Yearly Archives: 2005

Friday Ark #57

This entry was posted in Bird Blogging Cat Blogging Dog Blogging Friday Ark Pet Blogging Pets Weekend Cat Blogging Weekend Dog Blogging on by

Cats, Dogs, Spiders and ? every Friday.
We’ll post links to sites that have Friday (plus or minus a few days) photos of their chosen animals (photoshops at our discretion and humans only in supporting roles). Watch the Exception category for rocks, beer, coffee cups, and….?
We will add your post to the list if you do one of the following:

  • Leave a comment or trackback to this post,
  • Use the Carnival Submission Form,
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  • Our extensive staff finds it during our weekly search of the web

Of course, if our staff goes on strike then we will link only those posts someone tells us about.
Visit each border and come back regularly Friday-Sunday to visit new boarders. And do link to the Friday Ark whether you use trackbacks or not.

Dog folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Dogs hosted by Mickey’s Musings.

Cat folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Cats which goes up every Sunday and the 83rd edition will be hosted this week by Mind of Mog. There are more weekly cats at eatstuff’s Weekend Cat Blogging which has many participants who may not be familiar to Ark or Carnival participants.
Bird folks: I and the Bird: A Blog Carnival for Bird Lovers is published every 2 weeks. Send your links for the 9th edition to Hedwig the Owl. The 8th edition is up and hosted by the Science and Sarcasm.
New for the spineless: Circus of the Spineless. A monthly celebration of Insects, Arachnids, Molluscs, Crustaceans, Worms and most anything else that wiggles. The first edition is up at Milk River Blog.
Arkive editions of the Friday Ark.
Alert: There will be no updates today between 10:30 AM and 2:00 PM EDT.
Cats

InvertebratesDogsBirdsOther VertebratesIn MemoriamDidn’t Make ItExceptions (inclusion not guaranteed)For other current carnivals check out The Conservative Cat’s Carnival Page and The TTLB Uber Carnival
Note for Haloscan Users: Haloscan started (the end of July) rejecting trackbacks if they were submitted “too rapidly” by the same host. I don’t know what the timer is but it is long enough so that it was very difficult to ping everyone that is using Haloscan for trackbacks. I’m sure that they are doing this to try to hold back the tide of trackback spam but it makes the service pretty useless for carnival type posts. Perhaps you can contact them and urge some different solution. Update: Typepad appears to be doing the same thing. Everytime I update the Ark it appears the timers are reset and the long list of MT autogenerated pings fail. Yecchhhh….

Flogging the Gropenator

This entry was posted in Taxation on by

Kevin Drum and the LA Times bash arnold for vetoing some measures that targeted something called tax cheats.
First we read:

The governor has vetoed several bills that would allow agents to go after more businesses and individuals who cost the state millions by cheating on their returns, or not filing at all.

It is too bad that the state is being hindered by people trying to protect their earning from extortion.
Next:

The governor blocked efforts to increase penalties on retailers who filch the sales taxes they collect,…

These folks need to start providing restitution yesterday. They are thieves. Oh yes, the restitution should be to the people they stole the money from.

…and on companies that don’t collect taxes when they should.

Well, let’s thank these companies for helping folks keep their earnings.

A proposal to help authorities garnish wages of convicted tax evaders for as long as their debt is unpaid also was vetoed.

Hey, it’s their wages it should be their choice what they do with their money.
arnold is deserving of much derision and bashing. He is, after all, a politician and as such devoted to doing stuff with resources taken from others without their consent. In this case, though, he has some of it right though undoubtably for the wrong reasons.
And, Kevin, et al, it is pretty hard to give a war if no one, or few, contribute.

Those Sci-Fi Movies

This entry was posted in Movies Science Fiction on by

Jaquandor did the heavy lifting and kicked off this list’m and mark’m meme pulled from John Scalzi’s new book The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies wherein Scalzi provides

The Canon: Reviews and commentary on the 50 science fiction films you have to see before you die (more on this in a minute)

You know the routine: the one’s in bold are ones I’ve seen (it’s possible that I’ve seen a few of the unmarked ones and just don’t remember’m):
Akira
Alien
Aliens
Alphaville
Back to the Future
Blade Runner
Brazil
Bride of Frankenstein
Brother From Another Planet
A Clockwork Orange
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Contact
The Damned
Destination Moon
The Day The Earth Stood Still
Delicatessen
Escape From New York
ET: The Extraterrestrial
Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial)
The Fly (1985 version)
Forbidden Planet
Ghost in the Shell
Gojira/Godzilla
The Incredibles
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
Jurassic Park
Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior
The Matrix (I like it a little bit less each time I watch it.)
Metropolis
On the Beach
Planet of the Apes (1968 version)
Robocop
Sleeper
Solaris (1972 version)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
The Stepford Wives
Superman
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
The Thing From Another World
Things to Come
Tron
12 Monkeys
28 Days Later
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
2001: A Space Odyssey
La Voyage Dans la Lune
War of the Worlds (1953 version)
Oh yea, where the hell is Serenity? Well, I guess we have to read the book:

No, Serenity didn’t make the list. Deal with it (it is in the book, though. Page 24. Big shout-out to Joss Whedon there, too, although I don’t have very nice things to say about his Alien Resurrection script when I review that movie on page 59. Please don’t hurt me, Whedon fans).

I won’t argue specifics without reading what Scalzi says. Suffice it to say, for now, that as a movie Serenity runs circles around quite a few of the flicks on this list. On the other hand we may not have Serenity if not for all those that came before.