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I've only written one or two movie reviews since November of last year so I'm going to fill up a couple of posts and get caught up. Here's the first. Ranked best to worst....

Slumdog Millionaire

*****

All those Oscars? It totally deserved them.

Milk

*****

Incredible work by Sean Penn, the plot has no trouble being compelling and moving even though we know how it ends.

Defiance

*****

Gripping, dramatic, action packed; lots of Nazi's get killed. What more could you want?

Australia

*****

Epic movie, great ending, fantastic sets and settings, compelling story, not much is missing from this picture.

Special

*****

Highly original indie movie starring Michael Rappaport as a guy who participates in a clinical trial and comes to believe that he really has superpowers. It's really extraordinary how it plays with reality, and plays with the theme of an ordinary everyday average person becoming special. Though low budget, a higher budget probably would have taken away from its artistic authenticity.

Smother

*****

With Dax Shepard and Diane Keaton, this has an original screenplay, wonderful oddball characters, and is quite funny.

Burn After Reading

****

Another fantastic movie from the Coen brothers, abrupt ending notwithstanding.

I Love You, Man

****

Feel-good, low-key comedy with good acting, writing. Jon Favreau, one of my favorite actors, has a great though limited role as a type-A A-hole. Peter Segal is perfectly cast and Paul Rudd maintains his track record of never making a bad movie.

The Hangover

****

Pretty darned funny, not as funny as Old School, but close.

Secret Smile

****

From BBC TV, a young woman (Kate Ashfield from Sean Of The Dead) gets entangled with a sociopath (David Tennant, I think he's the new/current Dr. Who). As a profile of a sociopath and how they manipulate people, bringing a victim's closest friends and family over to their side, it is really brilliant. In the ways she becomes assertive and tries to take control back, it may even be educational. But a silly twist ending mars what would otherwise be an important movie. It is a lot like the stuff on Lifetime but the two great lead actors and the London setting make it better than typical TV fare.

Let The Right One In

****

Weird, oddly quiet foreign movie about a child vampire. It draws you in, leading to a startling but satisfying ending.

Valkyrie

***

Good but not great.

RocknRolla

***

Some memorable characters, but it doesn't have the punch of Guy Ritchie's earlier movies.

The Rules Of Attraction

***

I liked Less Than Zero, one of the better movies from the 80's. I guess Brett Easton Ellis specializes in tales of the young, rich and privileged engaging in depraved behavior. Based on his novel, this screenplay of Ivy Leaguers getting all F'd up, certainly takes it to the extreme. A small cameo by Fred Savage as a dorm-room junkie is remarkable for its stark difference from Vice Versa or the The Wonder Years. Eric Stoltz has another well-played cameo. But ultimately, the film becomes uncomfortable, getting caught up in the nihilism of its characters, letting it speak for itself I guess. A suicide scene is well-edited and momentarily shocking.

Boiler Room

***

I rented this solely because it was on [Tucson film critic] Phil Villareal's top-100 list. It might make my top-1000 list but not top-100. Worth watching once. Giovanni Ribisi plays a kid caught up in a shady brokerage firm. A young Vin Diesel has a small role, and Ben Affleck manages to do pretty well as a fiercely driven manager. A scene that plays tribute to Wall Street is kinda neat. The storyline, with Ribisi's character struggling to impress his father really works, but weird snippets showing the downfall of a customer that Ribisi is sticking it too don't, because they don't fill in any of that backstory.

Bottle Shock

***

Loosely based on the true story of California's emergence onto the world-class wine scene in the 1970's, with Chris Pine as a hippie-ish Northern California dude, Bill Pullman as his gruff dad and Rachael Taylor as, well, Pine's character's smokin' hot love interest (the film goes terribly awry when an outdoor shower scene with her is cut short). I really liked the dialog and the wine country setting, though it does take a while for the plot to congeal or give a sense of direction.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

***

You know, if the biosphere can survive the impact of ~/50-km wide asteroids traveling at ~50 km/s then the notion of "saving the Earth" is truly ridiculous (except saving it from a hyperspace-bypass!). In the original it was about saving our species from ourselves, which is completely not ridiculous. That is about my only qualm with this otherwise great remake.

