It's a hint.

When your house begins to resemble an xkcd comic

you know it's time to pick things up.  BTW, that's not an obelisk in the back yard, that's an NVIS antenna thankyouverymuch.

More Pirate Radio

This time with actual broadcast content.  Given that 7/8 of all current broadcast stations are either (1) political talk, (2) oldies, (3) pop-country, or (4) spoits twak, it's no wonder fewer people are listening these day.  Well some people are taking matters into their own hands and broadcasting with, y'know, listenable content.  It's getting kind of out of hand up in Brooklyn it seems, according to the New York Post.  I wish them luck.  And low, low fines from the FCC.

Side note: Can we get just one station to broadcast Postmodern Jukebox?  Please.

Weird as it can get, I'm glad we have WQRZ locally.  It's a welcome break from the homogenized robo-player blend.

Now with Flame-O-Phone!

This is so great that it has to be seen to be believed:
[dangit, blogger can't find the youtube video so here's the link]

Go look up the original if you must, but frankly this cover is much better.  Oh hell, here's the link.  See?  Disappointing after listening to that cover.

Got all that?  Good, because there's more at Postmodern Jukebox.

ps: here, have a TED talk.

Here, have a moment of zen.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140907.html
Myself, I'm going to the woods.  Pictures later, if I slow down to take any.

Don't let this happen to your river.

A CNN reporter kayaks (and partially hikes) the San Joaquin river in California end-to-end.  Story here.  It's pretty long, so go put on a pot of coffee before you get started.

For all of the amazing engineering and agricultural productivity (not to mention the Bakersfield Sound) than came of it, it's pretty clear that what's been done to this river has a serious downside.  It is very weird to imagine a river that is entirely diverted away into canals half-way down its length, reduced to a sandy trackway for fifty-plus miles, then gradually reborn in its lower half by water pumped in from other rivers.  Definitely has "unsustainable" stenciled all over it.

Here's an interesting paragraph from deep down in the article:

"Before I left, I promised Ryan and Laura I’d create my own water budget.  And figure out where my water in Atlanta comes from, exactly."

Well, a big bucket of that water that would be from Lake Lanier.  Which was formed by a dam on the Chatahoochee river.  A dam that was originally built – multi-state contract all signed and legal – for the sole purpose of power generation.  But mission creep took over, Atlanta tapped off more and more water, and when things were finally dragged into court, the ruling was – agreement be damned – Atlanta could have the water and everybody downstream else could go pound sand.  Including everyone on the Chatahoochee and Apalachicola rivers, and especially those oysters in Apalachicola Bay.

So, thank you for your concern, Mr. Sutter, and all the rest at CNN.  Please do work up a personal water budget, for all the good it will do.  But given your new experience, why don't you use your media empire soapbox to show Atlanta and the rest of the world what your fair city is doing to a still relatively pristine river right at this moment?  Please work on this, before it's too late and someone else has to take a kayak trip down another destroyed river in a half-century or so.

What the world needs: More Positive Science Fiction

Article over at the BBC.  Yeah, I can see the point.  Just remember, it still has to have a good can't-put-it-down story.

Movie Review: Noah

Having seen this movie now that it's out on DVD, here's my short review: it was pretty bad.

I'm kind of a stickler to the whole adapt-OK-fine-but-stick-to-the-source-material thing, and this movie fails miserably in that department.  Not that I'm claiming to be any sort of biblical scholar here, but it doesn't take more than a casual reading to see the problems.

After that... some of the CGI and effects were pretty good, but here and there it was just cheesy.  When Noah and family are on their journey early in the film, there was one green-screen scene of them walking across a parched landscape that was about as authentic as something out of "Land of the Lost," and I mean the 70's Saturday morning show, not the more recent movie flop.  Maybe the director was going for "otherworldly" rather than "realistic," but it just didn't work.  On the plus side, the at-sea scenes had the right sense of scale, and the moving rock pile angels kind of worked (at least on the CGI level, leaving aside the veracity part).

The acting was uniformly good.  Russell Crowe can pull off all sorts of stuff, and he pulls off another one here.  Other names (Hopkins, Connelly, Winstone) do fine.  Emma Watson did a workable job of avoiding being typecast in her old role from the Harry Potter movies.  Unfortunately, the kind of movie typecasts she broke out of here also include the adjectives "good" and "makes a lot at the box office."  Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

After the first half-hour of this movie, about all that kept me going to the end was a morbid desire to see where this turkey was going next.  I really can't recommend it beyond that.  Frankly, this is yet another example of movie makers thinking that they can out-write the source text's original author – a tall order in this case.  Bottom line: 1 out of 4 stars, but only for the actors' and CGI artists' competent efforts to save this train wreck.