June, 19, 2005 archives

this is part of an ad that is on the wall at the pershing square station of the metro red line, and it always cracks me up. photographs of david hasselhoff are just always funny.

something i’ve thought about doing is a letters from a nut-style (or the lazlo letters-style) experiment in which i would send letters to various celebrities praising them for really silly and relatively obscure things they have done (“dear steven spielberg, i really enjoyed your acting in blues brothers, when can we expect to see you on the big screen again? i haven’t really seen much of you since then.”) and ask for a signed picture of them in return for the signed picture of myself i have enclosed — but the picture would be david hasselhoff with my name signed to it (or whatever fake name i used).

the other idea is more recent: a spoof of the huffington post called the hasselhoff post. it almost writes itself.

here’s a few resources that someone may find helpful:

• php’s htmlspecialchars() function, useful for encoding user input that may contain characters like <
• php’s addslashes() function, useful for escaping user input for putting into an sql query (even better is to use a parameter-based query api)
• a list of the top ten php security vulnerabilities

and don’t forget that in php, variables like $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] are user input.

i saw something on the gold line yesterday that was funny — a sheriff got on at one of the stops, and started walking towards the front of the car (where he turned around and started checking tickets). as he was walking up to the front, a guy hopped out of his seat right after he passed by, and ran out of the train.

it cracked up all of the passengers that saw him take off, and what made it a little bit funnier is that the guy looked perfectly normal, even respectable. the two skate punks who took his seat looked more like the type you would expect to be riding without a ticket.

i think it is a little amazing how crash fails in spite of its shortcomings. a lot of the situations it sets up are pretty hackneyed (a latina lashing out because she’s been called mexican and really has puerto rican and el salvadoran parents? so not new). but the film pulls them together in an interesting way. and there’s a few scenes that really propel the film to great heights.

when i came back from seeing crash, they were shooting a movie near my building — but they were shooting it with a camera mounted on a remote-control helicopter. so there was a car driving around the block, followed by the helicopter, followed by a truck with a camera operator standing on the back of it with a big remote control.

and i thought the shoot up the street from that was interesting — they had cartoon-looking cars with winding keys mounted on them.