Quantum Of Solace

***

Didn't quite measure up to the prior Bond.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

***

Thompson was a genius writer, one of my all-time favorites and an exemplary American, taking full advantage of his freedoms (and then some!). This documentary starts out great, has some fresh techniques, but like the gonzo doc himself, gets bogged down in the 70's. It recapitulates the best known stories while adding little else. If you're not familiar with him, then this movie is a must-see.

Body Of Lies

***

Thankfully, this Ridley Scott movie doesn't try to hard to have a message about the "global war on terror" or whatever we're calling it these days. But I found the plot to be absurd when the two CIA characters, played by Leo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, go above the law. They set up a middle eastern businessman by staging a bombing (with cadavers) to draw out the real terrorists they're after. The most interesting aspect of the movie is how Crowe's character manages all these remote ops over his bluetooth while at his daughter's soccer game, at the grocery, etc.

The Woods

***

Horror movie set in a girl's school (sorry guys, nothing titillating here). Not too bad, but not remarkable either. Very Stephen King-ish, without measuring up to his better stuff.

Frost/Nixon

***

A nice history lesson, but not terribly entertaining, somewhat lacking in drama.

New In Town

***

A light-hearted comedy. Renee Zellwegger is a high-powered executive who steps in from the big city to shut down a small-town factory in Minnesota. Harry Connick Jr. is the rugged union rep fighting for the jobs. The film suffers from an overly conventional plot; how you imagine the story playing out is exactly what happens.

Twilight

**

Entertaining at times, but I thought sap would start running out of the DVD player when she's like "from that moment on... I was completely and irrevocably in love...".

Nobel Son

**

A letdown, just kind of crazy, throws everything against the wall and not much sticks (a sexy scene with Eliza Dushku was the high point for me).

Caprica (Battlestar Galactica spin-off)

**

Galactica was one of the best television series ever and this TV movie is about average. Has some interesting sci-fi-ish elements (VR, robotics and simulations) but lacks the passion and grit of the series.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

**

Kevin James is funny as usual, but the overly conventional plot where his character must face up to villains taking over his Mall drags it down quite a bit. They could have done this as a parody of Die Hard but it's nowhere near that clever.

My Bloody Valentine

**

Several lengthy nude scenes are about all this movie has going for it. I figured out who The Miner was very early on, and I never catch on to those things.

In The Electric Mist

**

Another in the series of James Lee Burke mysteries with detective Dave Robicheaux (hooray, I think I actually spelled that right and only looked once!), this time with Tommie Lee Jones instead of Alec Baldwin. It's just weird and dissonant how in this film he's taking names and kicking ass like Charles Bronson. Peter Sarsgaard, normally brilliant, is oddly miscast as a rehab-ready celebrity. And John Goodman doesn't fit as a local gangster boss. Maybe the humidity in Louisiana got to everyone, because it feels like they're doing a read-thru much of the time.

My Name Is Bruce

**

Bruce Campbell.

Blindness

*

Unbearable. We made it maybe twenty minutes in before it went back into a the red envelope.

Wendy and Lucy

*

Terrible. Unwatchable. I gave up after ten minutes. Poor sound, film school quality production. And I like many rambling incoherent art films.

In Frog Mountain Blues, Tucson author Charles Bowden makes a passionate argument for the conservation of the Santa Catalina mountains. The largest and highest peak, Mt. Lemmon, towers a mile and a half above the adjacent city of Tucson and was known by the Tohono O'Odham as Frog Mountain. I really liked some of his quotable quotes regarding conservation. Here are my favorites.

• "Any proposal for a national forest that means there will be less national forest still standing in the end is a bad idea."
• "What kind of national forest are we running where the existence of black bears is a problem and the existence of a bunch of cabins, ski runs, and a lodge is not?"
• "Land Of Many Uses is the slogan of the Forest Service. But so far as I can see, there is actually only one use: anything goes for one species, human beings."
• "The way we live and work kills wild ground and when the wild ground is gone, we will vanish also."
• "All the wild ground our ancestors called tractless wastes--now those spots are our last memories of a better world."

Written a quarter century ago, the book is still timely. Luckily, not much has changed. Well, let me qualify that. The city has sprawled right up to the edge of the national forest, the road has been widened, the village of Summerhaven is still rebuilding after a disastrous wildfire. Restrictions have apparently failed to prevent the extirpation of bighorn sheep. A horrible bear attack some years ago led to many being captured and relocated to more remote areas. People have completely freaked out when mountain lions showed up in a popular recreation area.

