loonyblog.

Worst wire-fu ever.

From CNN’s Oscar recap story:

In between promoting designers and raving about the competition, celebrities had to listen to some very odd — and even insulting — questions.

“Before you were a movie star, you were a serious actor,” said ABC’s Chris Connelly to Orlando Bloom.

So the results are in…and I lost my bet with my father. This isn’t completely unprecedented. In all the years we’ve been doing this (over a decade, although I’ve long lost track of exactly how long) I’ve only lost one previous time, in 1996. The difference between this time around and that one is that this time, I lost in the best way possible.

See, in 1996, I lost because in several categories, I went with what I thought should win, rather than what would win. It’s a mistake I’ve never repeated. This year, while I lost, I managed to get every single major category correct. The only ones I missed were score, song, costume design and cinematography. Unfortunately for me, my father got three of those right (he managed to miss only one this year, a feat to which I tip my hat).

So I graciously accept this defeat. Next year I hopefully won’t be as distracted, and will be able to spend more time on research.

My new television arrived yesterday, and while it almost killed the delivery guys as they brought it up the stairs to my apartment, it was all worth it once it was out of the box and set up. Last night I watched two movies specifically chosen to show off what this television can do: Hero and Days of Heaven.

Both movies were simply stunning. Hero, with its bright, bright colors and sweeping camera movements was just jaw-dropping (particularly the fight among the leaves). And Days of Heaven (in my opinion, the best looking film ever made) just popped off the screen. And because DoH was shot in a 16:9 aspect ratio, it ran totally full-screen (like most recent films, Hero was shot in a larger aspect ratio, so it’s shown anamorphic, with slight bars on the top and bottom of the screen). The scene with the locusts and fire in Days of Heaven should be seen on every HDTV ever made.

I went with the Sony KD-34XS955 for a few reasons. One, that I only have room in my wall unit for a 34 - 42 inch screen. And secondly, because of the image quality on all sources. This thing makes regular television look great (except for things taped off the WB, as that comes in really dark for some really annoying reason), Xbox games look amazing, and DVDs naturally look great as well. Plus it was relatively cheap for an HDTV. LCDs, rear-projection televisions and plasmas may get all the press, but believe me, if you can support the obscene weight (this thing weighs 200 pounds!) it’s worth it.

The one thing I haven’t tried on here yet is a pure HD signal. Time Warner’s being their usual pain in the neck, and it looks like I won’t be able to get a Cable Card until Friday. This year’s Oscars will have to be in SD instead. I’ll live.

Jim Hill Media is reporting that Disney is going to release Song of the South, the most controversial Oscar-winning film in Disney’s catalog, on DVD next year. I’ve been sort of split on this issue for a while now. On the one hand, it’s an important milestone for Disney, and its Oscar-winning song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” is still quite well known (even if people like to forget the movie it came from). On the other hand, it’s very offensive by modern tastes, as it depicts outdated black and native american stereotypes. I haven’t seen the movie since I was six — if that. So it’s been a long time, to say the least. But I do remember bits and pieces of it. As a young (white) kid, I didn’t see it as being offensive, although had I been of the same age and a minority, I’m not sure I would have had the same reaction.

Still, if handled with the utmost care, this could be an interesting DVD release. But even if this is seen as a positive thing, I don’t think we’ll be seeing any of the more controversial Looney Toons cartoons released any time soon, like “Angel Puss” (featuring Li’l Sambo) or probably the most offensive one ever made, “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips”.

Well here we go…I’m in a bit of a rush, as I’m flying early tomorrow morning, but this has to get done before I leave, so here are my Oscar picks. This is going to be a bit lighter on the commentary than I’d have liked, but there’s still a bit in here. Read on for the full picks in all the categories my father and I bet on every year (which is not the full list, but has much more than the top eight categories).

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Long-time readers of this site may have noticed a distinct lack of Academy Award news around here over the past few weeks. No, I haven’t come to my senses and decided that all of these awards are silly (the Golden Globes, and Tonys excepted), I’ve simply been too preoccupied with other stuff to give the matter much thought (mostly I was caught up in the move). Still, I have a record to uphold, and therefore my predictions will be posted. I’m tabulating my final picks over the next 24 hours, and will turn in my final choices tomorrow night to the impartial third party that is my mother (so as to win my long-standing bet with my father, an annual tradition we have). As I’m traveling on Thursday and Friday, I may not be able to post them online tomorrow night…I’ll certainly try, but if not, look for them on Saturday.

