Labels: scuba

Labels: scuba, the fantasy novel

Escaflowne the Movie
Script/Story: 3
Characters: 4
Combat Realism: 6
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 3
Overall: 4.5

Labels: movie review

Caught Stealing, by Charlie Huston, (2005)
Plot: 7
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/6
Characters: 6
Fun Factor: 4
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 4
Overall: 6

A cartoon of a book, June 26, 2005
Reviewer: John R. Sumser

The level of violence in this book reminds me of Daffy Duck-Elmer Fudd cartoons, and the hero of this story (a child-man who can't get over high school disappointments) does a pretty good Daffy.

I get the sense the book was written in a week or two, by a bunch of people drinking beer in front of a computer, laughing and asking each other, "So, what should we make happen next?" Think, Jack Kerouac goes hard-boiled, and you'll have this book . . . which is quite a complement if you liked On the Road.

But I got bored by the whole single-sheet of paper challenge, and long before Caught Stealing was anywhere near resolved I gave up on the and-now-guess-what-happens approach.

It could be my problem. I read too many student papers with the first-this-happened-then-this-happened-then-this-happened as the structure to read it in my leisure time.

Labels: book review

Note: like all Left-Wing fear-mongering, this films likes to erroneously equate the extreme Religious Right with mainstream Conservatism, which would be like equating NAMBLA with mainstream Liberalism.

The word you're looking for is "spoiler". Please don't forget it in the future.

Spoiler, shmoiler.... I presume when I read or write a review of a book or movie that there will be a discussion of the plot, unless the plot is somehow irrelevent, in which case the book or movie is probably not worth reading or seeing.

Labels: basketball, scuba, v for vendetta

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MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay - Seven residents of a Uruguayan town were killed on Friday when they were run over by a train they were moving manually as part of a reality television show aimed at raising funds for a local hospital, police said.

Several hundred townspeople from Young, about 235 miles west of the capital of Montevideo, were hauling a locomotive and two attached cars down a track — pushing and pulling from different sides -- when some participants fell under the wheels, said a police department spokesman.

Several other people were hurt in Friday's accident, three of them critically.

Eyewitness Ana Portela told a local radio station that the train was moving when "somebody slipped and fell under the locomotive, and others were falling alongside it."

"There were shouts and somebody said 'my arm!'" Portela said. "Everybody was in a state of shock."

Labels: reality tv

LONDON -- The popular Atkins diet could be linked to a life-threatening complication which one woman who claimed to be following it developed, according to doctors who published a case report on it Friday in a British medical journal.

Doctors from New York University wrote in The Lancet journal of a 40-year-old woman who developed a dangerous condition called ketoacidosis, a dangerous buildup of acids called ketones in the blood which can lead to patients falling into a coma.

The patient, who was not identified, was admitted to an intensive care unit for four days after becoming short of breath. Before being hospitalized, she had lost her appetite, felt nauseous and was vomiting four to six times a day, the doctors wrote in the paper. Tests confirmed ketoacidosis.

Ketones are produced in the liver when insulin levels fall due to starvation or diabetes.

"Our patient had an underlying ketosis caused by the Atkins diet ... This problem may become more recognized because this diet is becoming increasingly popular worldwide," said Professor Klaus-Dieter Lessnau, who led the team from the New York University School of Medicine.

...some outside experts said the case is rare and does not reflect a major health threat associated with low-carb diets. "I think this is an isolated case. The idea that serious ketoacidosis could be triggered by a low-carb diet does not happen very often," said Dr. Paul Clayton, president of the forum on food and nutrition at the Royal Society of Medicine in London. Clayton said that the main problem of high protein diets is in the strain they put on kidneys and the risk of renal failure.

as most dieticians predicted, the Atkins' forced ketosis thing did work for quick weight loss if you could stomach the super protein food plan, but hardly anyone could long term, and hardly anyone took steps to change their lifestyle (I.E. eating healthier and exercising), so hardly anyone kept the weight off. And thus does America turn to the next "sounds too good to be true" weight loss plan that doesn't involve any sort of sacrifice, hunger, or exercise. Hard to imagine why 2/3 of us are fat, eh?

