Ripped from Slashdot's rip from someone else.

So Slashdot is reporting that the Hollywood Reporter is reporting on finalized cast selections for the too-long-delayed Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy Movie.

Mos Def as Ford Prefect: I don't know if I like this. A black Ford Prefect? Oddly, the mental picture I always had of Ford looked a lot like Tony Blair. Don't ask me why.
Zooey Deschanel as Trillian: OK, this one I can see. She's cute, but she can pull off a spacey vibe.
Steven Moore as the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android: He was the voice of Marvin in the BBC miniseries, which I last saw several years ago. I liked him. "Here I am, brain the size of a planet..."
Martin Freeman as Arthur Philip Dent: Eh, close enough.

As for production credits, I wish they'd gotten this done before Douglas Adams died. It's hard to exercise creative control posthumously. But they do have Jay Roach on board. Groovy, baby!

And what about the unannounced cast members? Here are some completely hypothetical picks:

Zaphod Beeblebrox the First: Denis Leary. He's already lived as much of Zaphod's life as one can with only one head and no space transportation.
Slartibartfast: Ian McKellan. He's beyond perfect. Make Gandalf a little more disheveled and you have Slartibartfast. Alternatively, maybe Christopher Lee. But he has too much of an Evil thing going.
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz: Danny DeVito. Seriously. Vogons aren't great warriors, they're bureaucrats. Jeltz is the foreman of a construction crew whose bulldozer happens to be big enough to destroy planets. He can also play L. Prosser, since they're essentially the same character on two different scales, and Jeltz will have heavy makeup.


OK, go about your business. But beware of the leopard.

5:49 PM

Evil-Doers tremble in fear of the POWER OF CAKE!

I wonder if there has ever been a serious cartoon about people with outlandish superpowers. Like Cake-Man, whom I've mentioned already.
What about a man who can turn into a ferret. Just a ferret. And someone who can turn invisible, but only in the context of a game of hide-and-seek. And a woman who can prompt people to tell the absolute truth, in "rap" format, by poking them with a magic pencil. And someone with a complete resistance to beer. Not all alcohol, just beer. And a person with the power to plant phantom smells in someone's mind.
This has potential.

11:15 PM

Target cares about your safety.

Isn't it just fricking beautiful...

Target is doing an awesome job clearing the parking lot. NOT!
It's not a "parking lot" so much as a "field of death."

4:26 PM

Have I mentioned that I am the king of the road? I just drove a car with six inches of ground clearance out of a parking lot covered in four inches of snow. W00T!

3:35 PM

Inane question of the day...

Why is there no such thing as "popcorn beef?"
There's "popcorn chicken."
Long John Silver's has "popcorn fish."
Why doesn't anyone have "popcorn beef?"

It's my idea now. Anyone wants to make it, they have to pay me.
Unless someone else thought of it first. I'm doing a cursory search for prior art right now.

10:09 PM

Society Improvement Plan Number 357-C

Parking outside the lines should be punished. Instantly.
Therefore, a few inches outside the delineated parking area, retractable laser-forcefield emitters will be placed in a compartment under the asphalt.

So if someone parks like this:


Then the laser emitters will pop up just outside the allowed parking zone, like this:


And the portion of the vehicle that is removed will be carried away by automated parking lot attendant robots, leaving a "corrected" parking job in their wake:


Anyone thus punished will not be allowed to have their car repaired, and they will not be allowed to purchase, borrow, or rent another car for at least a year. If they are pulled over in any other vehicle and their license is tied to a "sliced" vehicle, they will be summarily executed by the police officer. Citizens will be encouraged to throw tomatoes at sliced vehicles to further degrade the owner's self esteem.

After the punishment period ends, and he or she (probably she) is allowed to buy another vehicle, the offender will park properly for the rest of her life.

8:12 PM

Is it weird that whenever I see a car identical to the one I'm driving, I check the license plate to make sure it's not an parallel- or time-displaced version of myself?

Yeah, I guess it is.

5:54 PM

Retail Logic

Logical box construction: Identical handholds on all four vertical sides or on two opposite sides.
Compaq® brand box construction: One big handhold on one side, one small handhold on the clockwise-adjacent side.
I imagine the product packaging department at Compaq is full of thick-skulled union morons. I also imagine the discussion on box design probably included the line "we don' need none-a dat fancy er-go-nomical bullshit!"

7:26 PM

I should be president.

I love politics. I don't have the attention span required to really learn about them in depth, but as Sideshow Mel once said, "my opinions are as valid as the next man!"

