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Yep- saw the big cloud while riding home on Max last night. Thanks to our wierd weather pattern this winter- all the ash went to the underpopulated east. Not a single flake fell on my property in Beaverton. Damn- I was looking forward to getting a serious case of Dementia Concretia thus using a Roadside Attraction to seal my escape from the common economy....

The frog twitching went way back, to Galvani, I believe, and inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Edison went all the way up to electrocuting horses

He also did an elephant.

Go to Maryhill, Washington on the banks of the Columbia river where an astronomically accurate, complete and not-falling down Stonehenge has been standing for 75 years now. It's dedicated to the WWI dead of Klickitat County.

Washington State has had it's own Stonehenge, accurately represented, for well nigh over 75 years now- why couldn't the astronomy students have just visited there?

Near Natrual Bridge, VA is a Foam version.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/VANATfoamhe nge.html

there were literally tons of wood that was supposedly from the cross that jesus was supposedly nailed to.

Shhh, I'm making good money selling my leftover firewood on eBay.

I would buy it if I only hadn't spent $28,000 on a grilled cheese sandwich bearing an image of the Virgin Mary... Would you give me a kilogram of your wood for one Jesus Tortilla or two Mother Teresa Buns?

There was also a chain of tourist-trap bubblehouses called "Xanadu".

> Just had visions of Swiss confectioners invading Pennsylvania.

That would be New Jersey. Grover's Mill (the first landing site from the radio play) is in West Windsor Township, NJ:
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/NJGROufo.ht ml

I think you'd be more enthused if it were a beer can house. You could use JOLT cans.

Obviously it isn't but coal fired power plants don't leave huge uninhabitable dead zones like Chernoybl did and have the risk of killing large numbers of people all at once, or make people flee their homes...forever.

-- MarkusQ

Actually, they should be made of foam.

We used to have a Xanadu house up in the Dells. It was neat, but I'm not sure if it was really all that practical. At the very least, the interior was much more... organic.

So you are the Seattle Troll! I didn't know you posted on Slashdot too. What kind of a connection are you getting under that bridge? And by the way, what's the story about the volkswagen?

Just in case you don't know what the parent post is talking about:

Seattle Troll

Yes. For someone interested in coffee, he could have visited these. Although the Bedford coffee pot house is in sad shape these days, it is being repaired.

There are several of these in the States. My personal favorite is Carhenge

There are F-16s that have crashed in the lake. The military decided it was too expensive to recover them since they were destroyed anyway. So they let them sink in the mud (presumably they did). I imagine that there is other airplane junk in the lake too, being the flyover for a military base.

There are some interesting artifacts around the lake. Being a desert region seems to attract a number of artists that sees it as their canvas. It's where you see all the car commercials with the car zooming along in a vast desert expanse on white ground (the salt flats).

It's unfortunate, but we do not have an enviromentally conscious citzenry. All sorts of trash and junk. have been dumped out at the lake, just so they wouldn't have to pay a landfill fee or bother with it.

It's true that the lake does have an ecosystem, but not much of one, as it is very salty.

Also, the Salt Lake is not the swimmer's aquatic paradise. At one time it was considered to be. There was a large resort on the shore. Unfortunately it burned to the ground when some vagrants built a campfire on the wooden floor (smart, huh?).

The lake was so salty that you would indeed float like a cork. But because of a railway causeway across the lake, the south end (where everybody goes swimming) does not have enough salinity as the lake is fed by freshwater sources there.

The lake does not have any natural beaches, but rather mud flats for shoreline. Not like what you find at the ocean. There are some man made ones, and this is where you can go spend the day if you want.

But even if you do find a spot of sand to toss the blanket on, there are "brine flies", the other half of the lake's ecosystem. Imagine a hord of gnats that want to make you their business.

There is bacteria that thrive in this anaeoribic enviroment around the shoreline. The resulting byproduct of their efforts is hydrogen sulfide, or as we like to call it "lake stink". If the wind is just right, there is not a place in the valley that you can go to escape it. But that only happens occasionally, like before a rainstorm. I think the natives like myself have a fondness for it (since it only happens a couple times a year) as it reminds us that we live in a unique place. However, if you are down on the shore, there are days it is very bad.

After years of drought, the lake is at a low point right now. However in the mid-eighties, it was at the highest point ever. An interesting engineering feat (or more likely boondoggle) was the installation of massive pumps that are capable of pumping the lake in order to lower the level.

There are a number of mineral companies that remove salt, rare metals (magnesium), and other minerals from the lake.

However, until recently (last 15-20 years), there was not that much concern for the lake ecology. The thing that people did/do not realize is that like other resources, it is finite.

There was a time that nobody harvested brine shrimp eggs. Now there are a number of companies that have to be regulated so they do not remove the entire next generation of brine shrimp from the lake. Indications are that decades of removing minerals from the lake have depleted the salt flats. So much so, that the world famous Bonneville Speedway does not have enough rock hard salt to break speed records on anymore.

My favorite thing about the lake? Without a doubt it is Pink Floyd, an escapee from a local aviary. He's more predictable than the swallows at Capistrano. Every year he makes

Tree of Utah

Sun Tunnels

Does this remind anyone else of the Xanadu House? As a kid I always wanted on of those, they were supposed to be inexpensive to build, easy to maintain, and well insulated.

