Sci-fi people: Look at this cool graphic I found

So anyway, I was looking for the album art of Santana's "Caravanserai" (at least I think that was the album) for my music library on Google Images, and this cool sci-fi wallpaper came up:
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It's a little scaled down, but you can click it to view the full-size version. Enjoy!

Why Eat'n Park cookies smile

DISCLAIMER: This post is what many would consider stupid, so unless you're a little strange/geeky/dorky/"out there" like me,I would strongly advise you to stop reading. Or don't, whatever your gut tells you.

Why do Eat'n Park cookies smile? You're eating them, ending their short life, and yet they keep smiling. They smile because although their bodies are being eaten, their souls are going to Cookie Heaven. No, not the bathroom, but a wonderful place beyond Earth, in the "Milky Way". I thought of this last night during a late-night meal with friends and thought I'd blog it. It's probably a good story to share with a little kid or younger sibling the next time you're at an Eat'n Park and they get their smiley cookie. On a side note, their attitude is sort of like the Pizza Planet aliens in Toy Story: "I'm going to a better place". :^)

A super hero draft

It's been a long time, readers, I know. I've meant to post here for a while by now but I've been too distracted and lazy. That ends today. Now, without further ado, here's the post I've had in the back of my head for a few months:

In my daily daydreaming, an interesting thought hit me once. Now, I've never been a very hardcore comic book enthusiast, but this idea intrigued me. It seems like the big two of comic books, DC Comics and Marvel, carry distinct roles within the world of comic book geekery. While DC predominantly carries super heroes with traditional "knight-in-shining-armor" identities such as Superman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, etc., a great deal of the Marvel roster consists of confused, misunderstood protagonists; "anti-heroes" if you will. These include the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, The Punisher, and to a lesser extent, characters like Spider-Man. However, A distinct anomaly exists within the headlining super heroes of each brand. On the DC side, we have Batman. Unlike his more traditional counterparts such as Wonder Woman and Superman, Batman is a vigilante of the night, shaken by the death of his parents and determined to take revenge on criminals everywhere. He's a good freak battling legions of bad freaks, much like a great deal of Marvel's heroes. Conversely, we have Captain America. A Marvel character, he's a U.S. Army officer who fights for truth, justice, and the American way. Yes, I know, that's Superman's line, but this helps prove my point. Batman and Captain America are a lot alike: they both have no super powers persay, but make up for it with their intellect, physical ability, and access to technology. However, they each posess the core image traits of the rival comic book label. The Wikipedia article on the "Marvel vs. DC" series made me think of this, but another idea in the same vein recently came to my mind.

With the "Iron Man" movie recently released and "The Dark Knight" on its way out, another hero comparison hit me. Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark are both wealthy industrialists and genius inventors whose lives are changed forever and who dedicate themselves to using their wealth and genius for good. Batman and Iron Man: now there would be one hell of a team-up. It would be possible, too, if only they weren't on rival labels. Furthermore, the comic book anomalies don't end with Batman and Captain America. While DC has Martian Manhunter, a sort of alternative-style superhero a la Marvel, the Fantastic Four are more DC-esque in terms of their valiant image. This led me to the idea of a "super hero draft" between DC and Marvel to shake up the rosters of each one. If this were actually applied then it would destroy nearly a century of continuity in addition to making superheroism look like a team sport, but its an interesting thought, right?

"The Road" by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

The sky is blackened, ashes are spinning in the breeze, and civilization has disappeared. Your Uncle Bob's last barbecue? No. The remnants of Iraq in a couple of years? No. Where the world will be in several decades? Maybe. In his bestselling novel "The Road", Cormac McCarthy shows us a post-apocalyptic future so bleak that it makes the "Mad Max" trilogy look like "The Sound of Music". The survival tale follows a father and son, known only as "the man" and "the boy", across the burnt landscape in a quest for the coast and a warmer climate. Along the way, they have to deal with bone-chilling cold, bands of highway marauders with no shame, constant shortages of food, and little hope. However, the duo somehow manages to carry on through the power of love. From time to time, the father flashes back to the burning end of civilization which brought his Hell on earth to be and to the woman he loved who is no more. One would think you'd give your main characters names, but perhaps McCarthy made them anonymous to remind us that in another world this could be any father and any son. This novel didn't for the most part send chills down my spine or wrench my heart, and the fact that the author uses no quotation marks got kind of annoying, but it was an interesting read nonetheless. I never thought that I'd like anything which was, as it turns out, named an Oprah's Book Club pick, but my math teacher made a good suggestion with this piece.

wallpapers, etc.

