News You Can Bruise for 2001 August 8

While in Russia, Sumana got me a bootleg copy of Dude, Where's My Car?, horribly dubbed into Russian (some guy reading the script in a monotone dubbed onto the soundtrack). It alleged "Real DVD quality" but it was a regular CD, and it alleged "MPEG 4 Video" but it was actually a very small (in screen size) AVI. We watched it by continuously pushing the key that jumped it forward 20 seconds, and got through it in about 5 minutes. I was surprised to see that it actually had some good sight gags.

mplayer, which we used to view the AVI, is a really neat program. It lets you use Windows media codecs on Linux. Of course the relevant portions of mplayer are not free software (nor are the codecs), but when you're watching bootleg copies of Dude, Where's My Car?, there's really no moral high ground.

The Russian word for "dude" is the first two syllables of "Chewbacca". I find this hilarious.