Friday, May 30, 2008

Iraq: What The Dems Said THEN.

With the release of Scott McClellan's book - which has turned him overnight from a "mouthpiece for the Reich" to the "fearless Truth-speaker" in the eyes of the seditious Left - the old, tired, and still dishonest chants of "BUSH LIED! PEOPLE DIED!" are being heard again.

While the stupid and ignorant have always been gulled by this rubbish, people with an interest in the facts and memories longer than 10 minutes realized that the Dems had pulled an Orwellian arabesque and reversed their positions on Iraq the moment it didn't look as smooth-going as the first Gulf War had been.

The quotes from many of today's detractors have been published far and wide across the Blogosphere, but someone has put together a tidy video SHOWING just how emphatic the belief in Saddam's threat to the world was when they were in power.

Today, these jokers claim they were "misled" by a guy they routinely deride as barely able to dress himself and the Treason Media pliantly covers for them. If that we so, what was there excuse in 1998? I suppose Dubya was using his Jedi powers on them all from the Governor's office in Austin.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Hello. Who Are You?

I can see by the Meebo chat widget that I'm getting a ton of hits today. The traffic stats won't be up until tomorrow, but I can tell a huge spike is happening and a lot of you are hanging around to check more than one or two items out. If you'd be so kind as to leave a Backtalk explaining what brought you to Dirkworld, I'd appreciate it. Thanks for visiting. Hope you'll be back - use the RSS subscription button at right to get the feed - and that you enjoy your visit. :)

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

New Sig Time - Chun Zhun Style!

A couple of years ago, I made a wallpaper from some photos of Asian babes playing soccer that were shot for some lad mag in conjunction with the World Cup.


(Click to get the full-size wallpaper.)

I just found out they were by a bloke named Chun Zhun and he's shot a manga-inspired spread of Asian babes, bikes, and bullets like this...



...which has become a new forum sig:



I'm sure the posters there will appreciate the change from the one that's been there for the past six weeks. (Even I'm over it.)

Video Game Sex Lecture Time!

From Kotaku comes this:

Savannah College of Art and Design professor Daniel Floyd has put together this flash movie on the subject of video games and sex for his media theory course. Good job of summing stuff up. Loved the kicker.

Pretty cool.

Saturday, May 24, 2008

No Country For Gay Men

I thought this movie blew and the only reason it won Oscars and acclaim was for the coin toss scene. Now, that has been dealt with. Heh.


No Country For Gay Men from Lawrence Scaduto on Vimeo.

Friday, May 23, 2008

"Open Mouth" Disease. Won't You Help?

Holy Taco brings us the sad story of a "Girl Tragically Struck With “Open Mouth” Disease":

Ya know, a lot of diseases go unnoticed in this day and age. Sure, there’s national breast cancer awareness month, but which month helps spread the word about Open Mouth disease? This malady, which affects approximately one girl, makes it physically impossible for her to close her mouth whenever a camera is around. Won’t you help put an end to this terrible affliction? For the cost of one cup of coffee a day, you can buy…one cup of coffee…and that’s about it. I’m pretty sure there’s no cure.




Hit the link to see FOURTEEN photos of this girl. I thought Paris Hilton was a one-look chump like Derek Zoolander, but wow.

I dug this comment:
Maybe she made that face once and it froze like that. Maybe my grandma were right.
If you're in the mood for more, check out Ex-Porn Pictures like this one:



WARNING: No nudity, but extremely wrong and offensive. Funny, but you may not want to show these to the vicar when he's over for lunch.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

DIRK™ Reviews It For You: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Just got back from the Midnight showing, so it's time for...

DIRK™ Reviews It For You: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Short Version:
The Man in the Hat is back!

Slightly Longer Version: Unless you're looking to hate it, you'll like it.