Ennywho, here's my prediction for the presidential race:

Kerry vs. Bush in November. I was thinking Clark, but I defer to my boss's judgment on this one.
Bush will win a clear majority of the popular and electoral vote.
He won't win Florida. Old people will actually follow instructions this time. But he will win California.
The Demon-crats will commit voter fraud as usual. It won't help.
The Democraps will also try legal trickery, like they did in Y2K. It won't help.
The Pussycrats will then spend another four years whining. Fuck 'em.


Also, Wesley Clark is the Anti-Christ. I just figured this out. Basil Exposition once played him in one of those low-budget Armageddon movies.


I'm kind of annoyed at Blogspot right now, because whenever I try to put files in a subdirectory of my site, it says "service unavailable" two out of every three times you try to load that file. So images will have to stay in the main directory. It just looks so untidy when I look at it in WS_FTP. Stupid virtual hosting.
I am still going ahead with the spell-checking though. With w.bloggar, I can edit posts by ID number.
I don't know why I do these things. Nobody visits my site anyway. It's just a place for me to vent without bothering anyone.


I wonder what it would be like to have the power to materialize cake out of thin air. Nothing else, just cake. Say there's a freak accident, and a bunch of people get super powers. One can fly, another can breathe underwater, the third gets x-ray vision, and the fourth one gets the power to summon cake.

I like that idea, actually. I think that Cake-Man would be the most popular of the four.


I want to be a director, just so I can tell talented people to make the music I want. Like I could call up John Williams and say, "I need some good music for a megalomaniac. Entrance music, background music, exit music, and fight music. Do it NOW! I COMMAND YOU!"


I'm going to get a pocket watch. And a cane. I don't have enough eccentric affectations.
No, not really. No hats, either. But I do need some black leather gloves to go with my dead cow skin.
Actually, I use my phone like a pocket watch. It's kind of cool, now that I have the "communicator flip" perfected.

12:08 AM

I particularly like my phone's "service light" feature. Turning it on causes the green light to blink at random. It's totally useless. They should have just called it the "blink green light at random" feature. I think a lot of people would use it.

1:04 PM

Time, time, time, for another peaceful war.

Peasant! Why aren't you out celebrating The Birthday?!

That's what January 16th will be called when the Reign of Terror begins. The Birthday and Anti-Christmas (June 25) will be two new global holidays.

A couple of other people born on January 16:
Danni Ashe (1968): I don't like Danni Ashe. Anyone who has tits as nice as hers but won't do hardcore is not someone who will survive the revolution unscathed.
Aaliyah (1979): I'm not at all sad that she's dead.
Eva Habermann (1976): Lexx was a decent series, and Eva Habermann is hot. But Xenia Seeberg is hotter.
Kate Moss (1974): Makes me want to puke. Shouldn't be famous. On The List.
Dr. Laura Schlessinger (1947): Her continued existence offends me. I'm going to have her declared a nonperson, so her being born on January 16th will not have ever officially happened.
John Carpenter (1948): Escape from New York is a masterpiece. And the later Halloween films aren't his fault.


Here are some more notes and such that I keep forgetting to post...

This Blog has had entire months go by, June 2002 for example, without making any spelling errors. This is not one of tehm.


There's obviously no way to add remote electrocution to the current phone system. That's a beautiful dream, but it's just not going to happen. So when I become Imperious Leader, I shall order a redesign of the phone system that includes this feature. Every phone that's able to work at all, cellular or hardline, will be capable of either electrocuting or exploding on command, and only authorized users will get the electrocution control. Anyone who is skilled enough to hack/phreak themselves the authority to activate the RKP (Remote Kill Protocol) will probably deserve to have it anyway.


The Hat of Fate has ordered the destruction of all red leather LEFT shoes west of the Mississippi.


Even I can't decide between "gray" and "grey."


Why couldn't Clark Kent build up a tolerance to Kryptonite?


In May 2002, I said a certain movie had "screamed SEQUEL at us at the top of their lungs and then beat the point home with a brick."
What movie was I talking about?
Is it, maybe, the one with an overblown, unnecessary sequel about to come out?


I can't believe Chevrolet actually produced the SSR. It's a lot ugly.


Since restoring connectivity to the Lair, I've downloaded an average of 4.43 megs of fresh porn every day.


I need a domain name. Suggestions?

10:26 PM

Evil Backlog.

