IMDb makes it easy to pick out celebrity Scientologists. Mr. Battlefield Earth John Travolta is an obvious one. Tom Cruise, in 1990, "renounced his devout Catholic beliefs and embraced The Church Of Scientology claiming that Scientology teachings had cured him of the dyslexia that had plagued him all of his life." Nicole Kidman is as well, and they married in Dec of 1990, so...? Jenna Elfman (aww, I was just starting to like her) and her husband Bodhi Elfman (uncle Danny isn't on the list, FWIW). Isaac Hayes, Kirstie Alley, Nancy Cartwright (voice of Bart Simpson), Juliette Lewis, Priscilla Presley...

Movie web sites are using Flash to recreate the excitement and style of their trailers for low-bandwidth transmission. I still think Frequency looks a little too sentimental for my tastes, but the site is an example of this kind of sharp Flash execution. (I was a tad surprised to see that Frequency actually has a story, might actually be worth seeing for its execution. From the director of the popular Primal Fear. Opens April 28th.)

And speaking of Battlefield Earth, battlefieldearth.com and battlefieldearth.net are distinct sites, and yet seem designed by the same people. The .com seems to be a general site about the book and the movie--and is out of date, no way to skip the Flash intro, and replays the unskippable Flash intro every time you try to go back to the main menu. (Sorry, had to get that off my chest.) The .net is dedicated to the movie specifically, links to the .com site, and has slightly better Flash (though hardly as interesting as other sites I've seen).

Battlefield Earth pre-production behind-the-scenes teaser: high bandwidth, low bandwidth. Mentions the involvement of a couple of people (director and cinematographer) that did work on a couple of the Star Wars films, recommended to Travolta by Lucas himself. Their actual involvement in Star Wars (eps I and IV) seem rather limited, at least by their titles...

I'm not gonna bother to look up articles on the darned thing, but I will make the observation that Battlefield Earth seems like an oddly rushed project. It's still "in production" on IMDb and will be released in less than a month. I saw Travolta on a talk show saying it wasn't done yet but opens in a month, and he played a clip of one of the completed scenes. Did I mention the movie looks like crap? (Never read the book, don't care to. I'm just full of snap judgements today.)

Time Code 2000, Mike Figgis's no-edit real-time 4-digital-camera split-screen film, opens April 28. I actually saw a trailer for it on TV; the Quicktime is available buried in their Shockwave-only official web site.

Win $1000 worth of books from Powells.com:

THE FINE PRINT: Powell's employees and members of their immediately family are not eligible. Duh. The winner must be at least eighteen years old because young people have plenty to be smug about already without winning this contest. Furthermore, the person who wins should like books. Surely you can understand what a drag it would be if the winner replied to our congratulatory notice by saying something like, "Oh, I thought you guys sold CDs, too. No? Just books? But I don't like to read." Then we find out the winner is the guy from the back of your English class who always swore he'd read the assignment yet could never identify the story's setting. ("No, Richard," Miss Piligian would reply - she had the patience of an angel, Miss Piligian did - "The Scarlet Letter was not set in Salinas, California.") Richard tells us, "I didn't think I'd win," explaining that he'd only entered in the hope that by not winning his odds would be that much better for the next drawing he tried, the Tri-State Pick-6 maybe, or next month's raffle at the Fish and Game.

Incidentally, Powells' newsletter is as charming as their web site.

Not long after I'd fallen in love with PHP, I've fallen in love with something else. Thankfully I can use TextPad to edit PHP code.

Post-its turn 20! Win some. Post-it flags/bookmarks are immensely useful; I use 'em to put tabs in printed manuals. Strong enough to be tabs, Scotch enough to be removed without damaging the book. Today I discovered the, uh, not-that-useful black Post-Its (no picture, alas), to be used with gold/silver pens, like these nifty Pentel shiny+roller hybrids.

... There, that should make up for my brief absence. :) I'm working a real-life big-timey super-duper full-time job now, and at least for the first week I'm trying not to touch the blog at work. But I'll get the hang of this schedule soon enough. (Oh, and there's plenty more bookmark dumping ground to come, I just don't have time left today.)