quick link: l.y.d.: puppetmaster
ernie's at it again. the asian jeff probst has instigated yet another blog contest fashioned after a tv-reality show, this time ''The Mole'' (and inspired by the Kaycee imbroglio). why does he do it? time and time again, why does ernie subject himself to the time-consuming hassle, the rantings of passive-agressive teen bloggers, the hurtful criticism, and the headaches of managing the whole mess? maybe he likes writing. maybe he likes participating in the blog community. maybe he likes creating something larger than himself.
maybe he enjoys train wrecks. maybe he's a hits whore.
alls i know is ernie's gonna do us up right, and i can hardly wait. yee-haw!

micro-review: Virgin Suicides, The (1999)
now this was a great movie. i liked sophia coppola's feature debut much better than anything her father has done (reiterating: only my opinion, but The Godfather is one of the worst movies ever made). i also highly recommend Lick the Star, her short film that shows regularly on IFC.
you know how Richard Dreyfus narrated Stand By Me and Daniel Stern narrated ''The Wonder Years,'' and their voices really defined the feel of the movie/tv show? Well, Giovanni Ribisi narrates The Virgin Suicides, but his voice doesn't define it; rather, his voice fits in perfectly--it's the right voice, and it doesn't take over. (6 Degrees: Giovanni Ribisi had a small role on ''The Wonder Years.'')
seriously cool flick, funny, funny sometimes when you feel bad for laughing. it's hard to describe the summer-high-pressure-weather-front feeling it evokes, or the mystery of magic girls when you're 14. heck, i'm still trying to figure out why Spike Jonez was thanked in the making-of featurette.

micro-review: AntiTrust (2001)
who writes this drivel? this movie coulda used a good swift shot of Phillip Seymour Hoffman (but then, so could every movie). i get the feeling that there was an okay geek script hiding under there, but it was trashed by flashy style rewrites. at least all the teenyboppers who flock around ryan phillipe movies now know the term ''open source.''

a cheap laugh at fractured english
your random spam emails generally do not interest you, but most of the time you get the general idea.

Dear Promoter!

We look at your work and we are in complete delight, concerning your successes in business of assistance of progress about a service!

I ask you to not think, that this letter is directed to you with the purpose of a raising P4P, this question interests us in the most least degree, because at the concerts on all territory of Russia we earn more. 10 minutes on a stage against 1 year on mp3.com ::))

Our group is really very popular in Russia, and we would like to escape for limits of our borders with your professional help... Please, check up our sounding, we with impatience shall wait from you of any reactions.

We would like to receive conditions of your help to us, than adequately we could to you answer, it can there could be commission money, which we with pleasure would divide with you personally.

Hoping on a fast reply, always at your order.

Your Alex Cherry / Ivan Kupala Group

www.mp3.com/alexcherry
www.mp3.com/kupala

PS: No P4P cheat stations please, sorry, if you are not a promoter.

bumps
things on the internet are dodgy of late, what with Blogger's T1 outage recently, which also took down BlogVoices, NewsBlogger, and innumerable blogs at BlogSpot. add onto this the reluctance in the past few days for certain sites to load for me, and, when they do, some of their graphical parts to randomly not load. i blame AOL. soon (read: when i get money (read: when i get a job)) i will get DSL again, and kiss you low-rent modem people goodbye.
so, since www.hipsmart.com doesn't want to work today, i think i will just turn off the sticky URL. that means you will see esswedl.tripod.com as the URL for this site (gasp! a free host! how 1997! or didn't you notice the obnoxious banner ad up there?). i just want to remind you that www.hipsmart.com will bring you here like normal. i'm blowing 35 bucks a year for the damn domain name, so if you would use it to link to me, i'd feel better. someday (re: previous read:'s) i'll shell out some more dough for a real host.

micro-review: Quills (2000)
enjoyable enough. a pleasant little romp, with some witty dialog and a necrophilic priest. more movies should have a necrophilic priest. fun and not terribly shocking, which is an improvement on the real marquis--he wasn't really much fun.
writers love to write about themselves, and since writers write movie scripts, there tend to be many writer characters in movies. too many, since simply being a writer doesn't make for an action-filled characterization (tap... tap-tap... tap). it's the same problem as movies about hackers: it sounds cool, but terribly boring to watch. hence the crazy, swirling colors and ''virtual reality'' representations of hacking that make little sense but look nice. this movie certainly has some of the best writing-made-action i've seen. generally, i think the scriptwriter makes a character a writer so that he doesn't have to seem tied down by a real job; he can wander around the screen for a few days getting into mischief and the boss won't mind. the writer-character is just a catch-all for a character whose job is unimportant or would get in the way of the plot. ''but what's my motivation?'' ''you're a writer. you're doing research.'' ''oh, i get it.''

