I used to work in an off-licence (a liquor store, in the US) and on Sundays it would be very quiet. I invented a method to rate the busy-ness of the day: the Bohemian Rhapsody Index (BRI). Essentially, this was the number of times I could sing the Bohemian Rhapsody in full before the next customer came in. An average Sunday would round out at around two or three on the index. I think one day had a rating of seven, which needless to say was pretty high even for that shop.

I would like to say that such things are useful for keeping you sane when working by yourself in a really boring job, but I suspect that even taking the idea seriously indicates a slight slippage in the levels of sanity.

Here’s an interesting thing: Disney are having trouble pitching the new Narnia film’s soundtrack/s because of the religious content of the movie. They’ve released a Christian soundtrack, but they may release another one too, to try and not put off whole sections of the market.

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis are roughly based on Christian stories and morality, and Disney has been trying its hardest to capitalise on the religious market that did so well for Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ. They’ve been marketing hard at Christians, showing trailers at Christian conventions and suchlike, and have released a soundtrack album for the film of songs ‘inspired by’ the story, all by Christian performers and treating the material from a Christian perspective. The problem that they’re facing is that they don’t want to turn off the secular (non-religous) parts of society from buying the music and watching the film. Equally they’re scared that Disney might become seen as a Christian-film maker (although after The Lion King I’m amazed they’re not already). Disney is hoping to release a non-Christian soundtrack album too, but currently isn’t sure if it’s going to manage this because music for the film hasn’t been fully settled on yet.

I find this a little weird. I don’t think I’ve heard of a soundtrack album being released targetted specifically at a group based on its religion before. Is this something we’re going to see more of in the future: I’d love to see the ‘Blade 4: The Christian Rock Original Motion Picture Soundtrack’, featuring songs about the Christian metaphor of a man with supernatural powers, born from death and to deliver humanity from evil. How about having whole different soundtrack options on films, so you’d have one version of the film with the secular soundtrack, and another one with Christian folk singers chirping uplifting ballads between actors’ lines?

But why stop there? ‘Lord of the Rings: The Bollywood Edition’ would be great. You could do a George Lucas style remake of the film’s special effects, having Gollum dance on, twirling his wrists, and sing in Hindi about the need for understanding of the balance between the physical incarnation of the body and spiritual fulfillment.

Should Christians be insulted that their religion is now just a marketing tool? Or are they expected to simply enjoy the idea of celebrating Christ through their consumer choices? It all smacks of buying redemption to me. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that people have tried to buy their way into heaven (the medieval church became massively rich selling pardons) but it’s certainly an interesting manifestation of late-stage capitalism’s interpretation of religion’s position in society.

More (in a slightly more serious tone) here.

The black helicopters are circling!

There’s a chap on my forums who believes that he has alien-technology implants in his neck. He believes that they were put there 35 years ago by the Australian Navy. He also claims to be part of a cover-up of the murder of the Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt, who, mainstream reports say, drowned. His website can be seen here.

We’ve been as polite as possible to this chap and his one defender (a conveniently timed new forum member), but without medical training we’re just working on logic and observation, so I need your help:

Do you or a friend know how to read X-rays or CT scans?

On this page there are scans that the person claims to show alien-technology implants in his neck. To me they look remarkably like organic structures, possibly scar tissue, or maybe a hardening of ligaments from some damage to the neck. I think my favourite bit on that page is the third page of the letter which talks about the need to ‘expose the TRUTH’ about the operation on his neck. I’ve seen the Truth, the truth, but rarely do I see the TRUTH. I love this kind of stuff!

I would like to hear from anyone with experience in the field who can make a judgement on the pictures, either way. It would be especially useful if they are currently working in a verifiable position in a hospital – this is all about checkable evidence, so being able to confirm that the person saying it does have a medical background would be useful! Surely someone or a friend must be able to help with this?

I would really love for it all to be true. I think it would be great if some massive governmental/corporate/alien conspiracy were to be behind all this, but I just don’t think it is, which is a shame. Still, I’d like to find someone with medical experience of looking at scans who can say that the shadows on the scans are seen on thousands of other ones every day (or that they aren’t).

The thing that I find the strangest out of all of this is that this man claims to have been involved in an internationally mandated assassination of his country’s prime minister but then he waffles on about alien-technology neck implants and almost completely forgets the initial claim. Such an assassination is far more believable than the implant story, but he doesn’t give any details about it.

You can see the full forum thread here. It’s quite entertaining!

The top brains at the University of Hertfordshire have come up with shocking revelation that ‘the choice of language [on application forms] generates a positive or negative impression’. Where would we be without academics, eh?

