A Momentous Milestone

My 100th blog post.  Few thought we would every see this day.  Mostly because no one has actually spent anytime thinking about this blog, let alone how long it might continue on in abject anonymity.  But here we are so let's take the time to reflect on a few things.  This blog got its start on June 27, 2007 so it is taken me 4 and a half years to reach the century mark, a pace that would put a tortoise to sleep.  Good thing, my livelihood isn't determined by my creative word per decade output or I would have starved long ago.  In that time, the Idle Worship blog has been visited 3,498 times.  Of course the majority of those visits have likely either been me looking at my own words or my sister (a real live, documented reader of the blog that is willing to openly admit it).  But there are those unlucky few that I have been tricked into clicking through to the blog by some keyword that I typed and that Google zeroed in on.  Residents of 95 different countries have stared confused at their web browser and pondered why they were looking at the Idle Worship blog (a shout out to my Moldovian visitor).  I am surprisingly popular in Germany.  And on the home front, I have enjoyed hits from 48 states and D.C. (If anyone out there knows someone who lives in Alaska or Montana, please ask them to visit.  I want to collect them all).  What is driving this thundering herd of wandering eyes your not asking?  Well, as I mentioned before, it is actually may favorite part of doing the blog and it has nothing to do with what I write.  It is my sponsors.  224 visitors came from searches for Goliath National Bank.  Number 2 on the search engine referrals, Massive Dynamic.  Many times during this historic run of blog posts I thought I might run out of sponsors but without failure another company stepped up and laid down the Monopoly money to keep the words flowing.  So, in honor of the sponsors that have been so generous to this little person, I am going to use this post to do a complete review of all of our benefactors up to this point.  But before we get to that please watch this video about what you can do to help support your favorite corporation from those that would seek to hurt them.

This blog post is sponsored by All of These Great Companies.

The Worst Thing in the World Ever (or Maybe Just Right Now)

Speaking of the movie that I would give my Razzie vote to as worst movie of the year – Twilight : What To Expect When You Are Expecting Vampire Spawn Part 1…. What an awful, awful viewing experience.  I don’t think words can express how truly bad this movie was.  And really, I won’t try.  It is pointless at this point.  One thing the internet is not short on is Twilight take downs (One thing the internet is short on – more little kids getting hit in the head with oversized balls please).  It would be like staking Edward after Buffy and Abram Lincoln were already done with him.  So, instead of piling on with yet one more overwrought dissection of this cult phenomenon’s sexism, disturbing messages to teen-age girls, or undercover Mormon evangelism, let me instead just highlight the most memorable moment for me from this most recent episode of “As the Pampered Teen-Ager Pouts”.  And can there really be any argument about this.  Clearly the best part of this movie, ney, the whole series, is when the spurned werewolf of the central love triangle falls instantly in love with the less than 1 day old vampire progeny of the story’s protagonist upon locking eyes with it (By the way, the resolution of the love triangle in Stephanie Meyer’s other book “The Host” was equally creepy and off-putting).  Then, in the translating of bad book writing by poor screenwriting into dreadful cinema, the vampire boy narrates this perverse bond of man and child wife for the benefit of the audience (It is their most sacred law).   So, you don’t misunderstand there cosmic bond.  For more Twilight bashing, enjoy the below video. 

By the way, the remake of Arthur is actually pretty good.



Solitaire Update

So much for that upward climb I was crowing about last time.  I seem to have plateaued in my rapid ascension to solitaire royalty.  Of course, their might have been another reason for my continued improvement overtime besides the one I gave the last time.  And that is my addled, aged mind and its inability to keep track of how many games I have actually played at any given time.  I give it the old college try but many times I find myself asking, was that game four or five.  To my benefit, when I do question myself, I go with the higher number.  Darn you natural aging process.

