This is what I get for reading the Internet so much. Rumors:
"As for DiCaprio and Scorsese, they are now believed to be planning a biopic of Howard Hughes at IEG. The duo also is out to studios with a feature pitch based on four science fiction books from novelist Dan Simmons : "Hyperion," "Fall of Hyperion," "Endymion" and "Rise of Endymion." The project is said to have attracted bids from three competing studios but is not yet set up.
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic, The Gangs of New York) is interested in the role of "Raul Endymion" in the movie adaptation of Hyperion (proposed in treatment form by Dan Simmons as one film or three), and is currently meeting with directors and studios to discuss the proposal. DiCaprio, who would both star and co-produce the feature, met on July 5 with Martin Scorcese, director of DiCaprio's new film The Gangs of New York."
Please... not Kate Winslet as Aenea... please dear God... no....
In my efforts to understand fully the Muse behind the Hyperion Cantos, I found this page with excerpts of John Keats' poetry and even a picture of the very room near the Fontagne di Spagne where died. I had no idea that Hyperion and Endymion were real poems (which just goes to show how little I know about poetry)... but now as I read them I am even more awed at Dan Simmons' masterful literary achievement. (Here is the poem "Endymion".)
Of course, at this point I can no longer read the opening lines without a sad sigh and an unshed tear for Aenea...
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
The Guardian UK has an excerpt from Joseph Stiglitz's book about why so many people hate "Globalization" as implemented by the USA in the past decade. (Stiglitz served as an advisor during the Clinton administration.)
Very brief, and if you don't understand why people are always protesting the WTO and referring to our export of free trade as "hegemony" and "empire", this is definitely worth a read.
I finished reading Dan Simmons' The Rise of Endymion this morning, and sent off this email..
-------------------------
hi everyone,
it's 5:25 AM and i have just finished the fourth book of Dan Simmons' Hyperion novels. i started reading at 10pm tonight and i could not put the book down.
it is simply one of the most moving stories of love i have ever read... the literary devices of science fiction allowed the author to create so much more loss, so much more grief, and so much more hope and joy. at one point in the book i felt such betrayal and such pain that i had to put it down for 10 minutes... and there were other points where i so feared the grief of the inevitable that i had to struggle to keep reading on.
the characters, their emotions, their fates... are so compelling and moving that they dwarf the sheer grandeur of a fantastic journey across hundreds of light-years and centuries of human civilization. the setting of the story - dozens of worlds, hundreds of characters, centuries and centuries of history - is so seemlessly, convincingly presented and so beautifully crafted that it only added to the depth of the epic story of love and wonder and humanity. there is no technobabble for the sake of technobabble; there is no pointless name-dropping. the New York Times Book Review called it "one of the finest achievements of modern science fiction". they're not kidding.
my imagination is still reeling from travelling the stretches of space, journeying through alien jungles and hiking sheer cliff faces to temples on impossibly tall mountains... my mind still echoes with the candid thoughts on religion and philosophy... and my heart still aches at the bittersweet tale of love.
i would not be surprised, nor would i be disappointed, if this were the finest piece of science fiction i will ever read. asimov, clarke, herbert - sit down, boys, and pay attention. this is the real stuff.
1. Hyperion
2. The Fall of Hyperion
3. Endymion
4. The Rise of Endymion
books 1 and 2 read together, books 3 and 4 read together. the pairs should really each be merged into a single volume. the Hyperion novels are *excellent* in their own right (the first novel won a Hugo) but the Endymion novels are where Dan Simmons rises above the rest.
this is my first all-nighter in a while and i'm not as concise as i normally like to be, so please excuse my gushing. i'm naming my first daughter Aenea or my first spaceship "Spirit of Aenea", that's all there is to it.
-peter
"No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing."
Here is the ROSKO list of the "hardcore 200" spammers who are responsible for 90% of all the spam in North America and Europe. Die die die....
A flawed study sparked the fragile kindling of parental neurosis to create this public health nightmare blaze. Please, please vaccinate your kids!
The original Worms was one of the most addictive games of all time. Now, it's back in full, sheep-/old woman-throwing 3D glory.
CNN has a story about sleep positions and what they reveal about a person's personality. The names of the positions are pretty amusing, too - log, starfish, etc.
We all know that Jessica Lynch's rescue was not really the stuff of legend. What *is* legendary is just how much of a production the military made of it. Check out this BBC article for some interesting insights.
Witnesses told us that the special forces knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital.
Dr Uday was surprised by the manner of the rescue
"We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital," said Dr Anmar Uday, who worked at the hospital.
"It was like a Hollywood film. They cried 'go, go, go', with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital - action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan."
There was one more twist. Two days before the snatch squad arrived, Harith had arranged to deliver Jessica to the Americans in an ambulance.
This page offers a very simple and stark contrast between what Bush has said and what he has done. Included are choice gems like this quote from the President of the Virginia firefighter's association: "The president has merely been using firefighters and their families for one big photo opportunity." (For more wonderful instances of Bush lying, check out this top 10 list of Bush's lies.)
8. "My plan unlocks the door to the middle class of millions of hard-working Americans." All the available slots of this top-ten list could be filled by statements Bush made to sell his tax cuts at various points—on the campaign trail, in 2001 (for the first major tax-cuts battle), and in 2003 (for the second major tax-cuts battle).
...
In fact, about 12 million low- and moderate-income families received no tax relief from Bush’s 2001 tax cuts (and millions of families were left out of his 2003 package). His plan unlocked few doors. Instead, about 45 percent of the 2001 package was slated to go to the top 1 percent of income earners. In 2003, Citizens for Tax Justice calculated that individuals earning between $16,000 and $29,000 would net about $99 from Bush’s proposed tax cuts. Again, not an amount that would cover the entrance fee for a middle-class life.
