The Departed Disappoints

Martin Scorcese's "Departed" is a good movie. But it was rather pale comparted to his classic "Goodfellas". Some problems:

The movie had no sense of humor. Goodfellas had a sense of humor. Jack Nicholson had a little sense of humor, but not as much as he usually has. This movie could have been improved by Nicholson giving his famous "Herrrrrrre's Johnny..." line. That would have gone well with the squirting gore. I didn't think he was that believable as a mafia kingpin.

DiCaprio is unconvincing as a tough guy. He tries too hard. Real tough guys don't have to try hard to be tough.

There's too much wanton violence, and it's not very believable. Goodfellas only had a limited amount of violence, but it was very believable. The murderers also had some serious concerns about getting caught. They didn't just walk around and murder everyone in sight without being the slightest bit concerned about getting caught. It's not really THAT easy to murder people and not get caught, even if you're a big mafiosi.

The plot was a bit illogical. For example, Jack Nicholson picked up Matt Damon from his graduation ceremony at the police academy. Duh. And no police officers were supposed to have noticed THAT? Matt Damon gets picked up at graduation by a Mafia kingpin in a stretch limo and none of the guys in the police mafia unit are going to notice THAT? They are still going to consider Matt Damon to be squeeky clean? Highly unlikely. Police officers aren't idiots. They notice things like that.

Another problem was that DiCaprio and Damon look too much alike. There was one chase scene where DiCaprio was following Damon, but they both looked so much alike that I couldn't tell who was who.

But all in all, it was a pretty good movie. It just wasn't a classic.

It Takes a Village To Start World War III

I don't understand the happy talk about the Global Village. If you ever lived in village, you realize that villages are horrible places. Why? Excessive conformity.

In a village, you generally have one language, one religion, one way of dressing, one way of talking, one way of living. Outcasts get ostracized or burnt at the stake. But suddenly we have a situation where the whole world has become a village and must decide upon one language, one religion, one way of dressing, one way of living, etc.

To a great extent, the English-speaking world, led by America, has won this war. Much of this victory came literally from winning World War II, and leading the world in a rather generous way (for a super-power empire).

English tends to be the dominant language in the Global Village, and American dress, as illustrated in educational Hollywood /Western movies tends to be the one way of dressing and the one way of talking.

However, there is enormous conflict over the one religion that is to dominate the Global Village. There is a Holy War building between Islam and Christianity.

There are also explosive differences between Asian and Western cultures which have not quite reached the boiling point.  Asia is rapidly usurping 
the West's role as the center of the world.   We can already see on the 
Internet that Chinese is making inroads against English as the world's 
language. 

We are probably moving toward World War III with Asia in about 10 or 20
years.  It could be particularly disastrous if China and India grow a brain
and team up together.  Then they could easily rule the world.

But what could possibly be the unity between China and the West?

Second draft 10/26/06

NUTT GOONGRICH RIDES AGAIN!

Former Speaker from a horse's ass Nutt Goongrich today opined that Rep. Foley was blameless in the recent Washington gayboy scandal. It was all the fault of a vast conspiracy of mind-controlling Democrats!

Nutt went on to explain that the Librulls were secretly conspiring with Martians. The Martians, of course, are capable of mind-control, and they used this mind-control to FORCE Rep. Foley into writing salacious gay e-mails to teenaged boys. The Librulls gained the help of the Martians by promising easier access of illegal Martian aliens into the USA (typical traitorous Democrat behavior!).

Nutt went on to complain that too much attention was being paid to Rep. Foley's gay perversions, and not enough attention was being paid to the conspiracy of Librulls and their illegal Martian alien co-conspirators.

Besides, who ever heard of focusing attention on an innocent sex scandal involving a Washington intern just to gain votes? Holy Lewinskys, Batman, where did the Democrats get THAT idea?

Yep, sounds like another brilliant analysis from Nutt Goongrich. His last brilliant idea was to give laptops to homeless people so that they could work their way out of homelessness by starting new businesses.

Come to think of it, maybe NUTT has been spending too much time talking to Martians!

Things I Hate About Microsoft

We all know that Microsoft is the company that everyone loves to hate, and I must comfess to having a love/hate relationship with the company myself. So I will begin by listing the things that I HATE about Microsoft. In the future, when I am in a better mood, I will list the things that I like about Microsoft. However, when you have as much money as Bill Gates has, you don't NEED to have people like you.

1. Excessive boot-up time. I have a 2.5 GHz machine and it takes me more time to boot it up with XP Home than it used to take to boot up my old 12 MHz machine back in 1990. So much for progress.

The slowness is apparently because Microsoft has some neurotic need to load every imaginable bell, whistle and fatware into every computer. I have no idea why. The boot-up time could be solved simply by using a load on-demand approach. In other words, don't load any stupid software until the user requests it. Microsoft could do this if they would make the effort.

2. The "Welcome Screen". Talk about a constant annoyance!!! It is especially annoying at home. I turn on the computer and let it boot up, which takes forever. Then when I come back, its always sitting at the stupid, fucking, dumbass "welcome screen". So then I have to sit and WAIT somemore, while it sits there loading more FATWARE, or whatever the fuck Windows XP does.

