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Victoria Alexander - The Devil's Hammer
Courtesy of
www.fromthebalcony.com

February 17, 2008
I want to be on Survivor 17!, Red Butler Global Concierge, Movies This Week, The Future Without Female DNA, Sex With Robots, Madonna New Face, and more...

Victoria Alexander - The Devil's HammerBy Victoria Alexander


Las Vegas: Satan Vacations Here

I want to be on Survivor 17!, Red Butler Global Concierge, Movies This Week, The Future Without Female DNA, Sex With Robots, Madonna New Face, and more...

Survivor 17. I need a patron! I’ve been watching CBS’s “Survivor” since the beginning and I’m ready to enlist and re-invent the game. I have strategies guaranteed never seen before on Survivor.

I will get rid of the tired Richard Hatch “alliance” ploy. As soon as the contestants hit the boat, they start making alliances! Its become The Idiot’s Survivor First Move.

I have more military tactics than Alexander the Great planning his invasion of Thebes!

The Idiot’s Survivor Second Move: You are in a tribe for 5 minutes and scheming who you will take with you to The Final Two.

I have a fresh, new approach to the game. While I hate being outside, can’t swim (yet), I can make fire! So if anyone reading this knows the backdoor to Mark Burnett, can get my audition tape (yet to be made but in the works!) to the top of the CBS pile, or even knows a CBS intern, I will thank you on the show!

That’s me learning how to make fire by a Masai warrior in Kenya. With my credentials camping through Nepal (pictured: me with my personal sherpa in Pokhara, Nepal on a trek in 2001), Tibet, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, and West Africa, I think Survivor would be a cake walk (because I have read Clauswitz on War). I will be the 17th Sole Survivor.

Red Butler International Concierge. Your own Personal Assistants, Personal Concierge, and a Virtual Wallet. Red Butler is very affordable and does just about anything you ask and saves loads of time.

Would you like restaurant reservations for this evening? Looking to plan a vacation? Want to fly a retired Mig-29 fighter jet? The service professionals at Red Butler, a global concierge company, can make it happen.

With contract-free concierge services beginning at a modest $36.95 per month, you can place requests via phone, e-mail, text message, or on the web. Sit back and relax as your own personal assistant does the legwork.

Have the perfect voluminous hair and pint-size pooch? The perfect 12-hour lipstick and the slenderizing, run-proof pantyhose?

Red Butler was established in 2003 and opened its "doors" to the public in 2006.

Red Butler is great for solving any request, whether its finding a hard-to-find fashion item (getting on the shortest wait list for a Birkin bag, finding the last bottle of must-have Chanel nail polish color in stock), recommending the best dry cleaner in town, letting customers know when the hottest fashion and designer events are coming to town, scheduling beauty and spa services and more.

Other services include travel arrangements, wake up calls and directions. Anytime. Anywhere. Red Butler prides itself on being not just a company, but an experience.

Movies This Week. “Jumper” (YES), The Spiderwick Chronicles” (YES), “Vantage Point” (YES), and “Definitely, Maybe” (YES).

Jumper. Redacted review for TDH: Finally a superpower human without the need to do good for humanity. No ending since it’s a 90 minute trailer for Christensen’s starring franchise.

Remember the old days when knowledge was jealously guarded by, first the pharaohs and kings, and then the Catholic Church? With the internet, there is no more secret knowledge. It’s all out there. And now it’s more important to be beautiful than smart. You can get bank loans for cosmetic surgery, so what’s next to set people apart? Well, in the near, after we have been genetically engineered to be beautiful, we’ll want super powers.

But right now it’s just a squirmy quirk of mutant DNA. When David Rice was five years old his mother vanished and he was raised by a brutal, neglectful father who never brought him a birthday gift or noticed his son had an unusual gift. This gift, by the way, only serves David.

When a teenager, an accident causes David to consciously recognize his power to teleport anywhere. It took him 12 years to dope things out.

After learning about David’s teen years, we “jump” forward to present time, where David (Hayden Christensen) is living The Life in a luxury duplex in New York City! He goes into bank vaults and takes as much cash as he wants. (I would go to Hermes, thereby “jumping” the two year wait list for “the Birkin”.) But David is a really good guy. He leaves I.O.U.s. He can take stuff with him (unlike Invisible People who have to go around naked).

Apparently, for some reason, David needs “jump sites.” I’ve been to the Sphinx. David goes there in 1900, before the onslaught of the tourists, The Mall, Pizza Hut and KFC. (Did you know the Sphinx, whose legacy was to look out into Infinity, now has a Pizza Hut and KFC directly in front of it blocking Time and Space? You can buy a high-rise apartment looking out at the Sphinx’s broken nose.)

The Sphinx is one of David’s jump sites. No one sees him sitting on top of the Sphinx’s head. Zahi Hawass, High Priest of The Sphinx and Great Pyramids complex, is off-site digging in sand for a bigger find than Howard Carter.

With the world literally his, David decides to go back to his hometown and romance his high school first crush, Millie (Rachel Bilson).

