Equality Forum 2006, Christian Protesters

I just got home from a fantastic day at "Sunday Out," the street-festival portion of Equality Forum. I ran into a few old friends I haven't seen in ages, met some interesting new people, saw a bunch of cute boys, talked with the protesters, and took about 350 photographs.


I do not like the protesters, Sam-I-Am. One day, I hope we'll look back at these photos of these hateful signs and feel the same way about them that we feel now when we look back at photographs of signs that say "Whites Only." They have no business coming to our events and disrupting them with their hateful messages. The come in the guise of people who love us, who simply want to save our souls. But all they ever do is tell us that we're "abominations," that we're evil, that we're going to hell. I've grown somewhat accustomed to their presence at gay events, and that bothers me most of all. Can you imagine a black pride rally, and the Klan showing up, and all the black people there just quietly accepting their presence???

I don't mind if they're simply present, quietly handing out pamphlets. And that's what a few are doing, but the main group of protesters walks around carrying large signs containing offensive, anti-gay language, and preaching loudly through a megaphone. It may be legal, but it is rude and it is immoral, and it is wrong.

Here are the loudest:

Michael Marcavage:

Michael is with "Repent America". Several years ago when he was still a student at Temple University, he was involuntarily committed to a state mental hospital after some sort of Christian protest he was involved in on campus. Why they let him out of the hospital, we'll never know. Today, he believes that the government should "uphold God's law" by rounding up gay people and killing them.

Jason Storm:




I don't know what ministry Jason is from, but then: who cares? The thing you probably notice right away about Jason Storm is that he's smoking hot. I mean, I never like goatees, but I'd totally do Jason Storm. You can see above the photo where he's looking right at me. I'm hoping that's lust in his eyes. Jason came to Penn's campus a year or two ago, and I was somewhat impressed with him. He can be charismatic at times. And on a college campus, I have no problem with him. The problem at gay events is that it's hard to take him seriously when he's doing is gosh-darned best to ruin the day of everyone else present. And he says awful things. For example he quotes the high suicide rate among gay teens as evidence that there's something fundamentally (no pun intended) wrong with them, rather than as evidence that so many impressionable gay teens internalize the horrible, hate-filled message that we are evil abominations who don't deserve to live. I completely lost my temper at him last year at the same event and screamed back at him before I even realized I'd opened my mouth. Also, did I mention that I'd do him?

Some other protesters worthy of special mention:

Denny and Merv:














Denny (left) was standing at 5th and Market, quietly handing out religious tracts. Ironically (and I told him this, too), I came *SO* close to wearing that same shirt that he was wearing today! Thank god I went with the green polo shirt instead, right? Anyway, I spoke with him for a while, and I was impressed with his non-confrontational style. He and Merv come from a ministry in Virginia. I later learned that Denny has 10 people (or is it 10 children?) in his family. Apparently they mostly live on donations that come in from around the country. I spoke with Merv, too. He's originally from around Reading, PA, apparently, but I forget where he says he moved to. Both were extremely nice, and neither was from the same ministry as Michael Marcavage or Jason Storm above, although they were familiar with both. Denny said they'll probably hand out 4000-5000 tracts today. And I know from experience that they have to buy those tracts--they're not free. As you may know, i collect religious tracts. I started collecting them at gay events, actually. The idea was that if *I* took a pamphlet, then that's one less that someone else could take and potentially be poisoned by.

And that's a great segue into our next specially-featured protester:

Caleb:

Hands off, boys; he's Christian. Caleb, it turns out, is Denny's son, but I didn't know that at first. Still, it explains the scraggly beginnings of a beard that Caleb is growing. The encounter started when I saw Chumley wearing an official Equality Forum staff pass and a microphone headset, rushing off down Market Street. My spidey sense tingled: Something's afoot! So I headed off after him. It quickly became apparent that he was following a guy (Caleb) who was handing out religious tracts and collecting them from the recipients. Indeed, Chumley had a stack of 10 or 15 in his hand already. I asked if I could have them, for my collection, but since he didn't know me from Adam at the time, he said no, possibly figuring me for another Christian protester. A woman followed closely behind, and I followed closely behind her. We all stopped walking when we'd gone halfway around the block, at something (4th?) & Chestnut. There the conversation began:


Chumley made it plain--much to Caleb's chagrin--that he would continue to follow him as long as he kept handing out those religious tracts at Equality Forum. Chumley was eventually called away, leaving the woman (Amena) and I with Caleb. We stood and talked on that corner for at least a half hour. It was actually a very pleasant, very interesting conversation. Obviously, Amena and I disagreed with Caleb, and we debated back and forth, each of us explaining our view of God, trying to find flaws in the other side's argument, and so on. Caleb seemed quite surprised that we even believed in God. So right there it was nice to be able to help humanize gay people to the fundamentalists who preach against us and disabuse them of the myths and misconceptions they have about us. And we learned about him--a 16 year old from a large family, who has a job framing houses, but will probably one day give that up in favor of doing outreach, and he's homeschooled (no surprise there) and he's never seen The Matrix (another big surprise), and he thinks Fred Phelps is evil (a surpise at last). And this conversation had the added benefit of occupying the time of someone who would otherwise be out trying to brainwash other gay people. We were right across the street from Xando, and I offered to buy all 3 of us a coffee if they'd like to join me (I was getting hot, plus tired of standing up for so long. It's 3 hours later now and I'm still exhausted.) They declined, alas, and the conversation continued for a bit until we all returned to the street fair. I was extremely impressed with Caleb. He's only 16, but he clearly knows what he believes, he's very familiar with the bible, and you have to admit it takes a heck of a lot of guts to go out and minister to thousands of people who basically hate you. Too bad he's so misguided.

Some other protesters:



Oh, and I love this. It happens quite a bit with these protestes. You go to take their photograph, and they hide their faces. Wow. They must be SOOOOOO proud to be doing God's work, huh?




Now, I don't want you to think that everyone at the street festival just stood quietly and ignored these dillweeds (can I say that?).

I don't know this woman, but I love her. She stood and watched the "Christian" protesters for a moment, then she went and proudly stood next to them while displaying her flyer for transgendered people who are transitioning. I gave her a hug:


This guy was walking backwards while he verbally engaged the protesters, who were themselves walking through the street fair. He was clearly angry, and justifiably so:



This guy had only two words--Sieg Heil! :


The angriest of the counter-protesters. This man was not taking shit from ANYONE, and least of all the faux-Christians who pretend to "love" us. He was just screaming at them as he accusatorially pointed his finger at them. The crowd applauded him:


Another man who yelled back:


These guys have been around for the last few "christian" protests. I'm not sure who they are, but they're great. They use their banners to hide the "Christians" from view, and they chant and shout to drown out the hateful messages the protesters are spewing.


Here's Chumley, using an air horn to drown out the voices of the protesters:


This guy made his own sign right there on the spot and proudly stood directly in front of the protesters. I think the sign speaks for itself:

And finally, the people who really DO believe that God loves us. They lined the street and guarded the front of Christ Church, where MCC was holding a religious ceremony.





Heroes, all.

Photoshop - Blue skies through the trees

A common problem I encounter with photos is that the sky is washed out. I have an entire folder full of photographs I've taken of various skies and clouds, etc. just for this purpose, so I can replace the sky in a photograph with something more pleasing. Here is such an example:

It's a mini-panorama of 40th and Locust Streets in Philadelphia. The photo is mediocre, I suppose, but it definitely demonstrates the problem with the sky. Now in this particular photo, I have a second problem: lots of trees and tiny little gaps between the trees through wich you can see the washed-out sky.

Here is a photo of a nice sky I took, and then stretched to match the dimensions of my main photo:


So next I took the sky and put it on its own layer behind the main photo. So how to I make the sky shine through in all the right places?

One thing I could do is to use Select-->Color Range on the top layer to select the washed out sky colors, and then delete them or make them transparent with a layer mask so that you can see the sky underneath. But it's very time consuming, plus you inevitably select parts of the photo you don't want to, or vice versa--leave parts unselected that should be showing sky behind them. So that's not the ideal solution here.