But a lot of what Bowden poetically writes about in the book, the remote canyons and rocky peaks, remain completely wild. Many have been decimated by fire, but are slowly coming back.

I'm trying to get caught up in Point Of Inquiry episodes. This is my favorite podcast; it really makes you think.

In the last episode, Bruce Hood talks about "supersense" or an innate instinct that humans have to believe in the supernatural, even despite their better judgement. Take for instance the space program. Here you will find probably the highest concentration of people who operate on pure rationality, yet you will find that it is laden with superstition, particularly of course with high-risk activities (launches and landings). Or recall all the silly superstitions of Barack Obama and John McCain that were reported during the campaign. These are smart people and deep down they know that these things have zero direct effect on the outcome. But Hood believes they are not without value; they get the believer to have more confidence than they otherwise would, and that confidence often has real positive results. And this is at the most secular end of the spectrum, obviously it applies to religious belief as well.

Or take the trees planted from seeds carried by the astronauts (there's one outside the place where I work). Now of course they've received more radiation than normal seeds but they certainly aren't imbued with some special space essence. But it's nice to know that there is that connection, maybe it makes us feel that our campus is a bit more special.

I don't think Hood is trying to argue against rationality in any way, but merely to show how this trait is common (why we have it would be a task for evolutionary psychology) and how we use it. He certainly isn't saying that such ju-ju has objective existence, just that understanding how such beliefs arise is important. And if we can do that, maybe we can minimize our need for such things (IMHO ... imagine Star Trek where Picard needs to eat a bag of peanuts before going into Warp, or the crew needs to pray before using the Transporter ... not that ST is any guide to our future other than in a hope for a secular, superstition-less wiser society).

Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is, I imagine, to Heinlein's Starship Troopers as Vietnam-era Army grunts are to WWII roughnecks. Written in the mid-1970's the story follows the rise through the ranks of space marine William Mandella, drafted by the world government of Earth circa 2005. We're at war with an alien race, the Taurans, for control of a network of wormholes ("collapsars").

My interest was piqued after finding out that director Ridley Scott has had his eye on it for 25 years and by 2011 it could become his first sci-fi movie since Blade Runner.

It's a good story, made better with plausible descriptions of how society changes. Due to the relativistic effects of time dilation, what is a few years in Mandella's reference frame is centuries on Earth. The bulk of the novel is told through first-person narrative so it'll be interesting to see how it is translated to the screen. (FWIW Scott's Body of Lies opens by employing two devices: the protagonist narrating notes to a computer and testifying to a committee).

There's a number of other things that Haldeman does really well such as describing activity on cryogenic worlds or battles at near-light speeds (with computers controlling, frozen in near-statis and encased in gel, the soldiers can endure accelerations up to 25g). As in Troopers, barracks are coed and fraternization is accepted; a large part of the human interest is provided by Mandella's relationship with a female compatriot.

I won't give away the ending, but one interesting and imaginative thing was that in its last look at Earth, a millennium in the future, a transhuman or posthuman society has taken over. The clone of a single person, multiplied into the billions, residing on many worlds, is a hive-mind entity. The Taurans, likewise, have a collective mind. Mandella, returning from the Large Magellenic Cloud, asks how the Tauran and the Human are able to communicate mind-to-mind. The human immediately replies that Mandella is incapable of understanding (implying that it's by a post-human mental power).

Cool stuff. If Ridley Scott puts anywhere near the effort he put into Blade Runner, it'll be an amazing movie!

Frederick Pohl's Man Plus has been on my want-to-read list for about, oh, 22 years. That's when I first saw it in the school library. I don't recall reading the jacket, but the title conjured visions of sweeping, far-future science fiction. Well, I finally got around to it; it is every bit as good as I had hoped. It's not the epic novel of my lofty imagination, but is something more fun and accessible with a great story and fantastic characters.

