Disney grows up

As someone says in the comments, the wicked witch is dead. The executive principally responsible for Disney’s spew of highly profitable, totally crappy direct-to-video sequels (Cinderella III, etc) has been ejected from her role as head of DisneyToon. (She’s not really dead; in that case I would have used much nicer language.)

Hopefully no more pablum will be forthcoming from The Mouse. There are plenty of other studios pumping out bad animation these days (don’t see: Happily N’Ever After, The Wild and, sadly, Shrek 3.) Disney can focus on doing high-end, charming, intelligent Pixar stuff.

[Hat tip: Broke Hoedown]

Into thin air, continued

 

Here is a truly beautiful chess position, as played and analyzed by Tomasso Dorigo, an Italian theoretical physicist. [Dorigo, do I have that right?] The game features a wonderful sacrifice of the into-thin-air sort (Qc7+!!), in which a piece is moved onto an empty square where it will die, but destroy the enemy position.

I am still analyzing the position and trying to bust Tomasso’s beautiful 30.Rb7! move. Analysis on his site. But what may be even more fun is the commentary by Tomasso and others about chess visualization and its relationship to particle physics. Good stuff.

I’m inspired to learn about string theory and found this site very useful for the novice who, like myself, needs to catch up on a few hundred years of physics backstory.

Vanilla Sky and the El Camino

Recently a coworker and I were mulling over the very bad movie Vanilla Sky. (Featuring Tom Cruise, who has probably made worse movies, and directed by Cameron Crowe, who hopefully bottomed out with Elizabethtown.) Vanilla Sky starts off as a stalker-chick story. Then it seems to morph into a psychological study about loss or something like that. Then it veers abruptly into science fiction territory. Watching it on PPV I felt like it was a movie that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.

Of course that should really NOT be a huge knock on a movie. In fact, there’s nothing worse than a tired genre film – the kind where you feel you could have written every cliched plot device in your sleep – so on principle I think I should be giving an enthusiastic two-thumbs-up to any genre buster that manages to make its way out of the Hollywood machine.

Which brought me to reconsider, briefly, my lifelong criticism of the El Camino, that griffin with the head of a sedan and the butt of a truck, sired in the dark forges of Detroit. Again on principle, the El Camino seems daring and creative.

Alas, it’s also hideous. And Vanilla Sky was a disjointed mess.

Sometimes creativity and cojones are not enough.

In case you missed it

Craptails. The ten worst drink concepts ever. Pictured: Salmon Colada. (From Chow.com.)

One man’s fun is another man’s noxious torture

I must point out D Churbuck’s annual rite of boat-cleaning and boat-painting. Fascinating. Though it sounds about as much fun as hunching over a chessboard for 36 hours on a sunny summer weekend. (– Oh. Scratch that. Sounds much less fun.)

(Yes, I break my own just-stated rule about linking out.  *shrug*. At least I nailed the post title.)

Top five secrets of keeping your blog obscure

The problem with the Web is that there’s nowhere to hide. If you aren’t careful, you can wind up with all kinds of idiots, unwanted visitors, search engines, or, even worse, friends and relatives finding and reading your blog.

Reassembler to the rescue. Here’s how to keep your thoughts to yourself and your blog safely hidden away from prying eyes.

1. Choose a name with zero commercial value. That way even if you come up #1 on a Google search, it brings in only a trickle of unwelcome guests.

2. Avoid focus. Everything these days is about identifying a niche, having a point of view, the Long Tail. Blah blah blah. If instead you meander from one subject to another, even the occasional surfer who accidentally stumbles onto your blog is unlikely to ever return. If you must tag your articles by subject – which I don’t recommend - a good tactic is to tag every post uniquely, so you wind up with a zillion tags and only one post per tag. Failing that, tagging everything as “uncategorized” will indicate your general hostility toward the reading public.

3. Use really long post titles and sentences and avoid clarity in favor of arcane, brobdingnagian words and overly clever amalgamations of Latin phrases, technical terms and non sequiturs. (See what I did there?) Example here. Generally avoid literalness in favor of metaphor, simile and faux observations of parallelism between disparate subjects. (And a lot of parenthetical phrases.)

4. Never link to anyone else. They might link back. Also don’t allow comments.

5. Don’t do Top Five lists.

Recent iPod additions

Capital G – Nine Inch Nails
Dashboard – Modest Mouse
Evil – Interpol
Little Sister – Queens of the Stone Age
Sick Sick Sick – Queens of the Stone Age
Worldwide Suicide – Pearl Jam

Nothing from the 80s. And a little dark for me. Maybe I should track down some old acoustic Howard Jones just to keep my balance.

Word of the day: Barratrous

Fraudulent.

Barratry is a legal term referring to particular types of fraud, e.g. a ship’s crew defrauding the ship’s owner.