Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

Every now and then, you come across something that makes you wonder if you’re reading The Onion. It is almost invariably the case at those times that you are not. Case in point.

Britney Spears is reportedly set to quit pop music – to become a forensic scientist.

The sexy star has allegedly told friends she is considering swapping her singing career for student life and enrolling at university to study for a degree after being motivated by a TV series.

Place yer bets. Which do you think will happen first? Will it be (A) Britney’s first encounter with a corpse in an autopsy theatre leaves her feeling icky and she decides to quit between vomiting sessions, (B) Britney puts her plans off indefinitely when her hubby convinces her that she needs to do just one more tour... and that she needs him to choreograph it, or© Britney loses interest in forensic science when she catches a rerun of “I Dream of Jeannie” on TVLand and decides that she wants to be an astronaut like Major Nelson (or – dare we hope? – a genie like Jeannie).

Looking at the two latest reviews posted to The Anvil & Sprocket, you would never imagine the bad experiences we’ve had with vampire movies in the past. After all, we just keep reviewing more of ‘em…

First, John continues his Misty Mundae kick – and his record of finding bad vampire flicks – with his review of Lust for Dracula. Then, I review Van Helsing and find that it makes a surprisingly decent action movie.

I can’t stop fiddling with the TechTV / G4 muck. I already know that G4 bought them with the sole purpose of shutting them down. I already know that G4 consistently dumbs down their programming and has removed the “Tech” side of TechTV. And now they’ve gone and deprived me of Swish. But still, I’m compelled to read the insider stories.

First: Dan Huard writes about life as a TechTV/G4 employee. Among other things, he points out that the top brass at G4 made some drastic changes to the format of The Screen Savers – such as having him pre-produce the live callers on the show and telling him that they didn’t want so many calls from “geeks” on the program. Feh. I think I’ve adequately expressed the social acceptability of the geek before, so I say unto that, “Feh.” If G4 doesn’t want geeks, they’re in the wrong business.

Second, samureye writes about attending the last episode of Unscrewed. Including the fact that while G4 has dumped the entirety of the Unscrewed family, an upcoming show has a title suspiciously similar to a regular segment on the show. Hmmm…

sigh One day, there’ll be good geek programming again.

God forbid that I should give you anything that might be construed as a reason to buy a Microsoft product, but XBox Modification – one of the many people who showed you how to turn the XBox into a Linux machine – has a story about how they’ve managed to install and run Macintosh OS X on Microsoft’s funbox.