Thursday, February 21, 2008

Rubber poop monster stalks sewerage plant workers

I reckon this is the weirdest thing I have read today. A sewerage plant in Eastbourne, East Sussex, called in a scam artist, err I mean paranormal investigator Michael Kingscote, to check out their plant after sightings of a "zombie-like figure who roams the tunnels". Right - whatever. If we disregard the obvious explanations of some homeless guy wandering around, or over-active imagination, I reckon it leaves us with one possibility. Someone has stolen the rubber poop monster outfit from Kevin Smiths film Dogma, and is stalking the workers for some nefarious reason ala Scooby Doo

Yes, the Golgothan is back and he's bad. Scaring sewerage plant workers is obviously part of some enormous devilish scheme to take over the world and turn it into the next plane of Hell. Or another Starbucks.

Or it could be someone dressed as the Golgothan, scaring people away from the sewerage plant because its not out in the middle of nowhere like most sewerage plants no no - its in the middle of a city, next to the Bank. And they are tunnelling in to steal the Crown Jewels, which just happen to be there temporarily for cleaning, under the cover of darkness, using the monster to scare off workers who might uncover their fiendish plan. But the plucky team of psychic investigators, some who are ex-navy seals, uncover the crafty plot, and blow up the plant to save the jewels from the thieves. Cue big explosion, cue people diving left and right to escape fireball, cue short sharp shower of shit.

Shit - I think I just came up with a new movie plot. What's Michael Bay's phone number again?

XKCD - funny funny funny.

Check out the XKCD website if you haven't already for some super funny webtoons. Heres a couple of examples to whet yer whistle.




Michael Bay is Awesome!!!

Michael Bay gets a bad rap these days for his over the top, overly long and poorly scripted movies.
I for one actually dont mind the numbingly blatent action and fireball explosions that seem to crop up in his films. The Rock was great, Armageddon was ridiculous, The island was actually quite clever and Transformers was not bad. In saying that here is a video for an internet fibre optic company that he is endorsing. It is quite witty. After the Jump.



Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Poor polling leads to inconclusive results - BTW Go the Canes.

Rugby. Lifeblood of our small nation at the bottom of the South pacific. Or is it? According to a poll presented on Stuff today, more Kiwi's are turning away from Rugger and doing, well, who gives a shit really. My point is that its yet another example of poor opinion polling and poor journalism. Combined they create a bullshit article that plays on the ever present undercurrent of malaise we feel every year when the rugby season starts.

So, this article in Stuff is titled "Kiwi's losing interest in Rugby". That's nice. And on what amazingly insightful piece of investigative journalism do they base the revelation on? A poll. Well, after being polled a few times, I know the calibre of questions the most pollsters ask. They are generally slanted in some way, whether they mean to or not, and will probably skew the results towards a specific outcome. This particular one asked people whether or not they would be taking more, less or the same interest in rugby this year compared to previous ones.

Ok, not very specific, but not only that, they list the results and then talk about MORE people feeling bummed about rugby this year. Sorry? Did I miss something? You asked a small sample of people (500 which is minuscule) one question and are now drawing a different result? They asked people if they would be more or less interested in rugby, but this does not tell you if this is different to LAST year. Or the year before. At no time does it point to historical data. The only thing you can tell from this poll is that for a small sample of people, 29% were less interested, 54% the same and 14% were more interested.

To get an accurate result, to answer the question on whether people are more or less interested in rugby this year, compared to other years, they would need to poll a LOT more people every year, at the same time of year, and compare the data from each year.

They also draw conclusions based on irrelevant fact. They state that this is because we got so much rugger last year, and that we lost the world cup. Yes - I said it. We screwed the pooch. Farted with the new girlfriend and fluffed the blanket. We George W. Bushed it. We came a gutser. We ballsed it up. It was, by all accounts, a bit of a booboo. But, I still support the All Blacks - they are a fantastic bunch of strapping lads who could've taken those South African finalists with one arm tied behind their backs any day.

I digress. Anyway, the point is, this is baseless conjecture - its like me taking a poll of the neighbourhood on cat's and then using this information to conclude a point about dogs. The information may seem to be related, but unless you actually ask the specific question, its just a guess.

You may say at this point, "What the hell do you care?" and you'd be right. I don't. But I wanted to talk about rugby without being all "Go the 'canes!" and sound like a sports nut.

Ahem

GO THE CANES!!


Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Kevin Smith looks a bit Southparky

Being a fan of Kevin Smith, I enjoy his podcast he releases every week with Scott Mosier call Smodcast. He's got it on hiatus at the moment while he's filming his new flick Zack and Miri make a Porno, but its usually there to download every Tuesday. He's very open with his life, sharing things that the average person probably wouldn't, but its kind of refreshing. For those of you who do subscribe to Big Kev's verbal wonderland, or if you are wanting to get into it, here's a YouTube vid using snippets of the Smodcast put to animation.

Not sure who this guy is who made it, but its bloody good. Check out Kevin Smiths fan site Quickstop Entertainment, and his online diary (which gets updated when he's not filming) for an in depth view into Kevin Smith's life.



For more amusement, check out how Kev deals with a heckler from the crowd at the Comicon in 2007. Even if you're not a fan of Kevin Smith, its still a good laugh.



Monday, February 18, 2008

NASA urged to focus on sending people to Mars.

An interesting article over at NewScientist.com suggests that maybe NASA’s plan to go to the Moon by 2020 is not as important as going to Mars. It is true that many people think that if the Space Shuttle was not developed back in the 70’s it would have freed up money and resources to accomplish just this feat. We could have had a presence on Mars as early as the mid eighties had we not been languishing around in Low Earth Orbit. Now a group of space experts and NASA officials say that NASA should return the focus on getting to the red Planet and scale down the plans for a permanent settlement.

Far Cry Movie all kinds of crap

Uwe Boll, director of such classic movies as Bloodrayne (huh?) Blackwoods (who?) and Sanctimony (what?) has released a trailer for his upcoming movie Far Cry. Yes, based directly on the award wining PC game which rocked all kinds of awesome all over my PC, is a movie which will undoubtedly cause me to vomit uncontrollably all over my PC. And not because its a gore fest, more a worst-movie-ever fest.

See the trailer in all its terrible glory below. Who keeps getting this guy to make movies? Everything he touches turns to crap, although to give him some credit, most of it was crap to start with.

I think this will be a straight to DVD release and rank alongside Doom as yet another bad PC game to movie translation.