Saw: Worst Movie Ever?

Okay, maybe not--but it's pretty fuckin' terrible. Do yourselves a favour and avoid the mistake my partner & I just made. Do NOT rent this piece of garbage. What began as a maybe-not-entirely-terrible concept swiftly devolved into a risible waste of time. Bad script, lousy pacing, lazy editing, weak actors... it's a fuckin' train wreck. Skip it and just watch Se7en again.

Here, I'll do you a favour: it's not the orderly who's committing the murders. The body in the room, with the gunshot wound? It's not really a body. It's the serial killer pretending to be dead. There, I fucking ruined it for you. I "spoiled" the "surprise twist" so you won't have any incentive to go and waste your precious time.

You're welcome.

Make your $2,500 computer write like an $80 typewriter!

Maybe it's a subconscious yearning for simpler times, but something drives me to collect typewriter fonts.

They call it... Sawfish!

Triton Logging is a BC-based logging company that exploits underwater forestry resources. Yeah, you heard me right: underwater forests. See, when these massive hydroelectric projects go up, huge reservoirs are created and millions of trees become submerged under these artificial lakes. The wood is still perfectly good and was basically just going to waste, one more casualty of environmentally destructive energy policies.

With their blocky little Sawfish (pictured on the site), Triton buzzes around underwater and harvests this wood; then they dry it and sell it. It's innovative, ecologically-friendly and profitable--everybody wins.

In da House.

Go, go, go Jackie
It's an election
We gon' bargain like it's an election
We gon' rep the margins like it's an election
'Cause you know we don't give a fuck there's an election!

Yeah, I'm a little proud of Jack. He's the only national leader to seize the opportunity presented by Pauly Sure-I'm-Clean's prime-time roll of the dice; he's made good on his campaign promise to hold the Liberals' collective feet to the fire; he's shown he can play with the big boys and dictate major revisions to an already approved budget; he's managed to show the party's maturity by "buying in" to the system and working with the governing party to create a compromise budget and simultaneously held on to the cachet granted by outsider status when he refused a formal alliance and the concomitant cabinet seats.

Good on ya, Jack.

Shock and awe...

...is the only way I can describe my feelings: a U.N. resolution that worked (granted, the persistent mass protests by tens of thousands of Lebanese citizens probably helped). I'm absolutely delighted that the Syrians stuck to their April 30th deadline; woulda been nice if they'd followed the Israelis out in 2000, but I'll take what I can get.

Pope-Scriptum

Replying to my earlier post re: papal puns, pacanukeha reminded us that if we only knew the power of the Dark Side, we could bring order to the galaxy.

"Chaos is a friend of mine." - Bob Dylan

The latest project of K.O.S. is a contemporary and compelling translation of Aeschylus' "Prometheus Bound" and can be viewed here.

Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) have worked together collaboratively since the early 1980s when Rollins, a special ed teacher assigned to public school 52 in the South Bronx, established the Art and Knowledge workshop for students with learning disabilities. Out of this grew a collective art practice based on texts which the group studied together. Typically, pages from literary classics were laid on canvas to form a ground, then overpainted with imagery that had evolved through discussion as an embodiment of motifs and issues central to the given material. Their study of art history through books and museum visits was supplemented by a deep engagement with contemporary art practice as well as a strong appreciation of certain highpoints of contemporary mass culture. Thus, for example, works which presented unadorned pages from X-men comics coexisted with paintings based on Flaubert's "Temptation of Saint Anthony," Kafka's "Amerika," Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," and Aristophanes' "The Frogs."

- from the project's introduction.

michel.foucault@prescience.com

From Tom Brignall's article, "The New Panopticon: The Internet Viewed as a Structure of Social Control":

"If Internet service providers or police agencies randomly monitor Internet users, then the Internet begins to share similar properties with the panopticon prison structure. The panopticon as a conceptual structure can be applied to any physical structure that provides the ability of those in a position of authority to monitor the “inmates” without the “inmates” knowing when they are being monitored. What is unique within the structure of the Internet is that it allows multiple layers of observation to occur such that the “inmates” can become the observers of other “inmates”. In such a situation, no one knows who is the observer and who is the observed."

Read the rest here.

So the papacy's gone to the dogs.

And today's award for elegant wordplay comes courtesy of Il Manifesto, an Italian newspaper. In reference to Pope Benedict XVI's ambiguous image as both a snarling defender of the old church and gentle steward of papal tradition, their April 20th headline read simply, "The German Shepherd."

I'm as sick of pope-related news as anyone, but good puns is good puns.

Test Post

Pencils? Check. Water bottle? Check.
You may begin.