Maybe if they hadn't pushed all of the other aging technology with it, we would be seeing things like it for new small structures instead of thes extruded houses.

Xanadu House

Reminds me of this place.

I remember 20+ years ago touring a house constructed from a durable, high-strength foam. It was located in Gatlinburg, TN and was called "Xanadu - House of the Future". I recall that it was constructed by inflating large, plastic dome-like balloons and then spraying those balloons with the hardening foam. Builders then subsequently went in with saws and simply chopped out wherever they wanted a doorway, hall, or secret passageway to be. I remember being totally blown away when, towards the end of the tour, they had an Atari 2600 (playing that Snoopy vs. the Red Baron game) and color TV embedded in the wall. Plus, it had a slide/tunnel to get from the kids' room upstairs down to the den.

Good times... good times. (obligatory Homestarrunner reference =)

Cheers..

just stick it across the street from the MIR SPACE STATION so it won't get lonely...

But how about bizarre sh*t like THIS?

I don't go around telling people I'm 8'11" just because it's my theoretical maximum!

(This is the fixed link. THat one above got mangled)

Perky Dead Animal Dioramas

Stay at the Don Q Inn.

Visit the astonishing Dickeyville Grotto.

Escape from the Harry Houdini Historical Center.

Learn the correct pronounciation of "calliope" at the original winter quarters of the Ringling Bros. Circus, Circus World Museum in Baraboo.

Get arrested trespassing on the antennae that communicate wth nuclear submarines while under water at Project ELF.

Hijack the Wienermobile!

Read Wisconsin Death Trip.

Explore the giant animal lover in you at Schettl's Freight Sales.

See a genuine MIR and other crap.

Finally, no visit would be complete without some scrounging at Delaney's Surplus which seems to have burned (oh no!) and a tour of the transcendental Forevertron.

Stay at the Don Q Inn.

Visit the astonishing Dickeyville Grotto.

Escape from the Harry Houdini Historical Center.

Learn the correct pronounciation of "calliope" at the original winter quarters of the Ringling Bros. Circus, Circus World Museum in Baraboo.

Get arrested trespassing on the antennae that communicate wth nuclear submarines while under water at Project ELF.

Hijack the Wienermobile!

Read Wisconsin Death Trip.

Explore the giant animal lover in you at Schettl's Freight Sales.

See a genuine MIR and other crap.

Finally, no visit would be complete without some scrounging at Delaney's Surplus which seems to have burned (oh no!) and a tour of the transcendental Forevertron.

Stay at the Don Q Inn.

Visit the astonishing Dickeyville Grotto.

Escape from the Harry Houdini Historical Center.

Learn the correct pronounciation of "calliope" at the original winter quarters of the Ringling Bros. Circus, Circus World Museum in Baraboo.

Get arrested trespassing on the antennae that communicate wth nuclear submarines while under water at Project ELF.

Hijack the Wienermobile!

Read Wisconsin Death Trip.

Explore the giant animal lover in you at Schettl's Freight Sales.

See a genuine MIR and other crap.

Finally, no visit would be complete without some scrounging at Delaney's Surplus which seems to have burned (oh no!) and a tour of the transcendental Forevertron.

If you hit Philly, check out this little museum of medical oddities.

I've found Roadside America to be a nice resource for the curious travel geek. They even have a review of the Big Duck, which I visited last year.

I've found Roadside America to be a nice resource for the curious travel geek. They even have a review of the Big Duck, which I visited last year.

When in Maryland don't forget to stop by these 3 gems. All of them are free and educational:
Museum of Menstruation
Museum of Dentistry
Baltimore Tattoo Museum

• Spam Museum
• The Official SPAM Home Page
• Spam Carving Contest
• Amazing and Fabulous Spam Site
• Uncle Mikey's House of Spam
• The Ultimate SPAM gift catalog
• Bob Bragner's "Hormhell" page
• Uncle Kevin's Spam page
• Spamland
• on and on...

Looking at the photos of the planets mounted in their locations such as "Percy's Auto Sales" and the "Budget Traveler Motor Inn (0.7 mile from Sun)", all I could think about was Cadillac Ranch and other roadside attractions.

Looking at the photos of the planets mounted in their locations such as "Percy's Auto Sales" and the "Budget Traveler Motor Inn (0.7 mile from Sun)", all I could think about was Cadillac Ranch and other roadside attractions.

And don't forget, no visit to Utah is complete without an excursion to the World's Largest Copper Mine!

• Boston area, I would recommend the Big Dig and MIT's AI lab. Both have occasional public tours.
• Greensburg, Kansas has a geek double-header. The world's largest hand-dug well, and the world's second-largest stony-iron meteorite
• Lowell, Mass. has a ninteenth-century mill rigged up as a national park, very interesting tour.

There are lots of great European geek sights, but labels are almost all in local languages. Some good ones:

• Paris has a great display on techno-history of WW I and WW II at the Invalides, and a fine retrospective on military medicine near Port Royal metro stop. The Cite de Science et d'Industrie sounds good, but it's kid-stuff.
• Berlin has a tiny "Zuckermuseum", which says slavery ended only because German chemists perfected beet sugar.
• Vienna has a wonderful clock museum.
• The Utrecht (Netherlands) University museum has fascinating "medical curiosities" going back to 1700s or so. Also, go up inside at least one windmill, you can really see how it works.

big earth movers are really cool. there are a number of them that have been turned into museums.

