For those of you (and I would imagine that, given the PG-13 rating, there may be many between the ages of 10-15) thinking of going to see Beowulf so you can get a glimpse of the much rumored nude Angelina Jolie, don't bother.

For one thing, her "nude" scene is about as detailed as a Barbie doll. It's not what you'd call anatomically correct, and her animated counterpart lacks any kind of detail beyond a smooth, metallic body. A doll dipped in bronze, you might say.

What you will find, however, is lots of naked man ass. Lots of it. And judging by the number of groans and shouts of "Oh, man!" or "Come on!" there were many disappointed 13-year olds in the theater Saturday night. You get naked fat Anthony Hopkins man ass. You also get lots of naked Beowulf man ass. Lots of it. If you're into naked man ass, this is about as good as your going to get this side of the assless chaps convention or a Pride Parade. Hell, one sequence is 10 minutes of naked Beowulf jumping and swinging around on chandeliers, his naked man ass in full glory for all to see.

That being said, I'm still shocked that Beowulf got a PG-13 rating. I don't want to spoil anything, but we're talking blood, gore, people torn limb from limb, splattered blood, monsters stabbed directly in the eye with daggers and spurting blood for all to see, impaling, blunt force trauma, and, basically, just a whole hell of a lot of violence. Lots. And. Lots.

Which brings us back to the absurdity of American culture. The nudity in this film is, as I said, about the same level of erotica as a naked Barbie doll (man ass not withstanding). There is some on screen flirting, and some innuendo, but all of the sex takes place well off screen. What is on display is the bloody hacking, and punching, and head biting violent, horrible, bone crunching death. And lots of it. And that gets a PG-13.

If Bruce Willis had said "Yippee-kayay, motherfucker." in the most recent Die Hard flick, it would have likely been rated R. Because he said a bad word. But he can shoot people, blow shit up, throw the bad guys into industrial fans, etc. And Grendel can rip a man in two, then snack on the pieces while Beowulf literally tears him limb from limb (if you think that's a spoiler, you need to read more) and that's still firmly in PG-13 territory.

Absurd. We breed our children to find sex to be taboo (I am aware of the irony in that sentence). We won't talk about it, won't show it on TV, and decry things like a half-second nip slip on nationwide TV. But at the same time, we teach them that violence is perfectly acceptable. And we wonder why so many Americans froth at the mouth and declare that we should "kill them all" every time someone whips up a war frenzy. Even with the failure of Iraq still exploding all around us on a daily basis we hear people beginning to beat the drums of war for Iran.

But I digress. I've mentioned the "sex" (really it's some slight nudity, and some off-screen intercourse) and the violence of Beowulf, but is it any good?

Yes. It's a pretty decent film. The digitally animated characters fall firmly into the category of the "uncanny valley," which is the phenomenon that results when you make something too close to human, but it obviously is not. The result is a creepy, unnerving thing. People find robots like C3P0 and R2D2 to be cute and endearing precisely because they do not too closely resemble humans. But the digitally rendered characters in The Polar Express and Beowulf are very close to human, almost looking photo realistic at points, but they are not quite perfect. There is something about them that smacks of mannequins being brought to life.

Still, the animation is pretty good, and the set pieces are spectacular. And depending on how familiar you are with Beowulf you may or may not find some of the places where the story takes liberties to be disturbing. In the original epic, Beowulf slays 3 great monsters, and dies from the injuries that he suffers while fighting the third. In the movie, well, let's just say that the number of monsters slain is fewer than 3. And the attempt to ground one of those monsters (specifically the Grendel) in reality makes the fight much less spectacular. When you look back at the end of the movie, you think that Beowulf is boastful, and takes credit for things that he did not do, even when there were witnesses. And he takes credit for slaying monsters that he did not slay. It's disappointing. I can understand the appeal of trying to put a human face on an epic hero (Michael Crichton tried to do the same thing in his book, Eaters of the Dead). Still, why make a movie about an epic only to endeavor to make it less epic?

That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it. I did. It was violent, to the point of turning my stomach at times. As I told my wife, I've seen horror movies far less violent than Beowulf (most of which were rated R). But, it was still well made, well animated, and well acted. I enjoyed myself. I'd watch it again. I suppose that's the best thing I can say about any movie.

