Sci-fi channel tends to try running several movies with similar themes in a row. In this case Alien Apocalypse was the cross-over between Bruce Campbell movies and alien-related movies. Alien Cargo rode on it’s heels and was, relatively speaking, a breath of fresh air.

In spite of Loki’s rave (or maybe anti-rave?) reviews I have never seen Space Truckers. But based on the description it seems like Alien Cargo attempted the same genre (ie. long haul space cargo workers films) and succeeded at least modestly in every way that Space Truckers failed.

Continue reading Review: Alien Cargo (1999) →

Premise: (spoiler… as if it mattered) A team of four spacemen (actually, two space men and two space women) return from space after 40 years in deep sleep on a mission to look at some alien probe a ways off. Arriving back on earth they are enslaved and taken to the local saw-mill to be put to work. Two of them are killed in the process.

It turns out the world has been taking over by alien “mites” which look vaguely like giant humanoid grass-hoppers. The mites killed off most of humanity with neutron-type-bombs and enslaved the remainder to help them deforest the place and ship the wood back to their homeworld for a tidy profit.

Continue reading Review: Alien Apocalypse →

These music lists strike at something dear to my heart: music lists.

Almost never do I like all of an artist’s work, or even the majority of it. But there are a lot of one hit wonders that I’ve stumbled on over the years. Not that these people’s music is necessarily bad in general, nor that their “hit” was actually popular with anyone but me. But some of these have really stuck with me over the years (I still want to find a copy of “Scrabble Girl” or “Mercury” (no, not that Mercury, not that Mercury either, the Mercury that isn’t on the list) from the WXAC formats bin circa 1996).

A lot of these songs I’ve heard on Rhapsody or from free sample disks I got working at Borders, so I didn’t have to shell out the prohibitive costs for entire albums to find them. But some of them can be found free on the ‘net, and here is a smattering:

Continue reading Random Music (with heavy digression) →

Octopus Genesus

When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days – and also afterward – when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.

Genesis 6:1-4

Continue reading Octopus Genesus →

There is this form of expression I recently thought of calling “corporate art”.

Normally when folks hear a term like this I suspect they think of abstract paintings in hotel lobbies and hallways, or strong looking works of sculpture, or maybe those inspiration posters, or something similar. I remember loki at one point in college mentioned he was sort of fascinated with that kind of thing, or at least the lobby-paintings aspect of it. If I recall this is what inspired the Red Room exhibit (of ’97 or ’98 probably).

Anyway, fascinating though this stuff may be, this isn’t what I mean by “corporate art”.

Continue reading Corporate Art – Part I (An Introduction) →

For a long time now, probably since I got out of college, I’ve been cooking eggs occasionally. And, except for those already cracked before the package was opened, I have yet to find a bad egg no matter how old the container. Or at least I haven’t found one that actually had “the smell of rotten eggs”.

Over time this has spawned the Good Egg Hypothesis, which is something to the extent that: An unbroken, properly refrigerated egg never goes bad.

Today I did an experiment that put this hypothesis to the most extreme test I’ve ever administered it. I had a taste for hard boiled eggs and there were two left in the carton so I slipped them in to boil. In the past I’ve noticed eggs usually sink to the bottom of the pot, but these eggs floated right at the top. The one even floated nearly a quarter out of the water.

I figured this was probably a bad sign so I checked out the internet for info and found these instructions on how to hard boil eggs. Among other things the instructions say that older eggs almost float and are better, but that eggs which actually do float are too old and shouldn’t be used.

Continue reading The Theory of The Good Egg →