Instead, I used a layer blending mode to achieve my desired result. (I don't know much about blending modes, and I'm trying to learn more about them. Most of them remain very confusing, still.) In this photo, I took the top layer and changed the blending mode to "Darken". What this does (i think) is displays the darker layer. So in the parts of the photo where the top layer is darker, you see the top layer, and where the bottom layer is darker (ie. the sky) you see the bottom layer. Since the sky is washed out white in the top layer, everything on the bottom layer shows through in those parts. And since the top layer is darker almost everywhere else, you see the top layer. Here is the result:



Clearly the sky looks unnatural now, but you can see that the overall effect we were after has been achieved, and there are bits of blue sky showing between the branches and the leaves. The last step is to take the layer containing the blue sky and drop the opacity down. I lowered it down to 45% and here's the final photo:


Not too shabby. One caveat: this technique depends on the "important" parts of the top layer being darker than the bottom layer. There were actually a few spots where the top was extremely light, and the blue sky showed through in those areas. There are two ways to solve this: Erase the parts of the sky layer that are directly under the lightest parts of the foreground layer, or create a layer mask on the sky layer and paint black over those same parts (this is probably the preferable method since it's non-destructive). I didn't show you that step above, but trust me, I did it when you weren't looking. :)

So here are all the steps listed. You can take the first two photos above and try this yourself to see how it works.

1. Open a new Photoshop document containing the photo of the sky. (Save it to your computer and then just open it in Photoshop) 2. Copy the photo of 40th street and paste it into your existing document. You should now have a document containing 2 layers: the sky on the bottom layer and 40th Street on top. 3. Click on the top layer, and change the blending mode from "Normal" to "Darken". You should immediately see the blue sky show through. 4. Click on the bottom layer and change the opacity from 100% to 45% (or whatever percent you like). That's it! You're done! Now just save it in whatever format you like.

.

Da Vinci Code Revisited

This is a follow-up to my previous Da Vinci Code post. Thanks to Wayne and Maureen for their comment. I wish more people would leave comments.


The biggest complaint people make about religious (and I don't just mean Christian) people is that they're far too concerned with everyone ELSE's beliefs.
My response is this: People will believe what they're going to believe. Some people believe in God. Some people believe there is no god. Some people believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. And Some people believe what's in the Da Vinci Code. What's the big deal?

Christianity--all religion in fact--is a matter of faith. Sometimes even faith in the face of contradictory evidence. And that's ok. If there were proof, after all, it wouldn't be religion; it would be science. The fact that the Da Vinci Code presents some arguments that happen to contradict part of mainstream Christian thought shouldn't be bothersome, particularly since the Bible manages to contradict itself on plenty of occasions!

Let's assume it's true that 17% of Canadians and 13% of Americans do believe the contens of the Da Vinci Code. (I have no idea whether those stats are true or not) Is that a reason to write books "debunking" a novel? There are 1.3 BILLION Muslims in the world. 900 MILLION Hindus. And 1.1 BILLION who don't consider themselves religious in the first place. Aren't those better groups to target with books than readers of popular fiction? Especially considering the fact that you can believe the Da Vinci Code crap and still be a Christian. Doesn't "Debunking Islam" make more sense, from a Christian point of view at least?

"Half of this country voted for a man for President who is doing is best to flush our planet down the toilet. Most Americans actually believe that terrorism is a bigger threat to our society than global warming. Last year alone, 3 million people died from AIDS and there were nearly 5 million people newly-infected. There were 3 million homeless men, women, and children in America last year. How can I make a difference in the world? I know! I'll debunk a best-selling novel!"

What are the Christians who write these books afraid of, exactly? I assume that, as Christians, they already believe 1) that they're going to heaven, 2) that the Messiah will return, and 3) that God will win the final war against evil. What does it say about a religion if its strongest believers feel the need to waste their time letting everyone know that, "hey, you know that work of fiction you read? Well, it's not true." What's going through their minds, exactly? "Yeah, I know that I'm saved, and that Jesus Christ is the ultimate power in the universe, but what if this Dan Brown guy and his novel ruin all of that?"

