Monday, February 27, 2006
RIP Octavia Butler
In some tragic news, famed sci-fi author Octavia Butler died over the weekend, a victim of a stroke
at the age of 58. I am not familiar with her work, but she is and was one of Malaya's favorite authors. As the obit says:
Butler's work wasn't preoccupied with robots and ray guns, Howle said, but used the genre's artistic freedom to explore race, poverty, politics, religion and human nature.
"She stands alone for what she did," Howle said. "She was such a beacon and a light in that way."
Fellow Seattle-based science fiction authors Greg Bear and Vonda McIntyre said they were stunned by the news and called it a tremendous loss, and science-fiction Internet sites quickly filled with posts dedicated to her.
"We've lost the most intelligent and capable voice in the genre," one fan wrote. "Octavia was the SciFi I picked up when I realized that there could be more to SciFi/fantasy than simple escapism."
...
Her first novel, "Kindred," came out in 1979. It concerned a black woman who travels back in time to the South to save a white man. She went on to write about a dozen books, plus numerous essays and short stories. Her most recent work, "Fledgling," a reinterpretation of the "Dracula" legend, was published last fall.
She won numerous awards, and in 1995 became the first science fiction writer granted a "genius" award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which paid $295,000 over five years. She served on the board of the Science Fiction Museum.
Peter Heck, a science fiction and mystery writer in Chestertown, Md., said Butler was recognized for tackling difficult and controversial issues, such as slavery.
"She was considered a cut above both in the quality of her writing and her imaginative audacity," Heck said. "She was willing to take uncomfortable ideas and pursue them further than a lot of other people would have been willing to."
I never blogged about it at the time, but but back in November, around the time we went to
the George R. R. Martin book signing over in SF, we went to an Octavia Butler book signing in Oakland.
I had never read any of her work; I just went to keep Malaya company, and being as it was in a pretty ghetto-area, (we walked past crack sellers on the same block at the African American bookstore) I'm glad I accompanied her. The signing was fine though, and Butler was an interesting speaker and gave some lively answers during the Q&A. Her death, especially while still young enough to write quality work, is a tragedy. Malaya's especially bothered since her last book was clearly the first part in a series, and now we'll never get to read it.
We're not incensed enough to desecrate her grave for it, as we will do to Martin if he dies before finishing
A Song of Ice and Fire, but it's a shame to lose a promising series like this. Fortunately, (or unfortunately) Butler never had any kids, so we can't even look forward to/dread the prospect of some semi-talented offspring rooting through her files and necromantically fleshing out every
rough outline and
half-finished manuscript.
Labels: writing
Lotteries and Lawsuits
A couple of interesting news bits today. The first is a USA Today article about the woes that often
befall big lottery winners. A quote:
William "Bud" Post, who won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania Lottery in 1988, had a brother who tried to have him killed for the inheritance. Post lost and spent all his winnings. He was living off Social Security when he died in January.
Two years after winning a $31 million Texas Lottery in 1997, Billie Bob Harrell Jr. committed suicide. He had bought cars, real estate, gave money to his family, church and friends. After his death it was not clear whether there was money left for estate taxes.
Victoria Zell, who shared an $11 million Powerball jackpot with her husband in 2001, is serving time in a Minnesota prison, her money gone. Zell was convicted in March 2005 in a drug and alcohol-induced collision that killed one person and paralyzed another.
Evelyn Adams, who won the New Jersey Lottery twice, in 1985 and 1986, for a total $5.4 million, gambled and gave away all of her money. She was poor by 2001, and living in a trailer.
Gerry Beyer, who teaches estate law at Texas Tech University, has written about people who come into sudden wealth - such as lottery winners, sports figures, actors and actresses - and how they end up losing it. Many don't realize that if they spend their money, rather than investing and living off the earnings, "there's nothing to replace it," Beyer says.
I've heard it called the "Beverly Hillbillies Syndrome," and often applied to newly-famous and rich sports figures. They're much like lotto winners themselves; often kids from very poor areas, deeply-associated with no-job criminal low-life friends, and then suddenly based on their footspeed or jumpshot they're earning $50 over 6 years. Of course these new-rich don't know how to handle their money, and there are constant stories about sports agents and financial advisers who have stolen literally millions of dollars from their clients.
An awful lot of people have no real financial skills, and a person making $40k a year with $50k in credit card debt isn't going to change their overspending habits just because they've suddenly got $15m in the bank. They'll just proportionally increase the level of their overspending. It's worse for lotto winners, since they have no income; they just have a bit nut that seems inexhaustible, when they start gnawing away at it with outrageous luxury purchases and horrible, get-rich-quick investments. It's a shame, since that sort of nest egg should easily last forever. As today's horribly-worded article sort of says:
Under an investment plan, the Nebraska Powerball winners' $15.5 million, after accepting the lump sum and paying taxes, could produce a yearly income of about $500,000 a year.
In other news, the authors of another unknown and long-forgotten book are trying to
suckle from the commercial tit of Dan Brown's uber-blockbuster.
LONDON -- "The Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown was accused in Britain's High Court on Monday of taking material for his blockbuster conspiracy thriller from a 1982 book about the Holy Grail.
The accusation was made in a breach of copyright lawsuit filed against "The Da Vinci Code" publisher Random House. If the lawsuit succeeds in getting an injunction barring use of the disputed material, the scheduled May 19 release of "The Da Vinci Code" film starring Tom Hanks and Ian McKellan could be threatened.
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," sued Random House, which also published their book. Random House denies the claim. Baigent and Leigh claim Brown appropriated their ideas and themes in writing his book, which has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide since its 2003 publication.
I wondered why it took them 3 years to get around to suing, until yeah... the movie's coming out. It's clearly the best time for a shakedown, with the hope that some Hollywood money will fly their way just to make them go away so they don't wreck the worldwide movie release schedule.
None of this is surprising, I mean Brown's a huge cash cow target for any lawsuit, and with the thousands of books that have been written about DaVinci, the Holy Grail, Jesus' potential offspring, the Knights Templar, etc, there's bound to be substantial overlapping material in his tale and other, earlier works. So far no one has struck blood with their mosquito-like attempts, but with such a rich prize, you can bet they'll keep trying.
Labels: legal issues, lottery
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Book Review: The Dirt: Motley Crue
I posted a review of Marilyn Manson's autobio last week, and conveniently enough, here's a review of a very similar book, by the guys in Motley Crue.
Check the MM review again if you were interested in it the first time; I quoted out a couple of long comments and added some thoughts on them. They're on the review page, below the review.
As for this one...
The Dirt is a sort of group autobiography by the four principle members of Motley Crue, the metal band that basically started the whole 80s hair metal craze, and banished new wave, bringing hard rock back onto the charts. The book is broken up into dozens of short chapters, each one telling a given story or series of events, from multiple perspectives. Much like the Marilyn Manson autobio
I recently reviewed, this one mixes public and private events, and is extremely candid and forthcoming about every sort of scandal, drug abuse, groupie issue, broken marriage, and much, much more.
To the scores (categories
explained here):
Motley Crue: The Dirt, with Neil Strauss
Concept: 8
Presentation: 8
Writing Quality: 6
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 7
Entertainment Value: 8
Rereadability: 5
Overall: 7.5
I wish I'd read this one at the same time as the Marilyn Manson autobiography, so I could have written a sort of comparative, dual review. I'm not going to go point by point, but it's impossible not to compare them at least a little, since both books cover the same sort of material, and both have a similar tone and organization, probably thanks to co-author Neil Strauss.
There are a lot of obvious parallels in content, with their stories of rock stars on the way up, wild partying, drug use/abuse, groupies, band fighting, etc. The main difference is that the Motley Crue book has chapters by everyone in the band, and other related people as well. Mick Mars, Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, and Tommy Lee all contributed the material that Neil Strauss turned into coherent chapters throughout the book, and there are supporting chapters by various management people, record company executives, producers, and even a few sad ones by John Corabi, the guy they brought in to replace Vince Neil after he left/was fired from the band for 4.5 years in the early 90s.
While the structure is similar to Marilyn's autobio, this one is both better and worse. It's better in the scope; thanks to multiple voices contributing to the tale, the reader gets a much more complete picture of things, especially when there are chapters from producers and record company people the Crue have been viciously feuding with. I would have loved a few chapters in Marilyn's book from Trent Reznor's POV, or the POV of the other guys in his band, his record label, etc.
The Dirt is also superior in the time covered, since it goes over their childhoods and early band days and first stardom, just like Marilyn's book, but it also goes much further. Marilyn's ends with the recording of
Antichrist Superstar, his first hit record, and then includes a few journal entries from the subsequent controversial tour.
The Dirt covers Motley Crue's first big album, and much more, everything newsworthy they did up until press time in 2002. I hope Marilyn does a second book to bring us more up to date on his life, and I'm glad Motley Crue wrote theirs six years later. They didn't do much of anything interesting with their music during that time, but their personal lives were a mess, and they're quite entertaining to read about. All the tabloid fodder stuff with Tommy Lee and his wife Pam Anderson is ever-juicy.
But while this book covers much more than Marilyn's book, and has multiple points of view contributing to the full picture, Marilyn is a much more intelligent and introspective guy than any of the man-child idiots in the Crue, and his book is far more incisive. Neil Strauss did an excellent job with both books, and I'm sure his task was Herculean, as he turned their rambling dictations and scattered emails into coherent chapters with a nice, chronological layout. He couldn't put poetry into their minimally-educated ramblings though, and since the guys in the Crue never think anything bigger than fucking, drinking, snorting, and fighting, he can't do it for them.
