Groovymarlin.com

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love and adore Wikipedia. To my mind, it is the Internet evolution of the classic encyclopedia, and a good place to start researching all manner of subjects. Sometimes you’ll find the answers you need right within its articles; other times you might follow the reference links provided to find even more in-depth information and original research. An informed and thoughtful user can easily separate the true scholarly content from the fluff (not that fluff doesn’t have it’s place).

Lately I’ve been using Wikipedia to learn more about movies that I’m interested in. IMDB is great for technical details, but I find that most entries on Wikipedia contain fairly good plot summaries and discussions of character, criticism, and controversy. Sometimes I see a film on cable and, for whatever reason, don’t give it my full attention and end up missing some details. That’s what happened when I watched Brokeback Mountain, and I found the Wikipedia entry on it extremely helpful. Or sometimes I just don’t understand the details, like when I recently saw Immortal. (In the latter case, even reading the Wikipedia entry wasn’t a whole lot of help, as Immortal is just kind of incoherent.)

So I’m going to post regularly about film articles that I like on Wikipedia. Today I read the article about Audition, a 1999 horror-suspense film from Japan. File that under the category of films I want to see but just haven’t gotten around to, for one reason or another. The Wikipedia entry contains a well-written summary of the plot as well as trivia, information on critical responses, and links to further analysis. Audition is a pretty graphic film, but its themes of power, control, and gender roles in Japanese society are interesting.

At one point, a character says of Asami, the mysterious main female character, “She is beautiful, classy and obedient.” Wow…let’s just say he got that…wrong.

Good diary on Daily Kos yesterday about certain windbags who I won’t name who felt the need to claim that the students at VT didn’t “fight back” and were “cowards.” These people, these pompous windbags, these pathetic armchair commandos, make me sick. I won’t say their names or link to them, because I think that’s what they want most: publicity, attention, traffic. Why else would you say such a thing after a terrible tragedy like what happened in Blacksburg on Monday?

I mean, seriously…why say such things? I believe that these assholes WANT negative publicity and attention. Perhaps they’re vying to be the new hatemongers, to take the place of that skinny blonde vampire with the big, ugly Adam’s apple; the one who said all those skanky things about the 9/11 widows. She suffers from the same disease: attention whoredom.

Well, they won’t get attention from me, and this is the last time I’ll post, even indirectly, about their shameful and pathetic rantings. They are the true cowards, and the worst kind of all: hypocrites.

God bless all at Virginia Tech – victims, survivors, families and friends. Ignore the windbags, please.

I heard the dumbest segment on NPR this morning. They were interviewing teenagers about paying taxes. Many of these kids didn’t realize that they were required to file taxes if they earned income, whether through work or savings/investments, even though they’re just “kids.” Most of them said things like, “I don’t think people under 18 should have to pay taxes” and “It’s not fair.”

Jeez.

Guess what, you dim bulbs? I don’t think people between the ages of 30 and 40 whose last names end with “Y” should have to pay taxes! How ya like that?

Are the teenagers of this nation really so stupid? If some twatwaffle like Britney Spears makes a gajillion dollars when she’s 17, you don’t think she should pay some income tax on that? I can see it now…adoption becomes the new, hip tax shelter. Suddenly teenagers everywhere are making billions of dollars tax-free for their parents and guardians! Don’t get me wrong…when I worked at McDonald’s and had taxes taken out of every paycheck, I was bitter. Luckily the tax code is based on amount of income earned, and when I filed I always got a refund (this continued, sadly, long after I was a teenager and was basically living at the poverty level as a 25-year-old).

Something about the story just rubbed me the wrong way. I thought the teens interviewed were incredibly stupid and Morning Edition was kind of lame to even run the story. It was pointless and frustrating and just…stupid.

Happy tax day.

I first read about tumblelogs and tumblr.com on Lifehacker. Something about Gina’s post really spurred me to try it. Maybe it was this:

“I don’t have the time to keep it up.”

“I don’t have that much to say that often.”

These are the reasons most people abandon their personal weblog or never start one. But we all come across interesting tidbits online every day that we want to remember and share – links, photos, videos, even that side-splitting IM session you had with your co-worker. A new blog format, called a “tumblelog,” is a no-hassle, no-writing-required way to share those bits and maintain a personal site with the least possible commitment.

OK, sign me up. I had read about twitter, which just seemed stupid (I mean, who really wants to know that I just finished writing a status report for my manager and now I’m about to run four really unexciting test cases? Or, better yet, go loaf in the kitchen and decide between regular and golden Oreos?). But this tumblr thing is different. I run across little snippets online every day that I try to save in order to look at or blog about them later. Usually I stuff all those links into Google Notebook and then forget about them. Now I can use tumblr, and have even more fun, because it lets me post snippets of conversations too, and quotes, and pictures…cool stuff that I want to talk about but don’t really have time to write a full-fledged blog post about. (Because I’m soooo busy with that Oreo thing, obviously.)

There’s also a bookmarklet that you can use to quickly post about anything you’re looking at in your browser. I found that it works really well, and only need to actually go to the site and launch the real editor when I want to post a conversation. Today I fooled around with the CSS and colors a little bit, and managed to make the admittedly boring theme look a little prettier. Right now, themes are sparse and presentation isn’t really all that pretty. But presentation isn’t really the point; most bloggers seem to be using tumblr as an aggregator – a way collate all their posts to various blogs and such in one place. This is easy to do because you can even set up tumblr.com to read an RSS feed and post every entry onto your tumblelog!

So you can check out my tumblelog at groovymarlin.tumblr.com. I don’t kid myself — most people won’t find it all that interesting. In a way, it’s a public Google Notebook for me, a place to reference some story or quote or picture I saw online. And I think the conversations are occasionally humorous, and probably entertaining for the parties involved (names are mostly obscured to protect the not-so-innocent).

Leslie Stahl’s earrings are making me crazy. Leslie (or her stylist) has apparently decided that her signature look is large, chunky stone earrings that perfectly match whatever she is wearing. Blue blazer with black turtleneck? Blue and black “quartz” looking earrings. She does this ALL THE TIME and it’s making me insane. Of course I couldn’t find any really good pictures of this on the Internets to illustrate, though here are a few (click on image to see larger):

If you watch an episode of “60 Minutes” where Leslie is doing a story, you’ll notice it immediately. These earrings are a vile offense to fashion and here’s why:

- The whole “matchy-matchy” aspect is so lame. It’s like Garanimals for jewelry. Everyone (well, everyone with taste) knows you’re never supposed to match everything.

- The earrings themselves are all incredibly ugly, like giant rocks that Wilma Flintstone might wear on a night out on the town.

Horrible, horrible, horrible. Those earrings are all I can think about lately when I’m trying to fall asleep at night. Damn you, Leslie Stahl (or Leslie Stahl’s stylist)!