They should have used an effective and inexpensive method, like building a tunnel for the frogs...

(I have GOT to get back to California to get a picture of an advertisement billboard they've got out there, before they wake up and take it down. In keeping with the "frog" theme, they have a giant fluorescent frog posing on a series of billboards with the text of the advertisement. One of them says Davis is "Green and Safe and Nuclear Free"....with a GIANT GLOWING FROG standing next to the words. Too funny...)

Open your eyes people! I could go on and on.

Please do! I tried to take your lead, and find out more information on Google, but all I came up with was Giant Robots, Giant Squids, and The Jolly Green Giant, who, incidentally, lives in Blue Earth MN, the birthplace of the ice cream sandwich. So if you would be so kind, and provide some links to these giants of which you speak, I would be much obliged.

Actually, Topsy was due for an execution by hanging (she had killed three people in as many years), but there was public concern over the inhumanity of hanging her. Edison stepped up to the plate with the intent of a) making AC power appear dangerous, and b) demonstrating the effectiveness of electrocution as a painless form of execution.

Planning my road trips (I've driven about 7k miles in the past year- around the US, southern Canada and northern Mexico) is something I do most of online and with the help of an atlas. Most important tip: Don't be afraid to detour! You see random sign for a "Dutch Windmill" in the middle of rural Iowa, well, go see what the fuss is about! Even if the destination isn't all that, the sideroute offers more of a view of what Iowa looks like than the highway does, and those detours will be the most memorable parts of your trip. Second most important tip: Truck stops are awesome. They have great, cheap food at any time of day; they have showers and laundry facilities, should you be desperate; they have anything you could possibly have run out of or not known you needed; and they are full of the friendliest and most open people, people who know the roads well, that you'll ever meet. And this is coming from a young, not-bad-looking woman who travels alone a lot; I stop at truck stops all the time and always feel safe and welcome and well-fed. Truck stops are awesome.

Links:

Resources by state, including computer-friendly truck stops (easy access to phone jacks &c.)

List of truck stops in general

Another truck stop guide

If you're going to be connected on the road, this is a great link: TruckerNews has updates on road conditions all over the US, as well as stop closures, detours, weather, &c. Check your route in the morning and you won't have to detour or backtrack during the day.

Roadside America has a great list of quirky roadside attractions (ever wanted to see the world's largest ball of twine?)

Another great attractions link is Hidden America ...lots of great Americana.

If you really want to take your time and look around, try some scenic byways. A really wonderful way to get a taste of what America looks like at her best.

If you're like me and enjoy feeling the wind rush by, speedtrap.com is a great resource. Look up the places you'll be travelling the next day, and make sure you know where to watch for The Man.

Enjoy!

I was talking about the U2 lead singer as Sonny Bono currently is in the process of turning into a fossil fuel.

Probably not, but we're going to take you through the movie anyway. Grab a bucket of popcorn and prepare yourself for the movie review of Star Wars: Episode II - The Attack of the Clones.

So the movie starts off with the requisite main score while the oddly skewed yellow text brings us up to speed on the goings-on in the galaxy. Something about unrest in the Senate, a separatist movement led by a "Count Dookie", Amidala being a Senator herself, yada yada yada. The main message is that the forced-perspective text looked lame as fuck in 1977, and seems downright abysmal 25 years later. One would think that with all the billions Lucas has made on the previous films he could afford a decent title sequence.

True to a movie made for kids and dysfunctional adults, we then jump right into the action. Senator Amidala is getting off her liqui-chrome spaceship on Coruscant when... kaboom! ...she blows up. Omigod, is she dead?!? Of course not, it was her stand in (you remember her from Episode I, right?). This scene provides a great opportunity for Natalie Portman to get all weepy over her dead assistant and show us that Amidala even cares for the little people. What an angel.

After that we see Yoda, Samuel "Mace Windu" Jackson and some freaky looking alien Jedi talking to Darth Sidious. Er, um, I mean Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, who of course is in no way connected to Mr. Sidious. I mean, he's obviously a good guy, right? Yeah, sure. If you paid any attention to Episodes IV-VI you already know who he is. Also, those subtle facial expressions and tones of voice suggesting devious intentions sure do lend an air of, shall we say, insidiousness, to him.

So do the Master Jedi Knights pick up on Palpatine's two-faced treachery? No. The eight year-old kids at the theater see it plain as day, but to the leaders of the Jedi Council, people who have undergone the most stringent of training for detecting such duplicity, people who have freakin' powers of mind control and are sitting right across the desk from this guy, to them Palpatine seems A-OK.

Anyway, the whole point of this scene is to set up Obi-Wan "Ewen McGregor looks goofy in a beard" Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker as Amidala's bodyguards since it seems like somebody is trying to kill her. Of course it is Palpatine who suggests this. My goodness, what sort of deviltry is he up to? We also briefly see Jar-Jar Binks stroll by in the background. No lines for him in this scene, though.

