Cool Comics

From Dilbert & PHD Comics.

New Template MADNESS

I changed the template. This officially counts as procrastination.

I need to get ready for a four o'clock class me thinks.

Best President Ever

OK, so Josiah Bartlet was fictional. But he was an economist, a fairly left wing economist at that - which makes him pretty rare but not unknown.

He wrote a book called Theory and Practice of Macroeconomics in Developing Countries and that is just cool.

It'll be nice if we had an American presidential candidate who didn't sign up to bad economic policies. Such as McCain and Clinton's support for the Gas Tax holiday. Obama has nothing to do with it but he seems like a lightweight.

Oh well. I liked this video from The Colbert Report. And this from the Dilbert Blog.

Seven Days of Robert Altman: Day Seven

Day One: M*A*S*H
Day Two: McCabe & Mrs Miller
Day Three: The Long Goodbye
Day Four: Nashville
Day Five: The Player
Day Six: Gosford Park

Robert Altman died about six months after A Prairie Home Companion was released so it proved to be his last and with its permutations on death turned out to be a rather foreshadowing film. It received lackluster reviews but I highly enjoyed it, this film was my introduction to Altman when I watched it at the end of last year. I picked it up at the video store with the firm intention to finally watch one of his movies. (It would later turn out that I would have to study him the next year - stuff like that always amuses me)

The video is of one of the songs amongst the many I could have chosen.

Election Prediction (The Wild Guess)

I like making a wild guess, getting it down on paper (or blog) and then getting it out months later and having a good laugh. Without further ado, my predictions for the New Zealand Election this year.

National: 53 seats
Labour: 47 seats
Greens: 8 seats
Maori Party: 5 seats
ACT: 3 seats
NZ First: 3 seats
Progressive: 1 seat
United Future: 1 seat

That makes a total of 121 seats with the Maori Party providing the overhang. This situation will call for some complicated coalition building.

I'm also envisioning a situation where ACT and the Greens get less votes, NZ First is booted out completely (Winston Peters doesn't win back his Tauranga seat), the Maori Party get less party votes and National picks up the majority of these votes. That'll look like:

National: 58 seats
Labour: 49 seats
Greens: 6 seats
Maori Party: 5 seats
ACT: 2 seats
Progressive: 1 seat
United Future: 1 seat

That's 122 seats. Oh well, so much can change before election day.

The Primary Goes On!

I love elections. Today is a hugely important day for the democratic party nominees. It could make or break Hillary Clinton.

These seem to the best place to get results: Indiana (72 delegates) & North Carolina (115 delegates).

Currently Hillary has a 4% lead in Indiana and Obama has a 15% lead in North Carolina. But it's so ridiculously early that those numbers are completely irrelevant. (noon - NZ time)

Movie Maps of the World

Strange Maps has an advertisement from Volkswagen that shows three different maps of the world if we represent them through movie production.

The most bizarre one is the first one based on "average budget per feature film" where New Zealand ends up utterly huge with the author offering the comment that "Australia could fit in between the North and South Islands"

Could the Lord of the Rings really have distorted the stats so much? Probably. It's a sad fact that New Zealand makes very few films and they're probably not enough in number to bring down the average budget down enough. Also, if we're counting Lord of the Rings, (an overseas financed production) why not count say King Kong, 10,000 BC, Wolverine, Narnia, etc...

If we're going to have a small number of really high budget films with a small number of low budget films then not even the United States could compete on that stat with their small number of really high budget films and a really large number of medium and small budget films.

Sideways

Review: Bon Voyage (2003)

How could a film so riddled with cliches and scenes that has already been seen be so entertaining?

I didn't have much expectations when I decided to watch it, my flatmate had rented it and hadn't gone around to seeing it and I was feeling awake and alert that Sunday night. What else was I to do? It was awesome, the film flirts with Hitchcock, Truffaut and others I'm probably not aware of (the IMDB reviewers seemed to mentioning Renoir a lot). It wasn't very substantial but was mere entertainment (those expecting a World War Two drama would have been disappointed).

My flatmate attempted to watch but gave up after about half an hour declaring it 'shit'. I'll give it 8/10.

Awesome Simpsons: Bart's Girlfriend

I watched The Simpsons today and was greeted with an awesome episode from season six: Bart's Girlfriend. It's been a while since I saw a cool episode, all the ones I seem to be seeing on TV are from the later and vastly inferior seasons. Meryl Streep guests stars as the eponymous character.

The basic plot is that Bart finds himself lusting after Reverend Lovejoy's daughter: Jessica. He tries to pass himself off as a nice boy thinking that'll impress her but he soon discovers that she is a bad girl whose antics far exceed his own.

