Kirat submitted a funny article from CNN about how some twins accidentally married each other because they had been separated and didn't know they were related.
The couple's identities have been protected for legal reasons. Their case was first highlighted by Lord Alton of Liverpool during a discussion on donor conception in the House of Lords in December, but only came to light Friday.
The peer told the House of Lords that a court annulled the union as soon as the twins' true relationship became known. "They were never told that they were twins," he said during the Dec. 10 debate on a law covering human fertility and embryology. They had been adopted by separate families and "met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of the marriage that they entered into and all the issues of their separation."
No further details about the couple have emerged, and it is not known when the marriage took place or how long they were together before they discovered the truth. Adoption groups said Friday the case proves the need for openness and transparency during the adoption process.
Under British law the parents of a donor-conceived child do not have to declare that fact on the child's birth certificate, O'Clee told CNN. This means a child conceived with a donor sperm or egg may never know their true origin.
That's pretty crazy. I wonder how the fact was discovered after the marriage...I would think if it didn't come up before it, they may never have known.
"[It] is a biblical comedy, it is about the old testament. I'm just a dude wondering through biblical times. I'm not a famous character that you would have heard of before. Me and Michael Cera are just sort of wondering through and you get to see all these old stories from the Torah told through agnostic eyes."
Black says the strike won't have an impact - "It was written before the strike, we're just plowing ahead. There won't be any re-writes as long as we're in the middle of the strike. We are sticking with the script that we had when we started, no matter what." Harold Ramis directs the picture.
It seems like Michael Cera is in a bunch of movies now, and this also made me wonder what else Jack Black is working on. Apparently Year One also has McLovin', Vinnie Jones (of Lock Stock, Snatch, X-Men fame), and a bunch of other talent, as described in this IMDb comment:
JB and Cera meet the director of some of the greatest comedies of all time (Animal House and Caddyshack) who also wrote it w/ some Office writers, produced by Mr. Judd "Moneymaker" Apatow with Mclovin tagging along!
Sounds like it's got pretty incredible potential.
But that movie's not coming out until summer of next year. JB's got four movies coming out before that (listed here from soonest to latest release date):
Feb. 22, 2008 - The first movie, Be Kind Rewind (trailer), sounds a bit absurd. It's got Jack Black and Mos Def, with the premise: "A man (Black) whose brain becomes magnetized unintentionally destroys every tape in his friend's video store. In order to satisfy the store's most loyal renter, an aging woman with signs of dementia, the two men set out to remake the lost films, which include Back to the Future, The Lion King, and Robocop." However, it does have the writer/director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry, so who knows!
Jun. 6, 2008 - A Dreamworks' animated film, Kung Fu Panda (teaser trailer) with the usual Dreamworks big-name cast: Jackie Chan, Dustin Hoffman, Lucy Liu, Angelina Jolie, Seth Rogen, David Cross, Michael Clarke Duncan, and more.
Jul. 11, 2008 - A Ben Stiller-directed film, Tropic Thunder with the synopsis "Through a series of freak occurrences, a group of actors shooting a big-budget war movie are forced to become the soldiers they are portraying." And another crazy cast list: Ben Stiller, Bill Hader (cop in Superbad), Robert Downey Jr., and in unnamed roles (possibly cameos) there's Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, Matthew McConaughey, and Tobey Maguire.
TBA 2008 - The last movie is another comedy, Ye Olde Times about rival Renaissance Faires. This time the cast is crazy in that there's a lot of unexpected names in here: John C. Reilly, Will Arnett, Tim Robbins, Matthew Lillard, David Arquette, and Orlando Jones.
Of course some of these may get the same cold reception as Nacho Libre (except the Dreamworks one, since Dreamworks = instant success)
Writers or no writers, I'm so happy to have The Daily Show and Colbert Report return to air tonight. It's been much too long!
There's been some comments made about how Jon and Stephen can't write material since they're part of the WGA (Jay Leno may be in hot water for doing so last week), and also about how they may not be able to use some writer-produced segments like "The Word," so I'm interested to see what the shows end up like.
