Philonoist.net

I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t post my guesses at the Oscars, right?

Performance by an actor in a leading role

Daniel Day-Lewis in “There Will Be Blood” (Paramount Vantage and Miramax)

Performance by an actor in a supporting role

Javier Bardem in “No Country for Old Men” (Miramax and Paramount Vantage)

Performance by an actress in a leading role

Julie Christie in “Away from Her” (Lionsgate)

Performance by an actress in a supporting role

Cate Blanchett in “I’m Not There” (The Weinstein Company)

Best animated feature film of the year

“Ratatouille” (Walt Disney): Brad Bird

Achievement in art direction

“Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (DreamWorks and Warner Bros., Distributed by DreamWorks/Paramount): Art Direction: Dante Ferretti; Set Decoration: Francesca Lo Schiavo

Achievement in cinematography

“No Country for Old Men” (Miramax and Paramount Vantage): Roger Deakins

Achievement in costume design

“Across the Universe” (Sony Pictures Releasing) Albert Wolsky

Achievement in directing

“No Country for Old Men” (Miramax and Paramount Vantage), Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

Best documentary feature

“Taxi to the Dark Side” (THINKFilm) An X-Ray Production: Alex Gibney and Eva Orner

Best documentary short subject

“La Corona (The Crown)” A Runaway Films and Vega Films Production: Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega

Achievement in film editing

“No Country for Old Men” (Miramax and Paramount Vantage) Roderick Jaynes

Best foreign language film of the year

“Katyn” Poland

Achievement in makeup

“La Vie en Rose” (Picturehouse) Didier Lavergne and Jan Archibald

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score)

“Ratatouille” (Walt Disney) Michael Giacchino

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song)

“Happy Working Song” from “Enchanted” (Walt Disney): Music by Alan Menken; Lyric by Stephen Schwartz

Best motion picture of the year

“No Country for Old Men” (Miramax and Paramount Vantage) A Scott Rudin/Mike Zoss Production: Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, Producers

Best animated short film

“I Met the Walrus” A Kids & Explosions Production: Josh Raskin

Best live action short film

“Tanghi Argentini” (Premium Films) An Another Dimension of an Idea Production: Guido Thys and Anja Daelemans

Achievement in sound editing

“No Country for Old Men” (Miramax and Paramount Vantage): Skip Lievsay

Achievement in sound mixing

“Transformers” (DreamWorks and Paramount in association with Hasbro): Kevin O’Connell, Greg P. Russell and Peter J. Devlin

Achievement in visual effects

“Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” (Walt Disney): John Knoll, Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson and John Frazier

Adapted screenplay

“No Country for Old Men” (Miramax and Paramount Vantage), Written for the screen by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

Original screenplay

“Juno” (A Mandate Pictures/Mr. Mudd Production), Written by Diablo Cody

I’ll be back later with how I do.

Whew, just made it.

Technorati Tags: Oscar, Predictions

Filed by Adam College at 7:44 pm under Movies
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For not making Mr. T black enough.

The Lego explosions look just as real as the ones on the original TV show!

Technorati Tags: A-team, lego

Tagged with: Humor, Videos

Filed by Adam College at 6:12 pm under Everything Else
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Lost pet Anaconda, Beacon Hill Area-reward $1000
Reply to: craigslist.org
Date: 2008-02-10, 1:08PM EST

We are located on Myrtle st, on Beacon Hill area. This morning around 10am, we found out that our pet snake ran away from his cage. We believe that he can’t be too far away. Please, please, please….Anybody that can offer any help is urged to contact us, or the Animal Control. We offer $1000 reward. Do not approach the snake, or try to make any contact. It is not people friendly and his reactions can be unpredictable.

* Location: boston
* it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Technorati Tags: Boston, Snakes

Tagged with: Boston

Filed by Adam College at 2:48 pm under Everything Else
2 Comments

Sometime during my freshman year at Olin, the library called for submissions to create a list of 100 novels. In retrospect, I can’t recall why we felt we needed this list: lit readership was alive and well at Olin (thanks in no small part to Mel Chua), and with the Olin Library Community project (where each student selects a book for purchase) and Summer Reading (where in theory we all read a book and discuss it at the start of Fall term), a list of novels selected by members of the community, or even just students, seems superfluous.

I do remember that there was to be a challenge element to this: perhaps some sort of prize was going to be given to the student who read them all first.

At any rate, the list and the challenge died before sophomore year, but for old time’s sake, here is the draft list from which we were to pull the books, taken no doubt from the old Olin wiki, R.I.P. Some of these are classics, some classics of sci-fi, and others just Oliner’s favorite books: no parsed list ever came from these submissions, so this is perhaps an insight from those early days into either what we enjoyed reading, or what we thought we should be reading.

