Pathetic Fan Boy^{<font size=-2>(tm)</font>}

I went to the Final Fantasy movie site last night, and while there downloaded a desktop image (three actually) of Aki Ross, the main character. She now graces my laptop, at least for a few days .

Burnout Break

I was getting way too toasty from all the catch-up work, and two of my 'critical' tasks are now waiting on input from others out of the office, so when Brent invited me, I agreed to take off for a lunch movie (having worked overtime the last three days, it balances out fine). Guess what I went to see...

That's right! Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within! I won't give a full review. Suffice to call it a magnificent failure. Despite all its flaws, I think I'd see it again. Of course, it helps that I'm smitten with Aki, the lead female character. I'd love to meet her reference model. She sort of reminds me of a younger Linda Fiorentino.

Yes, Jean knows I find women other than her attractive, so you can't rat me out! But she's still my lovey bunny... (Jean is, you stinker!)

Submerged

I've been back from Anime Expo 2001 for a few days now. I'm totally swamped at work now, so even composing a note over lunch is tough. At home, I'm working on an article covering the Anime Music Video contest at AX (in my copious spare time) and I want to do a good job on it, so I won't be writing any weblog entries at home until I complete that.

So I'm still alive, had fun at Expo, and will write more later...

QOTD

If the founding fathers could have legislated this far into the future, do you really think Dr. Laura would be legal?

Dave Pell, NextDraft

Phrase of the Day

I asked Carsten if he had some time today, no critical issues, I just wanted to touch bases. Then it occured to me that I didn't really know the etymology of that phrase. Sure, it was probably from baseball, but I'm not into sports, so...

Internet to the rescue!:

There's an even subtler connection to baseball. After an interruption in play (a foul ball, for example) everything pauses, then recycles to start again. A rule provides that a runner on base must return to that base, and touch it, before play resumes. By extension, someone out of town on business will touch base by calling home, to make contact, to tie up loose ends, to set the universe on its proper axis, and be ready to start over from a fixed position.

bob

Sowing the Seeds

From the Department of the Law of Unintended Consequences, comes this unforseen negative attribute of genetically engineered organisms. While many opponents have worried about ecological disasters, it seems we weren't pessimistic enough.

Monsanto is suing farmers for having it's patented genetically modified crops on their land. In some of the suits, the farmers actually bought the organisms for one crop year, and are being sued on the basis of 'saving seed in violation of legal agreements'.

But in other cases, they are just 'auditing' the crops of farmers in a region where their seed is sold, and then suing farmers with said organism in their crops. In both cases, the mere fact that life will find a way to spread seems to be ignored in the suits. Are the farmers (both those who buy and those who are merely in proximity) supposed to salt the earth between crops to satisfy Monsanto?

What got me thinking about this was a news article this morning about the Earth Liberation Front, a monkeywrenching group which has been destroying GM research plots and committing arson on some labs. Public officials are playing a positioning game, labelling the ELF a 'terrorist' organization. If you cut down thousands of acres of old growth forest you are an entrepreneur, but...

Anyway, while the farmers have acquired legal help, it occured to me that what is really needed is a pro bono legal service along the lines of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, or the ACLU, only focused on questioning GM patents and corporate abuse of same. The two aforementioned organizations are very good at attacking violators of civil liberties, but nobody seems to want to tackle this emerging area. What we need is the equivalent of 'environmental ambulance chasers'. That is, lawyers who have the self-interested expectation of winning suits against abusive corporations like Monsanto, with the side-effect of protecting the farmers who are currently being harassed.

By the way, while all this may sound massively liberal (it is), I don't think that the worker in the field, such as the lumberjacks who work for the large lumber companies, are in any way evil. The usual semantic attack is to say that you must hate the little guy if he works for the big, bad corporation. Not so.

No Photos

This weekend's outing was to the Portland Children's Museum. We met with Sari and Trinity at Sari's workplace, which is a food testing laboratory, then carpooled to the museum.

The museum used to be on the Southeast side of Portland, and the building was old, rather like a fifty-year old middle school with old asbestos pipes, warped wood floors and the like. Still, they had imagination and did a good job making it fun for kids.

The new museum is now next to the Oregon Zoo, on the site of the original Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, which has moved across the river to Southeast Portland. Thus they've swapped places, and both have new facilities!

While both have lots of new exhibits and remain fun for the kids, they also seem to have sacrificed a measure of the creativity that came with operating on a shoestring. It's only a small reduction, but I feel it. Nevertheless, I suspect we'll be taking Kelly back to the Children's Museum again this summer, probably with her friend Trinity once more.

I got lazy and didn't take my camera, which is a shame, because I missed two photos of the sort I love to get. These are the ironic images which make good banner photos for a weblog . Both were at Sari's lab (Sari is Trinity's grandmother, or as seems popular out here on the Left Coast, Nona).

The first photo you won't see is of a pop machine vending mostly Coke products. There were four 2"X2" buttons for various flavors of pop, and one 6"X6" button for Coke! Guess they had an opinion on which pop you should choose.

The second photo would have shown a rack of tea bag dispenser boxes, below which were about a dozen Pyrex flasks. It would have been cuter if the flasks had had tea-leaf residue in the bottom, but it still tickled my funny bone.

I might post once or twice before the 4th of July, but after that things will be quiet until at least the following Monday. That's because I'll be attending Anime Expo 2001 in the interrim. I'm looking forward to it since I haven't been to the last two. See ya later.