Q: What do you get when you combine a snow day with internet access? A: Me wasting time on the computer. Through snow days off of school, rainy days stuck inside, and afternoons with nothing to do, I eventually discovered that I could create image files using Microsoft PowerPoint slides (yeah, I know, mild to moderate computer-nerdism), which led to the fruit of my trivial labors, these wallpapers. I hate to let them collect e-dust, so maybe someone will use them. Enjoy!

The Batmobile Wallpapers

Over the course of digging myself into a wiki-hole one day, I stumbled upon the article on that legendary pimp mobile, the Batmobile. The article included a link to this fan site which included a history of the car in its many incarnations. Upon going through the main chronology, the idea to compile the many Batmobiles into a black wallpaper struck me, leading to these three.

Batmobiles 1
Batmobiles 2
Batmobiles 3

The Sports Wallpapers

Sadly, the only pro sports I watch on a regular basis are football and hockey, but putting logos together into a league wallpaper seemed like an amusing idea, so I took it and ran with it. Rather than leave you wondering "Why is there no NFL wallpaper", I'll explain. I did in fact create a wallpaper of NFL helmets, but I'm saving this for a football season mega-post.

NHL hockey
NBA basketball
MLB baseball

Wait, one more thing!

Windows solitaire is so addictive, it's like a drug. I started opening windows of solitaire while I waited for websites to load, but I get sucked in every time. Know the facts because knowledge is power!

Don't worry readers, it's not abandoned...

Wow, I've just realized it's been 19 days since my last post. However, this doesn't mean that I'm quitting or even that I have nothing to blog about. I'm a procrastinator, plain and simple. I'm kind of like the Radiohead of bloggers: my releases are spread out far apart but when they do come out, they're really good. It feels like the computer is rotting my brain from sheer overuse (of the computer, not my brain), so goodbye for now!

DO NOT OPEN THIS POST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, too late! Your computer has now been infected with a debilitating virus which will eat up your files, burn your hard drive up, steal your identity, report your digital piracy to the FBI, give you erectile dysfunction, and decrease the market value of your home. Thank you, that is all.

The Curse of the Bambino, revisited

Now, I've never been much of a baseball fan, and I doubt that anyone who likes NASCAR will ever see this post, but bear with me because I have a few interesting theories.

The Curse flipped?

I don't know if I'm the first one to suggest this, but based on recent developments I'm starting to think that the legendary Curse of the Bambino has not only been reversed, but "flipped" so that the Red Sox will be the new team to beat for decades to come while the Yankees will struggle for another World Series championship. Think about it: Although the Yankees were like Dallas Cowboys or Minneapolis/L.A. Lakers of baseball from the time Babe Ruth was traded until the Curse was broken, but the Red Sox have now won two World Series titles in less than 5 years while the Yankees haven't made it to the biggest event in baseball since then. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

NASCAR's Curse of the Bambino?

While the Hendrick Motorsports stable has been one of the most dominant teams in NASCAR with three of it's drivers winning a total of 7 championships ever since Jeff Gordon rose to fame in the early 90s, they may have started what one might call "The Curse of the Busch-bino". With Dale Earnhardt Jr. leaving his stepmother's race team at the end of 2007, Hendrick Motorsports elected to drop then-lackluster performer Kyle Busch in order to make room for Dale Jr. However, Kyle Busch then signed with the Joe Gibbs Racing team and has been on fire as a breakout star from the beginning of 2008, currently leading the Sprint Cup points standings 5 races into the season. Meanwhile, Dale Jr. is the only Hendrick driver currently in a Chase advancement position at 6th, with 4-time Cup champion Jeff Gordon and defending champ Jimmie Johnson struggling to perform after a dominant 2007 season. A coffee table book about the golden age of Trans-Am calls 1968 "Camaro and Porsche - The Mark and Tony Show"; Perhaps 2008 will go down in NASCAR lore as "Hendrick and Toyota - The Dale and Kyle Show". [Joe Gibbs Racing currently runs Toyotas.] Or maybe Hendrick Motorsports will become to NASCAR in the 21st century what the Red Sox were to baseball in the 20th century. Only time will tell.

Predestination and you, pt. II

I hate to beat a dead horse here, but if you were intrigued by my previous post on predestination and you missed the Futurama movie on Comedy Central last night, then I urge you to see it next time it comes on. I don't even know where to begin describing it without giving spoilers, but the possibilities presented on time travel paradoxes are pretty mind-blowing.

Oh yeah, and birds evolved from a group of feathered dinosaurs, so the egg did in fact come before the chicken.

Don't drink the water!

I know they say don't drink the water when you go to Mexico, but apparently we're not much better.

Got pharm?

Cheers!

Predestination and you

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the original Terminator and Back to the Future Part I.