It's true...though the symbii.com URL has only been around since April 2007 (the blog was at nirajsanghvi.com before then, and moved to shorten the URL and repurpose nirajsanghvi.com), the blog began back in August of 2005. 882 days later, there's been 700 stories posted in 57 different topics. New Years just rolled around, so it felt appropriate to take the time to do a quick look back on the stats-to-date.
Here's a list of the top 3 topics by number of posts:
I'd heard plenty of these stories but I'd always rolled my eyes before when hearing people complaining about Vista and saying they were going back to XP. But over the holidays I got to thinking about it and realized I had a lot of issues in Vista that could be resolved by going back to XP.
That said, I really like Vista. The operating system may not seem drastically different from XP, but I quickly got used to a lot of its niceties. Having smart pre-fetching meant Windows knew I frequently launch Firefox and would be ready to bring it back into memory quickly after I closed it. Consequently the load time was dramatically reduced. The start menu's search feature was fantastic in pulling up programs quickly, and additions like Start++ meant I could even pull up web shortcuts and queries like "weather 60622" for Chicago weather right in the Start menu itself. And making backups of your files and settings in Vista is incredibly simple with their backup program that's built-in. I had stopped using Aero pretty early on but the UI still looked nicer and things were more convenient than XP in a lot of ways. So why go back to XP?
I'm going back mostly due to lack of hardware support and some bugs that still haven't been ironed out. In no particular order:
The video card quickly overheats while playing games (to the point where things went bluescreen...seems like a lot of Dell E1705 owners with NVidia cards are too familiar with this, and there haven't been updated drivers that might resolve the problem)
The external 5.1 sound card (Creative Sound Blaster 24-bit USB) which worked perfectly in XP took forever to release a Vista driver, and it causes a lot of distortion issues during video playback (hisses and pops)
Vista would drop the wireless network connection randomly and frequently, even without use of Standby or Hibernate (the only resolution to recover the network was restarting...trying to do anything else resulted in everything becoming sluggish)
Fan/temperature control programs wouldn't run in Vista because they aren't compatible or don't have signed drivers...some known workarounds for the signed driver check stopped working after an update - this could have resolved my video card overheating issue otherwise
Considering things worked pretty flawlessly in XP previously, it just made too much sense to revert, at least until these issues have time to get ironed out.
*It should be noted I was using 64-bit Vista, which could have meant some increased compatibility issues versus 32-bit.
If you haven't yet thought about the fact that all TV transmissions are going digital next year, now's the time to do so. This only affects people using analog TV sets to get TV over-the-air via an antenna. The government website offering the coupons says that those that get TV through cable without a converter box have to check with their cable companies. They're now taking applications for $40 coupons that can be used towards a selection of pretty basic digital-to-analog converter boxes that will allow the analog TVs to continue receiving channels. There's currently 14 converter options on the list.
The government is now taking applications for the coupons at dtv2009.gov. The coupons can be redeemed at more than 14,000 local stores, including Best Buy, Circuit City, Kmart, RadioShack, Target, and Wal-Mart.
Coupons will be mailed out starting in February and should be used before February 17, 2009, when over-the-air analog transmissions will finally go dark.
The boxes are primitive, but that's by design; the government has no interest in subsidizing the purchase of snazzy new home electronics, so the devices perform only basic conversion and have limited output options. Still, for those who 1) don't want to pick up cable or satellite service and 2) don't want to buy a new TV, it will soon be the only way to keep the programs coming.
I decided to check out the return of late-night TV without writers tonight, just to see what they would do. I haven't gotten a chance to watch the recordings of Leno or Letterman (who has his writers), but I did see a chunk of Conan (through the Bob Saget interview). Admittedly it was funny, but more in how bizzare and awkward it was rather than anything else. I mean, he spent a half hour talking about the beard he grew, spinning his wedding ring and having a producer time it, describing the writers' strike, and playing a pre-recorded "what we're doing during the strike" where he just went around trying to say funny things about anything he came across in the office. It was amusing because it was something different, but this type of material can't last more than a couple of shows.
