May 2004 – LonelyMachines

Donnie Darko

After being bugged by my friends ad nauseam to watch this movie, I finally rented it the other night, and so far I’ve watched it twice, and I still haven’t unraveled the whole thing. It’s that good.

Basically, it’s an odd combination of American Beauty, Magnolia and 12 Monkeys. Yes, you read that right. It uses approaches from several different genres, but doesn’t neatly fit in any.

Donnie Darko is a troubled (possibly schizophrenic) teenager attending an upper-class Catholic school in upscale Fairfax. He comes from a nice Republican nuclear family. He’s in therapy. See where this is going? No, you don’t.

One night, Donnie is woken by the apparition of a shadowy character who resembles a death’s-head bunny rabbit. The rabbit informs him that the world will end in 28 days. While this is happening, a jet engine falls out of the sky and lands on Donnie’s house, falling directly into the bedroom where he should have been sleeping.

Continued...

Code

Viola

Cobbled together a new WindowMaker theme to match the Viola site theme.

Viola

Code

Dropline

New WindowMaker theme to match the default Dropline Gnome theme. You can get the package here.

Civil Rights

This is why I should watch more TV

There’s a new gun-control lobby in town called Georgians for Gun Safety, which ironically, gets its money from the Boston University’s School of Public Health.

They’ve been running a series of advertisements on local television calling viewers’ attention to the impending repeal of the Assault-Weapons Ban. The ads are narrated by a Hispanic baseball player and reference the DC sniper shootings, which is odd because the rifle used by Mohammed and Malvo was a Bushmaster semi-automatic, not a weapon even covered by the Brady Bill’s nebulous and vague definition of “assault weapon.” The ads rely on a hodgepodge of half-truths and emotional exaggerations to make their point.

What these folks hope to achieve is vague at best, but given that the fastest-growing segment of our population is Mexican, I can see where having a Hispanic narrator would be a shrewd (if not despicably manipulative) touch.

I checked out their page, and as usual, we’re fed a bunch of vague and unsupportable “factoids” to stir up the emotions.

Continued...