Some cool quotes... (from SNPP)

Lovejoy: And now my daughter Jessica, who has just returned from boarding school, will read the same passage I just read. I noticed a few of you weren't paying attention.
Bart: [groans] Oh...
[Jessica walks up; a heavenly light shines upon her]
Bart: [gasps] Wow! There is a God!
[the light comes from a lighthouse outside]
Man: I'm telling you the light would work better if it pointed out to sea.
McAllister: Arr, shut up! I know what I'm doing.
[a boat crashes in the distance]
McAllister: Arr, I hate the sea and everything in it.

Lisa: Don't be so hard on yourself, Bart. It's not your fault Jessica doesn't like you.
Bart: Is it my hair? My overbite? The fact that I've worn the same clothes day in, day out for the last four years?

Bart: Excellent! You're incredible, Jessica: your throws, your catches, your spirals, and your loops -- it's like the toilet paper is an extension of your body.

Marge: Have you noticed any change in Bart?
Homer: New glasses?
Marge: No...he looks like something might be disturbing him.
Homer: Probably misses his old glasses.
Marge: I guess we could get more involved in Bart's activities but then I'd be afraid of smothering him.
Homer: Yeah, and then we'd get the chair.
Marge: That's not what I meant.
Homer: It was, Marge, admit it.

Rugby!

From Stuff...

Evans will earn somewhere in the region of $2 million for his 2 1/2 years with Quins, though it has been speculated that Carter could haul in as much as that for a single year in France.

One thing I don't understand about this is where do the European clubs get the money? Is there really such a big market for players in a region that is dominated by soccer? Then again, even in Europe rugby players make chickenshit compared to their soccer counterparts who are getting $20 million+

One question is, who is earning the most in NZ rugby? How much can the NZRFU actually afford to pay players? They'll need to up the ante or more players will leave. They have the lure of the All Black jersey but apparently you can put a price on that now (about a million or so).

Celebrating with Chocolate.

I'm about to overdose on the chocolate I bought to celebrate my "victory" over the bank. This all started way back on Friday when I was about to go to the supermarket. I checked my balance online and what did I find? That there was $1.43 left in my account. I found that the bank had taken $22.20 (as you can see - I'm not very rich at the moment) out as "interest charges". It was five o'clock and too late to go to the bank and complain.

So, yesterday I went to the bank and complained and got it reversed. They didn't know why it had happened but I got my money back and would have it the next day. So today I look in my account and find that low and behold I now only had 13c in my account (I had spent a dollar at video ezy to rent a movie). So I went back, turned out I had some bill payments that I had forgotten out sitting there unable to make payment (very little payments) because of the interest fee and the bank had charged me $22.50 for that. They reversed that as well.

So I bought some chocolate (this new chocolate by Cadburys - it's a mixture of dark and milk chocolate). Hopefully I won't have to go back to the bank for a while.

Review: Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

When I said at the start of the year that I should more Russian authors I don't think I meant this.

Nevertheless, I've found myself addicted to the Watch series since last year when I watched the Night Watch movie followed up by the Day Watch movie earlier this year. I got out the books from the library and promptly read them and now just finished Twilight Watch - the third book in the series. If you're into a mixture of magician/vampire/detective novels with a little satire on bureaucracy and some musing on modern Russia then this is will be right down your alley. If not, read War and Peace or something.

Admittedly, this book is not as good as the the first two but has it moments. Lukyanenko keeps up his annoying habit of putting heaps of lyrics in the prose. I don't let Thomas Pynchon do that and Lukyanenko gets the same treatment. What's the point? I don't even bother reading them.

There is a movie called Twilight Watch scheducled for release in 2009 but the setting has been changed from Russia to the States and it will feature American actors rather than Russians. A obviously disapointing movie with the only bright spot being that they've retained the director Timur Bekmambetov. So it should be interesting, the books and the movies are two different beasts with the movies going in a completely diffferent direction to the books. We'll just have to wait and see.

Seven Days of Robert Altman: Day Six

Day One: M*A*S*H
Day Two: McCabe & Mrs Miller
Day Three: The Long Goodbye
Day Four: Nashville
Day Five: The Player

Ah, the penultimate day and today's featured movie is Gosford Park. This won the oscar for best original screenplay. Beating some of my favourite films like Memento, Amelie and The Royal Tenenbaums. It beat Monster's Ball as well - but I haven't seen that.

The video today is one of the songs sung, which has been a bit of theme for the videos I've posted from Youtube. Mainly because they're about all that can be found. Altman has an interesting relationship with music. Something that totally needs to be explored... just not now.

Seven Days of Robert Altman: Day Five

Day One: M*A*S*H
Day Two: McCabe & Mrs Miller
Day Three: The Long Goodbye
Day Four: Nashville

So we go from 1975 to 1992. After making what many consider to be his masterpiece he slips a little and he makes films like Popeye. Finally, he makes his "comeback" with The Player. Though, it's not really a comeback, he never really went anywhere. People were still giving him money to sit behind a camera.

The clip below is the seven and half minute opening sequence of the movie. I can't actually watch it at the moment because my internet has seemed to have grinded to a halt. According to the comments there is some kind of error with the clip and there looks like there is a cut. But there really isn't.