10 Most Bizarre Films of All Times

I ran across this list of the 10 most bizarre films of all times: Blogcritics.org: Retro 10 List: Bizarre Films. I've seen about half of them, and liked them all. I read Mulholland Drive, and both read the book and saw the movie for A Clockwork Orange and Naked Lunch.

I might add:
Memento (!!!)
Brazil
Natural Born Killers
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
Eraserhead
Pink Flamingoes
Eating Raoul
Jacob's Ladder (not that bizarre, really)
Bukaroo Banzai
Shakes the Clown

Give me your votes.

Late.

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

Football Weekend 2005

The 2005 football weekend will be held in Green Bay, Wisconsin the weekend of November 19-20. The game will be the Packers hosting the Vikings on Monday Night Football on November 21.

Todd is in preliminary negotiations for the game tickets. I am currently developing a list of activities, but I think tailgating on Monday evening is a must. I need everyone’s confirmation on travel before we book flights and hotels. I am assuming that we would travel on Saturday the 19th, have an activity on Sunday, and go to the game Monday, returning home Tuesday, the 22nd.There is a Marriott Residence Inn within walking distance of both Lambeau Field and the Packers Hall of Fame. I assume that someone has Marriott connections and can help with the reservations.

More information will be forthcoming.

Late.

Hey Nostradamus!: A Novel by Douglas Coupland

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Spring Crawfish Festival

I went to the Texas Crawfish Festival (formerly known as the Spring Crawfish Festival) last night with Rick and Claire and Aaron and Elissa. We met Roy there, a high-school buddy of Rick's and mine. Lots of fun, the music was good, and the crawfish were pretty good, even compared to all the crawfish I ate in Lafayette during my technician meetings.

Claire had heard that there were roving bands of Goths, but we only saw a couple of isolated ones, some may have even been posers.

Late.

The Second Trip by Robert Silverberg

Eastern Standard Tribe by Corey Doctorow

Robin

I'm in Austin on business, and I went out with my friend Tony last night. I gave Robin (my skiing partner) a call, too, since she lives in Austin, and is usually up for any social activities. I didn't hear from her until today, because she had emergency appendectomy surgery! She seems okay, and she said that her appendix wasn't the problem, though they took it out anyway. She had so much pain that she nearly passed out while driving to the hospital. They're not sure what the problem was (is?) but she seems to be okay now.

It just goes to show the lengths that she'll go to avoid seeing me.

Late.

Townes Van Zandt

I was cleaning out some old stuff on my TiVo when I ran across an old episode of Austin City Limits. The show was a tribute to Townes Van Zandt, filmed in 1998, with Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Klein Bearkat Lyle Lovett, Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, Nanci Griffith, Steve Earle, Peter Rowan, producer Jack Clement, and Van Zandt's oldest son, John T. Van Zandt.

Music has the ability to pierce the soul, at least for me, more than any other medium. I was watching Steve Earl play "Fort Worth Blues," a song he had written shortly after Townes died on New Year's Day 1997, and the camera panned over to Nanci Griffith, and there were tears streaming down her face. I watched the rest of the show the same way. The songs were phenomenal, and the musicians were some of my favorites. Townes was a songwriter's songwriter, and musicians are still recording his music. Norah Jones has included several . One of the funniest things on the show was a friend of Townes that quoted him as saying "there's only two kinds of music. Blues, and zip-a-dee-doo-dah". That kind of sums up the moods of his songs, many of which were dark and brooding, but even the more upbeat songs had an undercurrent of loneliness.



Photo by Scott Newton for Austin City Limits

Update on site update (from the Department of Redundancy Department)

I've only managed to update two of the pages (the Site History and the What's New) and I managed to screw up both of those (I created a new Chinese Spam page, but haven't saved all the new spam that I've received, and I had a typo in the What's New page that I fixed in the blog entry)

I created a template for all the paged based on the Blogger template, which is backwards from the way I normally do it. I had a couple of false starts, since the Blogger page is so complex, with all the conditional codes in there, that the first two templates I created had errors that I didn't discover until I had already used them to convert a couple of the other pages. So this time I only converted a couple, to do some testing before I converted everything. And now that I'm pretty sure that it's right, I haven't started converting the rest. This might be a weekend task.

I'm going to Austin next week, for a conference. Should be fun to see some of the old stomping grounds.

Late.

Drew 3.0 Release!

I’ve been talking about redesigning the site, mainly the home page, for a couple of months now, and I’ve finally come close enough to put it out there. I combined the blog with the home page, so you just go to hevle.com to see what's up. I also integrated multiple blots on the home page ("What I'm Reading Now" and "What I'm Reading Now [for Book Club]") that will allow me to easily update using Blogger. The "Today's Quiz" and "Today's Poll" had to go; there was no easy way for me to update these. Down the road, I'm going to use this strategy on the Books page. There’s a slightly new format, wider, with more subdued colors.

I also better implemented some of the features of Blogger, like:
- Individual post links (just click on the hyperlink at the bottom of the post, shown as the time of posting)
- Automatically generated list of recent posts
- Automatically generated archive pages
- RSS syndication (that’s the “feeds” section)
- Contextual titles and menus - The same template builds dozens of different web pages, not just the home page, and they need to look different, so there’s a bunch of code in the Blogger template to do this. The template is hosted on Blogger's site, and Blogger builds and uploads each of the pages on my server when I add a post, or change the template.