Marilyn's book wasn't exactly a philosophical treatise, but he had a lot of insightful observations on fame, self-loathing, rock stardom, faith, society, consumerism, etc. He's also interested in philosophy and religion and culture, while the Crue cared about nothing more than drugs, drink, and girls, and any faux-Satanism or shock stuff they did was just for show or youthful rebellion. MM's songs are about something, and his albums have themes, etc. Motley Crue is just a bunch of totally out of control addicts; 4 guys who had horrible childhoods in broken homes, all of whom dropped out of school and could never hold a job, and all of whom were quite content to spend the ten years it took them to record their first four albums more or less constantly drunk, stoned, or both. Their goals were to get famous and earn enough money to pay for their drugs and parties, and they basically never thought much beyond that until they were into their 30s, and the money was no longer coming in. Frankly, it's a miracle they all lived that long, and theirs is a cautionary tale, since they basically lived the same lives as thousands of other guys their age, perhaps .001% of whom ever amounted to anything.
As for
The Dirt, it lives up to its name, and then some. I can't even begin to summarize all of the scandal and chaos it covers. Dozens and dozens of drug-fueled rampages, stories of self destruction and chaos, bankruptcies, broken marriages, fatal automobile accidents, arrests and incarcerations, near deportations, endless fights both within and without, and on and on. The number of famous women these guys banged was truly amazing; just Tommy Lee was married to Heather Locklear and Pam Anderson, with pit stops on Bobbi Brown, Carmen Electra, and numerous other famous models and actresses, and the rest weren't far behind. Vince Neil did a decade-long poor man's impersonation of Hugh Hefner, building a mansion with stripper poles and a mud wrestling pit, and he and the others literally use Playboy magazines as catalogues; looking through, finding women they liked, calling them up, and banging them.
That's the sex, and there's at least as much info about drugs, drink, fights, and so on. How none of them died is quite a mystery. Even the band controversy is outrageous, with endless fights and outright loathing between the members and their managers and record company execs. Vince actually quit the band for half a decade during the early 90s, and some of the saddest chapters are from the POV of the guy they got to replace him, and then cruelly dumped at the record company's instance when Vince returned, after lengthy litigation. As the book comes to an end Tommy Lee has left the band as well, and doesn't sound real likely to rejoin it.
The character studies are amazing, simply due to the time covered. Not one of the guys learns a goddamned thing during their first decade of fame. They're just as out of control and stupid at 28 as they were at 18 -- they've just got money enough for better drugs and hotter women. They outright admit that their first four albums were pretty much shit, written when they were all completely stoned and not collaborating at all, and they and the other authors paint and picture of just how fucked up they all were. A quote from page 248, from a chapter by Doug Thaler, their manager during most of their prime years:
But managing this band was never easy. These are four damaged individuals. Vince is a California surfer-rock guy, the peacock of peacocks, who never really had to work for his fame. I think the ill will toward him began after the car crash with Razzle, because the group would be playing charity shows for him and he'd go off drinking, fucking around, and putting the band's future at risk. To be fair, though, no one really understood the disease of alcoholism at the time.
Mick Mars was the exact opposite of Vince: a guy who had wiped shit off his head for his whole life and was thankful just to have a moment in the sun, even if it ended the next day. Nikki was basically a nerd, except when he had Jack Daniel's in him which was just about every night. And Tommy was like a little kid, running around and looking for mother and father figures. He could be the sweetest, most big-hearted kid in the world or the most spoiled, temperamental brat. But it was always either Vince's behavior or Nikki's drug addiction that jeopardized the band.
Say what you will about the guys, but the fact that they allowed comments like that in their own book is worth some kind of credit. And the entire book is like that, literally cover to cover.
I highly recommend it if you're at all interested in this sort of thing. I just wish at least one of them were a little bit insightful or intelligent. They all eventually kick their drug/drink habits, for days at a time at least, and all realize how fucked up their childhoods were and how stupidly they've behaved as adults... they just never do anything to change that or improve on it. Near the end, after countless failed relationships, including 6 months in jail due to his wife Pam Anderson pressing charges after they had a fight, Tommy Lee comes to the revelation that he should no longer marry women 4 days after meeting them. And honestly, that's about the highest level of insight any of the guys displays throughout the entire book.
It's a fun read though, in a "nice place to vacation but I wouldn't want to live there" sort of way.
Labels: book review
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Movie Review: Night Watch
Night Watch is a Russian-made supernatural thriller, set in Moscow in 2002. It was released in 2004, and quickly became the highest-grossing film ever in Russia, a record that stood for a year until its sequel,
Day Watch, more than doubled that record. As is usually the case with interesting foreign films, a US film studio, FOX Searchlight in this case, bought it and then took forever to release it here. I first heard about it back in the summer of 2004, and watched the Russian language trailer on a streaming webfeed and thought it looked fascinating.
Unfortunately, that was all I saw for many months. I
first blogged about Night Watch in April 2005, when the US trailer was released, and then the wait went on, and on, and on. The trailer for
Day Watch, part two of the planned trilogy, came out later that year... and still no
Night Watch. Finally, it saw the light of day in February 2006, and with it still looking interesting, off we went. What did we think? Was it worth the wait? To the scores:
Night Watch, 2004
Script/Story: 8
Characters: 5
Combat Realism: 6
Humor: 3
Horror: 6
Eye Candy: 7
Fun Factor: 7
Replayability: 7
Overall: 7.5
Awesome, awesome film. Malaya actually liked it better than me; she was all excited and full of, "Damn I liked that!" remarks as we left. I wasn't as enthused, mostly since I was turning over plot points in my head and deciding if I thought they worked or not. It's a fascinating, complex, densely-plotted film, studded through with awesome action scenes and very cool mythology and occult stuff. Like what we all thought and hoped Matrix 2 and 3 would be like, before we saw the soggy mess they actually degenerated into.
As I think back on Night Watch, 8 hours after seeing it, my approval holds strong, and might actually be rising. It was really quite good, and has numerous scenes with, "Holy shit that was cool!" potential. In fact, when the movie didn't work it was usually because it was too ambitious and tried too hard to be different and new. And I can hardly fault it for that.
I compared it to
The Matrix earlier, but I think it also
compares to Saw. Not in subject matter, since this isn't a gore-fest horror film, but it's similar in that this one also had a fraction of the budget of Hollywood films, yet had ten times more cool ideas and concepts, and worked because of them.
Night Watch is vastly more professional than Saw, with a ton of very cool special effects, but it's similar in that it's so much smarter and livelier than you expect of films in its genre.
Incidentally, just so you know, the film is in Russian. With subtitles. Malaya and me don't mind, but some people do. There is a lot of dialogue, but it's not so wordy that you're ever struggling to keep up reading, and I never felt like I missed anything visually while I was reading the dialogue. Also, they're the coolest subtitles ever; appearing from behind objects in the foreground of various scenes, printing down like computer words when someone is talking while working a computer program, turning red when someone mentions "blood" and so on, but they are still words.
The plot is complicated and complex, and has thrown off some critics (
Ebert, for instance) but it definitely makes sense and can be followed. Malaya and I both got it, at least, and we weren't taking notes or anything. There are a few events that require some suspension of disbelief for them to make sense, but since the whole movie is about people with supernatural powers and prophecies and such, I didn't think that was asking too much.
All you need to know about it to know if you're interested or not can be
seen in the trailer, a feature I highly recommend viewing. In a nutshell, the film is set in the modern day, a thousand or so years after the forces of light and dark declared a truce, lest they destroy each other in combat. Since then the two sides have lived quietly, unseen by ordinary humans, though they prey on us, from time to time. Each side has enforcement squads that keep an eye on the other side, and the light's is called the Night Watch. They watch the night, you see. (A small bonus point if you just realized what the Day Watch must be.)
Who's watching who? They call themselves The Others, and they look just like humans. Anyone can be born an Other, and no one knows they are until some stressful event brings it out. Everyone has a different power, ranging from curses to prophecy to transforming into an animal, and every Other can enter a sort of alternate dimension called the Gloom. An Other must pick which side he/she wishes to be on, and it's more or less up to you. All of the vampires and demons and such seem to be on the Dark side though, so I suppose sometimes your special Other power determines your fate.
There is order to their world though, with the Dark needing permission and permits from the Light to do things like, oh, drink a human's blood and turn them into a vampire. Things are changing the balance of power though, and prophecy says a virgin will appear at the center of a tremendous storm, and that a new Other will be born with the power to swing the balance to whichever side he/she chooses.
This sounds very wordy, but the film does a great job of explaining just enough to keep you aware, as it unfolds. Most of the info is shown, not told, and I have not even scratched the surface of the mythology and the plot, which is epic, but also very well-grounded in the characters in the film, all of whom get a fair amount of screen time and become real people, though few of them are actually human. Night Watch is also very clearly the first film in a series, since while it doesn't end in a cliffhanger, it's clearly setting up events for more showdowns and plot twists in film two. We'll definitely be there.
Labels: movie review
Friday, February 24, 2006
Oil refinery = real money
Just
read this article about an attack on a Saudi oil refinery that went like something out of a James Blond film, and wouldn't have had any comment except for the staggering money involved. Here's the quick news summary:
ABQAIQ, Saudi Arabia -- Suicide bombers in explosives-packed cars attacked the world's largest oil processing facility Friday but were stopped outside the gates when guards opened fire, detonating their vehicles, officials said.