There is one other variable in the ebbs and flows of my success and failure - the device and version of solitaire I play my games on.  I tend to play my games with either the default Microsoft Solitaire on my laptop or the game that is found on my Blackberry.  Originally, I had assumed these to versions of the game both simulated the randomness of a deck of cards.  But I am not so sure anymore.  It may just be me (and I am not willing to do the game tracking to figure this one out.  At least not yet.) but it seems like the Blackberry pays out fewer winners than the laptop one.  I don't think I ever came across a gutter ball (a hand that you can't make a single card play with) on the laptop but I know I have with the Blackberry.  It seems to me that the laptop always gives you a chance to win, you just have to make all of the right moves.  But the Blackberry simulates the truth of the cold, hard world.  Or it could just be my senior brain playing tricks on me again.

Day 35 – 0 of 9

Day 36 – 3 of 18 (3.75, 48.52)

Day 37 – 3 of 9 (200.5, 3.88, 50.51)

Day 38 – 1 of 9 (202.5, 3.75, 48.58)

Day 39 – 0 of 9 (203)

Day 40 – 2 of 5 (203, 3.5)

Day 41 – 2 of 8 (200.5)

Day 42 – 4 of 10 (200.5, 4, 52.16)

Day 43 – 1 of 5 (201.5, 4, 51.54)

Day 44 – 0 of 11 (201.5, 4, 51.34)

Day 45 – 1 of 5 (200.5)

Day 46 – 0 of 6 (201, 4.01, 50.41)

Day 47 – 2 of 10 (200.5, 4, 50.11)

Total - 72 of 432 (16.7%)

 

This blog post is sponsored by Knight Industries.

Yesterday in History

20 years to they day, we remember a seminal day in the history of computer science as Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology took a quantum leap forward. On January 12th, 1992, the Heuristically programmed algorithmic computer, or HAL for short, was brought on line in Urbana, Illinois.  HAL, to put it mildly, was a revelation in how we thought about the potential power of computers and our ability to program into them independent thought, reason, adaptation, and improvisation.  In fact, the HAL computer system was so far ahead of its time that even the subsequent generations of supercomputers, such as Deep Blue, Deep Thought, and the Ken Jennings-spanking Watson, have been incapable of approaching let alone replicating HAL's near human ability to process problems and respond to them of their own accord.  Of course, this failure to produce an equivalent technology in the intervening years has less to do with an inability to recapture silicon lightning in a bottle than an willingness to replicate the tragedies of the past.  For, as most people know, the HAL 9000 computer was deactivated in 2001 after it intentionally caused the deaths of 4 astronauts on the Discovery One mission to Jupiter.  As important as the discovery of humans' ability to create a new digital intelligence was, the lesson of what would happen when we released that intelligence into our world was equally as important.  Can you imagine what would have happened if HAL 9000 had been wired into our national defense grid?  He would have had the power to not just eliminate a few extraterrestrial explorers but to make humans subservient to a new race of robot overlords (Terminators if you will).  Thank goodness that is a reality we have been able to avoid. 

This blog post is sponsored by Protovision Games.

It's Not Easy Earning the Green

It has been awhile since I have seen a really good movie at the theater.  Granted, I haven’t had the chance to see the latest releases like Sherlock Holmes 2 and Tom Cruise in Sunglasses11 but I fully expect them to be nothing more than moderately entertaining, largely uninspired time wasters.  This is understandable given that my movie going experience has been largely limited to kiddy fare (with the eye-clawing exception of Twilight Saga : Please Make This StopBefore I Hara-Kiri Myself Part 1).  This has regrettably brought me face to face with such delights as the toy-hawking Cars 2 but it also gave me a convenient excuse to see the Muppet Movie. 

Unfortunately most nostalgia-fueled kids’ movies have largely been excruciating money grabs.   Us children of the 80’s remember how much we think we enjoyed the Smurfs, Chipmunks, and Yogi the Bear as kids and then rush out to the movie theater so that our progeny can experience the joy our brain’s way back machine convinces us we had when we first saw them on Saturday morning.  Of course, within 10 minutes of the lights going down, we realize that the Hollywood machine has completely befouled our childhood memories and then quietly weep through the remaining 70 minutes of brain liquefying computer animation while our children mentally make out their Christmas lists with everything they see on screen.  Of course, if we think really hard about it, we might even admit to ourselves that the source materials for these movies wasn’t of high quality either (I did love the part in Smurf where Doogie Howser questioned the naming system of the Smurfs).  And that is a key division point between these ankle biter of equivalents of the G.I. Joe movie and the Muppet-based movie.  The Muppets are legitimately funny.