Reinforcing the Da Vinci Code

I was at the bookstore today, and they have a whole table full of books about the DaVinci code. I'm sure you've seen them; they're not new: "Debunking the DaVinci Code," "Don't Believe the Da Vinci Code," and stuff like that. The thing that strikes me as funny is that The Da Vinci Code is a work of FICTION. It has never been billed as anything other than a plain old novel. And yet all these people--mostly conservative Christian types--have written books refuting its "claims"! Don't they realize that by doing so, they're essentially legitimizing it? People suddenly have a reason to check it out. "Hey, maybe there's something to this Da Vinci code thing after all! After all, nobody ever wrote a book called 'Debunking To Kill A Mockingbird'."

Imagine you're walking down a street--maybe it's a street you walk down every day. And on your walk, you pass an alley. It's just a plain old alley, and you walk right by it every day, so you think nothing of it, and you just walk on by. Now imagine it's another day, and you're walking by again. But this time there's a guy standing at the opening to the alley holding a "Don't Go Down This Alley" sign and shouting, "Keep moving people! There's nothing important in this alley! Just keep walking!" Suddenly that plain old alley that never meant anything before becomes very interesting.

So apparently there's something to this Da Vinci code after all. Quick! Everybody run to your local bookstore and read about what the Christian right doesn't want you to know.


 

Fishy Quote #15

"You're lucky you take away more stress than you add."

Fishy Quote #14

"You know what I love about you? You're my exact opposite."

Philadelphia Water Revenue Bureau Website

I went to pay my water bill today by calling up the Philly Water Revenue Bureau. I was on hold for a while, and when I finally talk to a person, she tells me that they don't take payments over the phone. I mean, every freaking other company and utility on the planet does, but not Philly water. She tells me I can pay online. So I go to their website (www.Phila.gov -- don't forget the "www" because their dumbass webmaster has the domain set up so you NEED the www. Otherwise you get an unfriendly error message. Dumbass webmaster.) I type in my account info, and it tells me I owe twice as much as my paper bill says I owe ($120 instead of $60). I find this very confusing and worrying, so i call the water company back and ask them how much I owe. The woman tells me--in her emotionally dead, monotone voice--that I owe $60. Good news for me. So I tell her about my confusion with the website, that it say I owe twice that much. She tells me that a payment was received 3 weeks ago, and that the website billing info is only updated ONCE A MONTH. WTF?! I nearly sent them all my food money for the month because I thought I owed them $120!! Isn't the whole freaking purpose of paying your bill over the web is that you have access to up-to-the-minute (or lord, at least up-to-the-DAY) information?! I politely tell her I know it's not her fault, but maybe she could pass on to her manager a suggestion that they update the site more frequently. She says, "ok," in that tone of voice that means, "yeah, right. fuck you. Like I don't have better ways to spend my time than pass your stupid-ass suggestions onto my mangager." I repeated my request, explaining that I nearly sent a lot of extra money which would have seriously hurt my ability to buy food for the rest of the month if I'd actually paid what the website said I owed, so it would be really nice she passed that along to her supervisor. Again came the same, "Ok." You know, I was in a good mood until I called them...

1960s Italian Lambretta Commercial

I don't know what they heck they're saying, but DAMN i want to go out and buy a scooter! Now if I can only get the frigging song out of my head... I'm never going to be able to fall asleep now.



p.s. The lyrics! The Lyrics! My kingdom for the lyrics!


 

Barbie Girl on YouTube

Ok, for some reason I like this video. (And no, not just because "Barbie Girl" is currently the ring tone on my cell phone). Also, the guy lip syncing the barbie part is cute. (Fishy is reading this and going, "Ew! He needs a haircut!") But there's something sexy about him. In part, I think I just like that he's not willing to make a fool of himself. That's an attractive quality if u ask me.



Update: Ooh! and he's shirtless in this one. Such a cutie...

Shirtless Twink Spanish Flea Dance

Oh my god. This is just beaufully random. What the hell are they doing???? I love it! The fact that two cute shirtless twinks are actually the ones doing the dance only adds to the enjoyment.

When Spiders Attack (bumble bees.)

I'm watching this amazing thing right now in my server room. I came up here when I got home from work to check on a file I'd been downloading. I was just sitting at the computer when all of a sudden I hear this scary buzzing sound coming from next to me. I jumped up and looked down and saw this big scary bumblebee crawling on one of my external hard drives. I've heard rumors that bumblebees don't sting, but it was big and scary and only 2 feet away, so I backed away and quickly found a container I could use to trap it and take it outside. Then I called Fishy to see if he had any ideas about how such a beast got into the house, let alone the server room.

