Under a Gibbous Moon

Well not really but it does go to show that the camp that is Monty Python can only be outdone by Star Trek.

Hat Tip: Great White Snark

I’m not a big fan of Apple. They make some good (if over priced products). The problem I have with them is their obsessive control over pretty much everything. Apple isn’t so much a product as it is a lifestyle. Hell, even one of their magazine is called the Cult of Mac. At the head of that cult sits a man named Steve Jobs who is brilliant and could teach Howard Hughes a thing or two about being crazy.

In Apples latest attempt at world domination, they have an editor over at Gizmodo house raided (because of the leaked new iPhone) by the police after he returns the phone to Apple. I guess that they were afraid he had quickly cobbled together a duplicate before he returned it. Anyway, I could go on all day about it, but I won’t because Jon Stewart is funnier.

Along with a change in operating system, I decided that I would give a new browser a try. Opera was on the list for Mint’s repository and so I figured what the hell.

Big mistake.

I used it solely for about a week before dumping it. I’ll start with the minor complaints. First off, the UI is a cutting edge if you’re still a big fan of Netscape. Of course, eye candy isn’t everything and I will have to admit that Opera has the fastest renderer that I have ever used, too bad it doesn’t render about 2/3 of the web pages I visited correctly. Most of them were minor with overlapping or oddly sized elements but a few pages were completely unusable as the menus did not display right.

I find it odd that a modern browser would have this much trouble. Apparently the people at Opera haven’t heard of web standards. In lieu of that, they put in a context menu for you to report a broken page.

In short, if you like the modern web, use a modern web browser, if you still only use Usenet and long for Geocities then Opera is for you.

Yeah, I know, I’m late to the party but I just don’t get out to KFC that often.

Of course, I’d heard of the Double Down, the sandwich that takes the bold step of omitting the bun and replacing it with two fried chicken breasts. This isn’t strictly true, since if the chicken was the bun then the sandwich would be some cheese and a piece of bacon. Semantics aside, I went and ordered one. It came in it’s own box and inside the box was a wrapper and inside the wrapper…

Looks kind of like the lazy man’s chicken cordon bleu. As far as the taste, depends on whether or not you like KFC chicken. It’s not a great sandwich but it tastes just fine. I personally think that the “controversy” around the sandwich is very overblown. Ya, so it has no bun. I would say this is much better for you than actually getting the KFC chicken meal with potatoes and biscuits and butter smothered vegetables.

Of course, if you want something really bad, you could always get one of these.

Movie adaptions of graphic novels seem to be all the rage these days. While I have never read the source for this movie, I have no particular doubt that it is far superior to this movie. Within the first ten minutes you’ll see Kate Beckinsale in her underwear. The movie goes downhill from there.

The premise of the movie is that it takes place in Antarctica just before the long winter sets in and cuts off the outpost from the rest of society. As everyone is getting ready to leave, there is a series a murders that must be solved before darkness sets in and the murder gets away with whatever he is trying to get away with (by the end, you won’t care either).

Within the first twenty minutes you know who is behind the murders. There is no ambiguity as each event that occurs only strengthens your conviction. This leaves you with an hour and twenty minutes to kill as our heroine catches up to where the audience is at. This lack of opacity or even a surprise twist makes the movie stumble around (literally) as the characters try to figure out the obvious. Even the red herrings are easily dismissed.

The movie is dull, the romance is forced, and people wandering around in a snowstorm gets old after forty-five minutes.