While I've been working on back-end issues, I've had a backlog of evil ideas. Here are a few:

Evil World Domination Idea Number 62½: In order to rapidly acquire naval protection for the Island Fortress of Not-Goodness, we will take over the Carnival Corporation and militarize its fleet of seventy ships. Most of the ships won't even need to be renamed, like the Glory, Victory, Pride, Triumph, Conquest, and so on. The Queen Mary II will be my flagship. My working name for it is the K.E.V. Better Than You. The QE2 will be renamed the K.E.V. You All Suck and the Queen Victoria will be called the K.E.V. Eat Shit And Die. They will all fly my military's flag of two raised middle fingers on a plain black background.


I think it should be possible to perform surgery on people that will render them able to speak normally but unable to yell. I think this should be done to every living human being.


Evil World Domination Idea number 17: All Evil World Domination ideas will be randomly numbered.


When I rule the world, every store will be required to reassign the best handicapped parking spot as a "Kip Only" spot. It will be marked with a giant "K," and only I or those who earn the Kip Spot Parking sticker will be allowed to park there. Violators will have both legs amputated, and will NOT be given handicapped parking status.

6:13 PM

Closed due to good weather.

I'm working on a pretty significant re-structuring of The Blog. Too bad the changes will be invisible to normal people.

Dick Gephardt said we're in "a deadly quagmire in the sands of Iraq, with no exit strategy and scant international support."
No international support??? What about Estonia! And Slovakia AND Slovenia!

I presume by now everyone I know has seen the cheese laser. The next logical step, of course, is the Ronco Cheese-o-Tron.
"Just insert a stack of slices in the hopper, install the pattern cartridge, then set it..."
"...And forget it!"
"And in just five minutes you have a stack of precision-cut cheese pieces that you can use for appetizers, kids' lunches..."

9:17 AM

Paranoia is a sign of intelligence.

I hate children. Have I ever mentioned this?
I was a child once. For about two years. Then I realized how much I hate children, so I stopped being one.


Apollo 14 was the first manned moon landing. Apollo 11 and 12 were staged. Apollo 13 was going to be the first real one, but they screwed it up. Still got good ratings from it, though.


Giving meat as a gift is a great idea. A brilliant idea. Omaha Steaks and Hickory Farms are two companies that will survive the wave of purges and confiscations that will occur when I come to power, for they are not naughty in My sight.


They always say "you can't compare apples and oranges." But you can. In fact, I will do so now: "Oranges are better than apples."


I must remember to bring a pineapple next time I visit my mother.
That reminds me...


The Birthday of The Kip is January 16th! You have less than a week to prepare to celebrate this soon-to-be national holiday. In lieu of gifts, I would prefer cash.


This is the new screensaver on The Phone of Kip:

I figure I'll offend about 49% of the customers I show it to.

To get this on your phone, save this image to disk:

Then upload it to your phone with this tool:
http://rumkin.com/tools/sprint/upload.php
Width/Height is 128x112, which is perfect for the VGA1000. If you want a different size, do it yourself.

6:33 PM

YOU WILL FAIL. THEN YOU WILL DIE.

I consider it my duty to teach people that they are not as important as they think they are.

THE EYE IS WATCHING YOU.

10:48 PM

I feel like dancing. Wait... no I don't.

IT WORKS! IT WORKS! If I was the active type, I'd do the dance of joy.

5:23 PM

Something new! This is a wireless blog! The Kip is Blogging from the VGA1000 with a beautiful widget named Kablog. If I see that this has worked, and I have no doubt it will, then the weird shall flow in new ways and from new places...

5:16 PM

This is Tom.


This is Tom. TOM WANTS BLOOD.

8:46 PM

Quod erat demonstrandum...

As I predicted, I've not been taking many pictures with my newfangled camera phone. Good thing I didn't get the one that cost twice as much to do the same things.

I want retractable claws, like Wolverine. I really do. Not to use on anyone, just to make them nervous. Like when some old person starts going on about how we should still carry vacuum tubes. I'd just extend and retract my claws a few times while I continue to nod along to their rambling. "What? (ka-chink) Oh, the claws? (ka-chink) Just a nervous tic. Do go on, don't let me interrupt you (ka-chink, ka-chink)."

We stopped carrying DirecTV on 12/31. Not that this fact should interest anyone I know, but dismantling the displays liberated a very nice piece of pipe. It's about a foot long, an inch and a half wide, and made of heavy gauge steel (I think. It's magnetic, whatever it is). We almost threw it out. Now it's mine. I need a name for him. I'm thinking "Tom."
"Tom thinks you need to stop pushing buttons you don't understand. Who's Tom? THIS IS TOM! (THWACK THWACK THWACK THWACK!!!!!)"

7:52 PM