Many Worded Version: Remember in The Empire Strikes Back when Luke asked Yoda what was in the cave and Yoda replied, "Only what you take with you."? Well, after skimming the laudatory and downright vengeful reviews and seeing it for myself, truer words couldn't apply. Angry nerds who never saw Star Wars in theaters until 1997 and then shrieked that George Lucas "raped their childhoods" two years later have been the worst as they try to nitpick every little thing they can as if they will matter more if they kill the Geek God. F*ck'em - they be hatin'.

Since the "big secrets" have been already leaked all over the place - (invisotexted for the three of you who actually haven't heard) Mutt is Indy Jr. via Marion; aliens are the McGuffin; Red is the new Brown - let's just whip thru what's hawt and what's naught:

First off, it's great to see Harrison Ford back after that pod dude had taken his place for the past, um, long time. If they didn't make a big deal about how he's older at the beginning, it would be easy to forget that he's almost eligible for Social Security. He doesn't phone it in this time; he's a singing, dancing Strip-o-Gram. Welcome back, mack.

Shia LaBeef (sp?) is also very, very good. The Nerd Nation despises him out of jealousy that a guy like him is a movie star while they're hoping at best to be Leeroy Jenkins. Unlike Short Round, you don't want him dead and he's got some tricky poignant moments to play concerning the nature of his relationship with his father figures. He's not ready to wear the hat yet, but perhaps two movies from now.

Cate Blanchett is fun playing Natasha Fatale, but not enough is done with her psychic powers, as in, they don't do anything with them at all. If she actually displayed some abilities, she would be a formidable villain, but as it stands, she's left short by the script. (Between her and Christina Ricci, we should be in for a wave of bob hairstyles, though no one has seen Ricci.) Ray Winstone is also left thinly-written and frankly I half-expected him to belch that he was Beowulf.

John Hurt and Jim Broadbent get better parts but the best is Karen Allen, whom I can't recall a single movie she's been in (if any) since Raiders. I hated Kate Capshaw and Allison Doody (huhuhuhuhuh) is a trivia answer (has she done anything since Last Crusade?) because Marion was always THE GIRL (i.e. like The Man) and she looks good despite being in her mid-50s. The smile is there and you'll wish she had been in the other sequels, too.

Spielberg has been bashed by some for being lazy - one review said that this proves he can direct in his sleep - and that's just not true. I don't know if they're expecting the Spielberg from 25-35 years ago to come thru a wormhole because this guy does just fine. Action scenes are free of shaky-cam and edit-fu hysterics clear in their geography. Spielberg has made so many great movies for so long, we're inured to how easy he makes it look.

The biggest problem is the script by David Koepp. I haven't followed the endless development and various drafts from other writers because it's irrelevant. It doesn't matter if Frank Darabont wrote the greatest script ever or not because we can only judge what we get on the screen NOW. The first act is wobbly as if it's trying to get its legs under it and as a result, it's got too many wisecracks, too much exposition, too much sitting and talking, and too much thematic setup to be comfortable. Once Mutt shows up and the globe-trotting begins, it's pretty much non-stop action until the end when it becomes a matter of "Insert McGuffin here to trigger special effects overload"; it's weak.

Another beef has been the use of CGI effects and this again is more nitpicking. People have complained that there is no sense of danger because we know they're on greenscreen stages, but since when have movies NOT been totally fake? Was there ever a real danger that the hero was going to die in the other films? Action used to be performed in front of obvious rear-projection screens, so why is some darn impressive blending of location footage and CG evil? Oh yeah, that's right, it's Lucas and we just must HATE Lucas. Move on, people. Lighten the f*ck up!

A less obvious, but subliminally problematic factor is the replacement of Douglas Slocombe (who retired after shooting Last Crusade, having shot all three Indys) with Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg's DP for everything he's done since Schindler's List. While the first three films had a warm, golden hue about them, this one has the blown-out silvery bloomed look that gives an icy vibe to the image and causes some dissonance to the viewer; it don't feel right, though most won't be able to put their finger on what's wrong and will blame other factors.