The other day, something got me thinking of predestination/determinism (i.e. the idea that all things in the universe are set in fate) and its use in popular culture. While predestination usually deals with a specific type of determinism in a religious context, (i.e. who will be saved and who won't), I'll be using this term because the word "determinism" itself is pretty obscure, unless of course you were a college philosophy major and ended up either becoming a professor or working at Barnes & Noble.

Now, let's get to the point. A wise character (I believe it was Neo from The Matrix, although I'm not sure) said "I don't like the idea of fate, because I'd hate to think that I wasn't in control of my own life." When my random train of thought hit this particular station over the weekend, I realized how often the predestination paradox and similar concepts come up in fiction. Remember the classic song "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry? In the first "Back to the Future", while Marty McFly is back in 1955, he joins the band onstage at the prom, performing Berry's classic hit (which didn't come out until 1957). Although everyone who's seen the movie remembers how he finished the song by borrowing from every band from AC/DC to Hendrix to Van Halen, leaving the 50's crowd shocked ("I guess you guys aren't quite ready for it, but your kids will love it!"), something else happened in that scene. In the middle of the rendition, the band's regular guitarist Marvin Berry calls his cousin Chuck so he can hear that "new sound" he's been looking for. This means that, within the fictional "Back to the Future" universe at least, no one actually wrote the song and that it just exists in the time-space continuum, that it just is. Furthermore, those who remember the original Terminator know that the guy who the future John Connor sent back in time to protect his mother before he was born was also the one who impregnated her with John, meaning that the leader of the human resistance, was bound by fate to exist, creating a "chicken or the egg" paradox.

We've all heard the cliches about this, like "If you shoot your grandfather before your dad is concieved, will you fade away?", but these movie scenes have really got me thinking. I'm not a philosopher, and I don't claim to know the meaning of life or understand the concept of God, but what if we really are just pawns in a predetermined series of events? What if we really don't have any control over our lives, and whatever will be will be regardless of how much control we think we have?

Metaphysics is a bitch, isn't it?

See Also

The Last Action Hero

First of all, I know I've been slacking about new blog posts, and I apologize. I've just been a little sidetracked lately and haven't gotten around to posting. But that's not the point of this post, so I'll stop rambling and get to the gist of it. The other day at lunch, a particularly redundant saying which I don't quite remember made me think of a long-forgotten favorite movie: 1993's often-overlooked The Last Action Hero. Not only had no one at my table seen it, but neither had the one person who I was sure would love it if he had, a black belt and likely future BASE jumper himself, was unfamiliar with it too. Troubled, I went to IMDb only to find that users gave it a rating of only 5.6/10. Hence this post. The Governator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, stars in this humorous parody of the action film genre, which also borrows from the "play within a play" aspect of Hamlet. The story follows young Danny, who receives a magic ticket originally from Harry Houdini, which allows him to enter the world of any movie he watches. He enters the realm of Jack Slater IV (Slater being a character portrayed by Schwarzenegger, who also appears as himself later on), leading to his frantic and comical efforts to get back to the real world and an effort to stop the Jack Slater villain from altering the "real" world to his benefit. This isn't the kind of movie meant to compete for Academy Awards or move the hearts of millions; It's not The Godfather or Schindler's List. But if you want a fun, exciting, unique film to kill time with on a rainy day or on a similar occasion, then by all means consider this movie.

The beginning of a blog and the end of the world

This is the end... my old friend, the end......

Actually, this is more like the beginning, but people who listen to the Doors will get the reference. Anyway, I know that it's doubtful anyone will read this blog, but I don't really care as long as it gives me a new hobby and a new creative outlet. What was the point of that little virtual singsong above, you ask? The point was to foreshadow the main point of this post, which is to share a cool website. Exit Mundi is the first (and so far only) site I've come across which catalogs almost every possible apocalyptic scenario you could imagine, as well as some that are too bizarre to make up. Sure, we've all heard about meteors, little green men, and tidal waves, but have you ever wondered if female DNA, the seed of life, will kill us all? If you watch the news, you'll see that humanity seems to get dumber every day: what if we all went nuts one day and wiped ourselves out? The site covers all of this and more, explaining even the most complex physical theories in terms which the average person can understand and topping it all with a dark, Vonnegut-reminiscent sense of humor. (Don't worry, religious people, there's even an entire category for the perspectives of different faiths on the apocalypse.) While this site is probably not for the faint of heart, it's definitely a worthwhile read for those who are into this kind of thing. Don't get too crazed over what you find, though, because I'd hate to leave a reader awake all night trembling in their pajamas with a shotgun in hand, waiting for the end of days to come!

P.S. I haven't yet delved too deeply into the Exit Mundi creator's other site, "The Other Bible", yet, but perhaps I'll make it the subject of a future post.