The ones in blue are the ones I’ve read:

100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

1984 - George Orwell

A Day in the Life of Ivan Dennisovitch- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers

A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith

Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

All the Pretty Horses - Cormac Mccarthy

Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner

Animal Farm - George Orwell

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

Babbitt - Sinclair Lewis

Beowulf - Seamus Heaney’s translation

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

Byzantium - Stephen R. Lawhead

Candide - Voltaire

Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

Charlotte’s Web - E. B. White

Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean Auel

Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

Connections - James Burke

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

Dune - Frank Herbert

East of Eden - John Steinbeck

Eaters of the Dead - Ibn Fadlan (compiled by Michael Crichton)

Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card

Ender’s Shadow - Orson Scott Card

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Fire and Hemlock - Dianna Wynne Jones

Five Smooth Stones - Ann Fairbairn

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway

Frankenstein - Mary Shelly

Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter

Good Omens - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

Hedda Gabler - Henrik Ibsen

Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow

Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

Hyperion et al - Dan Simmons

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

I, Asimov - Isaac Asimov

I, Robot - Isaac Asimov

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

Islands in the Stream - Ernest Hemingway

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

Jimmy Corrigan: The smartest kid on earth - Chris Ware

Just So Stories for Little Children - Rudyard Kipling

Lamb - Christopher Moore

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them - Al Franken

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

Macbeth - William Shakespeare

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Men of Mathematics - Eric Temple Bell

Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs

Native Son - Richard Wright

Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

Oh, the Places You’ll Go! - Dr. Seuss

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

Ordinary People - Judith Guest

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

Picture This - Joseph Heller

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi

Rootabega Tales- Carl Sandburg

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - Tom Stoppard

She’s Not There - Jennifer Finney Boylan

Silas Marner - George Eliot

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Small Gods - Terry Pratchett

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

Sophie’s World - Jostein Gaarder

Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

Spoon River Anthology - Edgar Lee Masters

Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein

Tales of the Unexpected - Roald Dahl

The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon

The Bell Jar- Sylvia Plath

The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

The Cider House Rules - John Irving

The Control of Nature - John Macphee

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

The Dancing Wu Li Masters - Gary Zukav

The Emigrants - Vilhelm Moberg

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan

The First Circle - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Forever War - Joe Haldemann

The Giver - Lois Lowry

The Giving Tree - Shel Silverstein

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

The Iliad & The Odyssey - Homer

The Jungle - Upton Sinclair

The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint Exupery

The Man Who Planted Trees - Jean Giono

The Moon is Down - John Steinbeck

The Oedipus Cycle - Sophocles

The Old Man and The Sea – Ernest Hemingway

The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster

The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

The Red Tent - Anita Diamont

The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Search for Delicious - Natalie Babbitt

The Second Tree from the Corner - E B White

The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx

The Stranger - Albert Camus

The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien

The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

The Wonderful O - James Thurber

The World According to Garp - John Irving

Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Trinity - Leon Uris

Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom

Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

Walden - Henry David Thoreau

Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut

Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak

Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

Tagged with: Books

Filed by Adam College at 9:08 pm under Olin
2 Comments

You might not know it, but the NFL Pro Bowl is taking place today in Honolulu. Of the four major American sports, the NFL is the only one to play its All-Star game *after* the Championship game or series. And of the four, it’s probably the least exciting and least memorable. (I’m sure it’s not the least watched, hockey’s got that one covered). Why so boring?

*There’s nothing to play for. there’s no Super Bowl home-team advantage at stake like in baseball, no conference pride or personal glory like in basketball and hockey. The only thing football players get is an extra paycheck and a salary bonus if it’s written into the contract.

*Related to the above, there’s no good coaching. Since the coaching staffs are comprised of the teams that lost the AFC and NFC conference championships, some would argue that the coaches are bitter about the losses fresh in their mind which undoubtedly came at the expense of players they must now “coach”. Players who have played for 16 games in one system must now switch to another. Hence, defense is a rarity in the Pro Bowl, and players are largely playing just to not get hurt.

*It’s not an event. Basketball, baseball, and hockey build All-Star Weekends around the game: rookie vs. sophomore games, slam dunk, home run, and skills contests. Each of these is a celebration of the sport as well as the players: the closest the NFL has is the buildup and anticipation during Super Bowl media week. The NFL does do this sort of thing, but they’re aired on the little-seen NFL network, and if shown, is shown at odd hours.

So why play it? Instead, have a players retreat in Hawaii the week *before* the Super Bowl. Show the beach tag/flag football, or skills events, maybe a rookie/sophomore tug of war. Coaches playing in the SB would undoubtedly hold their players from attending, but that’s OK. Still have the selection process: the moniker Pro Bowler means something even if the game doesn’t.

Or maybe, stealing from Hollywood’s award season hoopla, make an NFL awards show. Nominees for best player at each position and others, like best offensive line, best play, etc.) come out the tuesday after the end of the regular season. The awards show proper could be Saturday before the SB, or a week before/after. It’d be glitzy, hosted by some C-list comedian.

Like you wouldn’t watch.

