Intermittent Rant

I just UNinstalled IE 7 Beta today after installing it a few days ago. Reason? It’s incredibly unstable even for a beta. IE 7 boasts some nice new features like tabbed browsing, which works pretty well although limited in terms of configurability, and RSS support, which also works pretty well although I’ve been yearning for Live Bookmarks since Firefox introduced them and Netscape took them away in its recent update. No Live Bookmarks in IE 7. Boo hoo.

In spite of the new bells, its failings drove me to uninstall. It was a lot slower than IE 6 and Firefox even. In fact, there were times it took literally 3 minutes to open the browser. It would hang way too often. And worse yet, the Back button didn’t work right. The most basic feature of a web browser did not work on IE 7! This is what happens: I browse from page to page to page as one normally does during a browsing experience and then every once in a while I would hit the Back button only to see a page I had visited 10 pages ago. Every page in between was GONE! This was especially frustrating when I threw Google into the mix. Imagine doing a Google search, then clicking the first result, and then clicking Back to see the results page again and clicking the next result. Not hard to imagine. Everyone does it. Now imagine clicking Back and instead of seeing the results page, you see some page you saw 10 pages ago. And in order to see the results again, you have to re-do the search and click the next result. Now you see why I uninstalled it.

If you haven’t heard anything about the hot water the creators of South Park are in, then take a look at this. To put it in a nutshell: Round 1…Last season, South Park had an unforgettable episode about Scientology featuring Tom Cruise in a closet with Nicole Kidman urging him to come out. This angered Tom Cruise, who is quite known for being angry about such things and thus super-vindictive. The episode was supposed to be re-aired a few weeks ago; however, rumor has it Tom Cruise threatened to pull MI3 adverts if the episode was aired. The episode was not aired. Round 2…Because of offenses taken about the Scientology episode, Isaac Hayes, the voice of Chef and a Scientologist himself, left the show. Last week, the opener for the new season showed the return of Chef, but with mangled dialogue. It appeared the South Park creators clipped together dialogue from past shows to make Chef sound like a pedophile. Then at the end, they killed Chef. You bastards! The South Park kids blame the “fruity little club” for turning Chef against them. Episode ends with Star Wars 3 motif in which Chef becomes Darth Chef…or whatever.

Now the reason why I’m so impressed. Hollywood is crazy. Hollywood is full of nutjobs. Matt Stone even talks in a 60 Minutes interview about how Hollywood actors think they’re so important when in fact it’s just plain silly how they talk. I agree…Hollywood is completely out of touch with America and reality to some respect. Scientology commands a great deal of respect in Hollywood. Some of your favorite stars are Scientologists, or into Kabbala. In fact, you could say saying anything against Scientology in Hollywood is akin to career suicide. But when you’re Matt Stone and Trey Parker, it becomes a dare. And it’s a dare they’ve taken. And not without support…fans of South Park are boycotting MI3 in protest over the censorship of the imfanous episode that started all this. I agree on two grounds: 1) it’s about time somebody took on those Scientology bastards and 2) I think it’s reprehensible how the Mission:Impossible television show was morphed into this Tom Cruise ego-fest that has nothing to do with the original series. It’s just another BAD remake. Worse…it’s a sequel to a sequel to a BAD remake.