Jingus

No, not a class which was entirely devoted to statistics. Why? What did I get wrong? About as many would vote for any other 3rd party candidate: not enough to matter. Including Barr, and only Barr, in the poll along with McCain and Obama was just pointless.

The odds are pretty low for something like that. ...although it has happened four times now in presidential elections. You'd really think they would've gotten around to fixing that by now.

A movie made entirely by people whose careers I'm unfamiliar with, adapted from an apparently popular series of books I've never heard of, with a shitty trailer, and it dares to steal the title from a movie made only ten years ago in which Reese Witherspoon got naked. I seriously doubt we'll get such fanservice here. ::actually looks at the synopsis:: ...and it's a forbidden love story between a human and a goddamned vampire ...sigh ...yes I will watch it.

I probably would be, if I was watching. Stuff like that sure as hell doesn't entice me to consume their product.

yeah, everyone knows the accepted industry rate is 10%

Yeah, but in this case we've got Exxon selling all of its corporate-owned stores too. They apparently couldn't give themselves a break on gas prices. Which certainly suggests that the spiralling prices aren't really within the company's ability to control.

The site managed to name a bunch of specific cities and dates in Scotland where mine was used, so it's probably telling the truth. Now I just gotta figure out what the old German or middle French derivation of "moch" or "mock" is, since New-Moc(k/h) is apparently the root term which my surname got bastardized from.

And now, allow me to stand on my soapbox for a minute, and tell you Why Surveys Are Bullshit. First of all, Georgia is a better shot for Obama than any other recent Democratic candidate for one simple reason: there's a lot of black people there. (Let's please skip the argument over skin color not determining politics, and just agree that there are a whole lot of lazy, narrowminded, or generally contrary people who will vote for a candidate just because they share the same skin color/religion/gender/Other Distinguishing Feature, k? The study itself claims an 83% majority for Obama among black voters.) African-Americans only make up a little over 12% of the total US population, but in Georgia they comprise over 30% of the state's population. And I wouldn't say Georgia is a guaranteed red state anyway. Aside from voting for Carter both times, they also went for Clinton in 92. The Libertarian candidate never, ever gets anywhere near that much of the vote in the actual election. This is where the whole Margin Of Error thing really comes into play. It doesn't help that the survey included Barr as the only possible 3rd party option, and he's from Georgia, so it racks up the fake votes in his favor. Is 408 people really enough to be considered a representative sampling of a state with over seven million potential voters? And here's the real problem. Weighted? Weighted how? Is that like grading on a curve? What weights what and how does it change things and what are the rules and who decides that? None of this is explained in the article. Maybe if you counted up all the variables from their handy little charts and mercilessly extrapolated all the raw data and compared it to the numbers in the main article you might eventually answer half the questions I asked. I don't have that kind of mathematical talent or patience.

Ah. Duh. Right. ...I was always told my name was of Welsh decent; apparently it's Scottish. And the original derivation seems to have migrated over from ancient German, via French protestant refugees. The More You Know.

In a related story which hasn't been talked about here, Exxon has decided to sell off all their gas stations, saying they weren't profitable enough. Clearly there's some sort of big problem looming that they're afraid of.

That is... an unusual reaction. They do use it to wean junkies off heroin, after all. Some of the more hardcore pillpoppers I've known praised the 'done higher than most prescription pills. And I once knew a redneck family where the (adult) son and the mother literally both stole methadone from each other. So, yeah, it's supposed to be "good".

Yeah, it's a dirty politician thing to do, but can you win a presidential election without doing dirty politician things? One reason I no longer bother voting is how it seems like every single candidate for high office has been turned into a shifty backstabbing bastard by the process, if they weren't already one beforehand. In the modern political arena, it's one big popularity contest and perception is reality and yadda yadda yadda. In a race this tight, a candidate can't afford to take a risk by alienating the stupid demographic of our country (who, unfortunately, vote just as much or more than the smart ones) by even casually looking like they're supporting someone who kinda resembles a suicide bomber, especially when there's already plenty of propaganda about him being a terrorist himself. EDIT: weird thing, I went looking for some numbers about the total population of Muslims in this country, and found... there are no such numbers. Estimates literally range from 1 to 7 million, with all kinds of guesses in between. That's a pretty freakin' big margin of error.

In response to a post complaining about someone writing a short, obscure zinger instead of explaining what's on their mind... you write an even shorter, more obscure zinger?

