Is Angelina Jolie the new Roger Moore of spy movies?

Remember those backwater years of James Bond movies when the caricature known as Roger Moore kept the franchise going?  Nuff sed.

Imagine owning a cockatiel (or rather, it owning you) for 21 years, the bird turning little cardboard boxes into homes complete with chewed-out windows to stare at you.

Congrats to all the runners - the DNFs, winners and finishers - who ran the Rocket City Marathon course today; especially the ones who overcame personal adversity - pain, injury, etc.  Relatively warm for this time of year just before the cold and rain/snow sweep through.

Good to see familiar faces in the Holiday Inn, including Abdul and other hotel employees, Kris and the ham radio operators/comm team/timekeepers, Virginia College students, emergency/police personnel and fellow food volunteers led by Jim.

Thanks to Publix, Brueggers, Dole and Atlanta Bread Company; runners' support/family; the person who said he's going to play Santa Claus early and give some of the leftover food to random homeless people.

Checked the Book of the Future this afternoon - a new forecast is almost ready for broadcast.  Even I, as jaded as I am right now, can't believe what's going to happen next.  Surprised?  No.  Basically amazed.

Oh, and a shoutout to UT.

Hot Air Cools Off And Falls Back Down

In the subcurrents, I catch films like The Shock Doctrine (based on Naomi Klein's book) and a refutation of the same at reason.com.

After all, I'm still looking at the whole species here, using local subcultures as examples of the bigger trend's effects.

I ask myself if an aggressive/nonviolent member of our species, who accumulates wealth through insight and hard work, is responsible to other members of the species.  You know, the "Atlas Shrugged" mentality.

I ask myself if our species is, in fact, a species at all.

All answers are valid until proven otherwise.

These thoughts and investigations, interesting though they may be, do not get me much closer to getting off this planet.

However, one must keep one's eyes open to untold futures, even if one must repeat oneself for clarity and boring accompaniment basslines.

Keep the opposition feeling important with their protests so they don't do any serious damage.

But you don't know what those with whom I liaise call the opposition, do you?

You just think you do.

It's more simple and more complicated than you think.

If you think.

I like my emotional states but cooler heads prevail, as if logic, a tiny part of our species, is the only part of thinking that matters.  They're wrong.  They don't think enough.

Humour is part logical and part emotional.

China has one more opportunity to get this right.  If it doesn't, then some want to take 'em out the old-fashioned way, dragging India, Pakistan and southern Asia down with 'em.  I'm computing the odds to see if I should increase my military-industrial complex investments or buy some quiet countryside far away from the action and let the situation play out the way the Committee of 7.5 prefers, no matter what that is.

Either way, I and my family will profit.

Like I say, my family is you - seven-billion strong - some will profit and some will lose.  That's just the way it is.

Even backyard streetball has winners and losers.  Choose your teams carefully - a true leader finds strength in every team member.  Can you?

"I can't meet you and your husband for lunch...

...because I always seem to get pregnant afterward."

One thing about this parallel surreal world within the parallel real world of hypotenuses and right angles is try, try again.

If you live in the shadow of television towers, you'd better enjoy reading or building things.  If at first 20 channels of cable isn't working for you, try satellite.  If satellite leaves you wanting during a rainstorm, go back to 500 channels of cable for the tellie and ADSL for the Internet. If at first ADSL isn't working for you, try cable for speed's sake.  If cable seems one-way in many ways, try something like a Sony BDP-S370 with Internet options through ADSL.

And if none of those work, get out your high-res radar and track domestic drones for fun and games.

Stop Smiling or read it.

If you put those on engineering welfare out of work, how again did you say you were going to keep them occupied in occupational therapy?

Pandora and Netflix, perhaps?

Who will pay after Discovery's up and away?

Do you understand the connection between broadcast media and how the wheels of life are turned?

Do you know how to blind a visible light camera with science?

Do you have the intelligence to play the games you wrote and the rules you've forgotten while showing the hidden rules they make up that you're rewriting once more, all of us drawing new lines in the mantra sand?