There are a goodly amount of funny gags, some excellent chase scenes and a proper amount of callbacks and touchstones to tickle the faithful without being overly nostalgic. A few of the goofier bits - what's with the CG animals? - are sops to the kiddies because I guess today's 13-year-olds are too ADHDed to be satisfied with what worked for my generation, but again, people who are spitting at this brief moments are just projecting their emo rage at Lucas. Again.

The Bottom Line: Indy 4 (not typing that title again) isn't as good as Last Crusade, but better than the grim Temple of Doom. It doesn't bring any shame to the franchise and if the script had been buffed as shiny as the crystal skulls, it could've been something special instead of something merely very good. If you go in with a chip on your shoulder and your arms crossed like you're from Missouri, then you're probably going to be as dissatisfied as you want to be. If you just go looking for some old-fashioned Saturday matinée fun to munch some popcorn to, then you'll have fun. It'd be cool if they could whip another one of these out in the next couple of years and just blow the doors off instead of trying to build an overly complex Rube Goldberg mousetrap.

Score: 7/10 - See it at a matinée show in a theater.

Friday, May 16, 2008

If Men Wrote Advice Columns.

Click to embiggen.

Jessica Alba Stares You Down!

I'm not sure what the heck this is about, but she's simply adorable doing it.

While she has no significant thespian ability, she seems so nice. Seriously, have you ever heard about her acting up or being a bitch to anyone? Sure, she's knocked up without benefit of marriage, but compared to Britney, Lindsey and Paris, she's nearly an Amish virgin. That she was willing to do something as goofy as this video makes me feel like a brute for mentioning that she can't act. I wouldn't cast her in a film, but I'd love to hang out with her (even if I couldn't shag her.)

Why Gen X Needs To Smack Gen Whine Down.

A provocative article by Robert Lanham at Radar Online - Generation Slap: They're naive, self-important, and perpetually plugged in. This is a call to arms against Millennials - popped up on one of the forums I frequent and prompted the response below. Go read the article first before continuing here. I'll wait...

You back? OK, here we go...

Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill. Unless you're a trembling simp, these words will guide you to do what needs to be done to save the world.

The "Greatest Generation" spawned the Baby Boomers who basically f*cked everything up. Who was M&A-ing everything in the Eighties and living the coked-out Miami Vice lifestyle? It wasn't Gen Xers like me. We sat in high school and watched the glory days of indiscriminate sex and non-harmful drug use pass us by and by the time we were ready to take our turn at the wheel, we had to steer the mess out of the ditch.

Of course, since the Boomers controlled the media, they whitewashed their culpability, made Gen X the patsies and proceeded to turn Gen Whine into the drones they hoped Gen X would be if it weren't for a few hitches of circumstance that tossed spanners in the works.

Problem #1 is that Generation X came up when there was a band called Generation X who had some other cohorts in the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Ramones et al and along with it the DIY ethos. DIY meant "Do It Yourself", not "Demand It, Yo", but the unintended consequence was those who took the slogan to heart made for uncooperative drones. As the realization that the Boomers had shafted us sunk in and that we spent our youth being needlessly badgered into wearing FRANKIE SAY WAR! HIDE YOURSELF t-shirts and being afraid of Reagan - BTW, number of nuclear wars started by Reagan: 0 - a natural cynicism and desire to strangle the Boomers with their Versace ties set in.

Unlike Gen Whine, Gen Xers were allowed to get poor grades and understand the pitfalls of underachievement. Today's spoiled twats have be told from the moment that they went to their pre-pre-pre-school Esperanto classes that they are special, entitled, the center of the Universe and poop nothing but rainbows. They've been chemically warehoused if they show the slightest signs of boisterousness - what used to be called "being a kid" - and rewarded for just showing up...whenever that may be.

During the dot.bomb boom, the laws of supply and demand (i.e. the need for people to work those mice) allowed for some abuses by the minions because, well, just because. Those Aeron chairs weren't going to fill themselves and largess flowed. Of course, it was all a sham and the turn of the Millennium brought the collapse of the Clinton-era house of cards, smoke and mirrors. The immutable laws of economics came back from their holiday on Pluto and here we are now.