Guards began shooting when two cars tried to drive into the heavily protected facility in eastern Saudi Arabia, Interior Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Mansour al-Turki told The Associated Press. Both vehicles exploded outside the first of three fences around the sprawling complex. The attackers were killed and two guards were critically wounded, al-Turki said.
...
The attack occurred around 3 p.m. local time, several hours after weekly prayers on a day off for Saudis. The facility operates around the clock, seven days a week.
A Saudi journalist who arrived at the scene soon after an explosion said guards exchanged fire for two hours with two militants outside the facility. He also told The Associated Press that he saw workers repairing a pipeline. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
That's all well and good, but here's the part of the article that blew my mind.
The kingdom maintains crude oil production capacity of up to about 11 million barrels a day. The Abqaiq facility processes up to about 7 million barrels a day, 93 percent of which is loaded onto tankers for export.
You do that math in your head? This one facility handles about 2/3 of Saudi Arabia's oil production, which means 7m barrels a day. As the article says, crude is going for $62.50 a barrel right now, so that's... $437,500,000. A day! If the attackers had suceeded in shutting down this place, it would have cost Saudi Arabia over three billion dollars a week. Honestly, can you even conceive of that sort of money? And imagine when oil's $100 a barrel in a year or two, after Bush hypes us into invading Iran?
I also like the fact that crude went up $2 today based on the news of this unsuccessful attack. Figure they spent $100k on repair expenses, guard overtime, bullet costs, etc. That leaves them with a handy $13,900,000 profit for the day's work. I'm not suggesting an inside job, but damn, if you ran this place, wouldn't you think about hiring some losers to launch inept attcks, with that sort of guaranteed profit margin?
Labels: oil
New D2 Column
It doesn't happen often these days, but today I paused in my review writing and further delayed finishing my novel to bang out a Decahedron column I've been thinking about for a few weeks. This one's called,
Variants! Desperate Measures to Keep Alive a Dying Beast, and as the title suggests, it dicusses my recent play experience with a couple of types of variants. First I cover Live off the Land, which didn't prove too much to my liking, largely thanks to Duriel.
Happier is the talk about JustA's, a variant I've recently invented(?). It combines light twinking with intensive item hunting and constant character improvement. Want a way to play with a great weapon, any skills you like, and on /players 8, that's not so easy or pointless you want to kill yourself? Then check out this article; you should find it entertaining, and you might even want to give the variant a try.
That's what I said on the D2 site, anyway. And it might even be true. I posted the link in the community and single player forum, and I fully expect at least one post about how this is a cheating bullshit way to play, and furthermore it was discussed constantly in the forums 18 months ago, before the originators crawled off in disgrace, and it's a complete indictment of the sloth behind the Dii.net admins that they would post an article like this, much less write one.
And you know what? They'd be right.
Labels: diablo II
Movie Review: Dog Soldiers
Dog Soldiers is a very low budget monster movie, one that will appeal largely to genre fans, thanks to its clever writing, funny dialogue, and imaginative action sequences. It's not really a film non-horror fans are going to enjoy, with the hilariously-cheesy "man in suit" werewolves, cliched characters, and constant violence and profanity, but if you like intelligent shoestring film making, and horror, and monsters, you could have a good time with this one.
It's a movie that you're likely to end up feeling rather fond of, in a "root for the underdog" sort of way. It's got a lot of witty touches and one clever film homage after another, and while it won't wow you with its quality, it's not bad. Malaya and I had zero expectations going into this one, and laughed aloud at the home-made werewolf costumes, but the movie soon won us over with funny dialogue, earnestly-amateurish acting, and interesting scenarios. It's even got a decent plot, with lots of early scenes intelligently foreshadowing later developments.
To the scores, which are
explained here:
Dog Soldiers, 2002
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Casting: 4
Action: 5
Combat Realism: 5
Humor: 5
Horror: 6
Eye Candy: 2
Fun Factor: 4
Replayability: 6
Overall: 6
This "man in suit" horror film was recommended to me by a reader, long ago, and when I saw it on sale as a used VHS tape for $2, I bought it. At least a year passed before we finally got around to watching it, and while it's clearly a very low-budget, amateurish production, it's fun, and has some nice ideas, and does pretty much the best it can with the tools at its disposal.
The film is set in Scotland or Wales or some cold, northern area of the UK, and all of the actors sound like locals, or at least authentic Brits. Yes, we could have used subtitles a few times, since their accents are thicker than pea soup. The plot involves a group of army soldiers on a training exercise in the remote countryside, who are beset by a mob of werewolves. The soldiers hole up in a farm cabin, and fight off the attacking werewolves for a while, doing the best they can despite the fact that bullets don't seem to do much more than tickle the monsters.
The beasts are scary, in the best old style costume terror sort of way. There's not a bit of CGI in the film; it's all guys in wolf suits and masks, and while you're never able to forget the fact that it's guys in suits, they aren't bad suits. It's certainly more believable than the constant cartoon-y CGI bullshit in big budget films like
Van Helsing and
Underworld, at any rate.
There is a plot to the madness, sort of. While on patrol the soldiers find the mauled and murdered remains of a group of special forces soldiers, with one lone survivor. He's their commanding officer, and we know the Captain, since the opening scene of the film was a flashback to a year or two ago, when the leader of the soldiers was trying to become a member of some special forces outfit. This captain, the one survivor of the werewolf attack, was the leader of those special forces, and he flunked the lead soldier out when he would not shoot a dog at the conclusion of his final training exercise. Guess whether or not that plot point will come back later, while he's fighting werewolves?
Other connections come through also, with the one female civilian helping them turning out to be more than she seems, the Captain's presence there being far from an accident, the house they end up hiding in being all too convenient, and so on. It's definitely more clever than most horror films, and the battle scenes with the werewolves are pretty imaginative as well, with fights to keep them from coming in windows, through doors, around furniture and so frequently amusing.
I can't really recommend
Dog Soldiers, since it's just so shoestring budget and production values and amateurish in the acting, but if you like horror films with more imagination than special effects, you might enjoy this one for a cheap rental. It's more fun than a lot of big budget films of its type, at least, and so long as you go in with reasonable expectations, you won't be disappointed.
Labels: movie review
Cat personality unleashed
A simple four foot chain leash for a dog can provide valuable personality insight into your cats. No, really.
Last week Malaya got a dog (beagle mix, about 10kg and very friendly) for her mom, who's lonely and bored with her husband so often out of town. Plus, a dog gives her something to care for and a reason to go out and walk and such, and it "keeps her strong for the apo." The hypothetical, future apo, that is.
Malaya's mom doesn't know too much about keeping a dog yet though, and when she left out the nylon leash they had, the dog took it for a chew toy and did what dogs do with chew toys. Hence Malaya and me heading to PetCo after dinner last night, and picking up a chain leash.
The fun began when we got home, and wondered just how the cats would do on a leash. The dog's got a chest harness thing, while the cats have just collars, but it wasn't like I planned to take them outside; I just wanted to see how they'd react. I found out.
Dusty went first, and he simply went limp. He hunkered down on the couch and passively resisted, and then when my steady pull got him to ooze down to the floor, he flopped onto his side and remained motionless. I'm talking road kill kitty; I was pulling him like a sack of mail, until after about half a meter I took mercy on his pathetic state and unhooked him. He was on his side, his legs out and limp, and his head back. It was really quite a pathetic sight.
Jinxie was next, having watched Dusty's humiliation without much interest. I clipped the leash around her collar, and never even got to pull, since the weight of the chain was enough to cause her to dig in her claws and brace herself. A second passed, and when the pull no her collar didn't cease, she basically turned into a wild stallion fighting a bridle, whipping her head around in circles and rearing up and pawing. Her collar was no match for that, and in maybe two seconds Jinx won, as her
snap collar popped open and flew off with the leash still clipped around it.
As the title of this post suggests, the leash incident prefectly demonstrated their personalities. It was a feline
Rorschach test, and just as with the real inkblot test, there were no right or wrong answers; just insights into the testee's personality. As we already knew, Jinxie meets conflict with combative ferocity, while Dusty is a big "lie still and hope nothing bad happens" pussy. Feel free to conduct similar research on your own test subjects, and report the results here.
Labels: cats, dusty, jinx
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Business vs. Terrorism Fears.
The
current news brouhaha about a company from the United Arab Emirates successfully bidding to run the ports in several major US cities is interesting. It's funny how the Bush Administration is manic about the appearance of "fighting terrorism" when it's a political tool to bash their political enemies, and how it's just fine to let Arabs run our ports when they're paying top dollar for the privilege. It's also amusing to see how far Bush's political star has fallen, as lots of Republicans are rediscovering their spines (for political grandstanding, at least) and joining Democrats in opposing this seemingly-dubious deal. Two or three years ago, Dubya saying he wanted something was a blank check from his congressional supporters, so it's nice to see a bit of reality returning to the checks and balances concept of American government. (Now that it's too late for the Supreme Court, anyway.)
That aside, I was moved to blog about it when I read this bit in one of
today's news items, and laughed loudly enough to wake the cats.