Labels: diet, obesity

Labels: humor

Labels: photography, pornography

Taschen has just published The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds ($39.99), by Gretchen Edgren, a contributing editor to Playboy, and the book is a testament to Hefner's fidelity to his vision. Six hundred and thirteen women are represented, but there is one basic model. On top is the face of Shirley Temple; below is the body of Jayne Mansfield. Playboy was launched in 1953, and this female image managed to draw, simultaneously, on two opposing trends that have since come to dominate American mass culture: on the one hand, our country's idea of its Huck Finn innocence; on the other, the enthusiastic lewdness of our advertising and entertainment. We are now accustomed to seeing the two tendencies combined -- witness Britney Spears -- but when Hefner was a young man they still seemed like opposites.

Hefner said from the beginning that he was not producing a girlie magazine; Playboy was a "life style" magazine, of which sex was only a part. He was put off by the men's magazines of his youth, with their emphasis on riding the rapids and fighting bears. Why did virility have to be proved outdoors? Why couldn't its kingdom be indoors? "We like our apartment," he wrote in his editorial for the first issue of Playboy. "We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." Whatever one may think of DeDe Lind's interest in Nietzsche -- or Hefner's, for that matter -- this was the scenario he had in mind. He grew up in a comfortless Chicago family. His father was an accountant, his mother a Methodist disciplinarian. He has said that there was never any show of affection in his house. One suspects that there was likewise little evidence of jazz or hors d'oeuvres -- pleasure for its own sake. This is what he set out to sell: an upscale hedonism, promoted by the magazine’s articles and ads as well as by its nudes.

...

In the nineteen-seventies, because of competition from the new and raunchier Penthouse, Playboy made the decision to show pubic hair, and with this upping of the sexual ante a certain coldness set in. Now the makeup becomes very heavy, causing the women, who already looked alike, to seem as if they were clones.

In the nineteen-eighties and thereafter, the artificiality only increased, as did that of all American mass media. The most obvious change is in the body, which has now been to the gym. Before, you could often see the Playmates sucking in their stomachs. Now they don't have to. The waist is nipped, the bottom tidy, and the breasts are a thing of wonder. The first mention of a "boob job" in The Playmate Book has to do with Miss April 1965... But over time the augmented bosom became confessedly an artifice -- a Ding an sich, and proud of it. By the eighties, the Playmates’ breasts are not just huge. Many are independent of the law of gravity; they point straight outward. One pair seems to point upward.

Today -- or, actually, by the eighties -- one wonders whether sex, as it is experienced by human beings, is still the point. The current centerfolds, buck naked though they may be, communicate almost no suggestion of anything. In Playboy pinups, one is not looking for the note of the divine that one finds in the Venuses of ancient statuary, let alone for the pathos of Rembrandt's nudes. Nor should one ask for naturalness -- a real-looking girl. That is a sentimental preference, and one that many great nudes (Ingres's, Degas's) can refute. But what is so bewildering about the later Playboy centerfolds is their utter texturelessness: their lack of any question, any traction, any grain of sand from which the sexual imagination could make a pearl.

...

That, in the end, is the most striking thing about Playboy’s centerfolds: how old-fashioned they seem. This whole "bachelor" world, with the brandy snifters and the attractive guest arriving for the night: did it ever exist? Yes, as a fantasy. Now, however, it is the property of homosexuals. (A more modern-looking avatar of the Playmates' pneumatic breasts is Robert Mapplethorpe's Mr. 10 1/2.) Today, if you try to present yourself as a suave middle-aged bachelor, people will assume you're gay.

Labels: playboy

Two Iraqi women whose husbands and children were killed by US troops during the Iraq war have been refused entry into the United States for a speaking tour...