Just a brief description of the setting: it's the near future, an Earth near the brink of WW3, and the President of the U.S. is staking his legacy on an extremely unconventional space initiative: surgically altering and augmenting astronauts so they can live on the surface of Mars. With humanity on this planet in it's 11th hour, such radical steps are deemed necessary, and polling seems to strongly support the initiative when details of it are leaked. Roger Torraway ends up being the astronaut chosen for the trip to Mars. Most of his body is upgraded with prostheses, such as bug-like eyes that can see beyond the visible spectrum, and collapsible wings to capture solar or microwave radiation. A backpack supercomputer augments his reality in extraordinary ways.

There's one horrific or funny scene (depending on point of view), where NASA bureaucracy fouls up, almost destroying the program (and for it to seem funny, you've got to see it as a parody of the long history of NASA's disdainful attitude towards how much astronauts needed to know). It is summed up in the official-ese: "We had not properly estimated the trauma Roger Torraway would receive from the loss of his genitals...."

The story centers around his transformation into a superhuman creature. I don't think it'll be giving too much away to say that he eventually does reach Mars. There are some almost poetic descriptions of what Mars might be like.

...He really wanted that very much, to stroll the ebony surface of a Barsoomian night, with the stars pinpoints of color in a velvet black sky. It was easy enough to see the brighter stars even by daylight, especially for Roger, but at night they were fantastic... steel-blue Sirius, bloody Aldebaran, the smoky gold of Polaris. By expanding his visible spectrum into the infrared and ultraviolet he could see new, bright stars whose names he did not know...

It's a character and plot-driven work, with technology described only as far as suits the story. There are several sex scenes, each leaving a judicious amount (nearly all) to the imagination. The final chapter broaches the topic of transhumanism (without specifically naming it) in a clever way that ties it in with the plot and leaves the reader amazed. Written in the mid-1970's it still seems contemporary in language and, for the most part, in technology. This is a classic work of science fiction; highly recommended!

This story is not getting the attention it deserves. It reminds me of the infamous raid on Steve Jackson Games. But this time, federal law enforcement stupidity is harming dozens of businesses instead of just one. As a leaser of a co-lo machine myself, it's disturbing to think that it could just disappear at any moment, through no fault of my own, due to these heavy-handed tactics.

• North Korea makes it to second stage with its TaepoDong 2, tells its buddies it went all the way
• Hundreds of mosques built in the wrong direction, could be aligned with frickin' lasers

I just finished reading Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales Of A Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike "Tarzan" Mullane. An apt title, this book was a great read, with laugh-out-loud funny anecdotes on nearly every other page, plus sobering looks into the culture of NASA plus the aftermath of Challenger, and glorious descriptions of the Earth as viewed from space.

Mullane entered NASA as part of the first class of astronauts after Apollo-Soyuz, a group that included the first female and the first non-military astronauts. The culture clash is extreme between these "post-docs" and Mullane and his cohorts cut from the old-school military 'Right Stuff' jock mold. And by his own admission, his attitude towards Sally Ride, Judy Resnick and the other female astronauts starts out as condescending and sexist, but he gradually overcomes his biases. Ultimately he becomes a good friend of Resnick's and they share a flight prior to her death in the Challenger accident. His respect and admiration for her is evident, and an effective eulogy.

One thing that surprised me was how willing the astronauts were to accept extreme levels of risk, fueled by hyper-competitiveness and the desire to earn their astronaut wings. He says something like 'if God himself had told be there was a 90% chance I would die on my rookie flight, I would have taken it.' The way he describes the intense emotions leading up to launch makes the statement totally believable. He talks about how this attitude played into the Challenger disaster, with the secrecy regarding crew selection boosting the effect, so there was incredible pressure to not jeopardize your flight, if not your entire career, by not speaking up.

Of course, similar pressures were going on in NASA's bureaucracy, leading them to dismiss calls to scrub the Challenger launch (and not inform any of the astronauts of the discussions). His frank opinions include a relative lack of surprise that history basically repeated itself with Columbia. His own flights included a near burn-thru of an O-ring and the worst foam strike damage prior to Columbia's destruction. The latter story was recently summarized on spaceflightnow.com.

This autobiography is remarkably candid; he let's it all hang out. I think the word "penis" must appear a hundred times in the book. If you're curious about how the astronauts (of both sexes) go to bathroom in space, then this is the ultimate reference. He casually mentions things like how the pre-flight quarantine gets Playboy TV, and how waking up in zero-G gives guys the ultimate morning wood.

