Spamalot

Hedda surprised me with a trip to see Spamalot for my impending birthday. What an awesome gift!

The show is quite funny, and pays due homage to many of Monty Python’s most famous gags. The show is loosely based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, although they do rip out the hit “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” from The Life of Brian. Unfortunately, the song isn’t nearly as funny when not sung by a chorus of crucified men.

The first act is definitely outshone by the second, as the former is mostly an attempt to cram as many famous Holy Grail scenes as possible into an hour. Several scenes, such as the French Guard, have been expanded and extended from the original material, usually to good effect. Occaisionally, however, I found myself shakinig my head at their attempt to drag as much as they could out of an already old joke.

The second act, however, deviates fairly significantly from its namesake’s plot, and delivers fresh side-splitting hilarity in the usual style. The ending is utterly fantastic, and the Diva almost steals the show. All-in-all, the second act makes the show.

So, should you see it? If you hate Monty Python, then no. If you watch And Now For Something Completely Different every other weekend, or maybe have a blog category named after one of their works, then the answer is an emphatic yes.

Thanks for my present, Hedda!

Favorite Line in Spamalot

I almost forgot! Hedda took me to see Spamalot on July 9th, and the show happened to run smack dab in the middle of the final game of the 2006 World Cup. Here was my favorite line:

Knight of Ni: We are now no longer the Knights Who Say “Ni!” We are now the Knights Who Say “Ekky-ekky-ekky-ekky-z’Bang, zoom-GOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAALLLLLLLLLL!
*inhale*
“GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!
*inhale*
“GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLL!!
…
“It’s one-one at the half, by the way.”

Awesome.

Toilet Training In Japan

I’m just not sure what to say about this. It’s definitely potty humor, but it’s work safe … I think?

Thanks to Husky Ted for the confusion.

A Second Observation on An Inconvenient Truth

As an aside to my thoughts on seeing An Inconvenient Truth – a sort of secondary take-away from the film if you will – is how stunningly the act of campaigning for public office ruins a person. Most of us remember Al Gore from the 2000 presidential election as the sheet-faced academic automaton whose droning voice bored us to tears and narcolepsy. Yet in this film, the man is completely different.

Away from his political handlers, and speaking on a topic about which he is clearly passionate, he is engaging, funny, charming, principled, moral, and extremely human. If this had been the man running for president, the doofus now in office wouldn’t have had a chance!

Who are the political strategists that think the U.S. citizens are so stupid that we would only elect a bland moron? (Apparently they are mostly the Democratic ones, judging by the current make up of the government.) Why do they still have jobs? How can we even wonder at our own ennui, evidenced by our constantly abysmal voter turnout? If the football fans got something to watch besides baseball, they might get interested again.

An Inconvenient Truth

Okay, this one is for my mom:

Hedda and I just got back from seeing An Inconvenient Truth. It is very good. Most of the film is merely a recording of Al Gore giving his perhaps famous Global Warming speech and slide show, although it is interspersed with a bit of his own history and back story. Mostly, though, the film is a very well presented statement about the ugly truth of global warming.

Go see this film, Mom. Make an afternoon or evening trip up to the city for dinner and a show. It’s worth it.

Time Is Relative, and the Scale Is Arbitrary

I’ve beeing seeing emails and posts – and hell, I think I might have even seen some skywriting – about this sequential date thing.

…the time and date, for the first time in all of humanity, will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.

It’s usually preceded or followed closely by an important-sounding “This will never happen again,” as if to say, “Stop, and pay attention to the one-second passing of something amazing.”

Enough already! First of all, time is relative, so this is merely a localized phenomena. And even if Einstein had somehow totally boned us, our scale of time begins completely arbitrarily with the approximate birth of a major religious figure, and has been modified and changed so many times over the last two thousand years that nobody really knows what date it is anyway. Have you been keeping track of your leap seconds? Neither have I.

So just stop with this – it’s stupid and annoying and I’m tired of the spam. Or maybe I just really need my morning coffee.

Accredited Witness

It’s official. I am an Accredited Witness of the Toast Game.

Check out the rules for yourself, and play to win!

Is It A Chalice Or…

It’s like that old optical illusion, except for real. I’m sure their real fans will be getting them made of Mary-Kate or Ashley Olsen.

(via Gizmodo)

A History of the Sciences

I recently finished reading A History of the Sciences by Stephen F. Mason. Despite a publication date in the early 60s, it gives a pretty complete overview of the past 10,000 years in scientific advancement. It’s quite an undertaking, and even the most thoroughly covered advancements receive but the meanest of discussion – but fortunately that’s not really what the book is about.

Rather, Mason gives a history lesson along with the advancements of the eras. In our post-modern world, Science has achieved an almost sacrosanct status. We laud its deep knowledge that has given us real, verifiable ideas of how our universe functions, even as it opens up a seemingly never-ending series of doors, behind which often lie ethical dilemmas and humbling truths that even the most strong-willed of us would rather not face. It was not always so.

Indeed, for most of history, the worldview and religious beliefs of a particular scientist almost always colored their scientific attempts. At the very beginning, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle mis-explained the universe in terms of epicycles and geocentric theory, with angels and gods as prime movers keeping the planets in motion. Their theories, often quite rational from their own point of view, obviously conflicted with even the crude astronomical predictions of the day, and yet their own worldview forced them to accept what was clearly incorrect. Worse, these early philosophers’ prestige as thinkers caused no one to question them, leading millennia of their intellectual scions further down the false paths they beat.

Until recently, the cycle seems to have constantly repeated itself. Only in the last century, it seems, have we as a society begun to allow science to shape our worldview, and the ensuing conflict has been enormous. It can be seen played out in microcosm with the debate over evolution, from the original Scopes trial to the current Intelligent Design debacle. The impact of science on our morals is made amplified by the debates over technological uses of human biological science, such as cloning and abortion and their ilk.

The History of the Sciences does have some flaws. It takes an extremely Euro-centric view of scientific advancement. It hardly discusses the discoveries of the ancient South American civilizations, although it does have some cursory coverage of the Chinese and Muslim worlds. It hardly mentions the United States, despite this nation’s huge advancements in the practical sciences and its non-negligable contributions to raw science. (For example, the invention of the airplane merits but one lonely sentence.

Overall, however, it’s well worth the read. The illumination it gives on the socio-political-religious forces that have shaped science is very worth it.

Galactic Civilizations 2

I was a big fan of the original Galactic Civilizations. It was everything that Masters of Orion 3 wanted to be, and was an amazing example of how gameplay is more important than graphics. In the 3D-everything era, GalCiv was using sprites, but it didn’t matter because the game was so good.

There has been a bit of a story on digg today (here and here) about the publisher’s decision to not protect their game with any DRM. I would just like to take this opportunity to thank them personally for it. I’m a paying customer, and it infuriates me when the company I patronize treats me as a criminal. It happened to me with Half-Life 2, and I won’t be playing any more Valve games because of it.

It is very clear from their forum post that Stardock gets it. Software gets stolen, and there isn’t much you can do about it. Rather than annoy your customers and lose sales, reward them for purchasing your work with updates and content. On top of that, the GalCiv2 license is wonderfully fair, allowing users to install the software on multiple machines for convenience. As the author says, “How many sales are lost because people want to have a game on their laptop and desktop and don’t want to drag CDs around so choose not to buy the game?”

Oh, and this game is crack. I have stayed up until 4:00 a couple of times already because I simply lost track of time.