To pretend to believe that some rules are hard-and-fast?

I get tired.  I am tired.  I was tired and only pure happiness keeps me from telling my billions of cells I'm so bored I could die from lack of any really new games to play.

Perception does not design rocket fins.

RNA does not always reflect DNA sequences.

If you find the oldest brick ever made, does that make any difference in how the average brick is laid today or newly-manufactured 100 years from now?

Can you deduce where the next volcano will erupt using gravity wave interruption?

The QE2 is not the QE2, despite nominal numerical nomenclature.  Floating in port, immobile in sober anticipation of a giddily resurgent economy.

Beauty is in the art of the beholden.

How many traditional items are no longer made in your land?

Will cable company content providers go out of business because of sepia-toned business models?

Branding is hazing - until branding is outlawed, all forms of nonfatal hazing are acceptable, so it would seem.

Pop culture books are mind-numbing comfort food, calorie-free, part of the Book of the Future I can still access remotely.

Thanks to Dianna, Joe and Jessica.

Does your news source publish rumours or verifiable, double/triple/quadruple-checked facts?  Do you care?

Randomly Selected

A shoutout to scott thill (writer.editor.journo / wired.alternet.metromix.huffpo.filter.rollingstone.more.) in the contest at wired.com to win a copy of Apocalypse Now: Full Disclosure Edition.

Guess my words, according to scott, made a mark: "your brilliant comment on Apocalypse Now, televised body counts and more made my day, and won you a free copy of the Blu-ray."

My redux comments:

As a child watching the Vietnam War on television, I learned that body counts were key to victory. After watching "Apocalypse Now," including the original release and the redux, I've grown to appreciate the reality that an unreal media like cinema portrays about the fog and horror of war. Coppola, Hopper, Sheen, Duvall, Fishbourne and Brando captured the inside story of what made the television news so shocking. Such vision comes once in a lifetime - Eisenstein, Capra, Coppola...filmmakers such as these set standards few can achieve.

With the original film and redux in my movie collection, I will add the new Blu-Ray edition, whether I win it here or not. Either way, I thank wired.com for helping us to remember that cinematic versions of war are just as important as history books in helping us recall why we should think first, ask questions and shoot up the place as a last resort.

As I told scott, war and body counts are perennial, aren't they?  Historians tell us their worth, etc., and so on.  Coppola - his cast and crew, too - made it fun and insightful to watch, at least.  Look forward to seeing the 1080p flick in crisp and clear Blu-Ray.

We can choose how our species interacts.  How we make heroes.  How we live and die.

In my thoughts, stopping intolerance is the only enemy to dispense with.  "How" is "why" and sometimes war is the only answer we can find but never the only one.

The "Year of the Woman" does not mean more females in the U.S. Congress but a New Perspective on life.  Think about it - 50% of us usually do.

Avatars in Avatars

Talked with a friend who bought one of those airport body scanners for personal use.  The friend is working on installing the device at a theatre entrance, scanning those who pay a special entrance fee (read: more expensive) and having their bodies inserted into minor character roles in the digital screen projection of upcoming flicks.

The audience members won't know the change for sure unless they've seen the film more than once and/or they see fellow patrons at the cinema before the film showing stepping off to the side into the room where the body scanner will be discreetly located.

Given the fast pace of change, the friend expects hackers, once they learn of this public film role switching technique, to use homemade 3D body scanners to allow anyone to insert whomever they wish into any role in their digital film collection.

My friend is consulting with me about the best method for voice range/style retranslation.  Anyone I know who's played with voice insertion/deletion is up for a future Academy Award in the near future!

Imagine your favorite flick with all the famous actors replaced by friends and family with the flip of a switch and a little bit of moviemaking magic.

Where fantasy ends, reality begins.  Makes the average home theatre look as ancient as a dilapidated local opera house.  Are you the first on the block with the new technology?  As far as the rest of us go, how much is the transition worth to the typical Redbox movie renter?

When Nature Calls, Do Your Duty

Low-key humour of the day - a poke at television shows about movies, nature, military, history, current events, "reality," and what-if scenarios: