Because people are asking.

Yes, it's good. It's worth seeing, entertaining. You will not feel like you wasted your time or money.

Is it great? No. It's not as good as Die Hard With A Vengeance (though I should say I liked that movie a lot, so that's a fairly high bar). It's better than Die Hard 2. It is more than good enough to see in the theaters in any event.

It's just not great. It has terrific moments, but just doesn't come together as a great all the way through movie.

Posted by: Ace at 02:05 PM | Comments (42)
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Awesomely awesome with a side of fried awesome smothered in awesome-sauce.

The handheld, in-scene "found document" photography is reminiscent of Blair Witch. So is the marketing campaign. Although it's bigger, with more corporate push behind it.

It appears that a monster similar to Cthulhu (if not the Great Old One himself!) is chewing up Manhattan.

This teaser -- with no name, just a release date -- is running before the Transformers move.

The Gaming Life has links to the fake blogs and other online marketing sites and such. A blog about a lunatic prophet type, so well-known to Lovecraft readers, includes this post:

The writings of a mad man

How could the world be so enamored with a lunatic like Ethan Haas ?

It is almost not worth mentioning his writings but if only to discourage mankind from putting it's faith in such "visions". Read for yourself what this "great man" wrote:

The great war of the gods will come upon the earth; the fires and terror of their rule will return for a time, but the children of the gods may be thus prepared, themselves aware and powerfulÂ…they may stand along side the gods not as equals, but as allies, feared and ready.

Arguments are breaking out in the comments as to whether this is a true Lovecraftian thing or not; quite frankly, I have a sneaking suspicion the "arguments" are being waged between studio shills. Dave from Garfield Ridge sent this, suggesting that "Cthulhu" was the best guess; at first I doubted it, but this is definitely a Cthulhu-like mythos of madmen prophets and old gods returning to earth to wreak havoc.

With numerous "posters" denouncing this notion as absurd -- despite these obvious analogues, despite the fact that even if this isn't Cthulhu, it's definitely faux Cthulhu -- I'm starting to think maybe this is a bona fide name-used-and-everything Cthulhu pic, not just a knockoff. Methinks the studio shills doth protest too much.

If you're going to hew that close to the source material, why not just acknowledge the source and be done with it? I'm pretty sure all this is now public domain and Lovecraft's estate has no legal rights to the material any more, just a moral right; they ask for, rather than demand, compensation for use of this stuff.

Puzzles... at this hype-blog. Dig the creepy music, but disappointed the secret of all the puzzles turned out to be "Buy more Ovaltine."

More... at a Forbes blog. This quote appears at the "Ethan Haas" site, if you don't have Flash enabled:

"...war came, no longer from the elemental nor from the star's rain of fire. The world was again remade, and the glow was as the coming of the sun upon the Earth. The children of the gods were again too few, scattered and divided and among them walked the ancients and those whose thoughts were not as to the towers and the marvels, but to the End and the destruction of the Earth and to the fires from which nothing could escape."

Again, not exactly by the book Lovecraftian mythos, but close enough.

Solutions to the puzzle-site's puzzles are here.

An email back from one of the sites' propeitors read thus:

It's not a person, it's a group, a very ancient sect. These are dangerous "people", be careful trying to dig too deep....

I've never seen them myself, I'm not sure anyone has, for a very long time.....

The Forbes blog concludes (as I did):

...all the viral "Ethan Haas" stuff seems to be pointing in a particularly awesome direction: all these references to "the ancients" and prophecies and the destruction of the Earth casts a distinctly Lovecraftian tone. Could Abrams be filming a Cthulhu movie? Cross your fingers --or tentacles, as the case may be. We should know pretty soon.

Thanks to Sinistar.

Oh, Clarifying: The Ethan Haas sites are not confirmed to actually be connected with the JJ Abrams project -- so Lovecraftian hints there may have nothing at all to do with the movie. Perhaps just a completely unrelated videogame or something.

There is, in fact, a website clearly connected with the movie -- this site is called 1-18-08, the closest thing the unnamed movie has to an official title (its release date) -- but lacks all the Cthuluesque stuff in the Haas websites.

I've been assuming all are connected, but perhaps they're not.

Posted by: Ace at 01:43 PM | Comments (76)
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A normal whippet.

"Big Wendy" the whippet:

Big Wendy "suffers" from a "genetic disorder that has resulted in an exceptionally muscular appearance."

Great. When God's handing out genetic disorders, dogs are getting "stuck" with hulk bodies and I get a congenital predisposition to rickets.

Thanks, Nancy!

Via File It Under, which continues its "mineral porn" series, teaching us all about minerals and rocks and, also, boobies. It's pornographic, it's informative: it's pornformative!

Posted by: Ace at 12:55 PM | Comments (41)
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Video. Chilling.

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 12:09 PM | Comments (45)
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How you say, total douchebag, yes?

Police searched the home of Dominique de Villepin, the former French Prime Minister, yesterday as judges appeared close to charging him with conspiring to implicate Nicolas Sarkozy, now the President, in a corruption scandal. Criminal charges are thought likely after examining judges unearthed new evidence that appears to put Mr de Villepin, 56, close to the heart of the so-called Clearstream affair.

The scandal, under investigation since 2005, involves forged bank records that suggested falsely that Mr Sarkozy and other senior figures had received big bribes in the sale of French warships to Taiwan.

Mr de Villepin was serving as Foreign and then Interior Minister and Mr Sarkozy, his rival for the future presidency, was Finance, then Interior Minister.

...

Investigating judges and police arrived yesterday afternoon at the expensive Paris apartment building where Mr de Villepin lives.

They were acting on material that was extracted last week from erased data on an intelligence officerÂ’s computer. This added to evidence that Mr Chirac had been briefed on the affair at the time, according to leaked judicial transcripts. Two weeks ago the former President refused to obey a judicial summons for questioning over the case. His lawyers argued that he was immune from inquiries into any acts undertaken during his presidency.

,,,

The former Prime Minister also repeated earlier denials that he had discussed Mr SarkozyÂ’s apparent implication with Mr Chirac at the time.

However, Mr de Villepin will now seek to be an “assisted witness”, a status that enables suspects to be accompanied by their lawyers at judicial interviews, they said.

Posted by: Ace at 11:59 AM | Comments (9)
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Arab conspiracy theories and narratives of oppression at the hands of the infidel die hard, but they do die:

I’ve seen this kind of progression in Mosul, out in Anbar and other places, and when I ask our military leaders if they have sensed any shift, many have said, yes, they too sense that Iraqis view us differently. In the context of sectarian and tribal strife, we are the tribe that people can — more or less and with giant caveats — rely on.

Most Iraqis I talk with acknowledge that if it was ever about the oil, itÂ’s not now. Not mostly anyway. It clearly would have been cheaper just to buy the oil or invade somewhere easier that has more. Similarly, most Iraqis seem now to realize that we really donÂ’t want to stay here, and that many of us canÂ’t wait to get back home. They realize that we are not resolved to stay, but are impatient but to drive down to Kuwait and sail away. And when they consider the Americans who actually deal with Iraqis every day, the Iraqis can no longer deny that we really do want them to succeed. But we want them to succeed without us. We want to see their streets are clean and safe, their grass is green, and their birds are singing. We want to see that on television. Not in person. We donÂ’t want to be here. We tell them that every day. It finally has settled in that we are telling the truth.

His full account is here, including Iragis' description of Al Qaeda psychopathy so repellent I think it's probably just rumor and propaganda against an enemy.

But that's even better -- that they are propagandizing against their acknowledged enemy, Al Qaeda.

Posted by: Ace at 11:56 AM | Comments (10)
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Actually, she got the hat-trick. The day before she stabbed him in his already-blinded left eye, then decided she'd like that one back, and so went for the working one.

Her defense was, I'm guessing, an obsessive-compulsive disorder about neatness and symmetry.

A Hong Kong woman who blinded her boyfriend in one eye in a fight six years ago has been jailed for jabbing a chopstick into his other eye, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Last November, Po Shiu-fong, 58, accused long-time boyfriend Kwok Wai-ming, 49, of having an affair, the South China Morning Post reported.

During the row, Po stabbed a plastic chopstick into his left eye, which she had already blinded six years ago when she poked it with her finger.

"Po became hysterical when she saw the wound and mopped it with a towel. The pair then went to bed," the paper said.

"The next morning they had another argument in which she grabbed a chopstick and stabbed Kwok's right eye," it said.

Authorities believe it was the line "Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?" that set her off.

Thanks to Blacksheep.

Posted by: Ace at 11:43 AM | Comments (15)
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Grim milestone?

Posted by: Ace at 11:26 AM | Comments (17)
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Rusty says he got thanked by government officials for his (and his readers') efforts in getting the last one pulled down. Time to do it again.

Posted by: Ace at 11:16 AM | Comments (7)
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132,000 last month, plus the regularly scheduled increases for previous months' numbers.

Stocks drifted higher in erratic trading Friday, after the government reported that employers have been creating more jobs than expected.

The Labor Department said the unemployment rate held steady at 4.5 percent in June for the third straight month, as expected, and that 132,000 jobs were added - fewer than in May, but higher than the average forecast. The data also showed that a larger number of jobs were created in April and May than previously thought, and that June's average work week ticked up 0.1 percent, more than anticipated.

...

But while the positive snapshot boded well for the long-term performance of the stock market, it also raised worries that a too-strong economy will make the Federal Reserve more willing to raise rates to curb inflation.

Posted by: Ace at 11:12 AM | Comments (12)
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