Still, if you're looking for an epic battle showing epic heroes (with lots of naked man ass), 300 is better :P

So, I was talking to my wife, as I do from time to time, about Halo 3. It's my first Halo game. I never got caught up in the Halo buzz on the first X-Box, and the sort of "frat boy" cult that the fans of the first two games became was a bit of a turn off. Couple that with the fact that the Penny Arcade guys really disliked the first game, and I really respect their opinions on games in general, and you may understand why I never picked them up.

I do know that my nephews (ages 9 and 11 at the time, I think) were big fans of Halo, and I sat down to play co-op with the eldest once for about half an hour and was not impressed enough to buy the game myself.

So, given all that, I am almost ashamed to admit that I was swept up in the Halo 3 media storm. Everyone was talking about this game. Even to say just how much they hated it, and how they were going to buy a copy to play through it just to prove that they still hated it. I almost bought the first two games about a hundred different times over the past 3 or 4 months whenever I came across them on the bargain shelf at Target. I did take a few hours over the course of a week before the game's release to read most of the back story so I wasn't going in cold. I knew who Master Chief was, and what the Spartan Program was all about. About the fall of Reach, and the Covenant, and the Prophet of Truth, and what the halos were for, etc, etc. So I was prepared.

Well, kinda. I wasn't prepared for lackluster graphics, and run-and-gun twitch style FPS game play that I haven't seen in 3 or 4 years. I mean, this is some seriously retro stuff. You basically run, jump, shoot stuff, and from time to time push a button. Oh, and they throw in some vehicle driving from time to time, and the physics engine is very good at making the wheels bounce. It's also very good at making you feel like you are Chevy Chase in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, shooting down a snowy hill on a sled coated in cooking spray. To say that every vehicle in the game, including the "all terrain vehicles" lack any kind of real weight or traction is putting it mildly. To say that it felt like driving a power-wheels on a giant world made of Crisco would be more accurate.

But back to my original point. I was talking to my wife about how disappointing the game play was, and I mentioned that it was annoying to only be able to carry two weapons. You see, Master Chief can have, well, up to three weapons really. He can dual-wield some of the smaller weapons (though changing weapons causes him to drop the one in his left hand and stow the one in his right), and he can have one strapped to his back. It seemed like I spent much of the game very short on ammo, looking around for guns that I could pick up off of corpses on the ground.

Now, other games really make you pay attention to ammo. Two immediate examples spring to mind. Bio-shock likes you to constantly feel like you are fighting for survival, so many resources are limited. You need to play smart, and try to use what you have effectively. Rainbow 6 also goes for the "realism" angle, so they only give you a small amount of ammo, but this is offset by the fact that a well placed headshot can kill a bad guy in one hit (in Bio-Shock targeting specific areas of the body is also an effective way to get the most bang for the buck out of your ammo). In Halo, most of the bad guys need to be shot 437 times, directly to the face, in order to kill them. Also, every single bad guy in the game seems to drop a gun. So it's not like it was hard to find guns/ammo, it was just annoying to constantly have to scavenge them from the dead every 13 seconds.

So, my wife works with a couple of Halo 3 fanboys, and she passed the comment along: Bobby doesn't like that he can have only two weapons. At this point they gently placed their monocles into position over their right eyes and shared a hearty guffaw at my naivety. You see, they said, Halo was supposed to be more like a war type shooter simulator...thing.

Uh huh. Really. You mean like your Call of Duty, Rainbow Six, Medal of Honor, Battlefield: 1942 type shooter?

Funny, I don't seem to remember having energy shields that regenerate if I hide behind something for a few seconds in any of those shooters. I also don't remember being 7 and 1/2 feet tall, or being able to jump 10 feet straight into the air. Oh, and is it "realistic" to be able to carry 2 of each of up to 4 different types of grenades, but I can't carry 3 of any one? What's that about? Is Master Chief's suit equipped with two tiny grenade-shaped compartments for every type of grenade in the game?

If realism is what they were going for, maybe they shouldn't have made the main character so overtly an unstoppable killing machine super hero space knight. I mean, shit, in the opening cut scene he falls from space and gets up out of the crater, picks up a gun, and leads his team into the woods. It's not just realism, it's hyper realism.