[White House Spokesman] McClellan dismissed any connection between the deal and David Sanborn of Virginia, a former senior Dubai Ports World executive whom the White House appointed last month to be the new administrator of the Maritime Administration of the Transportation Department. Sanborn worked as Dubai Ports World's director of operations for Europe and Latin America.
"My understanding is that he has assured us that he was not involved in the negotiations to purchase this British company," McClellan added.
So yes, the newly-appointed businessman in charge of looking out for our best interests in government dealings with private industry was formerly a high-ranking guy in the company he approved for the contract. And he will undoubtedly return to that industry in two or three years, when Bush is out of office (assuming he's not impeached before then). But hey, Mouth of Bush says he assured them he was not involved in the negotiations, and why would he lie? It's not like $6.8 billion dollars is at stake or anything.
The sad part is that Sanborn probably wasn't involved; it's not like it really matters if he personally got up on this one, when the incestuous relations between big business and every aspect of the Bush Administration make every deal a done deal.
Now class, your vocabulary words for the day:
kleptocracy,
cronyism,
plutocracy.
Update: Even better:
...Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World -- giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.
Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush's cabinet.
Labels: business, terrorism
Monday, February 20, 2006
Book Review: The Long, Hard Road out of Hell
This rock and roll biography is widely-held to be one of the best ever written. Everyone raves about how honest, confessional, and candid it is, and I certainly can't dispute that. Marilyn Manson seems to have absolutely no modesty, and he freely talks about his horrible childhood, sexual experiences (hetero and otherwise), drug use, sexual fantasies, private fears, ambitions, self-loathing, cruelty to others and himself, painful personal issues, bad relationships, attempted murders, and much, much more.
To the scores:
Marilyn Manson: The Long, Hard Road out of Hell, by Marilyn Manson with Neil Strauss
Concept: 7
Presentation: 6
Writing Quality: 7
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 6
Entertainment Value: 8
Rereadability: 4
Overall: 7
I enjoyed Manson's autobiography and found it interesting and frequently astonishing, as Marilyn served up one painfully detailed anecdote after another. He covers his bizarre childhood, his astonishingly-foul grandfather, his early fumbling sex life, his miserable school years, his days as a failing writer and poet, his slow gravitation towards rock star, his early self-mutilating stage antics, his ongoing real life antics, the insanity of his protesting detractors, his weird celebrity interactions, and much more, quite a bit of it going far beyond anything you would believe if you read it in a novel.
Yes, the old "truth is stranger than fiction" cliché. It's accurate here though. Very accurate.
My only complaint about the book, and the reason I didn't give it a higher score, is that while I enjoyed the insane drug abuse stories, and groupie abuse stories, and all the rest, I wanted much more about the creative aspects of Marilyn's life and music. He mentions writing song lyrics a few times, but always in relation to some unbelievable weirdness interrupting his writing, or how he woke from a drug-fueled nightmare with a great idea for a song, or some horrendous real life experience that he turned into lyrical inspiration. He talks about wanting to write music that's intelligent and challenging and provocative, but never includes more than a few lyrics, and never critiques his own work after the fact, or talks much about the ideas behind his songs.
He does throw in snippets of lyrics from time to time, but very seldom, and there's virtually nothing about the sound of his music and band. He mentions the first keyboardist in his band playing nothing and just standing on stage during early gigs, since he couldn't afford a keyboard to learn to play. He talks about his various guitarists and bass players overdosing and doing groupies and other bizarre stuff, and mentions how the first bass player sucked and how they kicked him out of the band and stole another guy from another band, but there's never any talk about jam sessions, music-writing, concert rehearsal, musical collaborations, etc.
I assume this is a conscious decision; that Manson and his editors thought people would prefer to read about all the wild behind the scenes bullshit. And that stuff is entertaining, but it gets old. By the last third of the novel I'd start another chapter and think, "Oh great, another near overdose and violently out of control bar crawl with a crazy ex-girlfriend."
There is quite a bit of discussion of the non-creative process. The last few chapters are about the writing of his first big hit,
Antichrist Superstar, but 98% of it is about how the band was falling apart, how Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (their producer at the time) was losing patience with their drug use and procrastination in his home studio in New Orleans, and how Trent eventually kicked them out to work on the
Lost Highway soundtrack, when seven months had gone by and they'd finished like three songs.
Throughout, I wanted more of his creative process, info about how Marilyn works with the band to make the sounds, how he comes up with song ideas, how he tweaks and fine tunes his lyrics, etc.
Basically, if you want to read about Marilyn the person, especially in his childhood and pre-fame/early-fame years, and you love wild drug stories, sex tales, tales about people who are completely out of control in their lives, crazy Christian protestors, and so on, you'll love it. If you want more about the music of Marilyn Manson and his band, you'll pretty much come up empty. I wanted both, and was impressed by the quality of what was there, but I wanted more of the music overall.
I would definitely enjoy a second autobiography if he writes one, since this one just runs up through 1998 and the early stages of the Antichrist Superstar tour, and Marilyn has grown more famous since then, dated several celebrities, released several more great albums, become a popular artist, and much more. All of which I'd get more joy from reading about than I would yet more tales of wild antics on tour, drug overdoses, crazy chicks from his pre-fame days, and so on.
Labels: book review
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Podcasts.
I assume everyone has heard the term "podcast" by now, and is aware that they are home-produced mp3 files, usually with someone(s) talking about one of their personal interests. Comics, blogging, sports, whatever. They're basically audio blogs, as far as I can tell. Is anyone into these things? Listening regularly, or even producing them? I've been aware of them for some time, but have never been moved to actual listen to one, until today, at least. More on that in a moment.
Generally speaking (pun!) though, does anyone really like podcasting, and have any recommendations or comments on them? I am constitutionally disinclined to bother with them, since I'm usually bored listening to people talking. I have to wait for them to deliver the words at their rate (when I could read a transcript much faster than they can speak comprehensibly), I have to deal with their voice and all the times they say, "and... um..." I have to suffer through the dead time while they think on their feet, etc. Talking in entertaining fashion is a high level skill, it's why so few politicans are really any good at it, it's why few radio people are worth listening to, and it's why the rare person with a real gift for it can amass wealth and power with their skill.
Unfortunately, most of us don't have that ability. Even if a person is interesting and has some information worth communicating, the odds are that they can't do it very well verbally, and that most of the time they're not going to have good info anyway. Hell, most people can't even write a blog post worth reading; what are the chances they're going to produce 10 or 30 or 120 minutes worth of useful audio? I figure they'll just ramble on in badly-in-need-of-editing fashion, and I'll claw my ears out. (Which is equivalent to the reaction you guys probably suffer when voyaging through one of my longer articles here.)
I'm heavily biased towards text. After all, text can be edited at any point; if you typo or want to rewrite a sentence, or add something in, or delete something, you can do it seamlessly, and with zero technical expertise. True, audio files can be edited and reordered and such, but really, how often is someone going to do that with their podcast? They'll get lazy, and at best they might splice in a comment if they realize they forgot something. They're just not going to take the time to re-record portions when they mispoke, or were garbled, or what have you.
I find text far better for conveying info, since I can read at my own pace, I can skim over boring parts, I can search for keywords or terms I'm interested in, and I can continue listening to music while doing so. I can not listen to someone talking and get any sense from it while I'm doing something else involving words. The radio is fine if I'm driving, or playing a game, but I can't write or read while paying attention to someone talking, and that means listening to a podcast requires me to stop doing what I'm doing on my computer, 95% of the time.
Of course they call them "podcasts" for a reason, since in theory you're downloading them to listen to on your ipod, while you're on the go somewhere. And if I were regularly riding public transportation, or driving a lot, or walking somewhere, I would probably make a lot more use of podcasts. Well, some more use; I'd probably prefer to listen to music and read, in most situations.
I bring this topic up because Flagship Studios has released
their first podcast, and their plans are to produce one weekly. Their community manager, Ivan Sulic, will be recording and uploading them, and they will, in theory, give the listener info about the game and the creative process as Ivan talks to the various producers, designers, artists, etc.
The first one is now online, and you can
grab a copy here. (8meg, 8:40 in length, mp3, SFW.) I finally brought myself to listen to it this morning, and predictably enough, I wanted to claw my ears off. I never would have gotten past 2 minutes if I weren't interested in the subject and considering doing a fansite about HGL, and therefore aware that listening to all of these will be mandatory.
The sound quality is good, except for a few times when Ivan leans away from the mic, but the info-to-length ratio illustrates exactly why I always thought I would dislike podcasts. In this one, Ivan talks about how it's weird to have a job that requires him to get approval before he posts things, how that's different than his past unspecified jobs on gaming websites, how he can create a wide variety of content quickly, how he's hoping to update the official site every day even if the update is shit, and how this will definitely be the least-interesting of all the podcasts he's going to do.
That's it. Nine minutes. Less than a paragraph in summary. This, my friends, is why I prefer text. I guess no one wants to do a podcast that's concise and edited and to the point, since after all, we're all fascinating in our own minds, and everyone would benefit from listening to us ramble on about a wide variety of topics. Trust me, I'm as convinced of that as anyone -- fortunately, I only inflict that attitude upon the world through words that can easily be skimmed over. While you continue listening to your music.
So, two questions. 1) Does this podcast bore as badly as I think it does, or is my reaction more about me and my dislike of the medium? 2) Are all podcasts pretty much like this, or can anyone recommend better examples of the genre?
