A Call For Interfaith Dialogue

Earlier this week, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, called for an interfaith dialogue between Muslims, Christians and Jews. He added some interesting points:

"The idea is to ask representatives of all monotheistic religions to sit together with their brothers in faith and sincerity to all religions as we all believe in the same God."

"There is a lack of ethics, loyalty and sincerity for our religions and humanity."

He's already met with Pope Benedict XVI, the first Saudi monarch to do so. This call for a conference opens the door to peace, or at least a possible end to Muslim fanatics using the words of the Koran to justify their actions.

The Late, Great Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Perhaps best noted for the screenplay and novel for 2001: A Space Odyssey, he was a revolutionary futurist who helped turn science fiction into science fact.

He proposed the use of geosynchronous orbits for communications satellites, and predicted that man would land on the moon...both in the 1940s!

Just a few months ago, I clipped a quote from him in a news article, which I thought was interesting and would make a good signature bit for my emails. Now I see it as one last vision of the future that I hope comes true:

"Over the next 50 years, thousands of people will travel to earth orbit and then to the moon and beyond. Space travel and space tourism will one day become almost as commonplace as flying to exotic destinations on our own planet."

How Would You Like Your Metal, Sir?

It looks like there's a new Heavy Metal film in the works.

Man, I hope this one works out, or at least lives up to the 80s glory that was Heavy Metal. I can still remember going out to midnight showings to watch it (when I wasn't watching the Romero films, that is!)

Unfortunately, I paid to see Heavy Metal 2000 in the theater. The animation was at best Sunday morning cartoon quality. So please, powers-that-be, make a movie better than HM2k!

Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I-IV

On Sunday Trent Reznor released the new Nine Inch Nails album, Ghosts I-IV, on the NIN web site. I, like many others, tried to order the album, but the site was just too jammed up. When the page was later taken down for maintenance, Trent commented that he "didn't bring enough beer for the party." Since then, the site's come back up and orders are being taken.

Ghosts is a 4-part album, each with 9 tracks. They're all acoustic. This is nothing strange, as almost every NIN album has at least one acoustic track. Some of these have even appeared in film: A Warm Place and Something I Can Never Have were in Natural Born Killers (Burn was used in the trailer), The Mark Has Been Made (again, with several other clips) was featured in Man On Fire, and Just Like You Imagined played during the trailer for 300.

Overall, it's a great album to just sit back and chill out to. A number of the tracks really stand out, the rest are good...there are no bad tracks. The only negative is that none of the tracks are named, they're simply track#/Ghosts/album# (as in, track 1 is 1 Ghosts I, whereas the last track is 36 Ghosts IV). But the really attractive thing is the price, you can download the entire album for $5, or get the same download plus the CD release for $10.

I'm sure it's just a matter of time before they find their way into films.

Hail To The King

Gary Gygax passed away Tuesday morning. What can I say, other than "He will be missed."

iPod

A few weeks ago I bought an iPod Nano.

I've been loading more and more music into it. At this point, I've got all the best stuff out of my CD collection (and I have quite a collection), and I've still got about 1GB of space. That's with 1,541 individual songs loaded!

The user interface is great, it's very easy and the video stuff like 'cover flow' just makes things that much cooler. It's small, and light, and doesn't skip.

Now I can listen wherever I want: walking around, in a coffee shop, in my car (using an FM transmitter adapter), at home (where I got one of the cheap boom-boxes that has an iPod dock), whatever.

For anyone who's into music, I can't recommend one of these enough.