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.

the los angeles times covers the downtown loft boom and where developers are turning to next in a fairly long article, but doesn’t really cover any new ground.

the national institute of mental health (the ones with the rats) put out a study that says a quarter of all americans met the criteria for having a mental illness in the last twelve months.

recently i filled up the very large (three liter?) wine bottle in which i’ve been collecting pennies, nickels, and dimes. so i’ve dumped it all out, sorted it out by type, and am putting it into piles of ten.

dimes are pretty amazingly space-efficient. there was over $90 in dimes in the bottle.

but all this counting is for naught, really. i will probably take the coins with me to a coinstar location tomorrow and donate it all to the world wildlife fund.

and i’ve already started refilling the bottle with new coins.

despite a script by tina fey, mean girls just doesn’t live up to similar films like heathers and clueless. it’s a little frightening that rachel mcadams plays the leader of the popular-girl clique of a bunch of high school juniors — she’s 28. that would also make her about five years younger than amy poehler, who plays her mom in the movie.

it took me more than a year to get through it, but i’ve finally seen all of krzysztof kieślowski’s dekalog miniseries. there are 10 episodes, each based (sometimes fairly loosely) on one of the ten commandments. they are all connected by place (a warsaw apartment complex) and some refer to characters and events from others, but each is otherwise distinct.

they are all brilliant, of course.

the grand performances series that takes place at the california plaza in downtown los angeles is starting up this weekend with two films: mad hot ballroom and double indemnity. there’s all sorts of cool stuff on the schedule, which runs through september. and it’s all free.