micro-review: Shrek (2001)
enjoyable enough. some of the cg is breathtaking, some is just alright. i especially enjoyed the exploding bird. jokes about bodily emissions usually aren't the funniest, but the critic in the chicago tribune was too hard when she said this movie rises above the rest only because it is mediocre and the rest is awful.

there is something wrong when tom arnold is being interviewed simultaneously by craig kilborn and conan o'brien.

my mixed up saturday
it was weirdly contrasting, yet somehow delightfully appropriate. i started the day off with a tour of a water reclamation plant (read: sewage treatment). actually, Treatment Plant Operator is a job i'm going for (civil service exam: two weeks), and the whole process is terribly interesting. it's just that several stops on the tour were odiferous (guide's term) (read: soooo stinky; my term). i guess it's something you get used to, but i was gagging. i'm glad i didn't retch.
the day was followed by a pleasant couch relaxation period, wherein i alternately snoozed and watched appropriate movies. today's fare: Cannonball Run on Svengoolie and Flash Gordon featuring the non-stop Queen score (dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-Flash! Aaah-aah.).

blogs i'm reading: Geektastic
i would like to have a fresh, airy site design like this blog. i would also like to have job interviews, like this blogger. i would also like to have a delorian with flux capacitor, but we're steadily moving out of the realm of reality here.

i'm lost: CTA  | Chicago Transit Authority - Maps Schedules
okay, i've got to get to the bank (nearest branch conveniently located a few miles away (i'm being sarcastic--this is chicago, dammit. the bank should be everywhere)), so i guess i'll check out the CTA maps website to see what busses to take. what the? this delightful CTA page actually has content, but they've somehow obscured it with the background image. how did they do that? try looking at the page with images off: it helps.

smart news: The Straight Dope: Does civet come from tortured cats? Does kopi luwak coffee come from pre-eaten beans?
cecil's latest column, destined to become a classic. where else are you going to read about the exploits of Olfactory protoscientist #1 and Olfactory protoscientist #2?

hip (sorta)news: Fury.com: Kuro5hin iPad article
i just love reading predictions of forthcoming Apple products. since Apple hasn't announced these products or made them available for sale, i can just daydream about how nice it woud be to have one without the spending-money-anxiety of knowing i could have one.

toys: Palm IIIc
oh boy! a new toy! hmmm, what do i want on my palm IIIc? first, let's put all of the Douglas Adams Hitch Hiker books on it. that was easy. next? well, let's set up AvantGo to get some web content. geez, the HotSync keeps failing. ah, there we go. hey, none of the AvantGo stuff works right. HotSync again. damn, it won't sync. keep trying... hours slip by. finally! now i can read the onion, and write stuff for HipSmart on the road (have to wait until i get home and sync to publish the blog, though). cool!
how'd i get my hands on the palm? my gf just got a WAP cell phone, so the palm was passed down. dang, i just want to play with the cool phone. stupid palm.

blogs i'm reading: the biscuit city road fan club
technical notes: pretty good blog title. i was afraid it would be literal. in the left column, he warns against linking to him without sufficient interest--now that's indie spirit. i hope i don't get in trouble. in the bottom right corner of wherever you happend to be scrolled to, there's a little [+] or [-] icon that shows up, but disappears when you click it. what's with that?
content notes: indie music, fairly interesting. enough entries about semi-recognizable bands to keep you from feeling like a complete dolt.

unitarian joke count: The Simpsons Episode Guide: ''Missonary Impossible''

Lisa, Jr.: [someone] told us that there were many religions in the world. Which one is the right one?
Homer: Well, certainly not Unitarianism. If that's the one true faith, I'll eat my hat.

