point I thought the lead actress was going to get clobbered on the head. As another reviewer notes:
When it first appeared I thought…hmmm are there reporters in this scene or is that just a little flub? No… the camera pans back, no reporters in sight. Must have just been a mistake. I figured it was a small mistake. But then, it appears in the next scene, and the next scene, and the NEXT scene, and then in almost every single scene from that point on. At one point it almost HIT the actress head while shes sitting on the couch yelling at the nanny to take damien upstairs. It got so bad that you could tell the producers even tried cutting it out of some scenes. Suddenly this dark black fuzzy line appears at the top of the screen attempting to hide the mic. Unfortunatly even the black fuzzy line couldnt keep this thing out of the shot. It dips down below the line many many times. How do you take a horror movie seriously when the microphone is in all the shots??
Surely someone spotted this? Surely someone suggested removing the mics with some digital wizardry?
It spoils the entire film, and there were mumbles of questions and disbelief from other people in the cinema. Some even laughed, and I don’t blame them. There is simply no excuse for it. It’s lazy and unprofessional, it’s rule number one of film making – don’t let the audience know it’s actually make-believe.