Fearman's definitions

Sin City

1) Graphic novel by Frank Miller.

2) Movie based on parts of the novel and directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez. The setting is the fictitious Basin City, its popular name marked out by some slashes on a road sign. The women are either cute or out-and-out goddesses, and the guys are ... interesting. Jessica Alba is exotic dancer Nancy Callaghan. Devon Aoki is the mute guardian angel of the red light district, skilled with any kind of weapon you care to mention short of a nuke; if you gotta go, she'll take you out in style. Rosario Dawson is indeed a Valkyrie. Benicio del Toro is a gormless thug. Clive Owen is Dwight McCarthy, your average unforgettable noir antihero. Mickey Rourke is Marv, think Arnold Schwarzenegger only without that accent and a lot grittier. Nick Stahl gets yellower by the minute. Elijah Wood is Kevin, a mute cannibal with a yen for martial arts; in a smart career move, about as far from Frodo Baggins as you could imagine. (However great Peter Jackson's work is, you don't want to get typecast.) Also starring Alexis Bledel, Michael Clarke Duncan, Josh Hartnett, Jaime King, Michael Madsen, Powers Boothe and Rutger Hauer.

Filmed in black and white with colour highlights, this one is an out-and-out gem. Its sequel is set to screen in 2009.

Lines from Sin City:

Marv (with one hand out the car door grating a low-life's face off against the asphalt at 125 mph): I don't know about you, but I'm having a ball ...,

Marv: And when his eyes go dead, the hell I send him to will look like heaven after what I've done to him.

Dwight: She made a Pez dispenser out of him.

Various: Yeeesh ...,

by Fearman December 29, 2007

Shermer's First Law of Intelligence

From a Penn & Teller show, a quote from Michael Shermer: "Smart people are very good at rationalising things they came to believe for unsmart reasons."

You might think Creationism boasts a few fine minds, but just remember Shermer's First Law of Intelligence.

by Fearman December 28, 2007

Sun

1. The star at the centre of the Solar System, orbited by all the other bodies in the immediate neighbourhood. The thing that people go to the Canary Islands or Hawaii to enjoy a little better. A Type G2 yellow dwarf on the main sequence of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, approximately halfway through a lifetime of roughly ten billion years. The planet Earth orbits it at a distance of 93 million miles once a year. The Sun's mass is two times ten to the twenty-seventh tonnes, or a third of a million times the mass of Earth, diameter to the visible disc (photosphere) 853,000 miles. Contains 99.86 percent of the system's total mass. Shines by thermonuclear reactions at the core, where the proton-proton reaction fuses between 700 and 800 million tonnes of hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei every second, with four or five million tonnes of this mass released as light and other forms of radiation by Einstein's equation E equals mc squared; the photons take about a million years to blunder outwards before reaching the photosphere and flying out into space, where eight minutes later some of them power the weather systems of the Earth and photosynthetic reactions in plants that are directly or indirectly essential to most life on the planet; the ultra-violet radiation that comes with the package may give careless people sunburn. Energy output of the sun at this point in its evolution is 400 million exawatts. Interior structure consists of the core where nuclear fusion takes place, a radiative layer overlying this and a convective layer of progressively smaller convection cells towards the visible surface, physically a little like the patterns in a pot of water boiling on a stove. The sun's visible face is marked by comparatively bright faculae and dark sunspots, associated with localised magnetic fields; large prominences erupt from the disk that in themselves utterly dwarf the planet Earth. Ion storms coming from the sun interfere with Earth-based electronics and may pose a threat to manned space flight. Strengthening gusts in the solar wind interact with Earth's magnetosphere and generate aurorae around the magnetic poles. Solar core temperature is about fifteen million degrees Centigrade, temperature at the photosphere about 6,000 degrees, and temperatures of one to two million degrees are found in the wispy outermost layers of the atmosphere called the corona, from a Latin word meaning "crown". In absolute terms one of the brighter stars in the neighbourhood, although utterly outdone by the galaxy's relatively rare and short-lived supergiants. Orbits the centre of the Milky Way galaxy at a speed of roughly 140 miles per second at a distance of about 30,000 light years, carrying the planets with it, completing one circuit every 225 million years; one of our galactic years ago, the dinosaurs had yet to evolve.

2. A British tabloid paper noted for having a gorgeous babe on page 3.

3. Traditionally the nineteenth card in the Trumps Major of the Tarot deck. In the Rider-Waite version it shows a child riding a white horse with a red cape billowing behind them; further back a row of sunflowers peek over a wall and a rayed Sun-face looks down on everything ... but why are the sunflowers not facing the Sun?

The sun rose at six o'clock the next morning.

John was reading the Sun on the kitchen table.

The next spread she made featured the Sun, the Hanged Man, the Hermit and the Devil.

by Fearman May 17, 2008

religion

An irrational institution whose relationship with the finer aspects of human nature is essentially that of a parasite on a host.

Religion might not necessarily be the root of all evil but it certainly oils the wheels.

by Fearman April 1, 2008

dear John letter

1. A letter sent by a girlfriend (usually) explaining to her guy that she has no wish to see him any more, or that the relationship is not working out. Equivalent when the target is female is the dear Jeannie letter.

2. Letter from a would-be employer regretfully informing a job applicant that for one reason or another, which may or may not be given, they didn't make it.

Marie, not being the most confident girl on the block, gave Desmond her dear John letter after he ogled too many women on the beach.

I just got the dear John letter from ToyMaster last week.

by Fearman January 7, 2008

multimortamicrocanisequiphobia

Morbid fear of becoming the defendant in a class action suit taken on behalf of a large number of dead chihuahuas. Or by a large number of undead chihuahuas.

By the time you find yourself suffering from multimortamicrocanisequiphobia, it's time to decompress.

by Fearman November 22, 2007

Hell

1. Town in Nebraska slightly to the west of Heck but east of Motherfuckingcrapdagger.

2. A place they send you when you die for posting those adverts for religions or religiously connected material on the right of an Urbandictionary page. Yes, this includes Scientology.

3. Accurate description of the surface of the planet Venus, although on Venus there aren't that many guys in kinky suits with pitchforks.

4. The most terrible place most people can imagine. Like a boarding school on Sunday, only funnier.

5. A place you invoke after you discover that the bottle of absinthe that cost you over a hundred Euro shattered in transit.

6. Rumoured to be the subtitle of the latest version of Microsoft Word.

7. Place where you go, according to Gary Larson, to play the accordion for eternity.

8. A place where there are fires everywhere but it's dark. It's either very very hot or very very cold. You burn up ... forever. If there was any possibility of it being real it wouldn't have to be portrayed as anywhere near as nasty.

We're in Hell, and the good news is the population is only 301.

Now that line on Hell oughta stop them ... I wish.

Venus is Hell, Earth is Heaven.

I thought I was back in boarding school on a Sunday, but it turns out I'm only in Hell. That's a relief.

Hell! My best absinthe!

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by Fearman April 23, 2008