Then, just as I was explaining things to Fishy, I realized that the bee was moving strangely. And then I saw the spider. A small little spider crawling on top of the bee. And next thing I knew, the spider had essentially swung the bee over its back and was dragging it away. The bee was trying to crawl in the opposite direction, but without luck. The interesting thing was that other than that initial buzzing that got my attention, it didn't really flap its wings again, or even seem to try all that hard to get away, which led me to think that perhaps the spider had poisoned it to paralyze it. They struggled back and forth for a while. At one point the spider grabbed hold of a nearby Hershey's kiss wrapper, as if to prevent itself from being dragged away, but of course the wrapper just got dragged along with it, and now I think they've been webbed together. I wasn't sure at first who would win, but its clear at this point that the spider is the victor. This all started over an hour ago, and although the bee can still move a little of its own free will, it's not going anywhere. Still, I've been all but mesmerized by it for the last 60 minutes. I told Fishy all we need now is James Earl Jones doing a voiceover for the PBS "When Spiders Attack" special.

My intial reaction to scoop up the bee and take him outside suddenly became more complicated. Should I help the bee escape the spider? The bee is clearly the victim here. But the spider is probably hungry too, and what if this spider needs this bee to survive so that it can go on and kill the other bees in my house (I still don't know how Mr. Bumbles got in here, after all!) In the end, I decided to do nothing. I mean, if this had been a little kid who was trying to kill bees, I would have helped the bees. But this was a spider who depends on this sort of thing for its survival. And the bee had invaded my house, after all! Any other animal whose home had been invaded would have fought off or killed such an intruder. I felt a little like a nature photographer must feel watching a cheetah take down a gazelle. Do I help the poor gazelle? Or let nature take its course?

So now I'm nervous about this spider. Fishy suggested that I take pictures (mostly because he wanted to see), and I'll post it as soon as I get a chance to upload the photo, but the spider looks rather striking. (I wish I still had the macro lens I rented for the Philly flower show this year!) I'm a little scared to be living around a tiny little spider that can take down a big bumblebee. I already checked the web (no pun intended. haha) and it's not a brown recluse (I'm pretty sure), but I don't know whether it's dangerous to humans or not, so I'm hoping someone will recognize the sucker (again, no pun intended. hahaha) and tell me what it is, and whether I should move out of my house until it's gone.

UPDATE: looks like it's a cobweb spider. See here for comparison.

Hypoglycemic Asians

So many of the Asian people I've known have had hypoglycemia. What this boils down to is the fact that they get grumpy and bitchy when they get hungry. Fishy--himself of Chinese descent, and certainly grumpy and bitchy when he's hungry--recently pointed out that Asians eat a lot of rice--one of the foods they always tell you to avoid because of it's hypoglycemic index (meaning it gives you an energy rush, and then you crash hard afterward). He asked the very interesting question: are Asians hypoglycemic because they eat so much rice, or do they eat so much rice because they're hypoglycemic. I asked the followup question: Maybe they're not hypoglycemic at all. Maybe they're just crashing after eating a lot of high-glycemic foods like rice. Thoughts?

Overheard

Overheard on Penn's campus:

Boy#1: Do you know Eric Schwartz?

Boy#2: Can you be more specific?

Iron Sudoku Rankings Analysis

The rankings were finally posted today at Iron Sudoku!! I've decided to analyze the formula they use, because I have, as Fishy tells me, "too much free time."

The individual puzzles at Iron Sudoku are scored this way:

Easy: 1pt
Medium: 2pts
Hard: 3pts
Expert: 5pts

And there is one new puzzle every day.

Iron Sudoku has a ranking which it calls "Cream O' The Crop," which is computed with the following formula:
(total points earned ÷ total puzzles completed x 100) + (total puzzles completed)

Some have pointed out, therefore, that completing easy and medium level puzzles actually hurts your ranking, and so it makes more sense to do only the hard and expert level puzzles. (More interestingly, I don't believe this formula was posted previously, so nobody realized that they were actually hurting their ranking by returning to the site every day and doing the puzzle!)

