All posts by rbowen

Popcorn blog

Tim wrote some stuff about Casablanca as part of the “Popcorn blog” exercise that various people are participating in.

Things like this can be fun, but they also have the potential to be rather hokey. I mean, sure, literary criticism is a lot of fun, and is a useful exercise, but literary criticism with a particular agenda — attempting to draw a particular conclusion — has the potential to be academically dishonest, and a whole lot of hooey.

I’d say that it’s hard to find any half-way decent movie that is *not* about salvation. That’s why we enjoy watching movies, right? Because the good triumphs over the evil. Which is how Tim defines Salvation in his remarks. Sort of.

Strangely, it is the movies that are not about salvation – that is, the movies that have unexpected endings – which are often the more intrigueing ones, and the ones that make you think about your assumptions of what salvation actually is.

Like, say, Unbreakable, or The Talented Mr Ripley.

Because maybe, just maybe, they are about salvation after all.

For some of my more favorite “salvation” movies, I’d have to also recommend Unforgiven and The Shawshank Redemption. And for, perhaps, a more controversial one, A Clockwork Orange.

I look forward to seeing what some of the folks have to say about a few of the movies on the list.

The president on IRC?

<DrBacchus> Excuse me a moment while I kill my neighbor.
<DrBacchus> There. I feel a little better now.
<cynic> Harsh.
<DrBacchus> You don’t know my neighbor.
<DrBacchus> Of course, now you never will.
<DrBacchus> I wonder if IRC transcripts are admissible as admissions of guilt in court.
<chipig> it could of been faked.
<DrBacchus> True.
<DrBacchus> fajita: forget everything!
<fajita> DrBacchus: I forgot everything
<DrBacchus> *phew*
<chipig> if i had windows, i could just open notepad and write an irc log…
<DrBacchus> At least the bot won’t talk.
<chipig> Bush Admits there weren’t WMDs in Iraq, admission found in IRC log!
<DrBacchus> The day we have a president that hangs out on IRC, I’ll move to Canada.
<chipig> heh
<DrBacchus> I’m terrified of the prospect of my generation being in the Oval Office.
<DrBacchus> Imagine ThePrez emailing congress: yo guyz lets’ bom irak lol. kk?
* DrBacchus shudders

Kerry and Kenya

I’ve found the most compelling reason not to vote for Kerry. *EVERY* time I see his name in a news headline, I think that the headline says “Kenya” instead, and I go to read the article, only to be disappointed that it’s some lame free advertisement for Kerry’s presidential campaign.

Rush: Columbus Ohio, June 2, 2004

I went with TheHeretic to see Rush on their 30th Anniversary Tour.

It was amazing.

By the time they took their halftime break, I figured they had already done most of my favorite pieces. But they came back after the break and did the rest of my favorites, as well as a many that were completely unexpected – at least by me – such as Subdivisions, La Villa Strangiatto (along with a *very* strangiatto ad lib spoken piece by Lifeson), The 2112 Overture, The Trees, and an amazing rendition of Xanadu.

Neil did “Pieces of Eight“, which is a drum solo that doesn’t actually appear on any album that I’m aware of, but I’ve heard on a bootleg recording. I knew he was a mind-bogglingly good drummer, but the power of being there to hear it was stunning.

They opened with a retrospective piece which sampled from all of their albums, accompanied by photographs and video from the last 30 years. This led into The Spirit of Radio, the delightfully self-deprecating song from Permanent Waves about the music industry.

Throughout the concert, the visuals were sprinkled with footage from past concerts, as well as psychadelic light shows straight out of the Rush early days.

The crowd was fascinating, too, with people wearing tshirts from the 1976 Rush tour, and kids that can’t have been born when Roll The Bones came out. And a huge number of them appears to know all the words.

I knew all the words. Well, almost all. I didn’t know all the words to Earthshine, or to Working Man, perhaps the newest and oldest songs that they did. 🙂 They also did two songs from the new album, which is to come out at the end of this month. They were selling posters for the new album, but nothing actually said anywhere that it was the new album. Strange.