The problem is that Gen Whine grew up looking at the fat days of the illusory Nineties and think that they are entitled to the same lax expectations of responsibility. Why shouldn't they? Their Boomer parents gave them everything they wanted (note: not needed) as if they had grown up during the Depression. More than that, they were terrified that not giving their precious widdle babies a Playstation, Xbox AND Nintendo will lead them to shoot up their schools. Small price to pay to save some lives, right? When the spoiled punks still went and slaughtered their classmates, some other scapegoat - videogames, rap music, Republicans, global warming - was found to deflect acknowledgment of their total failure as parents.

Since the Boomers were raised spoiled punks, how else could their spawnlings turn out? It would be easy for Gen X to be bitter about the poofy treatment these emo pussies have it, but instinctively we know that if this whole shebang isn't going to end up in the ash heap of history it's going to require us to step up and salvage the nation by strangling the Boomers and their worthless Twittring twit kids in their sleep.

I jest. (A little.) But the shallow nature of Gen Why is evident in their inability to use proper English and grammar - this board spoils you guys; try hanging where the average poster is btwn 16-23 and weep for the Queen's English - and LULZ, OMG, WTF are considered Hemingwayesque expressions of the human condition. There is little ability to comprehend complex concepts and premises and as a result they respond enthusiastically to the most profound political ideology since Plato trod the sands of Greece....

CHANGE! HOPE!

We are sooooooooooooooo f*cked.

As the article mentioned, there's a lot more of these mouth-breathing Facebookers than there are of us, but using some jujitsu, it will be possible to keep these morons in their place. For starters, since they've be programmed to believe that everything will be handed to them, they have little ability to actually fight for it. Oh, their mommies will come into the office to scream at us for denying their golden rainbow-pooping children the Red Bull IV and a 24" LCD monitor so they can have all their social networking sites open at once - they can't master tabs in Firefox, I suppose - but tough f*cking sh*t, lady. Take your spawn out of our building and drop them at the car wash where people of their motivation are a good fit, career-wise.

The reason we can do this is unlike Jen Wha, we have a historical perspective that only age can provide and living through revolutionary changing times gives a sense of how things change. Today's kid who is old enough to drink was born in...wait for it....1987. (This year's newly minted voterbots were born in 1990.) The best-selling albums were Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet" and Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation 1814" respectively and little Suzy Bingedrinker's first CD ("What's an album, Grandpa?") was perhaps by N*Sync. They've always had MP3s and have no idea that MTV used to show videos.

OTOH - yes, I recognize the irony of using that contraction - we have seen music morph from vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to digital. Movies have become things we went to theaters to see to videotapes to DVD to hi-def. (I'm watching "Rattle & Hum" on HD DVD and realize that U2 has passed from relevance to annoying caricature on my watch.) I'm typing this on a laptop that would've been science fiction at any price a decade ago. The 1s and 0s that made "Tron" now make "Ratatouille" a mere quarter-century later. A $400 videogame console can render more at 60 fps that what used to take a couple hours per FRAME to generate using million-dollar supercomputers. Old Industries have collapsed and new paradigms are attempting to rise from the wreckage - not that the Boomers trapped beneath the rubble are helping or happy about it. Gen Whine just awaits the next toy and wouldn't know what to do if you handed them a real Scrabble board.

Today's brats only see the pretty whirring lights and sensations of our time, but have no idea that beyond their beautiful house they should ask themselves, "Well, how did I get here?" They stand at the plate and think they scored a home run and saunter back to the dugout to collect their high-fives. They think that no one will see their photos of them in their tutus with their cool wands. Ironically, for all that they think they're thinking, they are not thinking at all. They are the embodiment of their Boomer creators' programming to be dutiful citizens of the world and comfortable with using mob rule to transfer resources in the name of "fairness". (That whirring sound you're hearing is George Orwell spinning in his grave. We should hook him up to a generator and get some benefit from his unrest.)