Prior to Amidala getting hooked up with her Jedi, we get to meet the two of them alone in an elevator. Anakin is now a moody teen and his pining for Natalie Portman's firm buttox is quite apparent. When the elevator door opens they are greeted by Jar-Jar and... he speaks! Nothing like a little racist, neo-Jamaican patois to tickle the funny bone.

Once the whole gang is reunited all the complex character development gets dumped, wholesale, in about 45 seconds of screen time. Obi-Wan is the wise yet caring teacher, Anakin is straining under the throes of pubescent hormonal lust and good old rebellion, while Amidala is distant yet maternal in her care for Anakin. Jar-Jar appears to be little more than house nigger.

The next scenes begin to suggest why Lucas chose Attack of the Clones as title for this movie. All of the visual imagery was stolen from other people's films. The super-dense high rise cityscape, complete with moody nighttime lighting through half-open blinds, is equal parts Blade Runner and The Fifth Elephant to such an obvious degree that it is painful. We get to zoom about this impossibly crowded aerial metropolis at high speeds in a futuristic flying car chase. It's all Luc Besson at this point, including people falling from building to vehicle. You could swap Hayden Christensen (Anakin) with Bruce Willis at any point and the transition would be seamless (admittedly, replacing McGregor with Milla Jovovich might be noticed).

During this chase Anakin and Obi-Wan banter amusingly and offer flip one-liners. It almost works, but not quite. After the necessary crash to end the pursuit we swing fully into Ridley Scott's corner with teeming ground-level streets and a seedy bar full of oddly dressed people.

There's some sort of plot development going on through all this, but it's not very important. What is important is that this movie tries very hard to drop little nuggets of joy for the aging Star Wars fan base. The first one occurs outside the aforementioned bar when a bounty hunter who looks an awful lot like the Boba Fett of Episodes IV-VI kills somebody and then zooms off with his nifty jet pack. It is at this point where the first real signs of plot strain begin to show.

Now for some reason Obi-Wan is going to a mysteriously undocumented planet to investigate whatever the hell it is that we're supposed to care about, while Anakin stays behind to give the screenwriter a convenient opportunity to have Amidala reciprocate Anakin's puppy love.

The mystery planet is actually a sterile looking clone factory run by tall, lizard necked folks. Hard to say which movie set is being cloned, since the sterile, white, space-based science facility has been done so many times before. It's probably safe to credit Kubrick with being the biggest victim of theft here. All the clones themselves look vaguely ethnic. Additionally, they are apparently the precursor to Stormtroopers. Basically, at the factory they quickly breed a bunch of brown-skinned people who are literally identical looking, dress them up in white armor, and now they represent a huge, sinister force. What exactly is George Lucas trying to say here?

The lizard-necked scientists are a bit daft and don't realize they are revealing details to the wrong person when they tell Obi-Wan that the clones were ordered 10 years ago by a supposedly long-dead Jedi. They are also oblivious to the error of revealing the presence of a bounty hunter and his cloned "son", named Jango and Boba Fett, respectively, at the station. People in technical professions like genetics and computer science are often socially and politically clueless that way, resulting in atrocities like nuclear weapons and peer-to-peer file sharing.

Jango and Obi-Wan have a tense little meeting where more plot details of some sort are revealed, including the fact that all the clones look just like Jango himself, and then they get into a fight. Neither one of them dies though, so they chase after each other in space ships instead.

Back in the world of sappy love stories, things are progressing quite slowly. Anakin is still behaving like the sort of teen you'd send to military school as punishment. This brings to mind another apparent failing of Jedi University. If they're so great at molding super-competent Jedi, how come they can't raise a teenager who isn't a whiny little brat?

Amidala stays cold and distant to the advances of "Ani", and it's hard to see how they're going to end up getting busy and squirting out two kids. Then, they kiss. Yes, that abruptly. First she couldn't care less, then she's probing for tonsils. Whatever caused her change of heart apparently got left on the editing room floor.

George Lucas seems to be awfully fond of himself, so eventually he starts cloning his own movies. First Anakin has a dream about his mother being in pain, so he disobeys his orders and goes off to help her (Luke, 1:2). Amidala tags along.

Of course helping Mom means dropping another joy nugget for the fans, so it's back to Tatooine yet again. We reminisce with Watto a bit, and then head out to an awfully familiar looking house. Yup, it's the same one where future whiny little Jedi wannabe Luke grows up, and we get to meet the aunt and uncle who will be so trivial in later movies. The plot strains become more noticeable.

But hey, what's the point of time spent on Tatooine of you don't get to see some Tusken Raiders? Seems they've kidnapped Anakin's mother, Shmi, so we get to bust a hang with a whole bunch of them. Hell, even the Jawas pop up for a cameo. Nothing like rehashing old ground when you can't come up with a decent plot device.

Oh yeah, Anakin's Mom dies in his arms just as he rescues her (how convenient), and then he goes bezerk and slaughters all the Tusken Raiders. Apparently this is bad. Even Yoda gets some negative Force vibes from it, and he's way on the other side of the galaxy.

