Radiohead - EU Tour Dates Announced

Listen up children....according to ateaseweb, Radiohead's EU tour dates are confirmed (except Bonnaroo, of course) and it will be kicking off in May. No North American dates have been announced yet but the tour is supposed to kick off in June.

I'm all a-quiver, folks.

Wage Slavery

We are all wage slaves, biznotchez. Support the French youth movement.

Reject the bullshit. People were not meant to live this way.

V for Vendetta Movie - First Impression

We just got back from watching the V for Vendetta movie. Before I make any comments, let me just remind everyone that I'm an oldschool fan of the graphic novel, and that I've been pretty psyched about the movie for some time. Take that for what it's worth since I'm definitely the sort of person who consistently falls into the "The book was so much better than the movie" camp.

So my initial thoughts after having just seen the movie can be summed up as: "Meh." The movie retained about 80% of the events from the graphic novel, without retaining the chronology or the basic story arc. As a result, the government comes across as a rather weak example of a corrupt, totalitarian regime. I didn't really get a strong sense of the pervasive Orwellian oppression of the people either. And frankly, I walked away without a good understanding of the motivations of V, himself.

I didn't hate it, and I didn't love it. I had the same final feelings that I did when I saw the movie interpretation of "Fear and Loathing." The movie managed to faithfully convey a bunch of the events of the story without retaining the key parts of the story that made it powerful, or even allowed the story to make sense.

On a scale from Sucked to Rocked, I'm going to have to give it a 3.5.

News Explosion

Uh-oh. On the same day that Dubai Ports World announces that they're going to give up it's management stake in the U.S. ports, we also get the news that the U.S. military is going to close Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Why do I have the disturbing feeling that there is some heinous, unspeakable evil being perpetuated by the assministration right now that they're hoping will slip under the radar due to all this "Big News"?

The Empire Keeps Striking Back

From the "Things that make you go hmm" Department...

Disgustedem directed my attention today to this article from the Poughkeepsie Journal, specifically the third item. The key interesting bit here is that the man who is going to jail for selling crack is named "Landocalrissan Butler." This dude was named after Lando freaking Calrissian, from Empire Strikes Back. In the annals of really awful things parents can do to their kids, I'd say this one ranks pretty high. Hell, I unequivocably blame his parents for the fact that he wound up selling drugs.

I'm trying to conceive the circumstances by which this happened. Note that he's 25, which would put him right into the sweet period of 9 months after the release of ESB. One has to assume he was conceived the night that his parents saw ESB for the first time. And clearly, they were completely blown away, not just by the movie, but particularly by Billy Dee Williams performance. Moreover, both parents were sufficiently wow-ed that neither of them bothered to object to this crime.

I wouldn't even be quite as surprised to see a Hansolo Smith, because Han was a key character, and he was just damned cool. Somehow, naming one's kid after the guy who sold the rebels out to the Empire just does not seem right.

Anyhow, I've got to wrap this one up. I told my friend Mofftarkin that I'd meet him for a beer and I'm already late.