Zixar

If that's all you got out of it, HAPe4Me, then why did you bother to read the whole thing? I disagree with your conclusion, but that's one you still could have reached by page 6, or even earlier. Pawtucket can correct me if I'm wrong, but had he discovered Rocky's thread before I did, he still would have done the same thing. The ONLY reason I even revealed that I was the one who reported it was to deflect some of Rocky's hissy fit. Do you even know what I said in the report? Or do you even care, seeing as how you've already prejudged my guilt? I've read an awful lot of bitching from an awful lot of folks, along with a lot of silly "both sides were wrong" posts, but of all the people who want to criticize me for this, I've only gotten two honest answers to my question about whether Paw deserves an apology from Rocky--and even then, Excathedra didn't know, and Vickles said it was none of her business. So, which is it in your eyes, Hap? Will you be the first one to say that Pawtucket doesn't deserve an apology?

Snoogans. Make sure you get the extended DVD of Dogma and watch all the deleted scenes. Get the Clerks animated series DVD, too. There's also a DVD compilation of some of his college speaking tours "An Evening With Kevin Smith" that's pretty good. Go to Kevin's website at www.viewaskew.com and go download the "Flying Car" sketch he did for Jay Leno, as well as the "Roadside Attractions". Check out his cameo as Jack Kirby (the medical examiner who shows the billy club to the reporter) in the "Daredevil" movie.

Actually, I agree with leaving out the Scouring of the Shire. Tolkien could do it in the book because it ran short at that point anyway. Consider where it would have happened in the movie, though. We've just had the payoff of a nine-hour-plus film, the Ring is destroyed, the King is restored, the Hobbits are honored--ROLL CREDITS. (The multi-endings after that were a bad idea. IMHO, they should have wrapped all the endings up in a Galadriel-narrated montage like the first movie opened.) If you insert the Scouring of the Shire, though, it's a colossal downer after a huge emotional high. Remember that the Shire was pretty much ruined when they got back to it. Telling that in a book is easy. In a movie, however, all you would do is show that all the .... these four little guys went through (and, vicariously, the VIEWER,) over the past 9+ hours was for nothing. They didn't save their own homes! In the book, it's easy to show the four hobbits vanquishing the last foe and becoming great community leaders, rebuilding the Shire. In a movie, viewers are feeling the effects of the Bucket-O-Coke by that time, and don't want a smaller blip in the story when the big one just finished! All the Scouring really turns out to be in the book is a minor annoyance. In movies, all minor annoyances wind up on the cutting room floor. Most books on moviemaking and a lot of director's commentaries hit this fact over and over. The most common theme in the comments on the Deleted Scenes on a DVD is "we had to cut this scene for time, though everyone really liked it, it just didn't move the story along". Jackson made the right call, in this case. Although, one of the Saruman death scenes would have tied up that subplot better. I expect to see that on the EE DVD.

That's only going to make it worse, in the long run.

That's true--Ian Holm is shown as young Bilbo finding the Ring in the opening moments of the first film. A little botox, close-ups used sparingly...yes, it could be done! I, for one, would love to see what the folks at WETA Digital could do with Smaug battling the Lake-Men. Who would play the dwarves, though? And Thranduil? Beorn? Remember, too, that the wood-elves are semi-bad guys in The Hobbit... :(-->

Garth: Well said. Thanks for your post.

There's another thing to consider. As long as things are going smoothly, GreaseSpotters tend to have gracefully short memories when it comes to the occasional faux pas, provided the person committing it exhibits some humility in proportion to the severity of the act. Arrogance may get us into trouble, but it's pride that keeps us there. For everyone's sake, and yours especially, Rocky, swallow your pride and apologize to Pawtucket. If you do, I guarantee you that within a MONTH 99.9% of the people here will have forgotten all about this mess. Unless you do something similar again, that is, but that's entirely within your power to control, because it's SELF-control. Like I said way back on page 6: Well, would there?

Hey, Tom? That's not really helping. I don't think laleo is speaking from a position of stress, (although I could be wrong) and, even though your post isn't obstructive on the surface, you're dismissing what she's saying in a passive-agressive manner by implying that she is. Does that make sense?

oldies: I think that was fairly well done. Although in extreme pain on the cross, Jesus hangs in there until the very end, then chooses to finish it.

I think Gibson could have easily told the whole Christ story, birth to resurrection, if he'd pushed it out to 3 hrs. Shown a little more of Christ's great compassion for the people, and a little less of him being flayed into kosher salami. Purely cinematic nitpicks: 1) Jim Caviezel's digitally-colored eyes. At times they're ORANGE, for Pete's sake! (They're naturally blue, but no one would buy a blue-eyed Jesus.) 2) Another eye bit: At the end, when Mary is cradling Jesus' dead body after they take him off the cross, Caviezel's left eyelid flutters several times during the extreme close-up. Come on! He can't "act" dead any better than that?

ROTK Theatrical Version DVD: May 25, 2004 (no dts soundtrack--BOO!) ROTK Extended version DVD: Unknown, rumor says November, like the other two. Rumor also has it that ROTK EE will have a runtime of 4hr 10min.

Tom: Yes, they do, and yes, it's VERY cool! :)--> The big one is about $3,000, the little one about $500. There are a couple of smaller ETX scopes, a 60 and a 70, but they don't have quite the same pointing capabilities as the 90 and up, and certainly not as good optics as the 90. The big one is fully automatic. You just point it north, turn it on, and it gets a GPS fix to know its exact position and time, then compensates for uneven ground with tip and tilt sensors. The small one you have to enter the time and location manually, and it's best to level the tripod or table (or car trunk) first, but otherwise both then slew to two different bright stars, which you center in the eyepiece with the hand controller, the scope calculates for a second, and voila! The scope will then automatically slew to any object or coordinate you punch in on the keypad, and what's more, automatically rotate slowly to keep the scope LOCKED on that object until you decide to look at something else. The earth rotates, of course, and if the scope doesn't have tracking capabilities, the image tends to slide right across the field of view, faster at higher magnification! These scopes eliminate that. Extremely cool, and they hold their value well. A good scope is a good investment, and one you can pass down to your kids.

Tom: Mine's the one on the left, a 10" Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain. The pic of Saturn is about 60x, the other two about 120x. Meade LX200-GPS The images look similar in my little 90mm Maksutov-Cassegrain, only dimmer. It's the smallest one, the one in the middle of this page: Meade ETX telescopes

Radar: With respect, laleo covered this near the bottom of page 8. Yes, I'm frequently involved, but not always, and I very rarely, if ever, "start" the personal attacks when I am. If you'll look back at the Rocky vs. QamiQazi fight when Rocky threatened to reveal QamiQazi's identity, for example, who was it that tried to head it off at the start? If you would, please read the following page: Soap Opera - Page 7 Did I not try to reason with Rocky? What did I get for it? That thread had been going on for six pages before I ever posted on it. And that's just one example. In short, I am not the common denominator, I'm just the figurehead-du-jour that Rocky's taking his personal troubles out on. Prior to that, it was Pawtucket. Before that, me, or Hills, or QQ, I've lost track. If Paw banned me permanently this instant, Rocky would still continue on to the next person that looked crosseyed at him, because that's what he's done over and over and over again. I don't claim to be a saint. I don't claim to have never taken a personal shot at Rocky, either. But enough is enough. No, Paw did not ask me to extract an apology from Rocky. Here's what he did say, though: Now, I ask you, which is more believable--that Pawtucket, QQ, and I have had a secret anti_Rocky conspiracy going for years, and all the fights we've had amongst ourselves were just an elaborate setup to frame him? Or that Rocky will fight with anyone at the drop of a hat if he doesn't get his way? I'll ask you the same question I'm asking everyone else: after re-reading the first few pages of this thread, does Pawtucket deserve an apology, or not? Take me out of the picture and look at it again. This situation affects us all, whether I decide to quit this place or not. If you still want to blame me, what else can I say? Respectfully, Zix (edited to fix an ambiguous pronoun) [This message was edited by Zixar on March 04, 2004 at 11:25.]

Radar: It doesn't surprise me. I have similar and opposite views about Gore and Kerry. The point is that these things snowball very rapidly. One minute it's "Gore's a sore loser", the next minute it's "Bush is a Nazi deserter who stole the Presidency and should be shot". Things don't tend to get nicer from there. That's why the Political Forum was created in the first place, to keep otherwise-pleasant folks from showing their ugly political sides on the Open Forum.So, when a person is kicked out of the Political forums because he can't even abide the few rules in that squalid mud pit, what should be done when that person starts pouring water into the dirt of the Open Forum? There's always going to be differences of opinion, and there are going to be varying degrees of civility when those differences clash. We can't stop it all, that's true. But when an unpleasant situation keeps happening repeatedly, and there's one person who keeps showing up as the common denominator, what's a group supposed to do?

Well, getting a list of actual issues is some progress, anyway. I'd like to address these that Rocky posted to laleo: Laleo, What hypocrisy. You condone Zixar reporting a thread that broke no rules, but you have tirade after tirade condemning me. First off, believing that the mere reporting of a thread is some sort of heinous offense is ridiculous. Pawtucket has ignored far more of mine than he's ever responded to, and can corroborate that fact. Second, the thread was inappropriately posted, and Rocky knows it. While the original Goldwater article had only the typical political bias and wasn't of itself overly offensive, Rocky started making politically inflammatory comments while the thread was still on the Open Forum. Here are his own words, from his second post on the thread: Now whether one believes these are "tame" or not, Rocky frequently used the term "wingnut" derogatorily against conservatives on the Political forums, and "White House squatter" is a slur on the President referring to the 2000 election controversy. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with Rocky's political sentiments, using this kind of language has always started heated exchanges in the Political forums. Since Rocky had been banned from those same forums, starting a thread about a political figure, even if originally innocuous, and then starting in with remarks attacking the politics of his opponents was a clear violation of his ban. I did not post on that thread while it was in the Open forum. I brought it to Paw's attention, and he agreed it was inappropriate, posting only a single line to the thread before relocating it. Note that he did not erase it or alter it in any way, just moved it to the proper forum. That should have been the end of it, or at least this damnable thread should have terminated when Rocky found out where his thread had gone and that he could still access it. However, your lack of awareness of what my LEGITIMATE concern about the administration of this site makes your butt-in-ski-ness in this thread all the more absurd. Because the fact is that MY concern has ONE root and ONE root only. That is that at QQ's suggestion, Paw set up the alert button so that said concerns could be handled privately, rather than publicly. This is not entirely true. The alert button has been there since very early on in GreaseSpot's history. It wasn't at QQ's request any more than it was at Rocky's. Pawtucket banned me for NO other reason but that I used the alert button to report a couple posts made by zixar and qq that were hateful attacks on me. As has been said before, Pawtucket's view of what is and isn't a "hateful attack" can differ greatly from that of another poster. I myself got caught on the wrong side for something I thought was completely minor. It happens. From what I've been told, the ban had more to do with Rocky's "he hit me BACK first" attitude, i.e., he would bring these attacks on himself, then cry foul. Apparently it happened one too many times, but it was no one's fault but his own. In response to my reporting of said posts, Paw rewrote the rules more than once to make it such that he could justify saying I didn't have legitimate complaints, when, before the rewrite, I did. One of these "hateful personal attacks" was Hills Bro referring to Rocky as "Pebbles". Really. Pawtucket's next step was to try to humiliate me. I refused to be intimidated. I'd love to see the post in which Paw tried to "humiliate" and "intimidate". I could be wrong, but it's more likely Paw just called him on the carpet--privately--to get him to stop being such a difficult child. Pawtucket's next step was to ban me from the main political forum. If one cannot play nice with others... Zixar continued to harass me and hence the hateful attacks on me continued. Rocky should document this, and be specific about it. I called attention to it. Pawtucket's next step was to ban me from both political forums all together. I supposedly attack him, and he gets banned for it? Is there anyone here at all that thinks Pawtucket is that colossally stupid? Then, when I posted a legitimate issue for discussion in the OPEN forum, because that was the only place I was allowed to do so, Zixar's current (now five or six day) attack began and apparently hasn't let up. As I've posted above, this is false, and a deliberate distortion of the facts. Rocky started this whole thing by abusing this site, then Pawtucket personally, and only after that did he start in on me. When Pawtucket heeded Zixar's alert (even though I had violated NO rule...so, by definition we have an unbalanced and biased administration of the site, at least in this situation), he moved the thread, and did NOT tell me whether it had simply deleted or moved elsewhere. At that time, I did NOT have access to the forum, so I posted this thread to ask the question. Addressed several times before... Zixar took over and has not let up in his hate for me. No matter how much Rocky is desperately trying to personalize this so others will dismiss it as a ....ing match, it is not just another Rocky vs. Zixar squabble. Rest assured that if anyone else had reported his original thread besides me that that person would be the one painted as "evil" and "hateful". Do I owe Pawtucket an apology for me telling the truth about the unbalanced administration of this site? No, you owe him one for acting like a total spoiled child towards him, for starting this whole flap just because you don't get to run this site to your own pleasure. Pawtucket has not demanded one, nor has he asked me for one. That's a dodge. Of course he's not going to ask for one. That would only give Rocky more fodder for his martyr complex, since he's already tarred him as "arbitrary and capricious". Pawtucket deserves one, this whole site deserves one, and it looks like I'm not the only one who thinks so. Laleo, you copped an attitude against me from the first time we interacted, which I recall had to do with me agreeing with something you said. And you told me you were offended that I would dare to agree with you. You've never been anything but hateful to me, but it hasn't, until this thread, been as intense as that which lives so intensely in the words of Zixar. Notice that the "hate brush" he paints with just keeps getting wider and wider. To those who would defend him, I'd ask one question: how long will it be before you disagree with him on something and suddenly become part of the Evil Hateful Anti-Rocky Conspiracy, too?

Garth: Rocky answered you shortly after you posted the first time...

Tom: Not a very good start at being the Official GreaseSpot Horse Coroner™... :D-->

Looks like I'm going to have some posting to do in the morning. But a quick note to excathedra, about not particularly liking you: I'm sorry that hurt your feelings, but would you rather I lied to you? Perhaps my feelings towards you may change in the future. It has happened with other posters I didn't really like before, but I'm not going to lie to you about it now. However, for what it's worth, I think it stems more from just a fundamental difference in viewpoint than any personal flaw on your part. I know that doesn't make it any nicer, perhaps, but it's honestly how I feel about you. It would be disingenuous of me to say "nothing personal" about the situation.

Tom: Luckily, Jupiter will be a fine sight well into the summer, it just plods along in its 12-year orbit! Yes, it's an easy binocular target, but the real trick is seeing the four Galilean moons of Jupiter in binocs. That's the fun bit about Jupiter--those four moons zip around the planet so they're in different places every night! Here's what Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn look like through my telescope (although the Saturn pic is half the scale of the other two--didn't Barlow the camera) If you look closely at the big Jupiter pic, you can see one of the moons to the left, and it's casting a shadow on the lower right of the planet--a Jovian total eclipse! :)-->

Tom: Jupiter is currently in southeastern Leo, headed towards Virgo. It's the brightest object in the eastern sky from the time it rises, which is near local sunset. If you see a bright object in the west however, that's brilliant Venus, chasing the Sun down into the western horizon. Mark April 2nd on your calendars and get a decent pair of binoculars handy. Venus will pass through the Pleaides, in Taurus, on that night, which will make a lovely sight in even a 7x35 pair of binos. Telescopes have too narrow a field of view to take it all in, but some 10x50s are just perfect for this. What else would you like to know? :)-->

Just got back from seeing it. I thought it was very well done, and it was nowhere near as violent as I'd been led to believe. I thought it was about the only way to get the point across without glossing it over or relying solely on shock tactics. It made me rethink some things.

How about a prequel about his ministry of peace and love? Naaah. Too "Hollywood". :)-->

A typical response by Rocky: ---------------------------- 1. Dismiss everything by fiat. 2. Lie about the opponent. 3. Attempt misdirection to cover 1 & 2. 4. Make a closing remark, either ad hominem, a ridiculous non sequitur, or a little of both. Example: (4 points, 4 sentences)

Radar/Long Gone: I replaced the article I posted with a hyperlink to it. Apologies for contributing unnecessarily to thread/bandwidth clutter. :)-->