eating cucumbers without permission...

When I was younger, I watched an uncomfortably large number of action movies, all kinds. They were usually divided into movies with explosions and movies with fighting, but some even had both!!1 (Was there ever an easier audience?) A surprising amount featured underground hand-to-hand combat arenas, and had names like “Deathfighter III: the Bloodening”.

And now, equally uncomfortably, I’ve become inordinately fond of romantic comedies, at least partly because they engender more warm, fuzzy feelings than a guy getting his legs broken in the semi-final by the evil Muay Thai master.

It’s not surprising, then, that I enjoyed “Mr. & Mrs. Smith“, which I’ve mentally placed in the genre of “romantic comedy with violence”. “Grosse Point Blank” is the only thing that’s come close.

The surprising part was that it succeeded far better as a romantic comedy than as an action film. Other than the excellent chase sequence, and to a lesser extent John and Jane’s fight at the house, the action was uniformly uninspired. When the climactic gunfight is boring, you know you have a problem. The dialogue, on the other hand, was consistently amusing — when it comes down to it, even the chase was memorable chiefly by virtue of the Smiths’ repartee.

Not a classic, but worth watching at least once.

I’ve been getting a fair amount of mail about Multiply, so I thought I should clarify some things. I wrote it mostly because I wanted to see if it could work, not because I wanted the functionality or thought that it was a good idea. It is not under active development — I’m not even using it myself.

It does work (for the moment), but there are pretty good reasons not to use it.

Uploaded version 1.2.1 of Multiply.

Easy fixes:

• Support for the deprecated variables $tableposts, $tablecomments etc. added.
• Now load plugins in global namespace.

More annoying was the discovery that the code for separate plugins was totally broken. Oops?

The real brokenness is that, out of the box, any plugin loaded on the main WordPress install will also be loaded for the alternate presses. The alternates can have more plugins, just not less. Any filters added to the_content etc. will stay there. Easy enough to fix, but it requires yet another change to the core.

If this is something you need, it’s one change to wp-settings.php.

Search for the line that says:

if ('' != $plugin && file_exists(ABSPATH . 'wp-content/plugins/' . $plugin))

and change it to this:

if (!isset($mb_id) && '' != $plugin && file_exists(ABSPATH . 'wp-content/plugins/' . $plugin))

That’s it. It’s also harmless (unlike the change to wp-blog-header.php for pingback support), in that there aren’t any major ill-effects if you delete Multiply in a fit of pique.

Version 1.2.

• Plugins with their own DB tables should work fine now, as long as they install from within the admin interface. Anything with a separate install file won’t work unmodified.
• Attempt to automatically create the dodgy files needed for pingback & XML-RPC posting to work.

Ah, holidays! Now I can do everything I normally do while procrastinating, but without all that guilt!

“Se7en” was excellent, though I’m desperately hoping for a prequel, “5ive”, in which the members of the boy band of the same name are brutally murdered by… well, anyone really; it’s the murder part that’s important. I’d like to see a disgruntled copy-editor myself, aghast at the misuse of numerals. (Scrawled in blood on the wall: “‘5ive’ spells ‘fiveive’, you cretinous boob!”)

I’d have enjoyed it more if the ending had been a surprise, but I caught the last ten minutes a while back, channel-surfing in an ad break. The build-up was still worthwhile, but without surprise the twist lacked impact.

The a relentlessly grim atmosphere — is it any wonder he went mad and started killing? — began to grate after a while, as did the oppressive music, but for that script and those performances I’d have put up with Ed Wood in charge of the rest.