Category Archives: Random Stuff

In Retrospect…

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After reading this, I feel a little (and I do mean little, not a lot at all) bad for confronting an Air Marshal in Baltimore/BWI yesterday, explaining to him that if he’s going to try for “I’m just a business traveller talking on my crackberry, honest,” that he should probably not be giving physical descriptions of passengers loud enough for passersby to be immediate winners of the “Spot The Fed” game.
I don’t actually know that he was an Air Marshal, he might have been TSA, he might have been FBI, who knows. I do know that if he was trying to keep cover, he did a piss poor job, and I did (extremely politely and calmly, I might point out, not like some raving lunatic) point out to him that he might as well have been wearing a uniform for as “subtle” as he was being.

Up The Irons! Maiden’s Back!

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Hell to the yeah, Iron Maiden’s back. Their new single, The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg is available via iTunes Music Store, and it kicks serious ass.
It evokes the power, both in terms of vocals and writing, of the Powerslave era, and that’s saying a lot.
I can’t wait til the new album, A Matter of Life And Death, is finally released in September.
My crappy week just got a little bit brighter…

Google’s Dual-Class Stock Structure Questioned

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ZD has an article which says that some investment group is seeking to have a resolution voted on which would essentially make the Class A stock and the Class B stock “equals” in terms of voting power. The theory being that the Class B stock, which is only held by three top Google executives, holds far more voting power than is accounted for in actual shares held.
Now, here’s the kicker, the article points out, “By their ownership of 86,753,907 shares of Class B common stock, three of the company’s executives (Eric E. Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin) controlled 66.2 percent of the total voting power of all the company’s shares…even though they owned only 31.3 percent of the total shares outstanding,” the proposal says, according to Google’s filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
So, wait… they have 66.2% of the voting share? How the hell does this investment group expect this referendum to pass? “Yes, I’d like to give up my control of the company voluntarily”? Seriously, even if every single shareholder except the top-three voted for it, it would still only be 33.8% of the votes, a clear minority.
Weird the way people will waste their time on fruitless pursuits.

The Importance of Copy Editing

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I got my copy of Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime II CD today. As I was reading the liner notes, I notice this funny thing:

Photcreds: Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come vToo come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come

The “v” in there is actually in the credits. Although anyone who’s used a word processor knows what happened:

  • They blocked out where the photo credits would go in the liner notes
  • They misspelled “to” in “to come”
  • They copy/pasted it over and over again to use the right amount of room, accidentally not hitting CTRL on one of the pastes, leaving a “V” in there from the malformed CTRL-V
  • They never followed up and put the photo-credits in.

Oops.

Churches Can Be Cool

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A couple weeks ago, I drove by this little church (old enough to have a historical marker, FYI). Out front they had a little sandwich board for their “Friday Film”. It said “MONTY PYTHON: MEANING OF LIFE”.
That’s kinda cool, I thought, a church that’s willing to take a step back and laugh at itself to a certain extent, and isn’t so “lofty” as to insist that anything which might poke fun at Christian Mythology is inherently evil.
But, I’ll be honest, I didn’t give it much thought past that point. Until a couple days ago, when I drove by again, and this week’s “Friday Film” was a little further out there: Dogma.
Now, this takes things to a whole new level. I mean, Meaning of Life may poke fun at Christianity a bit, but Dogma takes it completely to the next level. I mean, Dogma describes Jesus as, “The nigger who owes me twelve bucks”, which of course is delivered by Chris Rock, playing the ostracized thirteenth apostle (written out because he’s black, of course). It implies that God likes to take time off and hide out playing Skee-Ball on a New Jersey boardwalk, to the detriment of anything else that might require his (her?) attention. It’s got the Buddy Christ even. George Carlin as a Catholic Cardinal?
Dogma is not the kind of movie I’d ever expect to see playing at a Church’s “Friday Film Night”. Heck, I’m an atheist, and I almost want to go over on Friday night just to congratulate the minister for having the balls to be open-minded about everything.
I’m glad to see it, though. Christianity can, at times, be really really full of itself.

RIP, G’Kar. Andreas Katsulas Passes On.

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Seen on Peter David’s blog, taken from Bill Mumy’s Site, Andreas Katsulas — known to science-fiction fans as G’Kar of Babylon 5, known to Star Trek fans as the Romulan Commander Tomalak, and to non-sci-fi fans most as the one-armed man in the movie remake of The Fugitive — has died of cancer at the age of 59.
He was a consummate character actor, and I’ve never read another actor say a bad thing about him in all of my readings. His portrayal of G’Kar over the five years of Babylon 5 is quite possibly one of the best performances in all of science fiction history.
The world is a lesser place now.