Meanwhile, Obi-Wan's story line isn't doing much better. Lacking anything more exciting to do in a space chase, they fly into an asteroid field. They even venture into an asteroid tunnel. To be fair though, the absolute coolest part of the whole movie happens in this scene. See, Jango Fett has these bomb thingies, and he's hurling them at Obi-Wan's ship. Whenever one of them hits an asteroid and detonates everything goes dead silent for a half second and then a wonderfully flanged and modulated kwaaang! rings out while a pale blue shock wave radiates through space. Hearing that sound is almost worth the price of admission.

Somehow Obi-Wan ends up on a droid factory planet pursuing Jango and Boba and he gets caught by the dread Count Dooku/Darth Tyranus/Saruman the White/Christopher Lee. Count Doofus tells him about some plot involving the Senate and the separatists that is entirely too confusing for this sort of movie. In short, he asks Obi-Wan to join him, and Obi essentially tells him to go fuck himself. Count Doodu responds to the snubbing by amassing a huge army of orcs, er, droids, and leaving Obi-Wan trapped in a tower until he is rescued by a giant owl.

Over on Tatooine, Amidala is revealing herself to be quite the mischievous little minx, and she talks Anakin into going to save Obi-Wan. They arrive at the factory and proceed to battle their way through the exact same sorts of choppy, bashing mechanical bits that so flummoxed Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest. R2-D2 has no problems with them though because he has jet packs. I don't recall him having jet packs before. I imagine they would have been very useful if he had managed to hang onto them for his later adventures.

I wish I could say C3PO did as well as R2, but his head gets lopped off and installed on one of those battle droids, while a battle droid's head gets stuck onto 3PO's ungainly frame. I don't want to ruin the movie, but I must tell you that much hilarity ensues from this manufacturing gaffe. But this movie isn't about droids, it's about clones, so let's get back to those.

The next clone returns us to Ridley Scott territory. Anakin and Amidala get captured, and are joined with Obi-Wan in a gladiator arena (yes, a gladiator arena) where they are forced to fight animals and robots to the death. It is at this point where Natalie Portman's midriff begins to receive significant screen time.

Things go well at first, then our protagonists get into trouble as the robots multiply. All seems lost until Samuel Jackson's bald head strides in, accompanied by a whole bunch of other Jedi. Jedi and robot go at it in great numbers and there's lots of glowing phalluses being wielded about and much carnage. Jango Fett flies on into the fray only to get beheaded by Mace Windu. His young clone Boba seems to find this upsetting, and presumably he'll be holding a grudge for some time over this.

Things go well (again) until our protagonists get into trouble (again) as the robots multiply (again). The next turn in the battle occurs when Yoda comes strafing into the arena with several ships loaded with clones and utters his most absurdly spoken line ever: "Around the survivors a perimeter create!" It made me want to beat Frank Oz to death with a copy of Labyrinth.

As the arena battle winds down and everybody leaves to chase the fleeing Count Dooker we see Boba Fett cradling his progenitor's severed head. Somebody should get the kid some counseling or he's going to have some real issues later on.

After a rolling battle across the plains of... whatever planet they're on ...Doochu gets cornered by Anakin and Obi-Wan. As anybody who's ever seen one of the other Star Wars movies can tell you, it's light saber time.

Anakin attacks. Anakin gets tossed in the corner like a sack of dirty laundry. Obi-wan attacks. Obi-Wan gets beaten down like a filthy Scottish actor. Anakin attacks again, this time in the dark and with two glowing phalluses! He looks a lot like one of those irritating Rave kids waving glowsticks about, but he must've forgotten to take his vitamin E because he gets his hand chopped right off. Yes, his hand. The right one. Just like his future son. Oh, the anachronistic irony! This is profound stuff.

Our protagonists are once again in trouble and all seems lost (again) until... ninja Yoda!

He comes hobbling in on his cane looking a bit feeble, but oh is he pissed. After a short hand gesturing bit of "My Schwartz if bigger than yours" they get down to the wand waving. But Yoda doesn't grab his saber. Nosirree, he telekenesifies it from his belt to his wrinkled green paw. Yoda is one bad mother fucker.

He flips, he spins, he darts through the air like a mosquito on crack. If you watch Iron Monkey on fast forward it still won't come close to the acrobatics of this little gremlin. However, he doesn't win. He's forced to chose between killing Count Doosey and saving the other two Jedi from a falling pillar, and he lets the Count go. Despite his ninja skills, Yoda is a humanitarian at the core. The next shot shows the Count flying away in a ship powered by some sort of solar sail (the "hard science" geeks are going to love that bit).

As the movie draws to a close we see Anakin flexing his new prosthetic hand, just like Luke does in Episode V. It might be chilling if it weren't so contrived. When a screenwriter/director has a decade and a half to come up with a prequel you would expect him to conclude with something a little less obvious. But, that's what you get when you focus on joy nuggets of nostalgia for a pathetic group of emotionally underdeveloped adults.

Probably not, but we're going to take you through the movie anyway. Grab a bucket of popcorn and prepare yourself for the movie review of Star Wars: Episode II - The Attack of the Clones.

