Category: Uncategorized

What’s two months old and can climb over a two-foot fence?

Because I am a sucker, I read the WENN bullet points on IMDB about every day. I don’t think they have permalinks, so I’m reprinting this one in full (copyright World Entertainment News Network but I don’t care):

Jackson’s Snake Film Creates Huge Buzz

Samuel L. Jackson’s new mile-high thriller Snakes On A Plane has created such a buzz among internet film fans, movie bosses have called for re-shoots – to give the film a tougher rating. The film, which stars Jackson as an FBI agent trying to keep a federal witness alive onboard a plane full of snakes, wrapped last September – but went back before the cameras earlier this month for five days of additional shooting. Film bosses at distributor New Line Cinema opted to add new scenes to the film to take the movie from PG-13 into R-rated territory, according to industry magazine The Hollywood Reporter. They claim the second round of filming became necessary after intense and growing fan interest in the film, which is scheduled to be released this summer. Among the reported additions to the film is a foul-mouthed rant from Jackson in which his agent character bellows, “I want these motherf**king snakes off the motherf**king plane!” The line is expected to take on cult status. The film-makers have reportedly added more gore, more deaths, more nudity and more snakes to the finished product.

Let’s emphasize the part that makes me wince.

The line is expected to take on cult status.

Aww, guys. Guys, you can’t… you can’t do that.

Two days in and still not through the backlog, I’m beginning to know a certain fear of my RSS aggregator.

I am not making this up: MSN and careerbuilder deliver an article about “What Kind of Procrastinator Are You?”

Sometimes I think MSN is a gigantic joke on the same order as Modern Humor Authority, but ten times subtler and more sinister.

It snowed, but all the snow melted right away.

Man, I’ve laid some stinkers this week. Another story that will not go in Anacrusis:

Yesterday the grumpy man who came to install new software on the spare workstation at my cube asked me “when was the last time you rebooted this?”

“Monday,” I said, “I haven’t had a reason to touch it all week.”

“That means you left it on overnight,” he grumped. “That leaves our network vulnerable. We take a dim view of that.”

Imagine that the italics represent anger. And I was like, yeah, okay, he’s probably right and I should have thought of that. I apologized. A few minutes after he left, I realized:

1. That workstation has no Internet connectivity–it’s only on the intranet here, and has to dial out for anything else.
2. There is no lock on my cubicle.
3. There is no lock on the computer’s power button.
4. The username and password are written on a note taped to the monitor, which I did not put there. The procedure for dialing out is sitting on a piece of paper right next to that.

And I was like, how exactly is leaving it on a threat, grumpy man?

I was reading an article in The Morning News and noticed that all the links were red. “Man,” I thought, “they haven’t filled out any of their pages yet.”

“Jeremy’s feelings about his father are complicated. His father is a cheapskate and a petty thief, and yet Jeremy likes his father. His father hardly ever loses his temper with Jeremy, he is always interested in Jeremy’s life, and he gives interesting (if confusing) advice when Jeremy asks for it. For example, if Jeremy asked his father about kissing Elizabeth, his father might suggest that Jeremy not worry about giant spiders when he kisses Elizabeth. Jeremy’s father’s advice usually has something to do with giant spiders.”

I’d forgotten how good F & SF could be. I’m not even halfway through the novella in the September issue* and it’s amazing, like a story about high schoolers watching the TV show of Hitherby Dragons. (Imagining Hitherby Dragons as a pirate TV show that takes place in the context of another story actually helps Hitherby Dragons make more sense.)

The novella is “Magic for Beginners” by Kelly Link, and I’ve already decided to buy its comprising collection when I can. I am also going to buy Leonard’s book. You should buy Leonard’s book! Leonard’s book will teach you to program computers.

While I’m talking about people who write stuff, I will tell you that histoires exists, and that its author very kindly claims to have been inspired by Anacrusis. Histoires comes in 101-word form, but it has multiple entries on most days, it is (unlike Anacrusis) free of lasersharking, and I don’t understand it. I want to be clear on that: I have no idea what is going on in histoires, but I read it anyway! I just enjoy the gestalt feeling of a world popping up around me, and Ms. Gaderian’s prose is like fancy citrus ice cream.

Newer and shorter is 55 Words by Rosemary Mosco, although you could argue that it’s longer, if illustration really does count for a thousand words. There are only four such stories up right now, and I wish it had an RSS feed, because I want to read more.

* The September issue came out in July. No one knows why the September issue came out in July. Take courage, my friend. We are not alone.

Today’s Rose is Rose must be pretty terrifying for humans who don’t read the strip regularly.