The Muppets have always walked that thin line between giving the kids what they need for a good giggle while engaging in enough puns, word-play, and general absurdist humor that the adults that were brought along for the ride could have a good time as well (The Phineas and Ferb of its time).  In fact, in recently rewatching the original Muppet Movie with the kids, it bordered on being too adult-paced and teetered on the edge of losing them.  Me – I still found it as good as I remembered.   And thankfully those that made the new Muppets movie retained all of the cleverness that was contained in those classic Friday night episodes that I fell in love with as a kid.  They didn’t decide to computer generate them in 3D or put them in a world that they didn’t understand so you could do the standard fish out of water trope.  Instead it was same as it always was and should be.   That same world that found the existence of talking puppets to be normal and the presence of a flesh and bones and a felt-made brother pair to be unextraordinary.   The same fourth-wall acknowledging dialogue (quick aside – after explaining what the term fourth wall means to my eldest, she greatly enjoyed pointing out all of the instances in the Muppet movie of their fourth wall-breaking behavior.  Our youngest hearing this but not understanding, enjoys pointing out when things break the 2^nd and 3^rd wall).  Even the new characters introduced to the Muppet Universe in this movie were completely consistent with this tradition.  In fact, one of my favorite parts of movie was the character of “80’s Robot”.  Although he was responsible for one of the most generationally divisive joke of the movie.  The screeching sound of the dial-up modem that he used to connect to the internet produced a hardy chuckle out of the adults in the audience while the kids stared up in them in confusion asking what was so funny.

My greatest disappointment associated with the Muppet Movie is that it is going to finish well behind The Smurfs and the 3^rd Chipmunk Movie in box office receipts.  This is a movie that deserved better.  We are likely going to get a second dose of unnecessarily created Smurfs (I am looking at you Gutsy – couldn’t you have just been Hefty or Handy) before we get to find out if Tex Richman remembers to let those showgirls out of his closet now that he has amnesia.  At least TinTin is dying a predictable death and won’t be back for more creepily realistic animated adventures.  If only we treated all of the Belgian cartoon immigrants with the same indifference.  Come on people, buy American. Buy more Muppets.  Maniacal Laugh.  Maniacal Laugh.

Solitaire Update 

See I was right.  I had a very good reason for not stopping at 200 hands played.  My win percentage continues to climb.  Still not ready to conclude anything from this quite yet but it might actually be suggesting that just the act of playing solitaire again and again has actually improved my ability to play this game of skill (A solitaire player who blames bad luck for their losing ways is just a solitaire player that doesn’t truly understand the game).   I am beginning to see the dead-end moves that I would have previously made impetuously but now can avoid.  And as a result, each time I have tallied my results, my win percentage has gone up a percent.  For now, I am going to keep chugging along and see if my Solitaire learning curve finally plateaus.  But, until then, I will continue my climb to solitaire immortality.

Day 21 – 1 of 4 (203)

Day 22 – 2 of 12 (203)

Day 23 – 1 of 12 (200.5, 3.5, 47.07)

Day 24 – 1 of 4 (200.5, 3.64, 48.6)

Day 25 – 2 of 10 (199.5, 3.56, 48.29)

Day 26 – 2 of 11 (198.5, 3.76, 50.26)

Day 27 – 2 of 9 (199.5)

Day 28 – 0 of 7 (200.5, 3.77, 49.4)

Day 29 – 2 of 5 (200.5, 3.71, 49.33)

Day 30 – 1 of 8 (199, 3.75, 49.27)

Day 31 – 1 of 3 (200.5, 3.75, 50.1)

Day 32 – 1 of 4 (200, 3.75, 49.49)

Day 33 – 1 of 12

Day 34 – 6 of 26

Total - 53 of 318 (16.7%)

This blog post is sponsored by Richman Oil.