Labels: Hellgate: London, podcasts
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Reviews Updated
In addition to the new reviews I've been posting (and have yet to post) I spent a few hours yesterday and today bringing the
reviews section up to date. I'd posted something like 15 movie reviews and 6 book reviews over the past few months, without archiving them in the reviews section or posting links to them in the nav bar, and that laziness-related oversight has now been rectified. A partial list of the new stuff follows, and if you've been reading the blog since Octoberish, you've seen all of these posted in blogs, though the archived versions here linked to have, in most cases, been expanded on and reorganized.
Movie Reviews (139)
--
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride -- 4.5
--
Fight Club -- 7
--
Harry Potter 4 -- 7
--
King Kong -- 6
--
Munich -- 7
--
Serenity -- 7.5
--
Team America -- 6
--
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Wererabbit -- 7
--
The Castle of Cagliostro -- 6.5
--
Bruce's Fists of Vengeance -- 6
--
Blood of the Dragon -- 6.5
Book Reviews (71)--
Harry Potter #6 -- 7
--
Eragon -- 6.5
--
Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger -- 5.5
--
The Twelfth Card -- 6
--
The Eight -- 5
New Writing Page
High and Low Stakes in Fiction
There are lots of other new review pages up too, but most of them are place holders for reviews to come. I've got a ton of stuff on the Bloodrayne page, for instance, but no actual review since while I've blogged about it with great glee, I have not and hope never to see that film. I'd put in links to all of those pages as well but hell, it's not like there's any shortage of words by me to read around here. If any of you actually want to see the archived blog entries on films I have yet to review, just go to the main reviews page and click the ones with an "NA" for a score. Kthx.
Lots more reviews to come, of course. Perhaps later this weekend, even. Perhaps right now, since I just remembered that I added a 4th chop socky review directly to the reviews section, without ever posting it in a blog entry. And dog forbid you miss the chance to read another long post about costumed men pretending to hit each other.Labels: blackchampagne.com
Chop Socky Review: Bruce's Fists of Vengeance
Yet another mid-70s film trying to rip off/cash in on Bruce Lee's name. This one's main character is named Bruce Le, and he's got a secret book left to him by his master, Bruce Lee. It's kind of sad the depths to which movie people will stoop to steal publicity for their film.
Although 1984 is the date given on IMDB, the cars and fashions look squarely mid-70s. I suspect 1984 was the date was when they re-dubbed it and released it in the US, though who really knows what the release schedule for this film was. It was filmed by a Philippine company, in the Philippines, perhaps even in Tagalog, since most of the actors are Filipino or black, with just a few Chinese and American-looking white guys. They probably then dubbed it into Chinese for release in Hong Kong. The original language is clearly not English, but that's about all I can say for sure.
To the scores, which are all relative to my other chop socky movie reviews. These can not be compared directly to non-chop socky films, since expectations for a punch porn film are much different than for a real movie.
Bruce's Fists of Vengeance
Script/Story: 5
Acting/Casting: 1
Action: 7
Combat Realism: 7
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 5
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 5
Overall: 6
Other than the acting and direction and cinematography, this was the best of the first four chop socky movies I reviewed. I realize that that sounds like a sarcastic statement, and in most cases it would be, but this is a chop socky film, and those are therefore not especially important aspects of the presentation. Sadly enough.
Otherwise, it wasn't a bad film. There was a decent plot with logical character motivations, the characters behaved in ways humans might actually behave, and the fight scenes, while not as plentiful as in some other chop socky films, were all pretty good. Better yet, they stared people who could actually fight, at least well enough to fake it on camera.
The acting though, was simply atrocious. Literally the worst I have ever seen, although it did successfully cross the "so bad it's funny" line quite a few times. The main bad guy, a young white guy who looked like one of John Travolta's guido friends in Saturday Night Fever, was astonishingly, painfully bad in his scenery-chewing excesses. Every time he spoke more than two lines he ended up scowling so hard the cords in his neck stood out, and I literally LOLed at any number of his scenes.
There was also a faux-romance between a very short martial arts master good guy and a much taller, semi-hot female martial artist, and their oil and water chemistry was a wonder to behold. Watching them walk together through the public parks of Manila (the whole film was shot in the Philippines, largely in public places because hey, it's free to film there) reminded me of a bad episode of Blind Date, and their three onscreen kisses were like a hostage situation, with the tiny little martial arts guy simply seizing the girl by the back of her neck and mashing his lips into hers. I couldn't say which one was less comfortable with their part, but neither looked very happy to be there.
I seldom pay much attention to the acting in chop socky films, since no one expects martial artists to be able to act, but it was especially dreadful in this movie. The protracted, dramatic death scene of one good guy, while the other good guy holds him and relentlessly asks "Where's the book?" would have been the worst acting in any film but this one.
Honestly, if all movies were like this, Steven Segal and his one facial expression (which hovers somewhere between gas pain and "where did I leave my car keys?") would own a shelf of academy awards.
Production ValuesNot good, but not horrible. The dubbing was awful, as was the English voice talent, and there were numerous places where the film stock went darker or lighter, or showed red and orange spots, but it was mostly in focus, and the martial arts sound effects were more or less in synch.
The real problems in this area were with the original film, since the direction and photography were horrendous. As bad as the acting. There must be half a dozen scenes where we spend at least 10 or 20 seconds looking at empty stairways after someone walks up or down them, and as many other shots of cars driving up to buildings, people walking through doors and out of sight, people dialing telephones, and so on. The film making is breathtaking in its incompetence.
They even do some fast forward and slow motion scenes in the later fights, but none of these are good ideas. Several shots of characters doing the requisite "whip nunchakus around head and over shoulders and under arms for ten seconds while opponent watches in mute horror" were obviously sped up, and in the final fight scene there are a couple of moves shown from two angles, the first at full speed, the replay in slow motion. Unfortunately, the slow motion second angle only makes more obvious how completely all of the punches and kicks are actually missing the target; I'm talking WWE style. But hey, at least they tried.
StoryAs the title demonstrates, this is yet another 70s martial arts film seeking to live off the name of Bruce Lee. So we've got two main good guy characters, both of whom wear Bruce Lee style hair (as do several of the bad guys), while lacking any trace of his personal charisma. They can both fight well enough, and do all sorts of high kicks competently, but damn they can't act. And the bad guys are even worse.
Anyway, one Chinese guy is a martial arts instructor in Manila. His friend comes to visit him and compete in some sort of martial arts tournament, and the friend brings along a secret book, written by Bruce Lee and detailing his fighting secrets. Guy #1 has studied it for a decade, and is now a super fighter thanks to it. He shares it with his friend, some white crime boss martial artist bad guy finds out about the book, and they spend the rest of the film trying to get it from the good guys.
Eventually guy #1 gets shot dead, the bad guys get the book, and Bruce, good guy #2, heads off to the bad guy's palatial estate with his fists of vengeance. Hence the title, I guess.
There are plenty of ridiculous plot issues along the way, of course, but you almost expect those. My favorite was then guy #1 was attacked in his hotel 3 or 4 times, beating up mobs of bad guys each time. He even let them into his room twice, after they knocked politely, the second time leaving the room full of unconscious bad guys, who were conveniently all gone when he returned. Maid service?
The bad guys finally send someone with a gun, who uses his weapon to kidnap good guy #1 and take him to the bad guy's estate. They tie him up there and leave him alone so he can do flexible contortionist stuff to escape the ropes, and he does, knocks a few guards out, and goes... right back to his hotel room, where he falls asleep. Better yet, the bad guys follow him there, show up a bit later, and after they knock and he lets them in, again, he starts to beat up the boss and then gets shot, setting up the worst "gasping last words" scene in the history of cinema.
Tip for the day; when the bad guys have already attacked you at your hotel half a dozen times, and kidnapped you at gunpoint, don't go right back to the same hotel and the same room once you escape them, and certainly don't answer the door and let them in when they come knocking later that night.
Martial ArtsThe only reason this one got a decent score, and while the combat is never great, all of the principle actors in this one are pretty good fighters. If they were as good at fighting as they were bad at acting, we wouldn't miss the real Bruce Lee, but they're at least pretty decent, and the fight scenes are staged with acceptable moves.
The fighting is far too polite; no one ever does any breaks or joint locks or pressure points or aims for any really vulnerable spots like the eyes, but they hit pretty hard and they are very good at kicking. Good guy #2 has some excellent kicks; his crescent kick especially is like lightning, and while his driving side kick, ala Bruce Lee, isn't up to snuff, he isn't horrible at it, and he's quite light and quick on his feet and has good hand speed. Good guy #1 is better, all around, and none of the bad guys embarrass themselves either.
You'd think that was standard in these films, but it's really not. Quite often it's blatantly obvious that the lead can't fight for crap, or at least not as well as the bad guys he's beating up, and worse are those movies where the head bad guy, usually an evil white dude, can't fight at all, and yet we've got to pretend he's super scary and powerful. The evil white guy can at least fight in this one, and it makes for a fairly-even final battle, though there's never any doubt who will win, given the type of film this is.
I wouldn't go so far as to say you could learn martial arts moves or techniques watching this movie, but sitting through it isn't painful, or a complete waste of time. I actually found myself wanting to try a few of the moves and combos they do, though all of them would be much more useful against a heavy bag, or a shadow, than a real person.