Now, one of these gin drinking socialite gamers went on to say that the choices are made to force the player to think more strategically. If you can only have two guns, and two of each type of grenade, you need to decide when and where the optimal usage for each weapon is. He said it was a balance they first achieved in multi-player and decided to apply to single player as well in the third, and final game. Fine. Only problem is, in multi-player you are playing on set maps that you know inside and out against a set number of players that have the same capabilities that you do. Here strategy and teamwork is key.

In the single player campaign, however, you are battling wave after wave of never-ending armies of aliens, and the game play quickly devolves into firing a gun repeatedly until it runs of of ammo, dropping it, and picking the next gun out of the still twitching hands in the ever growing pile of corpses at your feet. You don't necessarily know the layout of the levels, you don't know what kinds of enemies you are coming up against, and quite frankly you often don't really have a lot of time to consider which weapon is best against each type of foe when you are being attacked by 40 of them, all at once.

I'll buy the multi-player argument. For the most part I hear nothing but good things about Halo multi-player. It strikes me as having the potential to be a heck of a lot of fun. But, seriously, when a Halo fan tries to get snotty on you, well...

It's like lecturing your friends on misinterpreting the the finer points of an episode of Passions right after they get home from the Opera. Really. Halo is popcorn for the brain, mindless entertainment that really can't touch any of the other major shooters released this year. Even the other "mindless" shooters, Gears of War for example, were a lot more fun to play, looked a lot prettier, had just as good a storyline, and, dare I say it, were a heck of a lot more "strategic" in their gameplay; playing GoW I really found myself thinking about when to use which weapons under what circumstances, and the layout of the levels and the set up of the encounters gave you the few seconds you needed to try and work that through. In Halo it's just non stop shooting as fast as you can because the hordes of enemies don't stop coming long enough for you to catch your breath. And even if they did, hell, you only have two weapons. It might be a sniper rifle and a pistol. Not really the best options when you get attacked by 10 aliens in a crowded hallway. Of course you could always die, reload, and choose different weapons this time, knowing what's coming, but I refuse to think of that as a "strategy".

The thing that really makes me sad is that Halo 3 will be 100 times more successful than the other, far more deserving titles that came out this year. As I said to my wife today, comparing Bioshock to Halo 3 is like comparing Firefly to Star Wars: Episode II. One is a really, really great movie, lovingly crafted and excellently produced, that tanked at the box office. The other is a poorly written, poorly acted, mediocre special effects extravaganza that made half a billion dollars world-wide. I'll let you figure out which is which.

Oh, and as far as the Halo 3 storyline goes...I liked it a lot more 6 years ago when it was called "System Shock 2".

Maybe it's just me, and I happen to run a lot of software with this feature, but when the hell did software become so completely obnoxious about patching itself?

I know these companies must love the internets, and they are very proud of the fact that they can push new content at their customers whenever a new, stable build is ready. But 3 McAfee updates in one day? And two of them reboot? And if I choose not to reboot right now, it's going to remind me with a pop-up every 5 damned minutes until I do.

And, I know the guys over at McAfee are very proud of their product. I know that they think it's important, and it probably is. But many people already disable anti-virus software on their computers because it slows them down, and the scans frequently run at incredibly inconvenient and seemingly random times. So adding a "feature" that updates the software several times a week, and frequently pesters the user to reboot their computers the minute that the patch has been installed, isn't helping.

Hell, I'm a die-hard anti-virus user even though I don't practice any of the habits that generally result in infestation. My PC sits behind a firewall, and I never download content from untrusted sources, open e-mail attachments (even from my dad, and if you knew how many viruses he's had in the past 5-6 years you'd know why), get sucked in by phishing scams, etc, etc. But I like the sense of security that I get from having a scan that checks my system daily.

But...I am this close to uninstalling the thing from my hard drive. These pop-ups are driving me nuts. It's not always convenient for me to reboot on a moment's notice. It's a process that requires about 5-10 minutes for me to shut down everything I'm doing, restart the system, and get it all back up and running. I frequently have 5-6 applications open, minimum. I also game quite a bit, and I can't just quit in the middle of whatever I'm doing and reboot every fucking time McAfee decides I absolutely must be protected against the latest spam right now!

Fuck McAfee.