quick link: warrenellis.com
i have never been ''all about'' comics. it's hard to be ''all about'' anything. but i suspect that i spend enough money on comics to fall solidly into the comic geek category. growing up, comics were way too superhero oriented, or at least i was too naive to be able to seek out independent or quality comics. which is why the largest portion of my comics collection is made up of Archie comics--the superhero genre didn't interest me, and the dumb, simple jokes of Jughead did.
having grown up a bit (but i still love archie), i've learned how to seek out independent music and films, and the experience has helped me find comics i like. and i've found that one of the things i like best is Warren Ellis. i've mentioned his Transmetropolitan here before. i also love Planetary, and The Authority (the first superhero genre comic i really dig) (he no longer writes The Authority). Ellis is changing the industry with his attempt to make creator-owned comics viable. it's been tried before, but i suspect that it might work this time solely because of his talent--bridging the gap between the popularity of mainstream comics and the quality of independents.

musing: what's with prescription medicine commercials?
nowadays, commercials for Claritin talk about relief from allergy symptoms. but when the Claritin commercials first started, they didn't talk about anything. they just said, ''ask your doctor if Claritin is right for you,'' and had some pretty pictures. no indication of what the drug did. why is it that the first commercials for a new prescription drug don't mention what the drug does?

hip news: The Standard: Evan Williams: The Idealist
wow, the standard gives the subjects of its bios archetypal mythic titles (''The Test Titan,'' ''The Interrogator''), but they've gone all out for ev.

micro-review: The Body Artist by Don DeLillo
White Noise is one of the best books i have ever read. i thought Underworld and Running Dog were amazing. i've never been able to get all the way through Libra, Mao II, Ratner's Star or The Names. i was able to finish The Body Artist, DeLillo's latest, but i suspect somehow that it's not as good as the ones i haven't finished. i account my ability to finish it to its length: only 124 pages.
frankly, this reads a bit like Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) on a dry day. what i really like about DeLillo is the humor that underlies his intense stories. in The Body Artist, he's going with a much more subdued storyline, basically a single person, rather than the sweeping worlds of White Noise or Underworld. and this tiny little vista feels claustrophobic. perhaps that's exactly the tone to book is trying to relate, but it's not always enjoyable. it's the sort of personal post-modernism that Auster can pull off, not the huge, environmental po-mo i've come to expect and love of DeLillo.
okay, i guess, but i'll put it at the end of my DeLillo shelf.

quick link: The Onion | America's Finest News Source
the chicago tribune's sunday magazine features a trivial little sidebar listing a local celebrity's favorite web sites. this week: phil ponce, host of chicago tonight on wttw 11, the pbs station. the show is a heady affair, with ponce talking to a panel of four experts about local politics and news. in the magazine, ponce listed his favorite site as the satirical onion.
the magazine listed the url as onion.com, which i thought was a mistake. i've always known the url to be theonion.com. but i just checked it out, and it works. is this new? i could have sworn that they didn't always own both urls, and that onion.com would take you someplace, predictably, about onions.

things done on sunday

• bought at target: shoe organizer for closet, sweater organizer for closet, laundry detergent, ironing board cover, new iron to replace the one befouled by iron-on transfer glue.
• organized closet
• organized piles of junk in basement
• load upon load of laundry

follow-up news: Authors: Perish Before iPublish
i mentioned the iPublish service in a post called literary link: iPublish at the beginning of the month. now comes a warning from the author's guild that the iPublish contract pays low royalties and may give away your future works for almost nothing. i knew before that it sounded so-so at best, but giving time warner your rights is even scarier than you might think. then again, unpublished writers have no other way of getting a contract without an agent, and no way of getting an agent without getting published. those wacky gangsters. whatta ya gonna do?

In a file that the Cheese worm leaves on infected servers and which was subsequently posted to the Incidents list, the author wrote:
# removes rootshells running from /etc/inetd.conf
# after a l10n infection... (to stop pesky haqz0rs
# messing up your box even worse than it is already)
# This code was not written with malicious intent.
# Infact, it was written to try and do some good.

But Roger Thompson, technical director of malicious code research for security services firm TruSecure, stressed such programs are generally a bad idea.

''I would rather not have anything that comes in uninvited and messes with my computers,'' he said.

• a guestbook, which no one has signed. i think i'll go eat worms!
• the blogvoices commenting system has been added. talk about stuff using the ''yap'' link at the end of each post.
• the new HipSmart listserv, found at Yahoo! Groups : hipsmart. with this neat variant, you can receive posts in your email, start longer discussions, chat, and other keen things.