The following chart shows the value of every puzzle to date. The blue (left) part shows a running score for someone who successfully completes every day's puzzle. The purple (right) part shows the running score for someone who completes only the hard and expert-level puzzles.

		All Puzzles			Hard & Expert Only
Date	Puzzle#	Points Earned	Total Points	Ranking Score	Points Earned	Total Points	Ranking Score
Mar-11	1	1	1	101.0	0	0	0
Mar-12	2	3	4	202.0	3	3	301.0
Mar-13	3	1	5	169.7	0	3	301.0
Mar-14	4	5	10	254.0	5	8	402.0
Mar-15	5	2	12	245.0	0	8	402.0
Mar-16	6	2	14	239.3	0	8	402.0
Mar-17	7	2	16	235.6	0	8	402.0
Mar-18	8	3	19	245.5	3	11	369.7
Mar-19	9	2	21	242.3	0	11	369.7
Mar-20	10	3	24	250.0	3	14	354.0
Mar-21	11	2	26	247.4	0	14	354.0
Mar-22	12	1	27	237.0	0	14	354.0
Mar-23	13	2	29	236.1	0	14	354.0
Mar-24	14	1	30	228.3	0	14	354.0
Mar-25	15	3	33	235.0	3	17	345.0
Mar-26	16	2	35	234.8	0	17	345.0
Mar-27	17	3	38	240.5	3	20	339.3
Mar-28	18	5	43	256.9	5	25	364.1
Mar-29	19	2	45	255.8	0	25	364.1
Mar-30	20	1	46	250.0	0	25	364.1
Mar-31	21	1	47	244.8	0	25	364.1
Apr-01	22	1	48	240.2	0	25	364.1

What should be obvious is that not only should you avoid doing the easy and medium puzzles, but you should also avoid the hard ones! You can see that every time the purple player finished a hard (3-point) puzzle, his score actually went DOWN. If a player had only completed the expert level puzzles above, his score as of today would be 502.

The most ironic part about this is that the site says that the rankings system is there "For the players with a bit of a competitive spirit," but this ranking system actually discourages players from participating! Indeed, a player trying to maximize his/her score would have only played twice in the last 22 days!

Fortunately, Iron Sudoku does have a second ranking, which it calls "Village Elders," which is simply a straight tally of the number of points a player has accumulated so far. In that system, it makes sense to do the puzzle every day, since your score can only go up. The advantage of the "Cream O' The Crop" ranking is that anyone can start at any time and still have a chance at a good ranking, whereas the highest ranking Village Elders are almost guaranteed to be the people who have been playing the longest. (If you look at the chart again, you'll see that the purple player has a Village Elder ranking of only 25 points, whereas the blue player has a ranking of 48.)

It's been suggested that they create a ranking determined by how quickly you solve the puzzle. Personally, I oppose such a ranking. Sometimes I sit down and work on the puzzle straight through til I'm done, but more often I print it out and do it on the bus, entering the solution on the web later in the day. Or I work on it in bits and pieces while I'm at work. Also, IronSudoku.com is my homepage, so that I don't forget to do it every day. That means as soon as I open my browser, the timer would start, even if I'm not ready to start looking at the puzzle itself yet.

So none of these rankings is an accurate gauge of how good a player is. Cream O' The Crop rewards people who DON'T play. Village Elders punishes people who might be better players, but haven't been on the site as long. And a time-based ranking punishes people who don't have time to complete the puzzle all in one sitting. And of course it's all fairly meaningless anyway in a world where sudoku-solving software like Simple Sudoku et al make it easy to cheat. (Simple Sudoku is a fantastic program, btw, which is good for far more than just cheating!)

None of this will stop me from doing the Iron Sudoku puzzle every day; I just like to do Sudoku, and I like their chat room feature, and the interface for actually doing the puzzle is the best I've seen on a website.

So that's my analysis for now.

