Month: November 2002

The movie Searching For Bobby Fischer is not about the reclusive genius himself, but I still rank it as one of my favorites. The story of Bobby Fischer is far more tortuous, as this informative article in The Atlantic reveals. Although regarded as one of the best chess masters ever, Bobby Fischer’s reclusiveness and paranoia have risen to new levels. His recent anti-American screeds in radio broadcasts from The Phillippines caused even the fawning U.S. Chess Federation to denounce his actions. The article compares his tortured intellect to that of mathematician John Nash, upon whom the movie A Beautiful Mind was based, although “without the happy ending.” Despite all of Bobby Fischer’s achievements, that statement may ultimately sum up the life of this deranged genius.

I can’t believe people are still talking about this. Does anybody care? Did anybody care last year? How about the year before? There’s one. Yes, you in the fifth row: Can you tell us what year she died, because I can’t remember back that far. It was 1996? Great, thanks.

Honestly, can’t Larry King find some real news to report? He should get an interview with this guy. And huzzah to Reuters for updating their web site to look like part of the 21st century.

I’m not really a fan of professional basketball, but I thought that this story of triumph over adversity would have universal appeal. Now that Shaquille O’Neal’s big toe is all better, he is expected to return to play on Friday. No doubt the struggling Lakers are glad that he has overcome his critical injury and is now able to return to his duties of taking up the entire court with his massive girth, occasionally dunking, and missing all of his bricks free throws. Hey, maybe this will mean no more stupid Burger King commercials! Alas, that would be too perfect…

In a case that should be a new benchmark for frivolous lawsuits, “lawyers have filed a class-action lawsuit against McDonald’s on behalf of New York children who have suffered health problems, including diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity.” Pretty damn stupid, right? Wait until you hear about some of the plaintiffs: “a Bronx teen who ate every meal at McDonald’s for three years while living in a homeless shelter” and “a 13-year-old boy from Staten Island who says he ate at McDonald’s food three to four times a week and is now 5-foot-4 and 278 pounds.” Why the judge didn’t laugh in those lawyers’ faces, explain to them what the term “parental supervision” means, and throw some French Fries at them I just don’t understand…

Read this review of Harry Potter and the Chamber Of Secrets, not to hear how great the film is, but for this summary quote: “We’ve accidentally allowed a retarded monkey to rule America, but otherwise it’s not such a whimsical place. Perhaps works like this can help set that to rights.” Word. Although retarded monkeys everywhere are offended…

Blogger is not playing nicely with my template. This page will look pretty shitty until they fix it.

Update: The page finally looks right, but the problem with templates is still there. Maybe the folks at Blogger will look at my reported issues and find a fix that doesn’t require the screwy workaround I had to kluge to make everything look right.

Dr. Earl Warrick, a Dow Corning inventor that is perhaps best known for his invention of Silly Putty, died last Friday at the age of 91. 🙁

These sculptures of aquatic creatures made from hubcaps are amazingly detailed and intricate.

I’ve been lauding Mozilla’s ability to block pop-up and graphical banner ads for some time now. However, many companies are switching to far more annoying animated Flash ads that can’t be disable conventionally. Have I got an application for you! jTFlashManager allows you to disable and enable Flash on the fly, at least if you use Mozilla or Netscape. IE users will have a slightly harder time, but there is a work-around. I refuse to use IE unless absolutely necessary, though, so I hope that features like these will start to convert the people who haven’t seen the light. 😉

Yup. God Bless America. 🙂