I loved his stories of staying awake in the shuttle cabin to float and watch landscapes, cities, sunrises, sunsets, storms and all manner of other phenomena. They are well written, conveying the grandeur without being overwrought.

Bill Maher's Religulous was completely one-sided, presenting a totally biased and simplistic view of religion. I loved it!

It should be noted that, with a couple of exceptions, he doesn't exactly talk to the best and brightest religious personages. Nor does he give them time to make any good points; they're frequently interviewed long enough for him to make a joke at their expense, then he moves on to the next scene. He uses fundamentalism to paint with a broad brush all people of faith. Nor does he even consider any of the positive things that can come out of religion and faith.

However, the movie manages to succinctly make a number of good points here and there. One is to dispatch the notion that America was created as a "Christian nation". With some choice anti-religion quotes from Franklin, Adams and Jefferson he establishes that these guys were free-thinkers; to claim otherwise is revisionism. Second, in a nice little segment he backs his skepticism regarding the story of Jesus by alluding to commonalities between the Gospels and the myths made of many other historical figures of the Middle East. I.e. born of a virgin, born on the solstice, etc. One prior myth, that of Horus, is basically identical to that of Christ.

He spends most of the time on the big three monotheisms: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. But there are a couple of diversions to look at Mormonism and Scientology (the funniest scene is where he preaches OT-III stuff like Xenu and Thetans to Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, ranting like a lunatic).

I really like his monologue at the end, an extended diatribe against the damage that fundamentalists in power could do and a plea to recognize that doubt is good. I've transcribed it in the paragraph below.

Spoiler Alert!

I'll tell you what I didn't like about the unsatisfying series finalé to Battlestar Galactica. It wasn't the revelation that Kara was an angel, though that seemed like a deus ex Galactica cop-out that could have been handled by explaining her relationship to Daniel. It wasn't the fact that Baltar's (and Caprica 6's) faith ending up saving humanity; I was pleased to see his character redeemed and brought full circle. It wasn't the fact that we were left with no explanation for so many things, including the phenomena of Baltar and 6's "head" versions of themselves (other than that they were angels that no one else could see); though like the reincarnation of Starbuck, it would seem that it could have been explained in terms of creative malfunctions of resurrection technology. It wasn't the fact that they ended up on our Earth in the distance path, that seemed like a natural if not obvious place and time to end the series. Rather than any of these, it was that their civilization came to such an abrupt end after an entire series spent in pursuit of its salvation.

Let me get this straight, they saved 30,000+ lives only to force them to scatter, become hunter-gatherers and fend for themselves? On some hoaky, touch-feely, spur-of-the-moment decision by Lee to abandon all of their technology? Sure, that makes some kind of sense, to explain why there would be no archaeological record of them in our world. But why try so hard to make that connection clean, rational, sensible but invoke miracles to close all the other loopholes? It was completely ridiculous. I'm inclined to agree with those who say they ran out of ideas in season three....

MSNBC is currently having a poll on whether 'In God We Trust' should be removed from our money. I'll bet that most people don't know that it was added relatively recently.

I actually had a dream the other day wherein I thought of a slogan to replace 'In God We Trust'; I remember thinking it was brilliant, and I'd have to write it down as soon as a I woke up. That's all I remember.

What slogan would you replace it with?

I've spent my evenings this week tracking down a website hack. It's not on this server, but on another some friends and I maintain. A message came in on the trouble ticket system, "you have a hack". Someone had noticed pages full of links to "blue pill" sites stuck up on our site. I volunteered to look into it. I've had to do this sort of forensic/detective work a few times in the past; it's pretty fun and challenging.

The first clue was that the files were all owned by the web server process, indicating a high likelihood that a vulnerability in the web site had been exploited (as opposed to some other type of hack masquerading as a web sploit). The second clue was that there was a zip file, plus all the files had the same timestamp, indicating that they were extracted from the zip (versus uploaded individually). That meant that the hacker had been able to execute code on our server. Arbitrary code execution is a severe vulnerability, it means the hacker can pretty much do anything (limited only by the privileges of the web server process).

This all pointed to PHP. There's a ton of PHP code on this system. PHP itself was notoriously crackable early on, but by about age ten they'd rooted out all the major security flaws (it's still a case study in how not to design, or grow, a programming language). But since PHP has such a low barrier to entry, the code that web programmers write with it is often flawed.