As I haven’t been following the craziness over the past few weeks with my usual fervor, I’m not as confident this year as I usually am…still, a bet is a bet, and I don’t intend to lose (and the last few years have been painfully close, too). Stay tuned.

Hunter S. Thompson has died, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In all honesty, the fact that he’s dead doesn’t come as much of a surprise. He’s been saying for years that he was ready to go, and in “Better than Sex” he said that would be his last book (that turned out to be not quite the case, as it was published in ‘94).

No, what’s most surprising about how he died is the method. If ever there was someone that was going to overdose or drink himself to death, it was Hunter S. Thompson. The only thing I can think of is that after decades of trying to kill himself with booze and drugs, he finally accepted the fact that it wasn’t going to happen and decided to take the easy way out.

Still, it’s quite sad. He was one of a kind, and we should probably all be thankful for that.

My game PC has been giving me a lot of trouble lately, and things kept getting worse and worse, so I ultimately decided to just bite the bullet and replace the motherboard. But I couldn’t figure out precisely what the problem was…it was either the CPU, the motherboard or the power supply…or possibly all three. After doing the math, and taking a good long look at my beastly game machine’s tower, I decided to scale things back a little and go with a nice, compact Shuttle XPC.

I looked over my options and went with the SN85G4v3 (just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?). This isn’t the most recent XPC, but it is solid, and I wouldn’t have to worry about buying a new video card, hard drive or RAM. I did need a new processor, but the AMD 64 3400+ wasn’t expensive at all, and I got a good deal on the pair. One thing that I did have to give up was one of my three RAM chips, as the XPC only has two RAM slots. But that’s not that big a deal, as I still have a full gig of RAM.

In my previous setup, I had two hard drives: an IDE and an SATA. The SATA was the secondary drive, and about ten times as large. Since the XPC only has room for one internal drive, I decided to ditch the IDE and go with that. That’s where the fun began. See, here’s the thing. For some baffling reason, Shuttle decided to put an NVIDIA RAID chip on the motherboard. If you’re using an IDE drive, that’s no big deal. But if you’re using a single SATA drive as your main hard drive, you’re going to run into problems installing Windows. And I did. I tried repeatedly, each time I through the basic blue screen setup and rebooted to continue, I got this lovely error: “error loading operating system.”

Oh the fun.

I did a little hunting around online, and discovered that RAID problem. No biggie, right? Just pop in the driver during setup and…oh, wait. You can’t pop in a driver CD during the XP installation. The only way you can add extra RAID or SATA drivers is by inserting a floppy disk. Which Shuttle was kind enough to include in the XPC box, but they kinda forgot one thing: there isn’t room in the XPC for a floppy drive. Doh!

So I asked the Shack what to do, and a bunch of people pointed me towards XPCREATE, which lets you create a custom XP install CD. After reading over the directions a bit, and realizing that you need to have an existing Windows installation in order to do it (which I don’t have — I have a Linux box and two Macs, but the game PC is my only Windows machine) I opted for the other way out…I bought a USB floppy drive.

I went with this one from LaCie, since it’s at least a little attractive, and I love my FireWire LaCie hard drive. And sure enough, using the floppy drive and the provided disk, it worked. Which is good, because I would probably have killed someone if it hadn’t.

I can’t realy blame Microsoft for this problem…after all, when XP shipped, floppy drives were still common on PCs (Macs had long been done with them by that point). No, I completely blame Shuttle. Why the heck is there a RAID chip on a motherboard with only room for one hard drive? I guess if you got one of those external SATA adapters you could hook it up, but that seems like an awful lot of work to go through to add a second drive to this thing.

Ah, who cares. What matters now is that the machine is working (I’m writing this on it while it installs Painkiller: Battle out of Hell, actually) and it’s nice and snappy. Plus it’s about a tenth of the size of my old case, and makes a third as much noise.

After successfully getting a free 40 GB iPod Photo, I’ve set my sights on a new prize: a Mac mini. While it’s really cool and sexy and all, I’ve actually got a somewhat legitimate reason for wanting one: I’d like to replace my giant beast of a network server with a super-small (and quiet) Mac mini. I’m giving away some really cool stuff in exchange for referrals, so if you’re interested in scoring a free game for yourself and helping me get a Mac mini, head over to my Shackifieds ad and see if there’s anything there that interests you.