Watching Disney Movies as an Adult Part 2
Mood:  chatty
Topic: movies
A long while back (I don't remember which blog it was) I wrote about watching Roger Rabbit as an adult and getting a lot of jokes I didn't get before as a five year old. Cinderella just came out on DVD and I bought it for my wife since she collects Disney movies. While watching it last night, I realized something which didn't mean anything to me when I last saw Cinderella - the name of the cat.

If you remember from the last time you saw the movie, the cat was evil. Not only did it try and keep the mice from acquiring the parts for Cinderella's dress, but, when the Duke was about to leave, it wouldn't let Cinderella get the key to her room. The cat even purposely got the dog in trouble early on in the movie. The cat's name: Lucifer. Shocked you didn't remember that?

What better name for an evil character than the embodiment of evil Himself. Obviously to call him Satan would have been to obvious, but I don't think that Lucifer went over the heads of the adult audiences. Additionally, we must remember that at the time period when Cinderella was first release, many adults went to the movies to watch cartoons. The Disney cartoon was a family event, but it didn't preclude the adults from having fun.

If you look at the songs, plots, and characters, you can see that Disney was for older audiences. I guess that's when the tradition started and, even today, Disney movies always have some references for adults.

Yeah...what did you think would happen?
Mood:  chatty
Topic: News
Today's big news story, other than the Supreme Court stuff, involved the numbers from Detroit. Boy were they dissapointing! GM was down 25% from Sept last year and Ford was down 19% Toyota, on the other hand, had their best September EVER. Why? Well, it's pretty simple. Detroit was making all of their money on those gas guzzlin' SUVs while Toyota was focusing more on lighter cars and their Prius, which has been selling like bootleg DVDs on Canal Street.

I've been predicting (along with a few hundred thousand others) that this would happen as soon as gas got exepensive enough. With the cheapest gas around here coming in at $3.03 today (down from a high of $3.27), I don't blame people for avoiding SUVs like the plague. Maybe Katrina and Rita, while extremely devasting to many personal lives, are just the kick in the pants America needed to help it get off of oil. Let's hope our good old American ADD doesn't kick in and that we do something before prices go back down, allowing us to complain again next time they spike.

I give up, I think
Mood:  sad
Topic: Site Info
My current ISP doesn't allow me to run a server and I don't have the money to switch to an ISP that does. So, for now, unless I get alternative funding, I guess I'm going to come back to blogging here and having this be my permanent site. I'm pretty sad because I loved the independence of having my own site and blog. Being able to do pingbacks and trackbacks. Well, look to here for future posts.

instructions
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Site Info
I've decided that from now until I have to shut down my server, I'm going to be blogging with my server's blog It's A Binary World 2.0. Amongst other things, it automatically sends to some blog search engines whenever I've made a post and has led to 200 visits to my blog so far this month. So, from now on, go there to read my blog until I let you know that I'm going to have to shut down my server temporarily until late 2005.

I've made quite a few posts over the last few days so you should have plenty to read.

Quotes
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Quotes
"The truth is a hassle" - Mo Rocca

"This is the way I did it and it worked so I didn't think anymore" - Prof Land

"It's fun to program in assembler; so manly" - Prof Land

"I majored in the most unmarketable major of all: Sociology." - Alysha Cryer

more posts over in Binary World 2.0
May as well us it while it's available. Go to http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/blog/

Upgrading It's A Binary World 2
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Site Info
I have some new posts up on It's A Binary World 2 for you to check out. However, later today (in the evening) I will be upgrading the blog software. If you can't access the blog, just come back about 15 minutes later and it should all be set up.
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edit - messed up royally on the URL of the blog. It's fixed now.

Happy Valentine's Day
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Holidays
I have posted two different posts in my blogs today. So you get twice the fun. Access the other one here.

What is Saint Valentine's Day about anyway? I wanted to share this with you since I found myself wondering the same thing...

In researching the answer, I compiled facts from these three sources, Saint Valentine, Wikipedia Entry for Saint Valentine, and Wikipedia Entry for Lupercalia.

As the Wikipedia entry suggests, we know very little about Saint Valentine. Just like Saint Nicholous, it seems most of our holidays center around lesser known Saints. However, with Valentine even less is known. However, the British website does present us with some theories. Apparently, the Roman Emperor Claudius II had anulled all marriages and engagements in order to get men to go to war. I don't see what real effect this would have had on soldier morale. Just because someone declares my marriage invalid doesn't mean that I would stop loving my wife. It seems like the types of laws our Congress sometimes passes without thinking.

At any rate, such a law was not going to find a lot of popularity among the clerics of the early Christian church. Cancelling people's marriages probably had the unintended effect of "cheating" on wives since they were no longer wives, as well as some other potential societal and moral problems. Thus, the British site tells us, Saint Valentine performs underground marriages.

The Emporer catches wind of these covert operations and when the Saint doesn't recant, he is martyred. Conviniently, since he was performing marriages and other love things, he is killed on 14 Feb which is the day, in ancient Roman culture, where boys would draw girl's names from a pot and get to be with that girl all night at the festival. They would often end up getting married from this interaction.

As I pick up from the Wikipedia article, it is more likely that the date was fabricated by the early Catholic church eager to replace Lupercalia with a Saint's Feast Day as they had done with Easter and Christmas. Since his deeds had to do with love, they chose him to replace the Roman celebration of fertility and love.

In the 1800s in the United States, the holiday was commercialized and now we send each other cards and chocolate. Just like the Easter Bunny and certain elements of Christmas don't make sense outside of commercialism and a reversion to the pagan holidays they were meant to replace, Saint Valentine's Day has very little to do with this mysterious man.

g33k stuff
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Linux
First of all, I'm pretty happy that Linux Format Magazine (UK) ranked my distro, Fedora Core 3, as the second best of all the distros. Additionally, they expect it to edge into the number 1 spot with the release of Core 4 this may. q:o) More info on those reviews in a future post.

Second, if you're programming in the C programming language you will definitely want to check out Kwrite. My partner in ECE 476 was using some expensive commercial software that does some special formatting and apparently Kwrite does it too! For example, I can shrink down block statements to get a good overview of the code by clicking on a [-]. Neat!

Today's post can be found in my other blog
go here