Technorati Tags: Pro Bowl

Tagged with: Sports

Filed by Adam College at 7:29 pm under Uncategorized
1 Comment

I’ve owned joecollege at gmail since the early days of the service. You know, back when we only had 10 invites a piece, people were crazy enough to buy and sell them, and we all wondered what the hell we were going to do with a gig of storage space each. In 2007, I switched to using my full name, with middle initial, as my primary Gmail account, but since some people can’t be bothered to update their contact information, I’ve kept joecollege, automatically forwarding e-mail to my primary account. Most of it is bacn: the grey e-mail that’s not quite spam because I signed up for it, but is mostly unwanted and I’m not bothered if I don’t get around to reading it.*

Every so often, however, I’ll get a form e-mail response: I’ve gotten multiple ones from MySpace.com thanking me for signing up for their service. This morning I got one from CCBC, the Community College of Baltimore County (had to look it up). I usually scratch my head: there’s no f’ing way I’d sign up for MySpace, and CCBC would probably be a step down for me academically, not to mention a hell of a commute. Doing some digging usually yields that someone signed up for a form or online service, using joecollege at gmail.

Um, hello? Why the hell would you do this? Taking the time to sign up for something like Myspace, just so I go and delete it, is absolutely ridiculous. It’s a waste of my time and yours as well. You don’t get anything out of it: even on Myspace, I get your password e-mailed to me and go and delete your account. I have the key to the box that contains the key to your box, and I can change your key without your knowledge.

Here’s an example: the CCBC form responses were mailed to me.

Form: ask_an_advisor

1. First Name: Joe
2. Last Name: College
3. Your E-Mail Address: (e-mail removed by me)
4. Verify Email address: (e-mail removed by me)
5. Phone Number:
6. Status at CCBC: Prospective Student
7. Credit or Continuing Education Student: Credit
8. Major or Program of Study:
9. Purpose for Attending CCBC: Associates Degree
10. Type of Question: Selecting a major
11. CCBC Campus attending: Catonsville
12. Question that you would like to have answered by an academic advisor. (Be as specific as possible): <blank>

Here are the fathomable possibilities:

1) Some jerk developer is testing his own website code skills. Solution: don’t be an idiot, use your own e-mail address. How can you test the form submissions if you use a “fake” address?

2) Somebody felt like submitting a form for shits and giggles. Clearly this person gets excited clicking submit buttons. Here’s my solution: form-submission computations. If you really feel like submitting a form, just for the hell of it, go to such and such website, fill out the form, and once you submit, we’ll borrow your computer for 15 seconds and do some number-crunching for cancer or something for the greater good.

Actually, why aren’t we doing this already everywhere? It’s like reCAPTCHA but on a form-submission level. If you’re going to legitimately sign up for something, 10 seconds won’t hurt. It makes it prohibitively expensive for multiple spam submissions, and it’s for the benefit of humanity. Time delay is less of a usability flaw than a litmus test on a confusing looking graphic. If you’re upfront with the form and say it will take 10-15 seconds, so much the better, since real people will wait. The actual data from the form is inserted into the database at the *end* of the time period, of course, forcing spambots to wait the whole time.

Hmm… Thoughts?

*My personal bacn filter is to move anything with the word unsubscribe in it (among others). It’s not perfect, but since I check the bacn folder often (at a subject line level) I don’t miss much.

Filed by Adam College at 12:28 pm under Web
1 Comment

That embedded YouTube videos don’t appear in Planet Olin’s feeds, or on PlanetOlin.com. I usually include the link to the YouTube video in the post somewhere, but you could save some serious time by subscribing to Philonoist.net’s RSS feed independent of Planet Olin. Saves you a click, gives me an exaggerated sense of self-worth when I log into feedburner and see my stats.

You know, if you’re actually interested in the videos I find. Just sayin’…

Technorati Tags: Olin, Philonoist, PlanetOlin

Filed by Adam College at 2:11 pm under Everything Else
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I call this story “The Tale of the Not-So-Scary Scary Show“

Is it just me, or was TV loads better back then?

I have a major case of the nostalgias.

Tagged with: Videos

Filed by Adam College at 12:18 am under TV
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And see some movies. You know, like Woody Allen’s “Everything you always wanted to know about sex * but were afraid to ask.”

I’m just saying: these new pajamas made out of Dermasilk? You might want to rethink the color. And the headgear. While the pajamas may help with itchiness, can they really help with the loss of dignity of sleeping in something that makes you look like a sperm?

Check it:

Woody Allen (R) and the sperm outfit

Attractive Model and the sperm outfit pajamas.

Christ, I can’t tell them apart.

Technorati Tags: Woody Allen, Travelodge

Tagged with: Humor

Filed by Adam College at 11:07 am under Movies
1 Comment

If you’ve got £119 ($240USD plus another $60 for shipping), and don’t mind getting stared at by strangers and friends alike, plunk those pounds down on a Magic Wheel. Part Razor scooter, part unicycle, and part thumbing your nose at God’s divine wisdom to make you bipedal, the Magic Wheel’s sure to be a hit with all those lazy mofo’s who can’t afford a Segway. And hate skateboards. Rollerblades too. Check out the video:

Technorati Tags: Magic Wheel, Gadgets

Tagged with: Videos

Filed by Adam College at 1:50 pm under Everything Else
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