Exciting Zombie-Related News

World War Z, Time Magazine’s pick for greatest book of the millenium* is being made into a movie.  Now, astute Jonsonblog readers will remember the frenzy of excitement & trailer boners that occured the last time I found out that one of the great works in the history of western literature was being adapted for the screen, and the fury & rending of garments that occured when that movie turned out to be Shooter, with Mark Wahlberg.  But this time, it’s TOTALLY going to be different.

I’m like Charlie Brown & Hollywood is like Lucy, with movie adapatations of my favorite written materials being the football in this increasingly strained metaphor.  You’d think I’d learn, and in a way, a part of me has.  I mean, I did say a decade or more ago, “man, if they ever make a movie of Spider Man & it features Venom, I would run over a busload of nuns to go see that movie,” and yet by the time they DID make that movie, and it sucked,  I was guarded enough to avoid seeing it in theaters, preferring to steal it & complain bitterly to my iphone as I watched it alone in my room.  I like to think I’ve really grown up over the years.

But here I go again.  The next 18 months will feature movie versions of Stardust, World War Z & The Watchmen, and I can totally see all of them sucking before a frame of footage has been shot for any of them.  On the plus side, I saw the early trailer for Iron Man, and it looks pretty bad ass.  I think the Robert Downey Jr casting may pay off overall.

P.S., bonus note to the super nerds out there: the guy adopting WWZ to the big screen is the dude who created Babylon 5, a show so nerdy that even I never watched it. But that’s got to be a good sign, right?  Why would a heralded nerd with a cult following (like a Joss Whedon or JJ Abrams) come in & fuck up something like the greatest work of zombie literature ever written?

*In a perfect world this would be true and not just more of my lies.

links for 2007-07-28

• Atari 2600 Box Covers
  (tags: retro 80s videogames atari flickr)

links for 2007-07-27

• rings made from old typewriter balls
  (tags: jewelry typewriters foundobjects art)

My apologies to Jonathan Rouse of Loughborough University

So, a little under a year ago I wrote this entry lamenting the fact that if you typed “Jonathan Rouse” into Google (with or without quotes) I was the second place result, behind some guy with my same named who worked for the aforementioned university. 

Well, thanks to the vast left wing conspiracy, since right around that time I’ve been the number one result on Google for searches for Jonathan Rouse, again with or without quotes.  More importantly, that specific entry with its argumentative headline (”Screw you!”) has been the number one result.  Which means anyone coming here via Google lands on that outdated & needlessly agressive entry first.  So, sorry about that, Jonathan Rouse of Loughborough University. I guess you’re not such a bad guy. 

In case, btw, you’re an old friend and you found this page by searching for Jonathan Rouse, and you want to know which Jonathan Rouse this is, it’s:

1) The one in his mid 30’s who works in marketing in the Los Angeles area

2) The one who used to live in Arlington in the mid 1990s

3) The one who spent some time in Oxford, UK in the late 1970s & early 1980s

4) The one who went to Paul Revere Junior High, University High School & UC Irvine

I write this because recently a college roommate I hadn’t spoken to in a decade found the blog and dropped me a note, and it was really cool.  Andre Torrez used to maintain a “people I’m looking for” page on his highly trafficked blog so that if they Googled their names they’d find his page and thus find him, but I’m not looking for anyone, I just think it’s neat when old acquaintances show up.

links for 2007-07-26

• Fogonazos: Shipwrecks on the coast of Mauritania
  (tags: shipwrecks photography)
• Fogonazos: Polar Bears and submarines
  (tags: nature war submarines ice frozen)
• Fogonazos: Sphinx, amazing observatory at the top of the Alps
  (tags: architecture art europe ice images photography switzerland observatory alps)

Hacked iPhone ringtone

Instrx here.

World’s 29,000 laziest sex offenders identified, banned

This PR nightmare released by Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace cites the banning of 29,000 registered sex offenders who had MySpace pages.  In addition to being 400% more sex offenders than MySpace had originally claimed were using their service, it’s important to note when reeling at the vast number of rapists on MySpace that this is

1) only the REGISTERED sex offenders, meaning the ones who had been caught and tried and convicted and served their time and released back into the wild, and

2) only the not very bright registered sex offenders who used their real names when creating their MySpace pages. 

You used your real names?? Get your head in the game, sexual predators!  Hell, even I know better than to use my real name on MySpace - after all, the damn thing’s full of rapists, I’m no fool.  So, there’s probably WAY more rapists who haven’t been caught, or who got caught & acquitted, or caught, NOT acquitted, but using a fake name still out there on MySpace. 

This, when coupled with the recent reports that everyone is fleeing MySpace because it’s SO lame in exchange for Facebook accounts makes me think that MySpace in 2007 is like the island of Manhattan in Escape From New York, only instead of a wide swath of criminals, the community is pretty much nothing but rapists, all of them pretending to be horny teenagers, hoping to lure in other teenagers. 

Poor rapists… for a while, this new rapist-only MySpace has got to seem like a garden of Eden - “Jesus, there’s NOTHING but horny teenagers here!  I’m going to have to start using viagra to keep up with all my sexual assaults!”  But then slowly the horrible truth dawns, as they begin to realize that the only non-rapist on MySpace is Chris Hansen, saving up for sweeps week.

BTW, this entry has set a new personal record for most uses of the word “rapist” in a non-work related document (I work in marketing, you’d be surprised how often the term comes up).  There’s a good reason for that - I noticed that the jonsonblog is nowhere near the top of the results returned for the word rapist & I was hoping to change that.

Wow… even just writing that last joke creeps me out.  Hey, I learned something new about myself.  I can creep myself out with my own damn jokes.  Freak.

Nerd Trifecta

I got the final Harry Potter book Friday night (don’t worry, no spoilers ahead) and blew through it over the weekend, but I had a head start.  Since Thursday, I’d been reading a pirated PDF that some devoted lunatic made by transcribing all the words from a pre-release physical copy & uploading it to the internet.   

Thank God for devoted lunatics, the internet would lose about 50% or more of its value without them (wikipedia, lyrics databases, IMDB, amazon reviews, yelp.com, much, much more).  By the time I bought a copy, I was already on page 200, reading the words in tiny, tiny print on my iphone every time I got a minute here or there.

So I’m talking to my boss on Friday and I’m describing how I have a copy of the book and we have the following exchange:

Boss: Wait a second… you’re reading a stolen copy of the children’s book Harry Potter on your iPhone?

Me: (gesturing with hands crossing in upward paths) yeah, it’s like a convergence of nerdism.

Boss: Your air chart is trending in the wrong direction.

links for 2007-07-22

• Deer frozen standing up in the snow
  Gruesome - half eaten by scavengers
  (tags: death nature scavengers photography)

links for 2007-07-21

• Reunification of the Bells
  This is awesome; monopolies as an economic force are more powerful than government, apparently.
  (tags: history business telecommunications)