We're using third-party software like mediawiki (wiki system), vbulletin (forums), gallery (images) and wordpress (blogging). Some of those have a pretty bad track record, and I'm looking at wordpress when I say that. And there's a variety of WP vintages on this system. But there's also a lot of custom code written by people I don't even know, with a variety of skill and attention to security concerns. But there's also some legacy Perl CGI code, some of it written by me, that could be at fault....

"All Your Religions Are False" is a very funny rapid-fire presentation by Joel Grus from the recent BIL conference.

If you like that, check out comedian Dmitri Martin's "Creed-o-cide" and a humorous speech about atheism by Editor-in-Chief of The Onion Scott Dikkers at the Freedom From Religion Foundation conference.

"Never been done before." That's how Mr. X of Tucson's X Hiking Club described his intrepid plan to hike the steep Blackett's trail, blaze through dense desert to Thimble Peak, then descend through the perilous Seven Falls back to the base of Sabino Canyon. [For the record, he puts together a full range of hikes from beginner/training to... this].

For nearly ten straight hours we (he, Wafer and I) were scrambling up and down steep, near-vertical chutes. That's when we weren't hopping across boulders, traversing slide-rock above waterfalls, dodging tumbling boulders ("ROCK!") or plowing through desert scrub and cacti (in Sonora, what looks barren from far away always turns out to be a thicket of dry, stickery plants). We surprised two white-tailed deer who took off, climbing the ledges like mountain goats.

And, to reach the summit, a small rock climb (plenty of holds) then, ultimately, a 15-foot ledge with a fixed rope. A few years ago I would have been too chickenisht to tackle that. A few years ago I wouldn't have been fit enought to do all that in a day. As it was, I felt like I'd spent an evening in a Syrian prison... but it was worth it!

Check out Wafer's photoset on Flickr, with some good video of us crossing the Falls on page 2.

Check out Mr. X's videos (indexed below) and photos.

• Thimble
• Scramble
• Crevasse
• Negotiation
• Sabino
• Brush
• Slope
• Feet
• Ridge
• Rockslide
• Cliff-Out
• 45-Degrees
• Cactus
• Video
• Rock
• Dirt
• Steep
• Hallucination
• Route
• Wash
• Near-Vertical
• Canyon
• Exhausted
• Snow
• Crack
• Piece-O-Cake
• Summit
• 360
• Descent
• Jump
• Hop
• Falls
• Down

Update: Here's the GPS data you can open in Google Earth. It doesn't always line up with the terrain, but that is to be expected.

Mary turned me on to the botanical splendor of hedgehog cacti. Last year, I hiked a few miles in the Cactus Forest area of Saguaro National Park (East) to photograph a bunch of them for her (since she'd be unable to do the hike). It was mid-April, probably a little late to catch the best show, but there were still many good ones in shadier areas. It was thick with the suckers, every few steps brought a new one into view. Below is a montage of the shots I took, click it for a larger version (3.7 MB).

But first, an image of a rattler that I very nearly stepped on during the hike!

The problem: Apple movie trailers won't play on your KDE3 Linux web browser (such as Firefox on Kubuntu 8.04). The solution: get the backport of mozilla-mplayer. Of course, you could upgrade to the latest Kubuntu, 8.10, but then you're forced to switch to the KDE 4 desktop, and I'm not going there... yet (maybe in a few more releases).

Figuring out the problem took a little while, viewing the source of a typical trailer page and digging around in the JavaScript. Google searches turned up sub-optimal solutions. The issue turns out to be a browser detection JavaScript that Apple is using, and the fact that the older version of the mozilla-mplayer plugin advertises itself as quicktime "6 / 7" compatible (the script needs to see "7" as the first character).

Noodling For Flatheads is writer Burkhard Bilger's exploration of some vanishing traditions of the rural South.

The title chapter is about fishing for catfish using zero gear, only your fingers or a whole arm as live bait, then bashing the creature once you've wrestled it into submission. Sounds like a truly sporting way to do it, and a whole lot more fun than endless casting, spooling, and reeling. I've tried fishing a few times, but have no patience for it. Spear fishing has always sounded like it'd be fun to try too.