I also allowed comments on the blog posts as well. My fear in allowing comments was not that I'd receive negative comments, but that I won't receive any comments at all, and at the bottom of every post, you'll see "0 comments"


Late.

Multiple blogs

I've been talking about redesigning the site, mainly the home page, for a couple of months now, and I've finally come close enough to put it out there. I combined the blog with the home page, so you just go to hevle.com to see what's up. I also integrated multiple blots on the home page ("What I'm Reading Now" and "What I'm Reading Now [for Book Club]") that will allow me to easily update using Blogger. The "Today's Quiz" and "Today's Poll" had to go; there was no easy way for me to update these. Down the road, I'm going to use this strategy on the Books page. There's a slightly new format, wider, with more subdued colors.

I also better implemented some of the features of Blogger, like:
- Individual post links (just click on the hyperlink at the bottom of the post, shown as the time of posting)
- Automatically generated list of recent posts
- Automatically generated archive pages
- RSS syndication (that's the "feeds" section)
- Contextual titles and menus - The same template builds dozens of different web pages, not just the home page, and they need to look different, so there's a bunch of code in the Blogger template to do this. The template is hosted on Blogger's site, and Blogger builds and uploads each of the pages on my server when I add a post, or change the template.

I also allowed comments on the blog posts as well. My fear in allowing comments was not that I'd receive negative comments, but that I won't receive any comments at all, and at the bottom of every post, you'll see "0 comments".

site history

Reformatted existing pages, combined Blog page with home page, combined multiple Blogs on the home page to include What I’m Reading and What I’m Reading For Book Club. Added new features, updated What’s New and Site History pages.

My Friend Brian Camfield Sucks

My friend Brian Camfield complained that one of the items that comes up when he Googles his name is an email on my website that lists his email address as "Brian Camfield (who sucks). Brian and I worked together at FERA, and he sent me this picture on Tuesday, July 19, 1994, one of his first days working there. At FERA, we all went by initials; Brian was BMC, I was AGH.



p.s. Brian Camfield sucks

Late.

Response to Spammers

I was going through some old emails, looking for a particular old email to put on the blog, when I ran across this one:

----------
From: E-mail magnum
Sent: Monday, June 02, 1997 03:39
To: you@SWBELL.net
Subject:Why does everyone make money but me?

House wifes
High School Students
College Students
Professionals
( Anyone can make money all you need is a home computer )

One of the most expensive things to get on the internet is good e-mail addresses. Why? Because good e-mail addresses can make the average computer owner a great deal of money. Let me give you an example, a average computer owner sent letters to over
4 million people he received a 3% responce on slaes that means his $10-$20 prepaid phone cards were sold to over $40,000 people you do the math. An internet directory says their receiving a 10% responce. There selling a $20 product. That means every 1
,000 addresses they send out they receive about 100 responces. That means there making $2,000 for about 2 hours worth of work, wouldn't that be nice!

These lists can run hundreds of dollars and up. For the first time the averagecomputer owner can afford to get into this thriving bussiness oppurtunity. We will e-mail you over 2 million addresses, yes 2 million!!!! Imagine if you could sell over 2 m
illion people your product for only $29.95. You can't afford not to get these names even if you don't have a product yet. This is a limited offer and you won't find this many GOOD e-mail addresses at this price ever again.

Contact us at:

winnero1@Juno.com

______________________________________________
From: Andrew Hevle
Sent: Monday, June 02, 1997 12:58 PM
To: E-mail magnum
Subject:RE: Why does everyone make money but me?

Dear E-mail Magnum,

One of the nice things about being a computer owner is making use of the computer to do things that the computer owner cannot; for example, spelling. Most computers have a spell checking function which allows you to avoid embarrassing errors such as:
house wifes (housewives)
responce (response)
slaes (sales)
bussiness (business)
oppurtunity (opportunity)

Many more errors such as this can make people thing you are a moron, and not someone who can help them become rich.

You're welcome,
Drew

Late.

Drew 3.0 Beta

Check out the newly designed home page here. It's still a work in progress (see how the links are different colors, some are underlined and others aren't). I'm also still working on the server side includes (the code that updates the "What I'm Reading Now" and "What I'm Reading Now For Book Club"). [note from Drew: this is now the current home page]

And finally, the images are not showing up for my profile (upper right hand box labeled "Drew Hevle"). This is an artifact of the conversion from Word to HTML. Yes, I'm still using MS Word to lay out the pages.

Once I get all these corrected, I'll need to update the blog archives page, the Books page with the new server includes (it will automate the last books read list) and change the menu on every page to eliminate the blog link and to change the link to the home page (it has the extension .PHP now, so that the server runs the code.)

And, it really is late now, so I'm going to finish all this stuff up later this week.

Monday Update: All the formatting is complete, so all I need to do is correct the other pages' menus to reflect the new home page extension. It should be the home page in just a couple of days.

Late.

The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3) by Neal Stephenson

Fourth redesign (drew 3.1), circa april, 2005

third redesign (drew 3.0), circa april, 2005