Author: Gary

• As I wrote in the previous incarnation of my website, one of my interests is odd ball geographic entities. The New York Times just did a story on St. Pierre and Miquelon, the last parts of France in North America.
• The trailer is out for the Mel Gibson movie “The Passion”, which is a retelling of the story of the last 12 hours of Jesus. As can be expected, any movie about Jesus is going to draw a lot of controversy. The interesting twist that Mel is doing with this film is that the dialogue is entirely in Aramaic and Latin….two dead languages. The film is also much more graphic than any other version of the story which has been put to film so far. Just from the trailer, the cinematography and lighting look amazing. I suppose they could put more into that given how much they saved on the script.

  So far no one as been willing to distribute the film. Given the number of people that read the “Left Behind” novels, I’d think they’d have a built in audience for this that would at least make their $25m back.

  I mention all of this only because I think the idea of making a movie in Latin and Aramaic is really cool and I hope it starts a trend in movies to use the proper languages of the subject matter. Lawrence of Arabia was cool. If parts were in Arabic it would have been even cooler.

• My favorite movie reviewer is James Berardinelli. He doesn’t write reviews for anyone, just his website. He’s been working on his all-time Top 100 movie list, adding a new film each week. He’s up to #23 now.
• Philip Glass’s Etudes for Piano 1-10 are FINALLY coming out on CD. Its about time.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is total crap.
• I’m now serving as the business manager for PVP. We have a new ad system in place now. Its all part of my master plan to screw Scott over.

I lectured at the Center for Public Speaking (an extemp camp) yesterday on economics. The upcomming extemp season will be a very difficult one in Minnesota. Despite having the reigning State Champion on our team, we will have to deal with three returning national semi-finalists, and a national champion. We’ve been moved into an even harder section for state (as if that were possible) and those three national semi-finalists are all in our NFL district. Great.

Nonetheless, I’m not too worried. Why? 1) We’re going to start WAY earlier this year. Going to do lectures and get the ball rolling at the annual Apple Valley speech campette they do in August. 2) We’ll be working every week throughout the school year. Most kids will still have to focus on debate, but they will at least be spending some time on extemp. 3) We’ll have more talent. More kids will be doing extemp as well as starting earlier. 4) The fact that the competition is so intense in Minnesota will only make us better. At least for this year, the quality of competition in Minnesota is the best in the United States by far.

It will be an interesting year…

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about something called thermal depolymerization. Its not the sort of technology that gets people excited, but its something that really could change the world.

For the last several decades there has been a great deal of pressue to recycle things like paper, glass, and metals. The problem is, recycling glass and paper doesn’t make much economic sense. In Sweeden, they are now switching to incineration of paper. Paper is cheap.

Likewise, the components of glass (sand), are pretty easy to come by. Only metal recycling really seems to work well (aluminum, tin, iron, steel, etc). Other wastes (diapers, coffee grounds, egg shells, etc), usually get incinerated or put in a landfill. Both options have their downside.

What thermal depolymerization does is breakdown organic materials into oils, water, gas and carbon black. Organic materials includes paper, cardboard, waste oil, any and all food refuse, human waste, agricultural waste, bones, feathers, chicken guts, plastic, tires, wood, cloth…..damn near everything.

The amount of oil/gas/water you get depends on what you put in. Plastic is mostly oil. Food waste is mostly water.

The implication of this technology (assuming it works as promised, and the test facility look promising) is that we can pretty much kiss landfills goodbye, we can increase the domestic production of oil, we can safely get rid of hazardous organic waste (including medical waste), and increase efficiency of oil refining.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/scitech/SciTechRepublish_898675.htm

Creative genius and crime express themselves early in men but both are turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children, a study says…..

The energy of youth and the dampening effect of marriage, he adds, are also remarkably similar among geniuses in music, painting and writing, as well as in criminal activity.

I cannot believe that Elyse got the ax on America’s Next Top Model. She was by far and away the best looking, smartest, most model-ish one of the bunch. What a total screw job. Instead of being a model, she’s going to Med School. I think that only makes her hotter. You’d think it would be a good thing for the modeling industry to get some smart models, but Nooooooooo.