Fill in alarmist and armageddonist factoid here
When the Chernobyl nuclear reactor melted down in 1986, scores of people died, many more became ill with acute radiation sickness, and 135,000 people were evacuated. ... The prognosis for Chernobyl and its environs was grim. But surprisingly, Chernobyl’s surrounding flora and fauna have flourished remarkably. In Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl (October 2005, Joseph Henry Press), author Mary Mycio vividly describes an extraordinary – and at times unearthly – new ecosystem that is flourishing in this no-man’s land, where radiation levels are too intense for people to live.
For the last time. video games are really not movies. Roger Ebert also doesn't consider video games to be a cinematic art form, and he keeps having desperate young men (well, they always come across as desperate young men) write him about how video games are the Art of the Future or something like that. But what everybody seems to be missing is that a video game is obviously a work of art -- a work of VIDEO GAME ART.
Ebert doesn't review video games, books, still paintings, popular songs, television programs, or any of the other things that a movie might be based on. He reviews movies. So it's ridiculous to talk about it as if he has some particular prejudice against video games -- the only reason he has to say, well, no, he doesn't consider video games to be a significant narrative art form, is because these desperate young geeks keep acting like they they are. And they're not. Neither is chess. Is anybody complaining that chess isn't taken seriously as a narrative art form? No. So stop whining.
It's an accepted fact. Meetings are useless.
A tiny rant.
Okay, here's the thing. I don't dislike all musical quotes (you know, where one song quotes a tune or lyrics from another song) and I don't dislike all musical collage (where samples taken from different sources are layered on top of each other). (I might dislike all mash-ups but I haven't heard all mash-ups, so maybe there's one out there that sounds like something other than two radio stations coming in over the top of each other in a way that makes my brain want to explode.) But I really, really (really) don't think that a quote of a song that you think is lame in its original form somehow enhippens the original tune. If you're listening to some Celine Dion mash-up, and you're digging it, you dig the Celine Dion. Just admit it already.
Thank you. Rant ends here.
Conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson said on Thursday the wave of scorching temperatures across the United States has converted him into a believer in global warming.
Uh, that's nice, Pat, but global warming really doesn't work that way.
