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After reading a scathing review of the Hugh Jackman/Kate Beckinsale movie Van Helsing, which differed from my own experience more in reaction than in fact (mine was much closer to the experience excellently summarized by sekl—which makes sense, considering I was two seats away), I started thinking about just why I enjoyed the movie.

Because, to be honest, it was terrible.

But terrible in a strangely entertaining way.

While watching it, I thought—many times—that this is what happens when you put every cliché you can think of into one movie. (“Oh, of course the road goes along the edge of a cliff!”) Depending on your mood, it could be the most tedious or most hilarious thing you’ve ever seen. I also spent most of the movie trying to figure out whether or not it was intended to be a comedy.

And thinking back on that, it hit me. Van Helsing is the monster movie equivalent of The Eye of Argon.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, The Eye of Argon is reputed to be the worst fantasy story ever written. It’s the tale of the barbarian Grignr and his quest to steal the titular jewel, filled with cruel swordsmen, an evil wizard, disgusting creatures and a beautiful, captive princess, written with prose so purple it’s a wonder it doesn’t creep into the ultraviolet. And yet, reading it, you can never be sure whether it’s intentional parody or an earnest effort by someone who just didn’t realize how bad it was.

Traditionally, Eye of Argon is read as a group, each person trying to keep a straight face as long as possible and passing it on to the next once he or she bursts out laughing. Sometimes getting through a whole sentence about “livid wilderness lands” or “keen auditory organs” is a real challenge!

Read The Eye of Argon… if you dare!

Edited June 19: The the site I originally linked to has vanished, so I’ve re-linked to a copy that’s still up.

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In light of the recent announcement of boxed sets of the original Star Trek (Region 2, but Region 1 sets are on their way next year), I found myself thinking of some of the fizzier nicknames for the shows.

Since Next Gen came out just a few years after the New Coke fiasco, the names Classic Trek and New Trek stuck. Early in DS9’s life I remember hearing someone refer to Diet Cherry Trek. Which leads to an obvious question:

What types of soft drink are Voyager and Enterprise?

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I just received spam advertising a book about fascism. It’s not your typical spam — it just looks like the introduction to a book, placed in email and sent — unsolicited of course — to random people around the net. It was fairly well written and not obfuscated, so it didn’t trigger much in the way of spam filters. (The great irony is that by misspelling and breaking up words to get past filters, spammers are making it easier for people to spot, making themselves look horribly unprofessional — would you really trust the product from someone selling “druuugs?” — and creating new, definite spam signs. When you see 10 drug names all misspelled with strange symbols, you know it’s either a spammer or a 14-year-old IRC junkie trying to be L337.)

They even made the effort to include a full plain-text equivalent alongside the HTML version, for the benefit of people who don’t trust or can’t read HTML mail.

And that brings me to the funny part, this statement from the plain-text version:

If your e-mail software does not support html, please click here.

Two problems: aside from violating W3C QA guidelines on link text, it makes no sense, because there’s nothing to click on!

They tried. They really tried. But they forgot to ask whether I actually wanted to be on their mailing list. (Oh, and the “click here” thing was funny.)

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Last night’s mutual cyber-binge after only two days away from the keyboard was the kicker: If we’re going anywhere for two weeks, we’ll want to bring a computer along.

And so tonight I finally ordered a dual-boot PowerBook from TerraSoft. We’re splitting the cost as a combined wedding and belated/early birthday present to each other.

Sometime this weekend, we’ll have a new computer in the house!

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On our way out of Laguna Beach, we ended up on a side street parallelling PCH. Fortunately, we spotted this gem of a corner shopping center:

Just an ordinary corner shopping center - with a name out of Middle Earth
Just an ordinary corner shopping center – with a name out of Middle Earth

Now, the nearby city of Lake Forest has had Tolkien-named streets for years (Gondor, Elrond, and others), and of course UCI has its Middle Earth dorm complex. I have no idea how long this one has been there, but it’s interesting to think that we never would have found it if we’d been able to make a left turn out of the hotel parking lot!

Update: Cross streets are Calliope and Glenneyre