Birth

I didnt like this movie. Very slow. Well written and acted until the very end -- they seemed to cheap out and make the reincarnated kid just crazy. A little too easy for me.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337876/

Half-Life 2

They call this the best game ever made. Perhaps it is. A winding, Kafka-esqe plot with stunning visuals. Im about an hour into the game and it rocks. Its certainly perhaps the best first person shooter ever made -- with Half-life 1 being the second, and it held the title for probably 5 years.
http://www.half-life.com/

Alone In The Dark

A decent b-grade horror/action flick. Borrows stuff from Aliens, Stargate, and Lovecraft. If youre into that kind of thing like I am, youll dig it. Christian Slater does a good job, but man does Tara Reid stink as an actress. Just ignore her; shes not really part of the story.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0369226/

Dalek terror returns to Doctor Who

The new series of Doctor Who has seen Christopher Eccleston fight living dummies, restless spirits and aliens disguised as MPs, but he has yet to face his mortal enemies The Daleks.
That will be rectified in a forthcoming episode entitled simply Dalek, in which the Time Lord finds that one of the metal killing machines has been collected by an unsuspecting billionaire.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4469761.stm

The Starlost

A coworker and I were having a conversation today and this old CBC sci-fi series came up -- the Starlost. What a great but short-lived series. I loved this as a kid. Too bad it lasted about a dozen episodes. Ben Bova wrote the technical backstory. Very cool.
http://www.snowcrest.net/fox/star.html

More Evidence for Life On Mars

Evidence for intense local enhancements in methane on Mars has been bolstered by ground-based observations. The methane, as well as water on Mars, was detected using state-of-the-art infrared spectrometers stationed atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii and in Cerro Pachón, Chile.
Scientific teams around the globe are on the trail of methane seeping out of Mars. And for good reason: The methane could be the result of biological processes. It could also be an "abiotic" geochemical process, however, or the result of volcanic or hydrothermal activity on the red planet.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050419_mars_methane.html

Rare metal found in samples at Serpent Mound

Scientists studying recent rock samples taken from beneath an ancient earthen mound are trying to determine what caused unusually high concentrations of a metal rarely seen anywhere but near Earths molten core or in asteroids and comets.
Serpent Mound, an earthen snake effigy believed to have been built from about 1000 B.C. to A.D. 200 is about 60 miles east of Cincinnati. Some believe the 1,348-foot-long mound had a religious function for its builders, although nobody knows for sure what philosophy and beliefs shaped its origin because the mound builders left no written records.
Geologists only recently discovered high concentrations of iridium 1,412 feet beneath the mound.
The levels of the silver-gray metal, occasionally brought up in lava from volcanoes, measured 10 times beyond what is usually present in the Earths crust.
Since there are no lava fields in Ohio, some geologists point to the iridium as evidence the mound sits upon a slightly oblong crater created when a massive extraterrestrial object slammed into Earth.
http://www.chillicothegazette.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050418/NEWS01/504180308/1002

Donnie Darko

Really good movie. Weird, undefinable. Very well done. Basically a teenage boy goes crazy, or does he? The ending leaves you questioning in an amazing way.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246578/

Decoded at last: the classical holy grail that may rewrite the history of the world

In a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
In the past four days alone, Oxfords classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=630165

New Doctor Who Rocks

In Canada, Doctor Who had strong ratings for its first episode with Tuesday?s Canadian premiere on CBC garnered 986 000 viewers. This is an excellent rating for a show on CBC, and indeed for non-American dramatic programming.
http://www.dwin.org/article.php?sid=166

Kung Fu Hustle

Really, really fun movie. Great effects, funny story, and a matrix-like ending.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373074/

Ultimate Martial Art?

Human beings are obsessed with conflict. Conflict attracts us just as a light will draw a moth into its orbit, even it ultimately means the destruction of the moth. Conflict of all sorts dominates our entertainment. Increasingly every aspect of our social life is viewed through the filter of polarization, us and them, winner and loser, right and wrong. As human beings we are virtually incapable of simply holding a pair of opposites, of allowing that two points of view can exist simultaneously, that twp interpretations can illuminate one another rather than negate each other. Any contradiction demands some sort of outcome in which one side or the other "wins", comes out on top, prevails over the other.
http://www.aikiweb.com/columns/gledyard/2005_03.html

Walk through doors, but dont walk through walls.

It encapsulates the essence of non-resistance, it illustrates the hard and the soft of yin and yang, the balance of freedom and restriction. It addresses almost all the problems we encounter in our training, and simplifies the analytical process and corrective approach.
http://www.aikiweb.com/columns/rrobertson/2005_03.html

Bad Review Of The New Hitchikers Movie

The Hitchhiker?s Guide to the Galaxy movie is bad. Really bad. You just wont believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular - but thats just peanuts to the Hitchhikers movie. Listen.
And so on...
http://www.planetmagrathea.com/shortreview.html

Final Cut

Interesting movie. The premise: you can be given an implant before birth that records your whole life. What would life be like knowing that others, after your death, would watch your whole life? What would that change? What would they make of your life?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/

The Day The Earth Stood Still

I must have seen this movie a dozen times but I never get tired of it. This dvd rendition is massively cleaned up and clear, and the sound is unbelievable for a 1951 black and white scifi flick.
The commentary with the director (Robert Wise) is very interesting as well -- for example, the military in the movie were all nation guardsmen as the US Army refused to participate in the movie; they didnt like its peaceful message!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005JKFR/qid=1112637794/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-9607270-2338218?v=glance&s=dvd

Star Trek The Lost Years: The Sundered

Ive been going through some pretty heavy reading of late, mixed with some stressful times at work. With this in mind, I grabbed a copy of this book from the library. I thought Id given up most of my lightweight scifi reading habits when I was a teenager, but maybe I was wrong.
This book is an absolute joy -- reasonably well written, with a cool intertwining plot and believable characters. It takes place on the Excelsior with Sulu at command. A fun read!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/074346401X/qid=1112632276/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-9607270-2338218