Facebook Law

College Humour has put together an amusing video explaining why all those "For the Record: I hereby declare..." Facebook statuses you've likely been seeing on your newsfeed. I was a particular fan of the inclusion of the Rome Statute, which (as my International Law class recently learned) gives the International Criminal Court jurisdiction over war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, and aggression. Whoever originally wrote the block of text that's being passed around willy-nilly clearly had a good sense of humour.

Anal Retentive Ramblings: Using Two Spaces Between Sentences

I was sitting in bed hungover on this fine Saturday morning, perusing reddit's top links, when I came across an interesting article over at Slate. Technology columnist Farhad Manjoo's "Space Invaders" is a great tirade against the use of two spaces between sentences. Considering that I'm not a typographer it's kind of a strange thing to get frustrated by, granted, but the practice has always irked me. I can't tell you how many papers I've edited where the bulk of my effort has been dedicated to deleting fucking extra spaces. It is beyond relieving to find that I'm not alone in my frustration, and furthermore to be vindicated in my writing habits.

Manjoo gives an excellent breakdown of where the mistake came from, how it continues to be propagated, and why it's just plain wrong. Unsurprisingly it's of the same origin as the QWERTY curse, namely sloppy answers to the physical problems with early typewriters. This video from Daily Cup of Tech gives a decent breakdown on the historical details:

The point is that using two spaces between sentences is wrong. It's an obsolete solution to a problem we no longer have and yet people persist with it under the misconception that doing so is proper writing technique. It isn't, so stop. End of discussion.

Now if I can just find a good article that justifies the oxford comma...

LOL: ThinkGeek Served Cease and Desist for Fake Product

ThinkGeek, the popular online store for original geek clothing and paraphernalia, was recently served with a cease and desist letter by the National Pork Board. The claim states that the website infringed upon the NPB's trademark on the slogan, "The Other White Meat" (umm, gross). It's true that ThinkGeek used the phrase "the new white meat" in advertising for their product, Canned Unicorn Meat. However it's also true that the Unicorn meat is a fake product launched as an April Fools day prank, and thus protected as a parody.

I'll bet the lawyer(s) at the NPB are really embarrassed right now. I would be too if I outed myself as a humourless moron in such a dramatic fashion. To celebrate this memorable occurrence ThinkGeek is offering $10 off any purchase of $40 or more until June 30, just enter the code PORKBOARD at checkout.

It's days like this that I really love the internet.

Further evidence proving the inadequecy of Darwinism in modern society

I don't want to bother wasting space here by including the actual text of the article that's inspired me to write this post, so I'll just link to it:

www.denverpost.com/movies/ci_12110560

The fact that this Lisa Kennedy person is able to both find work and get published in today's economy fills me with hope for my future, and despair for the field of journalism. Clearly I have what it takes to succeed, being a fairly intelligent, critically minded human being with a University education, because Kennedy seems to be doing jut fine without any of those qualities. I mean really, come one, she actually takes issue with Wall-E's vision of the future and how it will influence developing minds? The whole point behind it is to give them hope that we can turn things around in the bleak reality they're faced with! Did she even finish the movie? She quotes Patty Greer at the end, saying that "We need to believe in our ability as a race that we can turn things around," and so I find it highly dubious whether or not she managed to focus her attention and sit still for the entire duration of Pixar's modern classic. Not finish the movie is a rookie mistake that has already been apologized for by the likes of Robert Ebert, so Kennedy doesn't have much wiggle room between being an idiot and a hack, if not a comfortable mix of the two.

Basically the entire piece is a thoughtless conservative puff piece about how movies are too dark, and actually spends a significant portion of the article attacking the thematic similarities of Roland Emmerich's body of work, as though he's in any way relevant on an intellectual level. That's like calling Michael Bay highbrow, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if Kennedy took issue with The Rock for providing terrorists with good ideas and motivations for attacking the American people. If this article were merely an anti-"2012" rant I would be fine with it, it wouldn't be any less stupid but at least it would have some sort of validity, if only a subjective one. As it is, though, the piece attacks all modern film making, actually referring to its own points as "pleas for the sanctity of the imagination" without the slightest hint of irony, completely misunderstanding many of the films it takes issue with that actually reflect her desires, and essentially calling for a classically insidious form of censorship under the banner of "good taste." It disgusts me.

Really though, I didn't need to write this rant to demonstrate the profound idiocy of this journalist, she did so herself many times throughout her own article. In closing I just want to call attention to the film she extols in her conclusion, Greer's "2012: We're Already in It," which won the the award for Best Feature Film — UFO or Related at the International UFO Congress Convention in Nevada. Admittedly I haven't seen this documentary, but since that apparently isn't a necessary requirement for making sweeping and possibly outright invalid claims about a film, I'm going to assume that it's probably as much of a crackpot as it sounds, and take this alone as sufficient evidence for Kennedy's fundamental inability to reflect critically. Even if the movie's good, the fact that Kennedy presents it the way she does serves to prove my point anyways.

I don't know why I bothered wasting twenty minutes writing about this stupid article, I guess I just needed to get a good rant out of my system, it's been a while. Who knows, maybe I'll use pieces like this to get myself hired one day by demonstrating my ability to, you know, think. Clearly there's a need for that in modern film criticism.

I need to get more sleep at night, clearly two hours isn't enough...