UPDATE: I've been fooling around a little more with the Excel spreadsheet I set up to examine the "Cream O' The Crop" formula because something hit me: the formula includes a term for "# of puzzles completed," and at some point, that becomes the dominant term and the other part of the ranking becomes negligible. Assuming that the exact same pattern of puzzle difficulty from these first 22 days repeats itself over and over again, and assuming that the purple and blue players continue their same pattern of playing, then on day 205, purple and blue are tied with a score of 423.5. Then, on day 206, blue finally surpasses purple with a score of 424.9 to 423.6. If purple instead pursues a strategy of playing only expert-level puzzles, then blue doesn't surpass purple until day #310, with a score of 528.1 to 528. This means that the strategy of playing only harder puzzles is only a good one for the first 204 (or 309) days, at which point purple should switch to blue's strategy of finishing every day's puzzle.

Update #2: Wait! Stop the presses! I was wrong again! More in a minute after I figure out the details!

Update #3: Of course, it was a silly mistake. Assuming that the blue player plays every day, then if the purple player misses even a single day, there is no strategy that is guaranteed to keep him ahead of blue forever. So the expert-only strategy works fine for those first 309 days, but after that, purple will never have a higher score than blue ever again. (The logic is sound, even though it's possible that my actual numbers might be a little off if I typed something wrong into Excel at some point, or because Excel is rounding to the nearest tenth of a point.) Hopefully there will be no more updates, if only because it's almost my bed time. G'nite!

my least favorite sudoku of all time.

This was yesterday's ironsudoku. It was way. too. hard.

*-----------*
|..2|.8.|.5.|
|...|.21|.4.|
|...|5..|7.2|
|---+---+---|
|.75|...|9..|
|.1.|9.3|.7.|
|..9|...|31.|
|---+---+---|
|6.4|..8|...|
|.8.|23.|...|
|.2.|.9.|4..|
*-----------*

TvDetective Quote #11

"I don't mean to sound negative, but all of your ideas are shit."

 

History of Violence

Just watched History of Violence. It's based on a graphic novel, too. Not a great graphic novel, but a good graphic novel. Frankly, i don't see what all the hype was about for this movie. It was nothing special. It was a bit gory for my taste (that's David Cronenberg for you), and I certainly didn't need to see Viggo Mortensen eating out his wife, but beyond that, I just didn't "get" the movie. And I "got" the graphic novel just fine. I'm glad I got the film from Netflix instead of paying the big bucks to see it.

V for Vendetta

Fishy and I just got back from seeing V for Vendetta. One word: Awesome. I can't say there was nothing wrong with it, but it was incredibly enjoyable. The Wachowskis' screenplay was surprisingly true to Alan Moore and David Lloyd's original, of which I am a big fan. Perhaps the thing that impressed me the most was that they appear to have kept Valerie's letter intact, verbatim or close to it. Hugo Weaving was perfect as V, although I had a hard time imagining him in the role before tonite. Natalie Portman was great as Evey, too, but an Evey rather different than the one from the g.n.

Don't get me wrong: this was not a word for word retelling of the graphic novel. Adjustments were made. Characters and plotlines were changed or omitted completely (as required in any movie adaptation), but this was still far more than I could have hoped from a Hollywood treatment of this story. (maybe my standards and expectations are too low.) Moore wrote this during Thatcher's reign and the riots that accompanied it. Moore wrote about facism. There are fascist allusions in the movie, but nothing explicit, to the movie's detriment. They also kind of wus out in their criticism of America, and they should have been far more explicit. (Of course, as Fishy points out, there's no way they could have gotten away with such blatant anti-Bush references in this day and age.)

I ultimately enjoyed this movie in the same way I came to enjoy the Lord of the Rings movies: as a supplemental experience to the original, printed version, rather than as a replacement for it. Alan Moore, I have no doubt, would be at the very least deeply disappointed with the movie, but I think people going into the movie fresh, or Moore fans who are willing to look at the movie as a supplement to the book will find something worth seeing.

Finally

New episode of Veronica Mars tonite!!! WOO HOO!!!!!!!!

update: the bastards changed the date of the new episode. AGAIN. Some stupid basketball game showed in its place. It's rescheduled for next week now.

March 15 update: to steal a line from TvD, I'm cautiously ecstatic. It's supposed to be on tonite! Those bastards better not screw me again.

Light my fire

Overheard today on campus, one Penn student talking to another:

"Light a man a match, and he's warm for a minute.
Light a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life."