Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Month: April 2004

  • Piri Reis Map

    Here’s a link to a good image of the Piri Reis map. For all you mystery-history buffs out there.

  • Chickens and Books

    A couple of links I found interesting. First is to All Consuming, “a website that watches weblogs for books that they’re talking about, and displays the most popular ones on an hourly basis.” Kinda cool. The other is to an article on Kuro5hin titled “Raising the Humble Chicken,” which is kind of random but good. I grew up with chickens; if we didn’t live inside the city limits, I think I’d try to convince my wife to let me get some.

  • Bend blogger meetup?

    Over on Jake’s site on a roundup of all the known Bend bloggers, the topic has come up in the comments on having a local blogger meetup. Time and place to be decided. I’d vote for one of the breweries.

    Any interest?

  • Blog & Order

    Notable: Tonight’s episode of Law & Order: SVU marks the first time I’ve heard the term “blog” used on a TV show. Not just used, it was central to the plot.

  • Historic house

    My drive home from work everyday takes me by an old brick house on Hawthorne Avenue, just out of downtown Bend on the entrance to the parkway. What’s notable about this house is that it’s obviously old—one of those old, pre-War homes that has ivy growing on it and just oozes atmosphere and looks like it should be on a register of historic places somewhere—and for a long time I’ve been meaning to look up its address online and see what pops up.

    Turns out it is a designated historic resource: the A.C. Lucas House, built in 1910, the first brick house in Bend. Cool.

    Here’s some of the links I dug up while researching the Lucas House:

    Okay, so not the most exciting of links. I can live with that.

  • Net Meme Threads

    Inspired by Tim Bray:

    From We Interrupt This Broadcast by Joe Garner:

    The Potsdam communique arrived in Japan on July 27.

    Instructions: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post its text along with these instructions, and point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads.

  • Some blog links

    Some things I found interesting this morning.

    Via Technorati I found a link to my site from eugene.com‘s blog of the day archive; apparently my site was their blog of the day on November 16 last year. Neat!

    And from ORblogs I found a new blog from Portland: the Kenilworth-Abernathy neighborhood blog. Not only does it center on that cool patch of southeast Portland that we like to visit (my brother, when he lived in Portland, always lived southeast, and my bestest friend lives there), but it has “Abernathy” in the name. I never knew one of the neighborhoods in Portland was named “Abernathy.” Worth further investigating.

  • Hellboy

    Forgot to mention, I saw the movie Hellboy last Saturday, and had a few words about it.

    Really good. For a long time I’d heard about plans for a Hellboy movie and was really skeptical that anyone could make a good one, but when I started seeing the actual previews, I got excited about it. And the movie delivered. It stayed extraordinarily true to the comic and Mike Mignola‘s vision.

    Totally worth it. Go see it!

  • Weak 24

    Maybe it’s just me, but I think this season of “24” is really weak, especially after last season. I thought this at the beginning of the season, and after Sunday night’s episode (and tonight’s follow-up), this weakness was just reiterated for me in spades.

    It just really smacks of bad writing, bad plotting. Jack Bauer had to kill his boss? WTF? Sloppy, poorly thought out, poorly executed (no pun intended). If it’s simply for shock value, as my wife suggested, then I think it’s really bad writing.

    But then again, it’s hard to follow up last season: they offered up Ass-Kicking Jack, Sacrifice-Himself-to-Save-the-World Jack, and Return-from-the-Dead Jack. This season? Junkie Jack, Desperately-Undercover Jack, and Cold-Blooded-Murder Jack.

    It’s almost as lame as me writing about how lame it is.

  • A-Team Movie

    Eric Rescorla speculates about casting for an A-Team movie (should someone in Hollywood ever get the urge to make one). Nice. But my first thought was, why not let the original actors play the roles? (They’d have to find somebody to take over Hannibal, of course.) Sure, it could be done, but that isn’t really how Hollywood works, sadly. It would have to fit the pattern of movies based on old TV shows: tweak the concept to bring it up to date, and cast current movie actors in the roles.

    So, if an A-Team movie couldn’t be made with the original cast (I mean, could anyone other than Mr. T play B.A. Baracus? Really?), here’s my take on the Hollywood-ified concept and cast:

    Plot: Four Desert Storm vets, framed for a crime they didn’t commit, help the innocent while on the run from the military. (Timing fits perfectly; in the mid-80s, they were Vietnam vets.) Of course, the opening voice-over (remaining true to the TV show, up to the point) goes:

    In 1992 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the [current hot/popular city] underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.

    Think along the lines of the aftermath of “Three Kings,” maybe.

    And the cast, my take:

    Hannibal: George Clooney (must have “Three Kings” on the brain… but also think “Ocean’s Eleven“)
    B.A.: Tough one. I’m thinking Chi McBride.
    Face: Hmm. How about Aaron Eckhart?
    Murdock: Ben Stiller (how could you not?)

    And of course, all the usual elements have to be there: the van, breaking Murdock out of the mental hospital, B.A. has to be tricked into flying (“Hey B.A., drink this glass of milk”), they have to be locked up in a tool shed or a machine shop or something so they can build some sort of weapon/vehicle/means of escape, and finally, of course, Hannibal has to be “on the jazz.”

    :)