Monthly Archives: August 2007

Philosophy

I Am No Longer An Atheist

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Anyone wanna guess what I now consider myself?

Okay, fine. I still don’t believe in any sort of god or religion or have any ambiguous feelings about either. In a way, I have upgraded from being an atheist to an anti-theist!

What does this mean? To me, an atheist is someone who just doesn’t believe in the existence of god. After talking to a bunch of friends (religious and atheist), I realized that not only do I not believe in god, but I actually think believe in god and/or religion is bad and I am against it.

Sometime in the future I’ll probably elaborate on why I feel this way. It’s more than “religion has caused a lot of bad things to happen” and “science is better than religion”-type arguments, I assure you.

(And yes, I was introduced to this term via Christopher Hitchens and his book [which I recently read] God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. And no, I do not think the book brainwashed me. If anything, it gave me a better vocabulary to explain how I feel about religion.)

Movies

Feline Fatale

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Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Batman Returns
The best part of the Catwoman DVD that I rented the other day was the special feature titled “The Many Faces of Catwoman.”

As for the movie itself… believe the reviews. It sucked way more than I expected. I honestly assumed all of the negativity came from obsessed comic fans who felt the movie wasn’t true to the original vision of Catwoman or too campy or too serious or who knows what. For the record, I actually didn’t hate Batman Forever or even Batman & Robin and figured that similar criticism was aimed at all three movies. That certainly wasn’t the case. Catwoman just plain sucked. Read any of the reviews for Catwoman for more information on that. (I guess I could be thankful that reading about the film on Wiki introduced me to the Films Considered the Worst Ever page.)

But Catwoman the film aside, “The Many Faces of Catwoman” was great. The documentary basically goes through every actress who played Catwoman (Julie Newmar, Lee Meriwether, Eartha Kitt, Adrienne Barbeau [voice of Catwoman from Batman: The Animated Series], Michelle Pfeiffer, and Halle Berry) and features original interviews with all but Pfeiffer. It also goes into the history of Catwoman from a comic book perspective and traces her evolution (apparently no comic book character has changed her look so many times).

While the documentary wasn’t groundbreaking or life-changing, it did make the stupid DVD worthwhile and if you happen to accidently rent it or are forced to or who knows what, at least check it out so you get some good out of the DVD.

Music, Trends

Frankie Valli

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For some reason Frankie Valli seems to be the guy right now.

A while back Pilooski remixed “Beggin'” and spawned this awesome video:

Then I saw that Simian Mobile Disco mentioned his song “The Night” as one of their current faves. And pretty much immediately after I saw that I noticed that Leam or Rosebud had already remixed the song!

And if you check out searches for “valli” on HypeMachine there is quite a bit.

I’ll admit, I think this is awesome. I’ve loved The Four Seasons since I was a little kid. Songs like “Let’s Hang On” and “Sherry” and “Working My Way Back To You” still have more of an emotional effect on me than I would expect.

Let’s hope that we see some more Franki Valli and Four Seasons remixes coming soon.