Time.com has a long special report about changes underway in Saudi Arabia. It's a very worthwhile read because it illustrates the extent to which Saudi Arabia used to be complicit with the terrorist activities of al Qaeda, and furthermore touches on previous US policies of turning a blind eye. Excerps:
Saudis are wondering how long the imams will stay in line. "When they speak about tolerance, the words don't come out easily," says a senior provincial official. "What we are hearing is only a facade. You can smell the disgust they feel in mouthing their new rhetoric." Sometimes it expresses itself plainly. Says Jordan: "We have noticed lately in influential mosques the imam has condemned terrorism and preached in favor of tolerance, then closed the sermon with 'O God, please destroy the Jews, the infidels and all who support them.'"
Like the mosques, Saudi schools have been the subject of scrutiny. Saudi textbooks have been laced with passages that not only extol the supremacy of Islam but also denigrate nonbelievers. An eighth-grade book states that Allah cursed Jews and Christians and turned some of them into apes and pigs. Ninth-graders learn that Judgment Day will not come "until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them." A chapter for a 10th-grade class warns Muslims against befriending non-Muslims, saying, "It is compulsory for the Muslims to be loyal to each other and to consider the infidels their enemy."
Double header from Commondreams.org: this article analyzes the US motives for invading Iraq and also sheds some incredibly disturbing light on our "war on terror". Quote from the article:
No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US air force complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.
Commondreams.org has an excellent piece summarizing the report from the Congress joint intelligence panel detailing the intelligence failures that lead to 9/11. Even though it's a summary, it's very detailed and since you probably won't ever read the actual report itself, it's worth a read. *Everyone should know the contents of at least this summary.* Some quotes:
"All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization can be found in Saudi Arabia," John O'Neill, the FBI's former top bin Laden investigator, said shortly before his death in the World Trade Center. O'Neill explicitly referred to interference from US policymakers concerned about U.S.-Saudi relations. He "complained that the F.B.I. was not free to act in international terror investigations because the State Department kept interfering," according to a New York Times account of O'Neill's interview with French journalist Jean-Charles Brisard shortly before his death. O'Neill "explains the failure in one word: oil."
...
The BBC's Greg Palast said that a "high-placed member of a U.S. intelligence agency" told him that "while there's always been constraints on investigating Saudis, under George Bush it's gotten much worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to "back off" investigating the Bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that angered agents." The official added that "since September 11th the policy has been reversed."
On orders of the Bush administration, a 28-page section dealing with suspected Saudi ties to the 9/11 plot was blacked out of the declassified version of the congressional report. Bush claimed that declassifying the information "would reveal sources and methods" and "help the enemy." But Sen. Bob Graham, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, decried the redactions. "In my judgment there is compelling evidence that a foreign government provided direct support through officials and agents of that government to some of the September 11 hijackers," Graham said. Sen. Chuck Schumer went further: "There seems to be a systematic strategy of coddling and cover-up when it comes to the Saudis."
After watching the French movie "8 Women", I fell in love with Virginie Ledoyen's rendition of Marie Laforet's song "Mon amour, mon ami". You can download the movie version here and the original version here. Click "continue reading" to read the lyrics (in French, of course!).
Read full entry...Telemarketing is a $400 billion dollar business?? Maybe this guy is just a few orders of magnitude off...
This page has some scans from a 1980s-era makeup book. Absolutely hilarious... it just goes to show how fickle fashion is. I'm glad I was too young to be dating back then.
I have uploaded three high-quality episodes of Firefly that were never aired on US TV. They are:
Trash (script)
The Message (script)
Heart of Gold (script)
Here is the script for "Dead or Alive", an unproduced episode. Also, this link indicates that Fox is releasing the Firefly DVDs on December 9th. Yay!!!
Here is an amusing little anecdote about a dog, telephones, and complex chains of events.
AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
MY HEAD IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE WITH EXCITEMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
:) :) :) :)
While searching for the full lyrics to a Vietnam War song, I came upon this wonderful tune.
(In case anyone is wondering, I was searching for the song "In the Army".)
Brad sent me this brainfart from the Family Research Council. Delicious quote from the essay:
This change was brought about by the sexual liberationists' constant rhetorical emphasis on the autonomy of "consenting adults," by the promotion and ultimate triumph of the notion that anything sexual is morally permissible, so long as it takes place between "consenting adults." The older sexual culture placed all kinds of restrictions on what grown-up people could do with themselves, but the new liberationism rejected all that. Why, after all, can't two (or, for that matter, three or four) adults do what they want, so long as no one is coerced? What "consenting adults" do together is no one else's business.
This rhetorical emphasis on consent implies an utter rejection of the old understanding of the nature of sex itself, which was the basis of the severity of the old mores. ... That old understanding held that there was an objective moral structure to sex, and that there were right and wrong ways to use it--regardless of whether the parties making use of it were consenting adults or not.
I hold there is an objective moral structure to the HTTP protocol, and there are right and wrong ways to use it, this piece of drivel being an example of the latter.
I don't know if this is more amusing or irritating. Actually I guess the product itself is hilarious but the fact that there is extremely high demand for it is irritating. 12" Action Figure of George W.
Direct quote from Slashdot comment in the recent string theory/"Does God play dice" thread:
on pseudorandom oscillation (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02, @04:14PM (#6853097)
My housemate was recently developing a comprehensive theory of the oscillations of short bits of string, even comprising such philosophical points as whether they're inherent or caused by some bored unemployed minor god. Then I bought a laser pointer and now it's all refraction this and speckle that.
Cats are fickle.