So the movie starts off with the requisite main score while the oddly skewed yellow text brings us up to speed on the goings-on in the galaxy. Something about unrest in the Senate, a separatist movement led by a "Count Dookie", Amidala being a Senator herself, yada yada yada. The main message is that the forced-perspective text looked lame as fuck in 1977, and seems downright abysmal 25 years later. One would think that with all the billions Lucas has made on the previous films he could afford a decent title sequence.

True to a movie made for kids and dysfunctional adults, we then jump right into the action. Senator Amidala is getting off her liqui-chrome spaceship on Coruscant when... kaboom! ...she blows up. Omigod, is she dead?!? Of course not, it was her stand in (you remember her from Episode I, right?). This scene provides a great opportunity for Natalie Portman to get all weepy over her dead assistant and show us that Amidala even cares for the little people. What an angel.

After that we see Yoda, Samuel "Mace Windu" Jackson and some freaky looking alien Jedi talking to Darth Sidious. Er, um, I mean Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, who of course is in no way connected to Mr. Sidious. I mean, he's obviously a good guy, right? Yeah, sure. If you paid any attention to Episodes IV-VI you already know who he is. Also, those subtle facial expressions and tones of voice suggesting devious intentions sure do lend an air of, shall we say, insidiousness, to him.

So do the Master Jedi Knights pick up on Palpatine's two-faced treachery? No. The eight year-old kids at the theater see it plain as day, but to the leaders of the Jedi Council, people who have undergone the most stringent of training for detecting such duplicity, people who have freakin' powers of mind control and are sitting right across the desk from this guy, to them Palpatine seems A-OK.

Anyway, the whole point of this scene is to set up Obi-Wan "Ewen McGregor looks goofy in a beard" Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker as Amidala's bodyguards since it seems like somebody is trying to kill her. Of course it is Palpatine who suggests this. My goodness, what sort of deviltry is he up to? We also briefly see Jar-Jar Binks stroll by in the background. No lines for him in this scene, though.

Prior to Amidala getting hooked up with her Jedi, we get to meet the two of them alone in an elevator. Anakin is now a moody teen and his pining for Natalie Portman's firm buttox is quite apparent. When the elevator door opens they are greeted by Jar-Jar and... he speaks! Nothing like a little racist, neo-Jamaican patois to tickle the funny bone.

Once the whole gang is reunited all the complex character development gets dumped, wholesale, in about 45 seconds of screen time. Obi-Wan is the wise yet caring teacher, Anakin is straining under the throes of pubescent hormonal lust and good old rebellion, while Amidala is distant yet maternal in her care for Anakin. Jar-Jar appears to be little more than house nigger.

The next scenes begin to suggest why Lucas chose Attack of the Clones as title for this movie. All of the visual imagery was stolen from other people's films. The super-dense high rise cityscape, complete with moody nighttime lighting through half-open blinds, is equal parts Blade Runner and The Fifth Elephant to such an obvious degree that it is painful. We get to zoom about this impossibly crowded aerial metropolis at high speeds in a futuristic flying car chase. It's all Luc Besson at this point, including people falling from building to vehicle. You could swap Hayden Christensen (Anakin) with Bruce Willis at any point and the transition would be seamless (admittedly, replacing McGregor with Milla Jovovich might be noticed).

During this chase Anakin and Obi-Wan banter amusingly and offer flip one-liners. It almost works, but not quite. After the necessary crash to end the pursuit we swing fully into Ridley Scott's corner with teeming ground-level streets and a seedy bar full of oddly dressed people.

There's some sort of plot development going on through all this, but it's not very important. What is important is that this movie tries very hard to drop little nuggets of joy for the aging Star Wars fan base. The first one occurs outside the aforementioned bar when a bounty hunter who looks an awful lot like the Boba Fett of Episodes IV-VI kills somebody and then zooms off with his nifty jet pack. It is at this point where the first real signs of plot strain begin to show.

Now for some reason Obi-Wan is going to a mysteriously undocumented planet to investigate whatever the hell it is that we're supposed to care about, while Anakin stays behind to give the screenwriter a convenient opportunity to have Amidala reciprocate Anakin's puppy love.

The mystery planet is actually a sterile looking clone factory run by tall, lizard necked folks. Hard to say which movie set is being cloned, since the sterile, white, space-based science facility has been done so many times before. It's probably safe to credit Kubrick with being the biggest victim of theft here. All the clones themselves look vaguely ethnic. Additionally, they are apparently the precursor to Stormtroopers. Basically, at the factory they quickly breed a bunch of brown-skinned people who are literally identical looking, dress them up in white armor, and now they represent a huge, sinister force. What exactly is George Lucas trying to say here?

The lizard-necked scientists are a bit daft and don't realize they are revealing details to the wrong person when they tell Obi-Wan that the clones were ordered 10 years ago by a supposedly long-dead Jedi. They are also oblivious to the error of revealing the presence of a bounty hunter and his cloned "son", named Jango and Boba Fett, respectively, at the station. People in technical professions like genetics and computer science are often socially and politically clueless that way, resulting in atrocities like nuclear weapons and peer-to-peer file sharing.

Jango and Obi-Wan have a tense little meeting where more plot details of some sort are revealed, including the fact that all the clones look just like Jango himself, and then they get into a fight. Neither one of them dies though, so they chase after each other in space ships instead.