Conan with his "strike beard"
However, it's perfectly possible this was intentional. It eased viewers back into watching the show, and without wasting any potentially good material they may have come up with. Considering they've had the 2 months of the strike plus some lead time (since the strike didn't come as a surprise), they've got to have come up with some good ideas. But with the timeline of the strike still unknown, it makes sense that they wouldn't want to rapidly blow through the material they've likely been stockpiling. I guess it won't be too long before we see if that's the case or not. My guess would be they've come up with enough stuff to last at least 3 to 4 weeks on the air, because otherwise it wouldn't make much sense to get back on the air knowing you can't keep up producing enough new material to weather the strike.
It was also interesting to see that Conan devoted quite a bit of time to explaining the strike and his support of writers, even getting a couple of jabs in at the network execs.
Despite the ongoing writers' strike, nearly all late-night TV are returning within the first couple of weeks of January. Leno and Conan come back to air on Jan. 2nd without their writers, since the studios have already or will lay off the non-writing staff of those shows if they do not. Conan's already made comments about how the show won't be as good without writers.
The Daily Show and Colbert Report are also returning without writers, but they will return the following week because they were scheduled for a 2-week break which would have had them resuming production on the 7th. The show formats may have to be changed because of the way WGA rules work...they can't use certain normally scripted segments like Colbert's "The Word."
And finally, Letterman is in a different boat than the other shows because his show and the following Craig Ferguson show are owned by his own production company, Worldwide Pants, rather than the network he runs on. For this reason he can negotiate a separate deal with the WGA, and will likely return to air with his writers, most likely in the same timeframe as the other late-night shows. While Jon Stewart's production company produces The Colbert Report, I think the fact that Comedy Central finances it means that it wouldn't be able to do the same thing.
Though all of this means the return of late-night, the writers' strike is still on rocky ground, especially after the WGA filed a complaint with the Labor Board that the AMPTA was refusing to negotiate in good faith.
This movie was very secretive, and several people found out about it via a trailer in theaters that didn't explain much except that the movie would come out January 18th, and basically showed a bunch of people at a party in New York that started freaking out when there was an earthquake and explosions downtown. Well, a lot of people speculated that it might be a Godzilla movie, and they are likely right according to this new 5 minute preview:
It's actually not quite a new Jackass movie...Jackass 2.5 is the half movie worth of extra stuff they couldn't fit into the second movie. From the new website:
Not knowing what to do with all this material, Jeff Tremaine and Johnny Knoxville decidedly set it aside for some undecided future use. For the better part of the year following the release of jackass number two, this cache of unseen footage remained in limbo until someone came up with the idea to film all new interviews with the cast, talking about this excess of never-before-seen pranks, stunts, and random acts of behind-the-scenes mischief and stupidity, and package it into a documentary-like feature called jackass 2.5.Although this isn't necessarily the "new" jackass movie, it's still every bit as unbelievable, dirty, and downright sexy as its predecessors-maybe even more so at points. Here's the trailer.
According to the Reuters article, the movie will be available starting December 19th:
The third outing in the hit franchise will be offered online for free over a two-week span beginning December 19 via Blockbuster and its new online property Movielink at blockbuster.jackassworld.com.
From there, the film will move on to different pay-per-view platforms including iTunes and DVD as part of a light-speed reinvention of the customary distribution-window chain. The domestic release strategy will be replicated internationally early next year, but with different distribution partners.
The movie launch also will be a curtain-raiser for JackassWorld.com (http://www.jackassworld.com), which will establish a permanent online home for the franchise beginning February 9.
Personally I'm not the biggest fan of Jackass because a lot of it is beyond absurd/disgusting, but they've already proven that there's plenty of people that are into it. I'm more interested in seeing how the online debut will help DVD sales, as I'm quite sure it will generate a lot of buzz.