Since ignorance is a curable disease, the question becomes whether it is possible to deprogram so many of these hoodie-wearing entitlement queens or whether we push them into the Grand Canyon and bury them as a cautionary tale and indictment that not all of us did that great job ourselves. Hmmmm. It's hard to say, but righting the ship starts as soon as we are willing to tell the pampered princes and princesses of this meaninglessly-named cohort, "LIFE IS NOT FAIR!!! SUCK IT UP, YOU LITTLE BRATS!!!"

Thus concludes this rant. So say we all.

=============

UPDATE: Business Week has a list of "Ten Reasons Gen Xers Are Unhappy at Work" which dovetails nicely into this discussion, especially #9: "[I]f Boomer colleagues are annoying, the Boomer parents of your Y reports are down-right over-the-top."

This LOLCAT pretty much sums up Gen Whine parents:

pet
more cat pictures

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Rare and Incredible KISS Performance!

It gets old before it's over, but until then, it's pretty awesome.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Dark Side of the Rainbow

You've probably heard about how if you play Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album at the same time as "The Wizard of Oz" is running, they synch up, but how many of you have actually tried doing it? Well, now you don't have to dust off the turntable and hook up the VCR because someone has done it for you.



You're welcome.

I just skipped around to random points in the clip and it's pretty freaky how it lines up. I wonder just how stoned and burdened by free time the hippie who discovered this synergy was? "Hey, Dude...let's try 'Master of Puppets' and 'The Yearling' after we're finished with 'The Land of Rape and Honey' and 'The Passion of the Christ'!"

Star Trek: The Sexed Generation

As with any of these mash-ups or montages, I'm always impressed by the amount of work that must've gone into this, but as you will see, this is something extra-special.

Worst. Hand. Sanitizer. Ever.

So I'm leaving the new nursing home tonight that Mom moved to and I notice a hand sanitizer station on the wall with a sign advising usage on the way in and out. While I hadn't touched much at the home, I was at the gas pumps and who knows what diseased freaks touched that, so I gave it a go.

It didn't feel like much came out, so I hit it again and proceeded to rub it around - on my HANDS, you pervs!!! - and it was this gross, slimy mess. My car keys were in my pocket, so I'm standing under the canopy, waving my hands my hands around like Kermit the Frog when he's particularly stoked for an act and they were not drying out. I eventually fished my keys out and used a tissue to wipe them off, but yeesh. I had to really wash my hands to get the damn sanitizer residue off. Bleah.

"Hand" Solo

Hey, Luke, um, dude...Han's groping your sister.

Friday, May 09, 2008

Tornado vs. Cars....WHO YA GOT?!?

Yikes!

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Photobombs Away!!!

Photobombers = people who hilariously ruin your nice little picture. Like this:





Dig some more! (Some slightly NSFW)

Sunday, May 04, 2008

I...Saw...Iron Man!

DIRK MINI-REVIEWS IT FOR YOU: IRON MAN

Iron Man is the best comic book movie that doesn't have "X-Men" in the title. Briskly-paced, perfectly acted (though Terrance Howard's breathy voice makes him seem wimpy), excellent FX, and a story with ADULT meaning to it and not dumbed-down for the kiddies and toy manufacturers. I thought the villain was able to get away with too much, but overall it ROCKED! Even the usually tubercular-looking Apple's Mama/Free Trade Dude Plooker was attractive and adorable. Stan the Man's cameo is his best yet.

Much, much, MUCH better than the Spider-dork films and a ringing indictment of how they've stupidly squandered the Fantastic Four franchise. The Incredible Hulk trailer still looks like shite, but The Dark Knight looks crazy off the hook - damn, Heath Ledger should be around to take a bow for this, the way it looks - but will probably make less than Iron Man because it's so dark compared to the peppier Iron Dude.

Score: 8.5/10 - Pay full price on a big screen.

In related news, here's a cute spoof with Batman and Iron Man sniping at each other: