From the Planned Parenthood Web-site:
“It’s an ingenious idea. Create a no-win situation for anti-choice protesters ? the more picketers who demonstrate outside a Planned Parenthood clinic, the more donations the Planned Parenthood clinic receives.”
2004 was the year of a head of cabbage! Its bold decisive leadership affected everything from the war in Iraq to the can-do inertia of the presidential election.
Read all about it
Beaconfire Consulting just launched the second website I’ve worked with them on. HearUsNow.org is run by Consumer’s Union (the folks who publish Consumer Reports) and is a clearinghouse of consumer information on telecommunications. My job was to take the designs and code templates to meet XHTML 1.0, CSS 2, and Section 508 Web Accessibility standards. Then I turn them over to developers who use my templates to build out the site. Then, out the other end, comes an odd mish-mash of good code and weird, random crap that the people who built the Content Management System decided was important or, more likely, that they just couldn’t figure out how to get rid of.
I’ve been working on this one for a couple of months. My first job for the good people at Beaconfire was ParentsAction.org which is a non-profit run by Rob Reiner and his wife to provide information fo parents. There’s some really interesting info on the site. I actually found myself reading the content as I was putting it in. That hasn’t happend much in my professional career as a Web-Guy.
Here’s what I want: a Content Management System cabable of actually rendering valid code. Not surprisingly, the worst offender I’ve come across is the Microsoft CMS. This piece of crap has such a willful disregard (along with the company that builds it) for Internet Accessibility and standards compliance that they should be prosecuted. But then again, what harm can a little prosecution do to Microsoft?
It was all Harris’ idea. We’d all get xboxes, headsets, and Halo2 so we could go online and blow the shit out of each other. It was good on paper, well…not really on paper, since Harris emailed his plan. It was a good plan on whatever it was on. So good, in fact, that we decided to do it.
Who could have forseen that it would end up being so incredibly fun? I mean, sure, running around with all sorts of guns and shit that blows up is fun. Doing so when the things blowing up are virtual representations of friends you haven’t seen in seven years is also fun. But the really, really, fun part was the talking. See, you put this headset with a microphone on your head (after spending about 30 minutes figuring out how to put the two pieces together and then how to fit those pieces on your head) and then you can talk. I mean really talk, to your friends in the game. You can just stand around looking at each others combat-dressed e-selves and have a freakin’ conversation!
And when conversation lags…well you do have a rocket launcher in your hand, don’t you?
And so, ManaTeam999 was born.
I had read some pretty dismissive reviews about this movie, so was not really expecting a whole lot. Well, actually, I was expecting – in spite of what I’d been told – to have a good time watching Jason Bourne trot around all kinds of exciting and exotic places doing all kinds of exciting and exotic things. And I was right. And so were the other reviewers.
Yes, the movie does go by as a sort of a travellogue. I’m still not sure how that is a bad thing. The locations are great (India, Berlin, Moscow, the U.S.). Each one is there for a reason. I never felt like the filmmakers were just zipping off to another country for no reason. It’s the plot, stupid.
Matt Damon is believable as Jason Bourne: MacGuyver for the new millenium. He’s all pent up and moral…just right.
The camera work is top-notch. They really do a great job of putting you right in the car during the chases (the Moscow chase is really amazing), and there is a documentary-style that they went for and accomplished. As is mentioned by Damon in one of the DVD-extras (of which there are many) there is much that happens at the edges of the frame. It really feels like the characters are doing what they do and we’re just barely seeing it; Like being let in on a secret. It’s a refinement on the style pioneered first on television (as far as I know) by the “NYPD Blue” folks (who sucked at it), except the camera doesn’t swoop and jerk around just for the sake of swooping and jerking which always makes me feel kind of sick. For a great example of how to use this style to nauseating excess, see Steven Soderberg’s cinematic aerobics in “Oceans 12.” Just be sure to take some Dramamine, or bring a barf-bag.
I’m trying to think of something biting to say, but his own words do it best:
“Courts are not equipped to execute the law. They are not accountable to the people,”
To help make ends meet until I hopefully get hired at this web-dev place in January, I’ve taken 20 hours a week at Barnes & Noble here in suburban Maryland. Oddly, I enjoy the job. My feet hurt, but I’m surrounded by books all day. “Hi, is there something I can help you find?” And coffee.
This may shock those who know me. Those who know how much I dig my kids and how I’ve always wanted to be a papa. I really don’t like babies. Don’t tell anyone, because I’ve got to pretend to be enamoured of my two brand new little nieces (they’re upstairs right now), but I really can’t stand babies. They don’t do anything for me. I seem to remember being completely smitten with Phenon when she was born. I look at pictures from back then and that’s what seems to be going on in the pictures. But I just don’t like babies.
Since it’s so hard to watch an entire movie every day, I’ve decided that it’s okay to write about the last half of a movie as well. Today, whild cooking lunch, I watched the last hour of “White Squall.” Jeff Bridges plays the captain of a ship-board class in the ways of seafaring. He takes a group of teen boys out for some weeks to teach them about how to be a lot of things. Most importantly: men. Like “Master and Commander” (reviewed 10/20/2004) this is a very manly movie about the special bond and love that develops between men when bad things happen.
Fortunately the men in this movie take their shirts off a lot and hug vigorously, so at least some passing honesty is afforded to the homoerotic underpinnings of such relationships. Don’t get me wrong here. In case you don’t know me, that is not meant as a slight or slam on masculinity. I think it’s at the core of our definition of masculinity and the denial of it is what leads to most violence (anti-gay or otherwise) committed by men. End sidetrack.
If the pacing of the dramatic storm that is the namesake of this movie is any indication, I’ll wager the first half of this movie is tedious in the extreme. I’ll bet that the camerashots are long and slow. I’ll bet that, like “Master and Commander,” no small amount of fetishistic glee is wrung from every drawn out panning shot of rigging, gunwhales, and poop decks. Double enténdre everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
I’m out of tea. Good day to you.
