Odds and Ends 9-15-2012

It baffles me that certain movies are not out on Blu-ray or took many years to get issued, such as Lawrence of Arabia. Having obtained a minty used copy of the special edition DVD set of The Right Stuff and watching it last night, I can’t understand why there is no Blu-ray of it. It is a stupendously beautiful looking and sounding movie that deserves the full high definition treatment. It also is the shortest over three hour movie I have ever watched. By watched, I mean repeatedly over the years.

While I like my Iview Cypad 7” Android based tablet, I do need more horsepower. The Google Nexus was a disappointment in my view, since it has no HDMI out or memory card slot. The new Kindle Fire HD 7” looks terrific, but still lacks the slot and leaves you tied to Amazon’s proprietary store. Even with that, it is the current top candidate for a replacement. Ainol, a Chinese manufacturer, has a new tablet, the Novo 7 Fire, that has everything I want, but there are some early technical problems involving overheating. Its specs beat both the Nexus and Fire HD, so if they work out the difficulties, that is the one I would like to get.

After many years, Black Mesa rolled out yesterday. Black Mesa is a mod for the Source engine that recreates much of the original Half Life with all the bells and whistles of newer technology. I did a short run as far as the highly annoying jumping the crates level and have to say the wait was worth it. The attention to detail is simply amazing and the voice acting isn’t bad at all. There is a possibility they may do the Xen levels later, but hardly anybody liked those. I can’t wait to get into the fire fights and see how they are executed.

Making Faith Godly

Making a challenge when teaching Sunday school has its consequences. This post is one due to the fact that I have to live up to the challenge I delivered to the men in my class to write about their faith this week. Diaries, journals, wives' diaries, letter, mother's diaries, blogs, or whatever it took were part of my request.

 

So here I am, writing about my faith. It is more rambling than I would like due to being written during a hectic day yesterday and a very tired day today.

 

Faith is the first critical step towards finding salvation through Christ. Yet there are different kinds of faith, from the material to the spiritual. Only the most paranoid have no faith, though I suppose they do have faith in the idea that the world is out to get them. Simply having a belief in something unseen (ref. Hebrews 11:1) is not religious in itself, as was pointed out by the class during a lesson I taught in Elders Quorum this past Sunday.

No, there is more to it than that. So I find myself contemplating my faith in God and whether or not it is a Godly faith.

 

An Impressive Bit of Socially Engineered Blog Spam

Going through my email account revealed a comment waiting to be approved. While posted from that ever witty pseudo being, Anonymous, it looked legit at first before going off the rails:

Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point.
You definitely know what youre talking about, why
waste your intelligence on just posting videos to your weblog when
you could be giving us something enlightening to read?
Look at my homepage ... free porn

No video on the post is a wee bit of a giveaway even before the pornography offer (link deleted by me). Misspelling is no longer a surefire indicator that something is spam, so that can be forgiven. The idea of using constructive criticism as a form of social engineering in spam is a new one to me. I know it made me read the entire thing, so I bet this one is fairly effective.
Fiendishly clever is the phrase that applies, methinks.

UPDATED

Meanwhile, the Russian referral spam continues unabated. This time it is one from super-online-search . com that takes you to a site you do not want to visit.The Huns are at the gates, I tell you.

UPDATED 9-13-2012

A comment for another post is another clever variation of this that turned out to be a way to get clicks on a “survey” site as well as the video.

I'm having this exact problem with the video: http://www.youtube.com/(removed by me)  I've put one comment on the video site, but Youtube won't let me link your post as part of the explanation. So far, you are the only post that has tried to make sense of this stupid spam issue. Thanks for posting!

The identity of the commenter was “Ron” but the link to his profile is the afore mentioned survey at sprezzaturarrd . blgospot . com. Interesting development because it looks like they are aware of people trying to spread the word. Notice how the video gets another hyperlink via the comment?

Sadly they did get a couple of clicks out of me verifying the profile, but somebody has to take a look to see what is going on to warn others.

Runaway Inflation Is Now Unavoidable

Bernanke has chosen to do the worst thing possible and that is an open ended qualitative easing. If you have savings or an IRA, expect to lose your shirt since interest will be held low and hyper inflation will lower the value of every penny you have. I suggest looking up the Weimar Republic in German history to get an idea of what is going to happen now.

Stock up on foods and goods while you can, your purchasing power is going to decrease very quickly now. Buying ammo would also be prudent since it will be going sky high after this news is absorbed.

Incompetent and suicidal are the only words I can find to describe this development. It looks like a desperate bid to influence the election.

A Short Comment on the Embassy Attacks

Weakness is never a virtue and never, ever respected in the long run. What we are seeing in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen is the end result of trying to appease evil. Nothing good can come of that, so I expect a lot more to happen now that the United State is perceived as weak.

I have always advocated spreading democracy and republicanism to all states on all continents. Once I believed that it would encourage peace, but then I grew up and ceased being a teenager. Now it is because I believe that everyone must have their chance and be judged upon their resulting behavior.

Does that sound ominous? It should.

The Obama state department has been an abject failure since the beginning, insulting allies and cozying up to people who genuinely hate the West. Fear of offending our enemies and a perverse desire to offend friends has been a hallmark of this administration. So it was only a matter of time before the chickens came home to roost.

Al Qaeda and their associates coordinated the initial attacks on 9/11/2012 with the hope they would spread. Killing Osama bin Laden turned out to be as meaningless as I expected. This is a much bigger movement than one man.

Watching the media rally around the President and try to make Romney a bad guy for making a rational, not to mention needed, statement about the groveling message from the Egyptian embassy staff has been a depressing sight.

Once again, I repeat that weakness is not a virtue.

Gammera the Invincible (1966) Review

An American producer imports a giant monster movie from Japan and splices in new scenes. Godzilla, King of the Monsters? No… Gammera!  The result is something kids will enjoy and adults will find very silly. Park your brain – you won’t be needing it for this movie about a 200ft tall flame spewing turtle. And just what is the mysterious Plan Z? UPDATED September 2012 with DVD screen captures and revised text.

In 1965, Daiei Studios released Gamera the Giant Monster to cash in on the giant monster craze started by 1954’s Gojira. It was a decidedly low budget film that surprisingly did well and spawned a series of sequels. While never as big as the Godzilla series, many a kid watched the films about Gamera, the children’s friend.

The version reviewed is the first Americanized one distributed by NTA, not the even more heavily edited Sandy Frank one most of us saw on TV back in the 1980’s. This one is only mildly incoherent by comparison.  On to the review!

Gammera the Invincible begins with an overly serious narration introducing the setup. Dr. Hidaka (Eiji Funakoshi) is in the Artic to conduct some serious research. On what, I do not know. But he is a serious scholar and don’t you forget it! There he and his lovely assistant Kyoke (Harumi Kiritachi) meet an Eskimo chief. Pleasantries are barely exchanged before a squadron of Soviet bombers fly by at low altitude.

11 from 9/11

Watching the 9/11 ceremony streaming from the memorial site and listening to the names of the murdered read off has made the memories come back with a vengeance. One thing that strikes me is the names come from every ethnic background. When Bin Laden and company launched the attack, they did not attack just one hyphenated American, but the entire country.

I wish people would remember that this year when identity politics have gotten the worst I have seen in my forty plus years of living.

It is painful to listen to the families of the fallen speak and they are only up to ‘P’. It is one thing to remember watching what happened over a decade ago, but to see and hear just a fraction of the people whose lives were permanently changed reminds us of the very human dimension involved. So many kids left behind missing their parents and growing up without their presence are reading names.

Never forget.