Revolving Skyscrapers – Has the future finally arrived?

Some interesting, and potentially exciting, news from the world of architecture this week following the announcement of the construction of “the world’s first building in motion”. Italian architect David Fisher revealed his plans this past Tuesday to build an 80-story skyscraper in Dubai that would feature constantly revolving floors, resulting in a building structure that is constantly changing its shape. But it’s innovative features don’t end there.

Click to continue reading the rest of this entry

Coming Soon To A Gas Station Near You – COAL!

There’s something that the presumptive US presidential candidates said last week that’s been a source of amusement, if not complete bewilderment, that I had to bring up on my blog.

Lately, we’ve all been feeling the squeeze – or in some cases, a head vice – each time we fill up our cars at the pump. Apparently, this hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Republican candidate, John McCain, who suggested the building of 45 new nuclear power plants and, get this, the development of technologies for using “clean coal” to reduce ‘America’s dependency of foreign oil’. Checking in on the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, reveals that he too supports the idea of “clean coal”. Sounds to me like neither of these guys has ever been around coal since I’m sure even coal miners will agree that clean is the last thing you think about when you work with coal. Click to continue reading the rest of this entry

UN Security Council Resolution 1820 – It’s About Time

Well, here’s news that I think the blogsphere should be buzzing over as something that was long overdue. This past Thursday, the UN Security council unanimously passed Resolution 1820 which demands the “immediate and complete cessation by all parties to armed conflict of all acts of sexual violence against civilians”, including children and going so far as to state that “rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide”. This means that armies and their leaders who are accused of such acts can now be tried for committing crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

But the resolution didn’t stop there. Click to continue reading the rest of this entry

AFI’s Top 10 Sci-Fi List – Are they kidding me?

My wife and I recently caught a part of the latest AFI special counting down the Top 10 films in the various genres. Fortunately, I caught the part featuring their list for Top 10 Sci-fi films of all time and I say fortunately because it spared me from the mistake of wasting my time watching the rest of this special.

To bring everyone up to speed, here’s the AFI’s picks for the top 10 sci-fi films of all time (in order of how they were presented during their special) – Click to continue reading the rest of this entry

Finding My New Look

I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of image I want to use as the header for this blog. While the emphasis should be on content over visuals, the fact is no one’s going to read or buy anything if it looks like crap, no matter how good it might otherwise be.

Of course, as with any website, the focus of the blog itself is what normally should help define the style and look for the site, if not the writer behind the blog. Knowing how I want to approach this blog – as a basic catch-all for my thoughts and comments on a wide range of topics – it made for some challenges on where to start. At first, I thought about taking some neutral visual background and overlaying it with various images from topics I’d most likely bring up or discuss in this blog. But looking at the blog design I used here, I figured a cleaner, simplistic approach would make more sense. Besides, the internet is filling up with lots of sites offering a cornucopia of visual treats, and in some cases it’s the equivalent of a visual overload, making it more confusing to know where exactly the focus of the reader should be. Click to continue reading the rest of this entry

BSG Episode “Revelations” – We’re Off To See The Wizard

A follow-up to my previous BSG post is in order, especially since I put the ball in Moore and Eick’s court to leave us with something to ponder about until early next year. And I think they did, though at least for myself, maybe not necessarily what they were aiming for.

The first 45 minutes of “Revelations” really delivered what BSG is renowned for – intense character moments brought on by people facing an impossible situation and having to contend with some of the unpleasant realities that come with taking someone close to your heart as a friend, lover, etc. When they revealed at the end of last season that Tigh, Tyrol, Anders, and Tory were Cylons, one of my hopes for this season was that they didn’t stretch out this discovery being made by the rest of the human fleet one character at a time. That is, after all, the way most conventional TV series would handle it as a means to help drag out – literally – the suspense of when the other shoe would drop. But that’s not the way BSG ever did things and fortunately that held true last Friday where they had the Final Four rolled out in quick succession. Click to continue reading the rest of this entry

Father’s Day – Best Day of The Year

So today was Father’s Day – that one day in the year where fathers can lounge around the house doing nothing . . . and no one’s going to get on their case about it.

For this year’s festivities, my kids decided that they wanted the whole family to go bowling – sounds fairly innocent enough. However, once we got there, all of them, including my wife, were having the most fun seeing how much I stunk compared to them in playing this game (note to self – in bowling, the object is not to toss the ball like one would in shot put). Ah, yes, there’s no better way to better way to celebrate fatherhood than to have your kids cheering their whooping your permanent vertical smile in a game of bowling. Click to continue reading the rest of this entry

To Moore and Eick: Please Don’t Screw This One Up

Let me start off by saying I’m a big fan of the science fiction series remake, Battlestar Galactica (or BSG as its referred to by its viewers) by Ron Moore and David Eick. The first two seasons of this show were a brilliant demonstration of the fact that science fiction is not about futuristic technology or ships flying around in space; rather, it is an examination of human drama, character conflicts and motivations set against an alternate reality.

Oh sure, BSG has gone on to create a new stylistic look – in particular the use of camera movements for the space scenes that creates the illusion of a real camera operator floating in space trying to capture all the action while staying out of the way. But those who really get what the show’s strength is know that it’s the multi-dimensional characters and the complexities of their relationships to one another. Of course, the show also has a tendency to pull off some wicked mind fraks on the audience (frak, for those who are unfamiliar with the show, is a series-based euphemism for a contemporary profanity word. I’m sure you can figure out which one). Certainly one of the other key hallmarks of BSG is that you could never assume anything about its story lines since many of those conventional storytelling ruses or plot devices used these days would invariably be taken to the curb and tossed – when you least expect it. Click to continue reading the rest of this entry

Okay, here’s the deal . . .

I’ve realized recently that there are many ideas or thoughts that I’m sharing with friends and colleagues that I’d like to present on a more public front, not so much for public visibility, but for the nostalgic effect of looking back in time to see what ideas or issues stirred my passions back in the day.

And so, that’s why I now have this blog, aptly titled “So, what were we talking about again?”, which I plan to use as a place to post my thoughts and musings about . . . well, whatever it is that’s occupying the gray matter within this cranium at that point in time.

Not sure what kind of journey you’ll be in for if you start reading this blog. But let’s hope it’ll be an interesting one for the both of us.