They played Dreamline, Bravado, and Mystic Rhythms, which are three of my all-time favorites. They did Tom Sawyer, YYZ, One Little Victory, Resist, Red Sector A, Secret Touch, Limelight, By Tor and the Snow Dogs, and Between the Wheels. I’m sure there were tother things that I’m forgetting, which will come back when I hear the songs the next time.

I’ve never actually been to a concert before. Well, not in an arena like this. I heard The Beach Boys after a Cincinnatti Reds game, and I heard Chicago at a little private concert at Internet World 1997, in the height of the Dot.Com days. But this was quite an experience. Although we were pretty far back — at the front of the lawn section — the sound was still enough to twitch all of my clothing every time Neil hit the drums.

And it all leaves just one question. Why does the goat have the receipts? For that matter, where does a goat even keep receipts? I know. Do you?

Raquetball

I played raquetball last night. And, as usual, I threw myself into it with an abandon that had very little influence from my lack of physical ability to do so. Does anyone else play the rule that GBI (Grevious Bodily Injury) gets you extra points?

Now I am sore all over, and very tired, even though I went to bed relatively early.

One of the guys that was there playing is 76 years old, and was whipping up on everybody that he was playing. I hope I have that kind of energy when I’m 76. I suppose I need to start now by actually exercising more than once a month.

The astonishing inefficiency of the IRS

I owe taxes on a previous tax year. I just sent payment for the most recent tax year, and specified very clearly to which year it was to be applied. In response, I got a letter stating that it had been applied to the other year, and that I had overpaid. They further informed me that it would take 6-8 weeks to determine if I still owed taxes on any other year before they could issue a refund. So, meanwhile, the year on which I attempted to pay is overdue and getting fines, and the year that I had a nice happy payment plan for, is paid off, and I’m short $500 while they attempt to do a database lookup.

How could it *possibly* take 6-8 weeks for them to determine whether I have other tax debts? That degree of inefficiency is simply staggering.

In all my recent dealing with the IRS, I am increasingly persuaded that they are incompetent bumbling fools working with (at least) 30-year-old technology to solve a problem that doesn’t need to be solved. I’m sure that a database containing records for 200+ million people is no small matter, but 6 weeks to query my account to see what I owe? Is it any wonder that tax fraud is such a big problem?

Reordering Nessus HTML output

I’ve been irritated by Nessus’s HTML output one too many times. I hate the fact that the list by host is in random order. Who thought that was a good idea?


#!/usr/bin/perl
open F, "<index.html";
my @R = <F>;
close F;

my $R = join '',@R;

my ($one, $two) = split /Notes.+?<tr>/s, $R;
my ($two, $three) = ($two =~ m!(.*)(</tr>.</table>.*$)!s);

my @O = split /</tr>.<tr>/si, $two;
my @X = join '</tr><tr>', (sort by_ip @O);
print $one, '<tr>',@X, $three;

sub by_ip {
    my @a = $a =~ /(d+).(d+).(d+).(d+)/;
    my @b = $b =~ /(d+).(d+).(d+).(d+)/;
    $a[0] <=> $b[0] ||
    $a[1] <=> $b[1] ||
    $a[2] <=> $b[2] ||
    $a[3] <=> $b[3] ||
    $a     <=>  $b
}

The list should now be ordered first by hostname, and then by IP address. Share and enjoy.

Say Anything

Yesterday I found Say Anything on sale, and snapped it up. Say Anything was one of our college movies, and, although I remember enjoying it a lot at the time (probably 1990 or 1991) I haven’t seen it since then.

The strange thing is, it’s not at all what I remembered. I seem to have forgotten the dark parts, remembering only the funny bits. (“I hereby surrender my duties as keymaster!” and “That’s my house! I live there!”) And not even all of those. How could I have forgotten the chicken?

On the same note, I tried to find a Lon Chaney movie yesterday. Any Lon Chaney movie. The man was in more than 150 movies, and is the very best known actor of all time in the horror/suspense/thriller movie genre. I could not find a single movie. It seems that if I want to see more of his movies, I have to trawl ebay and rare/used online stores. But it seems possible that almost all but his most famous movies (Phantom of the Opera, Hunchback of Notre Dame, and maybe Oliver Twist) are unavailable at almost any price.