But perhaps the worst part in all of this is the fact that a lot of other software vendors are starting to do the same thing. Sure, Windows was the first to give users the option of automatically downloading and installing patches. But Windows patches are far less frequent, and the OS is far less annoying about forcing you to reboot. It also tends to typically patch and reboot at night, while I'm asleep and my PC is idle. I'm not even sure if that's a setting. If it is, it must be the default because I never configured it. It just quietly downloads patches in the background, and restarts itself when I'm not around. Oh, and it lets me know what I did after I log back in, instead of pestering me the entire time I'm on before it does it's work.

But now there are seemingly dozens of other apps that are constantly updating themselves, and they are all just as obnoxious as McAfee. Like Apple iTunes. That sumbitch must update a couple of times a week. Every time I get a popup letting me know that updates are available and asking me to install them. Every time I choose to install I need to accept a new licensing agreement, and then the download begins. But the Apple downloader is special in that it keeps popping back into the foreground. I minimize it, put it behind other windows, and...oh! There it is, back up front. I need to drag if off screen or down into a corner to get rid of it. Then, when it's done, it wants me to restart iTunes, but first it needs to immediately scan for more updates that may have been released in the last 10 fucking minutes while it was updating. I mean Jesus. Really? You guys release so often that a new patch might have been released while you were patching the last one?

And then, of course, I need to deal with iTunes wanting to update my entire music library after every patch, which takes several minutes. Wouldn't be a problem if it weren't twice a week.

And like I said earlier; I game a lot. All of these interruptions have actually gotten me killed (in game, of course). I lose control of my avatar, and a window pops up in front of my view. Every single application seems to think of itself as the most important piece of software ever written by man. Every patch is absolutely vital, and they can justify interrupting any other work going on, at any time, by throwing windows in the face of the users and demanding attention right now with frequent reminders, requests, etc.

And now, even my games are doing it! Last night I was playing the beta for Team Fortress 2 and, right after I connected to a server, the game crashed on me. I tried to restart and it forced me to sit through a patch that took about 10 minutes to apply. Then, when I tried to restart again, it forced me to update Steam (the launcher used to run the game) with another patch. Now TF2 is a beta, so I can understand frequent patching, but I just patched Steam about 3 days ago, and here comes another one.

Here's an idea: try releasing stable, tested software in the first place, and maybe you won't need to patch it every 5 minutes. I hate to wave the Microsoft flag again, but X-Box Live! supports millions of users and patches twice a year. I see no reason why Steam needs to patch twice in the same week.

So all you software vendors get off your high fucking horses, and stop treating your software like it's been handed down from God and demands the immediate attention of every user in the world. Start updating quietly in the background, and stop requiring reboots. And if I choose not to reboot, remind me once a day (at most), not every 5 damned minutes. And if I say I'm not interested in patching or rebooting right now go away.

I should warn you that this post is entirely politically incorrect, and outright sexist. But I don't care. I generally treat women with respect, and as equals, but that doesn't mean that they aren't different. And talking about those differences can be good fun, and good therapy.

I read an interesting statistic today: 80% of men say that they would marry the same woman again if they had a chance to do it all over again, while only 50% of woman said the same thing.

It got me to thinking. Why would 80% of men say that they were happy in their current marriage, while only 50% of women would say the same thing? To me, the answer was pretty obvious: women are a lot harder to make happy. That got me to thinking a bit more. Why is that? Why is our culture so focused on keeping wives content, and why do we so often fail to do so? Is that fair?

Think about it. When people talk about what is wrong with a relationship, who most often takes the blame? Was it that the husband wasn't romantic enough? That he didn't buy flowers often enough? That he regularly forgot birthdays or anniversaries? Maybe it was that he didn't do enough puttering around the house, or put enough thought into the gifts that he did buy. Maybe those diamond earings weren't big enough, and why didn't he pay more attention to the shoes that she bought last week, or her new haricut? The list of things that women complain about men not doing (or not doing well enough) goes on and on and on. Essentially it all boils down to one thing: my husband doesn't do enough to make me happy.

Now consider the flip side of that. What do men complain about most often? Getting nagged (which the wife does when he's not doing enough to make her happy), or not getting enough action. That's about it. In general, men just want to be left alone, to do the things that make them happy, which generally involves watching TV or playing video games, or hanging out with the guys playing a round of golf and/or having a few beers.