Back in the world of sappy love stories, things are progressing quite slowly. Anakin is still behaving like the sort of teen you'd send to military school as punishment. This brings to mind another apparent failing of Jedi University. If they're so great at molding super-competent Jedi, how come they can't raise a teenager who isn't a whiny little brat?

Amidala stays cold and distant to the advances of "Ani", and it's hard to see how they're going to end up getting busy and squirting out two kids. Then, they kiss. Yes, that abruptly. First she couldn't care less, then she's probing for tonsils. Whatever caused her change of heart apparently got left on the editing room floor.

George Lucas seems to be awfully fond of himself, so eventually he starts cloning his own movies. First Anakin has a dream about his mother being in pain, so he disobeys his orders and goes off to help her (Luke, 1:2). Amidala tags along.

Of course helping Mom means dropping another joy nugget for the fans, so it's back to Tatooine yet again. We reminisce with Watto a bit, and then head out to an awfully familiar looking house. Yup, it's the same one where future whiny little Jedi wannabe Luke grows up, and we get to meet the aunt and uncle who will be so trivial in later movies. The plot strains become more noticeable.

But hey, what's the point of time spent on Tatooine of you don't get to see some Tusken Raiders? Seems they've kidnapped Anakin's mother, Shmi, so we get to bust a hang with a whole bunch of them. Hell, even the Jawas pop up for a cameo. Nothing like rehashing old ground when you can't come up with a decent plot device.

Oh yeah, Anakin's Mom dies in his arms just as he rescues her (how convenient), and then he goes bezerk and slaughters all the Tusken Raiders. Apparently this is bad. Even Yoda gets some negative Force vibes from it, and he's way on the other side of the galaxy.

Meanwhile, Obi-Wan's story line isn't doing much better. Lacking anything more exciting to do in a space chase, they fly into an asteroid field. They even venture into an asteroid tunnel. To be fair though, the absolute coolest part of the whole movie happens in this scene. See, Jango Fett has these bomb thingies, and he's hurling them at Obi-Wan's ship. Whenever one of them hits an asteroid and detonates everything goes dead silent for a half second and then a wonderfully flanged and modulated kwaaang! rings out while a pale blue shock wave radiates through space. Hearing that sound is almost worth the price of admission.

Somehow Obi-Wan ends up on a droid factory planet pursuing Jango and Boba and he gets caught by the dread Count Dooku/Darth Tyranus/Saruman the White/Christopher Lee. Count Doofus tells him about some plot involving the Senate and the separatists that is entirely too confusing for this sort of movie. In short, he asks Obi-Wan to join him, and Obi essentially tells him to go fuck himself. Count Doodu responds to the snubbing by amassing a huge army of orcs, er, droids, and leaving Obi-Wan trapped in a tower until he is rescued by a giant owl.

Over on Tatooine, Amidala is revealing herself to be quite the mischievous little minx, and she talks Anakin into going to save Obi-Wan. They arrive at the factory and proceed to battle their way through the exact same sorts of choppy, bashing mechanical bits that so flummoxed Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest. R2-D2 has no problems with them though because he has jet packs. I don't recall him having jet packs before. I imagine they would have been very useful if he had managed to hang onto them for his later adventures.

I wish I could say C3PO did as well as R2, but his head gets lopped off and installed on one of those battle droids, while a battle droid's head gets stuck onto 3PO's ungainly frame. I don't want to ruin the movie, but I must tell you that much hilarity ensues from this manufacturing gaffe. But this movie isn't about droids, it's about clones, so let's get back to those.

The next clone returns us to Ridley Scott territory. Anakin and Amidala get captured, and are joined with Obi-Wan in a gladiator arena (yes, a gladiator arena) where they are forced to fight animals and robots to the death. It is at this point where Natalie Portman's midriff begins to receive significant screen time.

Things go well at first, then our protagonists get into trouble as the robots multiply. All seems lost until Samuel Jackson's bald head strides in, accompanied by a whole bunch of other Jedi. Jedi and robot go at it in great numbers and there's lots of glowing phalluses being wielded about and much carnage. Jango Fett flies on into the fray only to get beheaded by Mace Windu. His young clone Boba seems to find this upsetting, and presumably he'll be holding a grudge for some time over this.

Things go well (again) until our protagonists get into trouble (again) as the robots multiply (again). The next turn in the battle occurs when Yoda comes strafing into the arena with several ships loaded with clones and utters his most absurdly spoken line ever: "Around the survivors a perimeter create!" It made me want to beat Frank Oz to death with a copy of Labyrinth.

As the arena battle winds down and everybody leaves to chase the fleeing Count Dooker we see Boba Fett cradling his progenitor's severed head. Somebody should get the kid some counseling or he's going to have some real issues later on.

After a rolling battle across the plains of... whatever planet they're on ...Doochu gets cornered by Anakin and Obi-Wan. As anybody who's ever seen one of the other Star Wars movies can tell you, it's light saber time.

Anakin attacks. Anakin gets tossed in the corner like a sack of dirty laundry. Obi-wan attacks. Obi-Wan gets beaten down like a filthy Scottish actor. Anakin attacks again, this time in the dark and with two glowing phalluses! He looks a lot like one of those irritating Rave kids waving glowsticks about, but he must've forgotten to take his vitamin E because he gets his hand chopped right off. Yes, his hand. The right one. Just like his future son. Oh, the anachronistic irony! This is profound stuff.

