Film Night

Finally saw D-War (aka Dragon Wars).

A few scenes that make you go ooh! and a lot of WTF. It's like a 70's Japanese monster movie, but with CGI instead of rubber suits and a really, really incomprehensible plot. The "good guys" destroy as much of the city as the "bad guys" do in a long sequence in which Stuff Blowed Up Real Good, but which ultimately has no bearing on the film's climax.

Somebody threw a lot of money at this film, though. Maybe it's better in it's original, non-Anglicized cut, when they're not trying to re-cast Korean locations as southern California.

Werewolves

Werewolves by Eliott O'Donnell is now available from Project Gutenberg.

The Book of Were-Wolves by S. Baring-Gould has been available for several years.

Food for Thought

Cognitive Dissonance and Politics and Why the Facts Don't Matter in Politics

"Voters think that they're thinking," Bartels says, "but what they're really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they've already made."

Yes, it happens all the time, and not just in politics. I've caught myself at it. The only real defense is to (1) always question and (2) reality check. Oh, and admitting that you're wrong, if even only to yourself, is not a character fault.

Be sane out there.

Lion in church ...

Many years from now, a small group of Hurricane Ike survivors will probably still be telling the story of how, on the night the storm flattened their island, they took sanctuary in a church -- with a lion.

Story here (no photos)

Where did the weekend go? PotW

The new picture of the week is up.

14 September 2008 DarkFang, 1998 DarkFang, making an appearance at a Texas festival, back in late September, 1998. Location: Somewhere around Dallas, Texas

I keep wanting to say this was a May Fest, but the other photos on the roll are of Six Flags Fright Nights. Dragon was there, too, running around in his Marylen's husky. I also remember a little girl who kept coming up and talking to the critters, wanting to take them home. We later found out that she saw the werewolf and husky from her house, across a busy six lane street, and was so captivated that she navigated across the street and slipped into the fair, all on her own. Her mother was somewhat less thrilled about it when she spotted her lost daughter a half hour or so later.

Technology Marches Onwards ...

Google's Picasa Web Albums added facial recognition as an option a couple of weeks ago -- identify a person in one of your photographs and it will make suggestions about the presence of that person in your other photos.

Privacy concerns aside (the government could sift through all public images anyway, and you can ID a person as any string of characters if you want to obfuscate), I can see this being a really useful tool to sort through all those old family album photos. I've got stacks and stacks of photos from before WWI, mostly without any captions. It might help to identify who else is in a picture if I know that's old great-uncle Don Frazzleberg (who I know from a labeled photo or two) standing second from the left.