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Antics at Vedauwoo
At last, my old childhood stomping ground is melted off and climbable! We headed up to Vedauwoo with our friend Alan to introduce him to climbing, and I eased back onto the lead on Easy Friction, 5.4. We all had a ball on this familiar slab, Easy Lieback 5.5, Cold Fingers 5.7, and Dropzone 5.9.…
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Movie: Bottle Rocket
I thought this was a refreshing, satirical break from the “crime movie” genre. The characters and the setup are ridiculous on one level, and very real on another. It’s light entertainment that, if you think about it, asks difficult questions about the nature of crime, justice, mental illness, love, friendsip, and cultural clashes.
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Movie: Heathers
This movie has only gotten better, and maybe more disturbing, since it was released in 1989. Since then Columbine and other high school killings have made this kind of satire even more taboo. And it is unnerving to wonder if the perpetrators of those attrocities found inspiration in the trenchcoat-clad Christian Slater character. Still, the…
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CCB website goes live with TYPO3
After sitting on it for a while, the Center for Computational Biology at the University of Colorado has gone live with the website I built for them. I reused the graphics from their previous website, but migrated the whole thing to the TYPO3 content management system, adding WYSIWYG editing, user registration, a multiple mailing list…
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Movie: The Big Lebowski
This was my second time around for this movie, Ann’s first. I think I liked it better this time. The Cohen brothers are just amazing at creating ludicrous, unreedeming, even annoying characters that are somehow facinating anyway – maybe because of the way they reflect truths from our world in such a dazzling, kaleidoscopic way.
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Reviews from the Boz
My old friend Roy Boswell kindly sent a batch of movie recommendations for me. A few of them are reviewed here too. Roy got rejected by my spam software – if this is happening to you please send me an email! I’m trying to find good settings for it. Read on for Roy’s reviews…
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Movie: Vanity Fair
Ann summed it up nicely the moment the movie ended, “So she fell out the bottom of one caste system into the top of another.” This film is based on the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, and like some of the movies based on Jane Austen and E.M. Forster books it left me grateful that…
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Morrison Bouldering
Another gorgeous, sunny day of Morrison bouldering. As beautiful as the weather was, I’m getting tired of hard overhanging problems. After a couple of nice warmups I flail the rest of the time on one or two moves. Ann may have had the right idea bagging the boulders and climbing up to the ridge with…
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Movie: Chino
For a low budget Western, this film manages to convey something unique. A lot of films have tried to capture the harsh beauty of the desert Southwest, the indominable spirit of wild horses, and unavoidable cruelty of wild west society, but this movie succeeds at these things in a way that manages to be captivating…
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Movie: I, Robot
A sci-fi flick inspired by Isaac Asimov’s short robot stories. It’s not bad – there are a lot of neat effects and a bit of exploration of Asimov’s “3 laws of robotics”. I was surprised to see a Fox movie criticize the idea of compromising freedom for security. It still doesn’t touch my favorite robot…