"Enter the Chicken" looks at the once popular, now widely reviled tradition of cock-fighting, still legal in Louisiana at the time of writing (and maybe still). He skips any judgmental remarks or editorializing but does not gloss over the gory details. It's nice that society is increasingly concerned with preventing cruelty to domesticated animals, though certainly overwhelmed by its hypocrisy in simultaneously ignoring mega-scale industrialized slaughter (evidenced by odd initiatives that would outlaw inhumane pens... on the way to the slaughterhouse!). Better the hunter's kill, in check with, and Darwinian effect on, wild game population. But I digress....

Subsequent chapters look at moonshine (I'd love to try some of the really good stuff), squirrel-brain eating (no thanks!), Soul Food, coon hunting, and world champion marble-playing hillbillies from Kentucky and Tennessee. Sadly it seems the brief resurgence of these "rolley holers" seems to have just barely predated the Internet era and I can find no video of these guys in action.

I'm jealous. My wife ordered a new laptop the other week, a Dell Inspiron 13. I have an Inspiron B130 from a few years back. The cost was essentially the same. Hers is surprisingly light, glossy, a thing of beauty and packed with features. Mine is bulky, heavy, boxy and slow by comparison. I guess that duality is only fitting.

She wanted something with a DVD drive, so netbooks were out of the question. We ended up customizing the base system with a Core 2 Duo (dual-core 2 GHz, 800 MHz bus), 250 GB drive, 3 GB memory, the Intel wireless option (for Linux support), dual layer slot-loading DVD reader/writer, 8-in-1 card reader, bluetooth and a webcam and the total was around $800 with shipping and Arizona tax included (because they sell at Best Buy here, there's evidently no way around it).

I compared that to the MacBook just for laughs. The base feature set is very similar to the options we choose, essentially the only significant difference was that it has another gigabyte of memory (and for OS X, you'll definitely want it). For around $1400. Without tax and shipping. So essentially Apple is charging twice as much.

Compare it also to my laptop, which is about two years old. Single processor, slower, one-sixth the memory, a graphics card with little or no 3D acceleration, tray loading read-only DVD drive, no camera, no card reader, no bluetooth, a measly 40 GB drive, and of course no support for the newer, faster wireless standard (N). It has a slightly larger screen (14.1" vs. 13.3") but it's definitely not as sharp. And, as I indicated, my laptop is a brick by comparison. It's amazing what two years and a lot of competition will bring.

In addition, the layout of the ports is smarter. Everything is either on the sides or in front. There is only a single USB port, but FireWire on the other side. And still only VGA out (no digital or optical). We can live with that. I like the keyboard layout too.

It came pre-installed with Vista. Before re-partitioning for Linux, I had to check it out. And I have to give them credit, the user interface looks very nice, very polished. It doesn't seem slow compared to XP but then, this is a very fast machine.

I put on Kubuntu Linux, installed Google Gadgets and a few other things. Because of US patent issues, encrypted DVD support isn't pre-installed with Free Software, and I'd forgotten how I got that going with mine. That was basically the only stumbling block. Stick in a DVD and get a 'Play? Copy?' etc dialog. It burns at about 6x. Google Earth is fast: I'm spinning and zooming around landscapes, the frame rate is high; on mine it's like clunk-clunk-clunk. Then I have to give it back to her; playtime is over.

The one slight negative seems to be that the maximum audio volume isn't that loud. It's fine for headphones, but if you couldn't really play something for a person who isn't right next to you.

Weight was a real issue. My laptop was listed at 5.4, while the 13 is 4.9. It feels like more than half a pound of difference though. Who needs a netbook?! This is one outstanding value and if you're looking for a new laptop, I highly recommend it.

The X Hiking Club folks are a lot of fun, eXtremely avid hikers, and not content to stick to the standard routes. Here's a Flickr set of our Blackett's Ridge/Phoneline Hike/Scramble/Bushwhack in Sabino Canyon. And here's my photo gallery of the hike.

Last weekend, I joined a hike organized by the Rincon Group of the Sierra Club, to the summit of Mt. Fagan in the Santa Ritas south of Tucson.

Lainie Levick, a board member of Save the Scenic Santa Ritas was on the hike, and talked about the efforts to prevent a proposed copper mine out there.

Check out my photo gallery for pics and comments.