Ntuple Indemnity

If you pick one week to go completely broke, this may be it. Forget all the Christmas presents you plan to buy your friends and family – there are some personal priorities at hand.

The Two Towers is released in the form that everybody actually wanted it to be in from the start. Let It Be drops the willy-nilly frilly. Mario Kart finally comes to GameCube (and let’s not even get started on that Zelda anthology offer). Knights of the Old Republic arrives for the PC. Heck, a Homestar Runner CD comes out this week.

Go out and spend some money. I am, of course, excited enough about each and every one of these items to potentially review them at one point or another, though I’m saving The Two Towers and Mario Kart: Double Dash!! for a full home theatre experience, so I will be behind everyone else by around two weeks. I’ll live.

My wallet, however, might not.

Do you hear that in the distance? If you listen really carefully, you can hear the Unite the Right movement show a true sense of harmonious unity for the very first time.

Collectively, with deft synchronicity, Conservatives all over the country are saying: “Well… crap.”

In another random fit of nostalgia, I tried some of the trivia quizzes on the Peanuts website today and found the vast majority of the questions to be way too easy, excepting those founded on 1990s material – which I largely missed out on due to the strip’s mysterious lack of syndication in The Calgary Herald. The lack of Peanuts was and still is a major problem of that newspaper’s.

But lo and behold, the Internet is always so eager to provide a solution. This brings me to my honourable mention of Timothy Chow’s Peanuts Trivia Quizzes.

There are exactly two things about that website that scare me. The first is that I can actually answer a good portion of the obscurer questions. The second is that I find myself stumped by equally as many. Granted, I remember such characters as Eudora, Lila, 5, Truffles, Thibault and “Shut up and leave me alone” – if you have no idea who these are, go read some of the older anthologies – but then I encountered such questions as, “What proposed explanation for banning The Six Bunny-Wunnies Freak Out from the school library led Sally to quip, ‘In that case, they should also ban my math book!’?”

A completely unrelated news item: today marked the season-opening session of the University of Alberta Debate Society. It’s like returning to a second home.

There has been a dearth of updates and commentary here over the past two weeks, but rest assured, this site (as temporary an establishment as it may or may not be) is far from dead. Expect in the near future overdue reviews of both the most excellent Seabiscuit and the predictably mediocre The Cradle of Life, among other surprises that are hopefully at least somewhat surprising.

Straight from the BBC:

Star Wars video prompts lawsuit

Ghyslain Raza became known as the “Star Wars Kid” after a video of him using a golf ball retriever to emulate the light sabre slinging tricks of Darth Maul was posted on the net.

The video was hugely popular and some people even added effects to make the golf ball retriever look and sound like a light sabre.

But the public exposure of the clip proved a burden for Mr Raza, who has been through psychiatric care to cope with his unwanted publicity.

…

The lawsuit says that Mr Raza has had to endure harassment and derision from his school mates and the general public because of the publicity that the clip received.

It also says that Mr Raza is undergoing psychiatric care to cope with the publicity and reaction.

Lawyers for Mr Raza are claiming compensation of 225,000 Canadian dollars (£100,000) from the four boys who allegedly stole the video and put it online.

Personally, they really should put this kid in Episode III. He’s a martyr of the fan community, the first of the millions to be caught in the act of Star Wars fantasy.