All Your Base Are Belong To Us — The Kip Lange Homepage

…that my publishing is going okay, Blogger is going a tad whacky on me today…

Well, once again, thank you Amazon.com and your recommendations. I took their advice this time and tried out a thriller they suggested, and now I’m addicted to the series.

Specifically, I’m talking about Lee Child (a former television writer) and his “Jack Reacher” series (warning: that link contains a few spoilers). They combine good solid thriller plots with a tough-guy lead character who’s reminiscent of Philip Marlowe, the progenitor of the first-person “tough guy” anti-hero detective.

You can jump into any of Child’s “Jack Reacher” novels whenever you want. It works because Jack Reacher is basically an ex-army drifter who finds himself just sort of coincidentally runing into a lot of mystery/thriller-based plotlines. A little bit like “Kung-Fu” (what a great series that was).

Like Raymond Chandler, the author of the Philip Marlowe novels, Lee Child was born roughly in the center of England, yet somehow manages to capture American grittiness like he’s stopping a bullet with his teeth. The writing is tight and beautiful, frankly.

Of course, this isn’t exactly Hemingway we’re talking about here, but this is great escapist fare for any lover of “literature noir” — more commonly known as “hardboiled mysteries” or “pulp fiction” — the gritty tough-guy novels that pay homage to the early pulp mags like “Black Mask” and such.

Anyway, if you’d like to read them in the order that they were written, start off with Killing Floor.

Now, the plots are a bit thin, and a bit tangled — another thing reminiscent of Chandler, he was famous for indicipherable plots (but a master stylist, a truly great author — Chandler, I’m talking about — one in a billion). But Child’s gritty (I know I keep saying “gritty”, but that’s the word) writing keeps you turning page after page. And it doesn’t drop down to the horribly simplistic (yet addictive) level of, say, James Patterson.

These are truly gritty (what’s the count on how many times I’ve used “gritty” so far? anyone keeping track?) and well-written novels, these Jack Reacher books from Lee Child. I generally don’t recommend authors much; lately I’ve been mired in Peter F. Hamilton’s grand space operas. But I’m recommending Lee Child and his Jack Reacher novels. These are really great books. You’ll get addicted in no time whatsoever.

So, if you’re looking for some good “take-me-away” fast paced thrillers, I say, go get yourself some Jack Reacher.

And if ya don’t read — well, turn off the damn TV for once in your life and start!

Okay, I got my hot little hands on a copy of Madden ’08 for the PS3. Here’s what I think so far.

First, the game is smooth. Damn smooth. Very good-looking. The playcalling is a bit more complex, but improved.

The most annoying thing about this game is that Madden and Michaels are no longer in it. Just annoying generic play-by-play TV announcer guy — and no color guy. Closest thing to a celebrity voice in the game is Marshall Faulk, who introduces each game.

Okay, now to the meat of the matter — Madden ’08 has gotten insanely complex. They have introduced this thing called “weapons” — Smart QB (Peyton Manning or Tom Brady), Power D-Lineman, stuff like that. Each of these have special moves you can use.

For instance, a “Smart QB” will come up to the line with a little light bulb underneath him. You hit L1 and he starts to read the play. If you run the same play against a “Smart QB” too much, he’ll recognize the defense eventually (it’ll show up on your screen, all diagrammed).

And that’s just one weapon…

Okay, the other bad news — they have changed the controls a little bit, and it’s annoying. Remember the great old “hit that X button to run like a power back”? No, now it’s R2 for speed and the right analog stick forward (the “Truck Stick”, it’s been around before) to run. Juking and everything is still there, don’t worry.

The replays are truly excellent now; the graphics are great. And you definitely want to be playing this one in HD. Franchise mode has been improved and reworked and is a bit more fun.

Belicheck still won’t let himself be put in the game. 😉

As far as I know, there are no roster updates available for the game yet.

Oh, and for us Pats fans — the Patriots are now insanely good. Out of a 0-99 ranking, the Pats are ranked at *98* overall. Once again, all this enthusiasm for the Pats is starting to scare me…

There’s also a really cool minigame where you get to be Michael Vick and throw a dog against a wall until it’s dead…oh wait, sorry, no.

However, in All-Pro Football 2k8, the competing franchise from 2K sports, you can play O.J. Simpson. He plays for a fantasy team called “The Assassins”.

I am not making that up.

Madden ’08 gets a B+ from me. If the interface was cleaner and things were a little simpler, I’d bump that up to an A/A-. I mean, come on, it’s Madden. You know it rocks.

Yeah, cuz when Serge the Eskimo gets here, everybody’s gonna jump for joy.

Serge is in Berlin working in post-production. Here’s the most recent video he’s edited (music video). Some nice effects and cuts, and…you gotta love the guy in the giant bunny suit.

Okay, folks. There are guys out there already selling iPhone headphone “adapters” that let you plug “regular” headphones into the iPhone’s super-recessed headphone jack.

Don’t waste your money. You can use regular headphones with the iPhone, easy. All you need is a sharp knife.

Take that sharp knife, take a pair of headphones, and right around the headphone jack, trim off about an 1/8th of an inch of the rubber around the jack. Then plug your headphones into the iPhone. Click, they can now fit in the super-recessed iPhone jack.

I’m using a medium-priced pair of “normal” headphones that I just altered this way right now, and the music is coming through perfectly.

And yes, you’ll still be able to use the modified jack on everything else.

I’ve just noticed that a lot of people are trying to reach a paper I wrote over ten years ago at Berkeley on The Third Man. It’s one of my personal favorites, out of all the junk I wrote in college (I actually cared about this one when I wrote it).

Anyway, I was flattered to have it linked from www.noircinema.info — recognition of any kind is always great, and I suggest visiting the aforementioned site for more insight on The Third Man and other noir classics.

You can even get the old Harry Lime radio shows done by Welles from there.

Anyway, it’s back up, it’s at http://www.kiplange.com/papers/thirdman.html.

And a word of warning — do not plagiarize. I am a professional writer, and plagiarism is a serious sin. If you use any of my work in your own paper for college or whatever, I expect you to cite it properly. If I find out this has been plagiarized, which I could easily do these days, I will contact your professor and inform him of what you’ve done (you better frickin’ believe it, buddy, I take writing very seriously).

Okay, enough beating you over the head with that. I hope you enjoy it a little, or that it proves useful to you.

I can see some of you, sitting there, saying to yourselves, “Hey, Kip, what the hell do you do for fun, besides fiddling with gadgets?”

I’ll tell you what I do. First I strip down to my underwear. Then I take a searching inventory of monkeys. Next, I bow down to a giant poster that looks like this:

I then rush to my computer, type
http://www.vastrightwingconspiracy.org/condiishot/
After this, I go to a nearby mirror, and repeat, “Nancy Pelosi wears a thong!” eight times, while holding back the urge to vomit (as many of you may know, Nancy Pelosi has caused me to projectile vomit several times; this is indeed a great problem and has led to me blocking C-SPAN on my TV).

Then I concentrate very hard, turn around, look over my left shoulder in the mirror, and wait very carefully for the face of Rudy Giuliani to materialize.

So there.

Right. Let me try to be brief about this. First, the iPhone doesn’t seem to want to ever connect to YouTube when you’re using a wireless network. Safari, the web browser, works just fine, but not YouTube. As does everything else, as far as I know. So if you can’t get at YouTube, trying going through the regular (and slow) AT&T “EDGE” service.

Now, if it’s not even working through that, you can try two things. First, give the iPhone a hard boot by holding the power button on top down until you get the red “Power Off” slide on the front. Power off, and start it up again (you’ll see the Apple logo if you did it right).

The other option is to “restore” the phone in iTunes. It’s not as scary as it sounds. Everything will re-sync. Make sure you don’t restore to a backup; restore it from scratch. That oughtta work.

In the meantime, hopefully we’ll get an update that will let wireless networks work better with the iPhone YouTube option. Or perhaps some which is actually useful, like a Flash player for all that video you can’t see everywhere except YouTube. Thppthh.

…I’m feeling so upset, although I’m so tired, I’ll have another cigarette — and curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid git…

Pardon the lyrics. But I am tired. I bet a lot of you who remember the ol’ Kip from back in my college days wonders, “Why has Kip stopped writing interesting things? Why is he writing all this bland crap about cleaning lasers and stuff?”

The answer is simple. I don’t want to post a divisive opinion or get into detail about any hijinks I’ve gotten into, because all a prospective employer would have to do is type “Kip Lange” or “Kip Lang” or whatever into a browser and *pop* up comes my blog, and suddenly I don’t get hired because they read about that time with the monkeys, the water-slide, and the KY Jelly, you know?

But dammit, I am going to do some more interesting writing. Possibly under a pen-name under a freely-hosted blog. I’ll let anyone interested know if I do it, so you can follow the rants that once defined my writing…

Right, so the iPhone has been working great, especially plugged into my wireless network. But for some reason it was being cludgy with me, timing out on weather forecasts, stupid things like that. So I figured I’d give it a restore.

So, just let me say for the record, Apple is frigging awesome. The restore took probably less than ten minutes, and then I was easily able to sync the phone back to my custom settings.

It works. Don’t be afraid to restore your iPhone if you want to make sure it’s running right. Just make sure you’ve synched it through iTunes before you do it, so you can get everything back the way you want it.