In a piece of painful irony, the reason given for the rejection was that the women don’t have enough family in Iraq to prove that they’ll return to the country.

Labels: iraq

The diamond invention -- the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem -- is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value -- and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems...

The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life. To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever -- "forever" in the sense that they should never be resold.

...

Until the mid-1960s, Japanese parents arranged marriages for their children through trusted intermediaries. The ceremony was consummated, according to Shinto law, by the bride and groom drinking rice wine from the same wooden bowl. There was no tradition of romance, courtship, seduction, or prenuptial love in Japan; and none that required the gift of a diamond engagement ring... The campaign was remarkably successful. Until 1959, the importation of diamonds had not even been permitted by the postwar Japanese government. When the campaign began, in 1967, not quite 5 percent of engaged Japanese women received a diamond engagement ring. By 1972, the proportion had risen to 27 percent. By 1978, half of all Japanese women who were married wore a diamond; by 1981, some 60 percent of Japanese brides wore diamonds. In a mere fourteen years, the 1,500-year Japanese tradition had been radically revised.

...

Women were not totally surprised by diamond gifts: some 84 percent of the men in the study "knew somehow" that the women wanted diamond jewelry. The study suggested a two-step "gift-process continuum": first, "the man 'learns' diamonds are OK" fom the woman; then, "at some later point in time, he makes the diamond purchase decision" to surprise the woman.

Through a series of "projective" psychological questions, meant "to draw out a respondent's innermost feelings about diamond jewelry," the study attempted to examine further the semi-passive role played by women in receiving diamonds. The male-female roles seemed to resemble closely the sex relations in a Victorian novel. "Man plays the dominant, active role in the gift process. Woman's role is more subtle, more oblique, more enigmatic...." The woman seemed to believe there was something improper about receiving a diamond gift. Women spoke in interviews about large diamonds as "flashy, gaudy, overdone" and otherwise inappropriate. Yet the study found that "Buried in the negative attitudes ... lies what is probably the primary driving force for acquiring them. Diamonds are a traditional and conspicuous signal of achievement, status and success." It noted, for example, "A woman can easily feel that diamonds are 'vulgar' and still be highly enthusiastic about receiving diamond jewelry." The element of surprise, even if it is feigned, plays the same role of accommodating dissonance in accepting a diamond gift as it does in prime sexual seductions: it permits the woman to pretend that she has not actively participated in the decision. She thus retains both her innocence, and the diamond.

...

It is conservatively estimated that the public holds more than 500 million carats of gem diamonds, which is more than fifty times the number of gem diamonds produced by the diamond cartel in any given year. Since the quantity of diamonds needed for engagement rings and other jewelry each year is satisfied by the production from the world's mines, this half-billion-carat supply of diamonds must be prevented from ever being put on the market. The moment a significant portion of the public begins selling diamonds from this inventory, the price of diamonds cannot be sustained. For the diamond invention to survive, the public must be inhibited from ever parting with its diamonds.

Retail jewelers, especially the prestigious Fifth Avenue stores, prefer not to buy back diamonds from customers, because the offer they would make would most likely be considered ridiculously low. The "keystone," or markup, on a diamond and its setting may range from 100 to 200 percent, depending on the policy of the store; if it bought diamonds back from customers, it would have to buy them back at wholesale prices. Most jewelers would prefer not to make a customer an offer that might be deemed insulting and also might undercut the widely held notion that diamonds go up in value... For example, Brod estimates that a half-carat diamond ring, which might cost $2,000 at a retail jewelry store, could be sold for only $600 at Empire.

When thieves bring diamonds to underworld "fences," they usually get only a pittance for them. In 1979, for example, New York City police recovered stolen diamonds with an insured value of $50,000 which had been sold to a 'fence' for only $200. According to the assistant district attorney who handled the case, the fence was unable to dispose of the diamonds on 47th Street, and he was eventually turned in by one of the diamond dealers he contacted.

Labels: diamonds

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