Labels: movie review
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Movie Review: The Castle of Cagliostro
There will be a review a day for a whle, since I've got a ton written and might as well post them. All subjects will be covered, though you can expect mostly non-current books and DVDs, since I've been posting reviews of new films as I see them. Today we've got an anime review, and yes, I'm updating these to the reviews section, which is several months out of date, with tons of reviews posted in the blog and not archived properly. But not for long...
The Castle of Cagliostro is an animated film by much-acclaimed Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki. This is one of his earlier works, done long before he became world famous for movies such as Princess Mononoke,
Spirited
Away, Howl's Moving Castle, and others.
Cagliostro was made in 1979, and it's not the "perfect for the whole family" timeless triumph that many of Miyazaki's later films are.
Cagliostro is more of an adventure romp, staring two wacky thieves, an evil prince, silly policemen, a beautiful princess in peril, a wandering samurai, and many more oddball characters.
It's a lot of fun, but it's more like a fast-paced thriller for children or tweens than an adult film. I saw it on a DVD I got at the library, and while I enjoyed it, I don't think I'll need to buy it or want to see it again. At least not until I've got a child to entertain with something better than legacy-destroying direct to video sequels from Disney.
To the scores:
The Castle of Cagliostro, 1979
Script/Story: 6
Characters: 6
Action: 8
Combat Realism: 3 (intentionally cartoonish)
Humor: 6
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 7
Fun Factor: 8
Replayability: 7
Overall: 6.5
It's a fun film, and a very lively, fast-paced one, but it lacks the intelligence and world-creativity of Mizayaki's mature works.
Cagliostro is anime, and it follows most of the familiar conventions of the genre, including stereotyped characters, wild, over the top emotional displays, slapstick violence, and all the rest. It's still very inventive, with numerous great comedy/action set pieces, many video game and even Buster Keaton inspired. The best is a long and very hazardous chase through the inside of a gigantic clock, with characters leaping from wheels and spokes, running over the teeth of rotating gears, and so on.
A major factor in your enjoyment of this one will be how well you can suspend your disbelief over absurdities. It's very anime in the way that it's 95% realistic and real world, and 5% wacky and over the top and defying the laws of physics. So you get realistic action for 9 minutes of a 10 minute chase scene, and then 1 minute of someone suddenly working magic, or leaping 50 feet straight up in a moment of terror, or a crappy car suddenly sprouting a jet engine and going the speed of sound, etc. If you can accept that, or even enjoy it, you'll probably love this movie. Kids more than adults, I suspect.
The plot is a bit scattered too, with more characters than it needs, and few of them used as well as they could have been. The main characters are pair of grifting thieves who float around Europe ripping off casinos and such, while having a lot of laughs and eating like pigs (in huge mouthed, shoveling it in Anime style). After an opening adventure they end up in a tiny, royal kingdom that operates sort of like a cross between Liechtenstein and East Germany. The royal family is dead, survived only by a young daughter and ruled by a regent who is clearly the bad guy, from the first minute we see him.
He's plotting to marry the princess once she returns home from her years being raised in a convent after her parents' deaths, and the count has been running things from his own gigantic castle. It comes complete with bottomless dungeons, secret passages, booby-trapped floor panels, turrets and towers and spires, and much more. It's all very fairy tale, but set in a semi-current world, so there are TVs and helicopters and machine guns. The thieves of course determine to break into the castle, the head thief wants to rescue the girl, and wackiness ensues.
Endless adventures follow, with sneaky entrances, narrow escapes, near deaths, and most of it is pretty entertaining. It gets overly complicated when a UN-like body gets involved, as they send in their Interpol-style police force to investigate counterfeit money that appears to be coming from the tiny kingdom. The head Interpol investigator is more interested in catching the thief though, since they have past history, and then the world media is watching the wedding, and then small scale wars break out, and the good guy thieves call in their old friends who include a samurai, and another woman thief shows up under cover, and there turns out to be a centuries-lost treasure that the bad guy wants and needs the girl's magical ring to find, and on and on.
The film isn't overlong, but it's a bit overcrowded, and I actually got sort of weary of all the madcap wackiness. I bet children would love it, with their hyperactive minds enjoying the frequent switches in characters and constant new scenes of action, but at times I found it a bit tiresome and superficial... while still enjoying the viewing experience.
Labels: movie review
Spam of the Day
A deceiving title, since I'm not about to post a spam every single day. Anyway, I get hundreds of emails a day, about 98% of which go right into the junk file. Some spams always slip through the filters though, and I often look at them, just out of curiosity. The ones that really perplex me are the plain text ones selling something like a home loan, or a medical reference, or anatomical enlargement, but that do it with such garbled, nonsensical language that it's actually hard to figure out what they're selling. Hence today's example:
Good day flux@blackchampagne.com,
We are the bes't available nowadays.
ALL Mmedsss are dispensed from Li#cens#ed Phar#m@cyyy.
---------------------------------
copy the address below and paste in your web browser:
bronchoalveolar.newtechtown.com/?zz=3Dlowcost
----------------------------------
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!.
gliding, venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked,=20.
and the results of your conversion will be displayed..
push the "Perform Currency Conversion" button..
when we were sharing rooms as bachelors in Baker Street..
Goodbye,
Mohamed Hogue
Okay, so it's some sort of counterfeit prescription outlet, selling sugar and/or rat poison tablets that look very much like brand name medicines. And these sorts of mails always alter the spelling of keywords like "penis" or "prescription" or "
v1agra" in order to slip past mail filters set up to block mails including those words. Hence "Phar#m@cyyy."
But what explains the five, fairly surreal and accidentally poetic closing lines? It's like someone mixed a poem about a snake around instructions for performing a financial transaction, and then "bachelors in Baker Street" means what, exactly? Is it the output of one of those random content creating programs that people use to fill up webpages in order to skew Google search results? Maybe it's just the personal closing signature of the emailer himself, something he puts on there to amuse his friends and doesn't think about being attached to the thousands of daily spams he sends out from a cybercafe?
The Mohamed Hague signature aside, the email sender's pseudonym was "Thurman W. Justice," which sounds like the name of a federal judge in a bad political thriller. His actual email is nathankutjepufe@yahoo.sg, but I suppose it's too much to hope that this actually came from Nathan Kutjepufe of Singapore, spammer, failing college student, Starcraft expert, and amateur poet?
Labels: mailbag
Chop Socky Review: Blood of the Dragon
I haven't run a chop socky review for a while, but since I've been catching up on my review writing lately (lots more yet to post), I thought I might as well start off with this one. It's called
Blood of the Dragon, and for once it's not a Bruce Lee rip off. It's a period piece, set in the old sword fighting days of China, and while nothing about the plot or the acting or the fighting is particularly good, at least it's not laugh out loud bad, as so many other chop socky films are.
My
chop socky review strategy has continued to evolve, and I've decided to do away with the double scores I used for the first couple of titles. I'm no longer scoring each category for chop socky & for regular films, so just know that the following totals are only valid in comparison to other films in the chop socky genre, and that if I had actually paid $9.25 to see this one in theaters, it would have 1s and 2s across the board.
To the scores!
Blood of the Dragon (Zhui Ming Qiang, 1973)
Script/Story: 5
Acting/Casting: 5
Action: 8
Combat Realism: 6
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 4
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 5
Overall: 6.5
Not a terrible film, and it's got a good amount of combat and weapon-play, but none of it is of great quality, and it's never exciting.
Production ValuesPretty poor. The dubbing is awful, with no attempt to match the lip synch, the color is washed out and muddy (it looks rather like a colorized black and white film, at times), and all of the "nighttime" shots were obviously shot in the day with a dark filter on the lens. There is a great deal of fake blood and gore though, to the film's credit. It's not one of those "guy gets stabbed and falls down dead without any fluid loss" films; they bleed a ton, but it's very orange and watery stuff, and quite a few of the guys who get stabbed through by a sword or spear obviously caught it between their arm and chest, before their dramatic tumble into oblivion.
StorySet in feudal China of no particular dynasty (they say "the emperor" a lot, but never name him), this film opens with a dreadful sword vs. spear fight. The spear guy eventually wins, in events that foreshadow later plot developments.
After that fight, the film cuts to a man and a woman as they ride through the Chinese countryside. They're both members of the rebellion, who are working to overthrow the evil emperor, and for no clear reason they are carrying a list of everyone who is a rebel sympathizer, which they must get to the rebel leader, Prince Ma Tung. Why Ma Tung doesn't know who's in his own rebellion is never explained, but don't let it bother you.
Predictably enough, the man/woman are ambushed, and they have a long and relatively non-violent fight against evil government soldiers. Eventually the man makes a run for it and takes a spear through the back, but gets away on his horse. The woman stays behind to cover his escape, and is eventually defeated and murdered.
The speared guy makes it to small town, and is there found by a beggar boy who is pretending to be blind. The man gasps his final words and hands the kid the list and tells him to take it to the prince, and after various complications the kid ends up running from the bad guys and being saved by the mysterious White Dragon. White Dragon is a criminal with a heart of gold, and the spear guy we saw in the opening scene of the film, which was apparently a flashback to action that took place years before. WD chases off the bad guys, then reads the list and realizes what it is at once. He then agrees to help the boy deliver the list, which entails walking across the dusty countryside for like, 10 minutes.
Unfortunately, the Prince turns out to be the son of the swordsman WD killed in the movie's opening, and he attacks WD who escapes with the list. Further complications ensue, with tons of incompetent government soldiers showing up to fight WD, as well as hunting for the rebels.
If you're already figuring that the Prince and WD will end up fighting together against endless bad guys, and that WD will nobly sacrifice himself for the good of his country, you've probably seen a few other chop socky movies in the past. Congrats.
Martial ArtsThis film has almost non-stop combat, virtually all of it with weapons, and while the sword and spear work is pretty mediocre, you've got to appreciate the sheer volume of it. The final showdown, with WD taking on like 50 bad guys with swords, goes on for literally 25-30 minutes, though that includes a few breaks when the badly-wounded WD (he spent a good 5 minutes earlier in the film gushing blood from a nearly-disemboweling cut down his back) retreats to a restaurant to drink heavily to kill the pain. No, really.
It's not great special effects and fighting, but almost all of it is shown from a distance in one long shot, so at least the guys fighting have some idea how to use their weapons. None of the combat is very imaginative, and this is well before the era of wire-fu, so there's minimal leaping and flying, though there are a few of the requisite trampoline leaps shown in extreme close up.
You could do worse than this film though, on the whole.
Labels: movie review
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Go Raiders/49ers!
After all the commplaining I've done about how crappy the football has been on TV in the Bay Area during the two seasons I've lived up here, I couldn't resist posting this. It's from
this week's MMQB column, by Peter King, and it's a list of the worst five teams in the NFL over the last three seasons. Guess who's on top?
1 Oakland 13-35
1 San Francisco 13-35
3 Houston 14-34
4 Arizona 15-33
4 Cleveland 15-33
Yes, those are my two local teams up there, with an average yearly record of 4-12. It could be worse though; I could have moved here 3 years ago.
Sadder yet is the fact that Arizona, 3rd on the list, plays SF twice a year. So of the 27 combined wins in 3 years, 6 came head to head, in games that
somebody had to win. Not that it was easy; SF went 2-14 last year, and both wins were against Arizona, and both came in overtime.
Fortunately, thanks to the NFL knowledge I gained during Sunday's Pro Bowl telecast, I know that both Oakland and SF will be greatly-improved this year... just like every single other team and player in the league.
Labels: football
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Penile Enlargement Disatisfaction.
Assuming this post even gets past your spam filter, check out
this amusing article about penile enhancement surgery. Turns out that, unsurprisingly, it hardly makes any difference and most men who get it are unhappy with the results.
"For patients with psychological concern about the size of the penis -- particularly if it is normal size -- there is little point in offering them surgery because it makes no difference," said Nim Christopher, a urologist at St Peter's Andrology Center in London.
Christopher and his colleagues, who questioned 42 men who had the surgery, found the dissatisfaction rate was very high. Often the men requested another surgical procedure.
"The average increase in length is 1.3 cm (0.5 inches) which isn't very much and the dissatisfaction rate was in excess of 70 percent," said Christopher.
He added that spam e-mails advertising penis enlargement surgery were inaccurate and gave men unrealistic expectations.
Rather than having surgery, he and his colleagues, who reported the findings in the journal of European Urology, said the men should be referred for psychological counseling.
Yes, but the pills! And the creams! Those must work their non-subtle magic. Right? Right? Apparently not, or the doctors wouldn't be recommending psychological counseling for their knife-hungry shorties. In other words, your only hope is to learn to be happy with your penis just as it is. A bitter pill to swallow in the "make me perfect, just like the people on the TeeVee" age in which we live. Hence the creams. And the pills.
Olympics Time.
You know it's been two (or possibly four) years and the Olympics are on again when you find yourself sprawled on the couch, staring in rapt fascination at a sport you never even knew existed, much less one that was practiced competitively in numerous nations around the world. I just watched 20 minutes of late night live coverage of some sort of women's cross country skiing relay race, in which they did laps around a course with various gentle hills and dips, switching off the baton between the two racers several times. Who even knew they had relay races on skis? Unsurprisingly, Finland, Norway, and Sweden took 3 of the top 4 spots, with another snow-centric nation, Canada taking second. The US came in 10th, which is why this one was on live on the late night broadcast, rather than chopped into highlights during the prime time coverage.
I've not seen much of the regular coverage yet this Olympics, but what I've seen thus far has been far better than in past years. They're actually showing athletes from other countries, and not just when they steal away the gold that was deserved by a noble, determined, hardship-overcoming American athlete. In much the same way that Sunday's Pro Bowl TV coverage taught me that every NFL player in the game was the best in the league and a wonderful person off the field, years of US TV Olympic coverage has shown me the truth of US Olympians: that every single one lost one or both parents to a tragic accident in their childhood, that they all trained through at least one injury that would have crippled a clydesdale, and that their young, determined, and often triumphantly tear-stained faces deserve nothing more than a six-figure endorsement contract with some sort of breakfast cereal, or perhaps even a local car dealership.
No one ever grew up to rich parents, enjoyed the best training equipment and coaching, lived a carefully regimented life from 6 until their first Olympic appearance at age 19, etc. They were all orphans raised by wolves who found/built their first pair of skis/track shoes with garbage and elbow grease, etc.
It always reminds me of my old days working at the San Diego Stadium. Once a year at a Chargers' game they'd introduce all of the cheerleaders (The Charger Girls), and invariably they were all double-major students, volunteers helping with handicapped children, attorneys, engineers, Nobel Laurettes, etc. I never heard of one cheerleader who was working as a stripper and aspiring to porn. Or using her looks and high breasts to live off a series of rich boyfriends. Or waitressing in Old Towne while hoping to make it as a commercial actress. Or spending her husband's money shopping and getting weekly manicures.
Perhaps someday an Olympian can transition to cheerleading, and then make the trip to the Pro Bowl, just to complete the trifecta?
Monday, February 13, 2006
Things I learned from the Pro Bowl.
The annual
NFL ProBowl was televised Sunday afternoon, from Hawaii, and this year, for a change, I taped it and watched it later. Most years I completely forget about it and don't much care when I remember the next day, and after watching this one I might have to make that my permanent policy. Ugly, sloppy, boring game. Thank Dog I had it on tape to watch in an hour, while eating reheated turkey meatloaf with stuffing and some tuna salad on Ritz for a chaser. All with a glass of fine Syrah, oddly enough.
As the lead says, boring though the game was, I did learn a few things by watching, most courtesy of the ESPN football announcing team of Mike Patrick, Joe Theisman, and Paul Maguire.
1) Every single player on the Pro Bowl squad is a great guy whose teammates love him and who is active in his community.
2) Every single player in the Pro Bowl is due to have an even better season next year, and is committed this off season to giving 110% towards improving himself as a player. Including Michael Vick. Especially Michael Vick. Who is actually an excellent passer, or at least far better than "they give him credit for."
3) Every team in the league is going to improve next year thanks to their new players and great new coaching staff with their new, winning attitude.
4) The NFL is the single greatest sporting league in the history of mankind, and an estimated 99% of league profits are donated to helping widows, orphans, amputees, and war veterans.
5) A simple zone defense can be quite effective when every single guy in coverage is fast and alert, the offenses have no desire to run the ball, and the QBs and receivers have never played together before.
6) Payton Manning does not care for wet footballs, and is not limited to blaming human beings, or even organic life forms, for his failures.
7) Steve McNair + shotgun = good idea. (Or at least better than Steve McNair + snap directly from center.)
7.5) Dick Cheney + shotgun =
duck and cover.
8) That whole
Al Michaels traded for Mickey Mouse's bastard cousin, or whatever the hell all those news stories I've been ignoring for the past week are about, is a good thing, if it will keep the current ESPN football crew from continuing to work together. Because their mouth words made my brain ache. Most NFL games I hardly hear the announcers, since I'm fast forwarding over all the dead time. But on the Pro Bowl coverage, since no one really cares who wins, the announcers talked about irrelevant bullshit not just between plays, but during them as well. I'm sort of figuring the changes in TV packages and Al Michaels in the news means that this announcing crew is going to be out of work next season, and that they wanted to be sure they praised every single individual in or even remotely connected to the NFL, just to help their chances for finding future football-related employment.
The best thing about the game? That neither Jerome Bettis nor Donovan McNabb was in it, since that kept their attention whore mothers and assorted fat, jersey-wearing entourages from dominating the crowd footage. Also, I was pleased that the players didn't spend the entire 4th quarter wandering around the sidelines with their incomprehending infant children on their shoulders, as used to happen in these sorts of exhibition games.
Tune in next February for more Lessons from the ProBowl, with your host, Fluxy "There went 90 minutes of my life I'll never get back" Flux.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Ukiah/Mendocino Vacation Photos
During dad's last visit, we drove up north to Ukiah, Mendocino, and various wineries in the area, and as usual, I was snapping away. The
photo page from this trip is now online, with around 40 pictures, and captions and all of that. Here's a representative sample of photos from the various areas we visited, minus their full captions, with the most detail placed on the redwood burl I was going to blog about separately.
Most of the trees in this valley looked dull and silvery, and I wondered why until I got home and looked at the zoomed photos I'd taken.
The main road, Highway 128, travels through this redwood forest for about 15 miles. It's amazing how close you are to these gigantic trees, and it's equally-amazing how bored all the locals were by it, as evidenced by them tailgating us at 50MPH in this very windy 40 zone. Dad drives pretty fast, but he had to pull over several times just to let delivery trucks slam past him. I'd have been perfectly happy tooling along at 25 and leaning out my open window like a labrador, or pulling over at any turn out and just walking off into the woods for an hour or two.
