I Kill Spies

No Media Kings has this small collection of articles about making movies. The basic message: spend no money; it’s better to finish a ghetto project than to never finish your unfunded blockbuster.

From No Problem : “This is the steel trap that has apprehended thousands who have confused “making a really good movie when I have the time” with not making a movie at all.”
Web link of note: You Should Make Movies
(At http://nomediakings.org/youshouldmovies.htm)

Today’s news-inspired haiku:

big scissors cutting hurried discharge of patient oops! the baby’s toe!

ORLANDO, Fla. — There was a medical mistake
at an Orlando hospital Monday as someone
accidentally cut off a baby’s toe.

According to the family, newborn Amirona
Simmons was about to be discharged from
Arnold Palmer Hospital when someone, while
trying cut an ankle ID band, accidentally
cut off the newborn’s toe.

Web link of note: Conny
(At http://www.lemonsupreme.com)

What are the odds of winning a battle in Risk ? (I’m talking about “classic” Risk now, not “Risk 2210“).

I was actually calculating all these out myself, and then I realised- “duh- this is the internet- someone has definitely already done this and posted it online!”

So here’s the info, taken from the Probabilities section from the RISK FAQ.

	Defender rolls 2 dice (2 or more armies)	Defender rolls 1 die (1 army)
Attacker rolls 3 dice (4 or more armies)	Att lose 2: 29.26% Def lose 2: 37.17% Both lose 1: 33.58%	Att lose 1: 34.03% Def lose 1: 65.97%
Attacker rolls 2 dice (3 armies)	Att lose 2: 44.83% Def lose 2: 22.76% Both lose 1: 32.41%	Att lose 1: 42.13% Def lose 1: 57.87%
Attacker rolls 1 die (2 armies)	Att lose 1: 74.54% Def lose 1: 25.46%	Att lose 1: 58.33% Def lose 1: 41.67%

If you’re more of a completist, there is Scott Bartell’s RiskOdds Calculator, which shows you the complete odds for an entire battle, with an option to choose how many armies have to die before the attacker gives up.

See also Scott’s FAQ about the calculator.

One of the weirdest toys I ever had? Easily the Strange Change. It was an electric heater with plastic monsters… you warmed up the monsters and when they were soft you compressed them into little cubes. Then when you heated the cubes up at a later date they expanded again into the monsters!

Recently I’ve discovered that you got a bunch of the creatures with the set… but you could also buy more creatures in little cardboard-backed blister packs. Sometimes the creatures would be in their square “Time Capsule“ form so I guess you wouldn’t necessarily know what kind they were!

Virtual Vikki has a great description with pictures, and there’s another good set of photos at Sam’s Toy Box. And yes, I still have this thing in my garage.

KIRBY: ya ever notice how these things have a dangerous resemblance to now’n’laters?
BRIAN: I have noticed that. Funny isn’t it?
KIRBY: maybe that’s why they stopped making them
KIRBY: too many kids were either eating the plastic, or caught the set on fire by putting a now’n’later on the hot plate
KIRBY: where’d we get our set anyway?
BRIAN: temple garage sale
KIRBY: oooh
KIRBY: yea I didnt think the parents would shell out for that
KIRBY: it was probably $20 new or something
BRIAN: besides it was a toy from the 1960’s!
KIRBY: oh
KIRBY: I didn’t realize it was that old
BRIAN: yeah when we were kids most of the really dangerous toys were gone already

Today’s trivia: Sterling Holloway, voice actor.

Yes, you know him. He’s the original voice of Winnie the Pooh.
He was the narrator on tons of Disney cartoons, like say Mickey and the Beanstalk.

Here’s an article about him with a picture. An intersting snippet:

Ironically, for the actor whose voice was to be his fortune, it was the advent of sound that drove him, however temporarily, from Hollywood. “I came to Hollywood at a bad time. The movies were in a state of turmoil,” he later recalled. “Sound was coming in and silents were going out. I made a silent two-reel comedy called The Fighting Kangaroo. Then I did a silent feature, Casey at the Bat, with Wallace Beery for Paramount, and all of a sudden I was a has-been. Nobody thought I was suitable for talkies. I didn’t feel so bad when I heard about John Gilbert. So I returned to New York.”

Web link of note: Girls Kissing .com
(At http://www.girlskissing.co.uk/)

SHAC: dammit.. my woman has been hanging out w/ those lesbians an awful lot lately
BRIAN: jealous?
SHAC: yeh
BRIAN: of whom?
SHAC: i wanna hang out w/ lesbians
BRIAN: exactly

SHAC: GEEEZ they have lotsa ads in their registration process
BRIAN: yeh well whatcha gonna do
SHAC: fuk i think i may have left the “please send me my free $5 hooker in the mail” box checked
BRIAN: dumbass

From Yahoo’s AP feed:

TOKYO – After selling 300,000 pet-lovers on the Bowlingual gadget that
supposedly translates a dog’s bark into human language, a toymaker hopes to
parlay that success into a new hit product: Meowlingual.

The cat-shaped machine set to go on sale in Japan in November translates
meows and purrs into human phrases such as “I can’t stand it,” although
exact wording hasn’t been decided yet, Tokyo-based Takara Co. said
Wednesday.