10 Best: Achievement, active, developed, evidence, experience, impact, individual, involved, planning, transferable skills
10 Worst: Always, awful, bad, fault, hate, mistake, never, nothing, panic, problems

There goes my CV then! At least I’m still allowed to write it in crayon around tea mug stains on the back of a court summons envelope.

Read the story here.

For those of you who weren’t already convinced that the UK is full of patches of complete eccentricity (which is like madness, but more traditional or accompanied by wealth), the release of the new Wallace & Grommit film, Curse of the Were-Rabbit has been retitled on posters in the Portland region of Dorset in England. Apparently there is the theory that the mention of the word ‘rabbit’ causes mines to collapse.

I have a friend living on Portland Island who I’ll be seeing in a couple of weeks. I’ve been there once, and, like most islands, the place is a bit odd, so I can well believe this story is true. There isn’t any mention of the film being redubbed, which may yet cause miner-related mayhem in Portland cinemas… Although, now I think about it, I doubt they have any cinemas on the island. Maybe they could beep out the word rabbit, or get someone with a nice thick dorset accent to re-dub the whole film replacing Wallace’s dulcet intonation of the word rabbit with the popular Portland alternative ‘undergound mutton’ or ‘furry things’.

Thanks again to The Register for the orignal story.

I’m a big fan of home-brew games. These are games that people have worked on themselves and are usually distributed either free or extremely cheaply. They’re usually quick fun ideas executed in ways that are perfect for mobile gaming. To me they’re one of the best reasons to get a handheld games machine, because there’s a lot of fun to be had very cheaply.

This creates a problem for manufacturers though: do you let people make these games run easily selling more base units, or do you try and block them and sell more full-price games?

Well, the answer that $ony has come up with is that they want to make their money out of games, so the PSP (PlayStation Portable) automatically upgrades its internal software occasionally whenever a new hole in its defences against home-brew software is discovered. That’s the problem for home-brew creators: they need to hack the console to let it play non-official releases. Its a real battle of the titans, on one side you have a whole planet of determined hackers who want to get the best out of their machine and use it to play the things that they want to (which is fair enough, if they own it they should be able to do what they like with it – although I suspect that’s not the legal perspective) and on the other side you have $ony trying to patch up holes as soon as they are found.

The firmware (the software inside the PSP that makes it tick) version 1.5 was found to have a flaw that home-brew programmers could use to get their code onto their machine. $ony have now upgraded the firmware to version 2.0, which automatically installs itself onto the machine through numerous official sources, so the holy grail for home-brew creators is to find a way to downgrade a machine from 2.0 to 1.5. Some people have worked out how to do this, but unfortunately for others, some hackers decided to put a trojan on a down-grade download saying it’s from ‘PSP Team’ which turns your swanky new PSP into a useless lump of silicon, AKA a brick. Current theories aren’t sure if the machine is recoverable from that state either. Very, very nasty.

The paranoid person in me suggests that maybe $ony did this themselves to scare people off from using home-brew software and to guarantee people don’t get to use anything that’s free on their PSP, but the voice of reason tells me that they’d have a lawsuit the size of Texas if they were ever found out and so the risk is too great. Still, it’s a nice conspiracy theory, and I always enjoy a good one of them.

More here.

Now that’s my kind of match up.

Florida’s swamps just become more appealing by the moment. Their long-standing reputation for having toothed-logs (otherwsie known as alligators) ready to consume unwary travellers, mob-hit victims, and stunned vampires (see Interview With The Vampire UK link US link) is now being enhanced further by their suitability as a breeding ground for the Burmese python.

The pythons love the climate and have inevitably found themselves a bit of serious hunting when they have grown big enough to need a lot of meat and consequently taken on the indigenous alligator population. In the latest clash a 6 foot alligator was eaten whole by a 13 foot python. We only know about this happening because the python’s stomach exploded, leaving the alligator’s tail sticking out in a very odd multi-tailed twist on the Isle of Man flag. It’s possible that the alligator was still alive when eaten and clawed through the stomach but was too tired to escape after killing the python. Blimey. It’s also possible that pythons will become the top of the food chain in Florida when they get big enough to take on the rest of the scaley bunch.

So, who’s for a trip to the Everglades?

More here.

When Hercules died he was put into the night sky as a constellation, so the story goes. Well, now we have a debate going on about Xena.

Those of you who’ve been paying attention to this sort of thing will know that I’m talking about the arguments in astronomy about whether Pluto counts as a planet and whether another astrological body, recently given the name Xena, is actually a planet instead.

Fair enough. Pluto was always a bit of a silly sounding name, because it made everyone think of the Disney dog which came later, but Xena? The warrior princess? UK link US link That’s a pretty strange choice… But they weren’t content to stop there. Oh no. They’ve found that Xena has a moon.

Can you guess what it’s been called?

Gabrielle.

Oh dear.

More info.