This isn't much better. Price Is Right Losing Horns on this one. Mind explaining in a logical sense why this is wrong, instead of just quipping? Or hell, even specifying which "this" you're referring to, since you left it pretty vague.

Third vote here for the Lloooraaanndo Sequence in Mulhollnad Drive. For whatever reason, that bit smacked me in the face and very nearly made me cry. Which is terribly odd, considering that 1.I haven't cried during any movie in like a decade, and 2.I couldn't explain why it was so moving. I have no idea. It just was.

Short, ya, but I'd make a claim it's still his best non-Adaptation role of this millenium. 300 is good at what it was supposed to be. I mean, it was the same as the comic with the queen subplot tacked on to make the movie longer. If you thought the book was boring, you would find the movie boring. I think people were expecting more from it than it was ever going to be. I kind of enjoyed 300, to a point. I didn't think it was one of Frank Miller's stronger books (and frequently find some of Miller's stuff to be overrated anyway), but I do gotta admire any movie which pretty much puts the entire comic directly onscreen, even if they did add in a bunch of new stuff to pad it out to feature length. And the goofy over-the-top stuff, with the Batista torsos and an epidemic of overacting and more gore than was really necessary, I just said Eh, It's A Comic Book Movie, What Are Ya Gonna Do. However, one single thing made me like that movie a LOT less than I probably would have otherwise: ENOUGH WITH THE FUCKING SLOW MOTION. Jesus CHRIST there was way, way, way too much slo-mo. I thought the Matrix sequels were bad about that, god, I had no idea how much worse it could get. Fuck, I thought that "Lesbos~!" episode of South Park was exagerrating, but apparently not. Sometimes it felt like literally half the damn movie was filmed in slow motion, and "beating the shattered pile of pulverized bone which used to be a dead horse" doesn't even begin to cover it. I have a regretable mental image of Zack Snyder sitting at home jerking off to the variable-speed camerawork in Brotherhood of the Wolf.

I notice that happens a lot. Seems like there's a trend where the only people who really love Mallrats are the ones who saw it before any of Smith's other films.

What's wrong with that? I mean, really, let's break it down here: 1. There are still a lot of idiots who think Obama is a muslim 2. His political rivals have on occasion perpetuated that falsehood in an attempt to hurt him 3. Muslims are the single least popular religious group in this country, bar none 4. These two women decided that the best way to help their hero... would be to sit directly behind him, at a televised event, wearing burkhas Seriously, do they not realize that the best way they could help Obama's image would've been just to stay home? Any possible video clip of two women in "Terrorist Clothing" sitting behind Obama and cheering him on would've been played on a loop on Fox all the way til election day.

sorry I asked

Yeah, that's my point, there are plenty of examples of CGI effects which were done so well that nobody even noticed them. That's the problem: nobody can remember those, obviously. Nobody saw that Lucas seamlessly corrected some really shady-looking original fx in the Hoth sequence of Empire, they're too distracted by all the new giant creatures which were obviously not a part of the old footage. And if nobody had ever told you about the guns-to-radios editing in E.T., really, would you notice?

Nothing "lesser" about that. Greatest single moment of the entire three hours of Grindhouse. What? No, I wasn't knocking that film. I was trying to say, that might have been the only single time I can think of where someone made a modern do-over of a legendary cinema classic, and afterwards even the snootiest of critics were all like "...okay, that was pretty fucking cool".

How do you know you spotted 'em all? Not all of them are gonna be named Hymie Schwartz with huge noses and curly hair.

. . . How did that work? still wondering about this little detail

When you bury Milla down in the middle of an ensemble, she tends to just kinda fade into the background. (Thankfully so, considering she tends to be Keanu Riffic in leading roles.) And I'm not sure if she even had any lines. Also, it was the last movie she did for a few years before getting her career back with The Fifth Element, so it's often easy to forget she had an earlier career. ...wait a minute. Looking at her IMDB profile, and doing the math from her birthdate to some of her credits... she was fifteen when she got nekkid in Return to the Blue Lagoon? Meanwhile, the website claims they brought in a body double for her nude scenes a year later in Chaplin. Curiouser and curiouser. ::surf, surf, surf:: ...and she took her first supermodel job at 11 years of age, and her debut role in a film was in a frigging Zalman King movie, so yeah she was probably fucked from the start. Maybe literally. IMDB also claims she was on the cover of High Times in 1984 when she was nine, but I found the issue in question and they seem to be off by a decade. Weird shit, dude.