Freyburg

Not according to me, but as per the Black Table. There’s some fine hate here. 🙂

Here’s an article about how Google’s plan to digitize libraries will sound the death knell for books on paper. I don’t know if I buy that; reading a book on a computer, while possible and sometimes necessary, is nothing like sitting down with the ol’ dead tree version. Until you can reproduce the “book” experience, all the prognostication in the world about the imminent demise of books will be as ephemeral as words on a screen.

The NYT has a short piece asking what exactly it is Bin Laden wants, with all his killing and such. I’ve often wondered that myself. Ol’ Osama’s a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them, so you have to wonder if he really buys into the pan-Islamic state he keeps pitching.

Apparently the battle for Fallujah, also known as “Holy crap, we’d better clean up this ungodly mess we made,” is going to be made into a movie, starring Harrison Ford. What happened, Solo? Did the carbonite give you brain damage?

Under Mars is an archive of soldiers photos from Iraq. They range from goofy to striking to pretty graphic, but it’s worth a look.

Here’s a bunch of new special edition iPods Apple probably won’t be releasing any time soon.

I’m a little slow on the uptake on this one, but there’s a great essay circulating around the interweb about the virtues of doing sweet jack all.

Or, as a friend of mine calls it, “29-E.” 🙂

Well, the short answer is I can’t. I live in a small town, the movie theatre is the next town over, and they get everything a month after it comes out. It’s a really good theatre, with great sound and comfortable seats, but I’m impatient.

So whenever I get to the city (be it Edmonton or Vancouver), I try to see a movie that’s just opened. This time it was Ocean’s Twelve, which was fairly entertaining and worth at least typing into a search engine next to “torrent” a few months from now. 🙂

What I don’t enjoy is the opening weekend crowd. I used to be able to tolerate the teenage nonsense that comes with a new movie, but it’s starting to get to me in my advanced years. But that’s just the start. Once you get into the theatre, they run a continuous string of commercials before the movie starts. Oh no, wait, that’s before the OTHER commercials start, all ten of them. That’s right, ten. It used to be they’d show one or two commercials before the trailers. Well, no more. They load up and make you sit through a pile of inanity at full volume. Not cool. At least the trailers were palatable, including Batman Begins, which looks like it might break the curse of terrible, over-directed Bat-schlock the last two films devolved into. But good gravy, I just paid $14 for this?

And just to top things off, there was an actual, no-foolin’ poster for a movie called “Karate Dog.” I’m not kidding.

Apparently Google is going to make the contents of many research libraries, including Oxford, freely searchable. That’s pretty cool, though I wonder if it’ll do anything positive for their bottom line.