Our protagonists are once again in trouble and all seems lost (again) until... ninja Yoda!

He comes hobbling in on his cane looking a bit feeble, but oh is he pissed. After a short hand gesturing bit of "My Schwartz if bigger than yours" they get down to the wand waving. But Yoda doesn't grab his saber. Nosirree, he telekenesifies it from his belt to his wrinkled green paw. Yoda is one bad mother fucker.

He flips, he spins, he darts through the air like a mosquito on crack. If you watch Iron Monkey on fast forward it still won't come close to the acrobatics of this little gremlin. However, he doesn't win. He's forced to chose between killing Count Doosey and saving the other two Jedi from a falling pillar, and he lets the Count go. Despite his ninja skills, Yoda is a humanitarian at the core. The next shot shows the Count flying away in a ship powered by some sort of solar sail (the "hard science" geeks are going to love that bit).

As the movie draws to a close we see Anakin flexing his new prosthetic hand, just like Luke does in Episode V. It might be chilling if it weren't so contrived. When a screenwriter/director has a decade and a half to come up with a prequel you would expect him to conclude with something a little less obvious. But, that's what you get when you focus on joy nuggets of nostalgia for a pathetic group of emotionally underdeveloped adults.

Allow me to explain.

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.

What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.

Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.

More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.

It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.

It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.

Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!

One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.

Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.

Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.

Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.

Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.

The guy who wanted to drive a fortified SUV INTO a tornado shouldn't be allowed to breed. We will be hearing more about him in the Darwin awards, rest assured.

Look, I live in Tornado alley, and up to a few months ago lived in "pre-fabricated housing", a.k.a. a trailer home (a.k.a. "tornado bait"). I'm a part-time storm spotter, and I've seen the damage a "little" F-1 gustnado can cause, let alone an F-5 monster. An F-5 will quite literally suck the asphalt off a highway.

If I were out tooling around in, say, an M1A1 Abrahms Tank, and I saw a tornado coming, I would turn tail and run (at right angles to the path of the tornado) as fast as that tank's treads would take me. Wind speeds in the vortex of a tornado have been measured at OVER 300 miles per hour with Doppler radar. Even a tank will be blown over.

This fool, in his SUV, will be waking up wondering what all these midgets are doing around him. Either that, or wondering where all the harp music is coming from.

I just dodged around a storm last night trying to get home. By local standards it wasn't anything much, but it left the roads covered in hail, dropped over an inch of rain in thirty minutes, and had 60 MPH sustained winds. I was driving, listening to the two local storm spotter nets on 2 meters, and trying to spot the rain and hail shafts in the lightning. It wasn't fun.

I've seen the shows about tourists coming to the US to see a tornado - they spend 2 weeks driving from Texas to South Dakota to see a storm, covering over 3000 miles! Word of advice folks: just come over in the spring, and plan a normal vacation. See the
sights and enjoy yourselves. The tornados will find you. Trust me.

• There may be a remaining US-66 shield on an Interstate sign near Miami, OK. There were a couple of them in 1993 when I went through.
• One of the all-time legendary US roadside attractions: The Thing, in Cochise AZ. Cheap to get in, falls into the category of "We're here, we might as well do it."
• Cadillac Ranch, outside Amarillo, of course.

I travel across the country with a laptop several times a year. No AOL is not the best choice because when you get to a motel on the outskirts of East Testicle, you're not going to have any idea what the dialup number is, and you're not going to have any way to find out.

What you want is an ISP with an 800 number. These are free and usable from anywhere. The problem is that the isp will probably charge you extra to use it. Does www.thelist.com still have anything useful on it? Have a look.

As far as access goes: yes, every single motel in the country (except maybe in Utah where for some reason everyplace is the most god-awful shithole imaginable) has a phone connection you can jack in to.

But sometimes the connection from the phone to the wall is hardwired. In these cases, you can normally detach the handset from the phone. The screw here is that the handset jack is a different size from the wall jack. So it's helpful if you've made your own connector. We've got this pathetic but omnipresent chain of stores here called "Radio Shack". You can find one almost anywhere, and often, especially in small towns, the sales person will have a clue and be passibly helpful.

If you're making your own connectors, and want to be extra-sure, make one with a rj-11 on one end, for your modem, and a pair of alligator clips on the other. That way if all else fails you can take the mouthpiece off the phone and clip on there.

And one final thing: Almost every single truckstop in america has restaurants with telephones on the tables! Usually little black "princess" desk phones. Jack in while you're eating.

Truckstops:
Flying J -- Bad food, inexpensive petrol, infrequent table phones.
76 -- The best, and a dying breed. They seem to have been subsumed by T/A. Independently run, often excellent food, REAL expensive gas, and -always- table phones.
AM/BEST -- Awful. Stay away.
T/A -- Awful. Stay away.
Rip Griffins There are about 6 of these scattered around. Nice if you can find 'em. Table phones.
Petro -- Popping up everywhere. Good food, table phones.

Have a great trip, and check out www.roadtripamerica.com for some well-organized touristical adventures.