What makes this dynamic even more intersting, is that in many cases, the female finds all of these activites reprehensible. But why? Why does she complain when the male wants to hang out with his friends, or watch TV? Why does it offend her so much? Is it simply because our society mandates that the male use his free time on activites that are designed to please her?

There seems to be an idea that a man must earn his pleasure. He can't hang out with the guys until he finishes his chores. He can't have sex until he's been sufficiently romantic. In short, he can't be happy until he's made the wife happy. But what if we tried the same thing? What if we refused to fix the sink unless the house was cleaned to our satisfaction? Or refused to get up from in front of the TV until a good meal was waiting ont he table? It would be chaos. And when the marriage quickly ended in a messy divorce, who would get the blame? The lazy, no-good husband, that's who.

So why are American marriages like this? It's an interesting question, and one that I'd like to see answered, or at least discussed. It's not as though relationships aren't more complicated than this, but when faced with a statistic like that it seems to indicate that men are a lot easier to please (significantly so), and the evidence would suggest that we're just a lot happier with what we have, and spend a lot less time trying to force other people to be something that we like more.

Is that unfair? Maybe, but no one refers to men as the fairer sex.

First, let me start with this qonderful quote from an ABC News story.

New York has no national monuments or icons, according to the Department of Homeland Security form obtained by ABC News. That was a key factor used to determine that New York City should have its anti-terror funds slashed by 40 percent---from $207.5 million in 2005 to $124.4 million in 2006.

The formula did not consider as landmarks or icons: The Empire State Building, The United Nations, The Statue of Liberty and others found on several terror target hit lists. It also left off notable landmarks, such as the New York Public Library, Times Square, City Hall and at least three of the nation's most renowned museums: The Guggenheim, The Metropolitan and The Museum of Natural History.

That's right. New York City, which has been hit by terrorists twice. The first, you may recall, happened on Clinton's watch. Trucks with homemade bombs were parked and detonated in the basement of the world trade center towers. The terrorists responsible were caught, tried, convicted, and are now serving life sentences in federal prisons. The second, happened in 2001 on George W. Bush's watch, and resulted in the destruction of the world trade center towers and some of the surrounding buildings. The parties responsbile (those that were not killed in the attack, that is) remain free today despite 300 billion in war spending.

Now the administration that got re-elected, largely by painting their opponents as incapable of handling national security, are going to slash the security budget for the city even as they cut taxes yet again.

Now, you and I, we can disagree. We can have a philisophical difference of the minds. I can, for example, believe that tax revenue is needed for vital social programs while you feel that cutting taxes is the best way to stimulate the economy. I might say that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare while you feel for moral or religious reasons that abortion is a form of murder and should be outlawed.

I may say that killing 30,000 innocent civilians is not the best way to win the hearts and minds of our enemies, while you may claim that loss of innocent life is sometimes a neccessary evil in prosecuting a just war (although you'd be wrong about the "just" part as the vast majority of the religious authorities in the world, including The Pope Himself, have declared that this war does not meet the critieria to be considered "just").

The point is that we can disagree on any one of a hundred different topics ranging from the social, to the political, to the economic. We can disagree, and we can debate intelligently, and we can discuss the merits and drawbacks of our ideas and philosophies. I can take that. I don't mind that you believe differently than I do.

What gets me is the sheer hypocrisy, and the constant, constant lying about everything, in every way. The failure to accept responsibility. The knee-jerk need to make up excuses for everything, no matter how horrible. To justify a war by saying that we are deposing a dictator that tortured and killed his own people, and then marching in and torturing and killing those very same people and trying to make excuses for it. I am sick and tired that this debate has become less about differences of opinion and is now almost totally about blind loyalty to one side or the other. It's like a twisted game, where score is kept by how quickly you can excuse the inexcusable.

I'm just tired of it, and I'm tired of sheep that mindlessly follow the party line. Lemmings that claim to be "Conservative" or "Republican" while supporting a government that upholds none of those ideals. Bigots that are lead by the nose to the polls based on racism and prejudices. In 2004 it was gays, and in 2006 it will be immigration, more gays, and flag burning. People so stupid that, time and again, they vote against their own self interests just so that they can vote in the name of hate.

Disagree with me all that you want, but believe what you believe. Don't believe what you are told to believe even if it's the opposite of what you claimed to believe yesterday.