Hey, David’s life is shattered when he finds out he’s not the only one with this talent. And, he’s targeted for death. He’s being tracked by Griffin (Jamie Bell) for 10 years. Griffin must be obsessed with David since he has a police wall charting his every more. Griffin is also a Jumper.

Griffin doesn’t bother to explain a thing, especially about the nefarious Paladins, a centuries-old secret society that has been hunting Jumpers. They are all- powerful and vanquish Jumpers with high doses of electricity (tethers). David’s nemesis is fanatic Roland (Samuel L. Jackson) who believes that the Jumpers are snubbing their nose at God.

Maybe Jumpers are really genetically engineered by an even more powerful secret society. Wait, that’s Jumper 3.

David runs into Griffin at the Coliseum and, followed by Roland’s men – who can “jump” also – the fight destroys the place. David has taken Rachel there to impress her by getting into a big fight and destroying the place.

I liked the special effects and the storyline – thin though it was. The full story must have been tethered into the netherworld.

I will not ruin the silliness of David’s parentage “reveal” that desperately needs a script doctor asap, or bland Bilson. Only Bell, with a bemused hobo look (and a unrealized homoerotic fixation on David that will be dealt with in his Berber lair dwelling).

This franchise has a lot of potential but what happened to director Doug Liman? He seems to have directed “Jumper” from the sofa of his “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” mansion. There is absolutely no heat between Christensen and Bilson or Christensen and Jackson.

Christ the Redeemer Hit by Lightning. I visited Christ the Redeemer, the world's largest statue of Jesus, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil twice already. I also took the glass-paneled cable car, that runs along a 1400-metre route, to Rio’s Sugarloaf Mountain.

The Christ statue is 130ft tall, is made of 700 tons of reinforced concrete and stands atop the 2,296ft Corcovado mountain overlooking the city.

The statue was struck last Sunday during a thunderstorm causing havoc in Rio and felling trees in several neighborhoods but did not damage the statue. Christ the Redeemer was named one of the new Seven Wonders of the World in 2007.

I know that Brazilians consider this a portentous event. It is an omen of coming disaster.

Madonna Does Know What People Think of Her. Madonna New Face (pictured with her daughter) recently hosted a celebrity-studded event on the lawns of the United Nations to aid Malawi orphans, UNICEF, and to inaugurate a new Gucci store.

Madonna was promoting Third World orphans and a grand opening of a luxury store as celebrities got gift bags filled with a Gucci bag and Gucci products. Am I the only one seeing irony here?

Madonna told the crowd: "I've earned a reputation for many things: pushing the envelope, for being a provocateur, for never taking no for an answer. For endlessly reinventing myself, for being a cult member, a kidnapper. For being ambitious, outrageous and irreverent. And for never settling for second best."

The Future Without Female DNA. US scientists say they have produced embryos that are clones of two men, in an attempt to produce patient-specific stem cells.

Well, at least that’s what they say they are doing. But we know better.

Researchers removed DNA from donated human eggs, and replaced it with DNA from the skin cells of two volunteers. They produced embryos with genetic material that matched the men's, but did not go on to extract stem cells.

Sex With Robots. Only 400 Years in the Future. David Levy, a PhD in gender studies and artificial intelligence and author of "Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relations", predicts sex with an electronic femme-fatale or a superstud sexbot will become an accepted part of the human landscape.

"Think of it: great sex on tap, 24/7," he said. People may even fall in love with their hard-wired sex slaves, he adds.

First Chakra Nirvana. That’s what we called sex at the Bihar, India ashram.

Last November, researchers in Japan unveiled a robot, named Twendy-One, that can cook, talk, obey verbal commands, and use its soft silicon-wrapped hands -- each equipped with 241 pressure sensors -- to interact with humans.

The sexbot Gigolo Joe was played by Jude Law (pictured) in Steven Spielberg's 2001 film "Artificial Intelligence: A.I." Gigolo Joe had a heart and provided chat and emotional support as well as sex.

A company in Japan, Axis, has already produced the world's first, rudimentary, sexbot -- for men. Called Honeydolls, the lifesize figures are made from surgical-grade silicone and resin, and are equipped with voice-emitting sensors in each breast. Pinch the nipples, and Cindy (or Soari or Maria, depending on the model) will react with a squeal and whisper pre-programmed sweet nothings in one's ear. Customized MP3 audio files can be substituted for a more personal touch. Price tag: $7,000.

Will Ferrell (pictured) has already been approached by Axis and done sittings for their Honeyman series.

Axis knows its buyer is a sensitive dude. New love dolls have built-in sensors that cause her to moan as if she were in the throes of orgasm. The silicon Honey Dolls are equipped with touch sensors which when (im)properly touched will activate the built-in MP3 player and make the dolls moan with different sounds. The moans, as provided by the manufacturer or ones you program yourself, are heard via a speaker located in the head of the doll.

If you would like to contact me about this column, or be included on my private distribution list for a weekly reminder, just email me at Masauu@aol.com.

Copyright 2003-2006 FromTheBalcony. All rights reserved.

 

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