A Line Has Been Drawn

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace. - Oscar Wilde



In the spirit of Mr. Wilde, Amsterdam has drawn a line. They have declared that the current sale of 'undesirable goods and services' has gotten out of hand. The first step in enforcing the new moral line occurred yesterday when a non-profit group bought out one of the cities largest entrepreneurs.

They dropped $35 million on Prostitute Windows.

A Prostitute Window is exactly as it sounds, a window in which a prostitute is posing, and is what makes the Red Light district so famous. The purchased Windows represent a third of the red light district. That third will be converted into apartments and regular store fronts constituting an estimated $21 million loss in real estate value.

While the district and the related industry will still be legal, it will be experiencing some shrinkage.

The New Annoyance

Bad Engineers!!! Bad!! Go sit in time out.

Brought to you by the same idiots who invented the keychain laser pointer, I give you the cell phone projector!



Now, instead of little red dots on movie screens, we'll get prOn.

Napster Strikes Back

Arrrrgggg, I've got this ridiculous song stuck in my head. My normal method of expunging songs is to repeatedly listen to them. Eventually, my head has had enough and gives up.

Anyway, I thought this would be a good excuse to point everyone to a particularly useful site. It's a wonderland of modern music where you can listen to any song in its entirety. You can listen as many times as you'd like, and it's free.

Now before you start preaching, it appears to be legal too. I'm not sure how, but Napster has risen from its ashes to present music as it should be. Take a gander, and hunt out some good music.

You deserve it.

Wheel of Time

One of this generations greatest fantasy authors died yesterday of amyloidosis. Robert Jordan was in the midst of writing the 12th and final book in the Wheel of Time series. He has passed his notes to his wife and publisher.

The series is an excellent read if you can make it though the 10,000 pages. Written around the classic fantasy cliché of farm boy rising to be king, Jordan manages to make the story fresh and engaging. Millions of readers, including myself, shall be anxiously awaiting the conclusion. Hopefully his wife and publisher can find someone to finish the tale.

The Engineer

Man, The Orange Box is getting closer, and I'm getting all excitable. One of the 3 games packaged in this beauty is Team Fortress 2, a stylish team based FPS.

Valve has been releasing profiles of the various character classes, and they just released the Engineer.



The Soldier and the Heavy are also available.

MPAA

I recently watched This Film Is Not Yet Rated which is a documentary of how movies are rated by the MPAA. When I watch these flicks I expect to be outraged. I expect there to be dirty nasty secrets, but in whole I wasn't shocked. It really didn't convince me to stand up and shout about the horrors of the MPAA.

The main complaint of the film is how secret the organization keeps its inner workings. Film makers are not allowed to know the identities of the raters nor the appeals board. There also isn't any kind of written guidelines that determine what an 'R' contains versus what a 'PG-13' entails.

The secrecy, while ridiculous, doesn't bother me. It's a private organization with private rules. Who rates a film is mostly unimportant if the process is clear. However, the problem is that the rating is arbitrary. There are no guidelines for film makers to examine, and previously rated films cannot be used as a precedent. A director is swinging in the dark.

One of the many directors in the film places movies into three categories:
Films made for entertainment, porn, and art. The current system seems to work very well for differentiating entertainment and porn. The people who get stepped on are the artists.

While it's sad that artists get a raw deal, the truth of the matter is that people who want to watch those films seek them out. Art house theaters exist because of this demand, and remember that unrated DVDs sell better than rated DVDs.

Ultimately, while the system has its warts, I can't really condemn it. It's not 100% fair, but it's closer than I would have expected.

Hunting

I'm back from my hunting trip, and fun was had by all. We bagged us some grouse and ate them on a rice pilaf. I've yet to accomplish the feat of actually killing a grouse, but I intend to try, try again. The reasoning for this desire is something I've been thinking about for a while now.

Before I had actually been hunting, I viewed it as a dated, evil pastime. Who in their right mind would want to kill Bambi? In this day and age, we don't need to hunt. It's just one more way to ravage nature.

I've asked myself over and over what I find truly wrong with hunting. The answer is that I didn't want to kill anything. I didn't want to wake up in the morning to the realization that I had ended the life of a beautiful animal.

There is a certain amount of innocents in that thinking that can be respected. However, it's also incredibly naive. I reap the benefits from the deaths of cows, chickens, pigs, and more recently elk on a daily basis. The difference is that I've never actually taken responsibility for their deaths. I've let someone else do the killing, and they can deal with whatever moral dilemmas arrive from such an act.

What I've decided is that in order for me to stand on solid moral ground as a meat eater, I'm going to have to take full responsibility for the purchasing of that meat. That means I have to kill something, eat it, and accept the act as "right". The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Who wants to be a vegetarian?