This beach, just south of Mendocino, was paved in small stones and covered by clumps of driftwood branches. The sticks were weird too, all waterlogged and flexible, and they didn't float. I tossed a few into the stream that ran down from the hills and cut a path through the sand, and they sunk like rocks.
Rock outcroppings emerged from the sea at low tide, weighted down by their soggy, slippery crop of seaweed.
Mendocino is set on an arrowhead-shaped point of land, with 20 meter cliffs on all sea sides. There is open space at the edge off town all the way around, and great walking trails... you've just got to know when to stop.
Redwood in a Pot!
The coolest thing we saw all day in a wine tasting room were these. They were obviously some sort of plant life, but we couldn't figure what. Turns out they're redwood burls. These are knobby, tumor sort of growths around the base of a redwood, and when cut off they will sprout and grow on their own. I'd never heard of them, having only seen redwoods sold as seeds or tiny saplings (which are 99% sure to die when you take them home), but they had three of them at one vineyard, and when I expressed interest and they said they were $20, I was sold.
I picked the biggest/greenest one, seen above on the right, and brought it home and stuck it in an earthenware dish on our shelf. It's going pretty good, and since I've been misting and pouring water over it for a couple of weeks now, the sprouts are beginning to erupting up through the top, as well as from the bottom. All the tall green ones you see here grow from the bottom, where it's wet. There are no roots of any kind, and I suppose I'll have to put it in dirt at some point. Redwood grow incredibly quickly, and are quite tenacious in their areas, but they have to have rich soil and cool temps and lots and lots of rain, which is why you don't see them growing in gardens all over the country/world.
Looking for info about these things online, I happened upon
The Redwood Doctor, who knows all.
A burl forms at the base of the tree and provides a reservoir of dormant buds that can sprout in the event of major structural damage to the trunk. The burl tissue provides a source of carbohydrates to its growing sprouts and can also generate roots.
He's not a fan of burls as pets, since he says they're usually illegally harvested from redwoods growing on protected land. (The ones pictured here were taken from healthy redwoods growing on the vineyard's land.) There is some
good info about them, but it's not real encouraging for my growing dreams.
Burls can be planted under the appropriate conditions to allow the shoots to form roots and then grow into trees, but the typical buyer of a redwood burl places it in water, watches the shoots grow, then disposes of it after the shoots die from lack of nutrients.
That's what I expected, since after all, plants grow in the ground, not in pots of water. There aren't enough nutrients in water to keep it going, and once the burl's reserves are depleted, it's going to die. So I'll have to put it in the ground, eventually, but we knew that already. In the meantime it's an interesting addition to our bamboo-centric display shelf, as seen below (without much visible bamboo).
It's growing fine so far, and the part I liked was that the shoots on the right bent and angled far to the side the very first day it was here, since that's towards where the sunshine comes in. They lean while the others grow straight, even though no direct sun ever hits this shelf. Okay, so plants aren't
that dumb.
Many more photos and words on these subjects can
be seen here.
Happy St. Valentine's Day!
This spam just got past my filter, and it amused me enough to share it.
Fucking St. Valentine
What are you to do if you have bad erection? Especially
in the forthcoming Saint Valentines Day???
Don t worry, it is not the last of pea-time...
The most simple way is to visit our site, order the
medication and that is all you are to do!
Do not kill the clock!
I'd of course advise against clicking their URL, but I left it in since it goes to a real site, and not just a huge link farm or redirect hell. It's actually sort of interesting, since it lists about every prescription drug on earth, and they even have links to full info pages with the ingredients, warnings, side effects, and more. It's fun to read about the horrible things that can go wrong, and I got as far as "swelling or peeling of the skin inside mouth" before I gave up. Not that I need a gout drug anyway; I was just curious.
What's up with their text though? I love that charmingly-broken English. "Forthcoming?" And what the hell is "pea-time?" Also, St. V-Day is like, Tuesday. Is your Viagra really going to arrive in time for the big night?
On another, somewhat related subject, does anyone have any idea how Pay Pal or Ebay actually conduct business at this point? I get at least 50 emails a day from money-stealing bastards pretending to be those corporations, as well as every major bank on earth. The few that make it through my filter get tagged as spam and deleted at once, but what do people do who actually use ebay or paypal? Do you read your mails and try to figure which ones are legit? Or do those companies do it all with user log in stuff, so you sign on when you visit their site and then get messages to your online account, or something like that? I've never used ebay and haven't used PayPal since they decided I was a porn site
and canceled my account, so I'm curious.
When I hear those stories about hackers with their vast armies of trojaned machines, I always think of these companies and the fake mails they create. What percentage of people with trojans and zombie PCs got infected clicking a mail they were sure was from a legitimate financial service? Half?
Turning back the clock on science.
Depressing article in the LA Times about Ken Ham, an evangelist who spends his life encouraging adults and children to ignore a great number of mankind's best scientific advances of the last several centuries.
A former high-school biology teacher, Ham travels the nation training children as young as 5 to challenge science orthodoxy. He doesn't engage in the political and legal fights that have erupted over the teaching of evolution. His strategy is more subtle: He aims to give people who trust the biblical account of creation the confidence to defend their views — aggressively.
He urges students to offer creationist critiques of their textbooks, parents to take on science museum docents, professionals to raise the subject with colleagues. If Ham has done his job well, his acolytes will ask enough pointed questions — and set forth enough persuasive arguments — to shake the doctrine of Darwin.
...
Ham encourages people to further their research with the dozens of books and DVDs sold by his ministry. They give answers to every question a critic might ask: How did Noah fit dinosaurs on the ark? He took babies. Why didn't a tyrannosaur eat Eve? All creatures were vegetarians until Adam's sin brought death into the world. How can we have modern breeds of dog like the poodle if God finished his work 6,000 years ago? He created a dog "kind" — a master blueprint — and let evolution take over from there.
When I hear about these sorts of people, I really wonder. It's like those insane, rabble-rousing columns by Ann Coulter; they can't really believe what they're saying, can they? I mean how can a person intelligent enough to think up Biblically-inspired ways to cheat the corners on biology and archeology and geology not know they're playind a fool's game? Perhaps it's my last lingering vestiges of faith in humanity, but I have to believe these guys know better, and know they're slinging bullshit, but that they do it because they think the end is worth the means. It's like the lying about WMDs and Al Queda connections and all the rest that Bush and others did to get us into the Iraq war; they knew it was lying, and the probably felt a little bad about it, but they honestly felt it was imperative that the US invade Iraq, and they were prepared to use any means at their disposal to make it happen.
Trained scientists and biologists can't honestly believe their fairy tale version of creation, but they think their followers are too stupid to handle cognitive dissonance, and that if people believe anything in the Bible isn't true, they'll lose faith in the whole thing. In fact, the guy in the article is quoted saying that, more or less:
When pastors dismiss the creation account as a fable, he says, they give their flock license to disregard the Bible's moral teachings as well. He shows his audiences a graphic that places the theory of evolution at the root of all social ills: abortion, divorce, racism, gay marriage, store clerks who say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."
No one with even rudimentary intelligence denies that evolution happens; after all, we've got hundreds of breeds of dogs, penicillin doesn't work anymore because bacteria has evolved resistances to it, etc. Ham even addresses the "dog kind" thing in the article, so he allows that evolution occurs; but only over short periods of time and not to human beings, who were created exactly as they are today, in the image of God. In that light, it seems like his real quibbles should be with geologists and archeologists and cosmologists, not biologists.
So he's not a complete crack pot, he's just a liar and a hypocrite who peddles lies and propaganda to the tune of $120k a year and a great deal of personal pain to the minds of the poor children who are subjected to his nonsense.
Whenever I read about one of these guys, I wonder if this happens anywhere else on earth, in Western nations. I assume there's no modern biology and evolution/origin of man taught in Islamic nations, since they are theocracies and I believe the Koran goes by a semi-Genesis account of human origins. But what about other Western Nations, like in Europe? Ham, the man in the LA Times profile, was originally from Australia, and he apparently left and came to make his fortune in America when he couldn't find enough gullible idiots in his homeland.
I'm sure there are local pockets of religious zealotry in every nation, and neo-Nazis who blame the Jews for unemployment or whatever, but are there national movements to overthrow contemporary scientific thought and education in other countries? I know this site has readers in NZ, Oz, Germany, the UK, Sweden, and lots of other countries -- seriously, does this sort of thing pop up in your local news, on a larger level than some nut on a street corner with a tangled beard and wild eyes?
I suspect not, which really makes me wonder what's wrong with the US? Conservative repression is always a reaction to changes in society, and there are always growing pains, but damn,
even the Pope says that science is no threat to faith. And Pope Benedict is a conservative, and he's holding strong on all the church's traditional anti-women and gay doctrine, but even he is more scientifically with the times than your average white southern Christian in the US. And this "embrace ignorance and repression" movement in the US is actually growing!
America seems immortal and all-powerful, but all empires fall in time, usually when they grow too decadent and foolishly-self absorbed to renew themselves, while simultaneously overextending abroad. And um... read the news lately? When Bush's administration would seemingly be happy to embrace an American Taliban style of repression of dissent, they are supported by a substantial minority of frightened, violent, and torture-approving citizens, and they eagerly admit to conducting illegal and secretive spying operations on their citizens... yikes. As Malaya often says, we've gotta get a cabin in Canada, or a hide away in NZ. Just in case.
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