Best Movie Review Ever

Speaking about the new waste of celluloid 'The Dukes of Hazzard', movie reviewer Mick LaSalle of SFGate says (quoted without permission):

There are routine movies and others that blaze a trail. There are routine bad movies and others so horrendous that they redefine bad, that make us look up synonyms for agonizing and abysmal and then gnash our teeth because the language has not kept pace with the decline of film. There are even movies that are so blazingly rotten that they can redefine past experiences and make us look back on recent weak efforts like 'Stealth' or 'Fantastic Four' and think, "Ooh, that was fascinating."

'The Dukes of Hazzard' is hardly some routine bad movie. Rather, it's one of the elite, right up there with 'I Am Curious ... Yellow' (1967) and Bo Derek's 'Ghosts Can't Do It' (1990), in stiff competition for the lamest thing ever put on celluloid. ... The filmmakers couldn't buy a laugh in a burning poppy field. ... Instead of releasing this film in theaters, they should have sent it straight to Guantanamo, at least while it's still legal.

doh!

High speed cats in Brunei

Ignore the idiotic setting in which these (what do you call folks from Brunei, Bruneze? Brunettes?) cats show what cats can do, as some of the pictures are really amazing, and the owners of the web-page are obviously pre-pubescent morons.

Judging people by their covers

Apparently, looks really do matter. If the author's premise is true, society is already Gattica-like without need for those pesky dna-tests. What I find interesting is that apparently there's a bit of science going on as regards the whole beauty-thing. Really interesting--Russ and I have long decried greater society's slavish devotion to what we call "boring beauty", and perhaps there's something to that.

Then again, there's the empirical angle, which's intriguing. I'm no fan of Marilyn Monroe or Twiggy, but apparently what they both have in common with the oh-so lemurly Audrey Hepburn is a 0.7 waist/hip ratio, and that's considered important. It makes you wonder if one day public gyms will offer, for the proverbial nominal fee, a quantitative "beauty analysis". In one way it's really interesting, and in another, quite discomfiting. None of us like to think of ourselves as automata....

The Great Sheep Dip of 2005

Who knew sheep's fluffiness was a mass survival trait?

(07-08) 18:59 PDT ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) --

First one sheep jumped to its death. Then stunned Turkish shepherds, who had left the herd to graze while they had breakfast, watched as nearly 1,500 others followed, each leaping off the same cliff, Turkish media reported.

In the end, 450 dead animals lay on top of one another in a billowy white pile, the Aksam newspaper said. Those who jumped later were saved as the pile got higher and the fall more cushioned, Aksam reported.

"There's nothing we can do. They're all wasted," Nevzat Bayhan, a member of one of 26 families whose sheep were grazing together in the herd, was quoted as saying by Aksam.

The estimated loss to families in the town of Gevas, located in Van province in eastern Turkey, tops $100,000, a significant amount of money in a country where average GDP per head is around $2,700.

"Every family had an average of 20 sheep," Aksam quoted another villager, Abdullah Hazar as saying. "But now only a few families have sheep left. It's going to be hard for us."

Koan of the Month

As related in the Genjokoan of Dogen Zenji:

Zen master Baoche of Mt. Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, "Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. When, then, do you fan yourself?"

"Although you understand that the nature of the wind is permanent," Baoche replied, "you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere."

"What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?" asked the monk again. The master just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply.