So, did a lot of stuff happen while I was incommunicado or what? I refer, of course, to Nomar going on the DL. Good things about WDW: The new Kali River Rapids ride at Animal Kingdom. Top-notch water ride with the best line experience ever. Worth going to Animal Kingdom for, which is good, cause not much else is. The new Aerosmith-themed roller coaster at Disney/MGM. It’s got rollover loops, just like a real roller coaster! Add in Tower of Terror, and Disney/MGM is definitely the right place to go for thrill rides at Disney. ...

That took a lot of the pleasure out of The Apprentice. (Gonna be spoilers here.) Long story short, Trump made two errors: 1. Complaining that Team Troy set the rental price too low at $35-40K. The Director of Sales for the building told them that it had been renting for around $40K; given the time they had to rent it, it made sense to nail down any offer in that range and hope that the other team would whiff, which they very nearly did. ...

Well, that was a vacation and a half. My digital camera broke midway through, so I have few pictures. I still had a metric ton or so of fun. More details later.

Ever wanted a list of Shaw Brothers movies that got four or more stars from Kung Fu Cinema? Yeah, me too. So I made one.

I will not be around this Monday, so there will be no Monday Mashup. This is tragic! To compensate, I will satisfy the legions of people (all two of you) who kvetched about not getting your Partridge Family. Fine! Here’s your precious pre-fabricated pop band. I know nothing about the Partridge Family other than that they travelled around in a school bus and sang. Or lip-synched, one or the other. Anyhow, I’m sure there was music and travel involved and on that thin, tenuous reed must our mashups be built. Oh, wait — for the research-minded, there’s an episode guide. Hey, Ray Bolger played the grandfather, so there’s a Wizard of Oz connection.

[Also written while flying home Sunday night.] Butt-Numb-A-Thon 5 in no particular order except, well, chronological: Haunted Gold, a very early John Wayne movie about a haunted gold mine. John Wayne hadn’t learned how to throw punches yet. There was much booing of the insanely racist dialogue. Return of Captain Marvel, an old adventure serial. Cheesy as hell. I was not too unhappy when it was cut short for the arrival of… ...

So, um, what’s (original) up with (original) Eric Raymond? (Unofficial spokesman for the open-source movement, if you didn’t know.) The big problem with his commentary on IQ and race is the way he misrepresents criticism of the The Bell Curve. He links the criticism of The Bell Curve to criticism of the single-factor IQ model, but that’s simply inaccurate. There are plenty of errors (original) of other sorts in the book. The statistical work is wrong, even according to the conservative magazine Reason: ...

The next five or six days will see very few updates, since I will be wallowing in the sybaritic capitalist glory that is Walt Disney World. Say g’night, Gracie.

Obsessive Flash game of the month: Hexic (original). Go, waste time. It’s from the guy who invented Tetris.

Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere has been a novel, a BBC miniseries, and may one day be a movie (original). Right now, however, it’s going to be a mashup. At the basic level, it’s a story about a fantastic world underneath the city. I personally find that the Underground puns are fairly significant, because they help link the wildness of the world to the reality of the city — without those allusions, goofy as they can be, the real London would have less meaning. It’s not just a fantastic world beneath the city, it’s a fantastic world that mirrors — perhaps echoes — the city. What else, what else? Door is deposed nobility, which could be fun to play with. The Goblin Market is cool. The Marquis de Carabas is the kind of figure one might well like to use. Ditto Croup and Vandemar… heck, lots of cool characters. By the by, we’ve added another gaming meme — the excellent Wednesday Weird (original) — to the gamememe mailing list. Every time a meme from here, the Weird, or Game WISH gets posted, subscribers to gamememe get an email. It’s the easy way to keep up on your meme postings.