3. Old CD-ROMs that don't work on idiotic Windows XP ("Xtra Pukey"). This is TOTALLY INFURIATING and TOTALLY INEXCUSABLE. I have all these perfectly good programs on CD-ROM from the 1990's and none of them work anymore on stupid fucking XP!!! Apparently Bill Gates and his greedy cohorts need to force you to spend more money buying more new, improved and unnecessary fatware.

4. Microsoft no longer supports Windows 95/98/ME. It is TOTALLY INEXCUSABLE that Microsoft does not continue to support old software. It would be like General Motors saying that they no longer repair cars manufactured before 1998. It would be like GM saying that if your car breaks down , then fuck you. Buy a new one.

But at least with GM, you would have a choice of other carmakers. With the Microsoft monopoly, you're stuck. It gives you a good idea how Bill Gates has managed to scrounge up $50 billion.

5. "XP" probably stands for "Xtra paranoid". The security features that are necessary at large corporations are not necessary at small businesses, and especially unnecessary for home computers.

In the name of security, XP makes it difficult or impossible to do many things that used to be easy to do.

6. Can't pop the hood. I find it TOTALLY INFURIATING that I can't look at the code in the Windows operating system. This essentially gives programmers a glass ceiling on the learning curve, and it keeps Windows full of stupid bugs.

Many of the worst features of Microsoft, like the Registry, are simply due to Windows need to hide the source code.

7. Just when you figure out how all of their non-intuitive crap works, they force an "upgrade" down your throat and you have to learn all that crap all over again. Case in point: Windows Media Player 10. I just upgraded the piece of shit and NOTHING is where I thought it would be. It is an absolute exercise in frustration.

Just now I went to play some of my favorite radio stations, and I discovered that on Media Player 10, there is apparently no "favorite stations". Or else they fucken hid it somewhere, as usual. Then the whole fucken interface is different, with tons of stations that I DON'T want. So now I have to waste some more time figuring out how this piece of junk works...

8. Mandatory re-naming dictator by Microsoft. The uberfuhrer of names at Microsoft decided that people should no longer call "directories" directories. We are now REQUIRED to call them "folders". I HATE that!

Directories are directories, not "folders"! Folders are those stupid things made out of manilla cardboard. I don't CARE what the Uberfuhrer of Microsoft says. I will call them DIRECTORIES forever!!!

9. The stupid "desktop". Is there ANYBODY on earth retarded enough to think that the Microsoft "desktop" has any resemblence to a physical desktop? I HATE the term "desktop". I hate the term almost as much as I hate the term "folder".

Why does Microsoft have this compulsion to use cutesy-wootsy terms? Who do they think they are? Apple?

10. Clippy. However, the little doggy isn't so bad. Poor thing, I hate to say anything bad about him. Wouldn't want to make him feel bad.

11. Help and Support Center. Courtesy of the "Fuck up a rubber duck Dept." at Microsoft. How did they manage to fuck up the Help system in XP so badly? This is the START --> HELP that I am talking about. It is infuriatingly frustrating. It used to be so simple to get to the Help screen. Now you have to wade thru endless crap. Nowadays, I usually just Google for Help rather than going thru Microsoft Help, which is worse than worthless.

When you do a search on Microsoft Help, it just seems to come back with a collection of unrelated crap that doesn't answer any questions. It appears as if everything is oriented toward showing off how "helpful" microsoft is to clueless newbees. But what about everybody else?

Another problem is that when you get Help results, they give you dozens of topics in no particular order. Not alphabetic or anything. Bad news.

12. No free advice. Considering that Microsoft has proprietary software, and you can't pop the hood, it seems to me that they should be a little more helpful about answering questions for free. Microsoft never talks to nobody, unless you pay them $$$ or unless they want to sell you something.

I've been using Microcrap software for years, and I have all sorts of questions that are devine mysteries and nobody at Microcrap gives a flying fuck.

For example, every morning Outlook generates a "to do" list of things that I need to do today. This is a very nice thing. Thank you Microsoft.

However, as I check off each item on my list, the fucken things don't disappear. They just sit there with strikeovers going thru them. They don't go away until the next day. Why the FUCK would I want my stupid completed tasks to just sit there with strikeovers thru them? Why don't they DISAPPEAR when I check them off? It is very cluttered.

The MVP told me that there is nothing that can be done about this. Even if I put on surgical outfit and go in with VBA (Very Bad Ass language). There is nothing that can be done. Pisses me off.

13. Another thing coming up that INFURIATES me! Now they are going to get rid of VBA and replace it with yet another fucked-up Microcrap language! More brain damage! What is with these idiots? Do they think that we have an endless amount of time to re-learn Microsoft languages every 3 years?

I learned VB, then I had to re-learn VB6, then I had to relearn VB.NET, now I have to learn VB Express. Same with C++. They couldn't even leave it well enough alone as fucking C++, they had to make it C sharp. Sharp as a Matzoh ball.

Every 4 years they re-invent the wheel and everybody has to stop what they're doing and curse and groan and swear and buy new computers and buy new software and re-learn the same old shit in a wonderful, colorful new way. Groan. Gimme Linux any day.

Unfortunately, Linux has even worse problems. So there isn't much choice.

14. Offshoring of American jobs. It is AMERICAN programmers who invented the computer revolution and who truly developed Microsoft. But they have been dumped and Microsoft is only interested in exploiting cheap labor in India.

Don't even get me STARTED on that one!!!
Second draft: 11/10/06